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- 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:
Ergo cum silices, cum dens patientis aratri,
Depereant acvo, carmina morte carent.
Cedant carminibus reges regumque triumphi,
Cedat et auriferi ripa benigna Tagi. (31–4.)
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SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE 21
phraseology of great poets suffer constant flow. Their stores are continually replenished in the course of their careers. Whenever, therefore, any really substantial part of the imagery and phraseology in two or more works is of identical tone and texture, no doubt seems permissible that they belong to the same epoch in the poet’s career. Application of these principles to Shakespeare’s sonnets can lead to no other result than that the bulk of them are of the same date as the earliest plays.
Probably Shakespeare’s earliest comedy, *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, offers a longer list of parallels to the phraseology and imagery of the sonnets than any other of his works.¹ The details in the resemblance—the drift of style and thought—confirm the conclusion that most of the sonnets belong to the same period of the poet’s life as the comedy. Longaville’s regular sonnet in the play (iv. 3. 60–73) closely catches the tone that is familiar to readers of Shakespeare’s great collection. Like thirty-four of Shakespeare’s collected quatorzains, it begins with the rhetorical question:—
Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye,
’Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument,
Persuade my heart to this false perjury?
Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.
But apart from syntactical or metrical forms, the imagery in *Love’s Labour’s Lost* is often almost identical with that of the sonnets.
The lyric image of sun-worship in *Sonnet* VII. 1–4:—
Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
¹ Cf. Mr. C. F. McClumpha’s papers on the relation of the sonnets (1) with *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, and (2) with *Romeo and Juliet*, respectively, in *Modern Language Notes*, vol. xv, No. 6, June, 1900, pp. 337–46, and in *Shakespeare-Jahrbuch*, xl. pp. 187 seq. (Weimar, 1904).
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22
# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE
*Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty,*
reappears in heightened colour in Biron’s speech in *Love’s Labour’s Lost* (iv. 3. 221–8):—
> Who sees the heavenly Rosaline,
That like a rude and savage man of Inde,
At the first opening of *the gorgeous East*,
Bows not *his vassal head*, and strucken blind
Kisses the base ground with obedient breast?
What peremptory eagle-sighted eye
*Dares look upon the heaven of her brow,
That is not blinded by her majesty?*
Only here and in another early play—*Romeo and Juliet*—is the imagery of sun-worship brought by Shakespeare into the same relief.¹
Another conceit which Shakespeare develops persistently, in almost identical language, in both the sonnets and *Love’s Labour’s Lost*, is that the eye is the sole source of love, the exclusive home of beauty, the creator, too, of strange delusions in the minds of lovers.²
¹ Cf. *Romeo and Juliet*, l. i. 124–5:
*the worshiped sun*
Peer’d forth the golden window of the east.
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