No More Learning

CH, XII.


## p. 258 (#280) ############################################

258
The Elizabethan Sonnet
addressed to the lady who became his wife, and a strand of
autobiography was woven into the borrowed threads. Yet it is
very occasionally that he escaped altogether from the fetters
of current convention, and gave free play in his sonnets to his
poetic faculty.
Spenser's sentiment professedly ranges itself with continental
and classical idealism. In two sonnets he identifies his heroine
with the Petrarchian (or Neo-Platonic) idea of beauty, which had
lately played a prominent part in numberless French sonnets by
Du Bellay, Desportes, Pontus de Tyard, Claude de Pontoux and
others. Many Elizabethan sonneteers marched under the same
banner. Drayton, in conferring on his sonnets the title Idea,
claimed to rank with the Italian and French Platonists. But
Spenser sounds the idealistic note far more clearly than any
contemporary. He writes in sonnet xLv:
Within my heart (though hardly it can shew
Thing so divine to view of earthly eye),
The fair Idea of your celestial hew,
And every part remains immortally.
This reflects the familiar French strain :
Sur le plus belle Idée au ciel vous fustes faite,
Voulant nature un jour monstrer tout son pouvoir;
Depuis vous luy servez de forme et de miroir,
Et toute autre beauté sur la vostre est portraite.
(Desportes, Diane, II, lxvii. )
Like the French writers, Spenser ultimately (in sonnet LXXXVII)
disclaims any mortal object of adoration in ecstatic recognition of
the superior fascination of the idéa:
Ne ought I see, though in the clearest day,
When others gaze upon their shadows vain,
But th’onely image of that heavenly ray,
Whereof some glance doth in mine eye remain.
Of which beholding the Idaea plain,
Through contemplation of my purest part,
With light thereof I do myself sustain,
And thereon feed my love affamish'd heart.
Pontus de Tyard had already closed the last book of his Les
Erreurs Amoureuses on the identical note:
Mon esprit a heureusement porté,
Au plus beau ciel sa force outrecuidée,
Pour s'abbreuuer en la plus belle Idée
D'où le pourtrait i'ay pris de la beauté. (bk. III, xxxiji. )
Spenser's sonnets similarly helped to familiarise the Elizabethan
reader with a poetic conceit, which, although not of French origin,
was assimilated with fervour by the sonneteers of La Pléiade. The


## p. 259 (#281) ############################################

The Sonneteering Conceit of Immortality 259
notion that poets not merely achieved immortality through their
verse, but had the power of conferring immortality on those to
whom their poetry was addressed, was a classical conceit of great
antiquity, which Pindar among the Greeks, and Horace and Ovid
among the Latins, had notably glorified. The Italians of the
renascence had been attracted by the fancy. But Ronsard and
his disciples had developed it with a complacency that gave
it new life. From France it spread to Elizabethan England, where
it was quickly welcomed. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apologie for
Poetrie (1595), wrote that it was the common habit of poets 'to
tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. ' 'Men
of great calling,' wrote Nashe, in his Pierce Pennilesse (1593),ʻtake
it of merit to have their names eternised by poets. '
Spenser was among the Elizabethan sonneteers who con-
spicuously adapted the conceit to English verse. Shakespeare,
alone excepted, no sonneteer repeated the poetic vaunt with
greater emphasis than Spenser. He describes his sonnets as
This verse that never shall expire. . . .
Fair be no longer proud of that shall perish.
But that, which shall you make immortal, cherish.
(Sonnet xxvII. )
He tells his mistress
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
(Sonnet Lxxv. )
With unbounded confidence he asserts:
Even this verse, vow'd to eternity,
Shall be thereof immortal moniment;
And tell her praise to all posterity,
That may admire such world's rare wonderment.
(Sonnet LxIx. )
Through all such passages Spenser speaks in the voice of Ronsard.
It was Ronsard who had, just before Spenser wrote, promised his
patron that his lute
Par cest hymne solennel
Respandra dessus ta race
Je ne sçay quoy de sa grace
Qui te doit faire éternel.
(Odes, 1, vii);
who had declared of his mistress
Victorieuse des peuples et des Rois
S'en voleroit sus l'aile de ma ryme. (Amours, 1, lxxii);
who had foretold
Longtemps après la mort je vous feray revivre. '
Vous vivrez et croistrez comme Laure en grandeur,
Au moins tant que vivront les plumes et le livre.
(Sonnets pour Hélène, II. )
17-2


## p. 260 (#282) ############################################

260 The Elizabethan Sonnet
3
In the hands of Elizabethan sonneteers, the 'eternising'
faculty of their verse became a staple, and, indeed, an inevitable,
topic. Especially did Drayton and Daniel vie with Spenser in
reiterating the conceit. Drayton, who spoke of his sonnets as 'my
immortal song' (Idea, vi, 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes'
(XLIV, 7), embodied the boast in such lines as
While thus my pen strives to eternize thee.
(Idea, xliv, 1. )
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish. (XLIV, 11. )
My name shall mount unto eternity.
(XLIV, 14. )
All that I seek is to eternize thee.
(XLVII, 14. )
Daniel was no less explicit
This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monnment.
(Delia, XXXVII, 9. )
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed
Unburied in these lines.
(xxxix, 9, 10. )
These [sc. my verses) are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time's consuming rage. (L, 9-12. )
Shakespeare, in his reference to his 'eternal lines' (XVIII, 12), and
in the assurances which he gives to the subject of his addresses
that his sonnets are, in Spenser's and in Daniel's exact phrase,
his hero's ‘monument,' merely accommodated himself to the pre-
vailing taste, even if he invested the topic with a splendour that
none else approached. But had Shakespeare never joined the
ranks of Elizabethan sonneteers, the example of Spenser, Daniel
and Drayton would have identified the Elizabethan sonnet with
the proud conceit.
It was not Spenser's work as a sonneteer which gave him his
enduring place on the heights of Parnassus: he owes his im-
mortality to other poetic achievement, which lent itself to larger
and freer development. Some of Spenser's contemporaries, who,
although endowed with a more modest measure of poetic power,
did not lack poetic feeling, unluckily confined their effort, in obedi-
ence to the prevailing vogue, almost entirely to the sonnet. The
result was that the dominant imitative tendencies almost succeeded
in stifling in them all original utterance. Such an one was Henry
Constable, master of a tuneful note, who drank too deep of the
Franco-Italian wells to give his muse full liberty of expansion. Like
Desportes, he christened his sonnet-sequence by the name of Diana,
and Italian words sonetto primo, sonetto secondo and so forth formed
the head lines of each of his quatorzains. He was a writer on a


## p. 261 (#283) ############################################

Constable's Diana
261
restricted scale. Only twenty-three poems figure in the original
edition of his volume, which he christened Diana, The praises of
his Mistres, In certaine sweete Sonnets (1592). "Augmented with
divers quatorzains of honourable and learned personages,' the book
reappeared in 1594. The poems there numbered seventy-six;
but many of the added pieces were from other pens. At least
eight were the work of Sir Philip Sidney. The second edition of
Diana was a typical venture of an enterprising publisher, and
was devised to catch the passing breeze of popular interest in
sonnet-sequences. Its claim to homogeneity lies in its reiterated
echo of Italian and French voices. Such of the added poems
as can be confidently assigned to Constable himself show a
growing dependence on Desportes. Very often he translates
without modification some of the Frenchman's baldest efforts. His
method may be judged by the following example. The tenth
sonnet in the sixth decade of Constable's Diana, 1594, opens
thus:
My God, my God, how much I love my goddess !
Whose virtues rare, unto the heavens arise.
My God, my God, how much I love her eyes!
One shining bright, the other full of hardness.
The Diane of Desportes (1, xxvi) supplies the original:
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ma deesse
Et de son chef les tresors precieux !
Mon dieu! mon dieu! que j'aime ses beaux yeux,
Dont l'un m'est doux, l'autre plein de rudesse.
Both Daniel and Lodge deservedly made a higher literary
reputation than Constable. But each exemplified in even more
remarkable fashion the practice of literal translation. Daniel had
lyric gifts of a brilliant order. But he had no hesitation in seeking
both the language and the imagery of numerous lyrics as well as
of numerous sonnets in foreign collections. Like Spenser, he was
well read in Tasso; and much of his inspiration came direct from
;
Tasso's sonnets. The fine pastoral poem beginning 'O happy
golden Age, which he appended to his sonnet-sequence Delia,
is a felicitous, though literal, rendering of a song in Tasso's pas-
toral play Aminta, Atto I, sc. 2 (O bella età de 'l oro). Many of
Daniel's happiest quatorzains bear the same relation to preceding
efforts of the same poet; and, in several cases, where Daniel's
English text wanders somewhat from the Italian, the explanation
is to be found, not in the free expansiveness of Daniel's genius,
but in the depressing circumstance that Daniel was following the


## p. 262 (#284) ############################################

262
The Elizabethan Sonnet
French rendering of Tasso by Desportes instead of making direct
recourse to the Italian text. Tasso was only one of Daniel's
many foreign tutors. It was probably on Desportes that he most
relied, and the servility of his renderings from the French is
startling.
Thomas Lodge, whose sonnet-sequence Phillis appeared in
1593, improves on Daniel's example as a borrower of foreign work.
In fact, he merits the first place among Elizabethan plagiarists.
Of thirty-four poems in strict sonnet form which were included,
without hint of any indebtedness, in his volume Phillis, as
many as eighteen have been tracked to foreign sources. These
eighteen sonnets, which were published by Lodge as the fruits
of his own invention, are shown on investigation to be literal
transcripts from the French and Italian. Further investigation
is likely to extend the range of his loans.
It is worth while to analyse the proofs that are at present
accessible of Lodge's obligations. Lodge did not confine his
borrowings to the great writers of France and Italy. He laid
hands on work of second and third rate pens, which never acquired
widespread fame. That six of the eighteen sonnets under exami.
nation should be paraphrases of Ronsard, or that five should
translate Ariosto, is far less surprising than that three should
come direct from an obscure Italian author, Lodovico Paschale,
whose sonnet-sequence appeared at Venice in 1549. Paschale was
an undistinguished native of Cattaro, in Dalmatia, and his work
has only once been reprinted since its first appearance, and that
nearly two hundred years after original publication. From
Paschale comes one of the best known of Lodge's sonnets, which
opens thus:
It is not death, which wretched men call dying,
But that is very death which I endure,
When my coy-looking nymph, her grace envying,
By fatal frowns my domage doth procure.
Paschale's sonnet began thus (1549 edition, p. 40 verso)
Morte non é quel che morir s appella,
Ma quella é uera morte ch' io supporto,
Quando Madonna di pietá rubella,
A me riuolge il guardo acerbo e torto.
Other foreign poets on whom Lodge silently levied his heavy loans
were Petrarch, Sanazzaro and Bembo among Italians, and Des-
portes among Frenchmen.
The only other Elizabethan of high poetic rank, apart from


## p. 263 (#285) ############################################

Drayton's Sonnets
263
Shakespeare, who prominently associated himself with the son-
neteering movement, was Michael Drayton. In one effort, Drayton
reached the highest level of poetic feeling and expression. His
familiar quatorzain opening 'Since there's no help, come let us
kiss and part' is the one sonnet by a contemporary which deserves
to rank with some of Shakespeare's best. It is curious to note
that Drayton's triumphant poem was first printed in 1619, just a
quarter of a century after he first sought the suffrages of the
Elizabethan public as a sonneteer. The editio princeps of his
sonnet-sequence, called Ideas Mirrour. Amours in Quatorzains,
included fifty-two sonnets, and was reprinted no less than eight
times, with much revision, omission and addition, before the final
version came forth in 1619.
Drayton's sonneteering labours constitute a microcosm of
the whole sonneteering movement in Elizabethan England. He
borrows ideas and speech from all available sources at home and
abroad. Yet, like many contemporary offenders, he deprecates the
charge that he is 'a thief' of the 'wit' of Petrarch or Desportes.
With equal vigour of language he disclaims pretensions to tell the
story of his own heart:
Into these loves who but for passion looks:
At this first sight, here let him lay them by!
And seek elsewhere in turning other books,
Which better may his labour satisfy.
For the most part, Drayton is a sonneteer on the normal
Elizabethan pattern, and his sonnets are rarely distinguished by
poetic elevation. Occasionally, a thin rivulet of natural sentiment
winds its way through the fantastic conceits which his wide reading
suggests to him. But only in his famous sonnet did his genius find
in that poetic form full scope.
The title of Drayton's sonnet-sequence, Idea, gives a valuable
clue to one source of his inspiration. The title was directly
borrowed from an extensive sonnet-sequence in French called
L'Idée, by Claude de Pontoux, a poetic physician of Chalon. The
name symbolises the Platonic idea of beauty, which was notably
familiar to Du Bellay and Pontus de Tyard in France and to
Spenser in England. Drayton's 'soul-shrined saint,' his divine
Idea,' his 'fair Idea,' is the child of de Pontoux's Céleste Idée,
Fille de Dieu (sonnet x). But Drayton by no means confined his
sonneteering studies to the volume whence he took his shadowy
mistress's name. Drayton's imitative appeals to night, to his
lady's fair eyes, to rivers ; his classical allusions, his insistence that
;


## p. 264 (#286) ############################################

264
The Elizabethan Sonnet
>
his verse is eternal-all these themes recall expressions of Ronsard,
and Desportes, or of their humble disciples. A little is usually
added and a little taken away; but such slight substance as the
sentiments possess is, with rare exception, a foreign invention.
Doubtless, Drayton was more conscious than his companions of
the triviality of the sonneteering conventions. No precise foreign
origin seems accessible for his sonnet (xv) entitled His Remedy
for Love, in which he describes a potion concocted of the powder
of a dead woman's heart, moistened with another woman's tears,
boiled in a widow's sighs and breathed upon by an old maid.
The satire is clearly intended to apply to the strained simples
out of which the conventional type of sonnet was, too often,
compounded.
Like Sidney, Spenser and Daniel, Drayton, despite his warning,
added fuel to the fire of the sonneteering craze. His work inspired
younger men with the ambition to win the fame of sonneteer.
The most accomplished of Drayton's disciples was Richard
Barnfield, who dubs Drayton, 'Rowland my professed friend. ' His
endeavours are noteworthy because they aim at a variation of
the ordinary sonneteering motive. The series of twenty sonnets
which Barnfield, in 1595, appended to his Cynthia, a panegyric on
queen Elizabeth, are in a vein which differentiates them from
those of all the poets of the day save Shakespeare's sonnets.
Barnfield's sonnets profess to be addressed, not to the poet's
mistress, but to a lad Ganymede to whom the poet makes pro-
fession of love. But the manner in which Barnfield develops
his theme does not remove his work very far from the imitative
products of his fellow sonneteers. As he himself confessed, his
sonnets for the most part adapt Vergil's second Eclogue, in which
the shepherd Corydon declares his affection for the shepherd boy,
Alexis. Barnfield had true power of fervid expression, which
removes him from the ranks of the poetasters. But his habit of
mind was parasitic. He loved to play with classical conceits. His
sonnets, despite divergences from the beaten path in theme, pay
tribute in style and construction to the imitative convention.
The collections of sonnets by Barnabe Barnes, and by Giles
Fletcher, by William Percy, William Smith, Bartholomew Griffin
and Robert Tofte merit briefer notice. They reflect, with fewer
compensations than their better known contemporaries, the ten-
dencies to servility. All but Fletcher were young men courting
the muse for the first time, who did not pursue her favours in their
adult years. They avowed discipleship to Sidney or to Spenser,


## p. 265 (#287) ############################################

Barnabe Barnes
265
a
to Daniel, or to Drayton, and took pleasure in diluting their
master's words with clumsy verbiage drawn from the classics or
from contemporary poetry of the continent. Rarely did they show
facility or individuality, and, still more rarely, poetic feeling.
Barnabe Barnes, who made his reputation as a sonneteer in
the same year as Lodge, was more voluminous than any English
contemporary. He gave some promise of lyric power which he
never fulfilled. As a whole, his work is crude and lacks restraint.
At times, he sinks to meaningless doggerel, and some of his
grotesque conceits are offensive. His collection of amorous sonnets
bore the title of Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Sonnets,
Madrigals, Elegies and Odes. Here, one hundred and five sonnets
are interspersed with twenty-six madrigals, five sestines, twenty-
one elegies, three canzons,' twenty odes (one in sonnet form) and
what purports to be a translation of Moschus's first Eidullion.
Many of Barnes's poems are echoes of Sidney's verse, both in
Arcadia and in Astrophel and Stella. His canzon II is a spirited
tribute to Sidney under his poetic name of Astrophel. The first
stanza runs :
Sing! sing Parthenophil! sing! pipe! and play!
The feast is kept upon this plain,
Among th’Arcadian shepherds everywhere,
For Astrophel's birthday! Sweet Astrophel!
Arcadia's honour! mighty Paris' chief pride!
Where be the nymphs ? The Nymphs all gathered be,
To sing sweet Astrophe's sweet praise.
Barnes also boasted of his debt to
That sweet Tuscan Petrarch, which did pierce
His Laura with love sonnets.
But Barnes’s volume is a spacious miscellany of echoes of many
other foreign voices. He often emulates the anacreontic vein of
La Pléiade, and had obviously studied much Latin and Greek
poetry of post-classical times. There is a likelihood that Shake-
speare knew his work well, and resented the unaccountable esteem
which it enjoyed on its first publication.
Giles Fletcher, a former fellow of King's College, Cambridge,
was of maturer age than most contemporary sonneteers, when he
brought out his sonnet-sequence of Licia, for he was then 44 years
old. On his title-page, he boldly announces that his 'poems of
love' were written 'to the imitation of the best Latin poets and
others. ' In an address to his patroness, the wife of Sir Richard
Molineux, he deprecates the notion that his book enshrines any
episode in his own experience. He merely claims to follow the


## p. 266 (#288) ############################################

266
The Elizabethan Sonnet
fashion, and to imitate the 'men of learning and great parts' of
Italy, France and England, who have already written 'poems and
sonnets of love. ' He regrets the English poets' proclivities to
borrow their best and choice conceits' from Italy, Spain and
France, and expresses a pious preference for English homespun;
but this is a counsel of perfection, and he makes no pretence
to personal independence of foreign models.
A definite, if slender, interest attaches to Bartholomew Griffin's
Fidessa, a conventional sequence of sixty-two sonnets. Griffin
was exceptionally bold in imitating home products, and borrowed
much from Daniel and Drayton's recent volumes. But it is worthier
of remembrance that one of his sonnets, on the theme of Venus
and Adonis, was transferred with alterations to Jaggard's piratical
miscellany of 1599, The Passionate Pilgrim, all the contents
of which were assigned to Shakespeare on the title-page.
Only the worst features of the Elizabethan passion for sonneteer-
ing—its clumsy inanity and slavish mimicry—are visible in the
remaining sequences which were published in the last decade of
the sixteenth century. William Percy, in his Sonnets to the fairest
Coelia, 1593, bade his lute 'rehearse the songs of Rowland's (ie.
Drayton's) rage,' and found, with Ronsard, 'a Gorgon shadowed
under Venus' face. ' The anonymous poetaster who published, in
1594, a collection of forty sonnets under the title Zepheria took
his own measure when he confessed
My slubbering pencil casts too gross a matter,
Thy beauty's pure divinity to blaze.
'R.
L Gentleman,' doubtless Richard Linche, published thirty-
nine sonnets, in 1596, under the title Diella, a crude anagram
on Delia. He freely plagiarised phrases and imagery of well known
sonneteers at home and abroad.
William Smith, a sycophantic disciple of Spenser, who published
fifty-one sonnets under the title Chloris, in 1596, and Robert
Tofte, who 'conceived in Italy' a sequence of forty sonnets in
irregular metres, entitled Laura (1597), merely give additional
proof of the plagiarising habit of the day.
But, as the queen's reign closed, there were signs that the
literary standard of the sonnet-sequence of love was rising above
such sordid levels as these. The old paths of imitation were
not forsaken, but the spirit of adaptation showed to higher ad-
vantage in the work of a few writers who, for the time, withheld
their efforts from the press. Chief among these was the courtly
Scottish poet, Sir William Alexander, afterwards earl of Stirling,


## p. 267 (#289) ############################################

Alexander, Drummond and Greville 267
,
who deferred the publication of his sonneteering experiment-
'the first fancies of his youth'-till 1604. Then he issued, under
the title Aurora, one hundred and six sonnets, interspersed, on
the Italian and French pattern, with a few songs and elegies.
Alexander is not a poet of deep feeling. But he has gifts of style
which raise him above the Elizabethan hacks. Another Scottish
poet, whose muse developed in the next generation, William
Drummond of Hawthornden, began his literary career as a son-
neteer on the Elizabethan pattern just before queen Elizabeth
died. In early youth, he made himself familiar with the most
recent literary effort of Italy, and reproduced with great energy
numerous Italian sonnets of comparatively recent date. But he
impregnated his adaptations with a native fire which places
him in an altogether different category from that of the juvenile
scribblers of Elizabethan London. With these two Scotsmen,
Alexander and Drummond, may be classed Sidney's friend, Fulke
Greville, afterwards lord Brooke, who wrote (but did not publish)
at the end of the sixteenth century a miscellaneous collection of
poems called Caelica. The collection consisted of one hundred
and nine short poems, on each of which the author bestowed the
title of sonnet. Only thirty-seven, however, are quatorzaing. The
remaining seventy-two so-called 'sonnets' are lyrics of all lengths
and in all metres. There is little internal connection among
Brooke's poems, and they deserve to be treated as a series of inde-
a
pendent lyrics. Nor is there any sign of real passion. Lord
Brooke's poetic mistresses, Caelica and Myra, are poetic figments
of his brain, and he varies his addresses to them with invocation
of queen Elizabeth under the poetic title of Cynthia, and with
reflective musings on metaphysical themes. The style is less
complicated than is habitual to Brooke's other literary work, and
the medley sounds a melodious note. Greville emulated the
example of Sir Philip Sidney; but the imagery often associates
itself, more closely than was suffered by Sidney's aims, with the
anacreontic vein of the Greek anthologists and of the French
sonneteers. The series was published for the first time as late as
1633, in a collection of lord Brooke's poetical writings. It may be
reckoned the latest example of the Elizabethan sonnet-sequence.
The pertinacity with which the crude artificialities and plagi-
arisms of the sonnet-sequence of love were cultivated in the last
years of queen Elizabeth's reign involved the sonnet as a form of
poetic art in a storm of critical censure before the vogue expired.
The rage for amorous sonneteering came to excite an almost


## p. 268 (#290) ############################################

268
The Elizabethan Sonnet
overwhelming ridicule. The basest charges were brought against
the professional sonneteer. Sir John Harington, whose epigrams
embody much criticism of current literary practices, plainly states
that poets were in the habit of writing sonnets for sale to
purchasers who paraded them as their own. He mentions the
price as two crowns a sonnet, and asserts :
Verses are now such merchantable ware,
That now for sonnets sellers are and buyers.
There is, indeed, other evidence that suitors were in the habit of
pleading their cause with their mistresses by means of sonnets
which had been bought for hard cash from professional producers.
In sonnet XXI, Drayton narrates how he was employed by a 'witless
gallant’to write a sonnet to the wench whom the young man wooed,
with the result that his suit was successful. Other grounds of offence
were discovered in the sentimental insincerity of the conventional
type of sonnet, which sanctioned the sickly practice of 'oiling a
saint with supple sonneting. ' The adjective ‘sugared' was scorn-
fully held to be the epithet best fitted for the conventional
sonnet. Sir John Harington, in an epigram 'comparing the sonnet
and the epigram' (Bk. I, No. 37), condemns the sonnet’s ‘sugared
taste,' and prays that his verse may have salt to make it last.
Sir John Davies was one of those who protested with vehemence
against the 'bastard sonnets' which ‘base rhymers' daily begot 'to
their own shame and poetry's disgrace. ' To expose the futility of
the vogue, he circulated, in manuscript, a series of nine 'gulling
sonnets' or parodies of the artificial vices of the current fashion.
In one of his parodies he effectively reduces to absurdity the
application of law terms to affairs of the heart. The popular
prejudice against the sonnet found expression in most unlikely
places. Echoes of the critical hostility are even heard in Shake-
speare's plays. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona (III, 2. 68 ff. )
there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-
sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous duke :
You must lay lime to tangle her desires,
By wailful sonnets, whose composëd rime
Should be full fraught with serviceable vows. . . .
Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart.
Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonneteers somewhat equivocally
when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo :
Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady
was but a kitchen wench; marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.
(Romeo and Juliet, II, 4. 41–44. )


## p. 269 (#291) ############################################

Elizabethan Critics of the Sonnet 269
When the sonnet-sequence of love was yielding to the loud
protests of the critics, Ben Jonson, in Volpone (Act III, sc. 2)
struck at it a belated blow in a contemptuous reference to the
past days of sonneting' and to the debt that its votaries owed to
‘passionate Petrarch,' Elsewhere, Jonson condemned, root d
branch, the artificial principles of the sonnet. He told Drummond
of Hawthornden that
be cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like
that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too
long cut short.
(Jonson's Conversation, p. 4. )
Jonson was here silently appropriating a depreciatory simile, which
had been invented by a well known Italian critic of the sonnet,
but there is no question that the English dramatist viewed the
vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet as, for the most part, a discredit
to the age.
To what extent the critics of the Elizabethan sonnet were
moved to hostility by resentment of the practice of clandestine
translation from the foreigner offers room for discussion. A close
study of the criticism to which many sonneteers were subjected
leaves little doubt that plagiarism was out of harmony with
the standard of literary ethics in Elizabethan England. The
publication, in the avowed guise of an original production, of a
literal rendering, not merely an adaptation, of a poem by a
foreign contemporary exposed the offender on discovery to a
severe censure. It has been suggested that foreign poetry was
so widely known in Elizabethan England as to render specific
acknowledgment of indebtedness superfluous. But the poetic
work which was tacitly translated by Elizabethan sonneteers
often came, not from the most popular work of great authors
of France and Italy, but either from the obscurer publica-
tions of the leading poets or from the books of men whose
repute was very restricted. In comparatively few cases would
the average Elizabethan reader be aware that Elizabethan sonnets
were translations of foreign poets unless the information were
directly given him. Moreover, whenever plagiarism was detected
or even suspected, critics condemned in no halting terms the
plagiarist's endeavour to ignore his obligation. Of one who pub-
lished without acknowledgment renderings of Ronsard's far-famed
and popular verse (although, as a matter of fact, the borrower
was too incompetent to be very literal), Puttenham wrote thus
in his Arte of English Poesie (1589):
This man deserves to be endited of pety larceny for pilfering other mens
devises from them and converting them to his own use, for in deede as


## p. 270 (#292) ############################################

270
The Elizabethan Sonnet
I would wish every inventour, which is the very Poet, to receave the prayses
of his invention, so would I not have a translatour to be ashamed to be
acknowen of his translation.
The word 'larceny' is italicised in the original edition. Michael
Drayton, in the dedication to his sonnets, in 1594, charged the
literal borrowers with 'filching. Again, Daniel, a sonneteer
who, despite his great gifts, depended largely on the literal in-
spiration of foreign verse, was forcibly rebuked by a discerning
contemporary for yielding to a practice which was declared,
without any qualification, to be 'base. ' In the play The Returne
from Parnassus (part II, act 11, sc. 2), the following warning is
addressed to Daniel:
Only let him more sparingly make use
Of others wit, and use his own the more,
That well may scorn base imitation.
To the same effect was Sir John Harington's ironical epigram,
1618 (II, 30), headed, “Of honest theft. To my good friend
Master Samuel Daniel,' which concludes thus:
Then, fellow-Thiefe, let's shake together hands,
Sith both our wares are fileht from forren lands.
The extravagant character of the denunciation in which some
contemporary critics of the plagiarising habit indulged is illus-
trated by another of Harington's Epigrams (II, 77), which is
headed, ‘Of a censurer of English writers. ' It opens thus:
That Englishmen have small or no invention,
Old Guillam saith, and all our works are barren,
But for the stuffe we get from authors forren.
Elizabethan sonneteers who coloured, in their verse, the fruits
of their foreign reading with their own individuality deserve only
congratulation. The intellectual assimilation of poetic ideas and
even poetic phraseology conforms with a law of literature which is
not open to censure. But literal translation, without acknowledg-
ment, from foreign contemporary poetry was, with little qualifica-
tion, justly condemned by contemporary critics.
Although the sonnet in Elizabethan England, as in France and
Italy, was mainly devoted to the theme of love, it was never
exclusively confined to amorous purposes.
Petrarch occasion-
ally made religion or politics the subject of his sonnets and, very
frequently, enshrined in this poetic form the praises of a friend
or patron. As a vehicle of spiritual meditation or of political
exhortation or of friendly adulation, the sonnet long enjoyed an


## p. 271 (#293) ############################################

The Sonnet of Compliment
271
established vogue in foreign literature. When the sonnet-sequence
of love was in its heyday in Elizabethan England, the application
of the sonnet to purposes of piety or professional compliment
acquired popularity. The art of the sonnet, when it was enlisted
in such service, largely escaped the storm of censure which its
amorous extravagances excited.
Barnes and Constable, in close conformity with foreign practice,
each supplemented their amorous experiments with an extended
sequence of spiritual sonnets. Barnes’s volume of spiritual
sonnets' was printed in 1595; Constable's religious sonnets only
circulated in manuscript. In 1597, too, a humbler writer, Henry
Lok, sent forth a swollen collection of three hundred and twenty-
eight sonnets on religious topics, which he entitled, Sundrie sonets
of Christian Passions with other affectionate sonets of a feeling
conscience. Lok paraphrases many passages from the Scriptures,
and was well read in the book of Ecclesiastes. His piety is un-
questionable. But there is little poetic quality in his ample effort.
Sonnets inscribed by poets in the way of compliment to their
friends or patrons abound in Elizabethan literature. James I, in
his Treatise of poetry, 1584, ignores all uses of the sonnet save for
the compendious praising' of books or their authors and for the
prefatory presentation in brief summary of the topic of any long
treatise. The latter usage was rare in England, though Shakespeare
experimented with it by casting into sonnet form the prologues
before the first two acts of Romeo and Juliet. But, before, during
and after Shakespeare's day, the English author was wont to clothe
in the sonnet shape much professional intercourse with his patron.
Few writers were guiltless of this mode of address. Not infre-
quently, a long series of adulatory sonnets forms the prelude or
epilogue of an Elizabethan book. Spenser's Faerie Queene and
Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad are both examples of
literary work of repute which was ushered into the world with
substantial supplement of adulatory sonnets. Both Spenser and
Chapman sought the favour of a long procession of influential
patrons or patronesses in a series of quatorzains. Even those
self-reliant writers of the day who contemned the sonnet-sequence
of love, and declined to make trial of it with their own pens-men
like Ben Jonson and Chapman-were always ready to salute a
friend or patron in sonnet-metre. Of sonnets addressed in the
way of friendship by men of letters to colleagues of their calling,
a good example is the fine sonnet addressed by the poet Spenser
to Gabriel Harvey, ‘his singular good friend'


## p. 272 (#294) ############################################

272
The Elizabethan Sonnet
Some of these occasional sonnets of eulogy or compliment
reach a high poetic level, and are free from most of the mono-
tonous defects which disfigured the conventional sonnet of love.
To the first book of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Sir Walter Ralegh,
the poet's friend, prefixed two sonnets, the first of which was
characterised by rare stateliness of diction. No better illustration
is to be found of the characteristic merits of the Elizabethan vogue.
Ralegh's sonnet was written in 1595, when the sonneteering rage
was at its height; and, while it attests the predominant influence
of Petrarch, it shows, at the same time, how dependence on a
foreign model may be justified by the spirit of the adaptation.
Ralegh's sonnet runs as follows:
A Vision upon this conceit of the Faery Queene.
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that Temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair love, and fairer virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Fairy Queene:
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those graces were not seen;
For they this Queen attended, in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce:
Where Homer's sprite did tremble all for grief,
And cursed th' access of that celestial thief.
*Celestial thief' is a weak ending, and crudely presents Ralegh's
eulogistic suggestion that Spenser, by virtue of his great poem,
had dethroned the older poetic deities. Ralegh's prophecy, too,
that oblivion had, at length, 'laid him down on Laura's hearse'
was premature. The tide of Petrarchian inspiration flowed on long
after the publication of The Faerie Queene. But Ralegh's sonnet,
viewed as a whole, illustrates how fruitfully foreign imagery could
work in Elizabethan minds, and how advantageously it could be
applied to new purposes by the inventiveness of poetic genius.


## p. 273 (#295) ############################################

CHAPTER XIII
PROSODY FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER
In the short summary or survey of the progress of English
prosody which was given towards the end of the first volume
of this history, we reached the period of the alliterative revival,
in or about the early days of Chaucer. In the second and third
volumes, the actual record of poetry has been carried, approxi-
mately, to the death of Spenser; and incidental notices of the
prosody of nearly three centuries have, necessarily, been included.
But it has been judged proper to continue here the retrospect, in
connected fashion, of the general history of English versification.
The prosody of the fourteenth century, after its very earliest
periods, is a subject of very complex interest as well as of
extreme importance; and its complexity is not really difficult to
disentangle. It is from the neglect to study it as a whole, more,
perhaps, than from any other cause, that general views of English
prosody, in the not very numerous cases in which they have been
taken at all, have been both haphazard and confused. Yet the
facts, if only a little trouble be taken with them, offer their own
explanation most obligingly, and illustrate themselves in a striking
and, indeed, almost unique manner. The contemporary exist-
ence of such poets as Chaucer, Gower and whosoever may have
written the Piers Plowman poems would be remarkable in any
literature, at any time and from any point of view. In relation to
English prosody it points, formulates, illuminates the lesson which
ought to be learnt, in a manner which makes it surprising that
this lesson should ever have been mistaken. The foreign'element-
the tendency to strict syllabic uniformity of the line and to further
uniformity in its metrical subdivisions—receives special, and, for a
long time, almost final, expression in the hands of Gower. The
‘native' reaction to alliterative accentual rhythm finds its greatest
exposition-exposition which seems to disdain formally all trans-
action with metre and rime, though it cannot altogether avoid
metrical colour-in the lines of Piers Plowman. . And the middle
way—the continuation of the process which has produced Middle
18
E. L. III.
CH. XIII.


## p. 274 (#296) ############################################

274 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
English prosody out of the shaping of the Old English lump by
the pressure of the Franco-Latin mould—is trodden by the greatest
of the three, with results that show him to be the greatest. The
verse of Piers Plowoman does all that it can with the method
it makes it clear that no other knight on any other day of the
tournament is likely to do better on that side-but it also shows
the limits of the method and the weakness of the side itself. Gower
does not quite do this, partly because he is weaker, and partly
because he has a better instrument-but he shows that this instru-
ment itself needs improvement. Chaucer shows, not only that he
is best of all, not only that his instrument is better than the others,
but that this instrument, good as it is, has not done nearly all that
it can do—that there is infinite future in it. He experiments until
he achieves ; but his achievement still leaves room for further
experiment.
But, for real prosodic information, it is necessary to fall back
upon the predecessors of these famous poets, in order to perceive
how they reached their actual position. Naturally, when one comes
to think of it, the predecessors of the right and left hand representa-
tives are of less importance than those of the central protagonist.
The attempts in more or less pure alliteration before Piers Plow-
man hardly deserve study here, for Piers Plowman 'puts them all
down': the practitioners of the octosyllable, more or less precisely
written, are of even less account prosodically. But with the great
mass of verse writers, in scores of varying forms, who are the
active forerunners of Chaucer (whether he directly studied them
or not is beside the question) it is very different. In the huge
body of mostly anonymous verse which is contained in a series
of manuscripts beginning with the Harleian 2253 and ending with
the Vernon, and which includes the work of named writers like
Hampole, William of Shoreham and Laurence Minot, we find end-
less experiment, in almost every instance of which the action and
reaction of mould and mass continue to develop the main process
often referred to. It is, of course, possible, by keeping the eye
wholly to one side, to lump all or most of these things under
general categories of 'so many [generally four] stress lines,' or,
by directing it mainly to the other, to discover Latin or French
originals more or less clumsily imitated. But if the examples are
first carefully considered as individuals and the common features
which they present are then patiently extracted in connection, it will
go hard but the nisus towards new forms, familiar to us later, will
emerge. And, to some students at any rate, the presence of
6


## p. 275 (#297) ############################################

The Staple of English
English Poetry 275
foot-arrangement and its results—inchoate and imperfect as they
may be—will pretty certainly manifest itself.
The most important, if the most disputed, of these results is
the actual attainment, whether by deliberate intention or not, of
what was to become the great staple of English poetry, the 'deca-
syllabic' 'five-stress' or 'five-foot' line. The older statements
(not quite obsolete yet) that this line does not appear before
Chaucer—that Chaucer “introduced' it-are certainly false; while
the attempts sometimes made to assign its invention, and its first
employment in couplets, to Hampole are not very well founded.
Something, at least, very like it appears as early as the Orison
of Our Lady, and frequently reappears in later poems, especially
in The Pricke of Conscience, but also in other poems of the
Vernon and other MSS which, probably, are later than Richard
Rolle. But it is, in this particular place, less proper to establish
this point by detailed argument than to draw attention to the fact
that it is only one result of a whole multitude—the result of the
ceaseless and resistless action and reaction of mould and mass. '
If the English decasyllable or heroic and the English alexandrine
(which appears in many places, sporadically, from Mannyng to Piers
Ploroman), and combinations of them, with or without shorter lines,
were merely imitations of French, they must have been more
regular : their very irregularity shows that something was forcing
or cramping (for either metaphor may be used) the hands of the
practitioners.
The greatest of these practitioners naturally get their hands
most free, but in different ways: in Piers Plouman, by shirking
the full problem on one side, in Gower, by shirking it on the
other. How Chaucer meets it has been told in detail in the proper
place. Here, we need only consider his results in the couplet and
in rime royal—the octosyllable, for all his excellent practice in it,
must be regarded as a vehicle which he definitely relinquished;
and his stanzas, other than the septet with final couplet, are of
minor importance. But he left the two great combinations of
the decasyllabic line in such a condition that, given the existing
literary language (largely his work) and the existing pronunciation
of it, hardly anything further could be achieved or expected. The
stanza exhibited-except, perhaps, in respect of pause—a severer
standard of uniformity than the couplet; five hundred years of
subsequent practice have shown that, in all cases, this is desirable,
since too great a variety in the individual line interferes with the
concerted effect of the group. But the couplet itself exhibits an
18–2


## p. 276 (#298) ############################################

276 Prosody from Củaucer to Spenser
amount of freedom which has been denied rather because the
deniers think it ought not to be there than because they can
prove its absence! It certainly admits of either single (masculine)
or double (feminine) rime; it certainly admits of extension in sense
from line to line and from couplet to couplet; the pause, though
hovering somewhere about the middle, by no means always de-
finitely or necessarily alights there, or anywhere; and the lines
are certainly not of invariable syllabic length. Here, perhaps,
agreement ceases. But even those who, though they allow that
Chaucer sometimes used nine syllables only, and often (with the
double rime) eleven, would elsewhere crumple up an apparent
hendecasyllable or dodecasyllable into ten, leave an opening to
the other side. Call the means of crumpling 'slur,''elision,' 'syn-
aloepha,' or what you will, the actual fact remains that some lines
are crumpled and some not; and will permit uncrumpling to those
who choose. Those who do choose see in Chaucer, and have no
mind to alter or disguise what they see, 'feet'-monosyllabic,
dissyllabic and trisyllabic of various composition-and lines-
acephalous,' heroic or alexandrine, as the case may be. In other
words, they see what, in different degrees, has existed in English
prosody ever since. And both parties, however much they may
differ on this point, agree, each on its own system, that the prosody
and versification of Chaucer are as accomplished, as orderly, as
reducible to general rule and system, as the prosody and versifica-
tion of any poet in the world, at any time. That a different opinion
was once and long held is universally admitted to have been the
result of sheer and almost excusable ignorance of certain facts
affecting pronunciation, especially the pronunciation of the final -e.
Thus, the prosody of the fourteenth century proceeds, as has
been said above, in a manner perfectly intelligible and even sur-
prisingly logical. The processes of adjustment of mould and mass
certainly are at work in the thirteenth century; probably, if not
quite certainly, in the twelfth ; and they continue, not merely
unhindered to any important degree by the alliterative-accentual
revival, but, in a certain fashion, assisted, and, as it were, clarified,
by it, in the fourteenth. The more disorderly elements, the rougher
matters, are drawn off into this alliterative direction. No very
great poet shows himself to be a danger in the other direction
of excessive smoothness and syllabic limitation; while a very great
1 Attempts have been made at various times to argue direct and extensive copying
of contemporary French prosody by Chaucer. I have been for years pretty well
acquainted with that prosody, and can pronounce it quite different from his.


## p. 277 (#299) ############################################

Chaucer's Successors
277
poet does show himself capable of conducting prosodic develop-
ment on the combined principles of freedom and order. And,
what is more, this is not only a great poet, but one recognised
as great by his own contemporaries; and his reputation continues
at its highest for more than another century. It might seem
impossible that so favourable a state of things should turn to
anything but good ; that standards, at once so finished and so
flexible as those of the heroic couplet and the rime royal of
Chaucer, should be corrupted or lost. A stationary condition
might seem to be the worst that could reasonably be feared; and
there would not seem to be anything very terrible in a stationary
state of Chaucerian verse.
But the fifteenth century was fated to show that, in prosody,
as in everything else, something unexpected is the only safe thing
to expect. The actual versification of the successors of Chaucer
has been discussed in the chapters appertaining to it; and it has
there been pointed out that some authorities do not take so low
a view of it as seems necessary to the present writer? . But the
fact remains that, in order to get the verses of Lydgate, Occleve
and the rest into any kind of rhythmical system, satisfactory at
once to calculation and to audition, enormous liberties have to be
taken with the text; complicated arrangements of licence and
exception have to be devised; and, in some cases, even these fail-
ing, the franker vindicators have to fall back on the supposition
that mere accent, with unaccented syllables thrown in almost at
pleasure, is the basis of Lydgatian and other prosody. Now, it
may be so; but, in that case, the other fact remains that very
small liberties, if any, need be taken with the text of Chaucer ;
that necessary exceptions and licences in his case are extremely
few; and that, whether his metre be accentual or not, it is most
certainly not merely accentual, in the sense that unaccented
syllables may be peppered down at pleasure as a seasoning, still
less in the sense that the number of accents itself may be altered
at pleasure. In rime royal especially, Chaucer's line-length
and line-arrangement are almost meticulously correct. In his
followers, examples of from seven to seventeen syllables, and of
from four to seven apparent accents, are not merely occasionally,
but constantly, found. And yet we know that almost all these
writers had Chaucer constantly before them and regarded him
1 Professor Max Förster of Würzburg bas been good enough to favour me with a
communication to the effect that some MSS of Burgh, at any rate, are much less dis-
orderly than the printed editions.


## p. 278 (#300) ############################################

278 Prosody from Chaucer to Spenser
a
6
with the highest admiration; and we know, further, that his
followers in Scotland managed to imitate him with very consider-
able precision.
No real or full explanation of this singular decadence has ever
yet been given; probably none is possible. But, in two respects,
at least, something like an approach may be made to such an
explanation. The first of these is that Chaucer, assisted by Genius
but somewhat neglecting Time, standardised' the language rather
too soon. We know that, in his own day, the management of the
final -e was far less uniform and systematic in the case of others
than in his own; that it was, in fact, changing into something like
its modern value. This, of itself, would suffice, with its consequent
alternate use and disuse, forgetfulness and remembrance—nay,
its positive temptation to make a convenience and licence of
the thing—to dislocate and corrupt the metre. And there were
certainly some, probably many, other changes which would help
to produce a similar effect. Nor is it probable that many, if any,
poets had a distinct theoretic understanding of the metres that
they used—the best part of two hundred years had to pass after
1400 before we find trace of any such thing. They were ‘fingering'
at Chaucer's measures by 'rule of thumb,' and with hands furnished
with more thumbs than fingers.
But there was probably another cause which, while less certain,
is highly probable, though it needs careful study and application
to its possible result. The alliterative-accentual revival had not
only spread very far and taken great hold, but it had, as has been
shown, exhibited a singular tendency to combine itself even with
very elaborate metrical arrangements. Nor is there anything
improbable in the supposition that this tendency spread itself much
more widely than such unmistakable instances as the Awntyrs
of Arthure, or the Epistill of Swete Susane, or even Gavin
Douglas's eighth prologué would, of themselves, indicate. Nay, it
is probable that the admixture was not so much an 'adultery
of art' as an unconscious process.
Its results, however, were (except in one important respect to
be noted later) rather unfortunate, and even in not a few cases
very ugly. For exactly how much the combination counted in
the degradation of rime royal and, in a less degree, of the deca-
syllabic couplet—the octosyllabic, always an easy-going form,
escaped better-it would be rash to attempt to determine. But,
almost indisputably, it counted for a great deal—for next to every-
thing-in the rise of the curious phenomenon called 'doggerel'


## p. 279 (#301) ############################################

‘Doggerel
279
which we perceive during this century, and which, towards the
close of it, and at the beginning of the next, usurps a very great
position in the realm of verse.