form a regular series, but that all the poems are arranged in the order in which Shakespeare meant to have them is not so clear. There is no evidence that the edition of 1609 was supervised or even authorized by him. The enigmatical dedication is not his, but the publisher's; and if "Mr. W. H." was the person who procured the Sonnets for publication (which, though doubtful, is perhaps less improbable than any other conjecture as to his relation to them), we may suppose that he would arrange them for the press. The order seems to us more like that of a collector—one who knew something of their history, and was interested in getting them together for publication—than that of the author. Possibly "Mr. W. H." had his own little theory as to the interconnection of some of them, like certain of the modern editors, no one of whom seems on the whole to have been any more successful in classifying them. We fear that both their order and their origin must continue to be among the insoluble problems of literature.
The student of Shakspere is drawn to the Sonnets not alone by their ardour and depth of feeling, their fertility and condensation of thought, their exquisite felicities of phrase, and their frequent beauty of rhythmical movement, but in a peculiar degree by the possibility that here, if nowhere else, the greatest of English poets may—as Wordsworth puts it—have "unlocked his heart."[2] It were strange if his silence,
- ↑ The Sonnets of William Shakspere, edited by Edward Dowden (London, 1881), p. xv. fol. (also in the larger ed. p. 4 fol.).
- ↑ Poets differ in the interpretation of the Sonnets as widely as critics: So, Mr. Browning; to whom replies Mr. Swinburne, "No whit the less like Shakespeare, but undoubtedly the less like Browning." Some of
"'With this same key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart' once more!
Did Shakespeare? If so the less Shakespeare he!"
