The Sonnet

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The Sonnet
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The Original Sonneteer

• Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca or Francis Petrarch
  1304-1374)
• Recall that Chaucer may have met him most
  certainly knew his work so, while England is in
  the Middle Ages, men like Petrarch are ushering
  in the Italian Renaissance
• Original in qt marks b/c there were others

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Technical Features of the Petrarchan (Italian)
Sonnet

• 14 lines
• Iambic pentameter
• Octave (8 line stanza) followed by a sestet (six
  line stanza)
• Octave presents one idea or situation sestet
  presents another, often opposite idea or
  situation
• The turn signals this switch in topic and tone
  to the reader according to Elements, The turn
  signals a logical or emotional shift, or a new
  beginning (191).
• Often, one of three basic paradigms applies to
  Petrarchan sonnets
• Standard Rhyme Scheme
• (Wyatt often uses abbaabbacddcee)
• Conceitsunlikely comparisons (love to a hook
  love to war love to a hunt)
• Sequences

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Topics of Petrarchan Sonnets

• Addressed to Laura beautiful, idealized woman
  who does not requite the poets love interest
• Poems are often about unrequited love
• Unlike Wyatts translations, Petrarchs are
  usually not as melancholic. Petrarchs are more
  upbeat about being in love according to the
  editors of the Norton Anthology, for Petrarch,
  love is a transcendent experience (526).

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Why Write Sonnets?

• A challenging form to write in often enabled
  great poets to demonstrate their genius (i.e.,
  Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney in particular)
• Different from other genres had a sequence but
  quite different from epic, drama, pastoral,
  narrative, and romance
• About a very interesting topic love
• Very popular in England in the Renaissance
• Possible Growth in Reputation or Patronage or
  both (but men like Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney did
  not need patrons often they were patrons)

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English SonnetsMajor Players in the Renaissance

• Sir Thomas Wyatt introduces form to England
• Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
• Sir Philip Sidney (first to write a complex
  sequence)
• Edmund Spenser (complex rhyme love interest
  probably his wife)
• William Shakespeare (3 quatrains couplet love
  interests may be a young man and a dark lady)
• John Donne (Holy Sonnets)

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Sir Thomas WyattandHenry Howard, Earl of Surrey
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Wyatt and SurreyForms and Ideas

• The pioneers of the sonnet form in England
• Translated and adapted Petrarchs sonnets
• Tone, especially of Wyatts more bitter than
  Petrarchs

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Sir Philip Sidney
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Sir Philip Sidney

• Sidney himself a hero of the Renaissance b/c he
  was an ideal courtier
• Died honorably in battle at 32
• Ardent protestant protested QEIs potential
  marriage to the Catholic duke of Anjou dismissed
  from court for it
• Related to (and friends with) many important
  people
• Father Sir Henry Sidney (Lord Deputy of
  Ireland)
• Father-in-law Sir Francis Walsingham (QEIs
  Advisor)
• Uncle Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (QEIs
  true love but who she never got to marry)
• Friend and Biographer Fulke Greville (another
  important poet)
• Spenser dedicated The Shepheardes Calendar to him
  
• Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke sister (he
  dedicated his other major work, The Countess of
  Pembrokes Arcadia to her)
• Courted Penelope Devereux (probably Stella)
  marriage was rumored, but two years later she
  married Lord Robert Rich (word Rich appears in
  many of his sonnets)

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Sidney the Poet

• Never considered himself a professional ()
  poet rather, he was an aristocratic courtier
  with an eye on being a great, Renaissance man
  who could be a great Englishman. He never tried
  to have his works published
• Though not a professional poet, he did write
  three of the most important works of the English
  Renaissance
• Other than Shakespeares, his is the most
  important sonnet sequence perhaps in the language
• Wrote Defense of Poetry one of the most
  important prose works in the Renaissance
• Arcadia may be most important prose fiction work
  during Renaissance

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SidneysAstrophil and Stella

• First major sonnet sequence in the English
  language
• 108 sonnets (11 songs interwoven throughout)
• Influenced heavily by Petrarch
• Each has 14 lines
• mostly about unrequited love
• many complex conceits
• Utilizes deep paradoxes about life and death,
  time, writing, and love
• Sequence implies not linear narrative action, but
  an exploration of states of mind, the human soul,
  and changes in each

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SidneysAstrophil and Stella cont.

• Important Features
• First major sequence
• Regular references to Rich (Penelope Devereux,
  later Lady Rich) points to game sonneteers
  often played with both words and audience
• While topic is Petrarchan (unrequited love),
  sonnets also paint a picture of love itself, not
  just the poet or the love-object
• Used iambic pentameter (5 feet,
  unstressed/stressed, intermingled occasionally
  with hexameter (6 feet)

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Edmund Spenser
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Edmund Spenser

• Next to Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the
  English Renaissance arguably its greatest poet
  (Shakespeares great contribution being drama)
• Spenser wanted to be a poet and is considered by
  some to be Englands first professional poet
  (Shakespeare being a professional dramatist who
  made little or no money/patronage for his poetry
  despite its greatness)
• Unlike Sidney, Wyatt, and Surrey, a commoner

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Spensers Poetry

• Technically, a genius manipulation of rhymes,
  meters, rhythms, etc. in several different poetic
  genres is unrivaled in English poetry
• Shepheardes Calendar
• Eclogues
• Archaic language
• Pastoral
• An announcement of his arrival as a poet
• Not received well critically (Sidney, Jonson, and
  Johnson all criticized it)
• Homage to Chaucer?
• 13 diff. meters (only 4 normal) show how
  experimental he was

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Spensers Poetry Cont.

• The Faerie Queene
• Considered by many to be his masterpiece (maybe
  the great work of the Renaissance)
• First three books (each 12 cantos long, each
  canto having anywhere from 40-50 individual
  9-line poems) published in 1590 at the
  encouragement of Sir Walter Ralegh
• Dedicated to the Queen, her courtiers, and
  Ralegh, it earned him 50 pounds per year for life
• Genre Epic Romance (poetic rendering of stories
  of errant knights, villains, monsters, heroes,
  etc.)
• Published six-book version in 1596 (full 12 book
  version not)
• One of the most influential poetic works that is
  not known widely

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Minor Poetry

• Complaints
• Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (about courtiers)
• Amoretti
• Sonnet Cycle
• Probably about the courting of his second wife
  may have meant to have been framed by his
  Prothalamion and Epithalamion
• Very intricate rhyme scheme (results in the
  Spenserian Sonnet being named after him)
• Prothalamion and Epithalamion
• Wedding Songs (Pre- and Post-)

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Contributions to Poetics

• Experimentation and Innovation
• Various Rhyme Schemes and Meters
• Sonnets about requited love
• Sonnet rhyme is very complex
• ababbcbccdcdee
• This implies a connectedness between all lines,
  and the three quatrains. Spenser used this to
  great extent in FQ and the Epithalamion. (See
  Norton intro.) In the end, Spenser was probably
  trying to mirror in the complex harmony of his
  poetry, the complex harmony he found in the
  universe (The Epithalamion has 365 long lines,
  twenty four stanzas, the first 16 describe day,
  and the last 8, night (matching a standard day
  with 16 hours of light)
• Vast technical virtuosity not matched by any
  other poet, perhaps ever

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William Shakespeare
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Shakespeare (the poet)

• Large percentage of his plays is in poetry, but
  here we are concerned with his poetry in general
• Shakespeare not discussed much as a poetic genius
  because of his enormous dramatic influence
  however, poetically he, like, Spenser was the
  giant of his age had he not written plays, hed
  be like Spenser

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Types of Poems Shakespeare Wrote

• Most famous for his sonnets
• Narrative Poems
• Venus and Adonis
• The Rape of Lucrece

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The Order of Shakespeares Sonnets

• There is a debate about the proper order of the
  sonnets
• Suffice to say, it probably does not much matter
  to those new to sonnets because, as you might
  recall, sequences are really supposed to capture
  an overall state of mind anywayorder should not
  matter
• Having said that . . .

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The Order of Shakespeares Sonnets Cont.

• Basic Breakdown
• 1-126 addressed to a young man
• Sonnets which urge the young man to marry and
  have children 1-17
• Rival poet sonnets 21, 79, 80, 83, 86
• 127-152 addressed to a dark lady
• 153 154 thought to be adaptations of Greek
  type of sonnet

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Other Questions

• Who is Mr. W. H. (the only begetter of the
  sonnets)? To whom are the sonnets dedicated?
• Is he Shakespeares true love?
• Suggested identities include
• Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton (to
  whom Venus and Lucrece are dedicated and
  therefore patronized Shakespeare in the 1590s)
  supposition here based on the fact that printer
  transposed HW into WH to hide true identity of
  dedicatee
• William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke he is
  one of the dedicatees of the First Folio (first
  collected edition of Shakespeares plays, but
  published posthumously)

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Shakespeares Borrowings Innovations

• Kept 14 lines
• Used 3 quatrains and a couplet
• Normal Rhyme Scheme
• abab cdcd efef gg
• Often each quatrain presents a new idea and the
  couplet the turn, but shifts and turns can occur
  anywhere, sometimes several in one poem
• Major innovation was in topic/addressee/Love-objec
  ts
• Young manIdentity?
• Dark Lady

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Ultimate Answer to Big Questions about Young
Man, Dark Lady, WH, and the Rival Poet

• Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World
• The challenge of the game was to sound as
  intimate, self-revealing, and emotionally
  vulnerable as possible, without actually
  disclosing anything compromising to anyone
  outside the innermost circle . . . Sonnets that
  were too cautious were insipid and would only
  show the poet to be a bore sonnets that were too
  transparent could give mortal offense (234).

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What Adds to the Confusion Resulting from
Biographical Study of Sonnets

• Greenblatt continues
• There were circles within circles . . . If the
  first seventeen of Shakespeares sonnets were
  written to Southampton, then Southampton
  constituted the innermost circle he was the
  reader who was privileged to know almost
  everything. But their closest friends would have
  known something those in the wider circles
  considerably less those outside this orbit but
  still within social range something less again
  and so on. The poets true mastery is most fully
  displayed if those on the outermost edges still
  find the poems thrilling and revealing, even
  though they know absolutely nothing about any of
  the key players, not so much as their names
  (234-5)

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And how things get cloudier or muddier

• Greenblatt writes prior to these two passages
• The whole enterprise of writing a sonnet
  sequence precisely involved drawing a translucent
  curtainof one of those gauzy fabrics
  Elizabethans lovedover the scene so that only
  shadowy figures are visible to the public (233-4)

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Ultimately, Greenblatt, argues, Sonnets, then,
were at once private and social that is, they
characteristically took the form of a personal,
intimate address, and at the same time they
circulated within a small group whose values and
desires they reflected, articulated, and
reinforced . . . Those outside the charmed
coterieand all are now in this categoryhad to
content themselves with admiration of the poets
craft and with groping in the darkness of
biographical specualtion (235).
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Final Point?

• Avoid reading them biographically, as fun as it
  is to speculate
• Admire the technical virtuosity of the poems
• Learn and meditate upon the emotional, spiritual,
  and philosophical depth and range of the poems
• Have funthey did!

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Overview Review
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Important Terms

• Sonnet
• Sequence
• Stanza (Octave, sestet, quatrain, couplet)
• Question/Answer Problem/Solution Idea
  Introduced/Idea Driven Home
• Turn
• Rhyme Scheme
• Meter
• Patronage
• Court, courtiers, coterie

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All Sonnets
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Petrarchan (Wyatt and Surrey)
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Sidney
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Spenser/Spenserian
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Shakespeare
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Bibliography

• Elements of Literature
• Norton Anthology of English Literature
• Riverside Shakespeare