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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 21
phraseology of great poets suffer constant flow. Their stores are continually replenished in the course of their careers. Whenever, therefore, any really substantial part of the imagery and phraseology in two or more works is of identical tone and texture, no doubt seems permissible that they belong to the same epoch in the poet’s career. Application of these principles to Shakespeare’s sonnets can lead to no other result than that the bulk of them are of the same date as the earliest plays.
Probably Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, offers a longer list of parallels to the phraseology and imagery of the sonnets than any other of his works.¹ The details in the resemblance—the drift of style and thought—confirm the conclusion that most of the sonnets belong to the same period of the poet’s life as the comedy. Longaville’s regular sonnet in the play (iv. 3. 60–73) closely catches the tone that is familiar to readers of Shakespeare’s great collection. Like thirty-four of Shakespeare’s collected quatorzains, it begins with the rhetorical question:—
Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
’Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.
But apart from syntactical or metrical forms, the imagery in *Love’s Labour’s Lost* is often almost identical with that of the sonnets.
The lyric image of sun-worship in *Sonnet* VII. 1–4:—
Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
¹ Cf. Mr. C. F. McClumpha’s papers on the relation of the sonnets (1) with *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, and (2) with *Romeo and Juliet*, respectively, in *Modern Language Notes*, vol. xv, No. 6, June, 1900, pp. 337–46, and in *Shakespeare-Jahrbuch*, xl. pp. 187 seq. (Weimar, 1904).
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