Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignes,
Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetustas.
Cum volet illa dies, quæ nil nisi corporis hujus
Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat ævi;
Parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis
Astra ferar nomenque erit indelebile nostrum.
This passage was familiar to Shakespeare in one of his favourite books—Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses. Golding’s rendering opens:
Now have I brought a worke to end which neither Jove’s fierce wrath
Nor sword nor fire nor fretting age, with all the force it hath
Are able to abolish quite, &c.
Meres, after his mention of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his Palladis Tamia (1598), quotes parts of both passages from Horace and Ovid, and gives a Latin paraphrase of his own, which, he says, would fit the lips of our contemporary poets besides Shakespeare. The introduction of the name Mars into Meres’s paraphrase as well as into line 7 of Shakespeare’s Sonnet lv. led Mr. Tyler (on what are in any case very trivial grounds) to the assumption that Shakespeare was borrowing from his admiring critic, and was therefore writing after 1598, when Meres’s book was published. In Golding’s translation reference is made to Mars by name (the Latin here calls the god Gradivus) a few lines above the passage already quoted, and the word caught Shakespeare’s eye there. Shakespeare owed nothing to Meres’s paraphrase, but Meres probably owed much to passages in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
[118a] See Appendix VIII., ‘The Will Sonnets,’ for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s conceit and like efforts of Barnes.
[118b] Wires in the sense of hair was peculiarly distinctive of the sonnetteers’ affected vocabulary. Cf. Daniel’s Delia, 1591, No. xxvi., ‘And golden hair may change to silver wire;’ Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, ‘Made blush the beauties of her curlèd wire;’ Barnes’s Parthenophil, sonnet xlviii., ‘Her hairs no grace of golden wires want.’ The comparison of lips with coral is not uncommon outside the Elizabethan sonnet, but it was universal there. Cf. ‘Coral-coloured lips’ (Zepheria, 1594, No. xxiii.); ‘No coral is her lip’ (Lodge’s Phillis, 1595, No. viii.) ‘Ce beau coral’ are the opening words of Ronsard’s Amours, livre i. No. xxiii., where a list is given of stones and metals comparable with women’s features.
[119a] Shakespeare adopted this phraseology of Sidney literally in both the play and the sonnet; while Sidney’s further conceit that the lady’s eyes are in ‘this mourning weed’ in order ‘to honour all their deaths who for her bleed’ is reproduced in Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxxii.—one of the two under consideration—where he tells his mistress that her eyes ‘have put on black’ to become ‘loving mourners’ of him who is denied her love.
O paradox! Black is the badge of hell,
The hue of dungeons and the scowl of night.
(Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 254-5).
To look like her are chimney-sweepers black,
And since her time are colliers counted bright,
And Ethiops of their sweet complexion crack.
Dark needs no candle now, for dark is light (ib. 266-9).
[121] The parody, which is not in sonnet form, is printed in Harvey’s Letter-book (Camden Soc. pp. 101-43).