All her looks gracious, yet no grace do bring
To me, poor wretch! Yet be the Graces there.
[422b] Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the ‘sightless view’ of the soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the ‘centre of his sinful earth’ in Sonnet cxlvi.
[423a] The use of the word ‘fulfil’ in this and the next line should be compared with Barnes’s introduction of the word in a like context in the passage given above:
Since what she lists her heart fulfils.
[423b] Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: ‘You love your other admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my name is Will,’ p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says the lines mean: ‘Love only my name (something less than loving myself), and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will, i.e. all desire.’
[425] The word ‘Will’ is not here italicised in the original edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes’s line quoted above:
Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.
[426] Because ‘will’ by what is almost certainly a typographical accident is here printed Will in the first edition of the sonnets, Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her Will, i.e. the friend ‘Will [? W. H.]’ This interpretation seems to introduce a needless complication.
[427a] See p. 83 supra.
[427b] The word ‘sonnet’ was often irregularly used for ‘song’ or ‘poem.’ A proper sonnet in Clement Robinson’s poetical anthology, A Handefull of Pleasant Delites, 1584, is a lyric in ten four-line alternatively rhymed stanzas. Neither Barnabe Googe’s Eglogs, Epyttaphes, and Sonnettes, 1563, nor George Turbervile’s Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, 1567, contains a single fourteen-lined poem. The French word ‘quatorzain’ was the term almost as frequently applied as ‘sonnet’ to the fourteen-line stanza in regular sonnet form, which alone falls within my survey. Watson is congratulated on ‘scaling the skies in lofty quatorzains’ in verses before his Passionate Centurie, 1582; cf. ‘crazed quatorzains’ in Thomas Nash’s preface to his edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, 1591; and Amours in Quatorzains on the title-page of the first edition of Drayton’s Sonnets, 1594.