Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale.djvu/107

Shakespeare's Sonnets quatrains with a concluding couplet, and with no attempt to preserve the division of the octave and sestet. As a simple trial will prove, it is much harder to write a sonnet in the Italian form than to compose three quatrains and a couplet; and as the Elizabethans prized fluency, they preferred Surrey's form. In Shakespeare it reached its greatest beauty so that Surrey's form is now often called the 'Shakespearean' sonnet. It is interesting to notice that at times Shakespeare makes the break in the thought between the eighth and ninth lines that the Italian sonnet writers observed. This will be seen in 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,' No. 29, or better still, in several sonnets printed together with the sestet beginning invariably with 'O,' Nos. 21–23, 71, 72, 76.

Apart from Shakespeare, the Elizabethan sonnet sequences most worthy of study are Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 1591, Daniel's Delia, 1592, Drayton's Idea, 1594, and Spenser's Amoretti, 1595. To read them, or even their finest passages, but makes more apparent the supremacy of Shakespeare.

 

Although two of the sonnets in this collection, Nos. 138 and 144, were included in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599, the first edition of the sonnets is the quarto which appeared in 1609 and which sold for five pence. This quarto was not sanctioned by Shakespeare; it is full of obvious errors and yet it is the accepted text. By permission, the text of this edition is that of Craig's Oxford Shakespeare, published by the Oxford Press, which follows the first quarto, correcting its mistakes.