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drama. The sonnets had taken years to write and had not been produced in the heat of passion, but in the maturity of Shakespeare’s full powers. And what was he exploring in these sonnets? Love. And what were Shakespeare’s “real opinions” about love?
    No one would ever know—Mahnmut was sure the Bard was too clever, too cynical, too stealthy ever to show his true feelings. But in play after play, Shakespeare had shown how strong feelings—including love—turned people into fools. Shakespeare, like Lear, loved his Fools. Romeo had been Fortune’s Fool, Hamlet Fate’s Fool, MacBeth Ambition’s Fool, Falstaff . . .well, Falstaff was no one’s Fool . . . but he became a fool for the love of Prince Hal and died of a broken heart when the young prince abandoned him.
    Mahnmut knew that the “poet” in the sonnet cycles, sometimes referred to as “Will,” was not—despite the insistence of so many of the shallow scholars of the Twentieth Century—the historical Will Shakespeare, but was, rather, another dramatic construct created by the playwright/poet to explore all the facets of love. What if this “poet” was, like Shakespeare’s hapless Count Orsino, Love’s Fool? A man in love with love?
    Mahmut liked this approach. He knew that Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds” between the older poet and the youth was not a homosexual liaison, but a true sacrament of sensibilities, a facet of love honored in days long preceding Shakespeare’s. On the surface, Sonnet 116 seemed to be a trite declaration of that love and its permanency, but if it truly was a refutation . . .
    Mahnmut suddenly saw where it fit. Like so many great poets, Shakespeare began his poems before or after they began. But if this was a poem of refutation, what was it refuting? What had the youth said to the older, love-besotted poet that needed such vehement refutation?
    Mahnmut extended fingers from his primary manipulator, took up his stylus, and scribbled on his t-slate—

    Dear Will—Certainly we’d both like the marriage of true minds we have—since men cannot share the sacramental marriage of bodies—to be as real and permanent as real marriage. But it can’t be. People change, Will. Circumstances change. When the qualities of people or the people themselves go away, one’s love does as well. I loved you once, Will, I really did, but you’ve changed, you’ve altered, and so there has been a change in me and an alteration in our love.
    Yours most sincerely,
The Youth
    Mahnmut looked at his letter and laughed, but the laughter died as he realized how this changed all of Sonnet 116. Now, instead of a treacly affirmation of unchanging love, the sonnet became a violent refutation of the youth’s jilting, an argument against such self-serving abandonment. Now the sonnet would read—

    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit (these so-called) “impediments”: love is not love
    Which “alters when it alteration finds,”
    Or “bends with the remover to remove,”
    O no!
    Mahnmut could hardly contain his excitement. Everything in the sonnet and in the entire sonnet cycle now clicked into place. Little was left of this “marriage of true minds” type of love—little except anger, accusations, incriminations, lying, and further infidelity—all of which would be played out by Sonnet 126, by which time “the Young Man” and ideal love itself would be abandoned for the slutty pleasures of “the Dark Lady.” Mahnmut shifted consciousness to the virtual and began encoding an e-note squirt to his faithful interlocutor of the last dozen e-years, Orphu of Io.
    Klaxons sounded. Lights blinked in Mahnmut’s virtual vision. For a second he thought— the kraken! —but the kraken would never come to the surface or enter an open lead.
    Mahnmut stored the sonnet and his notes, wiped the e-note from his squirt queue, and opened external sensors.
    The Dark Lady was five klicks away from Chaos Central and in the remote