Nor does he mince matters in directly addressing her. She is a brunette, with black eyes and black hair, yet black in nothing except her deeds, which have given her an evil reputation. She has sealed false bonds of love as often as he, and is twice forsworn, having deceived both her husband and her lover. She is as cruel as if she had that transcendent beauty which in reality she only possesses in his doting eyes. He knows that her heart is "a bay where all men ride," and yet love persuades him to believe her true.
Who taught thee how to make me love thee more
The more I hear and see just cause of hate?
She is his "worser spirit," tempting him to ill—his "false plague," whom he knows to be "as black as hell, as dark as night," though he has sworn her fair and true. His friend's name is Will also, and Sonnets 135, 136 contain a play upon their names:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy "Will,"
And "Will" to boot, and "Will" in overplus.
Only love my name, he says to her, and then you will still love me, for my name too is "Will."
Such are the three actors in this tragedy of sin and sorrow and remorse; and the more we read these wonderful poems, and perceive the intense passion that throbs through them, the nearer we seem to get to the great heart of Shakespeare, the real inner life of that man of whose outer personality we know so little. We see him wounded to the quick by his dearest friend, yet weighing the sin of that friend in the balance of divinest mercy as he acknowledges the strength of the temptation, and, while he does not extenuate the sin, extends a loving pardon to the sinner. He knows weakness of his own soul: he himself struggles in the toils of an unworthy passion, which his reason abhors while his heart is led captive. His is the battle and the defeat: who is he that he should judge with indignant virtue the failing of another?—
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;