The distance from this to the dedication of the Sonnets is great. What Sidney Lee attempts to prove by his researches and conjectures is, that the man, who figures in the Sonnets as the protector of the poet, was Southampton, and not Pembroke. The name of the youth is not of the first importance, nor does it signify greatly whether the woman celebrated and attacked in the Sonnets bore the name of Mary Fitton or another. However, the main point is, that in common with a number of previous authors, who have thoroughly studied the contemporaneous literature of Europe, and more especially the sonnet-poetry of Italy, France and England, such as Delius and Elze in Germany, and Henrik Schück in Sweden, Lee, relying on the numerous traits that these poems share with other sonnet-cycles of their period, stamps the whole argument of the text as fiction, and denies their autobiographical character. Scarcely any writer before him has so boldly endeavoured to limit Shakespeare's originality in the domain of sonnet-poetry. In the first place Lee points out, that the whole body of sixteenth-century sonnets was so dependent firstly on Petrarch, then on such French writers as Ronsard, du Bellay and Desportes, that even the finest of them, the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, Watson, Lodge, Drayton and Daniel may be characterised as imitative studies, if not simply as a mosaic of plagiarisms. Hereupon he tries to show Shakespeare's dependence on his predecessors. Shakespeare picked up, without scruple, ideas and expressions from the sonnets published by Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable and Sidney; he did this as deliberately and imperturbably as in his comedies he manipulated dramas and novels by contemporary and older poets. To Drayton especially is Shakespeare indebted. As all the Englishmen imitated the Frenchmen, Shakespeare has a false air of having been directly influenced by Ronsard, de Baif and Desportes, though he scarcely knew these poets in their own language. The Danish translator of the Sonnets, Adolf Hansen, had already pointed out numerous impersonal traits. Some of the poorer Sonnets with their forced and complicated metaphors so obviously bear the impress of the spirit of the age, that it is quite impossible to regard them as characteristic of Shakespeare, and some few Sonnets are such complete imitations, that they cannot be accepted as confessions. Sonnets xviii. and xix. work out the same idea as Daniel's Delia, and Sonnets lv. and lxxxi. treat the very same subject as the sixty-ninth Sonnet in Spenser's _Amoretti_. Finally the story of the friends, one of whom deprives the other of his mistress, is to be found in Lyly's _Euphues_.