Shall i Compare Thee? Sonnet 18 and Robert Greene’s Menaphon

Abstract

To what should we compare the first verse of what Helen Vendler justly calls ‘the most familiar’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets?1 Stephen Booth’s claim that ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?’ ‘plays on the proverbial comparative formula “as good as one shall see in a summer’s day”’ is uncontroversial.2 But is the wording of Sonnet 18’s rhetorical question, introduced by a phrase that, in slightly varying forms, was presumably heard in everyday conversation, also rooted in a particular Elizabethan or Jacobean text? Two passages from the Geneva Bible seem likely candidates. Lamentations 2:13—‘What thi[n]g shal I co[m]pare to thee, o daughter Ierusalém … ?’—is quickly followed by a second question concerning the devastated city that might plausibly be linked to the sonnet’s anxiety about time’s threat to the fair young man: ‘Is this the citie that men call, The perfection of beautie, and the ioye of the whole earth?’ (2:15)3 It could be said of Jerusalem what A. Kent Hieatt, in his study of the commerce between Spenser’s Ruines of Rome and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, says of the former’s representation of Rome: ‘Shakespeare discerningly assimilated the central image … the ancient exemplary city … and integrally transmuted it into an image of the exemplary physically and morally vulnerable beloved’.4 Another possibility is Luke 13:18: ‘What is the kingdome of God like? or whereto shal I compare it?’ Could Jesus’s reply to his own question—‘It is like a graine of mustarde seed, which a man toke and sowed in his garden, and it grewe, and waxed a great tre, and the foules of the heaven made nestes in the branches thereof’ (13:19)—have had any bearing on Shakespeare’s reply to his, which also enlists a horticultural figure, the ‘eternall lines’ in which ‘to time thou grow’st’, in the service of a vision of immortality?5