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# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
him incapable of such a personal confession of morbid infatuation with a youth, as a literal interpretation discovers in the sonnets.
It is in the light not merely of aesthetic appreciation but of contemporary literary history that Shakespeare’s sonnets must be studied, if one hopes to reach any conclusions as to their precise significance which are entitled to confidence. No critic of his sonnets is justified in ignoring the contemporary literary influences to which Shakespeare, in spite of his commanding genius, was subject throughout his extant work. It is well to bear in mind that Elizabethan sonneteers, whose number was legion, habitually levied heavy debts not only on the great masters of this form of verse in Italy and France, who invented or developed it, but on contemporary foreign practitioners of ephemeral reputation. Nor should it be forgotten that the Elizabethan reading public repeatedly acknowledged a vein of artificiality in this naturalized instrument of English poetry, and pointed out its cloying tendency to fantastic exaggeration of simulated passion.¹
Of chief importance is it to realize that the whole vocabulary of affection—the commonest terms of endearment—often carried with them in Renaissance or Elizabethan poetry, and especially in Renaissance and Elizabethan sonnets, a poetic value that is wholly different from any that they bear to-day. The example of Tasso, the chief representative of the Renaissance on the continent of Europe in Shakespeare’s day, shows with singular lucidity how the language of love was suffered deliberately to clothe the conventional relations of poet to
¹ Impatience was constantly expressed with the literary habit of ‘Olling a saint with supple sonneting’, which was held to be of the essence of the Elizabethan sonnet (cf. J. D.’s *Epigrammes*, 1598, Sonnet II at end, headed ‘Ignoto’, and the other illustrations of contemporary criticism of sonnets in my *Life of Shakespeare*, pp. 111–12).
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