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
dArezzo, 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 dont
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 Tottels Songes and Sonnetts, better known as
Tottels 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 Sidneys Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated
an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidneys 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
Petrarchs 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 Sidneys
sequence endeavours to tell a story, the others being more loosely
organized as variations focusing on a central (usually fictional)
relationship. Daniels Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and
high-minded; Draytons Ideas Mirror (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to
a strongly imagined, passionate intensity; Spensers 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 poets love for some
woman; with the exception of Shakespeare's sequence. Shakespeares
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
Shakespeares urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and
shifting and highly charged ironies, the forms 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 104117, beginning with If I profane with my
unworthiest hand (104) and ending with Then move not while my prayers
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.

Shakespeares sonnets
Shakespeares 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 Cupids 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 Shakespeares 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 womans 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 boys love alleviates the poets 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 lovers name, albeit left anonymous.
By contrast, all human endeavour frets under the sign of lifes 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)
dramatizes 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, Shakespeares 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.