Note 95b — VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

The form of fourteen-line stanza adopted by Shakespeare is in no way peculiar to himself. It is the type recognised by Elizabethan writers on metre as correct and customary in England long before he wrote. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English (published in Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575), defined sonnets thus: ‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole.’ In twenty-one of the 108 sonnets of which Sidney’s collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the rhymes are on the foreign model and the final couplet is avoided. But these are exceptional. As is not uncommon in Elizabethan sonnet-collections, one of Shakespeare’s sonnets (xcix.) has fifteen lines; another (cxxvi.) has only twelve lines, and those in rhymed couplets (cf. Lodge’s Phillis, Nos. viii. and xxvi.) and a third (cxlv.) is in octosyllabics. But it is very doubtful whether the second and third of these sonnets rightly belong to Shakespeare’s collection. They were probably written as independent lyrics: see p. 97, note 1.