SOURCE: "Mel and Sal: Some Problems in Sonnet-Theory," in Shakespeare 's Living Art, Princeton University Press, 1974, pp. 68-134.

In the excerpt below, Colie regards Shakespeare's sequence as an exercise in reappraising the conventions and limitations of the traditional sonnet, calling attention to Shakespeare's innovative juxtaposition of mel and sal—sweetness and sharpness—and to his distinctly unconventional decision to address many of his sonnets to a young man rather than a woman.

Edward Hubler's remark that "sweet" was Shakespeare's favorite epithet⁵⁹ is in good part true—certainly his contemporaries found his poetry so. Weever, in his Epigrammes, remarked on "honie-tong'd Shakespeare," Meres on the parallel between "mellifluous and honytongued Shakespeare" and Ovid, Barnfield on his "honyflowing Vaine."⁶⁰ Of course, some of this reference to sweetness merely meant that Shakespeare wrote amorous poetry, the "sugred Sonnets" specifically mentioned by Meres, as well as Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, officially...