unaccented syllable, without rhyme, is freed, in Shakespeare's hands, from the stiffness and rigidity which. characterized it before Marlowe's time, and becomes soft as a flute in its lighter notes and resonant and fulltoned as a bell in great passages:

My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,
So flew'd, so sanded; and their heads are hung
With ears that sweep away the morning dew;
Crook-kneed, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls ;
Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,

Each unto each. A cry more tuneable

Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn,

In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly.

One hears in these lines that clear "chime of the vowels" which gives English verse its most penetrating and magical melody.

The fairies and the clowns made an irresistible appeal to the crowds in the theatre, and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" enjoyed almost a century of popularity; it was imitated and pilfered from; when it lost its hold upon the generation of the Restoration, it reappeared as opera and operetta. In Germany its fortunes touched their highest prosperity; Wieland recalled its elves in his "Oberon," Goethe drew upon it in a striking scene in "Faust," and Mendelssohn, in song and overture, interpreted it with delicate insight and sympathy. It is the supreme masterpiece in the world of fairy lore.

CHAPTER IX

THE SONNETS

THE poetic period in Shakespeare's development coincided with a devotion to sonnet-writing which rose to the height of a passion from which few English poets escaped during the closing decade of the sixteenth century. The sonnet was the favourite verse-form for the expression of friendship, love, personal devotion, admiration of beauty; it engaged the interest of the greatest poets and of the most mechanical and commonplace verse-makers; it was the chosen instrument for the most delicate and poetic worship of individual women or of abstract virtues, and for the grossest and most obvious flattery.

At a time when an author had practically no ownership in his own work and when the business of publishing was carried on largely in defiance of or complete indifference to his wishes, and generally to his harm, a great mass of literary work was circulated in manuscript, and a goodly number of people found occupation in multiplying copies of these unpublished pieces for private circulation among the friends and admirers of authors. During the decade between 1590 and 1600 thousands of sonnets of every degree of merit passed from hand to hand, and were read, known, and talked

about almost as widely, in some cases, as printed books. The reputation of certain groups of sonnets soon extended beyond the circle of the writer's friends, and general interest and curiosity made it worth while for some printer or publisher to secure copies of the poems and publish them, not only without the consent and revision of the writer, but often without his knowledge.

This appears to have been the case with a group of sonnets written by Shakespeare between 1593 and 1598, when the lyrical mood was dominant. The Sonnets were published in May, 1609, by Thomas Thorpe, who appears to have turned the absence of protection to authors to his own profit by obtaining and printing unpublished works which had secured wide reading in manuscript form. The popularity of Shakespeare's Sonnets doubtless attracted his attention, and, having secured copies of them, he sent them to the press without the poet's consent and probably without his knowledge. That many of these poems had been in existence more than ten years before the publication by Thorpe is proven by the fact that two of them appeared in "The Passionate Pilgrim," published in 1599, and that Meres, in the "Palladio Tamia," published a year earlier, referred to Shakespeare's "sug'r'd Sonnets among his private friends." Allusions and lines in the Sonnets made it possible to assign them at least proximate dates. They can hardly have been written before 1594 nor later than 1598. They belong, therefore, to the period of "Romeo and Juliet " and the "Midsummer Night's Dream," and, with "Venus and Adonis" and the

"Rape of Lucrece," which they followed at a short interval, they constitute Shakespeare's contribution to lyrical poetry. Their extraordinary beauty of thought, sentiment, and form has given them a foremost place in English poetry, while their possible significance as a record of the poet's experience or an expression of his emotions has evoked an immense body of comment.

Surrey and Wyatt brought the sonnet as a literary form from Italy, where Petrarch was its acknowledged master; but they did not slavishly reproduce the Petrarchian model; they followed a sound instinct in giving the sonnet greater simplicity. The Italian sonnet consists of an octave and sestet a group of eight decasyllabic lines followed by a group of six decasyllabic lines; the sonnet of Shakespeare consists of three quatrains, or groups of four lines, with a concluding couplet. Precisians have held that the Shakespearean Sonnets are not sonnets, but fourteen-line poems. But Shakespeare did not originate the sonnet-structure which he used; it had been made ready to his hand by a long line of English poets. His supreme skill gave final authority to what had hitherto been an experiment.

Fifty-two years before the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets, a group of sonnets by Surrey and another group by Wyatt had been published, many of them being translations from Petrarch. The volume containing these sonnets was reprinted six or seven times before Shakespeare left Stratford. It was followed in 1582 by Watson's "Centurie of Love"; in 1591 by Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella"; in 1592 by Daniel's "Delia" and Constable's "Diana"; in 1593 by

Fletcher's "Licia," Barnes's "Parthenophil," and Lodge's "Phillis"; in 1594 by Spenser's "Amoretti " and Drayton's "Idea." To these collections of sonnets must be added probably as many more, the impulse expending itself apparently about 1597. The culminating point of this passion for sonnet-writing was probably reached about 1594, and its highest point of achievement was attained by Shakespeare. While there is much that is interesting and even important, from the standpoint not only of literary development but artistic excellence, in the work of this large group of sonneteers, Shakespeare alone gave his work universal significance and original and enduring beauty.

He did not originate a new form of sonnet, as he did not originate a new form of drama; he took the form which he found ready to his hand and gave it freedom, flexibility, a new compass, and a capacity for musical expression which the earlier English poets had predicted but had not unfolded. He continued and completed the modification of the sonnet as Petrarch left it which had been effected by the English sonneteers since the time of Surrey and Wyatt; surrendering something of the sustained fulness of tone of the Italian sonnet, but securing a sweetness, a flow of pure melody, which were beyond the compass of the earlier English sonneteers. The decasyllabic lines in groups of four, the alternate lines rhyming, and closing with a couplet, imposed rigid limitations on the poet but did not prevent him from securing some noble melodic effects.