ABSTRACT
In his Palladis Tamia Francis Meres gives a contemporary report on Shakespeare’s sonnets: As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagorus: so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends. The two things which he specially appreciated in Shakespeare were the musical quality of his verse, that it was ‘mellifluous and honey-tongued’, and the ‘fine filed phrase’, the wit; he calls Shakespeare’s sonnets ‘sugared’. Blair Leishman in Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Claes Schaar in An Elizabethan Sonnet Problem and in Elizabethan Sonnet Themes and the Dating of Shakespeare’s Sonnets illustrate this fully, as likewise the common texture of the love sonnet in Italy, France and Tudor England. Horace to some extent, and particularly Ovid also contributed to the richness of the sonnet brocade.
