{"id":"01KG6S6XF3C5H9N2FGF15KE9H6","cid":"bafkreiflbjukzlzivuti3xgax6ekejnsrczf5llt2ibvadbzha762lka7a","type":"chunk","properties":{"end_line":8965,"extracted_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:48.288Z","extracted_by":"structure-extraction-lambda","label":"Chunk 4","source_file":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","start_line":8919,"text":"Either She, or els no creature,\nShall enjoy my loue: whose feature\nThough I neuer can obtaine,\nYet shall my true loue remaine:\nTill (my body turned to clay)\nMy poore soule must passe away,\nTo the heauens; where (I hope)\nHit shall finde a resting scope:\nThen since I loued thee (alone)\nRemember me when I am gone.\n\n<!-- [Page 427](arke:01KG6QHPH0NHP4BP1H0BWBMBF3) -->\n16\nSONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE\n\nof his mistress in refusing him her old favours. In vain he tries to blot out of his mind the joys of her past kindness and to abandon the hopeless pursuit of her affection. He is ‘a man distract’, who, striving and raging in vain to free himself from strong chains of love, merely suffers ‘change of passion from woe to wrath’. The illusion of genuine passion could hardly be produced with better effect than in lines like these:—\n\nThe thoughts of past times, like flames of hell,\nKindled afresh within my memory\nThe many dear achievements that befell\nIn those prime years and infancy of love.\n\nIt was in the vein of Raleigh’s addresses to the Queen that Elizabethan poets habitually sought, not her countenance only, but that of her noble courtiers. Great lords and great ladies alike—the difference of sex was disregarded—were repeatedly assured by poetic clients that their mental and physical charms excited in them the passion of love. Protestations of affection, familiarly phrased, were clearly encouraged in their poetic clients by noble patrons.¹ Nashe, a typical Elizabethan, who was thoroughly impregnated with the spirit and temper of the times, bore (in 1595) unqualified witness to the poetic practice when he wrote of Gabriel Harvey, who religiously observed all current conventions in his relations with patrons:—\n\n¹ I have perused vearses of his, written under his owne hand to Sir Philip Sidney, wherein he courted him as he were another Cyparissus or Ganimede; the last Gordian true loues knot or knitting up of them is this:—\n\nHarvey’s love-poems to Sir Philip Sidney.\n\n¹ The two sonnets which accompanied Nashe’s gift to the young Earl of Southampton of an obscene poem called The choosing of Valentines, sufficiently indicate the tone of intimacy which often infected ‘the dedicated words which writers used’ when they were seeking or acknowledging patrons’ favours.\n\n<!-- [Page 428](arke:01KG6QHPVCYMPCW08KE44EJCGK) -->\n17\n\n# SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE\n\nSum iecur, ex quo te primum, Sydneie, vidi;\nOs oculosque regit, cogit amare iecur.\n\n*All liver am I*, Sidney, since I saw thee;\nMy mouth, eyes, rule it and to loue doth draw mee.¹\n\nAll the verse, which Elizabethan poets conventionally affirmed to be fired by an amorous infatuation with patrons, was liable to the like biting sarcasm from the scoffer.² But no satiric censure seemed capable of stemming the tide of passionate adulation, in what Shakespeare himself called ‘the liver vein’, which in his lifetime flowed about the patrons of Elizabethan poetry. Until comparatively late in the seventeenth century there was ample justification for Sir Philip Sidney’s warning of the flattery that awaited those who patronized poets and poetry: ‘Thus doing you shall be [hailed as] most fair, most rich, most wise, most all; thus doing, you shall dwell upon superlatives; thus doing, your soul shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrice.’ There can be little doubt that Shakespeare, always prone to follow the contemporary fashion, yielded to the prevailing tendency and penned many sonnets in that ‘liver vein’ which was especially calculated to fascinate the ear of his literature-loving and self-indulgent patron, the Earl of Southampton. The illusion of passion which colours his verse was beyond the scope of other contemporary ‘idolaters’ of patrons, because it was a manifestation of his superlative and ever-active dramatic power.\n\n---\n\n¹ ‘Have with you to Saffron-Walden’ (O 3 verso), in Nashe’s *Works*, ed. McKerrow, vol. iii, p. 92.\n","title":"Chunk 4"},"relationships":[{"peer":"01KG6S5PV0NV4W789X904TKDXB","peer_type":"section","predicate":"in"},{"peer":"01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA","peer_type":"file","predicate":"extractedFrom"},{"peer":"01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y","peer_type":"collection","predicate":"collection"},{"peer":"01KG6S6XF1NCN1GC5TDQYVN2BA","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"prev"},{"peer":"01KG6S6XF3RQ058T5PS876FDAC","peer_type":"chunk","predicate":"next"}],"ver":2,"created_at":"2026-01-30T06:24:53.731Z","ts":"2026-01-30T06:24:58.398Z","edited_by":{"method":"manual","user_id":"01KFF0H3YRP9ZSM033AM0QJ47H"}}