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French or Italian sonnetteers. Two regular quatorzains are prefixed, but to each of the ‘passions’ there is appended a four-line stanza which gives each poem eighteen instead of the regular fourteen lines. Watson’s efforts were so well received, however, that he applied himself to the composition of a second series of sonnets in strict metre. This collection, entitled ‘The Teares of Fancie,’ only circulated in manuscript in his lifetime.

Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ 1591.

Meanwhile a greater poet, Sir Philip Sidney, who died in 1586, had written and circulated among his friends a more ambitious collection of a hundred and eight sonnets. Most of Sidney’s sonnets were addressed by him under the name of Astrophel to a beautiful woman poetically designated Stella. Sidney had in real life courted assiduously the favour of a married lady, Penelope, Lady Rich, and a few of the sonnets are commonly held to reflect the heat of passion which the genuine intrigue developed. But Petrarch, Ronsard, and Desportes inspired the majority of Sidney’s efforts, and his addresses to abstractions like sleep, the moon, his muse, grief, or lust, are almost verbatim translations from the French. Sidney’s sonnets were first published surreptitiously, under the title of ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ by a publishing adventurer named Thomas Newman, and in his first issue Newman added an appendix of ‘sundry other rare sonnets by divers noblemen and gentlemen.’ Twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel were printed in the appendix anonymously and without the author’s knowledge. Two other editions of Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’ without the appendix were issued in the same year. Eight other of Sidney’s sonnets, which still circulated only in manuscript, were first printed anonymously in 1594 with the sonnets of Henry Constable, and these were appended with some additions to the authentic edition of Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and other works that appeared in 1598. Sidney enjoyed in the decade that followed his death the reputation of a demi-god, and the wide dissemination in print of his numerous sonnets in 1591 spurred nearly every living poet in England to emulate his achievement.

In order to facilitate a comparison of Shakespeare’s sonnets with those of his contemporaries it will be best to classify the sonnetteering efforts that immediately succeeded Sidney’s under the three headings of

(1) sonnets of more or less feigned love, addressed to a more or less fictitious mistress;

(2) sonnets of adulation, addressed to patrons; and

(3) sonnets invoking metaphysical abstractions or treating impersonally of religion or philosophy.

(1) Collected sonnets of feigned love. Daniel’s ‘Delia,’ 1592.

In February 1592 Samuel Daniel published a collection of fifty-five sonnets, with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to his patroness, Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. As in many French volumes, the collection concluded with an ‘ode.’ At every point Daniel betrayed his indebtedness to French sonnetteers, even when apologising for his inferiority to Petrarch (No. xxxviii.) His title he borrowed from the collection of Maurice Sève, whose assemblage of dixains called ‘Délie, objet de plus haute vertu’ (Lyon, 1544), was the pattern of all sonnet-sequences on love, and was a constant theme of commendation among the later French sonnetteers. But it is to Desportes that Daniel owes most, and his methods of handling his material may be judged by a comparison of his Sonnet xxvi. with Sonnet lxiii. in Desportes’ collection, ‘Cleonice: Dernieres Amours,’ which was issued at Paris in 1575.

Desportes’ sonnet runs:

Je verray par les ans vengeurs de mon martyre

Que l’or de vos cheveux argenté deviendra,

Que de vos deux soleils la splendeur s’esteindra,

Et qu’il faudra qu’Amour tout confus s’en retire.

La beauté qui si douce à present vous inspire,

Cedant aux lois du Temps ses faveurs reprendra,

L’hiver de vostre teint les fleurettes perdra,

Et ne laissera rien des thresors que i’admire.

Cest orgueil desdaigneux qui vous fait ne m’aimer,

En regret et chagrin se verra transformer,