The predecessor of Shakespeare in poetry.

The Renaissance period in England roughly coincides with the rule of Queen Elizabeth I, hence, another name for this historical and cultural epoch – the Elizabethan age.

Queen Elizabeth I was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth succeeded her half – sister Mary to the throne when she was only 25. Though progressing fast under the firm government of the Tudor monarchs, England was not yet one of the great powers. What Elizabeth needed was time, and she played for this time with an astonishing mixture of masculine audacity and feminine wiliness. She was in fact – this thin red-haired woman – the cleverest ruler of her age.

All the chief glories of the Elizabethan age in literature and many of them arrived during the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James I – came after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, a fleet of huge gallons crammed with the finest soldiers in Europe, who were outmatched by the smaller and faster English vessels, handed by the best seaman in the world. It was as if the English suddenly found themselves, discovering new sources of confidence, energy, and delight, all these finding expression in literature.

In English poets at that time imitated foreign models, the most important of which was the sonnet, the poetic form which is originally Italian. It was brought to perfection by the great Italian poet Francesco Petrarcha.

A Petrarch sonnet is a poem of 14 lines: two quatrains (4line stranras) and two terrets (3-like stransas). The rhyming pattern of the terrets could vary. The rhyming pattern of the quatrains is abba abba – as for thr terrets – ccd eed; cde cde; edc dcd.

As can be seen it is rather difficult to compose a sonnet observing the strict form and alteration of lines. Besides, in a classical sonnet a thought is put forward in the first quatrain, another thought (contradicting the first) in the second, these two thoughts intersect in the first terret, and a solution is reached in the second terret, usually in the last line of the sonnet. If the author is skilful enough, he makes the last word of the last line the most significant, this work is called the key of the sonnet. Thus, a good sonneteer must have skills not only in versifying, but in thinking! No wonder this intellectual poetic form was so wide-spread during the Renaissance.

The outstanding English poets of the middle of the 16^th century who were the first to bring the sonnet into the English literature were Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Sir Thomas Wyatt’s most quoted poem is not strictly, a sonnet, but it might serve as an example of an elaborate verse with a strictly observing rhyming pattern.

Purely English form of the sonnet was invented by Henry Howard Surrey. It consisted of three quatrains and a couplet: abab cdcd efef gg. later William Shakespeare exploited this pattern in his verse, and such sonnets came to be generally called “Shakespearean”. This is wrong ina way., for the real creator of the form was Surrey. here is one of his sonnets: …

“From Tuscane …”

Another great innovation of Surrey is blank verse (unrhymed five-foot metre) which was used in this translation of Virgil’s “The Aeneid”.

These lines are certainly not the best that Surry ever wrote, but they can give us an idea of how much the Elizabethan dramatists half a century later were indebted to Henry Howard Surrey, when their characters were to speak blank verse on the stage of the first professional theatres.

Sir Philip Sidney, another poet of noble birth, seemed to his contemporaries to embody all the traits of character and personality they admired. After studying at Oxford, he traveled widely on diplomatic missions and served at the court of the Queen. He retired from his duties in 1580 and turned to writing literature, just for amusement.

His first literary experience was a pastoral romance in prose “Arcadia”, with many very good poems incorporated into the prose narrative. About the same time he wrote a critical work “Apology for Poetry” in which Sydney proclaimed the great importance of poetry because of its power to teach and delight at the same time. Sydney’s “Astrophel and Stella” is the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles; in it he uses the Petrarchan sonnet as modified by Wyatt.

Among non-aristocratic authors was the greatest non-dramatic poet of the English Renaissance Edmund Spenser. His father was a cloth-maker, but Edmund had the luck to go to Cambridge as a “sizar” – a poor student who paid less for his education than others, but had to serve the richer students during meals. In that way he acquired some intellectual friends, Sir Philip Sidney among them. It was to Sidney that E. Spenser dedicated his “Shepherd’s Calendar”: the work consisting of twelve eclogues (dialogues between Shepherds” – one for each month of the year, and displaying an amazing variety of metre and stanza.

In 1580 Spencer became secretary to Lord Deputy of Ireland and lived in this country to his death. When Sir Walter Ralligh was in Ireland, he heard the first part of Spencer’s major work, the allegorical poem “The ??????” , and was so impressed by that he persuaded Spencer to go to London and supervise its publication. In 1590 the first three books of the poem were printed and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.

He is famous as an experimenter in verse forms, many of which became traditional in England. He created a sonnet form of his own, the spenserian sonnet.

An illustratie example comes from his sonnet cycle “???????” dedicated to his wife.