Part 6 (1/2)

Enthusiastic reception of the poems

In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal to the world of readers, and the reading public welcomed his addresses with unqualified enthusiasoer already knew Shakespeare's naht, but his draned in manuscript, as soon as the theatrical representation ceased, to the coffers of their owner, the playhouse ht him at the outset little reputation as a man of letters It was not as the myriad-minded dralish readers of familiar Ovidian fables, that he first impressed a wide circle of his conteenius The perfect sweetness of the verse, and the poetical iery in 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' practically silenced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes on the part of the seriously minded Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulogies in which they proclaiained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus 'Lucrece,'

wrote Michael Drayton in his 'Legend of Matilda' (1594), was 'revived to live another age' In 1595 Williaave 'all praise' to 'sweet Shakespeare' for his 'Lucrecia' John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to 'honey-tongued Shakespeare' in his 'Epigraised the two poeh he mentioned the plays 'Romeo' and 'Richard' and 'more whose names I know not' Richard Carew at the sa the praises of an English Catullus {79} Printers and publishers of the poeer purchasers No fewer than seven editions of 'Venus' appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617 'Lucrece' achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare's death

Shakespeare and Spenser

There is a likelihood, too, that Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare's poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shakespeare's admirers It is hardly doubtful that Spenser described Shakespeare in 'Colin Clouts coaine' (completed in 1594), under the name of 'Aetion'--a fale:

And there, though last not least is Aetion; A gentler Shepheard ht's invention, Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound

The last line seems to allude to Shakespeare's surname We may assume that the aded acquaintance with Spenser's work in a plain reference to his 'Teares of the Muses' (1591) in 'Midsuht's Drea for the death Of learning, late deceased in beggary,

is stated to be the theme of one of the dramatic entertaine In Spenser's 'Teares of the Muses' each of the Nine la influence on the literary and draestion with the not inappropriate comment:

That is so with a nuptial cere that Spenser in the sauratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the recent death of 'our pleasant willy' {80} The name willy was frequently used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the baptismal name of the person referred to Sir Philip Sidney was addressed as 'willy' by soists A comic actor, 'dead of late' in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century colish comedy had lately sustained by the death of the coentle spirit' who is described by Spenser in a later stanza as sitting 'in idle cell' rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare {81b}

Patrons at court

Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteeenius and 'civil demeanour' of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other noble patrons of literature and the drama His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself Elizabeth quickly showed hin his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence The revised version of 'Love's Labour's Lost' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusias a little later Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen's appreciation equalled that of Jay on Shakespeare of

Those flights upon the banks of Thames That so did take Eliza and our James,

he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare's plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richn

VII--THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet

It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great hout the sixteenth century In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was interlish language under Henry VIII, and Thoy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets entitled 'Astrophel and Stella' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney's voluly and in connected sequences, engaged ed at any period here or elsewhere {83} Men and woed poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the sae there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron's ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of conte with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashi+on was at its height

Shakespeare's first experihtly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career Three well-turned exaure in 'Love's Labour's Lost,' probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in 'Romeo and Juliet' are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of very early coeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, 'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second Frutes,' a series of Italian-English dialogues for students {84}