The one hundred and fifty-four poems which make up the "Book Called Shakespeare's Sonnettes" form a sonnet-sequence, as clearly as do Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," or Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "House of Life"; they deal with two leading themes in an order which is not necessarily historical, but which discloses an interior principle of arrangement; to borrow a comparison from music, they consist of variations on two dominating motives or themes. The order in which they were presented in the edition of 1609 has been generally accepted, although nothing is known with regard to the principle or method of arrangement followed by the publisher. This order has been accepted because it has, in the judgment of a majority of students, the justification of a logical and intelligible grouping. In the poet's time, sonnets were often written in sequence; the separate poems presenting, when read as a whole, a many-sided but connected treatment of a single theme or of a group of relating themes. The separate sonnets, written from time to time as expressions of diverse moods, as Tennyson wrote "In Memoriam," disclosed, when brought together, a unity, not only of manner, but of theme or thought. There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets at intervals during a period of four or five years; the Sonnets show that during this period his mind was constantly reverting to two kinds of emotional experience, which he approached from many different points of view and in many diverse moods, but which held a first place in his interest and moved him to expression.

The one hundred and fifty-four poems in Shakespeare's sonnet-sequence have for their general themes a deep and highly idealized love of friendship for a young man of extraordinary beauty and charm of nature, and a passionate love for a "dark woman." These two unknown persons and the poet are the actors in a drama which may have been subjective in its origin, but which is definitely objective in its presentation. The spiritual motive is suggested in the one hundred and forty-fourth sonnet :

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.

The friend to whom the first one hundred and twentysix sonnets are addressed was noble in nature, station, and fortune, endowed with all manly qualities, and possessed of a winning beauty of feature and charm of manner; the remaining twenty-eight are addressed to or describe relations with a woman who was plain of feature, pale, dark, treacherous, and stained, but the mistress of a potent fascination. If the sonnets are read in their present order as forming a connected poem, the poet, his friend, and the dark woman enact a drama of love, the acts of which are recorded in the emotions and meditations of the poet. The entire sequence may be broken into smaller groups, each of which conveys with more or less definiteness and completeness some phase of the drama or some aspect of the poet's experience.

The sonnet-sequence opens with a celebration of the beauty and perfections of the noble youth whom the poet loves, dwelling with an idealizing delicacy and subtlety, after the manner of the Elizabethan sonneteer, on his separate and numerable charms, and urging him to marry in order that the marvellous beauty which has been given him may be reproduced in his children. Failing to secure for posterity copies of his friend's beauty by marriage, the poet offers to give it immortality in his verse. With the twentyseventh sonnet a note of sadness and pain, foreshadowing a change in the harmony between the poet and his friend, is sounded; and the thoughts which come in absence and separation rise in the poet's mind and are set in exquisite form before the imagination in "sessions of sweet silent thought." The modulations of this theme are marvellously varied and beautiful, covering the whole range of sadness, longing, regret, loneliness, misgiving, foreboding, and despair.

So far no shadow save that of separation has rested upon the friendship between the two men, but now the dark woman enters. The poet in the forty-second sonnet describes himself as her lover, and his sorrow gets its deepest pang from the fact that his friend has robbed him of his mistress :

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,

And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;

Both find each other, and I lose both twain

And both for my sake lay on me this cross:
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.

Loneliness, disillusion, pain, self-denial, renunciation, and forgiveness are the notes of this phase of the poet's experience, rationalized and illuminated by meditation. There is no bitterness in his thought of his friend, estranged from him by the woman he loves and thus bringing him a double loss; his love and admiration triumph over his sense of injustice and injury. This feeling gives the episode of shattered friendship its tenderest note, and has left its record in a sonnet which registers Shakespeare's highest achievement in the field of lyric poetry:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In the forty-eighth sonnet the entrance of a rival poet is recorded, and the charms which have hitherto been celebrated by the writer of the Sonnets inspire "the travail of a mightier pen." The rival singer, whose advent gives a wound to the sonneteer's selflove, has been identified by different students of the Sonnets with Chapman, Marlowe, Drayton, and Daniel. In the light of rejection and disillusion the poet comments with unflinching frankness on the meanness of the player's occupation, the lowliness of his own station in life, and the frequent supremacy of evil in the world. Through all these phases of his humiliation and sorrow his love for his friend remains unmoved, and he finds a deep consolation in the sense of power which his art gives him. Through art the beauty of his friend shall be the joy of posterity, as it has been the poet's inspiration.

There is a touching cry of farewell in the eightyseventh sonnet; but after an interval of silence the poet takes up again the old themes, with more assurance and with a new note of hope and faith. This note becomes dominant in the one hundred and sixteenth sonnet, which may be regarded as the highest point of vision attained in the sequence :

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:
Oh, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.