The late Elizabethan period produced the greatest flowering in English of sonnet sequences, chiefly (though not exclusively) on the theme of love. Dozens of Elizabethan poets, major and minor, tried their hand at the genre, and many produced works of quality. We will look closely at selected poems from two of the best and most influential sonnet sequences, as well as at one of the finest examples of narrative poetry on the theme of love; and we will see how, by the end of the Elizabethan age, love lyric was striking off in new directions under new management.
Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is the first as well as one of the finest of the English sonnet sequences, and established the late-16th-century vogue for the genre. Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti shows the Elizabethan love sonnet at its height, bringing to the form an unsurpassed mastery and polish, as well as a distinctive take on its central theme. By way of contrast, in Hero and Leander, a narrative poem by Christopher Marlowe, we will see an aspect of Elizabethan love poetry very different from the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. Finally, we will look at how Donne’s Songs and Sonnets pours scorn on the whole Elizabethan notion of what love lyric should do and what it should sound like, setting important new trends for 17th-century verse.
As well as looking closely at individual poems and authors, we will consider more generally why the poetic forms and themes with which they worked attained such popularity. In terms of form, where did the sonnet and other important Elizabethan verse structures come from? To what did they owe their success as poetic forms and their popularity at this particular historical moment? What resources for expression did they provide and how did these great poets exploit them?
In terms of theme, the focus of the course will be poets’ exploration of the experience of desire. We will consider the ambivalent view that Elizabethan society took of lovers and poets, and some of the grounds on which love and love poetry were attacked and defended. We will see the importance in this respect of classical and Italian ideas and literary examples, and some of the ways in which those influences were variously adapted and resisted by different English writers.