ABSTRACT
To turn from the great European poets we have been considering to the sonnets of Shakespeare's English contemporaries is to enter a region of comparative provinciality and amateurishness. There are indeed a few sonnets, more of them by Sidney than by any other poet, which may be ‘let alone for the comparison’, but both in sheer genius and sheer craftsmanship the general level is far below that of the Italians and the French. Indeed, despite his immense genius and immense achievement, Shake-speare's own craftsmanship, sometimes even in his finest sonnets, is too often slovenly and very far from Coleridge's desideratum of ‘the best words in the best order’: there are too many inversions merely for the sake of rhyme, too many syllable-supplying expletives such as ‘do’, ‘did’, and ‘doth’, and too many rhymes on the final syllable of weak past participles, such as ‘remember-ed’. Perfection still remains perfection, even though it be Shakespeare himself who sometimes falls short of it.
