In the context of a comparison of Sp. and Sh. as sonnet-writers, it's
perhaps worth recalling Kent Hieatt's article "The Genesis of
Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: By Bellay," PMLA, Vol.
98, No. 5 (Oct., 1983), pp. 800-814, which argues in detail, and often
persuasively, that the unusual emphasis on questions of the generative and
ruinous work of time, and survival in time, in Shakespeare's sonnets
shows a strong influence from the young (17 years?) Edmund Spenser's
translation of DuBellay's Les antiquites de Rome.
Ken Gross
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