[[38]] Lee's Shakespeare, p. 26; Halliwell's Life of Shakespeare, p. 133; Grant White's Introductory Life of Shakespeare, pp. 25, 42.
[[39]] Lee's Shakespeare, pp. 22-26, 273, 274.
[[40]] Halliwell's Shakespeare, p. 172, Lee's Shakespeare, pp. 193-196.
[[41]] See pp. 68-70, supra.
[[42]] The portion of Sonnet CIV. relevant to this point is printed at [page 26], supra.
[[43]] These plays contain names of places and persons, and allusions and references, which could hardly have been made had Shakespeare been a stranger to their composition. In As You Like It, the forest has his mother's family name, "Arden"; the allusion to Sir Thomas Lucy, has already been noticed. [Page 63], supra.
[[44]] While I speak of the poet of the Sonnets and of the greater plays as unknown, I can but believe that the Sonnets, when carefully studied in connection with contemporaneous history and chronicles, will yet afford an adequate clew to his identification. It occurs to me that a promising line of inquiry might be made on this assumption,—that the poet was born about twenty years before Shakespeare and died soon after the production of the plays ceased, or when about sixty-five or seventy years of age; that he had reverses and disappointments, perhaps humiliations; that his name was William, and that he had written other works before he wrote the Shakespearean plays. It is also possible, although I think not probable, that the initials, W. H., appearing in the introduction to these Sonnets may refer to him. That he had produced earlier works, I think is shown by Sonnet LXXVI. The first lines of that Sonnet are as follows:
"Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation of quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep inventions in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?"