(ll. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the _Ode de la Chasse_
(on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his
_OEuvres et Meslanges Poetiques_, 1574.
{77a} Rosamond, in Daniel's poem, muses thus when King Henry challenges
her honour:
But what? he is my King and may constraine me;
Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed.
The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me,
I shall be judg'd his Love and so be shamed;
We see the faire condemn'd that never gamed,
And if I yeeld, 'tis honourable shame.
If not, I live disgrac'd, yet thought the same.
{77b} Watson makes this comment on his poem or passion on Time, (No.
lxxvii.): 'The chiefe contentes of this Passion are taken out of
Seraphine [_i.e._ Serafino], Sonnet 132:
Col tempo passa[n] gli anni, i mesi, e l'hore,
Col tempo le richeze, imperio, e regno,
Col tempo fama, honor, fortezza, e ingegno,
Col tempo giouentu, con belta more, &c.'
Watson adds that he has inverted Serafino's order for 'rimes sake,' or
'upon some other more allowable consideration.' Shakespeare was also
doubtless acquainted with Giles Fletcher's similar handling of the theme
in Sonnet xxviii. of his collection of sonnets called _Licia_ (1593).
{79} 'Excellencie of the English Tongue' in Camden's _Remaines_, p. 43.
{80} All these and all that els the Comick Stage
With seasoned wit and goodly pleasance graced,
By which mans life in his likest image
Was limned forth, are wholly now defaced . . .
And he, the man whom Nature selfe had made
To mock her selfe and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter under mimick shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late;
With whom all joy and jolly meriment
Is also deaded and in dolour drent.--(ll. 199-210).
{81a} A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century
hand, was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition
of Spenser's _Works_ (cf. _Outlines_, ii. 394-5).
{81b}
But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen
Large streames of bonnie and sweete nectar flowe,
Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men
Which dare their follies forth so rashlie throwe,
Doth rather choose to sit in idle cell
Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (ll. 217-22).
{83} Section IX. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each
of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the
unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597.
{84} Minto, _Characteristics of English Poetry_, 1885, pp. 371, 382.
The sonnet, headed 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' runs:
Sweet friend whose name agrees with thy increase
How fit arrival art thou of the Spring!
For when each branch hath left his flourishing,
And green-locked Summer's shady pleasures cease:
She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace,
And spends her franchise on each living thing:
The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing,
Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release.
So when that all our English Wits lay dead,
(Except the laurel that is ever green)
Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread,
And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen.
Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality,
Were ne'er before brought out of Italy.
Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet xcviii. beginning:
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that was common
to all the sonnets of the period. Much has been written of Shakespeare's
alleged acquaintance with Florio. Farmer and Warburton argue that
Shakespeare ridiculed Florio in Holofernes in _Love's Labour's Lost_.
They chiefly rely on Florio's bombastic prefaces to his _Worlde of
Wordes_ and his translation of Montaigne's _Essays_ (1603). There is
nothing there to justify the suggestion. Florio writes more in the vein
of Armado than of Holofernes, and, beyond the fact that he was a teacher
of languages to noblemen, he bears no resemblance to Holofernes, a
village schoolmaster. Shakespeare doubtless knew Florio as Southampton's
_protege_, and read his fine translation of Montaigne's _Essays_ with
delight. He quotes from it in _The Tempest_: see p. 253.
{86} Shakespeare writes in his Sonnets:
My glass shall not persuade me I am old (xxii. 1.).
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity (lxii. 9-10).
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (lxxiii. 1-2).
My days are past the best (cxxxviii. 6).
Daniel in _Delia_ (xxiii.) in 1591, when twenty-nine years old,
exclaimed:
My years draw on my everlasting night,
. . . My days are done.
Richard Barnfield, at the age of twenty, bade the boy Ganymede, to whom
he addressed his _Affectionate Shepherd_ and a sequence of sonnets in
1594 (ed. Arber, p. 23):
Behold my gray head, full of silver hairs,
My wrinkled skin, deep furrows in my face.
Similarly Drayton in a sonnet (_Idea_, xiv.) published in 1594, when he
was barely thirty-one, wrote:
Looking into the glass of my youth's miseries,
I see the ugly face of my deformed cares
With withered brows all wrinkled with despairs;
and a little later (No. xliii. of the 1599 edition) he repeated how
Age rules my lines with wrinkles in my face.
All these lines are echoes of Petrarch, and Shakespeare and Drayton
followed the Italian master's words more closely than their
contemporaries. Cf. Petrarch's Sonnet cxliii. (to Laura alive), or
Sonnet lxxxi. (to Laura after death); the latter begins:
Dicemi spesso il mio fidato speglio,
L'animo stanco e la cangiata scorza
E la scemata mia destrezza e forza:
Non ti nasconder piu: tu se' pur veglio.
(_i.e._ 'My faithful glass, my weary spirit and my wrinkled skin, and my
decaying wit and strength repeatedly tell me: "It cannot longer be hidden
from you, you are old."')
{88} The Sonnets of Sidney, Watson, Daniel, and Constable long
circulated in manuscript, and suffered much the same fate as
Shakespeare's at the hands of piratical publishers. After circulating
many years in manuscript, Sidney's Sonnets were published in 1591 by an
irresponsible trader, Thomas Newman, who in his self-advertising
dedication wrote of the collection that it had been widely 'spread abroad
in written copies,' and had 'gathered much corruption by ill writers'
[i.e. copyists]. Constable produced in 1592 a collection of twenty
sonnets in a volume which he entitled 'Diana.' This was an authorised
publication. But in 1594 a printer and a publisher, without Constable's
knowledge or sanction, reprinted these sonnets and scattered them through
a volume of nearly eighty miscellaneous sonnets by Sidney and many other
hands; the adventurous publishers bestowed on their medley the title of
'Diana,' which Constable had distinctively attached to his own
collection. Daniel suffered in much the same way. See Appendix IX. for
further notes on the subject. Proofs of the commonness of the habit of
circulating literature in manuscript abound. Fulke Greville, writing to
Sidney's father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1587, expressed regret
that uncorrected manuscript copies of the then unprinted _Arcadia_ were
'so common.' In 1591 Gabriel Cawood, the publisher of Robert Southwell's
_Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears_, wrote that manuscript copies of the work
had long flown about 'fast and false.' Nash, in the preface to his
_Terrors of the Night_, 1594, described how a copy of that essay, which a
friend had 'wrested' from him, had 'progressed [without his authority]
from one scrivener's shop to another, and at length grew so common that
it was ready to be hung out for one of their figures [_i.e._ shop-signs],
like a pair of indentures.'
{89a} Cf. Sonnet lxix. 12:
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.
{89b} For other instances of the application of this epithet to
Shakespeare's work, see p. 179, note 1.
{90} The actor Alleyn paid fivepence for a copy in that month (cf.
Warner's _Dulwich MSS._ p. 92).
{91} The chief editions of the sonnets that have appeared, with critical
apparatus, of late years are those of Professor Dowden (1875, reissued
1896), Mr. Thomas Tyler (1890), and Mr. George Wyndham, M.P. (1898). Mr.
Gerald Massey's _Secret Drama of Shakespeare's Sonnets_--the text of the
poems with a full discussion--appeared in a second revised edition in
1888. I regret to find myself in more or less complete disagreement with
all these writers, although I am at one with Mr. Massey in identifying
the young man to whom many of the sonnets were addressed with the Earl of
Southampton. A short bibliography of the works advocating the theory
that the sonnets were addressed to William, third Earl of Pembroke, is
given in Appendix VI., 'Mr. William Herbert,' note 1.
{93} It has been wrongly inferred that Shakespeare asserts in Sonnets
cxxxv-vi. and cxliii. that the young friend to whom he addressed some of
the sonnets bore his own christian name of Will (see for a full
examination of these sonnets Appendix VIII.) Further, it has been
fantastically suggested that the line (xx. 7) describing the youth as 'A
man in hue, all hues in his controlling' (_i.e._ a man in colour or
complexion whose charms are so varied as to appear to give his
countenance control of, or enable it to assume, all manner of fascinating
hues or complexions), and other applications to the youth of the ordinary
word 'hue,' imply that his surname was Hughes. There is no other
pretence of argument for the conclusion, which a few critics have
hazarded in all seriousness, that the friend's name was William Hughes.
There was a contemporary musician called William Hughes, but no known
contemporary of the name, either in age or position in life, bears any
resemblance to the young man who is addressed by Shakespeare in his
sonnets.
{94} See Appendix VI., 'Mr. William Herbert;' and VII., 'Shakespeare and
the Earl of Pembroke.'
{95a} The full results of my researches into Thorpe's history, his
methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of
which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of
Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix V., 'The True
History of Thomas Thorpe and "Mr. W. H."'
{95b} The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no
way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan
writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he
wrote. George Gascoigne, in his _Certayne Notes of Instruction
concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English_ (published in
Gascoigne's _Posies_, 1575), defined sonnets thus: 'Fouretene lynes,
every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in
staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do
conclude the whole.' In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney's
collection entitled _Astrophel and Stella_ consists, the rhymes are on
the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are
exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one
of Shakespeare's sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has
only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge's _Phillis_,
Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is
very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly
belong to Shakespeare's collection. They were probably written as
independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1.
{96} If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of
narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare's sonnets were
applied to the booksellers' miscellany of sonnets called _Diana_ (1594),
that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous
subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made
to reveal the sequence of an individual lover's moods quite as readily,
and, if no external evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as
Thorpe's collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan
sonnets are not merely in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds
superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost
every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive
impression of homogeneity.
{97} Shakespeare merely warns his 'lovely boy' that, though he be now
the 'minion' of Nature's 'pleasure,' he will not succeed in defying
Time's inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid--'blind
hitting boy,' he calls him--in his _Astrophel_ (No. xlvi.) Cupid is
similarly invoked in three of Drayton's sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition
of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in
Fulke Greville's collection entitled _Coelica_ (cf. lxxxiv., beginning
'Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth'). Lyly, in his _Sapho
and Phao_, 1584, and in his _Mother Bombie_, 1598, has songs of like
temper addressed in the one case to 'O Cruel love!' and in the other to
'O Cupid! monarch over kings.' A similar theme to that of Shakespeare's
Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, 'Love is ever dying,'
in his tragedy of the _Broken Heart_, 1633.
{98} See p. 113, note 2.
{101a} 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, _OEuvres Poetiques_, edited by Reinhold
Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60.
{101b} See Appendix IX.
{101c} Section X. of the Appendix to this volume supplies a
bibliographical note on the sonnet in France between 1550 and 1600, with
a list of the sixteenth-century sonnetteers of Italy.
{101d} Gabriel Harvey, in his _Pierces Supererogation_ (1593, p. 61),
after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's
invention is pure love itself; Petrarch's elocution pure beauty itself'),
justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground
that 'all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their
several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or
divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and
beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.' Both French and
English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of
plagiarising Petrarch's sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay's _Les Amours_,
ed. Becq de Fouquieres, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel's _Delia_, Sonnet
xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French
sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a
popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions
lxxxviii.) in _Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura_, beginning 'S' amor non e,
che dunque e quel ch' i' sento?' with a rendering of it into French like
that of De Baif in his _Amours de Francine_ (ed. Becq de Fouquieres, p.
121), beginning, 'Si ce n'est pas Amour, que sent donques mon coeur?' or
with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in
his _Passionate Century_, No. v., beginning, 'If 't bee not love I feele,
what is it then?' Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of
the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the
earliest efforts of Surrey and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the
skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master.
Petrarch's sonnet _In vita di M. Laura_ (No. lxxx. or lxxxi., beginning
'Cesare, poi che 'l traditor d' Egitto') was independently translated
both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 60), and by Francis
Davison in his _Poetical Rhapsody_ (1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch's
sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii.) was also rendered independently both by Wyatt
(cf. Puttenham's _Arte of English Poesie_, ed. Arber, p. 23) and by
Drummond of Hawthornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221).
{103a} Eight of Watson's sonnets are, according to his own account,
renderings from Petrarch; twelve are from Serafino dell' Aquila
(1466-1500); four each come from Strozza, an Italian poet, and from
Ronsard; three from the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493-1548); two
each from the French poet, Etienne Forcadel, known as Forcatulus
(1514?-1573), the Italian Girolamo Parabosco (_fl._ 1548), and AEneas
Sylvius; while many are based on passages from such authors as (among the
Greeks) Sophocles, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes (author of the epic
'Argonautica'); or (among the Latins) Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace,
Propertius, Seneca, Pliny, Lucan, Martial, and Valerius Flaccus; or
(among other modern Italians) Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) and Baptista
Mantuanus (1448-1516); or (among other modern Frenchmen) Gervasius
Sepinus of Saumur, writer of eclogues after the manner of Virgil and
Mantuanus.
{103b} No importance can be attached to Drayton's pretensions to greater
originality than his neighbours. The very line in which he makes the
claim ('I am no pick-purse of another's wit') is a verbatim theft from a
sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney.
{103c} Lodge's _Margarite_, p. 79. See Appendix IX. for the text of
Desportes's sonnet (_Diane_, livre ii. No. iii.) and Lodge's translation
in _Phillis_. Lodge gave two other translations of the same sonnet of
Desportes--in his romance of _Rosalind_ (Hunterian Society's reprint, p.
74), and in his volume of poems called _Scillaes Metamorphosis_ (p. 44).
Sonnet xxxiii. of Lodge's _Phillis_ is rendered with equal literalness
from Ronsard. But Desportes was Lodge's special master,
{104a} See Drummond's _Poems_, ed. W. C. Ward, in Muses' Library, 1894,
i. 207 seq.
{104b} Seve's _Delie_ was first published at Lyons in 1544.
{104c} 1530-1579.
{105} In two of his century of sonnets (Nos. xiii. and xxiv. in 1594
edition, renumbered xxxii. and liii. in 1619 edition) Drayton hints that
his 'fair Idea' embodied traits of an identifiable lady of his
acquaintance, and he repeats the hint in two other short poems; but the
fundamental principles of his sonnetteering exploits are defined
explicitly in Sonnet xviii. in 1594 edition.
Some, when in rhyme, they of their loves do tell, . . .
Only I call [_i.e._ I call only] on my divine Idea.
Joachim du Bellay, one of the French poets who anticipated Drayton in
addressing sonnets to 'L'Idee,' left the reader in no doubt of his intent
by concluding one poem thus:
La, o mon ame, au plus hault ciel guidee,
Tu y pourras recognoistre l'Idee
De la beaute qu'en ce monde j'adore.
(Du Bellay's _Olive_, No. cxiii., published in 1568.)
{106a} Ben Jonson pointedly noticed the artifice inherent in the
metrical principles of the sonnet when he told Drummond of Hawthornden
that 'he cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets which he said
were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked,
others too long cut short.' (Jonson's _Conversation_, p. 4).
{106b} See p. 121 _infra_.
{107a} They were first printed by Dr. Grosart for the Chetham Society in
1873 in his edition of 'the Dr. Farmer MS.,' a sixteenth and seventeenth
century commonplace book preserved in the Chetham Library at Manchester,
pt. i. pp. 76-81. Dr. Grosart also included the poems in his edition of
Sir John Davies's _Works_, 1876, ii. 53-62.
{107b} Davies's Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix IX.
{107c} See p. 127 _infra_.
{108} _Romeo and Juliet_, II. iv. 41-4.
{110} Mr. Fleay in his _Biographical Chronicle of the English Stage_,
ii. 226 seq., gives a striking list of parallels between Shakespeare's
and Drayton's sonnets which any reader of the two collections in
conjunction could easily increase. Mr. Wyndham in his valuable edition
of Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, p. 255, argues that Drayton was the
plagiarist of Shakespeare, chiefly on bibliographical grounds, which he
does not state quite accurately. One hundred sonnets belonging to
Drayton's _Idea_ series are extant, but they were not all published by
him at one time. Fifty-three were alone included in his first and only
separate edition of 1594; six more appeared in a reprint of _Idea_
appended to the _Heroical Epistles_ in 1599; twenty-four of these were
gradually dropped and thirty-four new ones substituted in reissues
appended to volumes of his writings issued respectively in 1600, 1602,
1603, and 1605. To the collection thus re-formed a further addition of
twelve sonnets and a withdrawal of some twelve old sonnets were made in
the final edition of Drayton's works in 1619. There the sonnets number
sixty-three. Mr. Wyndham insists that Drayton's latest published sonnets
have alone an obvious resemblance to Shakespeare's sonnets, and that they
all more or less reflect Shakespeare's sonnets as printed by Thorpe in
1609. But the whole of Drayton's century of sonnets except twelve were
in print long before 1609, and it could easily be shown that the earliest
fifty-three published in 1594 supply as close parallels with
Shakespeare's sonnets as any of the forty-seven published subsequently.
Internal evidence suggests that all but one or two of Drayton's sonnets
were written by him in 1594, in the full tide of the sonnetteering craze.
Almost all were doubtless in circulation in manuscript then, although
only fifty-three were published in 1594. Shakespeare would have had
ready means of access to Drayton's manuscript collection. Mr. Collier
reprinted all the sonnets that Drayton published between 1594 and 1619 in
his edition of Drayton's poems for the Roxburghe Club, 1856. Other
editions of Drayton's sonnets of this and the last century reprint
exclusively the collection of sixty-three appended to the edition of his
works in 1619.
{111} Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of
the poet's love (cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets xcviii., xcix.) are variations
on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch's well-known sonnet xlii.,
'In morte di M. Laura,' beginning:
Zefiro torna e 'l bel tempo rimena,
E i fiori e l'erbe, sua dolce famiglia,
E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena,
E primavera candida e vermiglia.
Ridono i prati, e 'l ciel si rasserena;
Giove s'allegra di mirar sua figlia;
L'aria e l'acqua e la terra e d'amor piena;
Ogni animal d'amar si riconsiglia,
Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piu gravi
Sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c.
See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthornden in Sonnets, pt. ii.
No. ix. Similar sonnets and odes on April, spring, and summer abound in
French and English (cf. Becq de Fouquiere's _OEuvres choisies de J.-A. de
Baif_, passim, and _OEuvres choisies des Contemporains de Ronsard_, p.
108 (by Remy Belleau), p. 129 (by Amadis Jamyn) et passim). For
descriptions of night and sleep see especially Ronsard's _Amours_ (livre
i. clxxxvi., livre ii. xxii.; _Odes_, livre iv. No. iv., and his _Odes
Retranchees_ in _OEuvres_, edited by Blanchemain, ii. 392-4.) Cf.
Barnes's _Parthenophe and Parthenophil_, lxxxiii. cv.
{112a} Cf. Ronsard's _Amours_, livre iv. clxxviii.; _Amours pour
Astree_, vi. The latter opens:
Il ne falloit, maistresse, autres tablettes
Pour vous graver que celles de mon coeur
Ou de sa main Amour, nostre vainqueur,
Vous a gravee et vos graces parfaites.
{112b} Cf. Spenser, lv.; Barnes's _Parthenophe and Parthenophil_, No.
lxxvii.; Fulke Greville's _Coelica_, No. vii.
{113a} A similar conceit is the topic of Shakespeare's Sonnet xxiv.
Ronsard's Ode (livre iv. No. xx.) consists of a like dialogue between the
heart and the eye. The conceit is traceable to Petrarch, whose Sonnet
lv. or lxiii. ('Occhi, piangete, accompagnate il core') is a dialogue
between the poet and his eyes, while his Sonnet xcix. or cxvii. is a
companion dialogue between the poet and his heart. Cf. Watson's _Tears
of Fancie_, xix. xx. (a pair of sonnets on the theme which closely
resemble Shakespeare's pair); Drayton's _Idea_, xxxiii.; Barnes's
_Parthenophe and Parthenophil_, xx., and Constable's _Diana_, vi. 7.