the word to his poems of love. [134a] When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron—
My saucy bark inferior far to his . . .
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
he seems to write with an eye on Barnes’s identical choice of metaphor:
My fancy’s ship tossed here and there by these [sc. sorrow’s floods]
Still floats in danger ranging to and fro.
How fears my thoughts’ swift pinnace thine hard rock! [134b]
Other theories as to the rival’s identity.
Gervase Markham is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the potent influence of his patron’s ‘eyes,’ which, he says, crown ‘the most victorious pen’—a possible reference to Shakespeare. Nash’s poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusiastic, and are of a finer literary temper than Markham’s. But Shakespeare’s description of his rival’s literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nash than the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes.
Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival’s genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman than by that of any other contemporary poet. But Chapman had produced no conspicuously ‘great verse’ till he began his translation of Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 1610 to a complete
edition of his translation a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in the coldest terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies that he had no previous relations. [135] Drayton,
Ben Jonson, and Marston have also been identified by various critics with ‘the rival poet,’ but none of these shared Southampton’s bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare applies to his rival’s verse specially applicable to the productions of any of them.