Part 9 (2/2)

The central conceit here so finely developed--that the patron e's_ verse because he inspires it--belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation

When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled 'Delia' to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the sa couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare Daniel wrote:

Great patroness of these reatness dost inspire

O leave [_ie_ cease] not still to grace thy work in e lory, madam, must be thine

Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the 'Lucrece' epistle

Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is 'part of all' he has or is Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these:--

[I] by a _part of all_ your glory live (xxxvii 12); Thou art _all the better part of me_ (xxxix 2); My spirit is thine, _the better part of me_ (lxxiv 8);

while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southaht of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as 'eternal love' (cviii 9), and a devotion 'what shall have no end' (cx

9)

Rivals in Southampton's favour

The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly compiled' 'comments'

of his patron's 'praise' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron The rival poets with their 'precious phrase by all the Muses filed' (lxxxv 4) ised Southae The field of choice is not small Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters {131a} Tho to him his 'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets

The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markhas for Southalow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm

Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned a Shakespeare's literary acquaintances, {131b} wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his 'Worlde of Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), 'as to racious sunshi+ne of your honour hath infused light and life'

Shakespeare's fear of a rival poet

Shakespeare e_ of Southaerous rival, as an 'able' and a 'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel of 'tall building and of goodly pride,' compared hom he was hiic in theHis 'spirit,'

Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been 'by spirits taught to write above a ulled hience Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by 'the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse' sealed for a tis of his own invention (lxxxvi)

Barnabe Barnes probably the rival

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare's laudation of the other poet's' powers He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement 'Eloquence and courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the ti vein;' and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language i that they had already achieved them All the conditions of the proble poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, as deereat poet His first collection of sonnets, 'Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with als interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595 Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, a lyrics and at least one almost perfect sonnet (No lxvi 'Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode?') Thomas Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's scholar;' the learned Gabriel Harvey bade hinancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, like Spenser;'

Ca' In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were 'the heavenly laht,' and that his sole aht worthy of his patron's 'virtues' Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii that his lord's eyes

that taught the dunorance aloft to fly, Have added feathers to the learned's wing, And given grace a doublesonnet he asserted that the 'worthier pen' of his dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism, for he 'stole that word' from his patron's 'behaviour' The eht froracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton's favour In Sonnet lxxxv Shakespeare declares that 'he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [_ie_ his rival]

affords' Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard's practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies the word to his poems of love {134a} When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron--