Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance

Abstract This book surveys English love poetry, primarily though not exclusively sonnets and sonnet sequences showing the influence of Petrarch, from the early sixteenth century up to the publication of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus in 1621. There has been no comprehensive study of this well-defined episode in English literature for over 30 years; this project incorporates a range of new scholarship and thinking into a circumstantial narrative history with local focus on particular poets (Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, Samuel Daniel, Wroth, Walter Ralegh, Shakespeare) and particularly notable poems (“They flee from me,” “Gascoigne’s Woodmanship,” “The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia”). In general, the self-absorption of Petrarchan lyricism is brought into a more populous environment, keyed to the ambitious and intense world of the English court, within or in sight of which many of these poets lived and worked. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the Petrarchan theme of love for a powerful but distant woman is literalized in the politics of the realm, in ways that the queen herself recognized and exploited. A final chapter offers a new model for the implied narrative of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which when seen in the context of the tradition as a whole has more coherence than it has generally been given credit for. The concluding disillusion of that sequence gives a major theme of that tradition especially acute expression.