CHAPTER VII

SONNETEERS, SONG-WRITERS, AND MINOR

VERSIFIERS

"To describe a thing of no account we say sometimes that it is not worth an old song.' When you come to think of it, how few things are!"

Sir Philip Sidney-The fashion of sonneteering-Elizabethan lyrics and music-Lyly, Nash, Greene, Lodge, and BretonCampion-Barnfield-Browne-Wotton.

THE fashion of sonneteering in England was really set by Sir Philip Sidney, over a hundred of whose sonnets, under the title of Astrophel and Stella, were circulated in no less than three separate editions during 1591. The notion of sonnets and sonnet-writing was already fairly familiar in England. Both Wyatt and Surrey had turned Italian canzone into irregular sonnet forms. Googe, Turberville, and others had produced so-called "sonnets"; Thomas Watson devoted the close and unintermittent labour of a zealous literary amateur to pouring the original wine of Petrarch out of French into English bottles. The sonnet was at this time scarcely regarded as a definite literary form, but rather as a synonym for a conventional love poem in eulogy of a mistress. It is in this sense that Shakespeare uses the word in his early comedies. The outward form of the sonnet, and its special applicability to court and complimentary usage, were soon better understood; but we still hear of six-line and eighteen-line sonnets (Breton's "Pretty twinkling starry eyes" is called Sonnet, and so is Wither's "Shall I, wasting in despair," as late as 1615); and, indeed, it is not until we get to

Drummond and Milton that the technicalities and exigencies of the sonnet as a verse form can be said to have engaged the study of competent poetical scholarship. Sidney's sonnets were probably written for the most part in 1581, within half a dozen years, that is to say, of the appearance of two of the largest and most popular sonnet collections in France-those of Ronsard and Desportes. The sonnet was soon flourishing in the English court as a delicate exotic. Then in 1591 Sidney's sonnets were published, and even thus transplanted to a ruder atmosphere, it seemed for a time as if the sonnet were going to flourish rankly. From 1591 to 1598 nearly every year witnessed the appearance of three or four competing sonnet series. Most of these volumes were highly frigid and artificial, and it is mainly to the fact that Shakespeare himself was for a time captivated by the passing craze that we owe our interest in such productions. Several isolated sonnets by Drayton and others are of a rare finish and perfection; but as regards collections, after the unapproachable 154 sonnets of Shakespeare, the collection of Sidney's entitled Astrophel and Stella has probably the most intrinsic interest; while to the literary historian, both as a pioneer effort and as enshrining the romance of the Bayard or the Hirosé of English letters, Astrophel and Stella must always make what is perhaps a disproportionately strong appeal.

In 1575, at Chartley, Philip Sidney first met Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex. She was then only about thirteen, while Sidney was a young man of twentyone, lately returned from the Continent with his head full of "serious" imaginings and ambitious dreams. He was a favourite of the Earl of Essex, and, as presumptive heir to the Leicester estates, a highly eligible parti. It was perfectly natural, therefore, that the project of marriage should have been entertained between the youthful heiress and the gallant but impecunious courtier. And there

seems no doubt that some such scheme was broached, and that the initiative was taken not by Sidney (who was consumed at this time not so much by love as by love's antidote-ambition) but by the relatives of the lady. Early in 1581, however, Penelope was hastily married to a wellendowed roué, Lord Rich, and then at last Sidney discovered the passion which had apparently been smouldering for some time, and found himself in the position of one who realises the depth of his love for a woman only when he is bound in honour to fight against his desire. Sonnets written for the most part during his forced retirement from court in 1581 represent a summer thundercloud of sentiment tinted by beautiful reflections and lurid gleams from afar, and emitting a few, a very few, lightning flashes of genuine passion.

Much of Sidney's best verse is to be found in the songs which are intertwined with the sonnets. The majority of these, it is important to bear in mind, are full of reminiscences of French and Italian conceits, and if the poems as a connected series are really a record of passion tragically thwarted and finally suppressed, it is at least strange that this passion should have needed so much help from Petrarch and Desportes in expressing itself. It may be that the book as a whole has gained a partly adventitious reputation due to the personal fame of the writer, yet Sidney's sonnets are certainly superior to any previously written in English. Admirers of the French sonneteers could no longer maintain that the quatorzain was too delicate a plant to bear transplantation to England; and writing sonnets to the eyebrows of despaired-of mistresses, real or imaginary, soon became the reigning literary fashion. Many of these exercises are so wire-drawn as to leave one in doubt whether Sidney's influence was an unmitigated benefit. But in one respect, at any rate, it was of real value: like all romanticists, he had appealed to

nature. He had proclaimed love, love unadorned, a worthy and sufficient theme for the poet. The success of poems written on such a principle at a time when euphuism threatened to make of the lyric a scholastic exercise must have been really valuable.

The fashion set by Sidney, and also the particular form of the Elizabethan sonnet, is to a large extent confirmed by Daniel's collection of fifty-five sonnets entitled Delia, which found their way into print in February, 1592. The love which they celebrate is evidently of a very platonic kind, and to compensate for deficiency in passion, Daniel falls back upon the resources of his French masters, especially Desportes. The success of Delia was so unequivocal that several booksellers seem to have rashly concluded that sonnets were destined to make their fortunes. Within seven months of Delia appeared the slender and typical sonnet-book entitled Diana. The writer, Henry Constable (1562-1613), had the misfortune to be a Roman Catholic at a time when the anti-Jesuitical panic was at its height. He had to leave England hastily, was shadowed abroad by Protestant emissaries, repulsed at the Scottish court for fear of offending Elizabeth, and finally, on venturing to return without a licence, thrown into the Tower; and all this although he appears to have been of a most peaceable disposition, was of a good family, and, in his sonneteering days, would appear to have had the entrée at court. His sonnets are graceful, ingenious, and typical; sweet in phrase, wholly deficient in passion, wrought in the French vein and held up as good models by Ben Jonson and Edmund Boulton, who writes, in 1616, in his Hypercritica of Constable's, "quick and high discovery of conceits."

In 1593 the sonneteers were reinforced from various quarters. Barnaby Barnes gave forth over a hundred sonnets in his Parthenophil and Parthenophe; Watson issued

his sixty-one Teares of Fancie, or Love Disdained; Giles Fletcher his Licia, or Poems of Love, in honour of his lady; and Lodge his Phillis, which is perhaps the most charming of the minor sonnet-books of the period. Though a diligent imitator of the French, Lodge has the dexterity to give his complaints an air of the most direct and artless simplicity. Better than the sonnets themselves, however, are the pastoral lyrics which are scattered among them. Drayton's Idea's Mirrour came next in 1594, and within a twelve-month followed the Calia of William Percy, the Zepheria of some anonymous author, Chapman's Coronet, the Alcilia of J. C., Forty Love Sonnets by E. C., and, finally, the eighty-eight Amoretti of Spenser. Certain Amoretti were addressed, though not by name, to the Elizabeth Boyle, who, in 1594, became Spenser's wife; but many of them are either purely ideal or not poems of love at all. A few are wholly expressive of religious aspiration, while the larger proportion are of the conventional type. He represents his lady as a beautiful but carnivorous creature. In one sonnet she is a lion, in another a tiger, in a third a panther. Her cruelty is a constantly recurring theme. She is an angler who smiles on her dying victims so sweetly that they enjoy dying; a cruel dolphin who will not come to Arion; a new Pandora, her beauty is but a bait; she binds men in the golden net of her hair; again and again the poet begs her piteously not to slay him outright.

Sonneteering was a fashion the force of which was soon spent, but the publication of light lyrical verse, generally in song form, but in an immense variety of measures, continued in great vigour throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Next to Elizabethan drama, Elizabethan song is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the age. It is also the most independent, for in lyrical measures English poets forgot their classical and Italian