Properties
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- # SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
urges on Adonis in Shakespeare’s poem (cf. ll. 129–32, 162–74, 1751–68). The plea is again developed by Shakespeare in *Romeo and Juliet*, i. i. 218–28. Elsewhere he only makes slight and passing allusion to it—viz. in *All’s Well*, i. i. 136, and in *Twelfth Night*, i. 5. 273–5. The bare treatment, which the subject receives in these comparatively late plays, notably contrasts with the fullness of exposition in the earlier passages.¹
An almost equally prominent theme of Shakespeare’s sonnets—the power of verse to ‘eternize’ the person whom it commemorated—likewise suggests early composition. The conceit is of classical origin, and is of constant recurrence in Renaissance poetry throughout Western Europe. The French poet, Ronsard, never tired of repeating it in the odes and sonnets which he addressed to his patrons, and Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton, among Elizabethan poets, emulated his example with energy. Shakespeare presents the theme in much the same fashion as his English contemporaries, and borrows an occasional phrase from poems by them, which were in print before 1594. But the first impulse to adopt the proud boast seems to have come from his youthful study of Ovid. Of all Latin poets, Ovid gave the pretension most frequent and most frank expression. *Sonnet LV*, where Shakespeare handles the conceit with
¹ Nothing was commoner in Renaissance literature than for a literary client to urge on a patron the duty of transmitting to future ages his charms and attainments. The plea is versified in Sir Philip Sidney’s *Arcadia* (bk. iii) in the addresses of the old dependant Geron to his master Prince Histor, and in Guarini’s *Paster Fide* (1585) in the addresses of the old dependant Linco to his master the hero Silvio. Chapman dwells on the theme in an address to his patron the Duke of Lennox, in his translation of Homer’s *Iliad* (of which the publication began in 1598):
> None ever lived by self-love; others’ good
> Is th’ object of our own. They living die
> That bury in themselves their fortunes’ brood.
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20 SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
gorgeous effect, assimilates several lines from the exultant outburst at the close of Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*. To that book, which Shakespeare often consulted, he had especial recourse when writing *Venus and Adonis*. Moreover, a second work of Ovid was also at Shakespeare’s hand, when his first narrative poem was in process of composition. The Latin couplet, which Shakespeare quoted on the title-page of *Venus and Adonis*, comes from that one of Ovid’s *Amores* (or ‘Elegies of Love’) in which the Latin poet with fiery vehemence expatiates on the eternizing faculty of verse.¹ Ovid’s vaunt in his ‘Elegies’ had clearly caught Shakespeare’s eye when he was engaged on *Venus and Adonis*, and the impression seems to be freshly reflected in Shakespeare’s treatment of the topic through the sonnets.²
No internal evidence as to the chronological relations of two compositions from the same poet’s pen is open to less dispute than that which is drawn from the tone and texture of the imagery and phraseology. The imagery and
¹ To the many instances I have adduced of the handling of this topic by Spenser and other Elizabethan poets, may be added this stanza from Roydon’s *Elegie* on Sir Philip Sidney, where he refers to the sonnets which Sidney, in the name of Astrophel, addressed to Lady Rich, in the name of Stella:
Then Astrophill hath honour’d thee [i.e. Stella];
For when thy body is extinct,
Thy graces shall eternall be,
And live by vertue of his inke;
For by his verses he doth give
To short-livde beautie aye to live.
* Cf. Mortale est, quod quaeris, opus; mihi fama perennis
Quaeritur, in toto semper ut orbe canar.
(Ovid’s ‘Amores’, i. xv. 7–8.)
The *Venus and Adonis* motto is immediately preceded in Ovid’s ‘Amores’ (i. xv. 35–6) by these lines:
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