Note 97 — VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

Shakespeare merely warns his ‘lovely boy’ that, though he be now the ‘minion’ of Nature’s ‘pleasure,’ he will not succeed in defying Time’s inexorable law. Sidney addresses in a lighter vein Cupid—‘blind hitting boy,’ he calls him—in his Astrophel (No. xlvi.) Cupid is similarly invoked in three of Drayton’s sonnets (No. xxvi. in the edition of 1594, and Nos. xxxiii. and xxxiv. in that of 1605), and in six in Fulke Greville’s collection entitled Cœlica (cf. lxxxiv., beginning ‘Farewell, sweet boy, complain not of my truth’). Lyly, in his Sapho and Phao, 1584, and in his Mother Bombie, 1598, has songs of like temper addressed in the one case to ‘O Cruel love!’ and in the other to ‘O Cupid! monarch over kings.’ A similar theme to that of Shakespeare’s Sonnet cxxvi. is treated by John Ford in the song, ‘Love is ever dying,’ in his tragedy of the Broken Heart, 1633.