It is interesting to know that Van der Noodt published a series, avowedly translated from the sonnets of Petrarch and Du Bellay, a translation of which, into English, in blank verse, was produced by Spenser in 1569, which were included in his works in 1591. Spenser’s “Shepherd’s Kalendar” came out in 1572.
The most important later miscellany was “The Paradise of Dainty Devises,” 1576, which we also may be sure that Shakespeare had read.
The harbinger of the new harvest of Elizabethan Sonnet Literature was Thomas Watson, who, in 1582, published his “Hecatompathia, or the Passionate Century of Love.” Two points may be noted concerning this: (1) That he named each sonnet a “Passion,” which explains Shakespeare’s use of the word in the phrase, “The Master-mistress of my passion;”[33] (2) that W. C., in his “Polimanteia,” 1595, in a marginal reference, not very clear in its bearing, said, “All praiseworthy Lucrecia, sweet Shakespeare, wanton Adonis, Watson’s heir.”
Puttenham’s “Art of English Poetry” was printed by Field, 1589. The first three books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” appeared in 1590, and Sir Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” in the same year, which, quite as much as any sonnets, affected the thought of Shakespeare’s early works.
In 1591 was published Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella,” with some of Daniel’s Sonnets, and in 1592 Daniel published a collection of “Sonnets to Delia,” after French models, dedicated to Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. At the same time Henry Constable brought out “Diana: the Praises of his Mistress in certain Sonnets,” and “Four Letters and certain Sonnets” were published by Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Spenser.
Here I must pause, having reached the time of Shakespeare’s proved association with the Stage, in order to trace his career up to that date in his private life, and make clear my reasons for my main proposition concerning the necessarily early date of the Sonnets. Starting with Shakespeare’s arrival in London we must remember that the traditions concerning his being driven from Stratford by Thomas Lucy or by anybody else, can be disproved by fact and legitimate inference.
The only two facts we are sure of are, that he had married a wife and had a family before he was able to support them; and that neither his father nor he was in financial prosperity. His mother’s inheritance of Asbies, which, it is clear, his father meant as the sphere of his son’s career, had been lost through a mortgage and some juggling on the part of Edmund Lambert. In 1587 the Shakespeares, in despair of regaining it, had offered to sell it outright to John Lambert for another £20, and to this the poet, then of age and the heir apparent, had agreed, but that the money had never been paid is clear from later litigation.
We cannot prove to the sceptical anything concerning the poet for the next five years. But as Tennyson’s lover says of Maud,
I know the way she went
Home with her maiden posy,