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Chiding his friend for absence in Sonnets LVII. and LVIII., the poet indicates such waiting and watching as would come to him had their relations been very intimate, and perhaps indicates that he and his friend lodged together.

Those Sonnets are as follows:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu;

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought

Save, where you are how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will,

Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

That God forbid that made me first your slave,

I should in thought control your times of pleasure,

Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,

Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!

O, let me suffer, being at your beck,

The imprison'd absence of your liberty;

And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,

Without accusing you of injury.

Be where you list, your charter is so strong

That you yourself may privilege your time

To what you will; to you it doth belong

Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.

I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,

Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.

I am not unaware that there are other Sonnets which indicate that they lived apart, though it is of course quite possible that they lived apart at one time and together at another. But whether or not they at any time lodged together, these Sonnets indicate that their lives were brought together by some common purpose, and that hours and seasons of communication and perhaps of kindred labor were frequent to them. Our affections or friendships do not blossom in untilled fields; it is the comradeship of common effort, mutually helpful and beneficial, that more than often determines the impalpable garments and coverings of our lives. Certainly we may believe that the two characters that fill these two thousand lines of poetry did not live and move so far apart as were the busy actor at a theatre and the courted and adventurous peer of England.

If the friend to whom the Sonnets were addressed was Shakespeare, and if the author of the Sonnets and of the accredited Shakespearean plays was some "pale, wasted," and unknown student who sold his labors and his genius to another, we may perhaps see how they would have had frequent interviews and hours of labor, and how Shakespeare might have had all the relations to the poet, which the Sonnets imply of the poet's friend. But if Shakespeare, then well advanced both to fame and fortune, was the poet it is very difficult to imagine any one person who could have borne to him all the relations which the Sonnets indicate—patron or benefactor and familiar associate and companion; a rival and successor in the favors of his mistress, and a loved or at least cherished friend.

While I present the view that some unknown student wrote, and Shakespeare adopted and published, the Shakespearean plays, I do not deny to Shakespeare a part, perhaps a large part, in their production. As I have said, there are many plays attributed to Shakespeare, some or the greater portions of which are distinctively of a lower class than the greater plays or the Sonnets. The theory of collaboration affects at least six plays commonly classed as Shakespearean, and perhaps others classed as doubtful plays. Why is not the situation satisfied if we ascribe to Shakespeare a capacity equal to the composition of Titus Andronicus? That is a play which seems to have been attractive from its plot and the character of its incidents. In it, however, there are but few lines that seem to be from the same author as the Sonnets and the greater of the recognized Shakespearean