“’Tis affirmed
    By poets skilled in Nature’s secret ways,
    That Love will not submit to be controlled
    By mastery.”

In support of his view, Mr. White urges, among other things, that most foul and wicked fling which Leontes, in his mad rapture of jealousy, makes against his wife, in Act i. scene 2, of The Winter’s Tale.  He thinks the Poet could not have written that and other strains of like import, but that he was stung into doing so by his own bitter experience of “sorrow and shame”; and the argument is that, supposing him to have had such a root of bitterness in his life, he must have been thinking of that while writing those passages.  The obvious answer is, To be sure, he must have been thinking of that; but then he must have known that others would think of it too; and a reasonable delicacy on his part would have counselled the withholding of any thing that he was conscious might be applied to his own domestic affairs.  Sensible men do not write in their public pages such things as would be almost sure to breed or foster scandal about their own names or their own homes.  The man that has a secret cancer on his person will naturally be the last to speak of cancers in reference to others.  I can hardly think Shakespeare was so wanting in a sense of propriety as to have written the passages in question, but that he knew no man could say he was exposing the foulness of his own nest.  So that my inferences in the matter are just the reverse of Mr. White’s.  As for the alleged need of personal experience in order to the writing of such things, why should not this hold just as well in regard, for instance, to Lady Macbeth’s pangs of guilt?  Shakespeare’s prime characteristic was, that he knew the truth of Nature in all such things without the help of personal experience.

Mr. White presumes, moreover, that Anne Shakespeare was a coarse, low, vulgar creature, such as, the fascination of the honeymoon once worn off, the Poet could not choose but loath and detest; and that his betaking himself to London was partly to escape from her hated society.  This, too, is all sheer conjecture, and rather lame at that.  That Shakespeare was more or less separated from his wife for a number of years, cannot indeed be questioned; but that he ever found or ever sought relief or comfort in such separation, is what we have no warrant for believing.  It was simply forced upon him by the necessities of his condition.  The darling object of his London life evidently was, that he might return to his native town, with a handsome competence, and dwell in the bosom of his family; and the yearly visits, which tradition reports him to have made to Stratford, look like any thing but a wish to forget them or be forgotten by them.  From what is known of his subsequent life, it is certain that he had, in large measure, that honourable ambition, so natural to an English gentleman, of being the founder of a family; and as soon as he had reached the hope of doing so, he retired to his old home, and there set up his rest, as if his best sunshine of life still waited on the presence of her from whose society he is alleged to have fled away in disappointment and disgust.