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- SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 13
a helpful patron. Tasso not merely recorded in sonnets an apparently amorous devotion for his patron, the Duke of Ferrara, which is only intelligible in its historical environment, but he also carefully describes in prose the precise sentiments which, with a view to retaining the ducal favour, he sedulously cultivated and poetized. In a long prose letter to a later friend and patron, the Duke of Urbino, he wrote of his attitude of mind to his first patron thus¹: ‘I confided in him, not as we hope in men, but as we trust in God. . . . It appeared to me, so long as I was under his protection, fortune and death had no power over me. Burning thus with devotion to my lord, as much as man ever did with love to his mistress, I became, without perceiving it, almost an idolater. I continued in Rome and in Ferrara many days and months in the same attachment and faith.’ With illuminating frankness Tasso added: ‘I went so far with a thousand acts of observance, respect, affection, and almost adoration, that at last, as they say the courser grows slow by too much spurring, so his [i.e. the patron’s] goodwill towards me slackened, because I sought it too ardently.’ There is practical identity between the alternations of feeling which find touching voice in many of the sonnets of Shakespeare and those which colour Tasso’s confession of his intercourse with his Duke of Ferrara. Both poets profess for a man a lover-like idolatry. Both attest the hopes and fears, which his favour evokes in them, with a fervour and intensity of emotion which it was only in the power of great poets to feign.
That the language of love was in common use in Eliza- Poetic
betthan England among poets in their intercourse with those protestations
who appreciated and encouraged their literary genius, is con- of love for
vincingly illustrated by the mass of verse which was addressed Queen
Elizabeth.
¹ Tasso, *Opere*, Pisa, 1821–32, vol. xiii, p. 298.
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