nd his plays in the dramatist's lifetime. Apart from his work as a
dramatist, Shakespeare, in his capacity of one of 'the King's servants'
or company of players, was personally known to all the officers of the
royal household who collectively controlled theatrical representations at
Court. Throughout James I's reign his plays were repeatedly performed in
the royal presence, and when the dedicators of the First Folio, at the
conclusion of their address to Lords Pembroke and Montgomery, describe
the dramatist's works as 'these remaines of your _Servant_ Shakespeare,'
they make it quite plain that it was in the capacity of 'King's servant'
or player that they knew him to have been the object of their noble
patrons' favour.

No suggestion in the sonnets of the youth's identity with Pembroke.

The sonnets offer no internal indication that the Earl of Pembroke and
Shakespeare ever saw each other. Nothing at all is deducible from the
vague parallelisms that have been adduced between the earl's character
and position in life and those with which the poet credited the youth of
the sonnets. It may be granted that both had a mother (Sonnet iii.),
that both enjoyed wealth and rank, that both were regarded by admirers as
cultivated, that both were self-indulgent in their relations with women,
and that both in early manhood were indisposed to marry, owing to habits
of gallantry. Of one alleged point of resemblance there is no evidence.
The loveliness assigned to Shakespeare's youth was not, as far as we can
learn, definitely set to Pembroke's account. Francis Davison, when
dedicating his 'Poetical Rhapsody' to the earl in 1602 in a very
eulogistic sonnet, makes a cautiously qualified reference to the
attractiveness of his person in the lines:

[His] outward shape, though it most lovely be,
Doth in fair robes a fairer soul attire.

The only portraits of him that survive represent him in middle age, {414}
and seem to confute the suggestion that he was reckoned handsome at any
time of life; at most they confirm Anthony Wood's description of him as
in person 'rather majestic than elegant.' But the point is not one of
moment, and the argument neither gains nor loses, if we allow that
Pembroke may, at any rate in the sight of a poetical panegyrist, have at
one period reflected, like Shakespeare's youth, 'the lovely April of his
mother's prime.'

But when we have reckoned up the traits that can, on any showing, be
ad