Early Modern Theories of the Sonnet: Accounts of the Quatorzain in Italy, France and England in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The second chapter investigates theoretical discourses produced on the sonnet in the second half of the 16th century, when the fashion for sonnets reached a peak in Italy, France and England. Theory is envisaged as a mode of reception that gives indications not only on the sonnet, but also on its significance within the period’s cultural production. The approach adopted in this chapter highlights the comparatively secondary significance of the sonnet in the English context until the very end of the century; a thorough investigation of English poetic treatises (including William Scott’s recently rediscovered Model of Poesy) provides up-to-date information on the specificities of English theories of the sonnet. The Italian sonnet had already been strictly defined by a long poetic tradition, and had been codified in the first half of the 16th century. In the second half of the century, the Italians were concerned with finding how such a defined form could allow some room for innovation so that new poets could compete with the masters of the past. The sonnet was strictly set apart from the epigram; it was more and more often published in collections that included only, or at least mostly, sonnets. In France, by contrast, the sonnet was very quickly and strictly codified, as if theorisation was used to compensate for the absence of a local tradition. The sonnet was precisely meant to mark a break from the French poetry of the past by imitating the Italian sonnet, especially Petrarch’s. The period of experimentation was relatively short (less than two decades), and though the poetic treatises were not entirely prescriptive (they left the rhyme structure of the sestet undetermined, for example), the features of the French sonnet were strict enough that the freedom left to poets mostly relied on variation. While French theorists tended to insist on the epigrammatic (rather than lyric) dimension of the sonnet, the question of poetic collections was left unattended. In England, the sonnet took a much longer time to be codified, and retained during and after the considered period its original meaning of ‘little song’, or short lyric poem. George Gascoigne’s account of the poetic form in his Certayne Notes of Instruction (1575) remains an isolated example of the way the features of the sonnet could be defined. Not only was the period of experimentation much longer (roughly, from the late 1520s to the 1580s): the standardisation of the form that occurred at the end of the century was short-lived and did not concern the totality of the poetic production. The fact that poetic treatises were late to appear in England probably played a role. What is more, addressing general questions of poetics related to the prosody and vocabulary of the English language seems to have held more stakes than determining the specificities of the English sonnet. While it is tempting to see the late explosion of the English sonnet as the result of a cultural distance caused by geographical distance, there are therefore more significant factors to take into account. It is only at the end of the century that the sonnet became more strictly defined, and that we find explicit indications of the constraints imposed by the form in theoretical works. Late 16th- and early 17th-century treatises insist on those constraints. In Scott’s words, the sonnet is connected to satire and to the epigram, as in French accounts—confirming the notion that French culture mediated the English appropriation of the Italian form. It is also at the end of the 16th century that the sonnet became explicitly associated with love and included in the genre of ‘songs and sonnets’, i.e. poetic collections modelled on Tottel’s Miscellany. The very last decade of the century was the moment when our textbook perception of the sonnet (a love poem of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with an ababcdcdefefgg rhyme scheme) became relevant to a significant proportion of the poetic production. The comparative approach allows the authors to bring some qualifications to the narrative of the sonnet moving in chronological succession from Italy to England through France. More significantly, it puts the English ‘sonnet craze’ into perspective by showing that the features now recognised as essential components of the English sonnet mostly correspond to one part of sonnet production, the love sonnet sequences of the 1590s and early 1600s.