Part 8 (2/2)

When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory

'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending dooement that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes

The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses to a woman In two of the latter (cxxxv-vi), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name of Will with a lady's 'will' (the synonylish of both 'lust' and 'obstinacy'), he derisively challenges comparison ire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his disdainful race' to the sa account as Shakespeare turned the word 'will' {118a} Si

Mylike the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, {118b}

he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses' features

The praise of 'blackness'

In two sonnets (cxxvii and cxxxii) Shakespeare amiably notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty He co to practise those arts by which other woave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature Here Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in 'Love's Labour's Lost'(IV iii 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as 'black as ebony,' with 'brows decked in black,' and in 'ence in the disguising arts of the toilet

'No face is fair that is not full so black,' exclaims Rosaline's lover

But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare's praise of 'blackness' clai his own invention Sir Philip Sidney, in sonnet vii of his 'Astrophel and Stella,' had anticipated it

The 'beams' of the eyes of Sidney's mistress were 'wrapt in colour black'

and wore 'thisweed,' so

That whereas black seems beauty's contrary, She even in black doth make all beauties flow {119a}

To his praise of 'blackness' in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit {119b} Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a ues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart

Twice, in e as had already served a like purpose in the play, does he mock his 'dark lady' with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes

The sonnets of vituperation

The two sonnets, in which this view of 'blackness' is developed, forory of sonnetteering effort In theared sentiment which characterisessonnets

He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woenuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but thewrath which the rejection of a lovesuit may rouse in a passionate nature does not seeenuinely in Shakespeare's sonnets of vituperation It was inherent in Shakespeare's genius that he should import more dramatic intensity than any other poet into sonnets of a vituperative type; but there is also in his vituperative sonnets a declaests that the e an attitude He cannot have been in earnest in seeking to conciliate his disdainful mistress--a result at which the vituperative sonnets purport to aim--when he tells her that she is 'black as hell, as dark as night,' and with 'so foul a face' is 'the bay where all men ride'

Gabriel Harvey's 'Amorous Odious Sonnet'

But external evidence is more conclusive as to the artificial construction of the vituperative sonnets Again a comparison of this series with the efforts of the ns to it its true character Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at soies to vituperation of a cruel siren

Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as Shakespeare's a 'fierce tigress,' a 'murderess,' a 'Medusa' Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female 'tyrant,' a 'Medusa,' a 'rock' 'Women' (Barnes laments) 'are by nature proud as devils' The ularity hich the sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France

In Shakespeare's early life the convention ittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in 'An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student's Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed' {121} After extolling the beauty and virtue of his elica, Petrarch's Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a poisonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind as passionless as a block' Finally he tells her,

If ever there were she-devils incarnate, They are altogether in thee incorporate

Jodelle's 'Contr' Amours'