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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
had already served, with inferior effect, the purposes of poetry many times before. The material for the subject-matter and the suggestion of the irregular emotion of the sonnets lay at Shakespeare’s command in much literature by other pens. The obligation to draw on his personal experiences for his theme or its development was little greater in his sonnets than in his dramas. Hundreds of sonneteers had celebrated, in the language of love, the charms of young men—mainly by way of acknowledging their patronage in accordance with a convention which was peculiar to the period of the Renaissance. Thousands of poets had described their sufferings at the hands of imperious beauty. Others had found food for poetry in stories of mental conflict caused by a mistress’s infidelity or a friend’s coolness.¹ The spur of example never failed to incite Shakespeare’s dramatic muse to activity, and at no period of literary history was the presentation of amorous adventures more often essayed in sonnets than by Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries at home and abroad during the last decade of the sixteenth century. It goes without saying that Shakespeare had his own experience of the emotions incident to love and friendship or that that experience added point and colour to his verse. But his dramatic genius absolved him of the need
¹ The conflicts between the claims of friend and mistress on the affections, and the griefs incident to the transfer of a mistress’s attentions to a friend—recondite topics which are treated in Shakespeare’s sonnets—seem no uncommon themes of Renaissance poetry. Clement Marot, whose work was very familiar to Spenser and other Elizabethan writers, in complicated verse headed ‘A celle qui souhaita Marot aussi amoureux d’elle qu’un sien Amy’ (*(Ewver, 1565?, p. 437*), describes himself in a situation resembling that which Shakespeare assigns to the ‘friend’ of his sonnets. Being solicited in love by his comrade’s mistress, Marot warns her of the crime against friendship to which she prompts him, and, less complacent than Shakespeare’s ‘friend’, rejects her invitation on the ground that he has only half a heart to offer her, the other half being absorbed by friendship.
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