Sonneteers

Abstract Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville was the first imitator to attempt a sequence on Sidney’s model. His Caelica begins with adoration of a distant beloved, becomes an acrid story of seduction and betrayal, then abandons human love for a Calvinist dark night of the soul; its unifying arc is the speaker’s increasingly harrowing humiliation. Samuel Daniel, a young man with connections to the Sidney circle, had some sonnets published with the first edition of Astrophil and Stella, and subsequently developed them into the sequence Delia. A succession of lyric moments in a static situation, it is the most purely Petrarchan of the English sequences. From 1592 to 1597 there is a great burst of sonnet sequences from English poets, with another, smaller burst from Scots in the early seventeenth century after James becomes king; they persist even as the genre becomes a common topic of mockery. They express a general faith in sonneteering as the gateway to a successful poetic career (sometimes it was), become highly competitive in the conspicuous display of their authors’ wit, and exploit the Petrarchan presumption of the beloved’s unattainability with lushly sensuous fantasizing of fleshly delights; the most extravagant in this regard is an openly homoerotic sequence by Richard Barnfield. Mary Wroth (Sidney’s niece) rounds things off with Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in 1621, a long-ignored sequence of Neoplatonic adoration which gains considerably in emotional force from the knowledge we now have of the tumultuous personal history the idealization is striving to transcend.