technicalities, and his
eighth 'gulling sonnet,' in which he ridicules the application of law
terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by
Shakespeare's legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.;
{107b} while Davies's Sonnet ix., beginning:

'To love, my lord, I do knight's service owe'

must have parodied Shakespeare's Sonnet xxvi., beginning:

'Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,' etc. {107c}

Shakespeare's scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in
nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering
in his plays. 'Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,' exclaims
Biron in 'Love's Labour's Lost' (IV. iii. 158). In the 'Two Gentlemen of
Verona' (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the
conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:

You must lay lime to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets whose composed rime
Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .
Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when
alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: 'Now is he for the numbers that
Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry,
she had a better love to be-rhyme her.' {108} In later plays
Shakespeare's disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced. In 'Henry
V' (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously
magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, 'I once writ a sonnet
in his praise, and begun thus: "Wonder of nature!"' The Duke of Orleans
retorts: 'I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress.' The Dauphin
replies: 'Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for
my horse is my mistress.' In 'Much Ado about Nothing' (V. ii. 4-7)
Margaret, Hero's waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to 'write her a
sonnet in praise of her beauty.' Benedick jestingly promises one so 'in
high a style that no man living shall come over it.' Subsequently (V.
iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of
penning 'a halting sonnet of his own pure brain' in praise of Beatrice.

VIII--THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

Slender autobiographical element in Shakespeare's sonnets. The imitative
element.

At a fir