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It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. 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 p. 103foreign 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 p. 104moods 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.' p. 105Sidney 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 p. 106husbandry 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' p. 107or 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
p. 108Should 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.'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').[83] p. 84Men 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.W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, 'the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,' he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare's sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue.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.He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors' control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without p. 90reference to the author's wishes.[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.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.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.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, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or 'benefit of ill' (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first 'group,' does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy.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.With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas (the metre of 'Lucrece') entitled 'A Lover's Complaint,' in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth.W. H.,' a young nobleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined.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.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.In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery.There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus and Adonis' or in 'Lucrece,' although p. 88occasional utterances of Shakespeare's Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them.announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem--'A Foure-fould Meditation'--by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed 'W.Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility.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.Three well-turned examples figure in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' probably his 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.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.Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands.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. 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.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.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.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 p. 86no literal interpretation.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.Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare's 'sugred [89b] sonnets among his private friends,' and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems.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.In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal.