[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Colie explores Shakespeare's sonnets, and contends that Shakespeare made significant deviations from contemporary sonneteering practices.]

By the Sonnets we are also invited to become critics, urged to experience something about the writing of poetry, the making of fictions, and the meanings of poetry to a poet and to any literate man. Where Love's Labour's Lost played with the literary stock conventions and devices, imposed a literary-critical skepticism upon the play's plot, action, and characterization, the Sonnets do something else, dramatize literary criticism. Where Love's Labor's Lost emptied so many conventions of their conventional freight, the Sonnets animate, among other significant and characteristic conventions of the genre, the self-referential, self-critical tendency in sonneteering itself.

Critics of Shakespeare's sonnets consistently remark on the dramatic quality of the sequence (or sequences, or series, or cycle, or cycles: the exact relation of the poems to one another is difficult to establish); and compared with other great Renaissance sonnet-sequences, English and Continental, the marked quality of Shakespeare's sonnets is, certainly, that dramatization into personality of Renaissance sonnet personae and conventions. Whatever the order of composition or the poet's “intent,” the arrangement of the poems (by the author? by the editor? by the printer? by chance?) manifests someone's awareness (for simplicity's sake I assume that someone to have been the poet) of a loose but nonetheless involved and involving “plot.” The arrangement of the characters into two triangles—poet-friend-mistress; poet-friend-rival poet—is, so far as I know, unparalleled in Renaissance sonneteering, although there are adumbrations of both relationships in sonnet literature. Two friends' love for the same lady is by no means unknown in romance and comedy; literary theory and practice sanctions sonnet-commentary on stylistic subjects. Shakespeare's sonnets work with the conventions of the literary genre in a remarkable way, possibly most boldly in this triangulation of personalities, by which the poet turns tradition upside down and inside out to examine the “real” implications of conventional utterance and, in some cases, to force these implications to new limits in the situation, poetical as well as psychological, which is the poems' donnée. What other Renaissance poet praises his cult-friend in terms normally reserved for the sonnet-mistress and devotes considerable sonnet-time to a mistress as well—a mistress who is herself notably atypical in the genre? Further, though many sonneteers qualify conventional admiration of ladies by denouncing their particular ladies for one or another real or fancied fault of love, what sonneteer settles down to love his lady, knowing that she has played him false and doubtless will do so again? Merely in the development of his psychological story, Shakespeare has managed to make important statements about the relation of a literary love-code to specific experiences of loving. As in his other works which deal with love, Shakespeare investigates that difficult, involving, threatening, fulfilling experience, examines both its mores—its customs and its morality—and its rhetoric, or, to stretch definitions for rhetoric, the poet examines the relation of its expressive style to behavior.

What are the psychological situations of love which can or should be expressed in lyric poetry, and what are valid ways of speaking about these problems? How does a poet deeply committed to his craft manage to honor the traditional conditions of love-literature and to express the particularities of a man's emotional response to his particular experience of love? In the Sonnets, many kinds of disappointment are examined: disappointment in a continuing relation to a cult-friend; disappointment in a mistress; disappointment by these two in concerted preoccupation with one another, shutting the poet out of both relationships; disappointment with the self as lover and as poet; even, at times, disappointment with poetry itself. That is not the only mood, of course; it is, though, a mood at variance with the traditional attitudes of love-poets writing sonnets—and the persuasiveness of this poet's disappointment is in part a result of the rarity of that mood in sonnets. Certainly the sonnet-lover conventionally presented himself as constantly analyzing and revising his psychological condition, but Shakespeare manages to treat the human relationships postulated in his sonnets so problematically, to make such “real” problems of them, that a standard self-analytic pose has been considerably enriched and deepened. For instance, when love for a friend conflicts with love for a mistress, what happens to the lover of both? Another way of saying this, pointing more exactly to the literary problem, is: How does a writer handle these two versions of idealized love, faced off against one another? What decorum suits such a conflict, and in what persona ought the poet to speak? Unlike Love's Labor's Lost, where he tackled the “mereness” of the love-conventions, in the Sonnets, Shakespeare set himself to realize—that is, to provide body and mind for—the psychological and literary problems raised by love and the literary love-plot, problems to which he returned again and again through his productive life.

In his sonnets Shakespeare experiments with materials repeatedly used in the sonnet-genre and alters these materials so that his series, though perfectly traditional in shape and in topic, almost leaps from the official limitations altogether. As one reads through, for instance, the English sequences gathered in Sir Sidney Lee's collection, one is first struck by the fact that this genre itself seems to be an invitation to repetitiousness—or, if one prefers the term, to copia; and not from poet to poet merely, but within a single poet's work as well. The genre itself requires acceptance of a theme and that theme's variations. Second, one cannot help noting how deviant Shakespeare's sonnets are, not in their repetitiousness, but from the norms of repetitiousness—even when, as he does, he asks a young man to marry in seventeen different sonnets!—how peculiarly personal the poems are, within a genre in which conventions of self-expression, self-analysis, and self-reference are extremely highly developed. Some of this independence on Shakespeare's part may be “merely” historical, a factor of the decade in which he came to sonneteering, as Patrick Cruttwell's perceptive essay [The Shakespearean Moment] suggests. No doubt Shakespeare was favored by the generation into which he was born, but so is any gifted poet, as we see after the fact. Shakespeare took advantage of his advantages; not only as inheritor but as legator too of poetic and dramatic practice, he was partly responsible for changes in modes of expression in English writing at the turn of the century. Shakespeare's talent was such that it could not be buried in the earth, or hid under a bushel: in the Sonnets, as in his dramatic experiments, he tackled difficult problems, penetrated deeply into the traditions he was using, with the result that those traditions were themselves permanently altered by his having submitted himself to them.

However deviant Shakespeare's sonnets seem when set against contemporary practice, nonetheless they are just as profoundly rooted within the sonnet-tradition. Dante set the mode for a concerted sequence in which repeated quatorzains were a major element; and once Petrarch had written his extraordinary sequence, inevitably the extended lyric narrative, made up of short poems, became one of the great Renaissance forms, a “modern” invention apparently owing little to antiquity. By giving his verses a surround of prose commentary which filled in narrative gaps, commented on his own poetic efforts and intentions, and examined his own lyric feelings in greater detail than the short poetic form then permitted, Dante built into the sonnet-sequence its tendency to literary as well as private, personal, and lyric self-criticism; the same scrutiny was directed at the poet and the poetry he was writing, a tendency which left its mark on the whole sonnet-tradition. The sonnet was by no means the only lyric form to comment on itself: several medieval forms, especially the canzone, permitted and encouraged comment by the poet on his own verse and his aspirations for it, and poetical self-reference occurs in many classical forms (lyric, epigram, ode). In sonnet-sequences, anyway, such self-commentary was accepted as a subtheme, until there were sonnets on sonnets, sonnets on the sonnet-form, long before Wordsworth or John Updike produced their sonnets-on-sonnets.

The literary-critical sections of the Vita Nuova are in prose, not poetry: the verses lie, separate jewels, in display cases of prose which serve several different purposes, only one of which was Dante's self-explication. Petrarch wrote his sonnet-commentary into his sonnets themselves; Lorenzo de' Medici prefaced his with a prose disquisition, the Comento; in Bruno's Gli eroici furori, at the end of the long tradition, the sonnets are set, like occasional marks of punctuation, in a sea of discursive prose, as illustrations for the topics under discussion. Petrarch's poetry, originally innocent of prose, did not lack prose commentary for long; his editors, some of them Petrarchan poets themselves (as Bembo was), provided explanation, explication, critical commentary, and justification for Petrarch's lines. Many petrarchisti made their reputations both by their own poetry and by commenting on their master's. Lecturing on Petrarch, like lecturing on Dante, became a major critical enterprise in Florence, so that a poet like Tasso, for instance, could write significant essays on single poems by Petrarch, by Della Casa, and by himself. In imitation of such respectful treatment of Petrarch, editors sprang up for the other vernacular lyric writers of the Renaissance, of whom Muret is the most distinguished, who edited Ronsard—indeed, one mark of Ronsard's official success was the attention his verse received from humanist and fellow-poet editors, conscious of their models to the south.

Clearly, then, sonnets could and did become one major opportunity for literary self-reference and self-commentary, not only in the poet's official duty to examine his own inward self, but also in his opportunity for critical comment on his own work and on the traditions in which he was at work. Dante's prose commentary on the verses of the Vita Nuova offers one kind of self-concern, Petrarch's stylized, romantic self-presentation of his maturing self another. Ronsard everlastingly commented on himself and his earlier poetical achievements (even, by extension, the ladies celebrated in earlier sequences), and Du Bellay's lyric poetry records his relation to his own poetry. Ronsard quotes himself so playfully as to raise interesting questions of tone and dedication, in a genre primarily epideictic. Sidney, who was much indebted to Ronsard's example, played his own self-referential games in Astrophel and Stella—at the linguistic level, often self-consciously skirting the destruction of the very poems he was writing, as he denied his poetic and stylistic aims in sonnets which set out to demonstrate and to illustrate (masterfully, I think) those very aims he criticized.

Sidney's sonnets celebrate a lady, though quite differently from Petrarch's orderly, clear, sequential celebration in the Canzoniere, and differently too from Ronsard's ultimately sequential series of sequences, which “progress” from the childlike nymph Cassandre to the mature, high-born, well-named Hélène. But again and again, Sidney returns to consider, and sometimes to celebrate, poetry; he tests the limit of possibilities of his conventional resources, and of language itself. “What may words say, or what may words not say?” becomes one of the major preoccupations of his lyric sequence, and stands as the fundamental, eminently quotable, classically succinct question about all utterance. His debate is conducted in fairly conventional terms—of Muse, of purling spring, of Aganippe well—thoroughly relevant to sonneteering; but so is the larger question of celebration as truth or as flattery:

What may words say, and what may words not say,
Where truth it selfe must speake like flatterie?

The “given” of the sonneteer is the beloved's perfection: what have grammar rules, dictionary's method, or allegory's curious frame to do with such self-evident revelation as Stella's beauty?

Sidney writes directly into his verse those problems peculiar to the sonneteer's exercise; he knows his own, and his models', relation to “poore Petrarch's long deceased woes,” and knows too that if he manages to persuade of the uniqueness of his lady and his love, he must do so by a native, not a denisened, wit. Part of the fascination of Sidney's sequence lies in the tension between his exploitation of the tradition, with all its grandiloquence of language and allusion, and the criticism to which the tradition is so overtly subjected.

Perhaps because Sidney's sonnets so manifestly do just this, Shakespeare's sonnets do not explore that paradoxical self-contradictoriness which so punctuates Sidney's Astrophel and Stella. Though they have their share of the conflicting rhetorical tropes, oxymoron and paradox, Shakespeare's sonnets rarely rely on technical manipulation of grammar and rhetoric to overcome deliberately self-courted poetic self-destruction. This is not to say that Shakespeare has not his own ways of making us note his skill at sonneteering: he makes impressive variations on the subjects and themes conventional in sonnet-sequences and expected by their experienced readers. As Stephen Booth has so brilliantly demonstrated in his modestly stated and important study [An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets], Shakespeare could and did manipulate several linguistic and structural systems in his sonnets at once, balancing one off against another to achieve effects very different from those of other sonneteers. Like Sidney, Shakespeare came at the end of a long European preoccupation with the sonnet, and was therefore able to range from one to another end of the stylistic and thematic gamut appropriate to the genre, from conventional Petrarchan opposition and hyperbole, through the sweet fluency of Bembo and Ronsard, to the relative simplicity of Du Bellay's or Wyatt's vernacular styles. Here, I want to touch only on his ways in the Sonnets of commenting on poetry, his own and other poets', his ways of managing criticism within the narrative frames he constructed.

We might begin with the standard trope for poetic immortality, the monumentum aere perennius—“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of Princes shall outlive”; “Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”; “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”; “Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea”; “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still green.” Again and again, the poet reiterates the poet's boast that verse can distill the truth of a man's transient life to its purest essence, that verse is a vial to hold that essence forever. And the classical immortality conferred by verse lives wholly in the poet's gift; he offers or withholds—though with this generous poet, there is no question of withholding whatever he might give. This poet, as his verse records, spent his talents only to find them still green, still growing with (significantly mixed metaphor) “spending” and “use.” Gradually, poetic immortality moves out from a trope of art (monumentum) to images of natural creativity: in Sonnet 115, for instance, the poet incorporates his growing poetic capacity and his present love in a single body—“Those lines that I before have writ do lie; / Even those that said I could not love you dearer.” But since “Love is a babe,” in the conventional reference to Cupid, as love grows, so does creative power, closely allied with, dependent upon, the love “which still doth grow.”

The monumentum trope in many variations is proudly displayed in these poems proud of their subject. The poet recognizes no equivocation about the value either of friendship or of the poetry celebrating this friendship, as the verse itself becomes a monumental epitaph to the friend's perfections. Implied in the trope itself is the memorial function of verse, officially centered in the epigrammatic tradition, of which the epitaph was a part. Navarre's opening speech in Love's Labor's Lost notes the relation of fame, epitaph, and poetry. Here, poetry, that implying art, comes to replace the monolithic precision of incised epitaph:

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.

(Sonnet 17)

Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead.

(Sonnet 81)

The appeal, across the grave and across the monuments marking men's lives, to any reader—our eyes, then “not yet created,” now o'er-read these lines, to fulfil the poet's prophecy and his boast—extends the meaning of the bookish convention to include an ongoing life; “breathers” marks life's simplest function, and at the same time reminds us of the etymology of poetic inspiration. With a poet in hand, a poet's friend can economize on marble and gilded monuments, may trust to the poet's muse, with whom it lies

To make him much outlive a gilded tomb,
And to be prais'd of ages yet to be.

(Sonnet 101)

The poet invokes, then, both the precise and cryptic quality of epitaphic praise and the grandiose boast of the lyric poet's conference of immortality upon his subjects—the poetry of statement and the poetry of praise fuse in this remarkable conflation of traditions generally quite separate.

This method of taking a metaphor literally, of forcing its implications on readers, is of a piece with Shakespeare's practice generally and is one indication of his essentially critical attitude toward his materials. Perhaps even more telling are those examinations of his work as he goes along, writing, it seems, with one eye on himself writing:

Who will believe my verse in time to come?

(Sonnet 17)

Let this sad int'rim like the ocean be.
Or call it winter,

(Sonnet 56)

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

(Sonnet 18)

—with its implied “no,” and its given reasons why such a simile is inadequate to the subject. In Sonnet 21, the poet rejects “couplement of proud compare,” to describe his love's excellence for its simple, plain truth; in Sonnet 59, he considers the whole problem of “invention”:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!

Love, inextricably joined to poetic creativity, has been a “babe,” “still growing”; the poem-monument had appealed, across death, to living generations yet to come. Now, in 59, even searching for poetic language is likened to the labor-pains of a mother, disappointed in her second, counterfeit issue:

O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whe'er better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
          O, sure I am, the wits of former days
          To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

The sonnet plays with the idea central to the de inventoribus trope; Shakespeare assumes as true the burden of Curtius's rediscovery for us, that classically-influenced literature (to say nothing of human habits of thinking) was marked by a series of formulae, schemes, topoi, by which a man was relieved of the responsibility for “invention” required of poets since the romántic revolution. The poem also looks toward the possibility of cyclic return, less a cultural than a natural return, by which this young man may simply be seen, wonderfully, as a later manifestation of some beauty authoritatively commented on “in some antique book.” The whole question, then, is raised of a poet's relation to his profession's past, without losing sight of his ever-present responsibility for epideixis, the praise of a specific “you,” an identifiable subject. Although the poet sounds as if his own invention were exhausted and suggests also that, all invention being merely repetition, either of words (topoi) or of a reincarnated beautiful object, he welcomes a literary situation in which he is required to parrot ancient phrases and tropes, he nonetheless belongs to the self-consciously modern era, and must bring into question that authoritative ancient achievement. “Whether we are mended, or whe'er better they, / Or whether revolution [i.e., cosmic timechanges] be the same” may repeat some ancient notions about historical events, but it calls into question the conviction that the ancients had a monopoly on correctness. The couplet has a weary ring, as if the poet, knowing the bad habits of poets in his day too easily persuaded to mere sycophancy, could not trust his dead colleagues, those unquestioned ancient masters, to have been more accurate than contemporary poets in praising their subjects.

The poet who called his friend “the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth / Than those old nine which rhymers invocate” (Sonnet 38), and who so identified his verse with his love and himself with his friend that he could write “O, how thy worth with manners may I sing, / When thou art all the better part of me?” (Sonnet 39), recognized that actual “breath”—his friend's presence, conversation, and company—was the inspiration of his poetry. Not of his “invention” merely, which could work even in the friend's absence (Sonnets 27, 98), but of his creativity—Sonnet 27 records how the image of the friend blots out all others, and 98, a “Zefiro torna” with a difference, how

Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
.....Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose:
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

Sonnet 113, on the other hand, demonstrates the poet's metaphorical powers at work: whatever he sees, in his friend's absence, he converts into the image of his friend:

The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature;

and, in Sonnet 114, he can “make of monsters and things indigest / Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble.” In these poems, we see the image-making process at work, watch the poet watching his own figuring forth in verse, his impossible matching of all things, good and bad, crow and dove and monster, to his obsession.

This record, however, runs counter to the constant stress on poetic “truth”—the friend is the poetry's ornament, which thus needs no ornament drawn from the manuals of rhetoric and poetics. “Couplement of proud compare” is rejected for “the sweet ornament which truth doth give.” A poet with such a subject has no need for art, no need for figure, no need for invention, since the subject itself, simply named, confers sufficient perfection upon verse.

In this connection, the slander-sonnets are interesting, in that they recognize in the slanderers' fictions a kinship with the poet's problems of expression. First of all, the very perfection which, by its signaling in verse, confers upon that verse a special value causes slander in real life, “the ornament of beauty is suspect,” by its mere existence. But at the same time, there may be some truth in the slanderers' comments (Sonnet 69), since his detractors judge the friend by his behavior—in the conventional overstatement of slander, as in the conventional overstatement of poetry, there is some matching of this particular, specific young man's qualities. Withal, in the end, the poet must charge the friend's enemies with fiction, though, as with the overstatements of his own poetry, he must count, even in its apparent dispraise, their fiction as a kind of praise:

That tongue that tells the story of thy days,
Making lascivious comments on thy sport,
Cannot dispraise but in a kind of praise:
Naming thy name blesses an ill report.

(Sonnet 95)

When his own reputation was at stake, however, the poet did not find things so easily resolved: “ill report” running about him was not so quickly turned to the service of fictive praise. On the contrary, that ill report sent him back, as proper sonneteer, to face himself as he was in naked self-examination, to assess himself and the slander about him. “'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed” is a line unthinkable about the friend; but he makes it, with its elaborate defense, about his own condition:

When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing.

(Sonnet 121)

As in the poems to his mistress, in which the poet's reproaches turn into an opportunity for self-assessment apparently detached, here too others' disapproval, however painful, offers a chance to make his own critique of himself, far closer to the facts of the matter than any outside criticism:

For why should others' false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

This sonnet is remarkable for its prosiness: “When not to be receives reproach of being” is exact and euphonious, but entirely without imaginative, figurative imagery. Quite different from the effort in the poems to the friend, the language here strives toward bareness and simplicity of statement, as in the remarkable turning:

No; I am that I am; and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own.

Nothing could be plainer, and nothing more daring, than this paraphrase of the Almighty's self-declaration in an unadorned poetic language which, precisely for that reason, commands belief.

The poet's plainness of statement becomes a poetic position, polemically defended in the Rival Poet series. Once upon a time he could say, fearing no particular threat, that he wrote of his friend “without all ornament”; once upon a time, could imagine his friend favoring his poems, after his death, even though they were mere “poor rude lines” compared with “the bett'ring of the time.” Then the friend might be imagined as saying,

“But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.”

(Sonnet 32)

But when an “alien pen” has actually attracted the attention and favor of this friend, then the poet must reconsider his whole relation to poetry, and to poetry specifically as persuasion, as a means to the beloved's grace. Unquestionably, his style is not high—he is “a worthless boat,” a “saucy bark” compared to the vessel “of tall building and of goodly pride” now riding on the “soundless deep” of the friend's patronage (Sonnet 80). Now his own “gracious numbers are decay'd,” his Muse is sick: he must “grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument / Deserves the travail of a worthier pen” (Sonnet 79); but, like himself and all the poets instructed by and in their connection with his friend, this new poet can do no more than repeat, as he so long has done, the subject's beauty. The question of matching comes up in another context: “I never saw that you did painting need,” he says, plaintively,

I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet's debt;

(Sonnet 83)

Who is it that says most which can say more
Than this rich praise—that you alone are you?

(Sonnet 84)

Because of the plainness of his style, then, his critical friend, recognizing how short the celebration has fallen of his true worth, must “seek anew / Some fresher stamp of the time-bettering days.” But rhetoric alone, the verbal instrument designed for persuasion, cannot persuade:

                                                  yet when they have devis'd
What strained touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou truly fair wert truly sympathiz'd
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend.

(Sonnet 82)

Finally, because of the misery of the separation and the misery of his own inadequate inspiration, he can only be tongue-tied, dumb, and mute (Sonnets 83, 85), trusting in silence an eloquence more persuasive than “the proud full sail of his great verse” (Sonnet 86).

Sonnet 76 shows an enlarged perception into the psychology and also the sociology of poetry:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

In these lines, there is the recognition that, in literary fashions, novelty counts, and that his own verse is not, in this sense, fashionable. The next quatrain moves from the general situation, in which time is taken to confer a “bettering” upon poetry, to his personal situation within the craft:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed—

to his own style of “clothing” his thoughts:

That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

Here, style as fashion comes into the sharpest conflict with style as individual expression—and, we gather from the plot constructed around the problem, which has provided “reason” for examining the problem in the first place, individual style must go down before the time's dictation. But, by the compliment's familiar turning, the poem's logic defends the poet's tautological reiteration of the friend's perfections, justifies the poet's practice altogether:

O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent;
          For as the sun is daily new and old,
          So is my love still telling what is told.

In the triumphant, and entirely conventional, figure of the sun's faithful return after its nightly extinction, bringing light and fertility to the world each day, the poet establishes the essential nature both of his love, and of his way of expressing that love. Human expression must triumph over fashion, and even over art.

The Rival Poet sonnets form one of several groups of separation-poems, in which the poet sings, studies, and comes to terms with his estrangement from his friend. Certainly he has been “absent” from the friend in earlier sonnets, and he has incurred the friend's displeasure too. But this separation is cast entirely in poetic terms: not only is the poet's love called into question, but so is the language he uses, his professional personality. Restoration of the friend's favor brings poetic reunion (Sonnets 97-103) as well, and the Muse is roused to celebrate the refound love—“return, forgetful Muse”; “Rise, resty Muse”; “O truant Muse”; “Make answer, Muse”; “Then do thy office, Muse”—which is, to reassert the values of the poet's poetic convictions:

“Truth needs no colour with his colour fix'd;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermix'd.”

(Sonnet 101)

The repetitiousness, the familiarity of the poet's style is, finally, justified by a perverse application of the doctrine of imitation: “Fair, kind, and true” must be his only argument because those are the intrinsic qualities of the young man praised. Fashion is rejected, finally, for the truth of plain speaking:

What's in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figur'd to thee my true spirit?
What's new to speak, what new to register,
That may express my love or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o'er the very same;
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.

(Sonnet 108)

Sonnets 108 to 113 reconsider the separation now happily ended: the poet examines himself, in some of the sharpest analytical sonnets he ever wrote. In “Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there / And made myself a motley to the view,” the poet gives himself no quarter, save in the assertion that “worse essays prov'd thee my best of love.” Fortune has not favored him, by committing him to a life which forces him to deviation from his best self:

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand.

(Sonnet 111)

In a marvelous image, full of self-disgust and yet speaking through that disesteem to his own professional commitment to his art, the poet comments on the “public means” which so threaten him:

And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

“Like the dyer's hand”!—stained by the dyes, marked by its service to the materials of its art, that hand can nonetheless make new patterns, must prepare cloth to useful and decorative functions, as the poet, his whole being steeped unmistakably like the dyer's hand in the materials of his own craft, shapes new patterns for new poetic purposes, chooses the colors (of rhetoric and of poetics) to make social ends beautiful. The poet's verse, to which he is servant, speaks to other people and will do so “Till all the breathers of this world are dead.”

Clearly, the relation of poet to this friend is based on poetry: poetry is not only the conventional instrument of appeal to patron, friend, and lover, the conventional voice in beauty's praise; but poetry is also the poet himself, ingrained in his personality and thus marking (the dyer's hand) all his human realizations and relations. That Shakespeare has provided poetic theory with a body and a personality in the fictive Rival Poet, around whom he organized a drama of verse and about verse, thereby invigorating an entirely academic convention of sonnet metapoiesis, is less surprising than that he thereby intensifies and dramatizes recurrent questions of styles—of praise, of imitation, of self-projection. The Rival Poet is invoked not as a voice for “style” of verse simply, though he unquestionably is made into a topic for discussing that subject. Because in this poet's prodigal economy, verse so clearly is the man, and a chosen style so interpenetrated with its poet's personality, the Rival Poet becomes an animate, breathing threat to our poet's continued life as poet, as friend, as man, a threat which can only be warded off by a purified rededication to poetic integrity. What Shakespeare's whole creative effort demonstrates is, I think, that for him poetic integrity lay in the continual reexamination of poetic values, the continual confrontation of those problems literature always sets for poets. In Love's Labor's Lost, the mereness of style is endlessly and lovingly exposed as the fraud that it is, the miracle of creation reduced to an examination of craft—and the value of skill in the service of literary creativity reaffirmed even as its illusionism is exposed. From the Sonnets, we learn something else: how a man's fundamental moral existence can be a matter of style.