m a child, has been
introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that
her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed.
Lady Newdegate's recently published _Gossip from a Muniment Room_, which
furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's
mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may
have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate
states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury,
and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey
eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond
doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of
the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is
satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second
edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate's
volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the
attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir
William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters
of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons
named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare
and the supposititious 'Will Herbert' for 'the dark lady's' favours in
the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot
wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly
tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover
named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the
sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person
of that Christian name.

{416} Professor Dowden (_Sonnets_, p. xxxv) writes: 'It appears from the
punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of
Shakspere's friend was the same as his own, _Will_,' and thence is
deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one
who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.

{418a} Ed. Mayor, p. 35.

{418b} Manningham's _Diary_, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes's _Odes Pastoral_
sestine 2:

'But women will have their own wills,
Alas, why then should I complain?'

{419} Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names,
unfamiliar words, and words deemed wor