Having thus glanced over the work of the principal commentators upon the Sonnets, let us try the simple plan of reading them as we read Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for instance, or the Sonnets from the Portuguese, by Mrs. Browning.  In Mr. R.G.  White’s admirable edition of Shakespeare he confesses that he has no opinion upon the subject:  “Mr. Thomas Thorpe appears in his dedication as the Sphinx of literature, and thus far he has not met his Oedipus.”  But herein have we not the main difficulty stated?  The first great error committed by almost all students of the Sonnets, if we may be pardoned the opinion, is to take it for granted that they are a mystery whose key is lost.  Just so long as the Sonnets are considered as a species of enigma they will be misunderstood and misinterpreted.  It was not Shakespeare’s habit to talk in riddles or to propound psychological problems:  of all poets except Chaucer he is the most simple, direct and straightforward.

We have in the Amoretti of Spenser, and in the Astrophel and Stella of Sir Philip Sidney, admirable examples of autobiographical poems written mostly in sonnet stanza, of irregular and varied construction and subject, although the general theme is the same.  Surely we may bring to the study of Shakespeare’s poems the same simple method used in reading these.  Poets of his own day, and using in their highest flights the form which was Shakespeare’s familiar relaxation, nobody has tried to ascribe to Sidney and Spenser metaphysical mysteries and psychological conceits.  Let us hope that some day this mistaken idolatry of Shakespeare, which besmokes his shrine with concealing clouds of incense, will be done away with, and that we shall be allowed to behold the simple truth, which never suffers in his case for being naked.

In his 76th Sonnet, Shakespeare says,

    Why write I still all one, ever the same. 
      And keep invention in a noted weed,
    That every word doth almost tell my name,
      Showing their birth and whence they did proceed? 
    Oh know, sweet love, I always write of you,
    And you and love are still my argument.

With this explicit declaration of Shakespeare, the general character of the poems, and the similar writings of his friends and contemporaries, we can but consider the Sonnets as autobiographical poems, written during a period of time beginning certainly as early as 1598 (when Meres speaks of Shakespeare’s having written sonnets), and ceasing some time before their first publication in 1609.  In the same way were written the poems composing Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which, although dedicated to “A.H.H.,” close with a long poem addressed to the poet’s sister.