427 IX. THE VOGUE OF THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET, 1591-1597. THE sonnetteering vogue, as I have already pointed out,' reached its full height between 1591 and 1597, and when at its briskest in 1594 it drew Shakespeare into its current. An enumeration of volumes containing sonnet-sequences or detached sonnets that were in circulation during the period best illustrates the overwhelming force of the sonnetteering rage of those years, and, with that end in view, I give here a bibliographical account, with a few critical notes, of the chief efforts of Shakespeare's rival sonnetteers." The earliest collections of sonnets to be published in England were those by the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt's and Wyatt, which first appeared in the publisher Tottel's Surrey's poetical miscellany called 'Songes and Sonnetes' in Sonnets, published in 1557. This volume included sixteen sonnets by Surrey and twenty by Wyatt. Many of them were translated directly from Petrarch, and most of them treated conventionally of the torments of an unrequited love. Surrey included, however, three sonnets on the death of his friend 1557. 'See p. 83 supra. 2 The word 'sonnet' was often irregularly used for 'song or 'poem.' A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson's poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe's Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word 'quatorzain' was the term almost as frequently applied as 'sonnet' to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on scaling the skies in lofty quatorzains' in verses before his Passionate Centurie, 1582; cf. 'crazed quatorzains' in Thomas Nash s preface to his edition of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 1591; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton's Sonnets, 1594. Watson's Wyatt, and a fourth on the death of one Clere, a faithful follower. Tottel's volume was seven times reprinted by 1587. But no sustained endeavour was made to emulate the example of Surrey and Wyatt till Thomas Watson about 1580 circulated in manuscript his 'Booke of Passionate Sonnetes,' which he wrote for his patron, the Earl of Oxford. The volume was printed in 1582, under the title of "EKATOMIANIA, or Passionate Centurie of Loue. Divided into two Centurie of parts: whereof the first expresseth the Authours Love,' 1582. sufferance on Loue: the latter his long farewell to Loue and all his tyrannie. Composed by Thomas Watson, and published at the request of certaine Gentlemen his very frendes.' Watson's work, which he called 'a toy,' is a curious literary mosaic. He supplied to each poem a prose commentary, in which he not only admitted that every conceit was borrowed, but quoted chapter and verse for its origin from classical literature or from the work of French or Italian sonnetteers.' Two regular quatorzains are prefixed, but to each of the 'passions' there is appended a four-line stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular fourteen lines. Watson's efforts were so well received, however, that he applied himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets in strict metre. This collection, entitled 'The Teares of Fancie,' only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime.2 Meanwhile a greater poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more Sidney's 1591. ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of Sidney's sonnets were addressed by him under the name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney's efforts, and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. Sidney's sonnets were first published surreptitiously, 'See p. 103 supra. All Watson's sonnets are reprinted by Mr. Arber in Watson's Poems, 1895. under the title of 'Astrophel and Stella,' by a publishing adventurer named Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appendix of 'sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen.' Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the appendix anonymously and without the author's knowledge. Two other editions of Sidney's 'Astrophel and Stella' without the appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney's sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed anonymously in 1594 with the sonnets of Henry Constable, and these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition of Sidney's 'Arcadia' and other works that appeared in 1598. Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous sonnets in 1591 spurred nearly every living poet in England to emulate his achievement.1 In order to facilitate a comparison of Shakespeare's sonnets with those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney's under the three headings of (1) sonnets of more or less feigned love, addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress; (2) sonnets of adulation, addressed to patrons; and (3) sonnets invoking metaphysical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or philosophy.2 In February 1592 Samuel Daniel published a collection of fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to his patroness, Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke. As in many French volumes, the collection feigned love. concluded with an 'ode.' At every point Daniel I. Collected sonnets of 3 In a preface to Newman's first edition of Astropheland Stella the editor, Thomas Nash, in a burst of exultation over what he deemed the surpassing merits of Sidney's sonnets, exclaimed: ' Put out your rushlights, you poets and rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers! for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs.' But the effect of Sidney's work was just the opposite to that which Nash anticipated. It gave the sonnet in England a vogue that it never enjoyed before or since. * With collections of sonnets of the first kind are occasionally interspersed sonnets of the second or third class, but I classify each sonnet-collection according to its predominant characteristic. ⚫ Daniel reprinted all but nine of the sonnets that had been unwarrantably appended to Sidney's Astrophel. These nine he permanently dropped. Daniel's betrayed his indebtedness to French sonnetteers, even when apologising for his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.) His title he borrowed from the collection of Maurice Sève, whose assemblage of dixains called 'Délie, objet de plus haute Delia, 1592. vertu' (Lyon, 1544), was the pattern of all sonnetsequences on love, and was a constant theme of commendation among the later French sonnetteers. But it is to Desportes that Daniel owes most, and his methods of handling his material may be judged by a comparison of his Sonnet xxvi. with Sonnet lxiii. in Desportes' collection, 'Cleonice: Dernieres Amours,' which was issued at Paris in 1575. Desportes' sonnet runs : Je verray par les ans vengeurs de mon martyre Et peut estre qu'alors vous n'aurez desplaisir This is Daniel's version, which he sent forth as an original production : I once may see, when years may wreck my wrong, Whose glorious blaze the world's eye doth admire, Which then presents her winter-withered hue : Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass, But Phoenix-like to make her live anew. In Daniel's beautiful sonnet (xlix.) beginning, Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, he has borrowed much from De Baïf and Pierre de Brach, sonnetteers with whom it was a convention to invocate 'O Sommeil chasse-soin.' But again he chiefly relies on Desportes, whose words he adapts with very slight variations. Sonnet lxxiii. of Desportes' 'Amours d'Hippolyte' opens thus: Fame of Daniel's sonnets. Sommeil, paisible fils de la Nuict solitaire . . . O frère de la Mort, que tu m'es ennemi ! Daniel's sonnets were enthusiastically received. With some additions they were republished in 1594 with his narrative poem, 'The Complaint of Rosamund.' The volume was called 'Delia and Rosamund Augmented.' Spenser, in his 'Colin Clouts come Home againe,' lauded the 'well-tuned song' of Daniel's sonnets, and Shakespeare has some claim to be classed among Daniel's many sonnetteering disciples. The anonymous author of 'Zepheria' (1594) declared that the 'sweet tuned accents' of 'Delian sonnetry' rang throughout England; while Bartholomew Griffin, in his 'Fidessa' (1596), openly plagiarised Daniel, invoking in his Sonnet xv. 'Carecharmer Sleep, brother of quiet Death.' Constable's 'Diana,' 1592. In September of the same year (1592) that saw the first complete version of Daniel's' Delia,' Henry Constable published 'Diana: the Praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets.' Like the title, the general tone was drawn from Desportes' 'Amours de Diane.' Twenty-one poems were included, all in the French vein. The collection was reissued, with very numerous additions, in 1594 under the title Diana; or, The excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. Augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages.' This volume is a typical venture of the booksellers. The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth's ladies-in-waiting. They had swept together sonnets in manuscript from all quarters and presented their 'It is reprinted in Arber's Garner, ii. 225-64. |