genuine cohesion. In the first 'group' the long opening sequence
(i.-xvii.) forms the poet's appeal to a young man to marry so that his
youth and beauty may survive in children. There is almost a
contradiction in terms between the poet's handling of that topic and his
emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse
alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend's youth and
accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets
(cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. ci. cvii.) These alternate with
conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet's
affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of
absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many
reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii.
xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when
he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is
rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the
poet's mistress in the poet's absence, but the poet is forgiving
(xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.) In Sonnet lxx. the young man
whom the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and
experience:
And thou present'st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass'd by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail'd, or victor being charg'd!
At times melancholy overwhelms the writer: he despairs of the corruptions
of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares
himself weary of his profession of acting (cxi. cxii.), and foretells his
approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.) Throughout are dispersed obsequious
addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet's verse
(cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.) But in one sequence the friend is
sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets
(lxxviii.-lxxxvi.) In three sonnets near the close of the first group in
the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy
in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf.
cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.)
Main topics of the second 'group.'
In two sonnets of the second 'group' (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments
his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In
twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his 'dark' mistress for her proud
disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other
men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first 'group,' the poet
rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to
yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.) Elsewhere he makes
satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex
by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.) or lightly quibbles on his name of
'Will' (cxxx.-vi.) In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the
second as in the first 'group' lack visible sign of coherence with those
they immediately precede or follow.
It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for
which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in
Thorpe's arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic
fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged
no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the
light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in
1640--thirty-one years after their first appearance--they were presented
in a completely different order. The short descriptive titles which were
then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the
collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in
more or less amorous vein.
Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Their dependence on
French and Italian models.
In whatever order Shakespeare's sonnets be studied, the claim that has
been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can
only be accepted with many qualifications. Elizabethan sonnets were
commonly the artificial products of the poet's fancy. A strain of
personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is
vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions
were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The
typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a
medley of imitative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian
sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant
notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves.
Daniel's fine sonnet (xlix.) on 'Care-charmer, sleep,' although directly
inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre
de Brach {101a} apostrophising 'le sommeil chasse-soin' (in the
collection entitled 'Les Amours d'Aymee'), or the sonnet of Philippe
Desportes invoking 'Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire' (in the
collection entitled 'Amours d'Hippolyte'). {101b} But, throughout
Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French
effort is unmistakable. {101c} Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his
literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and
from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of
'an English Petrarch'--the highest praise that the critic conceived it
possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. {101d} Thomas Watson in
1582, in his collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled
'[Greek text], or A Passionate Century of Love,' prefaced each poem,
which he termed a 'passion,' with a prose note of its origin and
intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one 'passion' was
'wholly translated out of Petrarch;' that in another passion 'he did very
busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard;' while 'the sense or
matter of "a third" was taken out of Serafino in his "Strambotti."' In
every case Watson gave the exact reference to his foreign original, and
frequently appended a quotation. {103a} Drayton in 1594, in the
dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled 'Idea,' declared
that it was 'a fault too common in this latter time' 'to filch from
Desportes or from Petrarch's pen.' {103b} Lodge did not acknowledge his
borrowings more specifically than his colleagues, but he made a plain
profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: 'Few men are able
to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical
writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand.' {103c} Giles Fletcher, who
in his collection of sonnets called 'Licia' (1593) simulated the varying
moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as
most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all
written in 'imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' Very many of
the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by
William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources in the
Italian sonnets not merely of Petrarch, but of the sixteenth-century
poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro.
{104a} The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after
whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently
served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Seve {104b}
in christening his collection 'Delia;' Constable followed Desportes in
christening his collection 'Diana;' while Drayton not only applied to his
sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term 'amours,' but bestowed
on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the
invention of Claude de Pontoux, {104c} although it was employed by other
French contemporaries.
Sonnetteers' admission of insincerity.
With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that 'no inward
touch' was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes
as
'[Men] that do dictionary's method bring
Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;
[Men] that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.'
Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments.
But 'even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,'
wrote Gabriel Harvey in 'Pierces Supererogation' in 1593, 'are but
dainties of a pleasurable wit.' Drayton's sonnets more nearly approached
Shakespeare's in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton
told the readers of his collection entitled 'Idea' {105} (after the
French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go
elsewhere. 'In all humours _sportively_ he ranged,' he declared. Giles
Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets
entitled 'Licia, or Poems of Love,' with the warning, 'Now in that I have
written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let
him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may
write of love and not be in love, as well as of husbandry and not go to
the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.'
{106a}
Contemporary censure of sonnetteers' false sentiment. 'Gulling Sonnets.'
The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their
monotonous and mechanical treatment of 'the pangs of despised love' or
the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of
contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from
the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey
wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the
conventional sonnet-sequence in his 'Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The
Student's Loove or Hatrid.' {106b} Chapman in 1595, in a series of
sonnets entitled 'A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,' appealed to his
literary comrades to abandon 'the painted cabinet' of the love-sonnet for
a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the
sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a
sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron
of Drayton's 'Idea'), he inveighed against the 'bastard sonnets' which
'base rhymers' 'daily' begot 'to their own shames and poetry's disgrace.'
In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in
manuscript a specimen series of nine 'gulling sonnets' or parodies of the
conventional efforts. {107a} Even Shakespeare does not seem to have
escaped Davies's condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the
sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal technicalities, and his
eighth 'gulling sonnet,' in which he ridicules the application of law
terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by
Shakespeare's legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.;
{107b} while Davies's Sonnet ix., beginning:
'To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe'
must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., beginning:
'Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,' etc. {107c}
Shakespeare's scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.
Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in
nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering
in his plays. 'Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' exclaims
Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (IV. iii. 158). In the 'Two Gentlemen of
Verona' (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the
conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:
You must lay lime to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets whose composed rime
Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .
Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.
Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when
alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: 'Now is he for the numbers that
Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry,
she had a better love to be-rhyme her.' {108} In later plays
Shakespeare's disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced. In 'Henry
V' (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously
magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, 'I once writ a sonnet
in his praise, and begun thus: "Wonder of nature!"' The Duke of Orleans
retorts: 'I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.' The Dauphin
replies: 'Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for
my horse is my mistress.' In 'Much Ado about Nothing' (V. ii. 4-7)
Margaret, Hero's waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to 'write her a
sonnet in praise of her beauty.' Benedick jestingly promises one so 'in
high a style that no man living shall come over it.' Subsequently (V.
iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of
penning 'a halting sonnet of his own pure brain' in praise of Beatrice.
VIII--THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS
Slender autobiographical element in Shakespeare's sonnets. The imitative
element.
At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare's sonnets give
the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any
contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current
conventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well as for Shakespeare's
unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention--an affluence
which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of emotion--the
autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed
altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the
collection is studied comparatively with the many thousand sonnets that
the printing presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during
the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare's
performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill,
often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the
efforts of contemporary practitioners. The thoughts and words of the
sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney
were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and with as
little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his
dramatic work. To Drayton he was especially indebted. {110} Such
resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare's sonnets and those of
Petrarch or Desportes seem due to his study of the English imitators of
those sonnetteers. Most of Ronsard's nine hundred sonnets and many of
his numerous odes were accessible to Shakespeare in English adaptations,
but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard
direct.
Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of
Shakespeare's collection. They are usually manipulated with consummate
skill, but Shakespeare's indebtedness is not thereby obscured.
Shakespeare in many beautiful sonnets describes spring and summer, night
and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion. Such topics are common
themes of the poetry of the Renaissance, and they figure in Shakespeare's
pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of
Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baif, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the
Italian and French masters. {111} In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops
Ronsard's conceit that his love's portrait is painted on his heart; and
in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard's phraseology in
describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of 'tables,' is
'character'd' in his brain. {112a} Sonnet xcix., which reproaches the
flowers with stealing their charms from the features of his love, is
adapted from Constable's sonnet to Diana (No. ix.), and may be matched in
other collections. Elsewhere Shakespeare meditates on the theory that
man is an amalgam of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire
(xl.-xlv.) {112b} In all these he reproduces, with such embellishments
as his genius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton,
Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy. In
two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged
in a mere literary exercise by offering him alternative renderings of the
same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases
twice over--appropriating many of Watson's words--the unexhilarating
notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has
the greater influence on lovers. {113a} In the concluding sonnets,
cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue
illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek
anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the
notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers. {113b}
Shakespeare's claims of immortality for his sonnets a borrowed conceit.
In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was
so certain of immortality that it was capable of immortalising the person
to whom it was addressed, he gave voice to no conviction that was
peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of
spirit, or spontaneous ebullition of feeling. He was merely proving that
he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a theme that Ronsard
and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets,
had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe. {114a} Sir Philip
Sidney, in his 'Apologie for Poetrie' (1595) wrote that it was the common
habit of poets to tell you that they will make you immortal by their
verses. {114b} 'Men of great calling,' Nash wrote in his 'Pierce
Pennilesse,' 1593, 'take it of merit to have their names eternised by
poets.' {114c} In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the 'eternising'
faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic.
Spenser wrote in his 'Amoretti' (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration.
Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as 'my immortal song' (_Idea_, vi. 14)
and 'my world-out-wearing rhymes' (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such
lines as:
While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (_Idea_ xliv. 1).
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (_ib._ xliv. 11).
My name shall mount unto eternity (_ib._ xliv. 14).
All that I seek is to eternize thee (_ib._ xlvii. 54).
Daniel was no less explicit
This [_sc._ verse] may remain thy lasting monument (_Delia_, xxxvii.
9).
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,
Unburied in these lines (_ib._ xxxix. 9-10).
These [_sc._ my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [_sc._ verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time's consuming rage (_ib._ l. 9-12).
Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman.
Shakespeare, in his references to his 'eternal lines' (xviii. 12) and in
the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the
sonnets are, in Daniel's exact phrase, his 'monument' (lxxxi. 9, cvii.
13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste.
Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour
that was not approached by any other poet: {115}
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; {116}
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that
Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a woman. In two of the latter
(cxxxv.-vi.), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own
name of Will with a lady's 'will' (the synonym in Elizabethan English of
both 'lust' and 'obstinacy'), he derisively challenges comparison with
wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes,
who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress's 'wills,' and had turned the
word 'grace' to the same punning account as Shakespeare turned the word
'will.' {118a} Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red . . .
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, {118b}
he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and
flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses' features.
The praise of 'blackness.'
In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare amiably notices the
black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a
preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was,
he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He commends
the 'dark lady' for refusing to practise those arts by which other women
of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature. Here
Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in 'Love's Labour's
Lost'(IV. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as 'black
as ebony,' with 'brows decked in black,' and in 'mourning' for her
fashionable sisters' indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet.
'No face is fair that is not full so black,' exclaims Rosaline's lover.
But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare's praise of
'blackness' claim the merit of being his own invention. Sir Philip
Sidney, in sonnet vii. of his 'Astrophel and Stella,' had anticipated it.
The 'beams' of the eyes of Sidney's mistress were 'wrapt in colour black'
and wore 'this mourning weed,' so
That whereas black seems beauty's contrary,
She even in black doth make all beauties flow. {119a}
To his praise of 'blackness' in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Shakespeare
appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in
the conceit. {119b} Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion
is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the
poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a
woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart.
Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in
the play, does he mock his 'dark lady' with this uncomplimentary
interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.
The sonnets of vituperation.
The two sonnets, in which this view of 'blackness' is developed, form
part of a series of twelve, which belongs to a special category of
sonnetteering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons the sugared sentiment
which characterises most of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets.
He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman
whom he represents as disdaining his advances. The genuine anguish of a
rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but
the mood of blinding wrath which the rejection of a lovesuit may rouse in
a passionate nature does not seem from the internal evidence to be
reflected genuinely in Shakespeare's sonnets of vituperation. It was
inherent in Shakespeare's genius that he should import more dramatic
intensity than any other poet into sonnets of a vituperative type; but
there is also in his vituperative sonnets a declamatory parade of
figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned and
that the poet is striking an attitude. He cannot have been in earnest in
seeking to conciliate his disdainful mistress--a result at which the
vituperative sonnets purport to aim--when he tells her that she is 'black
as hell, as dark as night,' and with 'so foul a face' is 'the bay where
all men ride.'
Gabriel Harvey's 'Amorous Odious Sonnet.'