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By Root 21038 0

’ 1593, ‘take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets.’ In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ‘eternising’ faculty of their verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic. Spenser wrote in his ‘Amoretti’ (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name.

Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration. Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ‘my immortal song’ (Idea, vi. 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes’ (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such lines as:

While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (Idea xliv. 1).

Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (ib. xliv. 11).

My name shall mount unto eternity (ib. xliv. 14).

All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 54).

Daniel was no less explicit

This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9).

Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,

Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10).

These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect

That fortify thy name against old age;

And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect

Against the dark and time’s consuming rage (ib. l. 9-12).

Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman.

Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste. Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.

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 doom.

So, till the judgement 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 synonym in Elizabethan English of both ‘lust’ and ‘obstinacy’), he derisively challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress’s ‘wills,’ and had turned the word ‘grace’ to the same punning account as Shakespeare turned the word ‘will.’ Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red . . .

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,

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 commends the ‘dark lady’ for refusing to practise those arts by which other women of the day gave 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 ‘mourning’ for her fashionable sisters’ indulgence 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’ claim the merit of being his own invention. Sir Philip Sidney, in sonnet