To his praise of ‘blackness’ in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit. [119b] Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart. Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in the play, does
he mock his ‘dark lady’ with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.
The sonnets of vituperation.
The two sonnets, in which this view of ‘blackness’ is developed, form part of a series of twelve, which belongs to a special category of sonnetteering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons the sugared sentiment which characterises most of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets. He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman whom he represents as disdaining his advances. The genuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but the mood of blinding wrath which the rejection of a lovesuit may rouse in a passionate nature does not seem from the internal evidence to be reflected genuinely in Shakespeare’s sonnets of vituperation. It was inherent in Shakespeare’s genius that he should import more dramatic intensity than any other poet into sonnets of a vituperative type; but there is also in his vituperative sonnets a declamatory parade of figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned and that the poet is striking an attitude. He cannot have been in earnest in seeking to conciliate his disdainful mistress—a result at which the vituperative sonnets purport to aim—when he tells her that she is ‘black as hell, as dark as night,’ and with ‘so foul a face’ is ‘the bay where all men ride.’
Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet.’
But external evidence is more conclusive as to the artificial construction of the vituperative sonnets. Again a comparison of this series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true character.
Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren. Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as Shakespeare’s a ‘fierce tigress,’ a ‘murderess,’ a ‘Medusa.’ Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female ‘tyrant,’ a ‘Medusa,’ a ‘rock.’ ‘Women’ (Barnes laments) ‘are by nature proud as devils.’ The monotonous and artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France. In Shakespeare’s early life the convention was wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in ‘An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed.’ [121] After extolling the beauty and virtue of his mistress above that of Aretino’s Angelica, Petrarch’s Laura, Catullus’s Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as ‘a serpent in brood,’ ‘a poisonous toad,’ ‘a heart of marble,’ and ‘a stony mind as passionless as a block.’ Finally he tells her,
If ever there were she-devils incarnate,
They are altogether in thee incorporate.
Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours.’
In France Etienne Jodelle, a professional