ABSTRACT
The sun with which Shakespeare opens his sonnet can be said to dominate sonnet literature. Shakespeare’s very first sonnet to the lady is a direct and incontrovertible comment on Sir Philip Sidney’s seventh in Astrophel and Stella. Shakespeare, like all artists, must have known that the opening of a work gives it a direction. Shakespeare has transferred ‘dead’ from Constable’s ‘heart’. Shakespeare’s close integration of his sonnets, with each taking colour from its predecessors and throwing its tinge on its successors, means that the order in which we find the sonnets should not be tampered with. Barnabe Barnes’ ‘waste of mind’ has become Shakespeare’s ‘expense of spirit’. Although it seems likely that Constable’s sonnet triggered off Shakespeare’s, and that Barnes’ and Fulke Greville’s are closely associated with it, it explodes a great deal of other material. Shakespeare is protesting against neoplatonism which suggests that one can choose a spiritual love as against a physical.
