Impulsively Shakespeare brings his fantastic pretension to a somewhat more practical issue in the concluding apostrophe:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me—for my name is Will. [423b]
That is equivalent to saying ‘Make “will”’ (i.e. that which is yourself) ‘your love, and then you love me, because Will is my name.’ The couplet proves even more convincingly than the one which clinches the preceding sonnet that none of the rivals whom the poet sought to displace in the lady’s affections could by any chance have been, like himself, called Will. The writer could not appeal to a mistress to concentrate her love on his name of Will, because it was the emphatic sign of identity between her being and him, if that name were common to him and one or more rivals, and lacked exclusive reference to himself.
Loosely as Shakespeare’s sonnets were constructed, the couplet at the conclusion of each poem invariably summarises the general intention of the preceding twelve lines. The concluding couplets of these two sonnets cxxxv.-vi., in which Shakespeare has been alleged to acknowledge a rival of his own name in his suit for a lady’s favour, are consequently the touchstone by which the theory of ‘more Wills than one’ must be tested. As we have just seen, the situation is summarily embodied in the first couplet thus:
Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one—Will.
It is re-embodied in the second couplet thus:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me—for my name is Will.
The whole significance of both couplets resides in the twice-repeated fact that one, and only one, of the lady’s lovers is named Will, and that that one is the writer. To assume that the poet had a rival of his own name is to denude both couplets of all point. ‘Will,’ we have learned from the earlier lines of both sonnets, is the lady’s ruling passion. Punning mock-logic brings the poet in either sonnet to the ultimate conclusion that one of her lovers may, above all others, reasonably claim her love on the ground that his name of Will is the name of her ruling passion. Thus his pretension to her affections rests, he punningly assures her, on a strictly logical basis.
Sonnet cxxxiv. Meaning of Sonnet cxliii.
Unreasonable as any other interpretation of these sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) seems to be, I believe it far more fatuous to seek in the single and isolated use of the word ‘will’ in each of the sonnets cxxxiv. and cxliii. any confirmation of the theory of a rival suitor named Will.