ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a follow-up to a 1983 study of Shakespeare's Sonnets: A. Kent Hieatt very effectively demonstrated the relation between the Sonnets and Spenser's translation of Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome, addressing in particular the phrasing attendant on the theme of time. One observer has remarked, In Shakespeare's Sonnets time has structural and emotional functions that make it the dominant and most persistent of all the issues the speaker has on his mind. In the eternity topos of Sonnets 55, Not marble nor the gilded monuments, Shakespeare is close to Ruines at a number of points beyond the verbal repetitions and the inversion of the theme. Shakespeare's references in Sonnets 55 to stone structures affected by age the unswept stone, the overturned statues, and the uprooted masonry relate to what amounts to a massive, shared subtheme in the two sequences.
