th
some unknown woman. The identification of the young man of the first
seventeen sonnets with other friends who are praised in later sonnets is
not certain, though in some cases probable; and much research and
conjecture have entirely failed to make clear the relations between the
poet, the rival poet, the lady, and the friend. The _Sonnets_ furnish us
with no knowledge of Shakespeare's personal affairs, and only a meager
basis even for gossip as to some of his experiences with men and women.

Another kind of inquiry has sought to discover in the sonnets not facts
or incidents of Shakespeare's life, but indications of his emotional
experiences. The results of such inquiry are manifestly outside the
scope of this chapter. For their discussion, the reader must be referred
to Professor Alden's introduction to the Tudor edition of the _Sonnets_.
Shakespeare's personality as it is reflected from his works will also be
considered in the concluding chapter of this volume. So much stress,
however, has been placed on interpretations of the sonnets, and these
have so often occupied an exaggerated place in his biography, that it
may be worth while to remark that whether these lyrical poems are
genuine and personal or are conventional and literary, and whether they
make the poet more clearly discernible or not, they must certainly be
taken not alone by themselves, but in connection with the dramas as
affording us an impression of the man who wrote them. Of the sonnets,
it may be said in almost the same words just now used of the documents
and traditions, that whether they contain much or little to illuminate
the vast intellect and soaring imagination which created Hamlet and
Lear, they contain nothing irreconcilable with the personality which
these creations imply rather than reveal.

CHAPTER III

SHAKESPEARE'S READING

We have called the present chapter "Shakespeare's Reading" rather than
"The Learning of Shakespeare," because, apart from the famous line in
which Ben Jonson stated that the poet had "small Latin and less Greek,"
it is evident from the allusions throughout the plays that Shakespeare
was a reader rather than a scholar. In other words, he used books for
what interested him; he did not study them for complete mastery; and
many and varied as are the traces of his literary interests, they have
the air of being detached fragments that have stuck in a plastic and
retentive mind, not pieces of systematic erudit