for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor Shakespeare greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James, he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare's plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, and Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. of the Eliza bethan sonnet. VII THE SONNETS The vogue IT was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets entitled 'Astrophel and Stella' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney's volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron's ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height. Shakespeare's first experiments. Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' probably his Shakespeare's sonnets composed in 1594. earliest play; two of the choruses in 'Romeo and Juliet' are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second Frutes,' a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman's patronage for his earliest publication, 'Venus and Adonis,' that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of the Majority of hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his growing age was a conventional device. - traceable to Petrarch of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation. In matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggests that they came from the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts occasionally and at irregular intervals during the nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in 1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594 be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is made to Queen Elizabeth's death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and a final act of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height. - value. In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably Their unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative literary energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near kin The form of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Want of conti nuity of subjectmatter. ship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early dramatic efforts as 'Love's Labour's Lost' and 'Romeo and Juliet.' There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus and Adonis' or in 'Lucrece,' although occasional utterances of Shakespeare's Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language. Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more. The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in the original edition opens the volume. It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were first printed follows the order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. The whole series is commonly separated by critics into two 'groups'-the first consisting of sonnets i. to cxxvi., all of which are usually described as being addressed to a young man, and the second consisting of sonnets cxxvii. to cliv., all of which are usually described as addressed to a woman (a 'dark lady'). But both groups as a matter of fact include several meditative soliloquies in the form of sonnets that are addressed to no person at all, and a few of the sonnets in the first group might, as far as internal indications go, have been addressed to a woman. 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. 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. 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. The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and the mechanical monotony with which they treated '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. 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 Gen Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Shakespeare's allusion to sonnets in his plays. scornful |