Sonnet Sequences — Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, and the Elizabethan

Renaissance Literature Renaissance Literature 8 min read 1546 words Beginner ExcellentWiki Editorial Team

The Petrarchan Tradition and Its Conventions

The sonnet sequence is one of the most characteristic literary forms of the Renaissance, a series of sonnets linked by theme, subject, and underlying narrative, typically exploring the poet’s love for an idealized beloved and the emotional and psychological states that this love produces. The form originated with Petrarch’s Canzoniere (also known as the Rime sparse or “scattered rhymes”), his collection of poems addressed to Laura, which established the conventions that would dominate European love poetry for three centuries and that poets continue to engage with today. Petrarch’s sonnets present a lover consumed by desire for an unattainable woman whose beauty and virtue inspire both ecstasy and torment in the poet-lover. The conventions of Petrarchan love poetry — the lover’s sighs and tears, the lady’s beauty and cruelty, the paradoxes of freezing and burning, the catalog of the lady’s beauties (golden hair, rosy cheeks, starry eyes, ivory neck) — became the common property of European poets.

The sonnet sequence was imported into England from Italy via France in the early sixteenth century. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, translated and adapted Petrarchan sonnets in the 1530s and 1540s, establishing the sonnet as an English form. But it was the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591 that triggered the extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence that swept through England in the 1590s. The sonnet craze of the 1590s produced more than twenty sonnet sequences in a single decade, including major works by Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.

Astrophil and Stella

Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582, published 1591) is the first great English sonnet sequence and the most influential. The sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs recounts the poet-lover Astrophil’s obsessive love for the unattainable Stella (modeled on Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich). The narrative traces the progress of Astrophil’s passion from its first awakening through its growth, its consummation (in the eighth song), and its eventual frustration. Sidney’s achievement was to transform the conventions of Petrarchan love poetry by infusing them with psychological realism, dramatic tension, and a self-conscious wit that acknowledges the artificiality of the conventions even as it exploits them for powerful emotional effect.

Sidney’s handling of the sonnet form is masterful. He varies the rhyme schemes, the metrical patterns, and the rhetorical structures from sonnet to sonnet, creating a sequence that is both unified and varied. His famous opening sonnet — “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show” — announces the central theme of the sequence: the relationship between the experience of love and the expression of love in poetry. Throughout the sequence, the act of writing sonnets is itself dramatized as part of the lover’s experience, and the sequence is as much about the difficulties of writing poetry as it is about the pains of love.

Spenser’s Amoretti

Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) is a sonnet sequence of courtship and marriage that offers a deliberate alternative to the Petrarchan tradition of frustrated desire. Unlike Sidney’s Astrophil, whose love for Stella remains unsatisfied, Spenser’s sonnet sequence moves progressively toward fulfillment — the courtship of Elizabeth Boyle culminates in marriage, celebrated in the magnificent Epithalamion that follows the sonnets. The sequence traces the lover’s emotional journey through hope and despair, separation and reconciliation, to the final achievement of mutual love.

Spenser’s sonnet form is distinctive. He uses a rhyme scheme of ABABBCBCCDCDEE, a variation of the English sonnet that interlocks the rhymes across the quatrains in a way that mirrors the interlocking structure of the Spenserian stanza. The Amoretti is less dramatic and more meditative than Astrophil and Stella, but it achieves a quiet power through its celebration of married love as the highest form of human relationship. Spenser’s treatment of the beloved is also distinctive: she is not the remote, idealized figure of Petrarchan convention but a real woman with whom the poet hopes to spend his life.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets (published 1609, probably written in the 1590s) are the greatest sonnet sequence in English and one of the supreme achievements of lyric poetry in any language. The sequence of 154 sonnets explores the poet’s relationships with a beautiful young man and a mysterious “dark lady,” tracing an emotional arc that moves from admiration and affection through jealousy and betrayal to disillusionment and, finally, a kind of resolution. The sonnets are remarkable for their psychological depth, their formal mastery, and their ability to treat the most conventional of poetic subjects with extraordinary freshness and intensity.

The first 126 sonnets are addressed to the young man, urging him to marry and have children (the “procreation sonnets”), celebrating his beauty, exploring the poet’s feelings of love and jealousy, and meditating on the power of poetry to confer immortality. The remaining sonnets (127–154) are addressed to the dark lady, a woman whose beauty is not conventional but whose power over the poet is absolute. The relationship with the dark lady is sexual, obsessive, and finally destructive, and it introduces a note of disillusionment and bitterness that contrasts sharply with the idealizing tone of the sonnets to the young man.

The most famous of Shakespeare’s sonnets — “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Sonnet 18), “When I consider everything that grows” (Sonnet 15), “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” (Sonnet 116), “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (Sonnet 130) — are among the most anthologized poems in English. They have been read, studied, and loved for four centuries, and they continue to speak to readers with undiminished power.

The Petrarchan and English Sonnet Forms

The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), with a rhyme scheme typically of ABBAABBA for the octave and CDECDE or CDCDCD for the sestet. The octave presents a problem or situation, and the sestet provides a resolution or turn. The English or Shakespearean sonnet is divided into three quatrains (four lines each) and a concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG. The English sonnet allows for a more argumentative structure, with each quatrain developing a different aspect of the subject and the couplet providing an epigrammatic conclusion.

Other Sonneteers and the Sonnet After the Renaissance

Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel also produced significant sequences in the 1590s. Drayton’s Idea (first published as Idea’s Mirror in 1594) is a sequence of 63 sonnets that includes one of the finest of all English sonnets — “Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part” — a poem of love and parting that achieves a perfect balance of emotion and control. Daniel’s Delia (1592) is a more conventional Petrarchan sequence, but its graceful lyrics and its elegant handling of the sonnet form make it one of the most attractive of the Elizabethan sequences.

The influence of the Renaissance sonnet on English poetry cannot be overstated. The sonnet form shaped the development of English lyric poetry by providing a structure that demands both discipline and creativity. The fourteen-line form forces the poet to concentrate his meaning, to develop and resolve an argument within a fixed space, and to achieve the maximum of expression with the minimum of words. These formal demands have attracted poets of every generation, and the sonnet has remained one of the most popular and challenging of lyric forms. The sonnet was revived in the Romantic period by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, who turned to the form for some of their most powerful poems. Wordsworth’s “The world is too much with us” and “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,” Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and Shelley’s “Ozymandias” are among the greatest English sonnets, and they demonstrate the continuing vitality of the form. The sonnet was further transformed by the Victorians — Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life — and by the modernists, including Frost, Yeats, and Hopkins. The sonnet craze of the 1590s left a permanent mark on English poetry, establishing the sonnet as the most enduring and versatile of lyric forms.

FAQ

What is a sonnet sequence? A series of sonnets linked by theme, subject, and underlying narrative, typically exploring the progress of a love affair.

Who started the sonnet craze of the 1590s? Sir Philip Sidney with Astrophil and Stella (published 1591), though Wyatt and Surrey had introduced the sonnet to England decades earlier.

What is the difference between Petrarchan and English sonnets? The Petrarchan sonnet has an octave-sestet structure rhyming ABBAABBA CDECDE; the English sonnet has three quatrains and a couplet rhyming ABABCDCDEFEFGG.

What is Shakespeare’s sonnet about? The collection explores the poet’s relationships with a young man (sonnets 1–126) and a dark lady (sonnets 127–154).

How many sonnets did Shakespeare write? 154 sonnets.

What is the most famous sonnet ever written? Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?,” is probably the most famous sonnet in any language.

What is unique about Spenser’s Amoretti? Unlike most Petrarchan sequences, it ends happily with marriage, and its sonnet form uses interlocking rhymes.