Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.
IntroductionIX. Drayton and Spenser
Early in 1534 a more imposing figure in the annals of Elizabethan sonneteering first took the field. Michael Drayton, a reputed friend of Shakespeare, wrote sonnets at intervals through more than a quarter of a century. But the greater number of his poems in this kind were completed before 1600, and an important instalment was published in 1594 when the sonneteering rage was at its height. It is in one of his latest sonnets that his sonneteering power shows to best advantage. Elsewhere he rarely maintains a high level of melody or diction; signs of haste and carelessness in composition abound; he gives the reader the impression that it was with reluctance, if not with his tongue in his cheek, that he yielded to the sonneteering craze. In Sonnet ix. he asks:—
He admits that his sonnets have little connection one with another; they lack any single thread of sentiment to justify their publication as a sequence. In a preliminary address ‘To the Reader’ he disavows passion:—
Drayton ranges over a variety of subjects. Writing in general terms on topics like the celestial numbers, imagination, folly, and the soul, he constantly ignores the lady to whom he professes to owe his inspiration. Elsewhere his references to his mistress are the merest conventionalities. In Sonnet xxi. he 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. There is other evidence to prove that such commissions were familiar to most of the professional sonneteers, and Drayton doubtless speaks truth when he claims personal experience of the practice.
Nevertheless, while he acknowledged that the art as it was ordinarily practised in England was a bastard product, Drayton affected anxiety to persuade his public that, unlike his literary colleagues, he handled none of their well-worn weapons of plagiarism. He announced to ‘his ever kind Mecænas, Ma. Anthony Cooke, Esquire,’ to whom he dedicated his first volume of sonnets in 1594:—
But these protests prove on examination to be unworthy of attention.
The title of Drayton’s sonnet-sequence, Idea, gives a valuable clue to one source of his inspiration. The title was directly borrowed from a very extended sonnet-sequence called L’Idée, by Claude de Pontoux, a poetic physician of Chalon. L’Idée, a sequence of two hundred and eighty-eight regular French sonnets, was published, with a few odes, chansons, and other verse, in 1579, just after the author’s death.
L’Idée is to a very large extent based on classical and Italian originals, and presents an unimpressive series of extravagant conceits illustrating a lover’s despairing grief. The name symbolises the Platonic [idea] of beauty, which was especially 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’ ‘Céleste Idée,’ ‘Fille de Dieu’ (Sonnet x.) Drayton adopted many of de Pontoux’ developments of this traditional theme. The English writer’s enumeration of the contrasted sensations which he endures at one and the same moment, is found in the work of every sonneteer who wrote since Petrarch. Ronsard’s lines (Amours, Livre
Drayton’s defiance of his critics (see Sonnets xxxi. and xxxix.) echoes de Pontoux’ confident appeals to his ‘Muse’ and ‘Minerva’ to protect him from the assaults of ‘Zoïle mordant’ (Sonnet cxliii.).
But Drayton by no means confined his sonneteering studies to the volume whence he took his shadowy mistress’s name. He worked with equal zeal on the labours of other foreign poets. Drayton’s sonnet on the Phœnix’s regeneration by fire (No. xvi.) is traceable through a long series of French adaptations to Petrarch himself (Sonnet clii.). The sonnet on the belief that young eagles are proved to be of the true breed by their power of facing the glare of the sun (No. lvi.) was probably suggested by Watson’s Hecatompathia (No. xcix.), which is itself an imitation of Serafino (1550 ed., Sonnetto Primo); but the tradition of the genuine eagle’s visual capacity was quite as accessible, in the shape that Drayton handled it, in French and Latin verse as in Italian and English. His treatment of the perennial dispute between Love and Reason, in which Reason is ignominiously defeated (Idea, xxxviii.), is an obvious copy of Ronsard’s Sonnets pour Hélène (No. xxi.), which has for burden, ‘La Raison centre Amour ne peut chose qui vaille.’ Perhaps, too, an added touch or two was derived by Drayton from Desportes’ lyric, ‘Procez entre Amour au siege de la Raison,’ to which Ronsard’s sonnet had already given birth. Drayton’s imitative appeals to night, to his lady’s fair eyes, to rivers; his classical allusions, his insistence that his verse is eternal: all these themes recall at every turn expressions from Ronsard, and Desportes, or from their humbler 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 absurd triviality of the sonneteering habit. 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. This satire is clearly intended to apply to the simples out of which the conventional type of sonnet was for the most part exclusively compounded.
Apart from Shakespeare, Spenser was the most richly endowed of Elizabethan poets who engaged in sonneteering. We have already seen how his earliest work was an avowed adaptation of the sonnets of Petrarch and Du Bellay; but nearly a generation passed before he addressed himself to the composition of a sonnet-sequence of the conventional pattern. It was in 1595 that there was printed for the first time his collection of eighty-eight sonnets. There is every reason to believe that he wrote them about 1592, while he was wooing, at the mature age of forty, the lady who became his wife on 11th June 1594. His sonnet-sequence was thus no fruit of his callow youth, as in the case of most of his contemporaries. It came from his pen when his poetic powers were at their zenith. He had already made substantial progress with his greatest literary achievement, The Faery Queen. But any expectation that his sonnets as a whole consequently claim a far loftier rank than that to which the contemporary efforts mainly belong, is belied by a close study of them.
William Ponsonby, on his own responsibility during the author’s absence in Ireland, published Spenser’s sonnets in 1595. The author bestowed on them the Italian title of Amoretti. The publisher described them as ‘sweet’ and ‘conceited.’ Such warnings prepare the reader for the knowledge that most of them illustrate the fashionable vein of artifice, and are founded on Italian models.
Not that Spenser failed on occasion to escape from the conventional chains. A few of his sonnets betray rare capacity for the treatment, with poetic directness, of original ideas. His familiar sonnet (No. lxxv.)—‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’—is evidence of the highest poetic faculty.
Amid all the conventional imagery, Spenser makes at least three autobiographical statements in his sonnets. Sonnet xxxiii. is addressed by name to his friend Lodowick Briskett, and is an apology for the poet’s delay in completing his Faery Queen. In Sonnet lx. Spenser states that he is forty-one years old, and that one year has passed since he came under the influence of the winged god. Sonnet lxxiv. apostrophises the ‘happy letters’ which comprise the name Elizabeth, which he states was borne alike by his mother, his sovereign, and his wife, Elizabeth Boyle.
In their metrical effects, too, Spenser’s sonnets showed greater originality than most of his English contemporaries. He declined to follow exactly either the ordinary English or foreign model. He formed most of his sonnets of three quatrains alternately rhymed and a concluding couplet. The alternate rhymes were unknown abroad. But he restricted the total number of rhymes in a single sonnet to five, after the foreign fashion instead of employing seven, after the English fashion. The first line of his second quatrain rhymes with the last line of his first quatrain, and the first line of his third quatrain with the last line of his second. Thus each quatrain was insensibly absorbed into its successor, and a continuity which was rare in Elizabethan sonnets was achieved. In two sonnets (x. and xlv.), the poet ventured on a further innovation by winding up the sonnet with an Alexandrine.
But, despite all his metrical versatility and his genuine poetic force, the greater part of Spenser’s sonneteering efforts abound, like those of his contemporaries, in strained conceits, which are often silently borrowed from foreign literature without radical change of diction. Spenser sought his main inspiration in Petrarch. The first friendly critic (Gabriel Harvey) of Spenser’s sonnet-sequence greeted him as a Petrarchist, and defended him from censure based on the ground of his subservience to the prevailing habit of imitating the Italian master. ‘Petrarch’s invention,’ Harvey pointed out, ‘is pure love itself; Petrarch’s elocution pure beauty itself.’ ‘All the noblest French, Italian, and Spanish poets,’ continued Spenser’s champion, ‘have in their several veins Petrarchised, and it is no dishonour for the daintiest or divinest muse to be his scholar whom the amiablest invention and beautifullest elocution acknowledged their master.’
The metaphors from ships and tempests (Sonnets xxxiv. and lxiii.) are of true Petrarchan lineage. Spenser’s avowal of sensibility to ice and fire (xxx.), and his appeal to his lady to forsake her ‘glass of crystal clean’ (Sonnet xlv.), echo with slight variations the Italian phraseology. In identical terms, too, does Spenser follow Petrarch in describing his imprisonment in the net of his mistress’s golden tresses, which on occasion wave in ‘the loose wind.’
But vast as is Spenser’s manifest debt to Petrarch alike in his general scheme and in its details, he did not disdain to borrow at the same time from Petrarch’s French and Italian disciples. It is not always possible to determine whether he is the immediate debtor of Petrarch or of Petrarch’s followers in Italy and France. His heroine is the wayward mistress, the ‘sweet warrior’ (Sonnet lvii.) of every sixteenth-century sonneteer. But difference of view is inevitable as to whether she owe most to Petrarch’s ‘dolce guerrera,’ or to De Baif’s ‘belle ennemie,’ or to Desportes’ ‘douce adversaire.’ Spenser had clearly immersed his thought in French poetry. Adopting Ronsard’s imagery, he denounces his mistress in her wrath as a ‘tigress.’ Like the lady-loves of all the Pléiade, her features are fairer than the flowers or precious stones. Desportes, de Pontoux, and Tyard never tire of likening their mistress’s eyes to pinks (œillets), her cheeks to roses, or her lips to gilliflowers or marjorams. Spenser is not too proud to accept this florid choice of similes (Sonnet lxiv.). Ronsard when in the presence of his mistress noted
Ronsard had already told the world, that no searcher going from the shores of Spain to India could find ‘si riche gemme en Orient’ as the hue (teint) of his mistress.
Similarly Desportes, whom Spenser followed here with greater literalness, had bidden
Shakespeare alone excepted, no sonneteer repeated with greater emphasis than Spenser Ronsard’s favourite conceit that his verses are immortal, and give immortality to those they commemorate:—
In two sonnets Spenser identifies his heroine with the Petrarchan [idea] of beauty which had lately played its part in numberless French sonnets by Du Bellay, Desportes, Tyard, de Pontoux, and others. He catches the true idealistic note far more completely than Drayton, who, in conferring on his sonnets the title of ‘Idea,’ professed to range himself with the Italian and French Platonists. Spenser writes in Sonnet xlv.:—
Pontus de Tyard had already closed the last book of his Les Erreurs Amoureuses on the identical note:—
When he was in his most solemn mood, Spenser invariably cast his anchor in a foreign port. His sonnet to Christ at Eastertide (Sonnet lxviii.) was clearly suggested by Desportes’ ejaculation at the same season which unexpectedly fills a niche in the poet’s Amours de Diane. Petrarch’s gravest tone resounds in Spenser’s impressive sonnet (lxxxiii.):—
Watson and Sir Philip Sidney had already taught the Elizabethan sonneteer to check any wanton tendencies in his Muse by seeking inspiration at the Petrarchan oracle. In that regard there is much in Spenser’s sonnets that reminds the reader more especially of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. The richer tones of Spenser’s mature genius give the greater part of his Amoretti a literary rank above that reached by the Astrophel of former days. But Spenser, no less than Sidney, to a large extent handled the sonnet as a poetic instrument whereon to repeat in his mother-tongue what he regarded as the finest and most serious examples of poetic feeling and diction in Italy and France.