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- Words peculiar to sonnets and early plays.
At many points, characteristic features of Shakespeare’s vocabulary in the sonnets are as intimately associated with the early plays as the imagery. Several uncommon yet significant words in the sonnets figure in early plays and nowhere else. Such are the epithet ‘dateless’, which is twice used in the sonnets—XXX. 6 and CLIII. 6, and is only used twice elsewhere, in two early plays, *Richard II*, i. 3. 151, and *Romeo and Juliet*, v. 3. 115'; the two words ‘compile’ (LXXVIII. 9), or ‘compil’d’ (LXXXV. 2), and ‘filed’ (in the sense of ‘polished’), which only appear in the sonnets and in *Love’s Labour’s Lost* (iv. 3. 134; v. 2. 52 and 896; v. i. 12); the participial ‘Out-worn’ in sonnets LXIV. 2 ‘Out-worn buried age’, and LXVIII. 1 ‘days out-worn’, which is only met with in *Lucrece*, 1350, ‘the worn-out age’, and 1761, ‘time out-worn’; the epithet ‘world-without-end’, *Sonnet* LVII. 5, which is only found elsewhere in *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, v. 2. 799; ‘wires’ for ‘hair’ (CXXX, 4), a favourite word with Elizabethan sonneteers between 1590 and 1597, which is only found elsewhere in the epithet ‘wiry’ for ‘hairy’ in *King John*, iii. 4. 64; and ‘idolatry’ (‘Let not my love be called idolatry’) in CV. 1, which is used elsewhere in five plays—one alone, *Troilus and Cressida* (ii. 2. 56), being of later period.
is closely akin to the lines in yet another early play, *Midsummer Night’s Dream*, iii. 2. 391–3, where we read how
the Eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams,
Turns into yellow gold his salt-green streams.
* Cf. Son. xxx. 6:
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night.
* Rom. and Jul. v. 3. 115:
A dateless bargain to engrossing death!
* Viz. Two Gentlemen, iv. 4. 207; *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, iv. 3. 75; *A Midsummer Night’s Dream*, i. 1. 109; *Romeo and Juliet*, ii. 2. 114; and *Troilus and Cressida*, ii. 2. 56.
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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 25
Three rare words which testify to Shakespeare's French reading—‘rondure’ (XXI. 8), ‘couplement’ (XXI. 5), and ‘carcanet’, i.e. necklace (LII. 8)—are only found elsewhere respectively in *King John*, ii. 1. 259, in *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, v. 2. 535, and in *Comedy of Errors*, iii. 1. 4.
One or two quotations or adaptations of lines of the sonnets in work by other pens, bring further testimony to the comparatively early date of composition. In these instances the likelihood that Shakespeare was the borrower is very small. The whole line (XCIV. 14)—
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds appeared before 1595 in the play of ‘Edward III’ (ii. 1. 451), together with several distinctive phrases.¹ The poet Barnfield, who, in poems published in that and the previous year, borrowed with great freedom from *Venus and Adonis* and *Lucrece*, levied loans on the sonnets at the same time.²
¹ Two are especially noteworthy, viz. ‘scarlet ornaments’, of the lips or cheeks (Sen. CXLIII. 6 and Edw. III, ii. 1. 10), and ‘flatter’, applied to the effect of sunlight (Sen. XXXIII. 2 and Edw. III, i. 2. 142).
² In Sonnet LXXXV Shakespeare uses together the rare words ‘compiled’ and ‘filed’ (in the sense of ‘polished’) when he writes of comments of your praise, richly compiled, . . .
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