PETRARCHAN SONNET

1. PETRARCHAN SONNET • Petrarchan sonnet is limited to 14 lines organically divided into an octave (first eight lines) rhyming abba abba, and a sestet (last six lines)in which several rhyme schemes were permitted: • abba subject • abba

2. SONNET FORM AS RENAISSANCE INNOVATION • Sonnets are among the most accomplished and fascinating lyric poems in the English language. • Yet, the form is not original to English language. • During the fourteenth century in Italy Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) initiated the form and later Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) developed. • cde / cdc • cde / dcd resolution

3. LOVE SONNET • The literary equivalent of that chivalry which led the knight of the Middle Ages to show his devotion to his lady by fighting in field or tournament for her protection and honour. • In the hands of Petrarch’s imitators, Italian, French and English, the sonnet became a literary exercise, providing the poet the opportunity to display his ingenuity in the expression of a fictitious love.

4. PETRARCHAN THEME • Young, handsome and a gentle male lover is the speaker; he is deeply in love with a fair young lady whom he describes in superlatives. Although the lady is virtuous and beautiful with blond hair, blue eyes and white skin, she is cold and distanced. The man’s love remains unrequited. The lovers never have a physical union and can never be together. As a result the man returns his love to God.

5. SONNET ARRIVES ENGLAND • The first English poetry anthology, the Songs and Sonnets published in 1557 by Richard Tottel, and now generally known as Tottel’s Miscellany is a substantial collection of sonnets and other lyrical poems. • Many of them were written by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?–47). • They drew heavily on Italian models, especially Petrarch.

6. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) • introduced Petrarchan love poetry into England. • although his poetry is notable for its fine energy many of his sonnets are the literal translations of the Italian originals. • Introduced anti-Petrarchan theme: male lover is depicted as being in love involuntarily and expressing his desire to escape from this bondage. Wyatt asserts a manly independence.

7. Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (1517-47) • He imitated Italian amorous poets, but broadened the scope of the sonnet in both form and content. • Introduced a new structural scheme: 3 quatrains and a concluding couplet, known as Surreyan or English sonnet. • Introduced new themes: of friendship especially to Clere and to Wyatt. • Shakespeare adopted and used it with great effectiveness so that the form is best known as Shakespearean.

8. Surreyan or Shakespearean Sonnet Rhyme scheme: • abab • cdcd • efef • gg Virtues: • rhyme scheme is more obvious and easily followed by the ear and directly progressive. Limitations: • the poet has said all that needs to be said at the end of the 3rd quatrain, and the couplet embodies a redundancy.

9. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) • Sonnet was ignored by poets for 25 years, until Sidney published Astrophel and Stella in 1590. • Without these poems Shakespeare’s sonnets would not have been written. • The speaker expresses some phase of his feeling in relation to his mistress. • The passion is first thwarted and then suppressed. • Sidney borrowed freely from French Petrarchans but achieved complete originality and first rate poetry.

10. Other Sonneteers • During the years 1591-1597 major and minor poets followed the fashion of Astrophel and Stella. • Spenser’s Italian Amoretti: records the progress of his courtship with Elizabeth Boyle, his wife. • Although they are similar to Shakespeare’s sequence, they all lack the richness and the range of subjects found in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

12. Shakespeare’s Sonnets • The greatest collection of lyrics in English. • Love lyrics, grown from the social, erotic and literary contexts of his age. • Their greatness lies in their power to be read again and again in later ages, and to raise compellingly, even unanswerably, more than merely literary questions.

13. Shakespeare’s Sonnets • are as ‘’dramatic’’ as any of Shakespeare’s plays, • meditate on love, beauty, time, betrayal, insecurity, and joy. • overwhelm readers with questions and contradictions about love, time and death. • refuse to offer even the possibility of solutions to the problems they raise.

14. Date of Composition • They could have been written anytime from 1585 to 1609. 1593-1594 and 1598-1601. • There are parallels of imagery, theme and mood found in Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, and Romeo and Juliet, written between 1592-1595. • Love’s Labour’s Lost includes seven quatorzains and parallels of imagery, thought and phraseology. Rosaline is the Dark Lady who wins Biron’s heart (127 and 130). • Sonnets 107 and 152 belong to the Hamlet period.

15. Order and Arrangement • Of the 154 sonnets, the first 126 were addressed to a man, and the rest to a woman. • Three persons- fictitious or not- are either addressed or referred to in the poems: the Fair Young Man, the Dark Lady, and the Rival Poet.

16. Fair Young Man • The Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke respectively have most often been identified as the beautiful youth addressed in Sonnets 1-126. • he is surpassingly beautiful, lovely than a summer’s day, • his beauty is of feminine cast, • belongs to upper class of society, a young aristocrat

17. Fair Young Man • The nature of this love of a mature man for a youth of perhaps seventeen or eighteen years of age appeared strange and repellent to many because Shakespeare used words of affection normally employed by the male lover addressing his fair lady. To him the youth is his ‘’Rose’’, his ‘’Sweet Boy’’ and ‘’the world’s fresh ornament’’. • Such addresses to men were customary in Shakespeare’s time. Sonnet 20 refutes the idea that the first 126 sonnets celebrate a homosexual love affair. The youth is described as having ‘’ a woman’s face’’ and called as ‘’master mistress’’.

18. Sonnet 76 • Why is my verse so barren of new pride, • So far from variation or quick change? • Why with the time do I not glance aside • To new-found methods, and to compounds strange? • Why write I still all one, ever the same, • And keep invention in a noted weed, • That every word doth almost tell my name, • Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? • O know, sweet love, I always write of you, • And you and love are still my argument; • So all my best is dressing old words new, • Spending again what is already spent: • For as the sun is daily new and old, • So is my love, still telling what is told.

19. Sonnet 76 • so far the poet has displayed many literary devices and rhetorical tactics, • but, in the middle of the sequence poet reveals the problems facing a writer: • the limitation of subject matter while singing the praises of his love • Somehow the poetic voice has been able to make its ‘noted weed’, its usual clothing, or poetic practice, ‘keep invention’ and seem fresh.

20. Sonnet 76 • by glancing aside to other devices, the poet relates Sonnet 76 to its neighbouring poems. • authorial persona appears, dresses old words and ideas anew • the sonnet then alludes to childbirth, a metaphor of artistic creativity used in many of the other sonnets, • Shakespeare’s poetic voice claims that the artistry in his poems reveals a recognizable tone of voice throughout—but regrets it.

21. Sonnet 76 • Questioning his own artistry Shakespeare raises 2 questions: • how far the Sonnets may properly be considered as individual poems and how far they should be read as part of a cycle of loosely connected poems which Shakespeare specifically ordered, • how far the Sonnets are autobiographical expressions of Shakespeare’s own desires and thoughts, and how far they represent a purely literary exercise, potentially disconnected from real or actual experience

22. Sonnet 130 • satire of Petrarchism • Anthony Burgess’s novel Nothing Like the Sun (the title taken from Sonnet 130) was published on 23 April 1964 to help celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. • Romeo’s relationship to the unseen Rosaline mirrors Petrarch’s relationship with Laura. • Shakespeare proclaims his independence from convention in Sonnet 130 in which, while declaring love for his mistress, he mocks the standard vocabulary of praise:

23. Sonnet 130 • Dissociating himself from convention, Shakespeare undoes almost every Petrarchan conceit about feminite beauty. • His love is unlike any woman- misrepresented by the false comparisons of Petrarchan conceits; (Sidney’s Stella). • Shakespeare brings a new class sensibility to the strictly elite, courtly and highly stylized literary precedents of Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney.

24. Conclusion • No one knows for certain when Shakespeare wrote the sonnets or in what order, • Whether he wanted them to be published or not, • If he related or addressed them to any specific persons. • All we have are speculations. • Yet, sonnets do not have to entertain, advise or inform us. • Rather they show Shakespeare struggling to understand himself as emotional autobiography.