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The alleged morbidity of the sonnets. of seeking his cue there exclusively. It was not in his nature (to paraphrase Browning again) to write merely for the purpose of airing his private woes and perplexities. Shakespeare acknowledged in his plays that ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. The exclusive embodiment in verse of mere private introspection was barely known to his era, and in these words the dramatist paid an explicit tribute to the potency in poetic literature of artistic impulse and control contrasted with the impotency of personal sensation, which is scarcely capable of discipline. To few of the sonnets can a controlling artistic impulse be denied by criticism. The best of them rank with the richest and most concentrated efforts of Shakespeare’s pen. To pronounce them, alone of his extant work, free of that ‘feigning’, which he identified with ‘the truest poetry’, is tantamount to denying his authorship of them, and to dismissing them from the Shakespearean canon. The second general objection which is raised by the theory of the sonnets’ autobiographic significance can be stated very briefly. A literal interpretation of the poems credits the poet with a moral instability which is at variance with the tone of all the rest of his work, and is rendered barely admissible by his contemporary reputation for ‘honesty’. Of the ‘pangs of despised love’ for a woman, which he professes to suffer in the sonnets, nothing need be said in this connexion. But a purely literal interpretation of the impassioned protestations of affection for a ‘lovely boy’, which course through the sonnets, casts a slur on the dignity of the poet’s name which scarcely bears discussion. Of friendship of the healthy manly type, not his plays alone, but the records of his biography, give fine and touching examples. All his dramatic writing, as well as his two narrative poems and the testimonies of his intimate associates in life, seems to prove B 2 <!-- [Page 423](arke:01KG6QHPHYXNBK53AXTXXWA6V8) --> 12 # 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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