ally of Barnabe Barnes,
who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress's 'wills,' and had turned the
word 'grace' to the same punning account as Shakespeare turned the word
'will.' {118a} Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red . . .
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, {118b}

he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and
flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses' features.

The praise of 'blackness.'

In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare amiably notices the
black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a
preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was,
he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty. He commends
the 'dark lady' for refusing to practise those arts by which other women
of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature. Here
Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in 'Love's Labour's
Lost'(IV. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as 'black
as ebony,' with 'brows decked in black,' and in 'mourning' for her
fashionable sisters' indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet.
'No face is fair that is not full so black,' exclaims Rosaline's lover.
But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare's praise of
'blackness' claim the merit of being his own invention. Sir Philip
Sidney, in sonnet vii. of his 'Astrophel and Stella,' had anticipated it.
The 'beams' of the eyes of Sidney's mistress were 'wrapt in colour black'
and wore 'this mourning weed,' so

That whereas black seems beauty's contrary,
She even in black doth make all beauties flow. {119a}

To his praise of 'blackness' in 'Love's Labour's Lost' Shakespeare
appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in
the conceit. {119b} Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion
is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the
poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a
woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart.
Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in
the play, does he mock his 'dark lady' with this uncomplimentary
interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.

The sonnets of vituperation.

The two sonnets, in which this view of