Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Introduction

VI. The Earliest Elizabethan Sonneteers—Sidney and Watson

The promise of a poetic revival in England, which the effort of Wyatt and Surrey gave, was not fulfilled. Surrey’s death in 1547 was followed by a barren quarter of a century, and only at the close of that period did a great literary era dawn on England. In that interval the Pléiade school of France inaugurated and brought to maturity the first golden age of modern French literature. Throughout the same epoch Italian literature was still bearing rich fruit, and it was Italian literary energy that dominated the new French outburst. To Elizabethan literature, however, the primary impulse seems to have come from the new French activity, and not from the continuous flow of Italian poetry. The sonnet was reintroduced, for the second time in the century, into England mainly from France. Petrarch quickly reasserted over the Elizabethan sonnet that supremacy which Wyatt and Surrey had acknowledged. The best Elizabethan sonneteers—men like Sidney, Watson, and Spenser—were not content to practise the sonneteering art on any large scale until they had steeped themselves in Petrarch’s text. But even they studied with equal thoroughness the writings of the Pléiade masters, while the majority of the Elizabethan sonneteers concentrated their attention on contemporary France, and derived their chief knowledge of Petrarch and of his Italian followers from the French adaptations of Italian work by Ronsard and Desportes rather than by more direct approach. The wholesale loans which the Elizabethan sonneteers invariably levied on foreign literature did not always succeed in extinguishing the buoyant native fire. But genuine originality of thought and expression was rare. Indeed, some of the Elizabethan sonneteers (whose literary morality and whose claim to the honours of poetic invention have not hitherto been impugned) prove, when their work is compared with that of foreign writers, to have been verbatim translators, and almost sink to the level of literary pirates.

Thomas Watson, Edmund Spenser, and Sir Philip Sidney, who were all in tender years of infancy when Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, divide among themselves the parentage of the Elizabethan sonnet. In early youth Sidney and Watson visited France, and Sidney extended his travels into Italy, making the acquaintance of the painters there as well as of the poets. Spenser seems also to have gone abroad in early life, while he was serving in a secretarial capacity his patron, the Earl of Leicester. In all these men the recent literary revival in France first stirred the poetic impulse.

Probably Spenser’s earliest poetic effort was an act of homage to Ronsard’s counsellor, Joachim du Bellay. Fifteen of the Frenchman’s sonnets on the theme of the Apocalypse were rendered by Spenser, while a schoolboy, into English, under the title of The Visions of Bellay. Subsequently he revised this youthful venture, and combined with it a translation of the longer series of sonnets by Du Bellay called Les Antiquités de Rome. In the ‘envoy’ in sonnet form to his rendering of Du Bellay’s Antiquités, Spenser apostrophised the Frenchman in language that plainly acknowledges his literary influence:

But Spenser also learned much that was of pressing importance to him from the greatest of the French poets who preceded the Pléiade. It was not, it proves, from the masters of that new French school, it was from that school’s eminent predecessor, Clément Marot, two of whose eclogues he silently imitated in his Shepherd’s Calendar (Nos. xi. and xii.), that Spenser gained his earliest knowledge of Petrarch. Shortly before his death, Marot had translated into six twelve-lined stanzas, with a four-line envoy, an ode or canzone (No. xlii.), which figures among Petrarch’s sonnets. The Italian poet gave this poem no separate designation, but Marot invented for it the title of Les Visions de Petrarque, which harmonises with its subject-matter. Spenser’s earliest experiments in verse include, besides the sonnets from Du Bellay, seven others which bear Marot’s invented name of The Visions of Petrarch. These seven sonnets reproduce in English Marot’s French verses word for word. The expansion of the French twelve-line stanzas into quatorzains, and of the four lines of the French envoy into fourteen lines, fails in any material respect to differentiate the English and French renderings of Petrarch’s ode. There can be no doubt that Spenser only knew the ode at the time of writing in Marot’s version. Subsequently he read Petrarch in the Italian text, and at a much later date devised a new sonnet-sequence on the Petrarchan plan; but it is clear that it was through the study of French that Spenser passed to the study of Italian.

The evidence that Sidney and Watson drew their first literary sustenance from France is less complete, but there is positive evidence that very early in their career both came under the impressive influence of Ronsard, Du Bellay’s chief. It was claimed for Watson that he did for the progress of English poetry what Ronsard did for French poetry. With no less eagerness than Spenser did Sidney and Watson seek, in years of adolescence, direct acquaintance with the Frenchmen’s Italian masters. Watson translated into Latin Petrarch’s whole collection of sonnets. The ‘Stella’ of Sidney’s adoration was avowedly modelled on Petrarch’s ‘Laura.’ But there is little question that it was through France that both Sidney and Watson travelled to the Italian shrine.

Thus were the foundations laid for the edifice of sonnet-sequences in Elizabethan England. Spenser only in later life continued those experiments in the adaptations of foreign sonnets which he began in youth. But about 1580, more than a decade before Spenser resumed his labours, Sidney and Watson both set to work simultaneously on the construction of a sonnet-sequence in the Petrarchan vein. The main part of Sidney’s work, which is known under the title of Astrophel and Stella, circulated among his friends in manuscript for eleven years before it was printed posthumously in 1591. Watson’s first effort in the like direction came from the press in 1582. The publication of Watson’s collection gave the cue to the sonneteering movement in Elizabethan England. His volume sheds a flood of light on the biology of Elizabethan sonnet-literature.

Watson’s book is entitled The Hecatompathia, or Passionate Centurie of Love. It consists of one hundred separate poems, few of which are quite regular sonnets; the lines usually number eighteen instead of fourteen. But the work illustrates at every point the method and spirit of the nascent sonneteering vogue.

The inaugural poem (a regular sonnet) is addressed to the author by an admiring friend, and places Petrarch in the centre of the stage. The lines opening thus:—

Another enthusiastic friend of the English poet, writing in Latin verse, declared how France was now at length fast garnering the wealth of Parnassus and luxuriating in the new achievements of Ronsard:

Of all countries of Europe only England, Watson’s panegyrist proceeds, was still awaiting the advent of great poetry, and Watson had arisen to satisfy her yearning.

Watson deprecates all claim to originality. To each poem he prefixes a prose introduction in which he frankly indicates, usually with ample quotation, the 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, Ercole Strozza (1471–1508), or Agnolo Firenzuola, together with passages from the chief writers of Greece and Rome. As a rule, his rendering is quite literal, though he now and then inverts a line or two of his original, or inserts a new sentence. In the conventional appeals to his wayward mistress, and in his exposition of amorous emotion, there is no pretence of a revelation of personal experience. Watson’s whole effort is a literary exercise from the pen of a scholiast. Appropriately enough he devotes his last page to a good rendering in Latin, in regular sonnet form, of one of Petrarch’s concluding quatorzains (cccxiii.), in which the Italian poet deplores his absorption in the vanities of love, and prays God that he may aspire to higher things.

Subsequently Watson vigorously concentrated his energy not only on the more recent poetry of Italy, but also on the new birth of Italian music, which gave added impetus to lyric activity through Europe. He published a paraphrase in Latin hexameters of Tasso’s lately issued pastoral drama Aminta, and also an English rendering of a selection of Italian madrigals. The latter work was widely popular.

The new Italian music was growing fashionable in Elizabethan England, especially the madrigal and part-song, to which the great contemporary Italian composers devoted their chief energies. In Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590), Watson gave the earliest hint of the sustenance that the Elizabethan lyric was to derive from the recent union of Italian music with Italian poetry. He translated the Italian words which Luca Marenzio, the Venetian composer, and other Italian musicians of eminence, had set to music. The verse was for the most part derived from the Italian sonneteers. One of the most famous of Petrarch’s sonnets (cclxix.)—‘Zefiro torna, e ’l bel tempo rimena’—is the original of the fourth of Watson’s translated madrigals. Watson rendered it from the reprint in Marenzio’s music-book, without any indication of its authorship. That reticence illustrates how the taste for music silently opened a new path for the admission into Elizabethan England of the Italian master’s poetry.

But Watson never deserted the sonnet in its pristine simplicity. In 1593, a year after his death, there was published a second sequence of amorous sonnets by him in strict metre. These numbered sixty in all, and bore the title The Tears of Fancie, or Love Disdained. Although the writer there gave no references to his authorities, the trail of France and Italy is unconcealed. In the opening sonnets he describes a skirmish between himself and Cupid in the Anacreontic manner which Ronsard especially affected. The remaining poems re-echo, in a somewhat piping key, the tearful sighs and groans which Petrarch and his imitators had already sounded with wearisome iteration. At times he adapts a Petrarchan canzone or ode to the purposes of his sonnet-sequence. His Sonnet lii., which describes how the sun and the moon bring joy to all living creatures except the despairing lover, reproduces with little change Petrarch’s first sestina:

In Sonnets xix. and xx., in which the power of the heart and eye in cherishing love are fantastically contrasted, he handles a Petrarchan conceit which was universally appropriated by Petrarch’s disciples. Sonnets xlvii., xlviii. and li. on Spring, Sonnets xxviii. and xxix. on Echo, are equally derivative in thought or expression.

Sir Philip Sidney died six years before Watson, but the long series of sonnets which occupied his leisure through the last six years of his life were not published till 1591. Then for the first time, in accordance with a common practice of the age, they were produced surreptitiously by an adventurous publisher, Thomas Newman, who acquired a written copy without consultation with the author’s friends. The pathetic circumstances of Sidney’s early death in the war in Holland rendered him a national hero, and his writings exerted on Elizabethan thought an overwhelming influence which owed as much to his extraneous repute as to their intrinsic merit. Although it is probable that Sidney’s pursuit of the favour of Lady Rich, a coquettish friend of his youth who married another, led him to turn sonneteer, the imitative quality that characterises Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love is visible throughout Sidney’s ample effort, and destroys most of those specious pretensions to autobiographic confessions which the unwary reader may discern in them.

Sidney had a far finer poetic faculty than Watson, but his reading in French and Italian was no less extended. He wrote under the glamour of Petrarchan idealism, and held that it was the function of the ‘lyrical kind of songs and sonnets’ to sing ‘the praises of the immortal beauty,’ and of no more mundane passion. Detachment from the realities of ordinary passion, which comes of much reading about love in order to write on the subject, is the central feature of Sidney’s sonnets. Sidney’s masters were Petrarch and Ronsard. His admirers dubbed him ‘our English Petrarch,’ or ‘the Petrarch of our time.’ His habit was to paraphrase and adapt foreign writings rather than literally translate them. But hardly any of his poetic ideas, and few of his ‘swelling phrases,’ are primarily of his invention. Songs, in accordance with the foreign practice, were interspersed in his sonnet-sequence, and they no less than his quatorzains are founded on foreign models.

Sonnet xli. fairly represents Sidney’s method when at its freest. He describes how he won a prize in a tournament owing to the presence of his lady-love among the spectators. The beams of her eyes lent him prowess. In like fashion Petrarch (Sonnet cci.) had described a brilliant court entertainment which was illumined by the light of Laura’s countenance. The central idea of the two poems is the same. Sidney’s tournament is the child of Petrarch’s princely banquet. Sidney follows Ronsard with greater fidelity in reproaching his mistress with showing more attention to her dog than to himself. Petrarch’s addresses to the River Po (Sonnet cxlvii.) and to the River Rhone (Sonnet clxxiii.) precisely adumbrate Sidney’s address to the River Thames (Astrophel, ciii.). The apostrophe to the bed (Sonnet xcviii.), in which the English poet turns and tosses in the black horrors of the silent night, repeats the cry of whole flocks of Petrarchists in France and Italy. His condolences with Stella in her sickness (ci.), and his lamentations on her absence (xci., cvi.); the appeals to sleep (Astrophel, xxxviii. and xxxix.), to the sonneteer’s favoured bird, the nightingale, to the moon, and to his mistress’s eyes, are all close echoes of his reading, even though they are at times touched by a finer feeling and music than English minds can discover in the foreign original.

Sidney conspicuously emulates the extravagance of French sonneteers in his reiteration of their habitual epithet ‘sweet.’ When he wrote

Sidney clearly had in mind lines like these:—

Like Watson, Sidney follows Petrarch in closing his sonnets of love on Petrarch’s most characteristic note. In his concluding sonnet he imitates the Italian poet’s solemn and impressive renunciation of love’s empire:—

In one respect Sidney showed a loyalty to his foreign models in which he outran his sonneteering fellow-countrymen. He alone of all the sixteenth-century English sonneteers endeavoured to reproduce with any strictness the foreign metres as well as the foreign imagery and ideas. Sixteenth-century Italy, for the most part, observed the common Petrarchan scheme of a b b a, a b b a, c d e, c d e. France loyally followed the Italian formula as far as the first eight lines were concerned, while introducing into the last six the modification c c d, e d e. But neither in France nor in Italy did the number of different rhymes in a sonnet exceed five. From the first England evinced an unwillingness to obey any such intricate metrical laws. Wyatt and Surrey adopted the simplest and (in Italy) the least common of the Petrarchan variations of the regular type; they closed their sonnets with a rhyming couplet. The last six lines were consequently no longer constructed of two tercets, but of a quatrain and a couplet. The concluding couplet came, in fact, to dominate the Elizabethan sonnet, and the dozen preceding lines gradually lost the demarcations and limitations of separate quatrains and tercets that were habitual to them abroad; they developed into an unbroken string of alternately rhymed lines. The five rhymes of the foreign sonnet thus grew into seven in the Elizabethan sonnet. The Elizabethan sonneteer, indeed, often dispensed with strongly marked pauses at any point in the poem, and the poem ran continuously from the first to the twelfth, if not to the fourteenth line. George Gascoigne, in his Certayne Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Ryme in English, defined the accepted Elizabethan practice when he wrote of sonnets thus:—‘Fouretene lynes, every lyne conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve to ryme in staves of foure lynes by cross metre and the last two ryming togither, do conclude the whole’ (published in Gascoigne’s Posies, 1575). The multiplicity of rhymes in Elizabethan sonnets was deplored by Samuel Daniel, himself a sonneteer on the English pattern, whose metrical dexterity left little to be desired. But he excused the rhyming excesses of himself and other sonneteers by the reflection that ‘ryme is no impediment’ to a true poet’s ‘conceit, but gives him wings to mount … to a far happier flight.’

Spenser showed some familiarity with the French and Italian laws, but rarely put them into practice. Watson abandoned them altogether; and Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, was content to follow Watson’s example. Sidney sought no such freedom. Alone of the Elizabethans he declined to obey the anglicised rules of sonneteering. In nearly all the one hundred and eight sonnets of which his collection entitled Astrophel and Stella consists, the principle of the double quatrain is faithfully respected. He very often adopted the orthodox Petrarchan scheme a b b a, a b b a. He made smaller resistance to the rhyming couplet at the close, but in twenty-one sonnets he avoided it. When he employed it, he so diversified the rhymes of the preceding four lines as to preserve much of the effect of the double tercet.

But whatever the fate of the Petrarchan metres, Petrarchan imagery completely dominated the thought of the Elizabethan circle of poets that gathered round Sidney and Spenser. The eight sonnets and the two canzone in which Petrarch pictured visions of Laura in a dream especially captivated the Elizabethan poet’s imagination, and when Sir Walter Raleigh sought to give expression to the elation with which Elizabethan England welcomed (in 1590) the first instalment of Spenser’s Faery Queen—the firstfruits of the mature Elizabethan spirit—he had recourse to a Petrarchan conceit wherewith to give his eulogy its pith and moment.

Raleigh’s compliment to Spenser’s Faery Queen is a notable act of homage to Petrarch. The finely turned qualification of Petrarch’s influence had little significance. The prophecy that at length ‘oblivion had laid him down on Laura’s hearse’ was premature. The tide of Petrarchan inspiration was destined immediately to flow in England in fuller vigour than before.