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- 18 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
## II
**Date of the sonnets.**
It is not known for certain when Shakespeare’s sonnets were written. They were probably produced at various dates, but such external evidence as is accessible assigns the majority of them to a comparatively early period of Shakespeare’s career, to a period antecedent to 1598. Internal evidence is on this point very strongly corroborative of the external testimony. The language and imagery of the sonnets closely connects them with the work which is positively known to have occupied Shakespeare before 1595 or 1596. The passages and expressions which are nearly matched in plays of a later period are not unimportant, but they are inferior in number to those which find a parallel in the narrative poems of 1593 and 1594, or in the plays of similar date. Again, only a few of the parallels in the later work are so close in phrase or sentiment as those in the earlier work.¹
**The plea for marriage.**
Two leading themes of the sonnets are very closely associated with Shakespeare’s poem of *Venus and Adonis* and the plays that were composed about the same date. The first seventeen poems, in which the poet urges a beautiful youth to marry, and to bequeath his beauty to posterity, repeat with somewhat greater exuberance, but with no variation of sentiment, the plea that Venus thrice fervently
¹ Almost every play of Shakespeare offers some parallels to expressions in the sonnets. Canon Beeching (pp. xxv–xxvii) has collected several (which are of great interest) from *Henry IV* and *Hamlet*, but they are not numerous enough to justify any very large conclusion. It does not seem to have been noticed that the words ‘Quietus’ (*Hamlet*, iii. 1. 75, and *Sonnet* CXXVI. 12) and ‘My prophetic soul’ (*Hamlet*, i. 5. 40, and *Sonnet* CVII. 1) come in *Hamlet* and the sonnets, and nowhere else. The sonnets in which they occur may be of comparatively late date, but the evidence is not conclusive in itself.
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