Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.’ [108] In later plays Shakespeare’s disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced. In ‘Henry V’ (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, ‘I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: “Wonder of nature!”’ The Duke of Orleans retorts: ‘I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.’ The Dauphin replies: ‘Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.’ In ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ (V. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’ Benedick jestingly promises one so ‘in high a style that no man living shall come over it.’ Subsequently (V. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.
VIII—THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS
Slender autobiographical element in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The imitative element.
At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current conventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention—an affluence which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of emotion—the autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the collection is studied comparatively with the many thousand sonnets that the printing presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare’s performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the efforts of contemporary practitioners. The thoughts and words of the sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and
with as little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his dramatic work. To Drayton he was especially indebted. [110] Such resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of Petrarch or Desportes seem due to his study of the English imitators of those sonnetteers. Most of
Ronsard’s nine hundred sonnets and many of his numerous odes were accessible to Shakespeare in English adaptations, but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard direct.
Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare’s collection. They are usually manipulated with consummate skill, but Shakespeare’s indebtedness is not thereby obscured. Shakespeare in many beautiful sonnets describes spring and summer, night and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion. Such topics are common themes of the poetry of the Renaissance, and they figure in Shakespeare’s pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baïf, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the Italian and French masters. [111] In
Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops Ronsard’s conceit that his love’s portrait is painted on his heart; and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard’s phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of ‘tables,’ is ‘character’d’ in his brain. [112a] Sonnet xcix., which reproaches the flowers with stealing their charms from the features of his love, is adapted from Constable’s sonnet to Diana (No. ix.), and may be matched in other collections. Elsewhere Shakespeare meditates on the theory that man is an amalgam of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire (xl.-xlv.) [112b] In all these he reproduces, with such embellishments as his genius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton, Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy. In two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged in a mere literary exercise by offering him alternative renderings of the same conventional conceit. In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases twice over—appropriating many of Watson’s words—the unexhilarating notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the greater influence on
lovers. [113a] In the concluding sonnets, cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers. [113b]