Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/372

 entitled ‘A Lover's Complaint,’ in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth. If, as is possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early days.

Shakespeare's ‘Sonnets’ ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch and followed by nearly all the great English sonneteers. Seeking greater metrical simplicity, they consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. It is rarely that a single sonnet forms an independent poem. As in the sonnets of Spenser, Sidney, and Drayton, the same train of thought is pursued continuously through two or more. The collection, numbering 154 sonnets in all, thus presents the appearance of a series of poems, each in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. It seems doubtful if the order in which the sequences are printed preserves that in which they were penned. It is rarely that a single sonnet or a short sequence of sonnets betrays much logical connection with those that precede or follow (cf. cxlv. cxlvi. and cli.).

No clear nor connected story is deducible from the poems, which divide themselves into two main groups. In the first (i.–cxxvi.), Shakespeare addresses for the most part a young man. In the opening sequence, the right of which to priority seems questionable, the youth is urged to marry that his beauty may survive in children (i.–xvii.). Elsewhere the poet insists, in language originally borrowed from classical literature but habitual to sonneteers of the day, that his verse will perpetuate for ever his friend's memory (xviii. xix. liv. lv. lx. lxiii. lxv. lxxxi. cvii.). In four sequences (xxvii.–xxxii. xliii.–lvi. xcvii.–xcix. cxiii.–cxiv.) the poet dwells on the effects of absence in intensifying love. At times the youth is rebuked for sensuality (xxxii.–xxxv. lxix.–lxx. xcix.–xcvi.). At times melancholy overwhelms the writer; he despairs of the corruptions of the age, and longs for death (lxvi.–lxviii. lxxi.–lxxiv.). In one sequence the writer's equanimity is disturbed by the favour bestowed by a young patron on a rival poet (lxxviii.–lxxxvi.). The first group concludes with a series of sequences in which the poet declares his constancy in friendship.

In the second group, most of which are addressed to a woman (cxxvi.–clii.), Shakespeare, in accord with a contemporary convention of sonneteers, narrates more or less connectedly the story of the disdainful rejection of a lover by an accomplished siren with raven-black hair and eyes. In one group of six sonnets (xl. xli. xlii. cxxxiii. cxxxiv. cxliv.), which stands apart from those that immediately succeed or follow them, a more personal note seems to be struck. The six poems relate how the writer's mistress has corrupted his friend and drawn him from his ‘side.’ Sonnet cxliv. (published by Jaggard in 1599) suggested the state of feeling generated by this episode: Two loves I had of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest [i.e. tempt] me still; The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. The story of intrigue developed in these six sonnets is not easily paralleled. It may owe its origin to a genuine experience of the poet himself.

Many attempts have been made to identify among Shakespeare's contemporaries the anonymous persons to whom the poet seems to refer, but no result hitherto reached rests on sure foundations. The sole clue the text offers lies in the plain avowal that a young man was a patron of the poet's verse, which had derived from him ‘fair assistance’ (Sonnet lxxviii.). Shakespeare is not known to have formally acknowledged any literary patron except Southampton, and some of the phrases in the dedication to ‘Lucrece’ so closely resemble expressions that were addressed in the sonnets to a young friend as to identify the latter with Southampton. Southampton, Shakespeare's junior by nine years, was a patron of literature and of the drama. On 11 Oct. 1599 he was spoken of as passing ‘away the tyme in London merely in going to plaies every day’ (Sidney Papers, ii. 132), and when Queen Anne of Denmark visited him in London in January 1604–5, Shakespeare's ‘Love's Labour's Lost’ was performed (Hatfield MSS.;, ii. 83, 167). John Florio [q. v.] may be reasonably included among Shakespeare's early London friends, although there is little ground for regarding him as the original of Holofernes in ‘Love's Labour's Lost,’ and he was long in Southampton's ‘pay and patronage.’ An independent tradition confirms the closeness of Shakespeare's intimacy with Southampton. According to Rowe, ‘there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably