not to be matched in any other of Shakespeare's
literary compositions. But they may be, on the other hand, merely
literary meditations, conceived by the greatest of dramatists, on
infirmities incident to all human nature, and only attempted after the
cue had been given by rival sonnetteers. At any rate, their energetic
lines are often adapted from the less forcible and less coherent
utterances of contemporary poets, and the themes are common to almost all
Elizabethan collections of sonnets. {152} Shakespeare's noble sonnet on
the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force
and insight a stereotyped theme of sonnetteers, and it may have owed its
whole existence to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet on 'Desire.' {153a}

The youth's relations with the poet's mistress.

Only in one group, composed of six sonnets scattered through the
collection, is there traceable a strand of wholly original sentiment, not
to be readily defined and boldly projecting from the web into which it is
wrought. This series of six sonnets deals with a love adventure of no
normal type. Sonnet cxliv. opens with the lines:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two angels do suggest (_i.e._ tempt) me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. {153b}

The woman, the sonnetteer continues, has corrupted the man and has drawn
him from his 'side.' Five other sonnets treat the same theme. In three
addressed to the man (xl., xli., and xlii.) the poet mildly reproaches
his youthful friend for having sought and won the favours of a woman whom
he himself loved 'dearly,' but the trespass is forgiven on account of the
friend's youth and beauty. In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare
addresses the woman (cxxxiii. and cxxxiv.), and he rebukes her for having
enslaved not only himself but 'his next self'--his friend. Shakespeare,
in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress's disdain of his advances,
assigns her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no
better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind. In
these six sonnets alone does he categorically assign his mistress's
alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause
for his mistress's infidelity. The definite element of intrigue that is
developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan
sonnet-literature. The character of the innova