When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tottered weed of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer, “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
(Sonnet 2, 1609 Quarto)
About the early history of the sonnets, we know almost nothing. The first reference comes in 1598, when Shakespeare already had a reputation on the stage—the plays behind him included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Richard III, and The Merchant of Venice. That year Francis Meres praised him in Palladis Tamia as the “most excellent” English playwright, like Plautus and Seneca a master of comedy and tragedy. Shakespeare had first come to attention as author of a popular pillow-book, Venus and Adonis (1593), and what he called a “graver labor,” The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Meres remarked that the “sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece,
