Now
even in an age of punning titles such as that of a well-known and
delightful treatise by Sir John Harrington, the peculiar fondness of
Shakespeare for puns was notorious; but especially for puns on names, as
in the proverbial case of Sir Thomas Lucy; and above all for puns on his
own Christian name, as in his 135th, 136th, and 143rd sonnets. It must
now be but too evident to the meanest intelligence--to the meanest
intelligence, he repeated; for to such only did he or would he then and
there or ever or anywhere address himself--(loud applause) that the
graceless author, more utterly lost to all sense of shame than any Don
Juan or other typical libertine of fiction, had come forward to placard
by way of self-advertisement on his own stage, and before the very eyes
of a Maiden Queen, the scandalous confidence in his own powers of
fascination and seduction so cynically expressed in the too easily
intelligible vaunt--A Woman will have her Will [Shakespeare]. In the
penultimate line of the hundred and forty-third sonnet the very phrase
might be said to occur:
So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will.
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