accused of psychopathic derangement. And this fashion is
retrospective. The cases of Shakespear and Michel Angelo are cited as
proving that every genius of the first magnitude was a sufferer; and
both here and in Germany there are circles in which such derangement
is grotesquely reverenced as part of the stigmata of heroic powers.
All of which is gross nonsense. Unfortunately, in Shakespear's case,
prudery, which cannot prevent the accusation from being whispered,
does prevent the refutation from being shouted. Mr Harris, the
deep-voiced, refuses to be silenced. He dismisses with proper
contempt the stupidity which places an outrageous construction on
Shakespear's apologies in the sonnets for neglecting that "perfect
ceremony" of love which consists in returning calls and making
protestations and giving presents and paying the trumpery attentions
which men of genius always refuse to bother about, and to which touchy
people who have no genius attach so much importance. No leader who
had not been tampered with by the psychopathic monomaniacs could ever
put any construction but the obvious and innocent one on these
passages. But the general vocabulary of the sonnets to Pembroke (or
whoever "Mr W. H." really was) is so overcharged according to modern
ideas that a reply on the general case is necessary.



Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion

That reply, which Mr Harris does not hesitate to give, is twofold:
first, that Shakespear was, in his attitude towards earls, a
sycophant; and, second, that the normality of Shakespear's sexual
constitution is only too well attested by the excessive susceptibility
to the normal impulse shewn in the whole mass of his writings. This