How lacking all his modern biographers have been in perception!
Every difficulty in those which are termed the procreation Sonnets disappears with the application of this key. Only by it can Sonnet 22 be made intelligible:—
"My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
As long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrow I behold,
Then look, I death my days would expirate
For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the steady raiment of my heart.
Which in my breast doth live, as thine in me.
How can I then be older than thou art?
O, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain;
Thou gavest me thine, not to give back again."
But nearly every Sonnet might be quoted in support of this view. Especially is it of value in bringing an intelligent and allowable explanation to Sonnets 40, 41, and 42, which now no longer have an unsavoury flavour.
Sonnet No. 59 is most noteworthy, because it implies a belief in re-incarnation. Shakespeare expresses his longing to know what the ancients would have said of his marvellous intellect. If he could find his picture in some antique book over 500 years old, see an image of himself as he then was, and learn what men thought of him!
"If their bee nothing new, but that which is
Hath beene before, how are our braines begulld,
Which laboring for invention, beare amisse
The second burthen of a former child?
Oh that record could with a back-ward looke,
Even of five hundredth courses of the Sunne,
Show me your image in some antique booke,
Since minde at first in carrecter was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or where better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
Oh sure I am, the wits of former daies,
To subjects worse have given admiring praise."
There is the same idea in Sonnet 71, which suggests that in some future re-incarnation Bacon might read Shakespeare's praises of him.
Conjectures as to who was the rival poet may be dispensed with. The following rendering of Sonnet No. 80 makes this perfectly clear:—
"O how I (the poet) faint when I of you (F.B.) do write,
Knowing a better spirit (that of the philosopher) doth use your name
And in the praise thereof spends all his might
To make me tongue tied, speaking of your fame!
(Shakespeare never refers to Bacon or vice-versa)
But since your (F.B.'s) worth wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark (that of the poet) inferior far to his (that of the philosopher),
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me (the poet) up afloat
Whilst he (the philosopher) upon your soundless deep doth ride."
It is impossible to do justice to this subject in the space here available. By the aid of this key every line becomes intelligible. The charm and beauty of the Sonnets are increased tenfold. Every unpleasant association of them is removed. No longer need Browning say, "If so the less Shakespeare he."