I collected all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham’s theory really was. I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work. This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham’s day. And yet it was one of the most important points in the whole series of poems. To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent. He did not wish to rest his fame on them. They were to him his ‘slight Muse,’ as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very few, friends. Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays, and shows a noble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius. When he says to Willie Hughes: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in _eternal lines_ to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee;— the expression ‘eternal lines’ clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted. In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C. and CI.), we find the same feeling. Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long To speak of that which gives thee all thy might? Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song, Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light? he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the Mistress of Tragedy and Comedy for her ‘neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed,’ and says— Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb? Excuse not silence so, for ‘t lies in thee To make him much outlive a gilded tomb And to be praised of ages yet to be. Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how To make him seem long hence as he shows now. It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression. To imagine that the ‘powerful rhyme’ of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to mistake Shakespeare’s meaning entirely. It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but _Romeo and Juliet_.