THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
older sonnet series. It is impossible to prove them autobiographical as a whole. Yet it is just as difficult to deny the similitude of personal experience in the great sonnets. Shakspere followed the sonnet fashion, as he followed other fashions, doing only what others had done, but doing it better, with more energy; and in the process he lights up unexpected and amazing areas of truth.
To say that in his later plays the thought overbalances the language, is to raise the main question as to whether Shakspere was a thinker at all. According to the theory of his mind here advanced, he was not. Except for his characteristic moments in which he flashes life into words, he is curiously conventional and timid. Though he followed the daring Marlowe and was the contemporary of Bacon, he never ventured out of the most conservative, even
[106]
