husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.'1

rary censure of sonnetteers' false sentiment.

The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical Contempo- 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.' 2 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'

'Gulling Sonnets.'

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).

2 See p. 121 infra.

or parodies of the conventional efforts.' 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. ; while Davies's Sonnet ix., beginning:

2

'To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe

must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., beginning:

speare's

scornful

allusion to

'Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,' &c.3

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare Shake- himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays. Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' exclaims Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' his plays. (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:

sonnets in

You must lay lime to tangle her desires

By wailful sonnets whose composed rime

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.

2 Davies's Sonnet viii. is printed in Appendix IX.

See p. 127 infra.

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 kitchenwench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.'1 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.

1 Romeo and Juliet, II. iv. 41-4.

109

VIII

THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

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 Slender auto- instinct and invention-an affluence which biographical element enabled him to identify himself with every phase of human 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

in Shakespeare's

sonnets.

The imi

ment.

skill, often of superlative merit, to which tative ele- 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.' 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 Ron

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.