The story unfolded by the Sonnets, then, is this:  Shakespeare had an ardent friendship, made all the livelier by the fervor of the poetic temperament, for a young man of noble birth and very great personal beauty, himself a lover of poetry, if not a poet.  This youth was very much younger than Shakespeare, who was already beginning to speak of himself as past the prime of life, although he was probably not more than thirty-four.  The friend of Shakespeare was almost perfect in beauty, intellect and disposition, but he had two faults:  he was extremely fond of flattery (Sonnet 84), and he was over-addicted to pleasure: 

    How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
    Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
    Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! (95.)

Shakespeare scorned to palter with the truth—­“fair, kind and true” he had called his friend—­but he saw his faults with the keen eye of love, that cannot bear an imperfection in the one who should be all-perfect.

    Thou truly fair wert truly sympathized
    In true plain words by thy true-telling friend; (82.)

and

                        I love thee in such sort,
    As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report; (36.)

therefore in all love he warns him to take heed.

Such was the character of Shakespeare’s friend, to whom he begins by addressing seventeen sonnets (or poems in the sonnet stanza, which is the better definition), urging him to marry.  He knows the weakness of his character and the temptations that beset him, and in a strain of loving persuasion, whose theme bears great resemblance to many passages in Sidney’s Arcadia, he beseeches him, now that he stands upon the top of happy hours,

    Make thee another self for love of me. 
    That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

Sonnet 17 in a most beautiful manner sums up the argument and ends the subject.

The Sonnets from the 18th to the 126th are all addressed to this beloved friend, who nevertheless, early in the history of their friendship, inflicted upon the poet a cruel wrong.  With the 33d Sonnet begin the references to this double treachery.  It is impossible for an unprejudiced reader to interpret this and the other poems upon the same subject in any way but one.  The mistress of Shakespeare, fascinated by the beauty and brilliant qualities of his friend, took advantage of the poet’s absence to win that facile heart, so incapable of resisting the charms of woman and the tongue of flattery;

    And when a woman woos, what woman’s son
    Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed? (41.)

His friend’s loss was the greater to the poet, for, although he loved with passionate strength, it was against his conscience and his reason.  Such a love, he says, is “enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;” “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.”