Whether the reader agrees with me or not on this point, it may be
accepted that Shakespeare revealed himself far more completely in his
plays than as a lyric poet. Just as he chose his dramatic subjects with
some felicity to reveal his many-sided nature, so he used the sonnets
with equal artistry to discover that part of himself which could hardly
be rendered objectively. Whatever is masculine in a man can be depicted
superbly on the stage, but his feminine qualities--passionate
self-abandonment, facile forgivingness, self-pity--do not show well in
the dramatic struggle. What sort of a drama would that be in which the
hero would have to confess that when in the vale of years he had fallen
desperately in love with a girl, and that he had been foolish enough to
send a friend, a young noble, to plead his cause, with the result that
the girl won the friend and gave herself to him? The protagonist would
earn mocking laughter and not sympathy, and this Shakespeare no doubt
foresaw. Besides, to Shakespeare, this story, which is in brief the
story of the sonnets, was terribly real and intimate, and he felt
instinctively that he could not treat it objectively; it was too near
him, too exquisitely painful for that.
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