[122] No. vii. of Jodelle’s Contr’ Amours runs thus:
Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils doré
Ces cheueux noirs dignes d’vne Meduse?
Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m’amuse,
Ay-ie de lis et roses coloré?
Combien ce front de rides labouré
Ay-ie applani? et quel a fait ma Muse
Le gros sourcil, où folle elle s’abuse,
Ayant sur luy l’arc d’Amour figuré?
Quel ay-ie fait son œil se renfonçant?
Quel ay-ie fait son grand nez rougissant?
Quelle sa bouche et ses noires dents quelles
Quel ay-ie fait le reste de ce corps?
Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,
Viuoit heureux de mes peines mortelles.(Jodelle’s Œuvres, 1597, pp. 91-94.)
With this should be compared Shakespeare’s sonnets cxxxvii., cxlviii., and cl. Jodelle’s feigned remorse for having lauded the black hair and complexion of his mistress is one of the most singular of several strange coincidences. In No. vi. of his Contr’ Amours Jodelle, after reproaching his ‘traitres vers’ with having untruthfully described his siren as a beauty, concludes:
‘Ja si long temps faisant d’un Diable vn Ange
Vous m’ouurez l’œil en l’iniuste louange,
Et m’aueuglez en l’iniuste tourment.
With this should be compared Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxliv., lines 9-10.
And whether that my angel be turn’d fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell.
A conventional sonnet or extravagant vituperation, which Drummond of Hawthornden translated from Marino (Rime, 1602, pt. i. p. 76), is introduced with grotesque inappropriateness into Drummond’s collection of ‘sugared’ sonnets (see pt. i. No. xxxv: Drummond’s Poems, ed. W. C. Ward, i. 69, 217).
[123] The theories that all the sonnets addressed to a woman were addressed to the ‘dark lady,’ and that the ‘dark lady’ is identifiable with Mary Fitton, a mistress of the Earl of Pembroke, are baseless conjectures. The extant portraits of Mary Fitton prove her to be fair. The introduction of her name into the discussion is solely due to the mistaken notion that Shakespeare was the protégé of Pembroke, that most of the sonnets were addressed to him, and that the poet was probably acquainted with his patron’s mistress. See Appendix VII. The expressions in two of the vituperative sonnets to the effect that the disdainful mistress had ‘robb’d others’ beds’ revenues of their rents’ (cxlii. 8) and ‘in act her bed-vow broke’ (clii. 37) have been held to imply that the woman denounced by Shakespeare was married. The first quotation can only mean that she was unfaithful with married men, but both quotations seem to be general phrases of abuse, the meaning of which should not be pressed closely.
[127] ‘Lover’ and ‘love’ in Elizabethan English were ordinary synonyms for ‘friend’ and ‘friendship.’ Brutus opens his address to the citizens of Rome with the words, ‘Romans, countrymen, and lovers,’ and subsequently describes Julius Cæsar as ‘my best lover’ (Julius Cæsar, III. ii. 13-49). Portia, when referring to Antonio, the bosom friend of her husband Bassanio, calls him ‘the bosom lover of my lord’ (Merchant of Venice, III. iv. 17). Ben Jonson in his letters to Donne commonly described himself as his correspondent’s ‘ever true lover;’ and Drayton, writing to William Drummond of Hawthornden, informed him that an admirer of his literary work was in love with him. The word ‘love’ was habitually applied to the sentiment subsisting between an author and his patron. Nash, when dedicating Jack Wilton in 1594 to Southampton, calls him ‘a dear lover . . . of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’
[128] There is little doubt that this sonnet was parodied by Sir John Davies in the ninth and last of his ‘gulling’ sonnets, in which he ridicules the notion that a man of wit should put his wit in vassalage to any one.