This laborious undertaking formed
the prelude to his sonneteering efforts in English.
the prelude to his sonneteering efforts in English.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v03
This recurrence, again, suggested to Spenser
many characteristic effects of sound: he saw, for example, that
the immediate sequence of rime in the fourth and fifth lines
provided a natural half-way house for a turn in the rhetoric of the
sentence; so that the fifth line is used, generally, either as the close
of the first stage in the stanza, or the beginning of the second ;
but he is very skilful in avoiding monotony, and will often run
a single sentence through the stanza, or will break up the stanza
into as many parts as there are lines, e. g.
Behinde him was Reproch, Repentaunce, Shame;
Reproch the first, Shame next, Repent behinde:
Repentaunce feeble, sorrowfull, and lame;
Reproch despightfull, carelesse, and unkinde;
Shame most ill-favourd, bestiall, and blinde:
Shame lowrd, Repentaunce sighd, Reproch did scould;
Reproch sharpe stings, Repentaunce whips entwinde,
Shame burning brond-yrons in her hand did hold:
All three to each unlike, yet all made in one mould.
1 Book 11, canto VI, stanza 29.
? Book tri, canto XII, stanza 24.
## p. 240 (#262) ############################################
240
The Poetry of Spenser
These metrical combinations and permutations are often em-
ployed very beautifully in pathetic passages :
Ye Gods of seas, if any Gods at all
Have care of right, or rath of wretches wrong,
By one or other way me, woefull thrall,
Deliver hence out of this dungeon strong,
In which I daily dying am too long:
And if ye deeme me death for loving one
That loves not me, then doe it not prolong,
But let me die and end my days attone,
And let him live unlovd, or love him selfe alone.
But if that life ye unto me decree,
Then let mee live as lovers ought to do,
And of my lifes deare love beloved be:
And if he should through pride your doome undo,
Do you by duresse him compell thereto,
And in this prison put him here with me;
One prison fittest is to hold us two.
So had I rather to be thrall then free;
Such thraldome or such freedome let it surely be.
But O vaine judgement, and conditions vaine,
The which the prisoner points unto the free!
The whiles I him condemne, and deeme his paine,
He where he list goes loose, and laughes at me.
So ever loose, so ever happy be!
But where so loose or happy that thou art,
Know, Marinell, that all this is for theel.
Throughout the various examples here given, it will be noticed
that alliteration plays an important part in the composition of
the general effect. Spenser would not have deigned to include
himself among those whom his commentator E K. calls the
rakehelly rout of our ragged rymers (for so themselves use to
hunt the letter)'; but he knew that alliteration was in the
genius of the English language, and he was the first to show its
capacities for those liquid sequences of labial letters, carried
through a rhythmical sentence, by means of which Milton after-
wards produced his effects of verbal harmony.
As his years advanced, Spenser seems to have felt more and
more that his allegorical conception of court chivalry, founded on
Platonism, protestantism and romance, had little correspondence
with the actual movement of things. First of all, in 1586 died
Philip Sidney, the ‘president of nobleness and chivalrie,' an
irreparable loss to the cause of knighthood in high places, which
is lamented in the pastoral elegy, Astrophel. Besides this, the
poet's expectations of his own preferment at court had been sadly
disappointed: the queen had favoured his suit, but the way was
1 Book rv, canto XII, stanzas 9-11.
## p. 241 (#263) ############################################
Spenser's Complaints
241
barred by Burghley, who seems to have borne him a grudge,
probably on account of his early connection with Burghley's
rival, Leicester. In 1591, a volume of his collected poems was
published with the significant title Complaints. An air of deep
melancholy runs through most of the contents. In The Ruines
of Time, dedicated to the countess of Pembroke, he makes the
fernale genius of the ruined city Verulam lament, in touching
stanzas, the death of Sidney, from which he passes to indignant
reflections on the neglect of poetry by the great, in evident
allusion to his own treatment by Burghley :
O griefe of griefes! O gall of all good heartes!
To see that vertue should dispised bee
Of him, that first was raisde for vertuous parts,
And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted bee:
O let the man, of whom the Muse is scorned,
Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorned!
The same strain is taken up in The Tears of the Muses, where
the nine sisters are made in turn to bewail the degraded state of the
stage and the different forms of literary poetry. Of their laments,
the most characteristic, as showing Spenser's lack of sympathy
with the development of the English drama, is that of Thalia:
And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
And brutish Ignorance, yorept of late
Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
All places they with follie have possest,
And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine ;
But me bave banished, with all the rest
That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
Here, doubtless, he alludes to the growing popularity of the
plays of Greene and Marlowe, as compared with the classical
'court comedies' of 'pleasant Willy' (Lyly), who ceased to write
for the stage about 1590, and who, therefore, is spoken of as
dead of late. ' But the most direct utterance of Spenser's spleen
against the time is to be found in his Prosopopoia or Mother
Hubberd's Tale, which, in its groundwork, he calls 'the raw
conceipt of my youth, but which, in its existing form, must have
been polished and altered to suit the change of circumstances.
Founded on the precedent of The Nun's Priest's Tale, in the
Canterbury pilgrimage, it contains, in the story of the ape and
16
6
E. L. III.
CH. XI.
## p. 242 (#264) ############################################
242
The Poetry of Spenser
6
the fox, a bitter attack on the customs of the court. Besides the
famous lines, beginning ‘How little knowest thou that has not
tried '—which we may well suppose were added, in 1590, to
the first cast of the poem-we have the picture of the brave
courtier,' evidently intended for a portrait of Philip Sidney, and
its striking contrast in the description of the ape, whose manners
are copied from all the corruptions of Italy. Once more, the poet
employs his invective against the great men (personified by the
ape) who disdain learning.
And whenso love of letters did inspire
Their gentle wits, and kindle wise desire,
That chieflie doth each noble minde adorne,
Then he would scoffe at learning, and eke scorne
The Sectaries thereof, as people base
And simple men, which never came in place
Of worlds affaires, but, in darke corners mewd,
Muttred of matters as their bookes them shewd,
Ne other knowledge ever did attaine,
But with their gownes their gravitie maintaine.
In all this he seems to be aiming at Burghley, the type of
the newly risen courtier, who is unfavourably contrasted with
the older nobility. The latter, he says,
for povertie,
Were forst their atncient houses to let lie,
And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
Had founded for the Kingdomes ornament,
And for their memories long moniment.
Language of this kind seems to show plainly that the poet's
advancement at court was barred by political obstacles. But he
also had to encounter a certain opposition in the change of taste.
In 1591, after a year spent with the English court, he returned
to what he considered exile in Ireland, and there, in the form of
an allegorical pastoral, called Colin Clout's Come Home Again,
he gave expression to his views about the contemporary state of
manners and poetry. While exalting the person of the queen,
with imagery never surpassed in richness, and paying noble
compliments to those of her courtiers who had duly appreciated
the beauties of The Faerie Queene, he reflects severely, through
the mouth of Colin Clout, on the general state of courtly taste,
especially in respect of love poetry :
Not so, (quoth he) Love most aboundeth there.
For all the walls and windows there are writ,
All full of love, and love, and love my deare,
And all their talke and studie is of it.
## p. 243 (#265) ############################################
The Later Hymnes
243
No any there doth brave or valiant seeme
Unlesse that some gay Mistresse badge he beares:
For with lewd speeches, and licentious deedes,
His mightie mysteries they do prophane,
And use his ydle name to other needs.
But as a complement for courting vaine.
These strokes seem to be aimed partly at the degraded vein
of Petrarchism, manifested abundantly in the sonnets of this
period, and partly at the style of Italian romance, brought into
fashion by Greene and his disciples. Spenser himself yielded not
a jot to the fashion of the times. It is true that his Amoretti,
written in honour of the lady to whom he was married in 1594,
are conceived in the most conventional Petrarchian spirit, as what
we may suppose he thought most likely to please his ‘Elisabeth. '
But the description of 'perfect love,' and the praises of Rosalind
in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, breathe the same heroic
Platonism as his Hymnes to Love and Beautie; while, in his
Prothalamion, and, still more, in his Epithalamion, he carries the
lyrical style, first attempted in The Shepheards Calender, to an
unequalled height of harmony, splendour and enthusiasm.
In
1595, he again came over to England, bringing with him the
second part of The Faerie Queene, which was licensed for publi-
cation in January 1595–6. While at court on this occasion, he
seems to have resolved to oppose his influence, as far as he might,
to the prevailing current of taste in poetry, by publishing his
youthful Hymnes in honour of Love and Beautie. Lofty and
Platonic as these were in their conception, he protests, in his
dedication of them to 'The Right Honorable and Most Vertuous
Ladies, the Ladie Margaret, Countesse of Cumberland, and the
Lad Marie, Countesse of Warwicke,' that he desires, 'by way of
retractation, to reforme them, making, instead of those two Hymnes
of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly
and celestiall. In the later Hymnes, he identifies the doctrine of
Platonic love, in its highest form, with the dogma of Trinity in
Unity:
Before this worlds great frame, in which al things
Are now containd, found any being-place,
Ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings
About that mightie bound which doth embrace
The rolling Spheres, and parts their houres by space,
That High Eternall Powre, which now doth move
In all these things, mor'd in it selfe by love.
It lord it selfe, because it selfe was faire;
(For faire is lov'd;) and of it self begot,
Like to it selfe his eldest sonne and heire,
16--2
## p. 244 (#266) ############################################
244
The Poetry of Spenser
Eternall, pure, and voide of sinfull blot,
The firstling of his joy, in whom no jot
Of loves dislike or pride was to be found,
Whom he therefore with equall honour crownd.
With him he raignd, before all time prescribed,
In endlesse glorie and immortall might,
Together with that third from them derived,
Most wise, most holy, most almightie Spright!
Whose kingdomes throne no thought of earthly wight
Can comprehend, much lesse my trembling verse
With equall words can hope it to reherse.
Finding still no opening for himself at court, Spenser returned,
once more, to Ireland, in 1597, where, in September 1598, he was
appointed sheriff of Cork, as a man fitted to deal with the rebels
of Munster. These, however, proved too strong for him, and, at
the rising under Hugh O'Neile, earl of Tyrone, his castle of Kil-
colman was taken and burned in October 1598. He himself,
escaping with difficulty, was sent by the lord deputy to London
with despatches about the rebellion. His calamities seem to have
broken his spirit. In spite of the favour extended to him by
influential courtiers like Essex, he is said to have been oppressed
by poverty; and, very soon after his arrival in London, he died
in King street, Westininster, on 16 January 1599.
To sum up the foregoing sketch of the poetry of Spenser, it
will be seen that he differed from the great European poets who
preceded or immediately succeeded him, in that he made no
attempt to represent in his verse the dominant moving spirit in
the world about him. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the one in
the fabliau, the other in the romantic drama, held 'the mirror
up to nature' and showed “the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure. ' Ariosto, by blending the opposite forms
of the fabliau and the roman, reflected the genius of knight
errantry as it appeared to the sceptical onlooker in courts.
Milton succeeded in telling the Christian story of the loss of Eden
in the form of the pagan epic. While Dante, like Spenser, made
allegory the basis of his poetical conception, no more vivid picture
can be found of contemporary life and manners in Italian cities
under the Holy Roman Empire than in The Divine Comedy.
But, in the conduct of his story, Spenser never seems to be in
direct touch with his times: his personages, knights or shepherds,
wear plainly the dress of literary masquerade; and, though the
fifth book of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, deals allegori-
cally with such matters as the revolt of the Netherlands and the
recantation of protestantism by Henri IV of France, it contains
no allusion to the Spanish armada.
## p. 245 (#267) ############################################
Summary View of Spenser's Genius 245
But the very absence of clear drift and purpose in the allegory
of The Faerie Queene made it a faithful mirror of the spirit of
the age. Through all the early portion of Elizabeth's reign, in
which the poetical genius of Spenser formed itself, the nation, in
its most influential elements, showed the doubt and hesitancy
always characteristic of times of transition. A clergy, halting
between catholic tradition and the doctrines of the reformers ;
a semi-absolute queen, coquetting in her foreign policy between
a rival monarch and his revolted subjects; a court, in which the
chivalrous manners of the old nobility were neutralised by the
Machiavelian statecraft of the new courtiers; a commercial enter-
prise, always tending to break through the limits of ancient and
stable custom : these were the conditions which made it difficult
for an English poet, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to
form a view, at once clear and comprehensive, of life and action.
Spenser himself evidently sympathised strongly with the old
order that was passing away. He loved the time-honoured
institutions of chivalry, closely allied to catholic ritual; he
reverenced its ideals of honour and courtesy, its exalted woman-
worship, its compassion for the poor and suffering. But, at the
same time, he was strongly impelled by two counter-movements
tending to undermine the ancient fabric whose foundations had
been laid by Charles the Great: the zeal of the protestant reformer,
and the enthusiasm for letters of the European humanist. The
poetical problem he had to solve was, how to present the action of
these antagonistic forces in an ideal form, with such an appearance
of unity as should satisfy the primary requirements of his art.
To fuse irreconcilable principles in a directly epic or dramatic
mould was impossible; but it was possible to disguise the essential
oppositions of things by covering them with the veil of allegory.
This was the method that Spenser adopted. The unity of his
poetical creations lies entirely in the imaginative medium through
which he views them. His poetical procedure is closely analogous
to that of the first Neo-Platonists in philosophy. Just as these
sought to evolve out of the decayed forms of polytheism, by means
of Plato's dialectic, a new religious philosophy, so, in the sphere of
poetry, Spenser attempted to create, for the English court and the
circles immediately connected with it, from the perishing institu-
tion of chivalry, an ideal of knightly conduct. Glimpses of real
objects give an air of actuality to his conception; his allegory,
as he himself declares in his preface to The Faerie Queene, has
reference to the most excellent and glorious person of our
## p. 246 (#268) ############################################
246
The Poetry of Spenser
Soveraine the Queen' Viewed in the crude light of fact, the
court of Elizabeth might be, as the poet himself describes it in
Mother Hubberd's Tale, full of petty intrigue, low ambitions,
corrupt dealings, Machiavelian statecraft, shameless licence; but,
exalted into the kingdom of Gloriana, clothed with the purple
atmosphere of romance and the phantasms of the golden age, the
harsh realities of life were veiled in a visionary scene of knights
and shepherds, sylvan nymphs and satyrs, pagan pageants and
Christian symbols; the ruling society of England was transformed
into the 'delightful land of Faerie. '
The diction and the versification of Spenser correspond felici-
tously with the ideal character of his thought. As in the later
case of Paradise Lost, what has been justly called the 'out-of-the-
world' nature of the subject required, in The Faerie Queene,
a peculiar vehicle of expression. Though it be true that, in
affecting the obsolete, Spenser 'writ no language'; though, that
is to say, he did not attempt to amplify and polish the living
language of the court, yet his mixture of Old English words
with classical syntax, in metres adapted from those used by
Chaucer, produces a remarkably beautiful effect. Native oppo-
sitions of style disappear in the harmonising art of the poet.
Though ill-qualified to be the vehicle of epical narrative, the
Spenserian stanza has firmly established itself in the language, as
a metre of admirable capacity for any kind of descriptive or
reflective poetry; and it is a striking illustration of what has
been said in the foregoing pages that it has been the instrument
generally chosen by poets whose genius has approached nearest
to the art of the painter, or who have sought to put forward
ideas opposed to the existing condition of things. It is
employed by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by Keats in
The Eve of St Agnes, by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and by
Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. To have been the poetical
ancestor of the poetry of these illustrious writers shows how
deeply the art of Spenser is rooted in the imaginative genius of
his country, and he needs no better monument than the stanza in
his own Ruines of Time:
For deeds doe die, however noblie donne,
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay;
But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne,
Recorded by the Muses, live for ay;
Ne may with storming showers be washt away,
Ne bitter-breathing windes with harmfull blast,
Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever wast.
## p. 247 (#269) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET
THE sonnet, which, for practical purposes, may be regarded
as an invention of thirteenth century Italy, slowly won the favour
of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing reached
England till the third decade of the sixteenth century, when
English sonnets were first written, in imitation of the Italian, by
Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey. But these primary
efforts form an isolated episode in English literary history; they
began no vogue. A whole generation-more than a quarter of a
—
century-separated the final sonneteering efforts of Surrey and
Wyatt from the birth of the Elizabethan sonnet. At first, the
Elizabethan growth was sparse; nor did it acquire luxuriance
until queen Elizabeth's reign was nearing its last decade. Then,
sonneteering became an imperious and universal habit, a con-
ventional recreation, a modish artifice of gallantry and compli-
ment. No poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try
his skill on this poetic instrument. During those ten years, more
sonnets were penned in England than in any other decade.
The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a strange medley
of splendour and dulness. The workers in the field included
Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in varying degrees, invested
this poetic form with unquestionable beauty. Shakespeare, above
all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric melody and a meditative
energy which no writer of any country has surpassed. It is the
value attaching to the sonneteering efforts of this great trio
of Elizabethan poets, and to some rare and isolated triumphs
of their contemporaries, Daniel, Drayton and Constable, which
lends to the Elizabethan sonnet aesthetic interest. The profuse
experiments of other Elizabethans lack critical importance and
add nothing to the lasting fruits of poetic achievement. Few in
the crowded rank and file of Elizabethan sonneteers reached high
levels of poetic performance. Fewer still were capable of sustained
flight in the loftiest regions of poetry. Most of the fertile producers
## p. 248 (#270) ############################################
248
The Elizabethan Sonnet
betrayed a crudeness and a clumsiness of thought and language
which invited and justified ridicule.
None the less does the average Elizabethan sonnet illustrate
the temper of the time. It bears graphic witness to the Eliza-
bethan tendency to borrow from foreign literary effort. Even
the greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers did not disdain occasional
transcription of the language and sentiment of popular French
or Italian poetry. The rank and file almost entirely depended
for inspiration on their foreign reading. The full story of the
Elizabethan sonnet is, for the most part, a suggestive chapter in
the literary records of plagiarism, a testimony to the frequency
of communication between literary Englishmen and literary
Frenchmen and Italians, an illustration of the community of
literary feeling which linked the three nations to one another.
The influence which Wyatt and Surrey, the English pioneers
of the sonnet, exerted on the Elizabethan sonneteers is shadowy
and indeterminate. Their experiments, as has been seen', were
first published posthumously in 1557 in Tottels Miscellany, which
included verse from many other pens. The sixty sonnets contained
in Tottel's volume—for the most part primitive reflections of Pe-
trarch-represent, so far as is known, all the English sonneteering
work which was in being when queen Elizabeth's reign opened.
George Gascoigne, in his treatise on poetic composition, which
appeared as early as 1575, accurately described the normal
construction of the sonnet in sixteenth century England when
he wrote:
Sonnets are of fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables.
The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the
last two ryming togither do conclude the whole.
Though Tottel's Miscellany was reprinted seven times between
1557 and 1584, and acquired general popularity, little endeavour
was made during those seven and twenty years to emulate its
sonneteering experiments. In the earliest poetic miscellanies
which followed Tottel's Miscellany, sonnets are rare. Only three
quatorzains figure in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, 1576.
Of these, only one pays any regard to metrical rules.
others are carelessly formed of seven riming couplets, and the
lines are not of ten but of twelve or fourteen syllables. In the
succeeding miscellany, A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions,
1578, the quatorzains number no more than four.
Despite Wyatt and Surrey's efforts, it was by slow degrees
1 See ante, chap. VIII.
## p. 249 (#271) ############################################
1
6
The Model of Construction 249
that the sonnet came to be recognised in Elizabethan England as
a definite species of verse inviting compliance with fixed metrical
laws. George Gascoigne, although he himself made some fifteen
experiments in the true quatorzain, accurately diagnosed contem-
porary practice when he noted, in 1575, how 'some thinke that all
Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets, as in deede it is
a diminutive worde derived of Sonare. ' This view held its
ground more stubbornly than is often recognised. When Clement
Robinson, in 1584, published his Handefull of pleasant delites,
he described the volume as containing 'sundrie new sonets'
with 'everie sonet orderly pointed to its proper tune,' and he
headed many of his poems with such titles as 'A proper sonet,' or
"A sorrowful sonet. ' Yet Robinson's sonnets are all lyric poems
of varied length, usually in four- or six-lined stanzas. No sonnet
in the technical sense came from his pen. 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.
many characteristic effects of sound: he saw, for example, that
the immediate sequence of rime in the fourth and fifth lines
provided a natural half-way house for a turn in the rhetoric of the
sentence; so that the fifth line is used, generally, either as the close
of the first stage in the stanza, or the beginning of the second ;
but he is very skilful in avoiding monotony, and will often run
a single sentence through the stanza, or will break up the stanza
into as many parts as there are lines, e. g.
Behinde him was Reproch, Repentaunce, Shame;
Reproch the first, Shame next, Repent behinde:
Repentaunce feeble, sorrowfull, and lame;
Reproch despightfull, carelesse, and unkinde;
Shame most ill-favourd, bestiall, and blinde:
Shame lowrd, Repentaunce sighd, Reproch did scould;
Reproch sharpe stings, Repentaunce whips entwinde,
Shame burning brond-yrons in her hand did hold:
All three to each unlike, yet all made in one mould.
1 Book 11, canto VI, stanza 29.
? Book tri, canto XII, stanza 24.
## p. 240 (#262) ############################################
240
The Poetry of Spenser
These metrical combinations and permutations are often em-
ployed very beautifully in pathetic passages :
Ye Gods of seas, if any Gods at all
Have care of right, or rath of wretches wrong,
By one or other way me, woefull thrall,
Deliver hence out of this dungeon strong,
In which I daily dying am too long:
And if ye deeme me death for loving one
That loves not me, then doe it not prolong,
But let me die and end my days attone,
And let him live unlovd, or love him selfe alone.
But if that life ye unto me decree,
Then let mee live as lovers ought to do,
And of my lifes deare love beloved be:
And if he should through pride your doome undo,
Do you by duresse him compell thereto,
And in this prison put him here with me;
One prison fittest is to hold us two.
So had I rather to be thrall then free;
Such thraldome or such freedome let it surely be.
But O vaine judgement, and conditions vaine,
The which the prisoner points unto the free!
The whiles I him condemne, and deeme his paine,
He where he list goes loose, and laughes at me.
So ever loose, so ever happy be!
But where so loose or happy that thou art,
Know, Marinell, that all this is for theel.
Throughout the various examples here given, it will be noticed
that alliteration plays an important part in the composition of
the general effect. Spenser would not have deigned to include
himself among those whom his commentator E K. calls the
rakehelly rout of our ragged rymers (for so themselves use to
hunt the letter)'; but he knew that alliteration was in the
genius of the English language, and he was the first to show its
capacities for those liquid sequences of labial letters, carried
through a rhythmical sentence, by means of which Milton after-
wards produced his effects of verbal harmony.
As his years advanced, Spenser seems to have felt more and
more that his allegorical conception of court chivalry, founded on
Platonism, protestantism and romance, had little correspondence
with the actual movement of things. First of all, in 1586 died
Philip Sidney, the ‘president of nobleness and chivalrie,' an
irreparable loss to the cause of knighthood in high places, which
is lamented in the pastoral elegy, Astrophel. Besides this, the
poet's expectations of his own preferment at court had been sadly
disappointed: the queen had favoured his suit, but the way was
1 Book rv, canto XII, stanzas 9-11.
## p. 241 (#263) ############################################
Spenser's Complaints
241
barred by Burghley, who seems to have borne him a grudge,
probably on account of his early connection with Burghley's
rival, Leicester. In 1591, a volume of his collected poems was
published with the significant title Complaints. An air of deep
melancholy runs through most of the contents. In The Ruines
of Time, dedicated to the countess of Pembroke, he makes the
fernale genius of the ruined city Verulam lament, in touching
stanzas, the death of Sidney, from which he passes to indignant
reflections on the neglect of poetry by the great, in evident
allusion to his own treatment by Burghley :
O griefe of griefes! O gall of all good heartes!
To see that vertue should dispised bee
Of him, that first was raisde for vertuous parts,
And now, broad spreading like an aged tree,
Lets none shoot up that nigh him planted bee:
O let the man, of whom the Muse is scorned,
Nor alive nor dead be of the Muse adorned!
The same strain is taken up in The Tears of the Muses, where
the nine sisters are made in turn to bewail the degraded state of the
stage and the different forms of literary poetry. Of their laments,
the most characteristic, as showing Spenser's lack of sympathy
with the development of the English drama, is that of Thalia:
And him beside sits ugly Barbarisme,
And brutish Ignorance, yorept of late
Out of dredd darknes of the deepe Abysme,
Where being bredd, he light and heaven does hate:
They in the mindes of men now tyrannize,
And the faire Scene with rudenes foule disguize.
All places they with follie have possest,
And with vaine toyes the vulgare entertaine ;
But me bave banished, with all the rest
That whilome wont to wait upon my traine,
Fine Counterfesaunce, and unhurtfull Sport,
Delight, and Laughter, deckt in seemly sort.
Here, doubtless, he alludes to the growing popularity of the
plays of Greene and Marlowe, as compared with the classical
'court comedies' of 'pleasant Willy' (Lyly), who ceased to write
for the stage about 1590, and who, therefore, is spoken of as
dead of late. ' But the most direct utterance of Spenser's spleen
against the time is to be found in his Prosopopoia or Mother
Hubberd's Tale, which, in its groundwork, he calls 'the raw
conceipt of my youth, but which, in its existing form, must have
been polished and altered to suit the change of circumstances.
Founded on the precedent of The Nun's Priest's Tale, in the
Canterbury pilgrimage, it contains, in the story of the ape and
16
6
E. L. III.
CH. XI.
## p. 242 (#264) ############################################
242
The Poetry of Spenser
6
the fox, a bitter attack on the customs of the court. Besides the
famous lines, beginning ‘How little knowest thou that has not
tried '—which we may well suppose were added, in 1590, to
the first cast of the poem-we have the picture of the brave
courtier,' evidently intended for a portrait of Philip Sidney, and
its striking contrast in the description of the ape, whose manners
are copied from all the corruptions of Italy. Once more, the poet
employs his invective against the great men (personified by the
ape) who disdain learning.
And whenso love of letters did inspire
Their gentle wits, and kindle wise desire,
That chieflie doth each noble minde adorne,
Then he would scoffe at learning, and eke scorne
The Sectaries thereof, as people base
And simple men, which never came in place
Of worlds affaires, but, in darke corners mewd,
Muttred of matters as their bookes them shewd,
Ne other knowledge ever did attaine,
But with their gownes their gravitie maintaine.
In all this he seems to be aiming at Burghley, the type of
the newly risen courtier, who is unfavourably contrasted with
the older nobility. The latter, he says,
for povertie,
Were forst their atncient houses to let lie,
And their olde Castles to the ground to fall,
Which their forefathers, famous over-all,
Had founded for the Kingdomes ornament,
And for their memories long moniment.
Language of this kind seems to show plainly that the poet's
advancement at court was barred by political obstacles. But he
also had to encounter a certain opposition in the change of taste.
In 1591, after a year spent with the English court, he returned
to what he considered exile in Ireland, and there, in the form of
an allegorical pastoral, called Colin Clout's Come Home Again,
he gave expression to his views about the contemporary state of
manners and poetry. While exalting the person of the queen,
with imagery never surpassed in richness, and paying noble
compliments to those of her courtiers who had duly appreciated
the beauties of The Faerie Queene, he reflects severely, through
the mouth of Colin Clout, on the general state of courtly taste,
especially in respect of love poetry :
Not so, (quoth he) Love most aboundeth there.
For all the walls and windows there are writ,
All full of love, and love, and love my deare,
And all their talke and studie is of it.
## p. 243 (#265) ############################################
The Later Hymnes
243
No any there doth brave or valiant seeme
Unlesse that some gay Mistresse badge he beares:
For with lewd speeches, and licentious deedes,
His mightie mysteries they do prophane,
And use his ydle name to other needs.
But as a complement for courting vaine.
These strokes seem to be aimed partly at the degraded vein
of Petrarchism, manifested abundantly in the sonnets of this
period, and partly at the style of Italian romance, brought into
fashion by Greene and his disciples. Spenser himself yielded not
a jot to the fashion of the times. It is true that his Amoretti,
written in honour of the lady to whom he was married in 1594,
are conceived in the most conventional Petrarchian spirit, as what
we may suppose he thought most likely to please his ‘Elisabeth. '
But the description of 'perfect love,' and the praises of Rosalind
in Colin Clout's Come Home Again, breathe the same heroic
Platonism as his Hymnes to Love and Beautie; while, in his
Prothalamion, and, still more, in his Epithalamion, he carries the
lyrical style, first attempted in The Shepheards Calender, to an
unequalled height of harmony, splendour and enthusiasm.
In
1595, he again came over to England, bringing with him the
second part of The Faerie Queene, which was licensed for publi-
cation in January 1595–6. While at court on this occasion, he
seems to have resolved to oppose his influence, as far as he might,
to the prevailing current of taste in poetry, by publishing his
youthful Hymnes in honour of Love and Beautie. Lofty and
Platonic as these were in their conception, he protests, in his
dedication of them to 'The Right Honorable and Most Vertuous
Ladies, the Ladie Margaret, Countesse of Cumberland, and the
Lad Marie, Countesse of Warwicke,' that he desires, 'by way of
retractation, to reforme them, making, instead of those two Hymnes
of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly
and celestiall. In the later Hymnes, he identifies the doctrine of
Platonic love, in its highest form, with the dogma of Trinity in
Unity:
Before this worlds great frame, in which al things
Are now containd, found any being-place,
Ere flitting Time could wag his eyas wings
About that mightie bound which doth embrace
The rolling Spheres, and parts their houres by space,
That High Eternall Powre, which now doth move
In all these things, mor'd in it selfe by love.
It lord it selfe, because it selfe was faire;
(For faire is lov'd;) and of it self begot,
Like to it selfe his eldest sonne and heire,
16--2
## p. 244 (#266) ############################################
244
The Poetry of Spenser
Eternall, pure, and voide of sinfull blot,
The firstling of his joy, in whom no jot
Of loves dislike or pride was to be found,
Whom he therefore with equall honour crownd.
With him he raignd, before all time prescribed,
In endlesse glorie and immortall might,
Together with that third from them derived,
Most wise, most holy, most almightie Spright!
Whose kingdomes throne no thought of earthly wight
Can comprehend, much lesse my trembling verse
With equall words can hope it to reherse.
Finding still no opening for himself at court, Spenser returned,
once more, to Ireland, in 1597, where, in September 1598, he was
appointed sheriff of Cork, as a man fitted to deal with the rebels
of Munster. These, however, proved too strong for him, and, at
the rising under Hugh O'Neile, earl of Tyrone, his castle of Kil-
colman was taken and burned in October 1598. He himself,
escaping with difficulty, was sent by the lord deputy to London
with despatches about the rebellion. His calamities seem to have
broken his spirit. In spite of the favour extended to him by
influential courtiers like Essex, he is said to have been oppressed
by poverty; and, very soon after his arrival in London, he died
in King street, Westininster, on 16 January 1599.
To sum up the foregoing sketch of the poetry of Spenser, it
will be seen that he differed from the great European poets who
preceded or immediately succeeded him, in that he made no
attempt to represent in his verse the dominant moving spirit in
the world about him. Chaucer and Shakespeare, the one in
the fabliau, the other in the romantic drama, held 'the mirror
up to nature' and showed “the very age and body of the time
his form and pressure. ' Ariosto, by blending the opposite forms
of the fabliau and the roman, reflected the genius of knight
errantry as it appeared to the sceptical onlooker in courts.
Milton succeeded in telling the Christian story of the loss of Eden
in the form of the pagan epic. While Dante, like Spenser, made
allegory the basis of his poetical conception, no more vivid picture
can be found of contemporary life and manners in Italian cities
under the Holy Roman Empire than in The Divine Comedy.
But, in the conduct of his story, Spenser never seems to be in
direct touch with his times: his personages, knights or shepherds,
wear plainly the dress of literary masquerade; and, though the
fifth book of The Faerie Queene, published in 1596, deals allegori-
cally with such matters as the revolt of the Netherlands and the
recantation of protestantism by Henri IV of France, it contains
no allusion to the Spanish armada.
## p. 245 (#267) ############################################
Summary View of Spenser's Genius 245
But the very absence of clear drift and purpose in the allegory
of The Faerie Queene made it a faithful mirror of the spirit of
the age. Through all the early portion of Elizabeth's reign, in
which the poetical genius of Spenser formed itself, the nation, in
its most influential elements, showed the doubt and hesitancy
always characteristic of times of transition. A clergy, halting
between catholic tradition and the doctrines of the reformers ;
a semi-absolute queen, coquetting in her foreign policy between
a rival monarch and his revolted subjects; a court, in which the
chivalrous manners of the old nobility were neutralised by the
Machiavelian statecraft of the new courtiers; a commercial enter-
prise, always tending to break through the limits of ancient and
stable custom : these were the conditions which made it difficult
for an English poet, in the middle of the sixteenth century, to
form a view, at once clear and comprehensive, of life and action.
Spenser himself evidently sympathised strongly with the old
order that was passing away. He loved the time-honoured
institutions of chivalry, closely allied to catholic ritual; he
reverenced its ideals of honour and courtesy, its exalted woman-
worship, its compassion for the poor and suffering. But, at the
same time, he was strongly impelled by two counter-movements
tending to undermine the ancient fabric whose foundations had
been laid by Charles the Great: the zeal of the protestant reformer,
and the enthusiasm for letters of the European humanist. The
poetical problem he had to solve was, how to present the action of
these antagonistic forces in an ideal form, with such an appearance
of unity as should satisfy the primary requirements of his art.
To fuse irreconcilable principles in a directly epic or dramatic
mould was impossible; but it was possible to disguise the essential
oppositions of things by covering them with the veil of allegory.
This was the method that Spenser adopted. The unity of his
poetical creations lies entirely in the imaginative medium through
which he views them. His poetical procedure is closely analogous
to that of the first Neo-Platonists in philosophy. Just as these
sought to evolve out of the decayed forms of polytheism, by means
of Plato's dialectic, a new religious philosophy, so, in the sphere of
poetry, Spenser attempted to create, for the English court and the
circles immediately connected with it, from the perishing institu-
tion of chivalry, an ideal of knightly conduct. Glimpses of real
objects give an air of actuality to his conception; his allegory,
as he himself declares in his preface to The Faerie Queene, has
reference to the most excellent and glorious person of our
## p. 246 (#268) ############################################
246
The Poetry of Spenser
Soveraine the Queen' Viewed in the crude light of fact, the
court of Elizabeth might be, as the poet himself describes it in
Mother Hubberd's Tale, full of petty intrigue, low ambitions,
corrupt dealings, Machiavelian statecraft, shameless licence; but,
exalted into the kingdom of Gloriana, clothed with the purple
atmosphere of romance and the phantasms of the golden age, the
harsh realities of life were veiled in a visionary scene of knights
and shepherds, sylvan nymphs and satyrs, pagan pageants and
Christian symbols; the ruling society of England was transformed
into the 'delightful land of Faerie. '
The diction and the versification of Spenser correspond felici-
tously with the ideal character of his thought. As in the later
case of Paradise Lost, what has been justly called the 'out-of-the-
world' nature of the subject required, in The Faerie Queene,
a peculiar vehicle of expression. Though it be true that, in
affecting the obsolete, Spenser 'writ no language'; though, that
is to say, he did not attempt to amplify and polish the living
language of the court, yet his mixture of Old English words
with classical syntax, in metres adapted from those used by
Chaucer, produces a remarkably beautiful effect. Native oppo-
sitions of style disappear in the harmonising art of the poet.
Though ill-qualified to be the vehicle of epical narrative, the
Spenserian stanza has firmly established itself in the language, as
a metre of admirable capacity for any kind of descriptive or
reflective poetry; and it is a striking illustration of what has
been said in the foregoing pages that it has been the instrument
generally chosen by poets whose genius has approached nearest
to the art of the painter, or who have sought to put forward
ideas opposed to the existing condition of things. It is
employed by Thomson in The Castle of Indolence, by Keats in
The Eve of St Agnes, by Shelley in The Revolt of Islam and by
Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. To have been the poetical
ancestor of the poetry of these illustrious writers shows how
deeply the art of Spenser is rooted in the imaginative genius of
his country, and he needs no better monument than the stanza in
his own Ruines of Time:
For deeds doe die, however noblie donne,
And thoughts of men do as themselves decay;
But wise wordes, taught in numbers for to runne,
Recorded by the Muses, live for ay;
Ne may with storming showers be washt away,
Ne bitter-breathing windes with harmfull blast,
Nor age, nor envie, shall them ever wast.
## p. 247 (#269) ############################################
CHAPTER XII
THE ELIZABETHAN SONNET
THE sonnet, which, for practical purposes, may be regarded
as an invention of thirteenth century Italy, slowly won the favour
of English poets. Neither the word nor the thing reached
England till the third decade of the sixteenth century, when
English sonnets were first written, in imitation of the Italian, by
Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey. But these primary
efforts form an isolated episode in English literary history; they
began no vogue. A whole generation-more than a quarter of a
—
century-separated the final sonneteering efforts of Surrey and
Wyatt from the birth of the Elizabethan sonnet. At first, the
Elizabethan growth was sparse; nor did it acquire luxuriance
until queen Elizabeth's reign was nearing its last decade. Then,
sonneteering became an imperious and universal habit, a con-
ventional recreation, a modish artifice of gallantry and compli-
ment. No poetic aspirant between 1590 and 1600 failed to try
his skill on this poetic instrument. During those ten years, more
sonnets were penned in England than in any other decade.
The harvest of Elizabethan sonneteering is a strange medley
of splendour and dulness. The workers in the field included
Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare, who, in varying degrees, invested
this poetic form with unquestionable beauty. Shakespeare, above
all, breathed into the sonnet a lyric melody and a meditative
energy which no writer of any country has surpassed. It is the
value attaching to the sonneteering efforts of this great trio
of Elizabethan poets, and to some rare and isolated triumphs
of their contemporaries, Daniel, Drayton and Constable, which
lends to the Elizabethan sonnet aesthetic interest. The profuse
experiments of other Elizabethans lack critical importance and
add nothing to the lasting fruits of poetic achievement. Few in
the crowded rank and file of Elizabethan sonneteers reached high
levels of poetic performance. Fewer still were capable of sustained
flight in the loftiest regions of poetry. Most of the fertile producers
## p. 248 (#270) ############################################
248
The Elizabethan Sonnet
betrayed a crudeness and a clumsiness of thought and language
which invited and justified ridicule.
None the less does the average Elizabethan sonnet illustrate
the temper of the time. It bears graphic witness to the Eliza-
bethan tendency to borrow from foreign literary effort. Even
the greatest of Elizabethan sonneteers did not disdain occasional
transcription of the language and sentiment of popular French
or Italian poetry. The rank and file almost entirely depended
for inspiration on their foreign reading. The full story of the
Elizabethan sonnet is, for the most part, a suggestive chapter in
the literary records of plagiarism, a testimony to the frequency
of communication between literary Englishmen and literary
Frenchmen and Italians, an illustration of the community of
literary feeling which linked the three nations to one another.
The influence which Wyatt and Surrey, the English pioneers
of the sonnet, exerted on the Elizabethan sonneteers is shadowy
and indeterminate. Their experiments, as has been seen', were
first published posthumously in 1557 in Tottels Miscellany, which
included verse from many other pens. The sixty sonnets contained
in Tottel's volume—for the most part primitive reflections of Pe-
trarch-represent, so far as is known, all the English sonneteering
work which was in being when queen Elizabeth's reign opened.
George Gascoigne, in his treatise on poetic composition, which
appeared as early as 1575, accurately described the normal
construction of the sonnet in sixteenth century England when
he wrote:
Sonnets are of fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables.
The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the
last two ryming togither do conclude the whole.
Though Tottel's Miscellany was reprinted seven times between
1557 and 1584, and acquired general popularity, little endeavour
was made during those seven and twenty years to emulate its
sonneteering experiments. In the earliest poetic miscellanies
which followed Tottel's Miscellany, sonnets are rare. Only three
quatorzains figure in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises, 1576.
Of these, only one pays any regard to metrical rules.
others are carelessly formed of seven riming couplets, and the
lines are not of ten but of twelve or fourteen syllables. In the
succeeding miscellany, A Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions,
1578, the quatorzains number no more than four.
Despite Wyatt and Surrey's efforts, it was by slow degrees
1 See ante, chap. VIII.
## p. 249 (#271) ############################################
1
6
The Model of Construction 249
that the sonnet came to be recognised in Elizabethan England as
a definite species of verse inviting compliance with fixed metrical
laws. George Gascoigne, although he himself made some fifteen
experiments in the true quatorzain, accurately diagnosed contem-
porary practice when he noted, in 1575, how 'some thinke that all
Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets, as in deede it is
a diminutive worde derived of Sonare. ' This view held its
ground more stubbornly than is often recognised. When Clement
Robinson, in 1584, published his Handefull of pleasant delites,
he described the volume as containing 'sundrie new sonets'
with 'everie sonet orderly pointed to its proper tune,' and he
headed many of his poems with such titles as 'A proper sonet,' or
"A sorrowful sonet. ' Yet Robinson's sonnets are all lyric poems
of varied length, usually in four- or six-lined stanzas. No sonnet
in the technical sense came from his pen. 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.
