Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open and shew riches
Ready to drop on me: that when I wak'd
I cried to dream again.

which is very lovely; but the Dark Lady may have had that vice in her
ears which Cloten dreaded: she may not have seen the beauty of it,
whereas there can be no doubt at all that of "My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun," &c., not a word was lost on her.

And is it to be supposed that Shakespear was too stupid or too modest
not to see at last that it was a case of Jupiter and Semele?
Shakespear was most certainly not modest in that sense. The timid
cough of the minor poet was never heard from him.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme

is only one out of a dozen passages in which he (possibly with a keen
sense of the fun of scandalizing the modest coughers) proclaimed his
place and his power in "the wide world dreaming of things to come."
The Dark Lady most likely thought this side of him insufferably
conceited; for there is no reason to suppose that she liked his plays
any better than Minna Wagner liked Richard's music dramas: as likely