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CHAPTER V.

ELIZABETHAN SONNETEERS.

THE last ten or fifteen years of the sixteenth century was a period of amazing poetic activity: there is nothing like it in the history of our literature. Never in any equal period of our history did so much intellect go to the making of verses. They had not then the same number of distracting claims: literary ambition had fewer outlets. Carlyle, Grote, Mill, Gladstone, Disraeli, had they lived in the age of Elizabeth, would all have had to make their literary reputation in verse, and all might have earned a respectable place among our poets-might, at least, like Francis Bacon, have composed some single piece of sufficient excellence to be thought worthy of the 'Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics.' Amidst a general excitement and ambition of fame the gift of song may be brought to light where in less favourable circumstances it might have been extinguished by other interests. And the rivalry of men endowed with eager and powerful intellects must always act as a stimulus to the genuine poet, although all their efforts come short of the creations of genius.

Three fashions of love-poetry may be particularised as flourishing with especial vigour during those ten or fifteen years-pastoral songs and lyrics, sonnets, and tales of the same type as Venus and Adonis. Spenser did much to confirm if not to set the pastoral fashion; but perhaps still more was done by Sir Philip Sidney with his 'Arcadia' and his sonnets of Astrophel to Stella. These two poets leading the way to the sweet pastoral country of craggy mountain, hill and valley, dale and field, the greater portion of the tuneful host crowded after them, transforming themselves into Damons, Dorons, and Coridons, and piping to cruel Phillises, Phillidas, and Carmelas.1 Out of this masquerading grew many

1 The land of ideal shepherds was only one of the ideal countries frequented by the artistic courtiers of Elizabeth. They were as eager to descry new worlds of imagination as her navigators were to discover new regions in the terraqueous globe. In the masques presented at Court we find inhabitants of four great worlds or continents-the country of Shepherds, the country of Faeries, the Mythological world, and the world of Personified Abstractions.

beautiful lyrics. England's Helicon,' which was published in 1600, and which gathered the harvest of this pastoral poetry, is by many degrees the finest of the numerous miscellanies of the Elizabethan age. It contained selections from Spenser, Sidney, Greene, Lodge, J. Wootton, Bolton, Barnefield, "Shepherd Tonie,' Drayton, Shakespeare, and others of less note.

Many of these pastorals took the form of sonnets, but I single out sonnet-writing as a fashion by itself, in order to draw attention to the numerous bodies of sonnets published in the last decade of the century as lasting monuments of sustained passion, real or ideal. The list is very remarkable. It opens with the publication of Sidney's sonnets to Stella in 1591, and includes— Daniel's sonnets to Delia, published in 1592; Constable's sonnets to Diana, 1592; Lodge's sonnets to Phillis, 1593; Watson's Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained, 1593; Drayton's Idea's Mirror, amours in quatorzains," in 1594; and Spenser's Amoretti or Sonnets in 1596.1

Hardly less notable is the fancy for short mythological or historical love-tales. The way in this form of composition was led by Thomas Lodge, who published in 1589 the poem of 'Glaucus and Scylla,' narrating with many pretty circumstances the cruelty of Scylla to Glaucus, in punishment whereof she was transformed into a dangerous rock on the coasts of Sicily. Marlowe began and Chapman finished the tale of Hero and Leander; Shakespeare sang the love of Venus and Adonis: Drayton the love of Endymion and Phoebe; Chapman (in 'Ovid's Banquet of Sense') the love of Ovid and Julia. The voluptuous descriptions of these tales could not have been expected to go on without sooner or later exciting the spirit of derisive parody: and accordingly, in 1598, Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis was rudely burlesqued by the satirical Marston in a comical version of the tale of "Pygmalion and Galatea." To prevent any undue indignation at the liberty thus taken with our great dramatist, I may here intimate a suspicion, for which I shall afterwards produce some grounds, that certain of Shakespeare's sonnets-those, namely, from the 127th to the 152d inclusive-were designed to ridicule the effusions of some of his seriously or feignedly love-sick predecessors. Marston's profane parody may thus assume the aspect of a Nemesis.

The enthusiasm of beauty was strong in the Elizabethan poets. With many of them it was a fierce and earnest thirst. Their lives were hot, turbulent, precarious: they turned often to the bloom of fair cheeks and the lustre of bright hair as a passionate relief from desperate fortunes. Beauty was pursued by Greene

1 In this chapter I have used the order of the publication of these sonnets as a basis of arrangement for the predecessors of Shakespeare in that form of com position.

and Marlowe not as a luxury but as a fierce necessity-as the only thing that could make life tolerable. Such visions as Hero and fair Samela filled them with mad ecstasy in the height of their intemperate orgies, and were called back for soothing worship in their after-fits of exhaustion and savage despondency. In many others of calmer and more temperate lives, beauty excited less ardent transports, and yet was a powerful influence. Beauty was a very prevailing religion; the perfections of woman, excellence of eye, of lip, of brow, were meditated on and adored with devout rapture; and though the votary's enthusiasm in some cases travelled into licentious delirium, in gentler natures it bred soft and delicate fancies, of the most exquisite tenderness. Beauty was part of all their lives, and shaped itself in each mind according to the soil. A very surprising number of different soils it found to grow in, and very remarkable were the products. One meets the same flowers again and again, but always with some individual grace. Even third-rate and fourth-rate poets do not seem to be weaving garlands of flowers plucked from the verses of the masters: they develop the common seeds in their own way. Consider, for example, the following madrigal by John Wootton, a name now uttterly forgotten by the generality, and a poet of whose personality nothing survives but his name and his contributions to England's Helicon :'

"Her eyes like shining lamps in midst of night,

Night dark and dead :

Or as the stars that give the seamen light,
Light for to lead

Their wandering ships.

Amidst her cheeks the rose and lily strive,

Lily snow-white :

When their contend doth make their colour thrive,
Colour too bright

For shepherd's eyes.

Her lips like scarlet of the finest dye,

Scarlet blood-red:

I. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY1 (1554-1586).

In 1591 a volume of sonnets was issued under the editorship of Thomas Nash, containing Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," twentyeight sonnets by Samuel Daniel, and other poems by "Divers Noblemen and Gentlemen." The publication was most probably surreptitious: Daniel, who published his "Sonnets to Delia" in the following year, complained that "a greedy printer had published some of his sonnets along with those of Sir Philip Sidney; and a corrected and authentic edition of Sidney's sonnets was issued before the close of 1591.

The main attraction of Nash's volume was the "Astrophel and Stella" series of sonnets; this was the title of the work, the other poems being merely appended. The editor extolled Sidney with characteristic eloquence and extravagance. He apologises for commending a poet "the least syllable of whose name, sounded in the ears of judgment, is able to give the meanest line he writes a dowry of immortality." He deplores the long absence of England's Sun, and ridicules the gross fatty flames that have wandered abroad like hobgoblins with a wisp of paper at their tails in the middest eclipse of his shining perfections. "Put out your rush candles, you poets and rhymers," he cries; "and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers; for lo! here he cometh that hath broken your legs."

Her

The story of the romantic passion between Sidney and Penelope Devereux, Astrophel and Stella, is well known to readers of literary history. Lady Penelope, sister of the unfortunate Earl of Essex, was some nine years younger than her distinguished lover. father had formed a high opinion of Sir Philip's promise, and on his deathbed expressed a wish for their union: but her guardians were in favour of a wealthier match, and two or three years after the old Earl's death, she was married at the age of seventeen, much against her own wishes, to an unattractive young nobleman, Lord Rich. This event may have been hastened by Sidney's attitude before the marriage. If his self-reproaches in the sonnets were well founded, he would seem to have been undecided and vacillating in his addresses, his natural impulses being obstructed by a pedantic fancy that love was unworthy of a great thinker like himself-perhaps a temporary result of his correspondence with Languet: but when the lady was married out of his reach, his love became most ardent, and he courted her favours in a long series of passionate sonnets. Seeing that he very soon after married another lady—a daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham-it

1 I have given some account of Sidney's life and character in my Manual of English Prose Literature, and shall here confine myself to his sonnets.

might with some reason be inferred that there was in Sidney's as in other sonnets not a little make-believe passion, and that his delight as an ambitious young poet at finding such an amount of literary capital was quite as strong as the pain of the disappointment. Certainly, however, Lady Rich, whose rare charms of beauty and wit were the theme of many celebrated Elizabethan pens, was likely enough to be the object of a genuine passion. As the wife of a man whom she disliked and kept in thorough fear and subjection, and as the sister of an ambitious nobleman nearly related to the throne, she led as she advanced in years a brilliant and a troubled life, and was in the Court of England the most conspicuous and fascinating woman of her generation. When Sidney wrote his sonnets she was in the prime of her beauty, and he may well have been sincere in deploring the loss of such a prize, and praying in wailful sonnets that he might continue to have a place in her affections.

In the choice of ideas for his sonnets Sidney prided himself on being original.1 This was a natural reaction from the long line of imitators between Surrey and himself. In Watson's Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love,' published in 1582, about the time when Sidney was composing his sonnets, the imitative and artificial character of the fashionable English love-poetry was specially illustrated by the candid acknowledgments of the accompanying notes. The poet makes no pretence to spontaneous effusion. Prefixed to the many ingenious praises of his lady's beauty, and allegations of her cruelty, and his own varied professions of unalterable love and consuming pangs of despair, are full references to the literary sources of his inspiration. Before depicting the pangs of Cupid's deadly dart and praying for its withdrawal, the commentary informs us that "the author hath wrought this passion out of Stephanus Forcatulus." Before a dire lament that Neptune's waves might be renewed from the poet's weeping eyes, Vulcan's forge from the flames within his breast, and the windbags of Æolus from his sobbing sighs, we are candidly informed that "the invention of this Passion is borrowed for the most part from Seraphine, Son. 125." A praise of his lady is imitated from Petrarch a sweet fancy about the capture of Love by the Muses, from Ronsard: a vision of his lady in sleep from Hercules Strozza. Another commendation of the most rare excellencies of his mistress is imitated from a famous sonnet by Fiorenzuola the Florentine, which was imitated also by Surrey and by two other writers in Tottel's Miscellany. So with the majority of Watson's "passions," as he called his poems; very few of them professed to be wholly

1 He carried his disdain of commonplace into other walks of love. The ladies of the Court thought him a dry-as-dust because he wore no particular colours 'nor nourished special locks of vowed hair."-Son. 54.