One god is god of both, as poets feign;
One knight loves both, and both in thee remain."
The expression, deep conceit, "seems to allude," remarks Mr. Malone, "to the Faery Queen. If so, these sonnets were not written till after 1590, when the first three books of that poem were published[49:A];" a conjecture which is strongly corroborated by two
lines from Barnefield's "Remembrance of some English Poets," where the phrase is directly applied to the Fairy Queen:
"Live Spenser! ever, in thy Fairy Queene;
Whose like (for deep conceit) was never seene."[50:A]
The remaining portion of Shakspeare's Poems includes the Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, which were printed together in 1609.[50:B] At what period they were written, or in what year of the poet's life they were commenced, has been a subject of much controversy. That some of these sonnets were alluded to by Meres in 1598, when he speaks of our author's "sugred Sonnets among his private friends," and that a few of these very sonnets, as many, at least, as Jaggard could obtain, were published by him the following year, in consequence of this notice, appears to be highly probable; but that the entire collection, as published in 1609, had been in private circulation anterior to Meres's pamphlet, is a position not easily to be credited, and contrary, indeed, to the internal evidence of the poems themselves, which bear no trifling testimony of having been written at various and even distant periods; and there is reason to think in the space elapsing between the years 1592 and 1609, between the twenty-eighth and forty-fifth year of the poet's age.
That some of them were early compositions, and produced before the author had acquired any extended reputation, may be inferred from the subsequent passages. In the sixteenth sonnet, with reference to his own poetry, he adopts the expression "my pupil pen;" and in the thirty-second he petitions his mistress to "vouchsafe" him "but this loving thought,"
"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought