The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Basic Books Inc, New York, 1962 (with essays by Hubler, Frye, Fiedler, Spender, Blackmur, an amusing novella by Oscar Wilde and the text of the sonnets). Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-9372.
Out of print but
might be able to find it with their out of print book search. Otherwise get thee to a good University library.
This delightful miscellany is long out of print, but for the amateur Shakespearean it is worth searching out--either at some good library or through out of print book search at amazon.com. It's contents and all the essays are shadowed by the mistaken notion that the author was Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Read in the context of later books by Ogburn and Sobran interesting lights are cast on its assumptions.
At many instances the fallacy of taking Shakspere as the author causes the analyses to go astray. In fact there can be no doubt to any open minded and sensitive reader that the sonnets are deadly personal, and reveal the quick of the poet's heart and life situation. Making sense out of this and the biography of the upstart crowe from Stratford-upon-Avon crams too much foot into too little shoe, as the Prince said to Cinderella's half sisters.
Wilde's delightful novella "The Portrait of Mr W.H." is a pleasure, and it is worth noting--without emphasis, that Wilde was in the homintern. Such was also bruited of the wolfish Earl of Oxford--who was some roisterer according to report. In the end perhaps the authorship question could be settled on instinct by asking the cutting question--who would you rather have a drink with at the Mermaid? W. Shakspere unremarkable man of Stratford-upon-Avon, or the dashing mad brilliant Earl of Oxford?
Mark Twain, that authority on smoking and the weather aptly summed up the Stratford case as like a museum brontosaur: "nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of Paris."