Sonnetteers’ admission of insincerity.
With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as
‘[Men] that do dictionary’s method bring
Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;
[Men] that poor Petrarch’s long deceasèd woes
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.’
Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments. But ‘even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey in ‘Pierces Supererogation’ in 1593, ‘are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.’ Drayton’s sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare’s in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled ‘Idea’ [105] (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere. ‘In all humours sportively he ranged,’ he declared. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ‘Licia, or Poems of Love,’ with the warning, ‘Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of
husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.’ [106a]
Contemporary censure of sonnetteers’ false sentiment. ‘Gulling Sonnets.’
The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical 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.’ [106b] 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’
or parodies of the conventional efforts. [107a] 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.; [107b] while Davies’s Sonnet ix., beginning:
‘To love, my lord, I do knight’s service owe’
must have parodied Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxvi., beginning:
‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,’ etc. [107c]