So give him the play, And lette him awaye To your assured friend and loving servand,
So here also had Shakespeare anticipated me? Had he been to Edinburgh too?
I might have known: but lo! I grow so used to our resemblances, I almost cease to notice them.
Donnelly too! I had never seen his book before--though I have taken keen interest in the subject ever since Delia Bacon arose in--well, the land where they do raise Bacon--and found Shakespeare out.
Could it indeed be true that Shakespeare was an ignorant impostor, whose business it was to hold respectable gentlemen's horses at the stage-door of the theatre, instead of which he wickedly suborned the Lord High Chancellor of England to write his plays for him, and the same with intent to deceive?
To make sure, I read a few pages of Donnelly.
Even that failed to convince me: the more I read, the more I didn't know.
I saw Shakespeare's _Works_ on the bookshelf, and reached the volume down. It opened at the _Sonnets_.
Ah! what exquisite music! But--what was this?
_Your_ name, from hence, immortal life shall have, Though _I_, once gone, to all the world must die.
If my slight muse do please these curious days, The pain be _mine_, but _thine_ shall be the praise.
What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is't but mine own when I praise _thee_?
Curious, surely. What could these lines mean?
_My life hath in this line some interest._
What if the true cryptogram were concealed in this strangely emphasised and deeply noted line? What if it were left to me to solve the mystery?
By Jove! here _was_ a discovery! Writing "interest" "interrest," as it would be written in the manuscript, the letters in the line spell the words
and Mistress Mary Fitton, as everybody knows, is the Dark Lady of the _Sonnets_, the lady who had "her Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus"; to wit, Will Shakespeare; her young lover, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke; and the respectable elderly lover whom she was plighted to marry at his wife's death--Sir William Knollys, Comptroller of the Household to Queen Elizabeth!
Mary Fitton's identity with the lady of the Sonnets has been established beyond question by Lady Newdegate's publication of _Passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fitton_. The perfect anagram which I had accidentally discovered in the most pointedly accentuated line in the whole of the _Sonnets_, was therefore something more than curious.