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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 27
Elizabethan era. It was ‘held back from publishing’. It circulated only among the author’s or the patron’s friends. The earliest known reference to the existence of any collection of sonnets by Shakespeare indicates that he followed the fashion in writing them exclusively for private audiences.¹
In 1598 the critic, Francis Meres, by way of confirming the statement that ‘the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’, called to ‘witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends etc.’ There can be little question that Meres refers to sonnets by Shakespeare which were in circulation among his private friends, and were, in the critic’s mind, chiefly distinguished from Shakespeare’s two narrative poems by being unpublished and in private hands.² Meres’ language is too vague to press very closely. The use of the common and conventional epithet ‘sugared’ suggests that Shakespeare’s sonnets were credited by the writer with the ordinary characteristics of the artificial sonneteering of the day.³
¹ Of the specimens of adulatory verse to which reference has been made above, neither the work of Raleigh, nor of Nashe, nor of Harvey was printed in the authors’ lifetime. Harvey’s confession of love for Sir Philip Sidney is not known to be extant. The manuscript copies in which Raleigh’s and Nashe’s verse declared their passion for their patrons were printed for the first time in our own day.
² Manuscript poems written for and circulating among an Elizabethan poet’s friends rarely reached his own hand again. In 1593 the veteran poet, Thomas Churchyard, when enumerating in his Challenge unpublished pieces by himself which had been ‘gotten from me of some such noble friends as I am loath to offend’, includes in his list ‘an infinite number of other Songes and Sonets, given where they cannot be recouered, nor purchase any favour when they are craued’.
³ The conventional epithet ‘sugared’ was often applied to poetry for patrons. In the Returne from Parnassus (1600?), a poverty-stricken scholar, who seeks the favour of a rich patron, is counselled to give the patron ‘some sugar candy teams’ (ll. 1377–8), while to the patron’s son ‘shall thy piping poetry and sugar endes of verses be directed’ (l. 1404). In the same piece (l. 243) Daniel was congratulated on his ‘sugared sonneting’. Cf. ‘sugred
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