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- 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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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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to the greatest of all patrons of Elizabethan poetry—the Queen. The poets who sought her favour not merely commended the beauty of her mind and body with the semblance of amorous ecstasy; they carried their professions of ‘love’ to the extreme limits of realism. They seasoned their notes of adoration with reproaches of inconstancy and infidelity, which they couched in the peculiarly intimate vocabulary that is characteristic of genuinely thwarted passion.
Sir Walter Raleigh.
Sir Walter Raleigh offers especially vivid evidence of the assurance with which the poetic client offered his patron the homage of varied manifestations of amoristic sentiment. He celebrated his devotion to the Queen in a poem, called Cynthia, consisting of twenty-one books, of which only the last survives.¹ The tone of such portion as is extant is that of ecstatic love which is incapable of restraint. At one point the poet reflects
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