Part 8 (1/2)

VIII--THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

Slender autobiographical element in Shakespeare's sonnets The ier proportion of Shakespeare's sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been , as well as for Shakespeare's unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention--an affluence which enabled him to identify hiraphic eleether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions As soon as the collection is studied co presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare's performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill, often of superlative ed by the efforts of contehts and words of the sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and with as little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his dramatic work To Drayton he was especially indebted {110} Such resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare's sonnets and those of Petrarch or Desportes seelish imitators of those sonnetteers Most of Ronsard's nine hundred sonnets and many of his nulish adaptations, but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard direct

Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare's collection They are usually manipulated with consummate skill, but Shakespeare's indebtedness is not thereby obscured

Shakespeare in ht and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion Such topics are coure in Shakespeare's pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baif, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the Italian and French masters {111} In Sonnet xxiv Shakespeare develops Ronsard's conceit that his love's portrait is painted on his heart; and in Sonnet cxxii he repeats so how his friend, who has just ift of 'tables,' is 'character'd' in his brain {112a} Sonnet xcix, which reproaches the floith stealing their charms from the features of his love, is adapted from Constable's sonnet to Diana (No ix), and may be matched in other collections Elsewhere Shakespeare am of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire (xl-xlv) {112b} In all these he reproduces, with such eenius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton, Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy In two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged in a s of the same conventional conceit In Sonnets xlvi and xlvii he paraphrases twice over--appropriatingnotion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the greater influence on lovers {113a} In the concluding sonnets, cliii and cliv, he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers {113b}

Shakespeare's claims of immortality for his sonnets a borrowed conceit

In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was so certain of i the person to whoave voice to no conviction that was peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of spirit, or spontaneous ebullition of feeling He wasthat he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a the Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe {114a} Sir Philip Sidney, in his 'Apologie for Poetrie' (1595) wrote that it was the common habit of poets to tell you that they will reat calling,' Nash wrote in his 'Pierce Pennilesse,' 1593, 'take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets' {114c} In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the 'eternising'

faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic

Spenser wrote in his 'Amoretti' (1595, Sonnet lxxv)

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name

Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushi+ng iteration

Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ' rhymes' (xliv 7), embodied the vaunt in such lines as:

While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (_Idea_ xliv 1)

Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (_ib_ xliv 11)

My name shall mount unto eternity (_ib_ xliv 14)

All that I seek is to eternize thee (_ib_ xlvii 54)

Daniel was no less explicit

This [_sc_ verse]monument (_Delia_, xxxvii

9)

Thou es live esteemed, Unburied in these lines (_ib_ xxxix 9-10)

These [_sc_ my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect That fortify thy nae; And these [_sc_ verses] thy sacred virtues e (_ib_ l 9-12)

Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman

Shakespeare, in his references to his 'eternal lines' (xviii 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel's exact phrase, his 'monu hi taste

Characteristically in Sonnet lv he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet: {115}

Not ilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyht in these contents Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time