by
him at one time. Fifty-three were alone included in his first and only
separate edition of 1594; six more appeared in a reprint of _Idea_
appended to the _Heroical Epistles_ in 1599; twenty-four of these were
gradually dropped and thirty-four new ones substituted in reissues
appended to volumes of his writings issued respectively in 1600, 1602,
1603, and 1605. To the collection thus re-formed a further addition of
twelve sonnets and a withdrawal of some twelve old sonnets were made in
the final edition of Drayton's works in 1619. There the sonnets number
sixty-three. Mr. Wyndham insists that Drayton's latest published sonnets
have alone an obvious resemblance to Shakespeare's sonnets, and that they
all more or less reflect Shakespeare's sonnets as printed by Thorpe in
1609. But the whole of Drayton's century of sonnets except twelve were
in print long before 1609, and it could easily be shown that the earliest
fifty-three published in 1594 supply as close parallels with
Shakespeare's sonnets as any of the forty-seven published subsequently.
Internal evidence suggests that all but one or two of Drayton's sonnets
were written by him in 1594, in the full tide of the sonnetteering craze.
Almost all were doubtless in circulation in manuscript then, although
only fifty-three were published in 1594. Shakespeare would have had
ready means of access to Drayton's manuscript collection. Mr. Collier
reprinted all the sonnets that Drayton published between 1594 and 1619 in
his edition of Drayton's poems for the Roxburghe Club, 1856. Other
editions of Drayton's sonnets of this and the last century reprint
exclusively the collection of sixty-three appended to the edition of his
works in 1619.

{111} Almost all sixteenth-century sonnets on spring in the absence of
the poet's love (cf. Shakespeare's Sonnets xcviii., xcix.) are variations
on the sentiment and phraseology of Petrarch's well-known sonnet xlii.,
'In morte di M. Laura,' beginning:

Zefiro torna e 'l bel tempo rimena,
E i fiori e l'erbe, sua dolce famiglia,
E garrir Progne e pianger Filomena,
E primavera candida e vermiglia.
Ridono i prati, e 'l ciel si rasserena;
Giove s'allegra di mirar sua figlia;
L'aria e l'acqua e la terra e d'amor piena;
Ogni animal d'amar si riconsiglia,
Ma per me, lasso, tornano i piu gravi
Sospiri, che del cor profondo tragge, &c.

See a translation by William Drummond of Hawthor