Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Elizabethan Sonneteers

Summary

In a sonnet addressed to Spenser, Keats remarks,

The flower must drink the nature of the soil,

Before it can put forth its blossoming.

This describes very well Shakespeare’s relationship to his fellow-sonneteers. However different the blossom he produced, their work, their example, provided the soil from which it sprang. The relationship is a complex one, and I wish to examine only one aspect of it here, namely Shakespeare’s attitude to the accepted ‘poetic’ of the sonnet-sequence, in the hope that this may throw light upon the way in which the tradition has been adapted to suit an individual talent.

Convention is so much the ruling power in the Renaissance sonnet-sequence that even the principles and assumptions upon which the sonneteer claims to be writing are themselves a part of the convention. Thus the 'poetic' which I am about to outline is in its context what we might call the governing conceit, consistent and true only within its own largely artificial limits. The sonneteer for the most part wears a double mask—as poet, no less than as lover.