"
And in the sonnets, too, in spite of himself, the same true feeling
pierces through the snobbish and affected excuses.
"Ay me! but yet them might'st my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth,
Who lead thee in their riot even there
Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth,
Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee,
Thine, by thy beauty being false to me."
Shakespeare was a sycophant, a flunkey if you will, but nothing worse.
Further arguments suggest themselves. Shakespeare lived, as it were, in
a glass house with a score of curious eyes watching everything he did
and with as many ears pricked for every word he said; but this foul
accusation was never even suggested by any of his rivals. In especial
Ben Jonson was always girding at Shakespeare, now satirically, now
good-humouredly. Is it not manifest that if any such sin had ever been
attributed to him, Ben Jonson would have given the suspicion utterance?
There is a passage in his "Bartholomew Fair" which I feel sure is meant
as a skit upon the relations we find in the Sonnets.
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