But Ronsard and
his disciples had developed it with a complacency that gave
it new life.
his disciples had developed it with a complacency that gave
it new life.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
The tradition of this
inaccurate nomenclature survived, indeed, to a far later generation;
and 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 second 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. Breton's 'Sonet l’ is in thirty-four stanzas of
four lines each, with one stanza of six lines. His ‘Sonet II' is in
thirty-two stanzas of six lines each. The long continued misuse
of the word illustrates the reluctance of the Elizabethans to accept
the sonnet's distinctive principles.
It was contemporary French, rather than older Italian, in-
fluences which first stirred in the Elizabethan mind a fruitful
interest in the genuine sonnet. The first inspiration came from
Clément Marot, the protestant French poet of the early years
of the sixteenth century, who was a contemporary of Wyatt
and Surrey. He studied Petrarch with ardour, translated into
French some of his sonnets and odes and made two or three
original experiments in the sonnet-form under the title of 'Epi-
grammes. Although it was only after Marot's death that the
reign of the sonnet was definitely inaugurated in France, his
tentative ventures impressed some of his English readers. But
Marot's influence was fugitive; it was quickly eclipsed. The sonnet
6
## p. 250 (#272) ############################################
250
The Elizabethan Sonnet
was not naturalised in France until Marot's successors, Pierre de
Ronsard and his friends, deliberately resolved to adapt to the
French language the finest fruit of foreign literature. Ronsard
and his companions assumed the corporate title of La Pléiade,
and the sonnet became the rallying flag of their school. In Italy,
Petrarch's sonneteering disciples multiplied greatly at the end
of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century; and
the French innovators detected in the rejuvenated Italian sonnet
a potent influence of domestic regeneration. The manifesto of the
new movement in French poetry was written by Joachim du Bellay,
one of its ablest champions. He solemnly urged Frenchmen to
write sonnets after the manner of Petrarch and the more modern
Italians. While pointing out to the French nation the avenues
to literary culture which the ancient classics offered them,
Du Bellay was especially emphatic in his commendation of the
Italian sonnet as a main source of culture: Sonne-moi ces beaux
sonnets, he adjured his fellow-countrymen, non moins docte que
plaisante invention italienne, pour lesquels tu as Pétrarque et
quelques modernes Italiens,
The primary debt that the Elizabethan sonnet owed to the
French development of literary energy is attested by the first-
fruits of Spenser's muse-first-fruits which constitute him the
virtual father of the Elizabethan sonnet. There seems little
question that Spenser, as early as 1569, when a boy of seventeen,
contributed some twenty-six sonnets, anonymously, to a pious
tract rendered, by another hand, from Flemish into English, under
the title of A Theatre for Worldlings. There, Spenser made his
first entry on the literary stage. With some changes, these youth-
ful poems were reprinted, twenty-two years later, in an acknow-
ledged collection of Spenser's minor verse, called Complaints, for
the whole of which the poet's responsibility goes unquestioned.
Spenser's early ventures in the sonnet form were divided into two
categories, the one entitled The Visions of Bellay, the other The
Visions of Petrarch. The latter title is misleading. Both sets
of sonnets were drawn directly from the French-the first from
Joachim du Bellay and the second from Clément Marot.
Du Bellay's sonnets were rendered by Spenser literally, though
without rime. This embellishment he only added to his revised
version. He also undertook, later, the translation of a longer
series of Du Bellay's sonnets, Les Antiquités de Rome, which the
English poet rechristened The Ruins of Rome. Elsewhere, in his
mature work, a close study of Du Bellay is apparent, and he openly
## p. 251 (#273) ############################################
Spenser and his French Masters
251
6
acknowledged his indebtedness to Du Bellay's delicate muse in
a laudatory sonnet which includes these lines:
Bellay, first garland of free Poësie,
That France brought forth, though fruitfull of brave wits,
Well worthie thou of immortalitie.
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. There,
Marot reproduces canzone XLII in Petrarch's collection of sonnets
to Laura. The French title, which conforms with the subject-matter,
is Marot's invention; Petrarch gave his canzone no specific head-
ing. Spenser's first draft of 1569 (which was largely recast in the
re-issue of 1591) slavishly adhered to the French, as may be
seen from the 'envoy,' which, in Marot's verse, runs thus:
O chanson mienne, en tes conclusions
Dy hardiment: Ces six grand visions,
A mon seigneur donnent un doulx desir
De briefvement soubz la terre gesir.
Spenser first rendered these lines thus:
My song thus now in thy Conclusions,
Say boldly that these same six visions
Do yelde unto thy lorde a sweete request,
Ere it be long within the earth to rest.
The text of the original Italian differs from both the French and
the English, and is of superior point and quality.
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. Some, too, of Ronsard's
humbler followers, notably Philippe Desportes, were as sonneteers
scarcely less voluminous and popular than their master. Ronsard
and Desportes were the chief French tutors of English poets at
the end of the sixteenth century, and Desportes, for a season, took
precedence of Ronsard. Few men,' wrote Lodge of Desportes, in
1590, are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes
whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand? . '
At the same time, Petrarch and many of his Italian imitators
were rediscovered by the Elizabethans, and Petrarch's sway was
1 Margarite, p. 79.
## p. 252 (#274) ############################################
252
The Elizabethan Sonnet
.
ultimately re-established, so that he and his Italian disciples
exerted, at the close of queen Elizabeth's reign, the most powerful
spell of all on English sonneteers. Elizabethan critics failed to
detect in the Elizabethan sonnet much appreciable deviation from
its Petrarchian archetype. “In his sweete-mourning sonets,' wrote
Sir John Harington, a typical Elizabethan, in 1591, 'the dolefull
Petrarke. . . seemes to have comprehended all the passions that all
men of that humour have felt. ' Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces
Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of
Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's invention is pure love itself:
Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself'), justifies the common
English practice of imitating them on the ground that
all the noblest Italian, French and Spanish poets have in their several veins
Petrarchized, and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest muse to be
his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknow.
ledge their master.
Spenser's youthful experiments attracted little attention.
Thomas Watson was the earliest Elizabethan to make a reputation
as a sonneteer. Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, echo-
ing, with characteristic perversity, the pedantic view of some
Elizabethan scholars, declared Watson to be a much more elegant'
writer of sonnets than Shakespeare. Watson, in truth, was a frigid
scholiast, who was characteristically indifferent to strict metrical
law. Yet his work is historically of great value as marking the
progress and scope of foreign influences. In early life, Watson
translated all Petrarch's sonnets into Latin; but only two speci-
mens of his rendering survive. This laborious undertaking formed
the prelude to his sonneteering efforts in English. In 1582,
he published, at the earnest entreaty of his friends, according to
his own account, one hundred 'passions' or poems of love, which
contemporaries invariably described as sonnets, though, with rare
exceptions, they were each eighteen lines long. The book was
entitled: The EKATOMIAOIA or Passionate Centurie of Love.
Congratulatory quatorzains prefaced the volume. One friend
greeted Watson as the successor of Petrarch, the inheritor of that
vein which glorified Madonna Laura. Another admirer, writing in
Latin, credited Watson with the power of achieving for English
poetry what Ronsard had done for French.
The most curious fact about this first collection of so-called
somets by Watson is the care with which the writer disclaims
originality. To each poem he prefaces a prose introduction, in
which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotations, the
## p. 253 (#275) ############################################
Thomas Watson's Sonnets
253
French, Italian or classical poem which was the source of his
inspiration. He aims at little more than paraphrasing sonnets
and lyrics by Petrarch and Ronsard, or by Petrarch’s disciples,
Serafino dell'Aquila (1466—1500), Ercole Strozza (1471–1508) or
Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1548), together with passages from the
chief writers of Greece and Rome. As a rule, his rendering is quite
literal, though, now and then, he inverts a line or two of his original,
or inserts a new sentence. In the conventional appeals to his way-
ward mistress, and in his expressions of amorous emotions, there
is no pretence of a revelation of personal experience. Watson's
endeavour won almost universal applause from contemporaries,
but it is wholly a literary exercise, which appeals for approval, not
on the ground of sincerity of emotion, but, rather, by reason of its
skill in dovetailing together fragments of foreign poetry.
The welcome offered Watson's first published collection of
sonnet-poems induced him to prepare a second, which, however,
was not issued till 1593, a year after his death. Watson's second
venture bore the title The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained;
it differed from the first in respecting the primary law which
confined the sonnet within a limit of fourteen lines. Although no
apparatus criticus was incorporated with it, the influence of France
and Italy was no better concealed from the seeing eye in Watson's
final sonneteering essay than in its predecessor. Watson's Tears
of Fancie were, once more, drops of water from Petrarch's and
Ronsard's fountains.
Watson's example largely encouraged the vogue of the Eliza-
bethan 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.
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, ad-
mittedly, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric poets and sonneteers.
He loiters far behind Shakespeare in either capacity. But Shake-
speare, as a sonneteer, should, of right, be considered apart? . With
2 See the chapter on Shakespeare's poetry, in volume v.
## p. 254 (#276) ############################################
254
The Elizabethan Sonnet
that reservation, Sidney may fairly be credited as marching at the
head of the contemporary army of sonneteers.
Although the date cannot be stated with certainty, it is prob-
able that Sir Philip Sidney's ample collection of sonnets, which
is known by the general title of Astrophel and Stella, was written
between the years 1580 and 1584. Widely circulated in manuscript
before and after Sidney's death in 1586, they were not printed till
1591, and then surreptitiously by an enterprising publisher, who
had no authority from Sidney's representatives to undertake the
task. It was not until 1598 that a fully authorised version came
from the press.
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 himself married on
20 September 1583, and lived on the best terms with his wife,
who long survived him. But 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
## p. 255 (#277) ############################################
Sidney's Sonnets
255
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 'trans-
cendent 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. He was endowed
with the lyric power of creating at will the illusion of a personal
confession. He is capable of the true poetic effect. None the less,
his poetic story of passion is out of harmony with the facts of his
biography, and it is reminiscent of foreign models. Yet neither
the interval between the fiction and the fact, nor the indebtedness
to French or Italian masters could dull the vivacious strength of
Sidney's poetic power.
None who is widely read in the sonnets of Petrarch or
Ronsard fails to perceive the foreign echoes in Sidney's sonnets.
The appeals to sleep, to the nightingale, to the moon, to his bed,
to his mistress's dog, which form the staple of much of Sidney's
poetry, resemble the apostrophes of the foreign sonneteers far too
closely to entitle them to the unqualified credit of originality.
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
poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizenëd wit. (Sonnet xv. )
Echoing Persius, he professes to follow a different method:
I never drank of Agannipe's well . .
I am no pickpurse of another's wit. (Sonnet Lxxiv. )
## p. 256 (#278) ############################################
256
The Elizabethan Sonnet
Yet the form, no less than the spirit, of Sidney's sonnets renders
his protest of doubtful significance. Sidney showed a higher
respect than any of his native contemporaries for the metrical
constitution 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. His supremacy in
that regard was at once frankly and justly acknowledged by his
contemporaries. On the first appearance of his effort in print, his
admirer, Thomas Nashe, addressed contemporary practitioners
this warning apostrophe: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and
rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers!
for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs. '
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. Each of the six following
years saw the birth of many volumes of sonnet-sequences, which
owed much to the incentive of Astrophel and Stella. 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. Three more volumes, in addition to the revised
editions of Daniel's Delia and Constable's Diana, appeared in
1594, viz: William Percy's Coelia, an anonymous writer's Ze-
pheria and Michael Drayton's Idea (in its first shape). E. C. 's
Emaricdulfe, Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Richard Barnfield's
Cynthia, with certaine Sonnets, came out in 1595. Griffin's Fidessa,
Linche’s Diella and William Smith's Chloris appeared in 1596.
Finally, in 1597, the procession was joined by Robert Tofte's
## p. 257 (#279) ############################################
Spenser's Amoretti
257
Laura, a pale reflection of Petrarch's effort (as the name implied),
although travelling far from the metrical principles of the genuine
form of sonnet. 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. But the amorous sequence is the
dominant feature of the history of the Elizabethan sonnet. The
spiritual and adulatory quatorzains fill a subsidiary place in the
picture. The amorous sequences incline, for the most part, to
Watson's level rather than to Sidney's, and, while they respect the
English metrical form, they generously illustrate the prevailing
tendency to more or less literal transcription from foreign masters.
The sonneteering work of Spenser in his maturity is to be
linked with Sidney. But even his metrical versatility and genuine
poetic force did not preserve him altogether from the injurious
influence of the imitative tendency. Only a small proportion of
his sonnets embody original ideas or betray complete freedom in
handling old conceits. 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 un-
known 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.
Spenser bestowed on his sequence of eighty-eight sonnets
the Italian name of Amoretti. His heroine, his 'sweet warrior'
(sonnet LVII), is the child of Petrarch's 'dolce guerriera. His
imagery is, at times, assimilated with little change from the sonnets
of his contemporary Tasso, while Ronsard and Desportes give
him numerous suggestions, although he rarely stoops to mere
verbal translation of foreign verse. Spenser's Amoretti were
17
E. L. III.
CH, XII.
## p. 258 (#280) ############################################
258
The Elizabethan Sonnet
addressed to the lady who became his wife, and a strand of
autobiography was woven into the borrowed threads. Yet it is
very occasionally that he escaped altogether from the fetters
of current convention, and gave free play in his sonnets to his
poetic faculty.
Spenser's sentiment professedly ranges itself with continental
and classical idealism. In two sonnets he identifies his heroine
with the Petrarchian (or Neo-Platonic) idea of beauty, which had
lately played a prominent part in numberless French sonnets by
Du Bellay, Desportes, Pontus de Tyard, Claude de Pontoux and
others. Many Elizabethan sonneteers marched under the same
banner. Drayton, in conferring on his sonnets the title Idea,
claimed to rank with the Italian and French Platonists. But
Spenser sounds the idealistic note far more clearly than any
contemporary. He writes in sonnet xLv:
Within my heart (though hardly it can shew
Thing so divine to view of earthly eye),
The fair Idea of your celestial hew,
And every part remains immortally.
This reflects the familiar French strain :
Sur le plus belle Idée au ciel vous fustes faite,
Voulant nature un jour monstrer tout son pouvoir;
Depuis vous luy servez de forme et de miroir,
Et toute autre beauté sur la vostre est portraite.
(Desportes, Diane, II, lxvii. )
Like the French writers, Spenser ultimately (in sonnet LXXXVII)
disclaims any mortal object of adoration in ecstatic recognition of
the superior fascination of the idéa:
Ne ought I see, though in the clearest day,
When others gaze upon their shadows vain,
But th’onely image of that heavenly ray,
Whereof some glance doth in mine eye remain.
Of which beholding the Idaea plain,
Through contemplation of my purest part,
With light thereof I do myself sustain,
And thereon feed my love affamish'd heart.
Pontus de Tyard had already closed the last book of his Les
Erreurs Amoureuses on the identical note:
Mon esprit a heureusement porté,
Au plus beau ciel sa force outrecuidée,
Pour s'abbreuuer en la plus belle Idée
D'où le pourtrait i'ay pris de la beauté. (bk. III, xxxiji. )
Spenser's sonnets similarly helped to familiarise the Elizabethan
reader with a poetic conceit, which, although not of French origin,
was assimilated with fervour by the sonneteers of La Pléiade. The
## p. 259 (#281) ############################################
The Sonneteering Conceit of Immortality 259
notion that poets not merely achieved immortality through their
verse, but had the power of conferring immortality on those to
whom their poetry was addressed, was a classical conceit of great
antiquity, which Pindar among the Greeks, and Horace and Ovid
among the Latins, had notably glorified. The Italians of the
renascence had been attracted by the fancy.
But Ronsard and
his disciples had developed it with a complacency that gave
it new life. From France it spread to Elizabethan England, where
it was quickly welcomed. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apologie for
Poetrie (1595), wrote that it was the common habit of poets 'to
tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. ' 'Men
of great calling,' wrote Nashe, in his Pierce Pennilesse (1593),ʻtake
it of merit to have their names eternised by poets. '
Spenser was among the Elizabethan sonneteers who con-
spicuously adapted the conceit to English verse. Shakespeare,
alone excepted, no sonneteer repeated the poetic vaunt with
greater emphasis than Spenser. He describes his sonnets as
This verse that never shall expire. . . .
Fair be no longer proud of that shall perish.
But that, which shall you make immortal, cherish.
(Sonnet xxvII. )
He tells his mistress
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
(Sonnet Lxxv. )
With unbounded confidence he asserts:
Even this verse, vow'd to eternity,
Shall be thereof immortal moniment;
And tell her praise to all posterity,
That may admire such world's rare wonderment.
(Sonnet LxIx. )
Through all such passages Spenser speaks in the voice of Ronsard.
It was Ronsard who had, just before Spenser wrote, promised his
patron that his lute
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne sçay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire éternel.
(Odes, 1, vii);
who had declared of his mistress
Victorieuse des peuples et des Rois
S'en voleroit sus l'aile de ma ryme. (Amours, 1, lxxii);
who had foretold
Longtemps après la mort je vous feray revivre. '
Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur,
Au moins tant que vivront les plumes et le livre.
(Sonnets pour Hélène, II. )
17-2
## p. 260 (#282) ############################################
260 The Elizabethan Sonnet
3
In the hands of Elizabethan sonneteers, the 'eternising'
faculty of their verse became a staple, and, indeed, an inevitable,
topic. Especially did Drayton and Daniel vie with Spenser in
reiterating the conceit. Drayton, who spoke of his sonnets as 'my
immortal song' (Idea, vi, 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes'
(XLIV, 7), embodied the boast in such lines as
While thus my pen strives to eternize thee.
(Idea, xliv, 1. )
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish. (XLIV, 11. )
My name shall mount unto eternity.
(XLIV, 14. )
All that I seek is to eternize thee.
(XLVII, 14. )
Daniel was no less explicit
This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monnment.
(Delia, XXXVII, 9. )
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed
Unburied in these lines.
(xxxix, 9, 10. )
These [sc. my verses) are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time's consuming rage. (L, 9-12. )
Shakespeare, in his reference to his 'eternal lines' (XVIII, 12), and
in the assurances which he gives to the subject of his addresses
that his sonnets are, in Spenser's and in Daniel's exact phrase,
his hero's ‘monument,' merely accommodated himself to the pre-
vailing taste, even if he invested the topic with a splendour that
none else approached. But had Shakespeare never joined the
ranks of Elizabethan sonneteers, the example of Spenser, Daniel
and Drayton would have identified the Elizabethan sonnet with
the proud conceit.
It was not Spenser's work as a sonneteer which gave him his
enduring place on the heights of Parnassus: he owes his im-
mortality to other poetic achievement, which lent itself to larger
and freer development. Some of Spenser's contemporaries, who,
although endowed with a more modest measure of poetic power,
did not lack poetic feeling, unluckily confined their effort, in obedi-
ence to the prevailing vogue, almost entirely to the sonnet. The
result was that the dominant imitative tendencies almost succeeded
in stifling in them all original utterance. Such an one was Henry
Constable, master of a tuneful note, who drank too deep of the
Franco-Italian wells to give his muse full liberty of expansion. Like
Desportes, he christened his sonnet-sequence by the name of Diana,
and Italian words sonetto primo, sonetto secondo and so forth formed
the head lines of each of his quatorzains. He was a writer on a
## p. 261 (#283) ############################################
Constable's Diana
261
restricted scale. Only twenty-three poems figure in the original
edition of his volume, which he christened Diana, The praises of
his Mistres, In certaine sweete Sonnets (1592). "Augmented with
divers quatorzains of honourable and learned personages,' the book
reappeared in 1594. The poems there numbered seventy-six;
but many of the added pieces were from other pens. At least
eight were the work of Sir Philip Sidney. The second edition of
Diana was a typical venture of an enterprising publisher, and
was devised to catch the passing breeze of popular interest in
sonnet-sequences. Its claim to homogeneity lies in its reiterated
echo of Italian and French voices. Such of the added poems
as can be confidently assigned to Constable himself show a
growing dependence on Desportes. Very often he translates
without modification some of the Frenchman's baldest efforts. His
method may be judged by the following example. The tenth
sonnet in the sixth decade of Constable's Diana, 1594, opens
thus:
My God, my God, how much I love my goddess !
Whose virtues rare, unto the heavens arise.
My God, my God, how much I love her eyes!
One shining bright, the other full of hardness.
The Diane of Desportes (1, xxvi) supplies the original:
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ma deesse
Et de son chef les tresors precieux !
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ses beaux yeux,
Dont l'un m'est doux, l'autre plein de rudesse.
Both Daniel and Lodge deservedly made a higher literary
reputation than Constable. But each exemplified in even more
remarkable fashion the practice of literal translation. Daniel had
lyric gifts of a brilliant order. But he had no hesitation in seeking
both the language and the imagery of numerous lyrics as well as
of numerous sonnets in foreign collections. Like Spenser, he was
well read in Tasso; and much of his inspiration came direct from
;
Tasso's sonnets. The fine pastoral poem beginning 'O happy
golden Age, which he appended to his sonnet-sequence Delia,
is a felicitous, though literal, rendering of a song in Tasso's pas-
toral play Aminta, Atto I, sc. 2 (O bella età de 'l oro). Many of
Daniel's happiest quatorzains bear the same relation to preceding
efforts of the same poet; and, in several cases, where Daniel's
English text wanders somewhat from the Italian, the explanation
is to be found, not in the free expansiveness of Daniel's genius,
but in the depressing circumstance that Daniel was following the
## p. 262 (#284) ############################################
262
The Elizabethan Sonnet
French rendering of Tasso by Desportes instead of making direct
recourse to the Italian text. Tasso was only one of Daniel's
many foreign tutors. It was probably on Desportes that he most
relied, and the servility of his renderings from the French is
startling.
Thomas Lodge, whose sonnet-sequence Phillis appeared in
1593, improves on Daniel's example as a borrower of foreign work.
In fact, he merits the first place among Elizabethan plagiarists.
Of thirty-four poems in strict sonnet form which were included,
without hint of any indebtedness, in his volume Phillis, as
many as eighteen have been tracked to foreign sources. These
eighteen sonnets, which were published by Lodge as the fruits
of his own invention, are shown on investigation to be literal
transcripts from the French and Italian. Further investigation
is likely to extend the range of his loans.
It is worth while to analyse the proofs that are at present
accessible of Lodge's obligations. Lodge did not confine his
borrowings to the great writers of France and Italy. He laid
hands on work of second and third rate pens, which never acquired
widespread fame. That six of the eighteen sonnets under exami.
nation should be paraphrases of Ronsard, or that five should
translate Ariosto, is far less surprising than that three should
come direct from an obscure Italian author, Lodovico Paschale,
whose sonnet-sequence appeared at Venice in 1549. Paschale was
an undistinguished native of Cattaro, in Dalmatia, and his work
has only once been reprinted since its first appearance, and that
nearly two hundred years after original publication. From
Paschale comes one of the best known of Lodge's sonnets, which
opens thus:
It is not death, which wretched men call dying,
But that is very death which I endure,
When my coy-looking nymph, her grace envying,
By fatal frowns my domage doth procure.
Paschale's sonnet began thus (1549 edition, p. 40 verso)
Morte non é quel che morir s appella,
Ma quella é uera morte ch' io supporto,
Quando Madonna di pietá rubella,
A me riuolge il guardo acerbo e torto.
Other foreign poets on whom Lodge silently levied his heavy loans
were Petrarch, Sanazzaro and Bembo among Italians, and Des-
portes among Frenchmen.
The only other Elizabethan of high poetic rank, apart from
## p. 263 (#285) ############################################
Drayton's Sonnets
263
Shakespeare, who prominently associated himself with the son-
neteering movement, was Michael Drayton. In one effort, Drayton
reached the highest level of poetic feeling and expression. His
familiar quatorzain opening 'Since there's no help, come let us
kiss and part' is the one sonnet by a contemporary which deserves
to rank with some of Shakespeare's best. It is curious to note
that Drayton's triumphant poem was first printed in 1619, just a
quarter of a century after he first sought the suffrages of the
Elizabethan public as a sonneteer. The editio princeps of his
sonnet-sequence, called Ideas Mirrour. Amours in Quatorzains,
included fifty-two sonnets, and was reprinted no less than eight
times, with much revision, omission and addition, before the final
version came forth in 1619.
Drayton's sonneteering labours constitute a microcosm of
the whole sonneteering movement in Elizabethan England. He
borrows ideas and speech from all available sources at home and
abroad. Yet, like many contemporary offenders, he deprecates the
charge that he is 'a thief' of the 'wit' of Petrarch or Desportes.
With equal vigour of language he disclaims pretensions to tell the
story of his own heart:
Into these loves who but for passion looks:
At this first sight, here let him lay them by!
And seek elsewhere in turning other books,
Which better may his labour satisfy.
For the most part, Drayton is a sonneteer on the normal
Elizabethan pattern, and his sonnets are rarely distinguished by
poetic elevation. Occasionally, a thin rivulet of natural sentiment
winds its way through the fantastic conceits which his wide reading
suggests to him. But only in his famous sonnet did his genius find
in that poetic form full scope.
The title of Drayton's sonnet-sequence, Idea, gives a valuable
clue to one source of his inspiration. The title was directly
borrowed from an extensive sonnet-sequence in French called
L'Idée, by Claude de Pontoux, a poetic physician of Chalon. The
name symbolises the Platonic idea of beauty, which was notably
familiar to Du Bellay and Pontus de Tyard in France and to
Spenser in England. Drayton's 'soul-shrined saint,' his divine
Idea,' his 'fair Idea,' is the child of de Pontoux's Céleste Idée,
Fille de Dieu (sonnet x). But Drayton by no means confined his
sonneteering studies to the volume whence he took his shadowy
mistress's name. Drayton's imitative appeals to night, to his
lady's fair eyes, to rivers ; his classical allusions, his insistence that
;
## p. 264 (#286) ############################################
264
The Elizabethan Sonnet
>
his verse is eternal-all these themes recall expressions of Ronsard,
and Desportes, or of their humble disciples. A little is usually
added and a little taken away; but such slight substance as the
sentiments possess is, with rare exception, a foreign invention.
Doubtless, Drayton was more conscious than his companions of
the triviality of the sonneteering conventions. No precise foreign
origin seems accessible for his sonnet (xv) entitled His Remedy
for Love, in which he describes a potion concocted of the powder
of a dead woman's heart, moistened with another woman's tears,
boiled in a widow's sighs and breathed upon by an old maid.
The satire is clearly intended to apply to the strained simples
out of which the conventional type of sonnet was, too often,
compounded.
Like Sidney, Spenser and Daniel, Drayton, despite his warning,
added fuel to the fire of the sonneteering craze. His work inspired
younger men with the ambition to win the fame of sonneteer.
The most accomplished of Drayton's disciples was Richard
Barnfield, who dubs Drayton, 'Rowland my professed friend. ' His
endeavours are noteworthy because they aim at a variation of
the ordinary sonneteering motive. The series of twenty sonnets
which Barnfield, in 1595, appended to his Cynthia, a panegyric on
queen Elizabeth, are in a vein which differentiates them from
those of all the poets of the day save Shakespeare's sonnets.
Barnfield's sonnets profess to be addressed, not to the poet's
mistress, but to a lad Ganymede to whom the poet makes pro-
fession of love. But the manner in which Barnfield develops
his theme does not remove his work very far from the imitative
products of his fellow sonneteers. As he himself confessed, his
sonnets for the most part adapt Vergil's second Eclogue, in which
the shepherd Corydon declares his affection for the shepherd boy,
Alexis. Barnfield had true power of fervid expression, which
removes him from the ranks of the poetasters. But his habit of
mind was parasitic. He loved to play with classical conceits. His
sonnets, despite divergences from the beaten path in theme, pay
tribute in style and construction to the imitative convention.
The collections of sonnets by Barnabe Barnes, and by Giles
Fletcher, by William Percy, William Smith, Bartholomew Griffin
and Robert Tofte merit briefer notice. They reflect, with fewer
compensations than their better known contemporaries, the ten-
dencies to servility. All but Fletcher were young men courting
the muse for the first time, who did not pursue her favours in their
adult years. They avowed discipleship to Sidney or to Spenser,
## p. 265 (#287) ############################################
Barnabe Barnes
265
a
to Daniel, or to Drayton, and took pleasure in diluting their
master's words with clumsy verbiage drawn from the classics or
from contemporary poetry of the continent. Rarely did they show
facility or individuality, and, still more rarely, poetic feeling.
Barnabe Barnes, who made his reputation as a sonneteer in
the same year as Lodge, was more voluminous than any English
contemporary. He gave some promise of lyric power which he
never fulfilled. As a whole, his work is crude and lacks restraint.
At times, he sinks to meaningless doggerel, and some of his
grotesque conceits are offensive. His collection of amorous sonnets
bore the title of Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnets,
Madrigals, Elegies and Odes. Here, one hundred and five sonnets
are interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-
one elegies, three canzons,' twenty odes (one in sonnet form) and
what purports to be a translation of Moschus's first Eidullion.
Many of Barnes's poems are echoes of Sidney's verse, both in
Arcadia and in Astrophel and Stella. His canzon II is a spirited
tribute to Sidney under his poetic name of Astrophel. The first
stanza runs :
Sing! sing Parthenophil! sing! pipe! and play!
The feast is kept upon this plain,
Among th’Arcadian shepherds everywhere,
For Astrophel's birthday! Sweet Astrophel!
Arcadia's honour! mighty Paris' chief pride!
Where be the nymphs ? The Nymphs all gathered be,
To sing sweet Astrophe's sweet praise.
Barnes also boasted of his debt to
That sweet Tuscan Petrarch, which did pierce
His Laura with love sonnets.
But Barnes’s volume is a spacious miscellany of echoes of many
other foreign voices. He often emulates the anacreontic vein of
La Pléiade, and had obviously studied much Latin and Greek
poetry of post-classical times. There is a likelihood that Shake-
speare knew his work well, and resented the unaccountable esteem
which it enjoyed on its first publication.
Giles Fletcher, a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge,
was of maturer age than most contemporary sonneteers, when he
brought out his sonnet-sequence of Licia, for he was then 44 years
old. On his title-page, he boldly announces that his 'poems of
love' were written 'to the imitation of the best Latin poets and
others. ' In an address to his patroness, the wife of Sir Richard
Molineux, he deprecates the notion that his book enshrines any
episode in his own experience. He merely claims to follow the
## p. 266 (#288) ############################################
266
The Elizabethan Sonnet
fashion, and to imitate the 'men of learning and great parts' of
Italy, France and England, who have already written 'poems and
sonnets of love. ' He regrets the English poets' proclivities to
borrow their best and choice conceits' from Italy, Spain and
France, and expresses a pious preference for English homespun;
but this is a counsel of perfection, and he makes no pretence
to personal independence of foreign models.
A definite, if slender, interest attaches to Bartholomew Griffin's
Fidessa, a conventional sequence of sixty-two sonnets. Griffin
was exceptionally bold in imitating home products, and borrowed
much from Daniel and Drayton's recent volumes. But it is worthier
of remembrance that one of his sonnets, on the theme of Venus
and Adonis, was transferred with alterations to Jaggard's piratical
miscellany of 1599, The Passionate Pilgrim, all the contents
of which were assigned to Shakespeare on the title-page.
Only the worst features of the Elizabethan passion for sonneteer-
ing—its clumsy inanity and slavish mimicry—are visible in the
remaining sequences which were published in the last decade of
the sixteenth century. William Percy, in his Sonnets to the fairest
Coelia, 1593, bade his lute 'rehearse the songs of Rowland's (ie.
Drayton's) rage,' and found, with Ronsard, 'a Gorgon shadowed
under Venus' face. ' The anonymous poetaster who published, in
1594, a collection of forty sonnets under the title Zepheria took
his own measure when he confessed
My slubbering pencil casts too gross a matter,
Thy beauty's pure divinity to blaze.
'R. L Gentleman,' doubtless Richard Linche, published thirty-
nine sonnets, in 1596, under the title Diella, a crude anagram
on Delia. He freely plagiarised phrases and imagery of well known
sonneteers at home and abroad.
William Smith, a sycophantic disciple of Spenser, who published
fifty-one sonnets under the title Chloris, in 1596, and Robert
Tofte, who 'conceived in Italy' a sequence of forty sonnets in
irregular metres, entitled Laura (1597), merely give additional
proof of the plagiarising habit of the day.
But, as the queen's reign closed, there were signs that the
literary standard of the sonnet-sequence of love was rising above
such sordid levels as these. The old paths of imitation were
not forsaken, but the spirit of adaptation showed to higher ad-
vantage in the work of a few writers who, for the time, withheld
their efforts from the press. Chief among these was the courtly
Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander, afterwards earl of Stirling,
## p. 267 (#289) ############################################
Alexander, Drummond and Greville 267
,
who deferred the publication of his sonneteering experiment-
'the first fancies of his youth'-till 1604. Then he issued, under
the title Aurora, one hundred and six sonnets, interspersed, on
the Italian and French pattern, with a few songs and elegies.
Alexander is not a poet of deep feeling. But he has gifts of style
which raise him above the Elizabethan hacks. Another Scottish
poet, whose muse developed in the next generation, William
Drummond of Hawthornden, began his literary career as a son-
neteer on the Elizabethan pattern just before queen Elizabeth
died. In early youth, he made himself familiar with the most
recent literary effort of Italy, and reproduced with great energy
numerous Italian sonnets of comparatively recent date. But he
impregnated his adaptations with a native fire which places
him in an altogether different category from that of the juvenile
scribblers of Elizabethan London. With these two Scotsmen,
Alexander and Drummond, may be classed Sidney's friend, Fulke
Greville, afterwards lord Brooke, who wrote (but did not publish)
at the end of the sixteenth century a miscellaneous collection of
poems called Caelica. The collection consisted of one hundred
and nine short poems, on each of which the author bestowed the
title of sonnet. Only thirty-seven, however, are quatorzaing. The
remaining seventy-two so-called 'sonnets' are lyrics of all lengths
and in all metres. There is little internal connection among
Brooke's poems, and they deserve to be treated as a series of inde-
a
pendent lyrics. Nor is there any sign of real passion. Lord
Brooke's poetic mistresses, Caelica and Myra, are poetic figments
of his brain, and he varies his addresses to them with invocation
of queen Elizabeth under the poetic title of Cynthia, and with
reflective musings on metaphysical themes. The style is less
complicated than is habitual to Brooke's other literary work, and
the medley sounds a melodious note. Greville emulated the
example of Sir Philip Sidney; but the imagery often associates
itself, more closely than was suffered by Sidney's aims, with the
anacreontic vein of the Greek anthologists and of the French
sonneteers.
inaccurate nomenclature survived, indeed, to a far later generation;
and 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 second 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. Breton's 'Sonet l’ is in thirty-four stanzas of
four lines each, with one stanza of six lines. His ‘Sonet II' is in
thirty-two stanzas of six lines each. The long continued misuse
of the word illustrates the reluctance of the Elizabethans to accept
the sonnet's distinctive principles.
It was contemporary French, rather than older Italian, in-
fluences which first stirred in the Elizabethan mind a fruitful
interest in the genuine sonnet. The first inspiration came from
Clément Marot, the protestant French poet of the early years
of the sixteenth century, who was a contemporary of Wyatt
and Surrey. He studied Petrarch with ardour, translated into
French some of his sonnets and odes and made two or three
original experiments in the sonnet-form under the title of 'Epi-
grammes. Although it was only after Marot's death that the
reign of the sonnet was definitely inaugurated in France, his
tentative ventures impressed some of his English readers. But
Marot's influence was fugitive; it was quickly eclipsed. The sonnet
6
## p. 250 (#272) ############################################
250
The Elizabethan Sonnet
was not naturalised in France until Marot's successors, Pierre de
Ronsard and his friends, deliberately resolved to adapt to the
French language the finest fruit of foreign literature. Ronsard
and his companions assumed the corporate title of La Pléiade,
and the sonnet became the rallying flag of their school. In Italy,
Petrarch's sonneteering disciples multiplied greatly at the end
of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century; and
the French innovators detected in the rejuvenated Italian sonnet
a potent influence of domestic regeneration. The manifesto of the
new movement in French poetry was written by Joachim du Bellay,
one of its ablest champions. He solemnly urged Frenchmen to
write sonnets after the manner of Petrarch and the more modern
Italians. While pointing out to the French nation the avenues
to literary culture which the ancient classics offered them,
Du Bellay was especially emphatic in his commendation of the
Italian sonnet as a main source of culture: Sonne-moi ces beaux
sonnets, he adjured his fellow-countrymen, non moins docte que
plaisante invention italienne, pour lesquels tu as Pétrarque et
quelques modernes Italiens,
The primary debt that the Elizabethan sonnet owed to the
French development of literary energy is attested by the first-
fruits of Spenser's muse-first-fruits which constitute him the
virtual father of the Elizabethan sonnet. There seems little
question that Spenser, as early as 1569, when a boy of seventeen,
contributed some twenty-six sonnets, anonymously, to a pious
tract rendered, by another hand, from Flemish into English, under
the title of A Theatre for Worldlings. There, Spenser made his
first entry on the literary stage. With some changes, these youth-
ful poems were reprinted, twenty-two years later, in an acknow-
ledged collection of Spenser's minor verse, called Complaints, for
the whole of which the poet's responsibility goes unquestioned.
Spenser's early ventures in the sonnet form were divided into two
categories, the one entitled The Visions of Bellay, the other The
Visions of Petrarch. The latter title is misleading. Both sets
of sonnets were drawn directly from the French-the first from
Joachim du Bellay and the second from Clément Marot.
Du Bellay's sonnets were rendered by Spenser literally, though
without rime. This embellishment he only added to his revised
version. He also undertook, later, the translation of a longer
series of Du Bellay's sonnets, Les Antiquités de Rome, which the
English poet rechristened The Ruins of Rome. Elsewhere, in his
mature work, a close study of Du Bellay is apparent, and he openly
## p. 251 (#273) ############################################
Spenser and his French Masters
251
6
acknowledged his indebtedness to Du Bellay's delicate muse in
a laudatory sonnet which includes these lines:
Bellay, first garland of free Poësie,
That France brought forth, though fruitfull of brave wits,
Well worthie thou of immortalitie.
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. There,
Marot reproduces canzone XLII in Petrarch's collection of sonnets
to Laura. The French title, which conforms with the subject-matter,
is Marot's invention; Petrarch gave his canzone no specific head-
ing. Spenser's first draft of 1569 (which was largely recast in the
re-issue of 1591) slavishly adhered to the French, as may be
seen from the 'envoy,' which, in Marot's verse, runs thus:
O chanson mienne, en tes conclusions
Dy hardiment: Ces six grand visions,
A mon seigneur donnent un doulx desir
De briefvement soubz la terre gesir.
Spenser first rendered these lines thus:
My song thus now in thy Conclusions,
Say boldly that these same six visions
Do yelde unto thy lorde a sweete request,
Ere it be long within the earth to rest.
The text of the original Italian differs from both the French and
the English, and is of superior point and quality.
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. Some, too, of Ronsard's
humbler followers, notably Philippe Desportes, were as sonneteers
scarcely less voluminous and popular than their master. Ronsard
and Desportes were the chief French tutors of English poets at
the end of the sixteenth century, and Desportes, for a season, took
precedence of Ronsard. Few men,' wrote Lodge of Desportes, in
1590, are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes
whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody's hand? . '
At the same time, Petrarch and many of his Italian imitators
were rediscovered by the Elizabethans, and Petrarch's sway was
1 Margarite, p. 79.
## p. 252 (#274) ############################################
252
The Elizabethan Sonnet
.
ultimately re-established, so that he and his Italian disciples
exerted, at the close of queen Elizabeth's reign, the most powerful
spell of all on English sonneteers. Elizabethan critics failed to
detect in the Elizabethan sonnet much appreciable deviation from
its Petrarchian archetype. “In his sweete-mourning sonets,' wrote
Sir John Harington, a typical Elizabethan, in 1591, 'the dolefull
Petrarke. . . seemes to have comprehended all the passions that all
men of that humour have felt. ' Gabriel Harvey, in his Pierces
Supererogation (1593, p. 61), after enthusiastic commendation of
Petrarch's sonnets ('Petrarch's invention is pure love itself:
Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself'), justifies the common
English practice of imitating them on the ground that
all the noblest Italian, French and Spanish poets have in their several veins
Petrarchized, and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest muse to be
his scholar, whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknow.
ledge their master.
Spenser's youthful experiments attracted little attention.
Thomas Watson was the earliest Elizabethan to make a reputation
as a sonneteer. Steevens, the Shakespearean commentator, echo-
ing, with characteristic perversity, the pedantic view of some
Elizabethan scholars, declared Watson to be a much more elegant'
writer of sonnets than Shakespeare. Watson, in truth, was a frigid
scholiast, who was characteristically indifferent to strict metrical
law. Yet his work is historically of great value as marking the
progress and scope of foreign influences. In early life, Watson
translated all Petrarch's sonnets into Latin; but only two speci-
mens of his rendering survive. This laborious undertaking formed
the prelude to his sonneteering efforts in English. In 1582,
he published, at the earnest entreaty of his friends, according to
his own account, one hundred 'passions' or poems of love, which
contemporaries invariably described as sonnets, though, with rare
exceptions, they were each eighteen lines long. The book was
entitled: The EKATOMIAOIA or Passionate Centurie of Love.
Congratulatory quatorzains prefaced the volume. One friend
greeted Watson as the successor of Petrarch, the inheritor of that
vein which glorified Madonna Laura. Another admirer, writing in
Latin, credited Watson with the power of achieving for English
poetry what Ronsard had done for French.
The most curious fact about this first collection of so-called
somets by Watson is the care with which the writer disclaims
originality. To each poem he prefaces a prose introduction, in
which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotations, the
## p. 253 (#275) ############################################
Thomas Watson's Sonnets
253
French, Italian or classical poem which was the source of his
inspiration. He aims at little more than paraphrasing sonnets
and lyrics by Petrarch and Ronsard, or by Petrarch’s disciples,
Serafino dell'Aquila (1466—1500), Ercole Strozza (1471–1508) or
Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1548), together with passages from the
chief writers of Greece and Rome. As a rule, his rendering is quite
literal, though, now and then, he inverts a line or two of his original,
or inserts a new sentence. In the conventional appeals to his way-
ward mistress, and in his expressions of amorous emotions, there
is no pretence of a revelation of personal experience. Watson's
endeavour won almost universal applause from contemporaries,
but it is wholly a literary exercise, which appeals for approval, not
on the ground of sincerity of emotion, but, rather, by reason of its
skill in dovetailing together fragments of foreign poetry.
The welcome offered Watson's first published collection of
sonnet-poems induced him to prepare a second, which, however,
was not issued till 1593, a year after his death. Watson's second
venture bore the title The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained;
it differed from the first in respecting the primary law which
confined the sonnet within a limit of fourteen lines. Although no
apparatus criticus was incorporated with it, the influence of France
and Italy was no better concealed from the seeing eye in Watson's
final sonneteering essay than in its predecessor. Watson's Tears
of Fancie were, once more, drops of water from Petrarch's and
Ronsard's fountains.
Watson's example largely encouraged the vogue of the Eliza-
bethan 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.
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, ad-
mittedly, is a prince among Elizabethan lyric poets and sonneteers.
He loiters far behind Shakespeare in either capacity. But Shake-
speare, as a sonneteer, should, of right, be considered apart? . With
2 See the chapter on Shakespeare's poetry, in volume v.
## p. 254 (#276) ############################################
254
The Elizabethan Sonnet
that reservation, Sidney may fairly be credited as marching at the
head of the contemporary army of sonneteers.
Although the date cannot be stated with certainty, it is prob-
able that Sir Philip Sidney's ample collection of sonnets, which
is known by the general title of Astrophel and Stella, was written
between the years 1580 and 1584. Widely circulated in manuscript
before and after Sidney's death in 1586, they were not printed till
1591, and then surreptitiously by an enterprising publisher, who
had no authority from Sidney's representatives to undertake the
task. It was not until 1598 that a fully authorised version came
from the press.
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 himself married on
20 September 1583, and lived on the best terms with his wife,
who long survived him. But 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
## p. 255 (#277) ############################################
Sidney's Sonnets
255
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 'trans-
cendent 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. He was endowed
with the lyric power of creating at will the illusion of a personal
confession. He is capable of the true poetic effect. None the less,
his poetic story of passion is out of harmony with the facts of his
biography, and it is reminiscent of foreign models. Yet neither
the interval between the fiction and the fact, nor the indebtedness
to French or Italian masters could dull the vivacious strength of
Sidney's poetic power.
None who is widely read in the sonnets of Petrarch or
Ronsard fails to perceive the foreign echoes in Sidney's sonnets.
The appeals to sleep, to the nightingale, to the moon, to his bed,
to his mistress's dog, which form the staple of much of Sidney's
poetry, resemble the apostrophes of the foreign sonneteers far too
closely to entitle them to the unqualified credit of originality.
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
poor Petrarch's long deceased woes
With new-born sighs and denizenëd wit. (Sonnet xv. )
Echoing Persius, he professes to follow a different method:
I never drank of Agannipe's well . .
I am no pickpurse of another's wit. (Sonnet Lxxiv. )
## p. 256 (#278) ############################################
256
The Elizabethan Sonnet
Yet the form, no less than the spirit, of Sidney's sonnets renders
his protest of doubtful significance. Sidney showed a higher
respect than any of his native contemporaries for the metrical
constitution 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. His supremacy in
that regard was at once frankly and justly acknowledged by his
contemporaries. On the first appearance of his effort in print, his
admirer, Thomas Nashe, addressed contemporary practitioners
this warning apostrophe: 'Put out your rushlights, you poets and
rhymers! and bequeath your crazed quatorzains to the chandlers!
for lo, here he cometh that hath broken your legs. '
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. Each of the six following
years saw the birth of many volumes of sonnet-sequences, which
owed much to the incentive of Astrophel and Stella. 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. Three more volumes, in addition to the revised
editions of Daniel's Delia and Constable's Diana, appeared in
1594, viz: William Percy's Coelia, an anonymous writer's Ze-
pheria and Michael Drayton's Idea (in its first shape). E. C. 's
Emaricdulfe, Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Richard Barnfield's
Cynthia, with certaine Sonnets, came out in 1595. Griffin's Fidessa,
Linche’s Diella and William Smith's Chloris appeared in 1596.
Finally, in 1597, the procession was joined by Robert Tofte's
## p. 257 (#279) ############################################
Spenser's Amoretti
257
Laura, a pale reflection of Petrarch's effort (as the name implied),
although travelling far from the metrical principles of the genuine
form of sonnet. 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. But the amorous sequence is the
dominant feature of the history of the Elizabethan sonnet. The
spiritual and adulatory quatorzains fill a subsidiary place in the
picture. The amorous sequences incline, for the most part, to
Watson's level rather than to Sidney's, and, while they respect the
English metrical form, they generously illustrate the prevailing
tendency to more or less literal transcription from foreign masters.
The sonneteering work of Spenser in his maturity is to be
linked with Sidney. But even his metrical versatility and genuine
poetic force did not preserve him altogether from the injurious
influence of the imitative tendency. Only a small proportion of
his sonnets embody original ideas or betray complete freedom in
handling old conceits. 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 un-
known 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.
Spenser bestowed on his sequence of eighty-eight sonnets
the Italian name of Amoretti. His heroine, his 'sweet warrior'
(sonnet LVII), is the child of Petrarch's 'dolce guerriera. His
imagery is, at times, assimilated with little change from the sonnets
of his contemporary Tasso, while Ronsard and Desportes give
him numerous suggestions, although he rarely stoops to mere
verbal translation of foreign verse. Spenser's Amoretti were
17
E. L. III.
CH, XII.
## p. 258 (#280) ############################################
258
The Elizabethan Sonnet
addressed to the lady who became his wife, and a strand of
autobiography was woven into the borrowed threads. Yet it is
very occasionally that he escaped altogether from the fetters
of current convention, and gave free play in his sonnets to his
poetic faculty.
Spenser's sentiment professedly ranges itself with continental
and classical idealism. In two sonnets he identifies his heroine
with the Petrarchian (or Neo-Platonic) idea of beauty, which had
lately played a prominent part in numberless French sonnets by
Du Bellay, Desportes, Pontus de Tyard, Claude de Pontoux and
others. Many Elizabethan sonneteers marched under the same
banner. Drayton, in conferring on his sonnets the title Idea,
claimed to rank with the Italian and French Platonists. But
Spenser sounds the idealistic note far more clearly than any
contemporary. He writes in sonnet xLv:
Within my heart (though hardly it can shew
Thing so divine to view of earthly eye),
The fair Idea of your celestial hew,
And every part remains immortally.
This reflects the familiar French strain :
Sur le plus belle Idée au ciel vous fustes faite,
Voulant nature un jour monstrer tout son pouvoir;
Depuis vous luy servez de forme et de miroir,
Et toute autre beauté sur la vostre est portraite.
(Desportes, Diane, II, lxvii. )
Like the French writers, Spenser ultimately (in sonnet LXXXVII)
disclaims any mortal object of adoration in ecstatic recognition of
the superior fascination of the idéa:
Ne ought I see, though in the clearest day,
When others gaze upon their shadows vain,
But th’onely image of that heavenly ray,
Whereof some glance doth in mine eye remain.
Of which beholding the Idaea plain,
Through contemplation of my purest part,
With light thereof I do myself sustain,
And thereon feed my love affamish'd heart.
Pontus de Tyard had already closed the last book of his Les
Erreurs Amoureuses on the identical note:
Mon esprit a heureusement porté,
Au plus beau ciel sa force outrecuidée,
Pour s'abbreuuer en la plus belle Idée
D'où le pourtrait i'ay pris de la beauté. (bk. III, xxxiji. )
Spenser's sonnets similarly helped to familiarise the Elizabethan
reader with a poetic conceit, which, although not of French origin,
was assimilated with fervour by the sonneteers of La Pléiade. The
## p. 259 (#281) ############################################
The Sonneteering Conceit of Immortality 259
notion that poets not merely achieved immortality through their
verse, but had the power of conferring immortality on those to
whom their poetry was addressed, was a classical conceit of great
antiquity, which Pindar among the Greeks, and Horace and Ovid
among the Latins, had notably glorified. The Italians of the
renascence had been attracted by the fancy.
But Ronsard and
his disciples had developed it with a complacency that gave
it new life. From France it spread to Elizabethan England, where
it was quickly welcomed. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apologie for
Poetrie (1595), wrote that it was the common habit of poets 'to
tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. ' 'Men
of great calling,' wrote Nashe, in his Pierce Pennilesse (1593),ʻtake
it of merit to have their names eternised by poets. '
Spenser was among the Elizabethan sonneteers who con-
spicuously adapted the conceit to English verse. Shakespeare,
alone excepted, no sonneteer repeated the poetic vaunt with
greater emphasis than Spenser. He describes his sonnets as
This verse that never shall expire. . . .
Fair be no longer proud of that shall perish.
But that, which shall you make immortal, cherish.
(Sonnet xxvII. )
He tells his mistress
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
(Sonnet Lxxv. )
With unbounded confidence he asserts:
Even this verse, vow'd to eternity,
Shall be thereof immortal moniment;
And tell her praise to all posterity,
That may admire such world's rare wonderment.
(Sonnet LxIx. )
Through all such passages Spenser speaks in the voice of Ronsard.
It was Ronsard who had, just before Spenser wrote, promised his
patron that his lute
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne sçay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire éternel.
(Odes, 1, vii);
who had declared of his mistress
Victorieuse des peuples et des Rois
S'en voleroit sus l'aile de ma ryme. (Amours, 1, lxxii);
who had foretold
Longtemps après la mort je vous feray revivre. '
Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur,
Au moins tant que vivront les plumes et le livre.
(Sonnets pour Hélène, II. )
17-2
## p. 260 (#282) ############################################
260 The Elizabethan Sonnet
3
In the hands of Elizabethan sonneteers, the 'eternising'
faculty of their verse became a staple, and, indeed, an inevitable,
topic. Especially did Drayton and Daniel vie with Spenser in
reiterating the conceit. Drayton, who spoke of his sonnets as 'my
immortal song' (Idea, vi, 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes'
(XLIV, 7), embodied the boast in such lines as
While thus my pen strives to eternize thee.
(Idea, xliv, 1. )
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish. (XLIV, 11. )
My name shall mount unto eternity.
(XLIV, 14. )
All that I seek is to eternize thee.
(XLVII, 14. )
Daniel was no less explicit
This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monnment.
(Delia, XXXVII, 9. )
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed
Unburied in these lines.
(xxxix, 9, 10. )
These [sc. my verses) are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time's consuming rage. (L, 9-12. )
Shakespeare, in his reference to his 'eternal lines' (XVIII, 12), and
in the assurances which he gives to the subject of his addresses
that his sonnets are, in Spenser's and in Daniel's exact phrase,
his hero's ‘monument,' merely accommodated himself to the pre-
vailing taste, even if he invested the topic with a splendour that
none else approached. But had Shakespeare never joined the
ranks of Elizabethan sonneteers, the example of Spenser, Daniel
and Drayton would have identified the Elizabethan sonnet with
the proud conceit.
It was not Spenser's work as a sonneteer which gave him his
enduring place on the heights of Parnassus: he owes his im-
mortality to other poetic achievement, which lent itself to larger
and freer development. Some of Spenser's contemporaries, who,
although endowed with a more modest measure of poetic power,
did not lack poetic feeling, unluckily confined their effort, in obedi-
ence to the prevailing vogue, almost entirely to the sonnet. The
result was that the dominant imitative tendencies almost succeeded
in stifling in them all original utterance. Such an one was Henry
Constable, master of a tuneful note, who drank too deep of the
Franco-Italian wells to give his muse full liberty of expansion. Like
Desportes, he christened his sonnet-sequence by the name of Diana,
and Italian words sonetto primo, sonetto secondo and so forth formed
the head lines of each of his quatorzains. He was a writer on a
## p. 261 (#283) ############################################
Constable's Diana
261
restricted scale. Only twenty-three poems figure in the original
edition of his volume, which he christened Diana, The praises of
his Mistres, In certaine sweete Sonnets (1592). "Augmented with
divers quatorzains of honourable and learned personages,' the book
reappeared in 1594. The poems there numbered seventy-six;
but many of the added pieces were from other pens. At least
eight were the work of Sir Philip Sidney. The second edition of
Diana was a typical venture of an enterprising publisher, and
was devised to catch the passing breeze of popular interest in
sonnet-sequences. Its claim to homogeneity lies in its reiterated
echo of Italian and French voices. Such of the added poems
as can be confidently assigned to Constable himself show a
growing dependence on Desportes. Very often he translates
without modification some of the Frenchman's baldest efforts. His
method may be judged by the following example. The tenth
sonnet in the sixth decade of Constable's Diana, 1594, opens
thus:
My God, my God, how much I love my goddess !
Whose virtues rare, unto the heavens arise.
My God, my God, how much I love her eyes!
One shining bright, the other full of hardness.
The Diane of Desportes (1, xxvi) supplies the original:
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ma deesse
Et de son chef les tresors precieux !
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ses beaux yeux,
Dont l'un m'est doux, l'autre plein de rudesse.
Both Daniel and Lodge deservedly made a higher literary
reputation than Constable. But each exemplified in even more
remarkable fashion the practice of literal translation. Daniel had
lyric gifts of a brilliant order. But he had no hesitation in seeking
both the language and the imagery of numerous lyrics as well as
of numerous sonnets in foreign collections. Like Spenser, he was
well read in Tasso; and much of his inspiration came direct from
;
Tasso's sonnets. The fine pastoral poem beginning 'O happy
golden Age, which he appended to his sonnet-sequence Delia,
is a felicitous, though literal, rendering of a song in Tasso's pas-
toral play Aminta, Atto I, sc. 2 (O bella età de 'l oro). Many of
Daniel's happiest quatorzains bear the same relation to preceding
efforts of the same poet; and, in several cases, where Daniel's
English text wanders somewhat from the Italian, the explanation
is to be found, not in the free expansiveness of Daniel's genius,
but in the depressing circumstance that Daniel was following the
## p. 262 (#284) ############################################
262
The Elizabethan Sonnet
French rendering of Tasso by Desportes instead of making direct
recourse to the Italian text. Tasso was only one of Daniel's
many foreign tutors. It was probably on Desportes that he most
relied, and the servility of his renderings from the French is
startling.
Thomas Lodge, whose sonnet-sequence Phillis appeared in
1593, improves on Daniel's example as a borrower of foreign work.
In fact, he merits the first place among Elizabethan plagiarists.
Of thirty-four poems in strict sonnet form which were included,
without hint of any indebtedness, in his volume Phillis, as
many as eighteen have been tracked to foreign sources. These
eighteen sonnets, which were published by Lodge as the fruits
of his own invention, are shown on investigation to be literal
transcripts from the French and Italian. Further investigation
is likely to extend the range of his loans.
It is worth while to analyse the proofs that are at present
accessible of Lodge's obligations. Lodge did not confine his
borrowings to the great writers of France and Italy. He laid
hands on work of second and third rate pens, which never acquired
widespread fame. That six of the eighteen sonnets under exami.
nation should be paraphrases of Ronsard, or that five should
translate Ariosto, is far less surprising than that three should
come direct from an obscure Italian author, Lodovico Paschale,
whose sonnet-sequence appeared at Venice in 1549. Paschale was
an undistinguished native of Cattaro, in Dalmatia, and his work
has only once been reprinted since its first appearance, and that
nearly two hundred years after original publication. From
Paschale comes one of the best known of Lodge's sonnets, which
opens thus:
It is not death, which wretched men call dying,
But that is very death which I endure,
When my coy-looking nymph, her grace envying,
By fatal frowns my domage doth procure.
Paschale's sonnet began thus (1549 edition, p. 40 verso)
Morte non é quel che morir s appella,
Ma quella é uera morte ch' io supporto,
Quando Madonna di pietá rubella,
A me riuolge il guardo acerbo e torto.
Other foreign poets on whom Lodge silently levied his heavy loans
were Petrarch, Sanazzaro and Bembo among Italians, and Des-
portes among Frenchmen.
The only other Elizabethan of high poetic rank, apart from
## p. 263 (#285) ############################################
Drayton's Sonnets
263
Shakespeare, who prominently associated himself with the son-
neteering movement, was Michael Drayton. In one effort, Drayton
reached the highest level of poetic feeling and expression. His
familiar quatorzain opening 'Since there's no help, come let us
kiss and part' is the one sonnet by a contemporary which deserves
to rank with some of Shakespeare's best. It is curious to note
that Drayton's triumphant poem was first printed in 1619, just a
quarter of a century after he first sought the suffrages of the
Elizabethan public as a sonneteer. The editio princeps of his
sonnet-sequence, called Ideas Mirrour. Amours in Quatorzains,
included fifty-two sonnets, and was reprinted no less than eight
times, with much revision, omission and addition, before the final
version came forth in 1619.
Drayton's sonneteering labours constitute a microcosm of
the whole sonneteering movement in Elizabethan England. He
borrows ideas and speech from all available sources at home and
abroad. Yet, like many contemporary offenders, he deprecates the
charge that he is 'a thief' of the 'wit' of Petrarch or Desportes.
With equal vigour of language he disclaims pretensions to tell the
story of his own heart:
Into these loves who but for passion looks:
At this first sight, here let him lay them by!
And seek elsewhere in turning other books,
Which better may his labour satisfy.
For the most part, Drayton is a sonneteer on the normal
Elizabethan pattern, and his sonnets are rarely distinguished by
poetic elevation. Occasionally, a thin rivulet of natural sentiment
winds its way through the fantastic conceits which his wide reading
suggests to him. But only in his famous sonnet did his genius find
in that poetic form full scope.
The title of Drayton's sonnet-sequence, Idea, gives a valuable
clue to one source of his inspiration. The title was directly
borrowed from an extensive sonnet-sequence in French called
L'Idée, by Claude de Pontoux, a poetic physician of Chalon. The
name symbolises the Platonic idea of beauty, which was notably
familiar to Du Bellay and Pontus de Tyard in France and to
Spenser in England. Drayton's 'soul-shrined saint,' his divine
Idea,' his 'fair Idea,' is the child of de Pontoux's Céleste Idée,
Fille de Dieu (sonnet x). But Drayton by no means confined his
sonneteering studies to the volume whence he took his shadowy
mistress's name. Drayton's imitative appeals to night, to his
lady's fair eyes, to rivers ; his classical allusions, his insistence that
;
## p. 264 (#286) ############################################
264
The Elizabethan Sonnet
>
his verse is eternal-all these themes recall expressions of Ronsard,
and Desportes, or of their humble disciples. A little is usually
added and a little taken away; but such slight substance as the
sentiments possess is, with rare exception, a foreign invention.
Doubtless, Drayton was more conscious than his companions of
the triviality of the sonneteering conventions. No precise foreign
origin seems accessible for his sonnet (xv) entitled His Remedy
for Love, in which he describes a potion concocted of the powder
of a dead woman's heart, moistened with another woman's tears,
boiled in a widow's sighs and breathed upon by an old maid.
The satire is clearly intended to apply to the strained simples
out of which the conventional type of sonnet was, too often,
compounded.
Like Sidney, Spenser and Daniel, Drayton, despite his warning,
added fuel to the fire of the sonneteering craze. His work inspired
younger men with the ambition to win the fame of sonneteer.
The most accomplished of Drayton's disciples was Richard
Barnfield, who dubs Drayton, 'Rowland my professed friend. ' His
endeavours are noteworthy because they aim at a variation of
the ordinary sonneteering motive. The series of twenty sonnets
which Barnfield, in 1595, appended to his Cynthia, a panegyric on
queen Elizabeth, are in a vein which differentiates them from
those of all the poets of the day save Shakespeare's sonnets.
Barnfield's sonnets profess to be addressed, not to the poet's
mistress, but to a lad Ganymede to whom the poet makes pro-
fession of love. But the manner in which Barnfield develops
his theme does not remove his work very far from the imitative
products of his fellow sonneteers. As he himself confessed, his
sonnets for the most part adapt Vergil's second Eclogue, in which
the shepherd Corydon declares his affection for the shepherd boy,
Alexis. Barnfield had true power of fervid expression, which
removes him from the ranks of the poetasters. But his habit of
mind was parasitic. He loved to play with classical conceits. His
sonnets, despite divergences from the beaten path in theme, pay
tribute in style and construction to the imitative convention.
The collections of sonnets by Barnabe Barnes, and by Giles
Fletcher, by William Percy, William Smith, Bartholomew Griffin
and Robert Tofte merit briefer notice. They reflect, with fewer
compensations than their better known contemporaries, the ten-
dencies to servility. All but Fletcher were young men courting
the muse for the first time, who did not pursue her favours in their
adult years. They avowed discipleship to Sidney or to Spenser,
## p. 265 (#287) ############################################
Barnabe Barnes
265
a
to Daniel, or to Drayton, and took pleasure in diluting their
master's words with clumsy verbiage drawn from the classics or
from contemporary poetry of the continent. Rarely did they show
facility or individuality, and, still more rarely, poetic feeling.
Barnabe Barnes, who made his reputation as a sonneteer in
the same year as Lodge, was more voluminous than any English
contemporary. He gave some promise of lyric power which he
never fulfilled. As a whole, his work is crude and lacks restraint.
At times, he sinks to meaningless doggerel, and some of his
grotesque conceits are offensive. His collection of amorous sonnets
bore the title of Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnets,
Madrigals, Elegies and Odes. Here, one hundred and five sonnets
are interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-
one elegies, three canzons,' twenty odes (one in sonnet form) and
what purports to be a translation of Moschus's first Eidullion.
Many of Barnes's poems are echoes of Sidney's verse, both in
Arcadia and in Astrophel and Stella. His canzon II is a spirited
tribute to Sidney under his poetic name of Astrophel. The first
stanza runs :
Sing! sing Parthenophil! sing! pipe! and play!
The feast is kept upon this plain,
Among th’Arcadian shepherds everywhere,
For Astrophel's birthday! Sweet Astrophel!
Arcadia's honour! mighty Paris' chief pride!
Where be the nymphs ? The Nymphs all gathered be,
To sing sweet Astrophe's sweet praise.
Barnes also boasted of his debt to
That sweet Tuscan Petrarch, which did pierce
His Laura with love sonnets.
But Barnes’s volume is a spacious miscellany of echoes of many
other foreign voices. He often emulates the anacreontic vein of
La Pléiade, and had obviously studied much Latin and Greek
poetry of post-classical times. There is a likelihood that Shake-
speare knew his work well, and resented the unaccountable esteem
which it enjoyed on its first publication.
Giles Fletcher, a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge,
was of maturer age than most contemporary sonneteers, when he
brought out his sonnet-sequence of Licia, for he was then 44 years
old. On his title-page, he boldly announces that his 'poems of
love' were written 'to the imitation of the best Latin poets and
others. ' In an address to his patroness, the wife of Sir Richard
Molineux, he deprecates the notion that his book enshrines any
episode in his own experience. He merely claims to follow the
## p. 266 (#288) ############################################
266
The Elizabethan Sonnet
fashion, and to imitate the 'men of learning and great parts' of
Italy, France and England, who have already written 'poems and
sonnets of love. ' He regrets the English poets' proclivities to
borrow their best and choice conceits' from Italy, Spain and
France, and expresses a pious preference for English homespun;
but this is a counsel of perfection, and he makes no pretence
to personal independence of foreign models.
A definite, if slender, interest attaches to Bartholomew Griffin's
Fidessa, a conventional sequence of sixty-two sonnets. Griffin
was exceptionally bold in imitating home products, and borrowed
much from Daniel and Drayton's recent volumes. But it is worthier
of remembrance that one of his sonnets, on the theme of Venus
and Adonis, was transferred with alterations to Jaggard's piratical
miscellany of 1599, The Passionate Pilgrim, all the contents
of which were assigned to Shakespeare on the title-page.
Only the worst features of the Elizabethan passion for sonneteer-
ing—its clumsy inanity and slavish mimicry—are visible in the
remaining sequences which were published in the last decade of
the sixteenth century. William Percy, in his Sonnets to the fairest
Coelia, 1593, bade his lute 'rehearse the songs of Rowland's (ie.
Drayton's) rage,' and found, with Ronsard, 'a Gorgon shadowed
under Venus' face. ' The anonymous poetaster who published, in
1594, a collection of forty sonnets under the title Zepheria took
his own measure when he confessed
My slubbering pencil casts too gross a matter,
Thy beauty's pure divinity to blaze.
'R. L Gentleman,' doubtless Richard Linche, published thirty-
nine sonnets, in 1596, under the title Diella, a crude anagram
on Delia. He freely plagiarised phrases and imagery of well known
sonneteers at home and abroad.
William Smith, a sycophantic disciple of Spenser, who published
fifty-one sonnets under the title Chloris, in 1596, and Robert
Tofte, who 'conceived in Italy' a sequence of forty sonnets in
irregular metres, entitled Laura (1597), merely give additional
proof of the plagiarising habit of the day.
But, as the queen's reign closed, there were signs that the
literary standard of the sonnet-sequence of love was rising above
such sordid levels as these. The old paths of imitation were
not forsaken, but the spirit of adaptation showed to higher ad-
vantage in the work of a few writers who, for the time, withheld
their efforts from the press. Chief among these was the courtly
Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander, afterwards earl of Stirling,
## p. 267 (#289) ############################################
Alexander, Drummond and Greville 267
,
who deferred the publication of his sonneteering experiment-
'the first fancies of his youth'-till 1604. Then he issued, under
the title Aurora, one hundred and six sonnets, interspersed, on
the Italian and French pattern, with a few songs and elegies.
Alexander is not a poet of deep feeling. But he has gifts of style
which raise him above the Elizabethan hacks. Another Scottish
poet, whose muse developed in the next generation, William
Drummond of Hawthornden, began his literary career as a son-
neteer on the Elizabethan pattern just before queen Elizabeth
died. In early youth, he made himself familiar with the most
recent literary effort of Italy, and reproduced with great energy
numerous Italian sonnets of comparatively recent date. But he
impregnated his adaptations with a native fire which places
him in an altogether different category from that of the juvenile
scribblers of Elizabethan London. With these two Scotsmen,
Alexander and Drummond, may be classed Sidney's friend, Fulke
Greville, afterwards lord Brooke, who wrote (but did not publish)
at the end of the sixteenth century a miscellaneous collection of
poems called Caelica. The collection consisted of one hundred
and nine short poems, on each of which the author bestowed the
title of sonnet. Only thirty-seven, however, are quatorzaing. The
remaining seventy-two so-called 'sonnets' are lyrics of all lengths
and in all metres. There is little internal connection among
Brooke's poems, and they deserve to be treated as a series of inde-
a
pendent lyrics. Nor is there any sign of real passion. Lord
Brooke's poetic mistresses, Caelica and Myra, are poetic figments
of his brain, and he varies his addresses to them with invocation
of queen Elizabeth under the poetic title of Cynthia, and with
reflective musings on metaphysical themes. The style is less
complicated than is habitual to Brooke's other literary work, and
the medley sounds a melodious note. Greville emulated the
example of Sir Philip Sidney; but the imagery often associates
itself, more closely than was suffered by Sidney's aims, with the
anacreontic vein of the Greek anthologists and of the French
sonneteers.
