So far, things were bad enough; but there was even worse to follow. The lad whose calf-love had flung him into ill-considered matrimony was now a mature man--and two years ago he discovered, for the first time, what the love of mature manhood can be like. With equal folly, equal recklessness, to his first affair, he had conceived a desperate and hopeless affection for a woman who exactly reversed the previous conditions--for she was very much younger than himself, better educated, and of much superior rank. The "dark lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets, upon whom he lavished all his golden wealth of phrase, laying open the most intimate secrets of human love, and scorn, and anguish--was (in all probability) Mary Fitton, a girl of nineteen, maid of honour to the Queen. Proud, high-spirited, vivacious--unquestionably beautiful, although "in the old age black was not counted fair"--aristocratic, _grande dame_ to the finger-tips: in every respect the antithesis of countrified, shrewish, repellent Anne Hathaway--yet the "dark lady" was inherently wanton, false, and faithless. Shakespeare recognised this, but it made no difference to the strength and intensity of his passion: So true a fool is love, that in your will, Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. In sonnet after sonnet he expressed his despair, his patience of contempt or injury. No such sounding of the whole diapason of love--no such revealing of a tortured human heart--has ever been put before the world. Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. And he depicted various features of this woman, in various rôles, in play after play: he could not shut her out. Whether he pilloried her dark beauty as Cressida or Cleopatra--whether he masked her wit and spirit under the name of Beatrice or Rosalind--whether he alternately implored or inveighed against her in the Sonnets--he was enthralled by so magnetic a fascination that it influenced his art at all points. Shakespeare the man--Shakespeare the artist--was obsessed by--bound fast in--a hopeless infatuation for a woman whom he knew to be unworthy. Here, indeed, was sufficient matter for musing. But the poet's unhappy reveries were cut short by the appearance of a young man--his brother Edmund, who had recently arrived in London and obtained a small acting post at the _Blackfriars_ Theatre. He addressed the older man with a mixture of respect and boyish naïveté. "Good Will, lend me a groat or so--ere I perish of sheer hunger. Six long hours have I laboured at their plaguy rehearsal, and I have not a penny to my pocket. In faith, I never starved like this in Stratford. I swear I will repay thee two days hence!"