'blackness' is developed, form
part of a series of twelve, which belongs to a special category of
sonnetteering effort. In them Shakespeare abandons the sugared sentiment
which characterises most of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets.
He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman
whom he represents as disdaining his advances. The genuine anguish of a
rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but
the mood of blinding wrath which the rejection of a lovesuit may rouse in
a passionate nature does not seem from the internal evidence to be
reflected genuinely in Shakespeare's sonnets of vituperation. It was
inherent in Shakespeare's genius that he should import more dramatic
intensity than any other poet into sonnets of a vituperative type; but
there is also in his vituperative sonnets a declamatory parade of
figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned and
that the poet is striking an attitude. He cannot have been in earnest in
seeking to conciliate his disdainful mistress--a result at which the
vituperative sonnets purport to aim--when he tells her that she is 'black
as hell, as dark as night,' and with 'so foul a face' is 'the bay where
all men ride.'

Gabriel Harvey's 'Amorous Odious Sonnet.'

But external evidence is more conclusive as to the artificial
construction of the vituperative sonnets. Again a comparison of this
series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true
character. Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in
his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren.
Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as
Shakespeare's a 'fierce tigress,' a 'murderess,' a 'Medusa.' Barnabe
Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female 'tyrant,' a
'Medusa,' a 'rock.' 'Women' (Barnes laments) 'are by nature proud as
devils.' The monotonous and artificial regularity with which the
sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted
their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France.
In Shakespeare's early life the convention was wittily parodied by
Gabriel Harvey in 'An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student's Loove
or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating
reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as
are here discoursed.' {121} After extoll