The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3485]
Estimate of number of love-sonnets issued between 1591 and 1597.
With Tofte’s volume in 1597 the publication of collections of love-sonnets practically ceased. Only two collections on a voluminous scale seem to have been written in the early years of the seventeenth century. About 1607 William Drummond of Hawthornden penned a series of sixty-eight interspersed with songs, madrigals, and sextains, nearly all of which were translated or adapted from modern Italian sonnetteers. About 1610 John Davies of Hereford published his ‘Wittes Pilgrimage . . . through a world of Amorous Sonnets.’ Of more than two hundred separate poems in this volume, only the hundred and four sonnets in the opening section make any claim to answer the description on the title-page, and the majority of those are metaphysical meditations on love which are not addressed to any definite person. Some years later William Browne penned a sequence of fourteen love-sonnets entitled ‘Cælia’ and a few detached sonnets of the same type. The dates of production of Drummond’s, Davies’s, and Browne’s sonnets exclude them from the present field of view. Omitting them, we find that between 1591 and 1597 there had been printed nearly twelve hundred sonnets of the amorous kind. If to these we add Shakespeare’s poems, and make allowance for others which, only circulating in manuscript, have not reached us, it is seen that more than two hundred love-sonnets were produced in each of the six years under survey. France and Italy directed their literary energies in like direction during nearly the whole of the century, but at no other period and in no other country did the love-sonnet dominate literature to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 1597.
Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached specimens may be found in nearly every published book of the period, the chief collections were:
II. Sonnets to patrons, 1591-7.
A long series of sonnets prefixed to ‘Poetical Exercises of a Vacant Hour’ by King James VI of Scotland, 1591; twenty-three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Four Letters and certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene’ (1592), including Edmund Spenser’s fine sonnet of compliment addressed to Harvey; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed in ‘Harleian Miscellany,’ 1813, ix. 491); six adulatory sonnets appended by Barnabe Barnes to his ‘Parthenophil’ in May 1593; four sonnets to ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s soul,’ prefixed to the first edition of Sidney’s ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595); seventeen sonnets which were originally prefixed to the first edition of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ bk. i.-iii., in 1590, and were reprinted in the edition of 1596; sixty sonnets to peers, peeresses, and officers of state, appended to Henry Locke’s (or Lok’s) ‘Ecclesiasticus’ (1597); forty sonnets by Joshua Sylvester addressed to Henry IV of France ‘upon the late miraculous peace in Fraunce’ (1599); Sir John Davies’s series of twenty-six octosyllabic sonnets, which he entitled ‘Hymnes of Astræa,’ all extravagantly eulogising Queen Elizabeth (1599).
III. Sonnets on philosophy and religion.
The collected sonnets on religion and philosophy that appeared in the period 1591-7 include sixteen ‘Spirituall Sonnettes to the honour of God and Hys Saynts,’ written by Constable about 1593, and circulated only in manuscript; these were first printed from a manuscript in the Harleian collection (5993) by Thomas Park in ‘Heliconia,’ 1815, vol. ii. In 1595 Barnabe Barnes published a ‘Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets,