[149a] Manningham’s Diary, Camden Soc., p. 148.
[149b] Court and Times of James I, I. i. 7.
[149c] See Appendix IV.
[152] The fine exordium of Sonnet cxix.:
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
adopts expressions in Barnes’s vituperative sonnet (No xlix.), where, after denouncing his mistress as a ‘siren,’ the poet incoherently ejaculates:
From my love’s limbeck [sc. have I] still [di]stilled tears!
Almost every note in the scale of sadness or self-reproach is sounded from time to time in Petrarch’s sonnets. Tasso in Scelta delle Rime, 1582, p. ii. p. 26, has a sonnet (beginning ‘Vinca fortuna homai, se sotto il peso’) which adumbrates Shakespeare’s Sonnets xxix. (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’) and lxvi. (‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry’). Drummond of Hawthornden translated Tasso’s sonnet in his sonnet (part i. No. xxxiii.); while Drummond’s Sonnets xxv. (‘What cruel star into this world was brought’) and xxxii. (‘If crost with all mishaps be my poor life’) are pitched in the identical key.
[153a] Sidney’s Certain Sonnets (No. xiii.) appended to Astrophel and Stella in the edition of 1598. In Emaricdulfe: Sonnets written by E. C., 1595, Sonnet xxxvii. beginning ‘O lust, of sacred love the foul corrupter,’ even more closely resembles Shakespeare’s sonnet in both phraseology and sentiment. E. C.’s rare volume is reprinted in the Lamport Garland (Roxburghe Club), 1881.
[153b] Even this sonnet is adapted from Drayton. See Sonnet xxii. in 1599 edition: