In Shakespeare’s early comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus offers Thurio, his rival for Silvia’s favour, some advice on the art of seduction:

There is no doubt the dullard Thurio needs a lesson or two in lovemaking. The above tutorial, however, is offered by one of Shakespeare’s most perfidious lovers. Proteus has himself fallen in love with Silvia, whom he attempts to woo in Act 4 Scene 2. He is met with a frosty response: ‘Thou subtile, perjur’d, false, disloyal man … I despise thee for thy wrongful suit’ (4.2.95, 102). The Two Gentlemen of Verona was written in the 1590s when the vogue for sonnets in England was at its height, and Proteus’s speech captures something of the energy, intensity and artfulness of this brief but important episode in the history of English poetry. Sonnets had developed by this time into a powerful vehicle for exploring the psyche, articulating inward experience and capturing the cadences of emotional turbulence. Usually written in the first person, they offered an opportunity for confessional utterance, each ‘feeling line’ promising to reveal what Proteus calls passionate ‘integrity’ (3.2.75–6). At the same time, however, and thanks to the demands posed by their inflexible form, Elizabethan sonnets are often astonishingly ‘composed’, or contrived, despite their appearance of spontaneity, and are always self-conscious about their mode of expression. They may be spoken by a Proteus whose very name declares his faithlessness; they may be fictionalised, ventriloquised, rehearsed, performed, studied or borrowed.

Early in The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom announces that ‘the greatest poet in our language is excluded from the argument of this book’. He gives three reasons for this exclusion, one historical, one generic, and one individual. Historically, Bloom states, ‘Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness’; only with eighteenth-century and Romantic notions of genius and originality does ‘the burden of the past’ become the poet’s overriding problem. Generically, Bloom thinks, drama is less susceptible to anxiety than is lyric: ‘As poetry has become more subjective, the shadow cast by the precursors has become more dominant.’ But for Bloom – and this accords with the essentially Freudian mode of his criticism – the most important cause is the individual one: ‘Shakespeare’s prime precursor was Marlowe, a poet very much smaller than his inheritor . . . Shakespeare is the largest instance in the language of a phenomenon that stands outside the concern of this book: the absolute absorption of the precursor. Battle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads; only this is my subject here.’

“If music be the food of love” (1.1.1) – famously begins Orsino and plunges into a stream of digestion metaphors informed by the spirit of Galen's theory and, as some argue, by its highly “misogynistic humoral distinctions between men and women” (Schiffer 2011: 33), the latter incapable of whole-hearted and sustained affection. Indeed Orsino's later fortunes give little credit to his boastful assertions about his passion being “as hungry as the sea” and by far exceeding the short-lived female “appetite.” A similar conceit, though obviously devoid of misogynistic colouring, is evoked by Cleopatra who speaks clearly for all lovers: “music, moody food / Of us that trade in love” (2.5.1–2). Whoever else trades in love, the association of love and music does not belong to the world of plays only. To the contrary, it had been well rehearsed in Shakespeare's sonnets before any of his dramatic characters indulged in music to nourish their love.

The positioning of Sonnet VIII in the cycle, squeezed in-between the gruesome “Unlooked on diest, unless thou get the son” in the final line of Sonnet VII, and the equally disheartening opening inquiry of Sonnet IX: “Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye / That thou consum'st thyself in single life?”, confirms only what seems to be the central message of the poem: men should get married and beget children in their likeness. Notwithstanding this rather conventional counselling, the poem soon surprises with the variety and dynamics of imagery used to argue the point:

INTRODUCTION

The earliest reference to Sonnets by Shakespeare occurs in Meres' Palladis Tamia, 1598: “The sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tqngued Shakespeare, witnes … his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.” In 1599 two sonnets, cxxxviii. and cxliv., were published by Jaggard in The Passionate Pilgrim. The second of these is what Dr. Furnivall calls the “key-sonnet” – “Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,” &c. For ten years nothing further is heard of the Sonnets. Then on May 20th, 1609, A book called Shakespeares Sonnettes was entered on the Stationers' Register, and published, in Quarto, the same year. Of this Quarto the title-page, in some copies, is as follows:– SHAKE-SPEARES, ∣ SONNETS. ∣ Neuer before Imprinted. T. T. and are By G. Eld for AT LONDON. to be solde by William Aspley. ∣ 1609. ∣ Others have the imprint: AT LONDON ∣ By G. Eld for T. T. and are to be solde by John Wright, dwelling ∣ at Christ Church gate. ∣ 1609. ∣ This was the only Quarto edition of the Sonnets that was published. Evidently they did not meet with the popularity which fell to Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and it was not till 1640 that any reprint appeared. In that year they were given, in rather haphazard fashion, in a volume of Poems: written by Wil Shakespeare, Gent; the volume containing The Passionate Pilgrim and many poems not written by Shakespeare.