dressed as 'Willy' by some of his elegists. A comic actor, 'dead of late' in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton.' Similarly the 'gentle spirit' who is described by Spenser in a later stanza as sitting in idle cell' rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare.2 Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of actors and men of letters. His genius and 'civil demeanour' of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other noble patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself. Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her The revised version of 'Love's Labour's presence. Patrons at court. A note to this effect, in a genuine early seventeenth-century hand, was discovered by Halliwell-Phillipps in a copy of the 1611 edition of Spenser's Works (cf. Outlines, ii. 394-5). 2 But that same gentle spirit, from whose pen Scorning the boldnes of such base-borne men Than so himselfe to mockerie to sell (ll. 217-22). G Lost' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. Those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza and our James, of which Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare, --included many representations of Shakespeare's plays by himself and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. 83 VII THE SONNETS AND Their liteRARY HISTORY zabethan sonnet. 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 inThe vogue scribed to great men and women flourished of the Eli- 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.1 Section IX. of the Appendix to this volume gives a sketch of each of the numerous collections of sonnets which bore witness to the unexampled vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet between 1591 and 1597. 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. speare's Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three Shake- well-turned examples figure in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' probably his earliest play; first experiments. 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.' Minto, Characteristics of English Poetry, 1885, pp. 371, 382. The sonnet, headed Phaeton to his friend Florio,' runs : Sweet friend whose name agrees with thy increase, For when each branch hath left his flourishing, But these were sporadic efforts. It was not til 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 hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater Majority of number were in all likelihood composed Shake speare's sonnets 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 in 1594. She makes the Winter's storms repose in peace, (Except the laurel that is ever green) Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread, Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality, Were ne'er before brought out of Italy. Cf. Shakespeare's Sonnet xcviii. beginning: When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, But like descriptions of Spring and Summer formed a topic that one thear |