reference is made
outside the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets to the youth as a literary
patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good
ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or
friendship also have Southampton for their subject. The sincerity of the
poet's sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to
illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young
Maecenas.

Extravagances of literary compliment.

Extravagant compliment--'gross painting' Shakespeare calls it--was more
conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years
of Elizabeth's reign than in any other epoch. For this result the
sovereign herself was in part responsible. Contemporary schemes of
literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous
passion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of
letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen's incurable greed of
flattery. {137} Sir Philip Sidney described with admirable point the
adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by
literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed
interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him 'to
be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.' 'You shall dwell upon
superlatives . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante's Beatrice.'
{138a} The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets
that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed
to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that
patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the
style that Sidney described. {138b}

Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.

Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that
the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again
in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection
for him was unalterable. Hundreds of poets openly gave the like
assurances to their patrons. Southampton was only one of a crowd of
Maecenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own
names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and 'placed
them,' in Sidney's apt phrase, 'with Dante's "Beatrice."'

Illustrations of the practice abound. Matthew Roydon wrote of his
patron, Sir Philip Sidney:

His