Note 110 — VIII—THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

Mr. Fleay in his Biographical Chronicle of the English Stage, ii. 226 seq., gives a striking list of parallels between Shakespeare’s and Drayton’s sonnets which any reader of the two collections in conjunction could easily increase. Mr. Wyndham in his valuable edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, p. 255, argues that Drayton was the plagiarist of Shakespeare, chiefly on bibliographical grounds, which he does not state quite accurately. One hundred sonnets belonging to Drayton’s Idea series are extant, but they were not all published 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.