Barnes's sonnets, 1593. customers with a disordered miscellany of what they called 'orphan poems.' Besides the twenty sonnets by Constable, eight were claimed for Sir Philip Sidney, and the remaining fortyseven are by various hands which have not as yet been identified. In 1593 the legion of sonnetteers received notable reinforcements. In May came out Barnabe Barnes's interesting volume, 'Parthenophil and Parthenophe: Sonnets, Madrigals, Elegies, and Odes. To the right noble and virtuous gentleman, M. William Percy, Esq., his dearest friend.' The contents of the volume and their arrangement closely resemble the sonnet-collections of Petrarch or the 'Amours' of Ronsard. There are a hundred and five sonnets altogether, interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-one elegies, three 'canzons,' and twenty 'odes,' one in sonnet form. There is, moreover, included what purports to be a translation of 'Moschus' first eidillion describing love,' but is clearly a rendering of a French poem by Amadis Jamin, entitled 'Amour Fuitif, du grec de Moschus,' in his 'Euvres Poétiques,' Paris, 1579. At the end of Barnes's volume there also figure six dedicatory sonnets. In Sonnet xcv. Barnes pays a compliment to Sir Philip Sidney, 'the Arcadian shepherd, Astrophel,' but he did not draw so largely on Sidney's work as on that of Ronsard, Desportes, De Baïf, and Du Bellay. Legal metaphors abound in Barnes's poems, but amid many crudities he reaches a high level of beauty in Sonnet lxvi., which runs : 2 Ah, sweet Content! where is thy mild abode? Is it with shepherds, and light-hearted swains, 'Arber's Garner, v. 333–486. " Ben Jonson developed the same conceit in his masque, The Hue and Cry after Cupid, 1608. Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbour hold? Is it in churches, with religious men, Which please the gods with prayers manifold; Whether thou dost in Heaven, or earth appear; Be where thou wilt! Thou wilt not harbour here!! In August 1593 there appeared a posthumous collection of sixty-one sonnets by Thomas Watson, entitled 'The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained.' They are throughout of the imitative type of his previously published turie of Love.' Many of them sound the same note as Shakespeare's sonnets to the 'dark lady.' Watson's 'Tears of Fancie,' 1593. 'Cen In September 1593 followed Giles Fletcher's 'Licia, or Poems of Love in honour of the admirable and singular virtues Fletcher's 'Licia,' 1593. of his Lady.' This collection of fifty-three sonnets is dedicated to the wife of Sir Richard Mollineux. Fletcher makes no concealment that his sonnets are literary exercises. For this kind of poetry,' he tells the reader, 'I did it to try my humour;' and on the title-page he notes that the work was written to the imitation of the best Latin poets and others.' Lodge's Phillis,' 1593. 12 3 The most notable contribution to the sonnet-literature of 1593 was Thomas Lodge's 'Phillis Honoured with Pastoral Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights.' Besides forty sonnets, some of which exceed fourteen lines in length and others are shorter, there are included three elegies and an ode. Desportes is Lodge's chief master, but he had recourse to Ronsard and other French contemporaries. How servile he could be may be learnt from a comparison of his Sonnet xxxvi. with Desportes's sonnet from 'Les Amours de Diane,' livre II. sonnet iii. Thomas Lodge's Sonnet xxxvi. runs thus : If so I seek the shades, I presently do see If that I think to write, his Muses pliant be; If so I plain my grief, the wanton boy will cry. 'Dekker's well-known song, 'Oh, sweet content,' in his play of Patient Grisselde' (1599), echoes this sonnet of Barnes. Arber's Garner, viii. 413-52. ⚫ There is a convenient reprint of Lodge's Phillis in Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles by Martha Foote Crow, 1896. F F If I lament his pride, he doth increase my pain; If tears my cheeks attaint, his cheeks are moist with moan He takes his fascia off, and wipes them dry anon. If so I walk the woods, the woods are his delight; Desportes wrote in 'Les Amours de Diane,' book II., sonnet iii. : Drayton's Si ie me siés à l'ombre, aussi soudainement Amour, laissant son arc, s'assiet et se repose : Bref, iamais l'inhumain de moy ne se depart, Pour rendre mon amour et ma peine eternelle. Three new volumes in 1594, together with the reissue of Daniel's' Delia' and of Constable's 'Diana' (in a piratical miscellany of sonnets from many pens), prove the steady growth of the sonnetteering vogue. Michael Drayton in June produced his 'Ideas Mirrour, Amours in Quatorzains,' containing fifty-one 'Amours' and a sonnet addressed to 'Idea,' 1594. 'his ever kind Mecænas, Anthony Cooke.' Drayton acknowledged his devotion to 'divine Sir Philip,' but by his choice of title, style, and phraseology, the English sonnetteer once more betrayed his indebtedness to Desportes and his compeers. 'L'Idée' was the name of a collection of sonnets by Claude de Pontoux in 1579. Many additions were made by Drayton to the sonnets that he published in 1594, and many were subtracted before 1619, when there appeared the last edition that was prepared in Drayton's lifetime. A comparison of the various editions (1594, 1599, 1605, and 1619) shows that Drayton published a hundred sonnets, but the majority were apparently circulated by him in early life.' 02 William Percy, the ' dearest friend' of Barnabe Barnes, published in 1594, in emulation of Barnes, a collection of twenty Percy's Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia.' He explains, in an 'Calia, 1594. address to the reader, that out of courtesy he had lent the sonnets to friends, who had secretly committed them to the press. Making a virtue of necessity, he had accepted the situation, but begged the reader to treat them as 'toys and amorous devices.' 1594. A collection of forty sonnets or 'canzons,' as the anonymous author calls them, also appeared in 1594 with the title Zepheria, 'Zepheria.' In some prefatory verses addressed 'Alli veri figlioli delle Muse' laudatory reference was made to the sonnets of Petrarch, Daniel, and Sidney. Several of the sonnets labour at conceits drawn from the technicalities of the law, and Sir John Davies parodied these efforts in the eighth of his 'gulling sonnets' beginning,' My case is this, I love Zepheria bright.' Four interesting ventures belong to 1595. In January, appended to Richard Barnfield's poem of 'Cynthia,' a panegyric on Queen Elizabeth, was a series of twenty sonnets extolling the personal charms of a young man in emulation of Virgil's Eclogue ii., in which the shepherd Corydon addressed Barnfield's the shepherd-boy Alexis. In Sonnet xx. the author sonnets to' Ganymede, 1595. expressed regret that the task of celebrating his young friend's praises had not fallen to the more capable hand of Spenser ('great Colin, chief of shepherds all') or Drayton ('gentle Rowland, my professed friend'). Barnfield at times imitated Shakespeare. Almost at the same date as Barnfield's 'Cynthia' made its appearance there was published the more notable collection by Edmund Spenser of eighty-eight sonnets, which in Amoretti,' reference to their Italian origin he entitled 'Amoretti.' Spenser had already translated many son Spenser's 1595. See p. 110, note. lb. v. 61-86. • Arber's Garner, vi. 135-49. • Reprinted in Arber's English Scholars' Library, 1881. nets on philosophic topics of Petrarch and Joachim Du Bellay. Some of the 'Amoretti' were doubtless addressed by Spenser in 1593 to the lady who became his wife a year later. But the sentiment was largely ideal, and, as he says in Sonnet lxxxvii., he wrote, like Drayton, with his eyes fixed on ‘Idæa.’ 'Emaric. An unidentified 'E.C., Esq.,' produced also in 1595, under the title of 'Emaricdulfe,'' a collection of forty sonnets, echoing English and French models. In the dedication to his dulfe,' 1595. 'two very good friends, John Zouch and Edward Fitton Esquiers,' the author tells them that an ague confined him to his chamber, 'and to abandon idleness he completed an idle work that he had already begun at the command and service of a fair dame.' Sir John 1595. To 1595 may best be referred the series of nine 'Gullinge sonnets,' or parodies, which Sir John Davies wrote and circulated in manuscript, in order to put to shame what he regarded as 'the bastard sonnets' in vogue. He addressed his collection to Sir Anthony Cooke, whom Drayton had already celebrated as the Mecanas of his sonnetteering efforts. Davies seems to have aimed at Shakespeare as well as at insignificant rhymers like the author of 'Zepheria.' No. viii. of Davies's 'gullinge sonnets,' which ridicules the legal metaphors of the sonnetteers, may be easily matched in the collections of Barnabe Barnes or of the author of 'Zepheria,' but Davies's phraseology suggests that he also was glancing at Shakespeare's legal sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxxiv. Davies's sonnet runs : My case is this. I love Zepheria bright, And far away impounds it with despite. Reprinted for the Roxburghe Club in A Lamport Garland, 1881, edited by Mr. Charles Edmonds. * Sir John Davies's Complete Poems, edited by Dr. Grosart, i. 51-62. See p. 128, note. |