Beatrice's 'will'--in other words that the uncle may
consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when
the former misinterprets the young lady's 'What is your will?' into an
inquiry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth
of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere
better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract
amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning
subsisting between the words 'will' and 'wish,' the latter being in
vernacular use as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the 'Two
Gentlemen of Verona' (I. iii. 63 and IV. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost
strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending
announcement that one interlocutor's 'wish' is in harmony with another
interlocutor's 'will.'

It is in this vein of pleasantry--'will' and 'wish' are identically
contrasted in Sonnet cxxxv.--that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modern
readers, makes play with the word 'will' in the sonnets, and especially
in the two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) which alone speciously justify the
delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the
name of Will.

Arbitrary and irregular use of italics by Elizabethan and Jacobean
printers.

One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation is
that the word 'will' in these sonnets is frequently italicised in the
original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument.
The corrector of the press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi.
largely turned upon a simple pun between the writer's name of 'Will' and
the lady's 'will.' That fact, and no other, he indicated very roughly by
occasionally italicising the crucial word. Typography at the time
followed no firmly fixed rules, and, although 'will' figures in a more or
less punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed
on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, and those
were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the obvious equivoque,
and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to
their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that
is alleged by those who believe that 'Will' is used now as the name of
the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each
of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of
the theory, Nos. cxxxiv