The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume III. Renascence and Reformation.
§ 17. Elizabethan critics of the sonnet
The pertinacity with which the crude artificialities and plagiarisms 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 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:
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 Shakespeare’s plays. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona (
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 publications 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 published 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):
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 acknowledgment, from foreign contemporary poetry was, with little qualification, 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 occasionally 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 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 unquestionable. But there is little poetic quality in his ample effort.