The Sixteenth-Century Sonnet
One of the most popular narratives explaining the English sonnet vogue relies on an understanding that then exemplary courtier, philospopher poet, and national hero, Sir Philip Sidney wrote a sonnet sequence, the rest of the country followed suit. The first sonnet of Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (pub. 1591) exemplifies not only the form, but the crucial themes of the sixteenth-century love sonnet (namely, a pining and self-obsessed lover with the metapoetical and futile hope that his writing can effect a return of his love from his virtuous beloved):
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."
The Iconic Sonneteer
Late sixteenth-century England saw a literary trend so explosive that almost everyone who put pen to paper became a sonneteer. How did the sonnet vogue take over the literary scene of the 1580's and 1590's? Where did the sonneteer go after the trend fizzled in the early seventeenth century? And, given that so many of the sonnets written in the Renaissance were dedicatory or religious, why do we continue to understand the personality of the sonneteer as a pining lover... and, frequently, not a very skilled poet?
Even our contemporary understanding of the sonneteer evokes the Elizabethan romantic, as evidenced by thesonneteer.org :
Among terms for poets, "sonneteer" stands alone; other terms like "poet" or "bard" evoke the ideal of the creator of a second, golden nature, as Sidney articulates in his Apology. Other terms such as "rhymer," "versifier," "hack," may connote some of the distrust, negative attitude, or downright vitriol toward poets and hardly harken to Shelley's later articulation that these are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," but they lack both the generic specificity and the full character portrait offered by “sonneteer.” The only term that comes close in terms of generic specificity with evocative power is "balladeer," which points as often to a notion of "mongering," composing or selling doggerel, libel, or sensationalistic cheap print, as it does to the idea of one who writes ballads specifically. Likewise, a sonneteer could simply be one who writes bad poetry, he need not write actual fourteen-line sonnets at all. Of course, in the sixteenth-century, the word “sonnet” need not only connote the genre defined by (fourteen lines of verse, etc.); using its etymological meaning of "little song," in the early Renaissance "sonnet" could simply refer to a short poem. For example, John Donne's Songs and Sonnettes of (1601) contains no generic sonnets, with the title simply denoting that the contents are short poems. Moreover, despite publishing this title, La Corona and a number of "Holy Sonnets," (generic sonnets of the religious variety) during his life, John Donne the poet is not the most ready icon of the Renaissance sonneteer. The term evokes a pining-lover, bent on exposing his pain in verse with the hope that, in Astrophil’s formulation, “Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,/ Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain” (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 1, 3-4). For this reason, Donne is most the "sonneteer" in his early carpe diem poems, not themselves formal sonnets, and poems that, in fact, reveal a strong reaction against the Petrarchan tradition. The late-sixteenth century saw a preponderance of sonneteer characters in the form of over-blown Petrarchan lovers whose melancholic pursuit of "cold" or "cruel" love objects has little to do with the traditions of dedicatory or religious sonnets. The pervasiveness of these characters belies the apparent simplicity of the word "sonneteer" as simply one who writes sonnets.
Precisely because sonnets are about futile desire that cannot conform to heterosexist ideals of sexual reproduction, the sonneteer reproduces in other ways. The cultural history of the sixteenth-century sonneteer shows this reproduction through imitation, ultimately resulting in the sonnet "boom" of the 1590s. The vogue for sonnets was intimately tied to class conditions and a system of pratonage which established the sonnet as not only a trendy literary exercise for members of the court but also the dedicatory form par excellence. Hence, Sidney closes his Apology with the curse for those who do not appreciate poetry, “that while you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet” conjuring the notion of the ever-pining sonneteer, yet pivoting on the fact of the dedicatory sonnet’s ability to bring about the favor of the court. The notion of dedicatory verse emerges since the only sonnets which could gain "favor" are dedicatory ones; the Petrarchan sonnet tradition reveals the sonnets' hope to effect romantic favor, but always in futility.
