The Elizabethan and Shakespearean sonnet

The sonnet form was created by Giacomo da Lentini, head of the Sicilian School under
Emperor Frederick II. It was later rediscovered by Guittone d’Arezzo, who brought it to
Tuscany and adapted it to his language when he founded the Neo-Sicilian School (1235-
1294). He wrote almost 250 sonnets. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Guido Cavalcanti (c.
1250-1300) also wrote sonnets, but the most famous early sonneteer was Petrarca (known in
English as Petrarch). Other fine examples were written by Michelangelo. The structure of a
typical Italian sonnet of this time included two parts that together formed a compact form of
‘argument’. First, the octave (two quatrains), forms the ‘proposition’, which describes a
‘problem’, followed by a sestet (two tercets), which proposes a resolution. Typically, the
ninth line creates what is called the turn or volta, which signals the move from proposition to
resolution. Even in sonnets that don’t strictly follow the problem/resolution structure, the
ninth line still often marks a ‘turn’ by signalling a change in the tone, mood, or stance of the
poem.
Later, the a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a pattern became the standard for Italian sonnets. For the
sestet there were two different possibilities: c-d-e-c-d-e and c-d-c-c-d-c. In time, other
variants on this rhyming scheme were introduced, such as c-d-c-d-c-d. The first known
sonnets in English, written by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, used this
Italian scheme, as did sonnets by later English poets including John Milton, Thomas Gray,
William Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
When English sonnets were introduced by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century,
his sonnets and those of his contemporary the Earl of Surrey were chiefly translations from
the Italian of Petrarch and the French of Ronsard and others. While Wyatt introduced the
sonnet into English, it was Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter, and a structural division into
quatrains of a kind that now characterizes the typical English sonnet. Having previously
circulated in manuscripts only, both poets’ sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel’s
Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). It was, however, Sir Philip
Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella (1591) that started the English vogue for sonnet
sequences: the next two decades saw sonnet sequences by William Shakespeare, Edmund
Spenser, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Fulke Greville, William Drummond of
Hawthornden, and many others.
The publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally
extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being Samuel
Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare; his lesser imitators were
Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and
many more. Astrophel had re-created the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing
lover in a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet
into three quatrains and a couplet gave Petrarch’s contemplative form a more forensic turn,
investing it with an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Within the common
ground shared by the sequences, there is much diversity. Only Sidney’s sequence endeavours
to tell a story, the others being more loosely organized as variations focusing on a central
(usually fictional) relationship. Daniel’s Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and
high-minded; Drayton’s Ideas Mirror (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly
imagined, passionate intensity; Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled
sexual love achieved within marriage.
This literature is often attributed to the Elizabethan Age and known as Elizabethan
sonnets. These sonnets were all essentially inspired by the Petrarchan tradition, and generally
treat of the poet’s love for some woman; with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence.
Shakespeare’s sonnets (published 1609) present a different world altogether, the conventions
upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and treacherous, the loved one beyond
considerations of sexual possession because he is male. The sonnet tended to gravitate toward
correctness or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in
its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but, under the pressure of
Shakespeare’s urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly
charged ironies, the form’s conventional limits were exploded.
The form is often named after Shakespeare, not because he was the first to write in
this form but because he became its most famous practitioner. The form consists of fourteen
lines structured as three quatrains and a couplet. The third quatrain generally introduces an
unexpected sharp thematic or imagistic ‘turn’; the volta.
In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, the volta usually comes in the couplet, and usually
summarizes the theme of the poem or introduces a fresh new look at the theme. With only a
rare exception, the meter is iambic pentameter, although there is some accepted metrical
flexibility (e.g., lines ending with an extra-syllable feminine rhyme, or a trochaic foot rather
than an iamb, particularly at the beginning of a line). The usual rhyme scheme is end-rhymed
a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g. The Prologue to Romeo and Juliet is also a sonnet, as is Romeo
and Juliet's first exchange in Act One, Scene Five, lines 104–117, beginning with ‘If I
profane with my unworthiest hand’ (104) and ending with ‘Then move not while my prayer’s
effect I take.’ (117). A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line
containing ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed
syllable followed by a stressed syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a
Shakespearean sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming
couplet.

Shakespeare’s sonnets
Shakespeare’s collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time,
love, beauty and mortality, was first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS: Never before imprinted – although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been
published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim. The quarto ends with ‘A Lover's
Complaint’, a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal.
The 154 sonnets can be divided into 3 groups: the first 126 are dedicated to a ‘fair
youth’; the next 26 to a dark lady; 2 deal with an erotic theme, fancifully playing with stories
of Cupid’s loss of his phallic brand. The first group, in its turn, further ramifies into thematic
subgroups, as follows: sonnets 1-17, also known as the ‘procreation sonnets’, focus upon
encouraging the fair youth to marry and procreate; sonnets 76-86 deal with the threat posed
by a rival poet, while the later poems represent the emotional triangle of ambiguous
relationships between the speaker, the young man and the dark lady. For instance, sonnet 144
treats of the narrator being torn between ‘two loves...of comfort and despair’ (states
associated with the young man and the woman) and confronted with confusing motives and
emotional turmoil.
There is no autobiographical pattern or narrative development within these particular
sequences, though many of them refer to preoccupations and perceptions that can hardly be
dissociated from particular aspects of Shakespeare’s life and worldview.
Love is the prominent theme traversing the poems. The ‘Dark Lady’ poems evince dislocated
reactions to shifting viewpoints on love and gender relationships, while the adulatory poems
dedicated to the young man contain heterogeneous interrogations about the perception and
language of love. Shakespeare reorders and confounds the Petrarchan conventions of
describing beauty, amorous expression and amatory relationships, thus debunking and de-
familiarizing the stock images and metaphors so much frequented by sonneteers since
Petrarch. Sonnets 21 and 130 (My mistress’ eyes) question and displace hyperbolic
descriptions of human beauty. The praise of beauty is transferred from mistress to master, so
that the ‘lovely boy’ (18), is ambiguously figured as the master/mistress ‘with a woman’s
face’ (20), as ‘Lord of my love’ to the vassal poet (26), his muse (38) and love gift (91). In
sonnets 29 and 30 the intense joy derived from the boy’s love alleviates the poet’s gloom. It
is a non-sensual, chaste love, his admiration of the young man being a purely aesthetic
wonder.
Artistic creation and especially poetry, as a supreme, enduring art, is invariably bound
up with the theme of immortality. Sonnet 54 proclaims the function of poetry as distiller of
truth; sonnet 55 envisages the everlasting force of his ‘immortal verse’; sonnet 81 guarantees
the immortality of the lover’s name, albeit left anonymous.
By contrast, all human endeavour frets under the sign of life’s transience. Thus, the
first 126 poems are haunted by the evanescence of love and the intimation of mortality.
Sonnet 12 warns that the biological clock can only be outlasted by procreation, which
transcends and defeats death. Sonnet 64 (When I have seen) dramatises the tensions between
ephemeral love and inexorable change (individual, political, geographical). Thus, the hope of
human perfection, the elevating spiritual communion and fellowship permeating the earlier
sonnets seems to dissolve in the later sonnets, riven by uncertainties, doubts, guilt,
restlessness and a sense of decaying values and virtues. Sonnet 94 centres upon the unsettling
image of festering lilies. Sonnets 109-112 reflect on heavy pall of falseness and scandal;
sonnets 118-120 are riddled with metaphors of drugs and disease; insecurity, sexual
vulnerability and self-loathing burst violently in sonnet 129, suggesting an unspecified,
traumatic spiritual disturbance, in which love gives way to revulsion.
As a whole, Shakespeare’s sonnets reject the courtliness and mythology of the
Elizabethan sonnet of the 1590s. Their new metrical energy is sustains the emotional range
and the new language forged to express it. Ultimately, they ponder over a flawed universe
aspiring towards the sublime, a humanity whose vision is marred by faults which lie in
ourselves.