nd publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged
no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the
light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in
1640--thirty-one years after their first appearance--they were presented
in a completely different order. The short descriptive titles which were
then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the
collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in
more or less amorous vein.

Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Their dependence on
French and Italian models.

In whatever order Shakespeare's sonnets be studied, the claim that has
been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can
only be accepted with many qualifications. Elizabethan sonnets were
commonly the artificial products of the poet's fancy. A strain of
personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is
vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions
were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The
typical collection of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a
medley of imitative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian
sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant
notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves.
Daniel's fine sonnet (xlix.) on 'Care-charmer, sleep,' although directly
inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre
de Brach {101a} apostrophising 'le sommeil chasse-soin' (in the
collection entitled 'Les Amours d'Aymee'), or the sonnet of Philippe
Desportes invoking 'Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire' (in the
collection entitled 'Amours d'Hippolyte'). {101b} But, throughout
Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French
effort is unmistakable. {101c} Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his
literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and
from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of
'an English Petrarch'--the highest praise that the critic conceived it
possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. {101d} Thomas Watson in
1582, in his collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled
'[Greek text], or A Passionate Century of Love,' prefaced each poem,
which he termed a 'passion,' with a prose note of its origin and
intention. Watson fra