r as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in
Shakespeare's. He borrows very many of his competitors' words and
thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure
them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely
inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's sonnets proved no
exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him
involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of
melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and
there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce
dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one
scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to
other sonnetteers, of a lover's supersession by his friend in a
mistress's graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and
draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion
is wanting in seriousness. The sole biographical inference deducible
from the sonnets is that at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained
no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful
patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal
evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton,
and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare's sonnets is the
corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of
Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave
Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and
encouragement, which entitles the Earl to a place in the poet's biography
resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d'Este in the biography of
Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, duchess of Savoy, in the
biography of Ronsard.

XI--THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER

'Midsummer Night's Dream.'

But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron

[How] to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,

his dramatic work was steadily advancing. To the winter season of 1595
probably belongs 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' {161} The comedy may well
have been written to celebrate a marriage--perhaps the marriage of the
universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third
earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl
of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5