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The sonnet, which, for practical purposes, may be regarded as an invention of XII c. Italy, slowly won the favour of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing reached England till the third decade of the XVI c., when English sonnets were first written, in imitation of the Italian, by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey. But these primary efforts form an isolated episode in English literary history; they began no vogue. A whole generation—more than a quarter of a century—separated the final sonneteering efforts of Surrey and Wyatt from the birth of the Elizabethan sonnet. At first, the Elizabethan growth was sparse; nor did it acquire luxuriance until queen Elizabeth’s reign was nearing its last decade. Then, sonneteering became an imperious and universal habit, a conventional recreation, a modish artifice of gallantry and compliment. No poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try his skill on this poetic instrument. During those ten years, more sonnets were penned in England than in any other decade. The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a strange medley of splendour and dulness. The workers in the field included Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in varying degrees, invested this poetic form with unquestionable beauty. Shakespeare, above all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric melody and a meditative energy which no writer of any country has surpassed. It is the value attaching to the sonneteering efforts of this great trio of Elizabethan poets, and to some rare and isolated triumphs of their contemporaries, Daniel, Drayton and Constable, which lends to the Elizabethan sonnet aesthetic interest.
| It bears graphic witness to the Elizabethan tendency to borrow from foreign literary effort. Even the greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers did not disdain occasional transcription of the language and sentiment of popular French or Italian poetry. The influence which Wyatt and Surrey, the English pioneers of the sonnet, exerted on the Elizabethan sonneteers is shadowy and indeterminate. Their experiments, as has been seen, were first published posthumously in 1557 in Tottel’s Miscellany, which included verse from many other pens. The sixty sonnets contained in Tottel’s volume—for the most part primitive reflections of Petrarch—represent, so far as is known, all the English sonneteering work which was in being when queen Elizabeth’s reign opened. George Gascoigne, in his treatise on poetic composition, which appeared as early as 1575, accurately described the normal construction of the sonnet in sixteenth century England when he wrote: “ Sonnets are of fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the last two ryming togither do conclude the whole ”. |
Though Tottel’s Miscellany was reprinted seven times between 1557 and 1584, and acquired general popularity, little endeavour was made during those seven and twenty years to emulate its sonneteering experiments. Despite Wyatt and Surrey’s efforts, it was by slow degrees that the sonnet came to be recognised in Elizabethan England as a definite species of verse inviting compliance with fixed metrical laws. George Gascoigne, although he himself made some fifteen experiments in the true quatorzain, accurately diagnosed contemporary practice when he noted, in 1575, how “some thinke that all Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets, as in deede it is a diminutive worde derived of Sonare. ” Writers like Thomas Lodge and Nicholas Breton, who made many experiments in the true sonnet form, had no hesitation in applying the term to lyric efforts of varied metre and in stanzas of varied length, which bore no relation to the quatorzain. As late as 1604, Nicholas Breton brought out a miscellany of poetry under the general title, The Passionate Shepheard; the II part bore the designation “Sundry sweet sonnets and passionated Poems,” each of which is separately headed “Sonet I,” and so forth; but two only of the poems are quatorzains and those in rambling lines of fourteen syllables. The long continued misuse of the word illustrates the reluctance of the Elizabethans to accept the sonnet’s distinctive principles.
The second set of sonnets, which, under the name of The Visions of Petrarch, Spenser penned in his early days, were drawn, not from the Italian, but from Marot’s French poem, in twelve-lined stanzas, entitled Les Visions de Petrarque. Spenser’s first draft of 1569 slavishly adhered to the French. These youthful ventures of Spenser herald the French influence on Elizabethan sonneteering. But, among French sonneteers, neither the veteran Marot nor his junior Du Bellay, to whom Spenser offered his boyish homage, was to play the foremost part in the Elizabethan arena. Du Bellay, though a writer of sonnets on a very generous scale, fell below his leader Ronsard alike in productivity and in charm. Thomas Watson was the earliest Elizabethan to make a reputation as a sonneteer. Watson’s example largely encouraged the vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet, and crystallised its imitative temper. The majority of Elizabethan sonneteers were loyal to his artificial method of construction. Some of his successors were gifted with poetic powers to which he was a stranger, and interwove the borrowed conceits with individual feeling, which, at times, lifted their verse to the plane of genuine poetry. Yet even from those sonnets which bear to Watson’s tame achievement the relation which gold bears to lead, signs of his imitative process are rarely obliterated altogether.
Philip Sidney entered the field very soon after Watson set foot there; for some years both were at work simultaneously; yet Watson’s influence is discernible in much of Sidney’s effort. Sidney, admittedly, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric poets and sonneteers. He loiters far behind Shakespeare in either capacity. But Shakespeare, as a sonneteer, should, of right, be considered apart. With that reservation, Sidney may fairly be credited as marching at the head of the contemporary army of sonneteers.
Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Sir Philip Sidney was born on November 30, 1554, at Penshurst, Kent. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, and nephew of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was named after his godfather, King Philip II of Spain. After private tutelage, Philip Sidney entered Shrewsbury School at the age of ten in 1564, on the same day as Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who became his fast friend and, later, his biographer. After attending Christ Church, Oxford, (1568-1571) he left without taking a degree in order to complete his education by travelling the continent. Among the places he visited were Paris, Frankfurt, Venice, and Vienna.
Sidney returned to England in 1575, living the life of a popular and eminent courtier. In 1577, he was sent as ambassador to the German Emperor and the Prince of Orange. Officially, he had been sent to condole the princes on the deaths of their fathers. His real mission was to feel out the chances for the creation of a Protestant league. Yet, the budding diplomatic career was cut short because Queen Elizabeth I found Sidney to be perhaps too ardent in his Protestantism, the Queen preferring a more cautious approach. Upon his return, Sidney attended the court of Elizabeth I, and was considered "the flower of chivalry." He was also a patron of the arts, actively encouraging such authors as Edward Dyer, Greville, and most importantly, the young poet Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him. In 1580, he incurred the Queen Elizabeth's displeasure by opposing her projected marriage to the Duke of Anjou, Roman Catholic heir to the French throne, and was dismissed from court for a time. He left the court for the estate of his cherished sister Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. During his stay, he wrote the long pastoral romance Arcadia.
At some uncertain date, he composed a major piece of critical prose that was published after his death under the two titles, The Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry. Sidney's Astrophil and Stella ("Starlover and Star") was begun probably around 1576. Astrophil and Stella, which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in the long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. Sidney married Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, in 1583. The Sidneys had one daughter, Elizabeth, later Countess of Rutland. While Sidney's career as courtier ran smoothly, he was growing restless with lack of appointments. In 1585, he made a covert attempt to join Sir Francis Drake's expedition to Cadiz without Queen Elizabeth's permission. Elizabeth instead summoned Sidney to court, and appointed him governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. In 1586 Sidney, along with his younger brother Robert Sidney, another poet in this family of poets, took part in a skirmish against the Spanish at Zutphen, and was wounded of a musket shot that shattered his thigh-bone. Some twenty-two days later Sidney died of the unhealed wound at not yet thirty-two years of age. His death occasioned much mourning in England as the Queen and her subjects grieved for the man who had come to exemplify the ideal courtier. It is said that Londoners, come out to see the funeral progression, cried out "Farewell, the worthiest knight that lived."
Sidney’s sonnets, like those of Petrarch and Ronsard, form a more or less connected sequence. The poet, under the name of Astrophel, professes to narrate the course of his passion for a lady to whom he gives the name of Stella. The relations between Astrophel and Stella closely resemble those between Petrarch and his poetic mistress Laura, in the first series of the Italian poet’s sonnets, which were written in the lifetime of Laura. There is no question that Sidney, like Petrarch, was, to a certain extent, inspired by an episode in his own career. Stella was Penelope, the wayward daughter of Walter Devereux, first earl of Essex, and sister of Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, queen Elizabeth’s favourite. When she was about fourteen years old, her father destined her for Sidney’s hand in marriage; but that project came to nothing. In 1581, when about nineteen, she married Robert, second lord Rich, and became the mother of a large family of children. The greater number of Sidney’s sonnets were, doubtless, addressed to her after she had become lady Rich. In sonnet XXIV, Sidney plays upon her husband’s name of Rich in something of the same artificial way in which Petrarch, in his sonnet V, plays upon the name of Laura his poetic mistress, who, also, was another’s wife. Sidney’s poetic courtship of lady Rich was continued till near the end of his days.
Astrophel’s sonneteering worship of Stella enjoyed a popularity only second to that of Petrarch’s poetic worship of Laura. It is the main theme of the collection of elegies which was written immediately after the tragically premature close of Sidney’s life. The elegiac volume bore the title Astrophel; it was dedicated to Sidney’s widow; his sister, the countess of Pembroke, wrote a poem for it; Spenser was the chief contributor. Throughout the work, Sidney’s lover-like celebration of Stella is accounted his most glorious achievement in life or literature. Sidney’s sonnets rehearse a poetic passion, to which the verse of Petrarch and his disciples supplied the leading cue. The dedication to Sidney’s wife of Astrophel, that tribute of eulogy which acclaims his mastery of the sonnet, seems to deprive his sonnet-story of the full assurance of sincerity. Wife and sister would scarcely avow enthusiastic pride in a husband’s and a brother’s poetic declaration of illicit love, were it literally true. Sidney, as a sonneteer, was an artist rather than an autobiographer. No mere transcript of personal sensation won him the laurels of an English Petrarch.
Charles Lamb detected in Sidney’s glorious vanities and graceful hyperboles “signs of love in its very heyday,” a “transcedent passion pervading and illuminating” his life and conduct. Hazlitt, on the other hand, condemned Sidney’s sonnets as jejune, frigid, stiff and cumbrous. The truth probably lies between these judgments. Felicitous phrases abound in Sidney’s sonnets, but he never wastes his genius on a mere diet of dainty words. He was profoundly touched by lyric emotion. Both in his Apologie for Poetrie and in his sonnets, Sidney describes with scorn the lack of sincerity and the borrowed artifices of diction, which were inherent in the sonneteering habit. He complained that his English contemporaries sang
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Echoing Persius, he professes to follow a different method:
(Sonnet LXXIV.) |
Sidney showed a higher respect than any of his native contemporaries for the metrical institution of the Italian and French sonnet. As a rule, he observed the orthodox Petrarchian scheme of the double quatrain riming thus: abbaabba. In the first eight lines of Sidney’s sonnets, only two rimes were permitted. In the last six lines his practice was less orthodox. Four lines, which were alternately rimed, were often followed by a couplet. But, in more than twenty sonnets, he introduced into the concluding sizain such variations of rime as ccdeed, which brought his work into closer relation with the continental scheme than that of any other Elizabethan. Although Sidney’s professions of originality cannot be accepted quite literally, he may justly be reckoned the first Englishman to indicate the lyric capacity of the sonnet. Sidney’s example, far from discouraging competition, proved a new, and a very powerful, stimulus to sonneteering endeavour. It was, indeed, with the posthumous publication of Sidney’s sonnet-sequence, Astrophel and Stella, in 1591, that a sonneteering rage began in Elizabethan England. Samuel Daniel’s Delia and Henry Constable’s Diana first appeared in 1592, both to be revised and enlarged two years later. Three ample collections followed in 1593; they came from the pens respectively of Barnabe Barnes, Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher, while Watson’s second venture was then published posthumously and for the first time. To the same period belong the composition, although the publication was long delayed, of the Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander’s Aurora and of the Caelica of Sidney’s friend, Sir Fulke Greville. All these collections were sequences of amorous sonnets. The Elizabethan sonnet was not exclusively applied to themes of love. Religious meditation and friendly adulation frequently commanded the attention of sonneteers. In his metre alone, did Spenser follow a line of his own devising; his prosody diverged alike from the ordinary English, and the ordinary foreign, model. Most of his sonnets consisted of three quatrains, each alternately rimed, with a riming couplet. Alternate rimes and the couplet were unknown to sonnets abroad. Yet Spenser followed the foreign fashion in restricting the total number of rimes in a single sonnet to five instead of extending it to seven as in the normal English pattern. He made the last lines of his first and second quatrains rime respectively with the first lines of his second and third quatrains, thus abab bcbc cdcd. Spenser approached no nearer the prosody of Italy or France. In three instances, he invests the concluding riming couplet with a wholly original effect by making the final line an alexandrine.
The pertinacity with which the crude artificialities and plagiarisms of the sonnet-sequence of love were cultivated in the last years of queen Elizabeth’s reign involved the sonnet as a form of poetic art in a storm of critical censure before the vogue expired. The rage for amorous sonneteering came to excite an almost overwhelming ridicule. The basest charges were brought against the professional sonneteer. Sir John Harington, whose epigrams embody much criticism of current literary practices, plainly states that poets were in the habit of writing sonnets for sale to purchasers who paraded them as their own. When the sonnet-sequence of love was yielding to the loud protests of the critics, Ben Jonson, in Volpone (Act III, sc. 2) struck at it a belated blow in a contemptuous reference to the past “days of sonneting” and to the debt that its votaries owed to “passionate Petrarch.” Elsewhere, Jonson condemned, root and branch, the artificial principles of the sonnet. Elizabethan sonneteers who coloured, in their verse, the fruits of their foreign reading with their own individuality deserve only congratulation. The intellectual assimilation of poetic ideas and even poetic phraseology conforms with a law of literature which is not open to censure. But literal translation, without acknowledgment, from foreign contemporary poetry was, with little qualification, justly condemned by contemporary critics. Although the sonnet in Elizabethan England, as in France and Italy, was mainly devoted to the theme of love, it was never exclusively confined to amorous purposes. Petrarch occasionally made religion or politics the subject of his sonnets and, very frequently, enshrined in this poetic form the praises of a friend or patron. As a vehicle of spiritual meditation or of political exhortation or of friendly adulation, the sonnet long enjoyed an established vogue in foreign literature. When the sonnet-sequence of love was in its heyday in Elizabethan England, the application of the sonnet to purposes of piety or professional compliment acquired popularity. The art of the sonnet, when it was enlisted in such service, largely escaped the storm of censure which its amorous extravagances excited.
Sonnets inscribed by poets in the way of compliment to their friends or patrons abound in Elizabethan literature. James I, in his Treatise of poetry, 1584, ignores all uses of the sonnet save for the “compendious praising” of books or their authors and for the prefatory presentation in brief summary of the topic of any long treatise. The latter usage was rare in England, though Shakespeare experimented with it by casting into sonnet form the prologues before the first two acts of Romeo and Juliet. But, before, during and after Shakespeare’s day, the English author was wont to clothe in the sonnet shape much professional intercourse with his patron. Few writers were guiltless of this mode of address. Not infrequently, a long series of adulatory sonnets forms the prelude or epilogue of an Elizabethan book. Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad are both examples of literary work of repute which was ushered into the world with substantial supplement of adulatory sonnets. Both Spenser and Chapman sought the favour of a long procession of influential patrons or patronesses in a series of quatorzains. Even those self-reliant writers of the day who contemned the sonnet-sequence of love, and declined to make trial of it with their own pens—men like Ben Jonson and Chapman—were always ready to salute a friend or patron in sonnet-metre. Of sonnets addressed in the way of friendship by men of letters to colleagues of their calling, a good example is the fine sonnet addressed by the poet Spenser to Gabriel Harvey, “his singular good friend.” Some of these occasional sonnets of eulogy or compliment reach a high poetic level, and are free from most of the monotonous defects which disfigured the conventional sonnet of love. To the first book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Sir Walter Ralegh, the poet’s friend, prefixed two sonnets, the first of which was characterised by rare stateliness of diction. No better illustration is to be found of the characteristic merits of the Elizabethan vogue. Ralegh’s sonnet was written in 1595, when the sonneteering rage was at its height; and, while it attests the predominant influence of Petrarch, it shows, at the same time, how dependence on a foreign model may be justified by the spirit of the adaptation. Ralegh’s sonnet runs as follows:
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“Celestial Thief” is a weak ending, and crudely presents Ralegh’s eulogistic suggestion that Spenser, by virtue of his great poem, had dethroned the older poetic deities. Ralegh’s prophecy, too, that oblivion had, at length, “laid him down on Laura’s hearse” was premature. The tide of Petrarchian inspiration flowed on long after the publication of The Faerie Queene. But Ralegh’s sonnet, viewed as a whole, illustrates how fruitfully foreign imagery could work in Elizabethan minds, and how advantageously it could be applied to new purposes by the inventiveness of poetic genius.
In the two famous writers in whom the reformation of English verse first distinctly appears, the reforming influences—or, to speak with stricter correctness, the models chosen in order to help the achievement of reform—are, without doubt, Italian, though French may have had some subsidiary or go-between influence. Sonnet and terza rima in Wyatt, and the same with the addition of blank verse in Surrey (putting aside lyrics), tell the tale unmistakably. And it is to be noticed that sonnet, terza rima and blank verse—the first two by their actually strict and rigid outline and the third through the fear and caution imposed on the writer by the absence of his usual mentor, rime, act almost automatically. But (and it is a precious piece of evidence in regard to their erring predecessors as well as to their penitent and reformed selves) it is quite clear that even they still have great difficulty in adjusting rhythm to pronunciation. They “wrench accent” in the fashion which Gascoigne was to rebuke in the next (almost in the same) generation; they dislocate rime; they have occasional recourse to the valued - e which we know to have been long obsolete, and even to have turned in some cases to the - y form in adjectives. Whatever their shortcomings, however (and, in fact, their shortcomings were much less than might have been expected), there is no doubt that the two poets whose names have long been and must always be inseparable deserve, in prosody even more than in poetry generally, the credit of a “great instauration”—of showing how the old patterns of Chaucer and others, adjusted to the new pronunciation, could be got out of the disarray into which they had fallen, by reference (immediately) to Italian models. Nor is it superfluous to point out that Italian, though apparently a language most different in vocalisation and cadence from English, has the very point in common with us which French lacks—the combination, that is to say, of strict, elaborate and most various external conformation of stanza with a good deal of syllabic liberty inside the line. These two things were exactly what wanted encouragement in English: and Italian gave them together.
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