Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of actors and men of letters. His genius and ‘civil demeanour’ of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other noble patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself. Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence. The revised version of ‘Love’s Labour’s
Lost’ was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later. Under Elizabeth’s successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen’s appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of
Those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James,
he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare’s plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.
VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY
The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.
It was doubtless to Shakespeare’s personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney’s collection of sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney’s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. [83]
Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron’s ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height.
Shakespeare’s first experiments.
Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ which prefaced in 1591 Florio’s ‘Second Frutes,’ a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. [84]