The problem presented in these Sonnets is undoubtedly the most fascinating problem in all literature, and it is as exasperating as it is fascinating. It appears to be so simple, it seems constantly to be on the verge of its solution, and yet the moment we get beyond a certain point in inquiry, the more complex its apparent simplicity is discovered to be, the more hopeless all prospect of explaining the enigma. Take the difficulty of assuming, what seems to be obvious, that they are autobiographical. Here we have the poet, and that poet Shakespeare, admitting the world into the innermost secrets of his life, taking his contemporaries, without the least reserve, into his confidence, inviting and assisting them to the study of his own morbid anatomy, and, in a word, stripping himself bare with all the shameless abandon of Jean Jacques and of Casanova. Everything that we know of Shakespeare seems to discountenance the probability of his having any such intention. No anecdote, with the smallest pretence to authenticity, couples his name with scandal. The theory which identifies him with the W. S. of Willobie’s _Avisa_ has no real basis to rest on, and without corroboration is absolutely inadmissible as evidence. Whatever Shakespeare’s private life may have been, it is quite clear that he carefully regarded the decencies, and would have been the last man in the world to pose publicly in the character presented to us in the Sonnets. If the poems are autobiographical, we can only conclude that they were published without his consent, and even to his great annoyance. This may certainly have been the case, and is indeed often assumed to have been so. But even then it is, to say the least, curious, that there should have been no tradition about the extraordinary story which they tell, especially considering the distinction of the _dramatis personæ_. Assuming that the youth, who is their hero, was a real person, he must, judging from Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv., have been conspicuous in the society of that time; assuming the rival poet to be a real person, he must have been equally conspicuous in another sphere, while Shakespeare himself, at the time the Sonnets were published, was the most distinguished poet and playwright in London. It is, therefore, extraordinary that all traces of an affair in which persons of so much eminence were involved, and which would have furnished scandal-mongers with the topics in which such gossips most delight, should have entirely disappeared. We must either conclude that posterity has been very unfortunate in the loss of records which would have thrown light on the matter, or that Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew nothing of the facts, and contented themselves with the poetry; or, lastly, that what we may call the fable of the Sonnets, the drama in which W. H., “the dark lady,” and the rival poet play their parts, is as fictitious as the plot of _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or _The Tempest_.