Now the
very individuality of Shakspere, judged by his dramas alone, has been
declared nonexistent; while in the sonnets he manifests some of the
deepest phases of a healthy self-consciousness. We do not intend to
enter into the still unsettled question as to whether these sonnets were
addressed to a man or a woman. We have scarcely a doubt left on the
question ourselves, as will be seen from the argument we found on our
conviction. We cannot say we feel much interest in the other question,
_If a man, what man?_ A few placed at the end, arranged as they have
come down to us, are beyond doubt addressed to a woman. But the
difference in tone between these and the others we think very
remarkable. Possibly at the time they were written--most of them early
in his life, as it appears to us, although they were not published till
the year 1609, when he was forty-five years of age, Meres referring to
them in the year 1598, eleven years before, as known "among his private
friends"--he had not known such women as he knew afterwards, and hence
the true devotion of his soul is given to a friend of his own sex.
Gervinus, whose lectures on Shakspere, profound and lofty to a degree
unattempted by any other interpreter, we are glad to find have been done
into a suitable English translation, under the superintendence of the
author himself--Gervinus says somewhere in them that, as Shakspere lived
and wrote, his ideal of womanhood grew nobler and purer.
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