It seems clear from all this that the sonnets cannot be placed so late as 1598-1600. They do not fit the facts of Shakespeare's life at this time. But they do fit the years from 1591 to 1594, and especially the years of the plague, 1592-3, when the theaters were generally closed, and Shakespeare no doubt had to battle for a mere existence. In 1594 Shakespeare's position became more secure. He gained the favor of Southampton and dedicated the Rape of Lucrece to him.
Collin develops at this point with a good deal of fullness his theory that the motifs of the sonnets recur in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece—in Venus and Adonis, a certain crass naturalism; in Lucrece a high and spiritual morality. In the sonnets the same antithesis is found. Compare Sonnet 116—in praise of friendship—with 129, in which is pictured the tyranny and the treachery of sensual love. These two forces, sensual love and platonic friendship, were mighty cultural influences during Shakespeare's apprentice years and the young poet shows plainly that he was moved by both.
If all this be true, then the Herbert-Fitton theory falls to the ground, for in 1597 Herbert was only seventeen. But unquestionably the sonnets are autobiographical. They reveal with a poignant power Shakespeare's sympathy, his unique ability to enter into another personality, his capacity of imaginative expansion to include the lives of others. Compare the noble sonnet 112, which Collin translates:
Din kjærlighed og medynk dækker til
det ar, som sladderen paa min pande trykket.
Lad andre tro og sige, hvad de vil,—
du kjærlig mine feil med fortrin smykket.
Du er mit verdensalt, og fra din mund
jeg henter al min skam og al min ære.
For andre er jeg død fra denne stund,
og de for mig som skygger blot skal være.
I avgrunds dyp jeg al bekymring kaster!
for andres røst min høresans er sløv.
Hvadenten de mig roser eller laster,
jeg som en hugorm er og vorder døv.
Saa helt du fylder ut min sjæl herinde,
at hele verden synes at forsvinde.
At this point the article in Samtiden closes. Collin promises to give in a later number, a metrical translation of a number of significant sonnets. The promised renderings, however, never appeared. Thirteen years later, in 1914, the author, in a most interesting and illuminating book, Det Geniale Menneske,[II.21] a study of "genius" and its relation to civilization, reprinted his essay in Samtiden and supplemented it with three short chapters. In the first of these he endeavors to show that in the sonnets Shakespeare gives expression to two distinct tendencies of the Renaissance—the tendency toward a loose and unregulated gratification of the senses, and the tendency toward an elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory. There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found a joy mingled with pain, in giving of his life to lovers in whom the longing of William Shakespeare lives for all time.
"He has loved and been loved. It was he whom Sylvia, Hermia, Titania, Portia, Juliet, Beatrice, Rosalind, Viola, and Olivia loved,—and Ophelia, Desdemona, Hermione and Miranda."
In the second chapter Collin argues, as he had done in his essay on Hamlet[II.22] that Shakespeare's great tragedies voice no pessimism, but the stern purpose to strengthen himself and his contemporaries against the evils and vices of Jacobean England—that period of moral and intellectual disintegration which followed the intense life of the Elizabethan age. Shakespeare battles against the ills of society as the Greek dramatists had done, by showing sin and wickedness as destroyers of life, and once this is done, by firing mankind to resistance against the forces of ruin and decay. "To hold the mirror up to nature," that men may see the devastation which evil and vice bring about in the social body. And to do this he does not, like some modern writers, shun moralizing. He warns against sensual excess in Adam's speech in As You Like It, II, 3: