as units in a fairly consecutive series, is quite in the man the time. There is no mention of Delia in all the twenty-eijonate appended by Daniel to Astrophel and Stella1; but nineteen orast these were interpolated into the later sequence, which bears her name, yet mentions it in thirteen only out of fifty-five. To glance at Drayton's Idea is to be instantly suspicious of another . such mystification. The proem begins :

'Into these loves, who but for Passion looks,

At this first sight here let him lay them by ':

6

and the author goes on to boast that he sings fantasticly' without a 'far-fetched sigh,' an Ah me,' or a 'tear.' Yet the sixty-first in the completed series (1619) is that wonderful sob of supplication for which Drayton is chiefly remembered :

'Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part!'

Only by the use of the comparative method can we hope to recover the conditions under which sonnets were written and published in Shakespeare's day. A side-light, for instance, is thrown on the half good-natured, half malicious rivalry between the members of shifting literary cliques, from the fact that Shakespeare, Chapman, Marston, and Jonson all contributed poems on the Phoenix to Rob. Chester's Love's Martyr (1601),2 and that sonnets on the same subject occur in Daniel's additions to Astrophel (Sonnet III.), and in Drayton's Idea (Sonnet xvI.). All six poets are suspected, and some are known, to have been arrayed from time to time on opposed sides in literary quarrels; yet you find them handling a common theme in more or less friendly emulation. I fancy that many of the coincidences between the Sonnets of Shakespeare and those of Drayton, on which charges of plagiarism have been founded, and

1 Sonnet XIII. opens thus :

'My Cynthia hath the waters of mine eyes.'

2 See Note IV. on The Sonnets.

B

by whose aid attempts have been made to fix the date of Shakespeare's authorship, may be explained more probably by this general conception of a verse-loving society divided into emulous coteries. Mr. Tyler adduces the conceit of 'eyes' and 'heart' in Drayton's xxxIII. (Ed. 1599), and compares it to Shakespeare's XLVI. and XLVII. (1609); but it appears in Henry Constable. Again, he instances Drayton's illustration from a 'map' in XLIII. 1; but, perhaps by reason of the fashionable interest in the New World, the image was a common one: Daniel employs it in his Defence of Ryme. And if Drayton, in this sonnet, strives to eternize' the object of his affection in accents echoed by Shakespeare, Daniel does the like in his L. :—

'Let others sing of Knights and Palladins

In aged accents, and untimely words,' etc. :

with a hit at Spenser that only differs in being a hit from Shakespeare's reference in cvi. :—

'When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely Knights.'

Of course it differs also in poetic excellence; yet many chancing
on Daniel's later line :-

'Against the dark and Time's consuming rage' :

might mistake it for one by the mightier artist. Drayton, like Shakespeare, upbraids some one, whom he compares to the son-and the sex is significant—'of some rich penny-father,' for wasting his 'Love' and 'Beauty,' which Time must conquer, 'on the unworthy' who cannot make him 'survive' in 'immortal song.' And the next number sounds familiar, with its curious metaphysical conceit of identity between the beloved one and

1 Ed. 1599=XLIV. of 1619.

2 Sonnet x. Ed. 1619.

the poet who sings him.' If any one had thought it worth his while to investigate the biographical problems of Drayton's obviously doctored Idea, he would have found nuts to crack as hard as any in Shakespeare's Sonnets. It is best, perhaps, to take Sidney's advice, and to 'believe with him that there are many misteries contained in Poetrie, which of purpose were written darkely.' At any rate, the ironic remainder of the passage throws a flood of light on the extent to which the practice of immortalising prevailed:-'Believe' the poets, he says, 'when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verses,' for, thus doing, 'your name shall flourish in the Printers' shoppes; thus doing, you shall bee of kinne to many a poetical preface; thus doing, you shall be most fayre, most rich, most wise, most all, you shall dwell upon superlatives.' 2

Shakespeare's Sonnets, then, belong to a sonneteering age, and exhibit many curious coincidences with the verse of his friends and rivals. But his true distinction in mere metrical form, apart from finer subtleties of art, consists in this: that he established the quatorzain as a separate type of the European Sonnet; he took as it were a sport from the garden of verse, and fixed it for an English variety. The credit for this has been given to Daniel; but the attribution cannot be sustained. For Daniel sometimes hankered after the Petrarchan model, though in a less degree than any other of Shakespeare's contemporaries: he travels in Italy, contrasts his Muse with Petrarch's, imitates his structure,5 and strains after feminine rhymes. Shakespeare alone selected the English quatorzain, and sustained it throughout a sonnet

1 Cf. Shakespeare's XXXIX., XLII., LXII.

2 Sidney, Apologie.

3 Delia, XLVII., XLVIII.

Ibid., XXXVIII.

3

5 Ibid., XXXI. and XXXIII. and x. of the Sonnets appended to Arcadia.

sequence.1 Even the merit of invention claimed for Daniel must be denied him. When Shakespeare makes Slender say2:-'I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here' :-he refers to Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557. But the numbers by the Earl of Surrey in that anthology were written many years earlier, and in the Eighth of his Sonnets there printed, you will find as good a model for Shakespeare's form as any in Daniel's Delia :—

'Set me whereas the sunne doth parche the grene
Or where his beames do not dissolve the yse:
In temperate heate where he is felt and sene :
In presence prest of people madde or wise.
Set me in hye, or yet in lowe degree:
In longest night, or in the shortest daye :

In clearest skye, or where clowdes thickest be:
In lusty youth, or when my heeres are graye.
Set me in heaven, in earth or els in hell,
In hyll, or dale, or in the fomyng flood:
Thrall, or at large, alive where so I dwell:
Sicke or in health in evyll fame or good.

Hers will I be, and onely with this thought

Content my selfe, although my chaunce be nought.3

The theme is borrowed from Petrarch; but the form is Surrey's, who used it in nine out of his fourteen sonnets, and essayed the Petrarchan practice in but one. By this invention he achieved a sweetness of rhythm never attained in any strict imitation of the Italian model until the present century. His sonnet is the true precursor of Shakespeare's, and it owes directly-little more than the number of its lines to France and Italy: being founded on English metres of alternating rhymes, with a final

1 Sidney and Drayton frequently copy French and Italian models. Spenser's linked quatrains are neither sonnets nor quatorzains: they represent an abortive attempt to create a new form.

2 Merry Wives of Windsor, i. I.

* Form and favour' in Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXV., 'golden tresses' in his LXVIII. may also be echoes of Surrey.

couplet copied by Chaucer from the French two centuries before.

The number of sonnet-sequences published in the last decade of the Sixteenth Century, during which Shakespeare lived at London in the midst of a literary movement, raises a presumption in favour of an early date for his Sonnets, published in 1609; and this presumption is confirmed by the publication of two of them in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). We know from civ. that three years had elapsed since he first saw the youth to whom the earlier Sonnets were addressed; and the balance of internal evidence, founded whether on affinities to the plays or on references to political and social events affecting Shakespeare as a dramatist and a man,1 points to the years 1599-1602 as the most probable period for their composition.2 Further confirmation of an almost decisive character has been adduced by Mr. Tyler. But I pass his arguments, since they are based, in part, on the assumption that the youth in question was William Herbert; and, although Mr. Tyler would, as I think, win a verdict from any jury composed and deciding after the model of Scots procedure, his case is one which cannot be argued without the broaching of many issues outside the sphere of artistic appreciation.

XV

Had Shakespeare's Sonnets suffered the fate of Sappho's lyrics, their few surviving fragments would have won him an equal glory, and we should have been damnified in the amount only of a priceless bequest. But our heritage is almost

1 Cf. Sonnet LXVI. :-'And art made tongue-tied by authority':-with the edict of June 1600, inhibiting plays and playgoers.

2 See Note III. on The Sonnets.

3 Introduction to the 'Shakespeare Q., No. 30' and Shakespeare's Sonnets. London, D. Nutt, 1890.