AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.

It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women
of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France,
the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to
great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth
century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue
was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the
English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy
to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591,
when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets entitled 'Astrophel and
Stella' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any
conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the
appearance of Sir Philip Sidney's volume the writing of sonnets, both
singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this
country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. {83} Men and
women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to
celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same
patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more
or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his
successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no
aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron's ears by
a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who
habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste,
applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius
when the fashion was at its height.

Shakespeare's first experiments.

Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of
his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in 'Love's
Labour's Lost,' probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in 'Romeo
and Juliet' are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine
Helen, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of very early
composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously,
if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet,
'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second
Frutes,' a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. {84}

Majority of Shakespeare's sonne