the time the Sonnets were written, which must have been between 1590 and 1595, such an expression as “the proud full sail of his great verse” could not possibly have been used of Chapman's work, however applicable it might have been to the style of his later Jacobean plays. No; Marlowe was clearly the rival poet of whom Shakespeare spoke in such laudatory terms; the hymn he wrote in Willie Hughes’ honour was the unfinished “Hero and Leander,” and that
“Affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,”
was the Mephistophilis of his Doctor Faustus. No doubt, Marlowe was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his “Edward I.” That Shakespeare had some legal right to retain Willie Hughes in his own company seems evident from Sonnet LXXXVII where he says:—
“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
