Note 138b — IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Adulatory sonnets to patrons are met with in the preliminary or concluding pages of numerous sixteenth and seventeenth century books (e.g. the collection of sonnets addressed to James VI of Scotland in his Essayes of a Prentise, 1591, and the sonnets to noblemen before Spenser’s Faerie Queene, at the end of Chapman’s Iliad, and at the end of John Davies’s Microcosmos, 1603). Other sonnets to patrons are scattered through collections of occasional poems, such as Ben Jonson’s Forest and Underwoods and Donne’s Poems. Sonnets addressed to men are not only found in the preliminary pages, but are occasionally interpolated in sonnet-sequences of fictitious love. Sonnet xi. in Drayton’s sonnet-fiction called ‘Idea’ (in 1599 edition) seems addressed to a man, in much the same manner as Shakespeare often addressed his hero; and a few others of Drayton’s sonnets are ambiguous as to the sex of their subject. John Soothern’s eccentric collection of love-sonnets, Pandora (1584), has sonnets dedicatory to the Earl of Oxford; and William Smith in his Chloris (1596) (a sonnet-fiction of the conventional kind) in two prefatory sonnets and in No. xlix. of the substantive collection invokes the affectionate notice of Edmund Spenser. Throughout Europe ‘dedicatory’ sonnets or poems to women betray identical characteristics to those that were addressed to men. The poetic addresses to the Countess of Bedford and other noble patronesses of Donne, Ben Jonson, and their colleagues are always affectionate, often amorous, in their phraseology, and akin in temper to Shakespeare’s sonnets of friendship. Nicholas Breton, in his poem The Pilgrimage to Paradise coyned with the Countess of Pembroke’s Love, 1592, and another work of his, The Countess of Pembroke’s Passion (first printed from manuscript in 1867), pays the Countess, who was merely his literary patroness, a homage which is indistinguishable from the ecstatic utterances of a genuine and overmastering passion. The difference in the sex of the persons addressed by Breton and by Shakespeare seems to place their poems in different categories, but they both really belonged to the same class. They both merely display a protégé’s loyalty to his patron, couched, according to current convention, in the strongest possible terms of personal affection. In Italy and France exactly the same vocabulary of adoration was applied by authors indifferently to patrons and patronesses. It is known that one series of Michael Angelo’s impassioned sonnets was addressed to a young nobleman Tommaso dei Cavalieri, and another series to a noble patroness Vittoria Colonna, but the tone is the same in both, and internal evidence fails to enable the critic to distinguish between the two series. Only one English contemporary of Shakespeare published a long series of sonnets addressed to a man who does not prove on investigation to have been a professional patron. In 1595 Richard Barnfield appended to his poem Cynthia a set of twenty sonnets, in which he feignedly avowed affection for a youth called Ganymede. These poems do not belong to the same category as Shakespeare’s, but to the category of sonnet-sequences of love in which it was customary to invoke a fictitious mistress. Barnfield explained that in his sonnets he attempted a variation on the conventional practice by fancifully adapting to the sonnet-form the second of Virgil’s Eclogues, in which the shepherd Corydon apostrophises the shepherd-boy Alexis.