An evil spirit your beauty haunts me still . . .
Thus am I still provoked to every evil
By this good-wicked spirit, sweet Angel-Devil.
But Shakespeare entirely alters the point of the lines by contrasting the influence exerted on him by the woman with that exerted on him by a man.
[155] The work was reprinted by Dr. Grosart in his Occasional Issues, 1880, and extracts from it appear in the New Shakspere Society’s ‘Allusion Books,’ i. 169 seq.
[157] W. S. are common initials, and at least two authors bearing them made some reputation in Shakespeare’s day. There was a dramatist named Wentworth Smith (see p. 180 infra), and there was a William Smith who published a volume of lovelorn sonnets called Chloris in 1595. A specious argument might possibly be devised in favour of the latter’s identity with Willobie’s counsellor. But Shakespeare, of the two, has the better claim.
[161] No edition appeared before 1600, and then two were published.
[162] Oberon’s Vision, by the Rev. W. J. Halpin (Shakespeare Society), 1843. Two accounts of the Kenilworth fêtes, by George Gascoigne and Robert Laneham respectively, were published in 1576.
[163] Reprinted by the Shakespeare Society in 1844.
[164] All these details are of Shakespeare’s invention, and do not figure in the old play. But in the crude induction in the old play the nondescript drunkard is named without prefix ‘Slie.’ That surname, although it was very common at Stratford and in the neighbourhood, was borne by residents in many other parts of the country, and its appearance in the old play is not in itself, as has been suggested, sufficient to prove that the old play was written by a Warwickshire man. There are no other names or references in the old play that can be associated with Warwickshire.
[165] Mr. Richard Savage, the secretary and librarian of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford, has generously placed at my disposal this interesting fact, which he lately discovered.
[167] It was licensed for publication in 1594, and published in 1598.