[94] See Appendix VI., ‘Mr. William Herbert;’ and VII., ‘Shakespeare and the Earl of Pembroke.’
[95a] The full results of my researches into Thorpe’s history, his methods of business, and the significance of his dedicatory addresses, of which four are extant besides that prefixed to the volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, are given in Appendix V., ‘The True History of Thomas Thorpe and “Mr. W. H.”’
[95b] The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English (published in Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: ‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.’ In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney’s collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge’s Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to Shakespeare’s collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1.
[96] If the critical ingenuity which has detected a continuous thread of narrative in the order that Thorpe printed Shakespeare’s sonnets were applied to the booksellers’ miscellany of sonnets called Diana (1594), that volume, which rakes together sonnets on all kinds of amorous subjects from all quarters and numbers them consecutively, could be made to reveal the sequence of an individual lover’s moods quite as readily, and, if no external evidence were admitted, quite as convincingly, as Thorpe’s collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Almost all Elizabethan sonnets are not merely in the like metre, but are pitched in what sounds superficially to be the same key of pleading or yearning. Thus almost every collection gives at a first perusal a specious and delusive impression of homogeneity.
[97] Shakespeare merely warns his ‘lovely boy’ that, though he be now the ‘minion’ of Nature’s ‘pleasure,’ he will not succeed in defying Time’s inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid—‘blind hitting boy,’ he calls him—in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.) Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton’s sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville’s collection entitled Cœlica (cf. lxxxiv., beginning ‘Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth’). Lyly, in his Sapho and Phao, 1584, and in his Mother Bombie, 1598, has songs of like temper addressed in the one case to ‘O Cruel love!’ and in the other to ‘O Cupid! monarch over kings.’ A similar theme to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, ‘Love is ever dying,’ in his tragedy of the Broken Heart, 1633.
[98] See p. 113, note 2.
[101a] 1547-1604. Cf. De Brach, Œuvres Poétiques, edited by Reinhold Dezeimeris, 1861, i. pp. 59-60.
[101b] See Appendix IX.
[101c] Section X. of the Appendix to this volume supplies a bibliographical note on the sonnet in France between 1550 and 1600, with a list of the sixteenth-century sonnetteers of Italy.
[101d] Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of Petrarch’s sonnets (‘Petrarch’s invention is pure love itself; Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself’), justifies the common English practice of imitating them on the ground that ‘all the noblest Italian, French, and Spanish poets have in their several veins Petrarchized; and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest Muse to be his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledge their master.’ Both French and English sonnetteers habitually admit that they are open to the charge of plagiarising Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura (cf. Du Bellay’s Les Amours, ed. Becq de Fouquières, 1876, p. 186, and Daniel’s Delia, Sonnet xxxviii.) The dependent relations in which both English and French sonnetteers stood to Petrarch may be best realised by comparing such a popular sonnet of the Italian master as No. ciii. (or in some editions lxxxviii.) in Sonetti in Vita di M. Laura, beginning ‘S’ amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’ i’ sento?’ with a rendering of it into French like that of De Baïf in his Amours de Francine (ed. Becq de Fouquières, p. 121), beginning, ‘Si ce n’est pas Amour, que sent donques mon cœur?’ or with a rendering of the same sonnet into English like that by Watson in his Passionate Century, No. v., beginning, ‘If ’t bee not love I feele, what is it then?’ Imitation of Petrarch is a constant characteristic of the English sonnet throughout the sixteenth century from the date of the earliest efforts of Surrey and Wyatt. It is interesting to compare the skill of the early and late sonnetteers in rendering the Italian master. Petrarch’s sonnet In vita di M. Laura (No. lxxx. or lxxxi., beginning ‘Cesare, poi che ‘l traditor d’ Egitto’) was independently translated both by Sir Thomas Wyatt, about 1530 (ed. Bell, p. 60), and by Francis Davison in his Poetical Rhapsody (1602, ed. Bullen, i. 90). Petrarch’s sonnet (No. xcv. or cxiii.) was also rendered independently both by Wyatt (cf. Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, ed. Arber, p. 23) and by Drummond of Hawthornden (ed. Ward, i. 100, 221).