st glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare's sonnets give
the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any
contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current
conventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well as for Shakespeare's
unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention--an affluence
which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of emotion--the
autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed
altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions. As soon as the
collection is studied comparatively with the many thousand sonnets that
the printing presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during
the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare's
performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill,
often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the
efforts of contemporary practitioners. The thoughts and words of the
sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney
were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and with as
little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his
dramatic work. To Drayton he was especially indebted. {110} Such
resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare's sonnets and those of
Petrarch or Desportes seem due to his study of the English imitators of
those sonnetteers. Most of Ronsard's nine hundred sonnets and many of
his numerous odes were accessible to Shakespeare in English adaptations,
but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard
direct.

Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of
Shakespeare's collection. They are usually manipulated with consummate
skill, but Shakespeare's indebtedness is not thereby obscured.
Shakespeare in many beautiful sonnets describes spring and summer, night
and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion. Such topics are common
themes of the poetry of the Renaissance, and they figure in Shakespeare's
pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of
Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baif, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the
Italian and French masters. {111} In Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops
Ronsard's conceit that his love's portrait is painted on his heart; and
in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard's phraseology in
describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of 'tables,'