Shakespeare's Sonnets (1923) Yale/Appendix C
APPENDIX C
The Sonnet and Elizabethan Sonneteers
It was Petrarch (1304–1374) who made the sonnet the most popular form of the lyric during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Though sonnets had been written before him, notably by Dante, the vogue of Petrarch, overshadowing that of all other lyric poets ancient and modern, was carried far beyond 'this side idolatry.' His themes were love and beauty, a hopeless love thwarted by destiny and death. His followers and imitators were legion. Vagany, in his compendious bibliography of sixteenth-century French and Italian sonneteers, does not include them all, for no man has ever read them all or could survive if he made the attempt.
Before the sonnet reached England, it came to France, where Ronsard and his contemporaries were deeply influenced by Italian poetry; and in Shakespeare's day it was largely through the French sonneteers that Petrarch affected English writers, though they made direct translations of Italian sonnets as well. The first English sonnets were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1518–1547), and were first published after their death in Tottel's Miscellany, 1557. As might be presumed, both these poets were confirmed admirers of Petrarch, and their sonnets showed it.
The sonnet of Petrarch, commonly called the Italian sonnet, is a poem of fourteen lines divided into two parts of eight and six lines, the octave and the sestet. The octave was written abbaabba, while the sestet could have two or three rhymes, arranged in no fixed order save that the last two lines should not rhyme together. In the octave a thought, an emotion, a picture is completely presented and the verse sentence, so to speak, comes to an end. In the sestet, the explanation, the comment, the summing up of the whole matter is given. Wyatt attempted the Italian form, but found it too difficult to write correctly, and his sonnets end in rhymed couplets. Surrey, more of a stylist, devised a new and simpler form for the sonnet—three quatrains with a concluding couplet, and with no attempt to preserve the division of the octave and sestet. As a simple trial will prove, it is much harder to write a sonnet in the Italian form than to compose three quatrains and a couplet; and as the Elizabethans prized fluency, they preferred Surrey's form. In Shakespeare it reached its greatest beauty so that Surrey's form is now often called the 'Shakespearean' sonnet. It is interesting to notice that at times Shakespeare makes the break in the thought between the eighth and ninth lines that the Italian sonnet writers observed. This will be seen in 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,' No. 29, or better still, in several sonnets printed together with the sestet beginning invariably with 'O,' Nos. 21–23, 71, 72, 76.
Apart from Shakespeare, the Elizabethan sonnet sequences most worthy of study are Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 1591, Daniel's Delia, 1592, Drayton's Idea, 1594, and Spenser's Amoretti, 1595. To read them, or even their finest passages, but makes more apparent the supremacy of Shakespeare.