ts composed in 1594.

But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593,
after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman's patronage for his earliest
publication, 'Venus and Adonis,' that he became a sonnetteer on an
extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive
outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed
between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and
thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his
growing age was a conventional device--traceable to Petrarch--of all
sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation. {86} In
matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from
the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his
sonnetteering efforts occasionally and at irregular intervals during the
nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in
1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594
be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is
made to Queen Elizabeth's death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and
a final act of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importunate vogue of
the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external,
points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it
exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full
height.

Their literary value.

In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach
levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be
matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the
mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling,
the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which
are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink
almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both
their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near
kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest
poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal
jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early
dramatic efforts as 'Love's Labour's Lost' and 'Romeo and Juliet.' There
is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus and Adonis' or in
'Lucrece,' although occasional utterances of Shakespeare's