English Anti-Petrarchism: Imbalance and Excess in "the Englishe straine" of the Sonnet

Although many critics credit (or charge) Shakespeare with the first sonnet sequence to depict lovers who not only consummate their sexual relationships but also generally make themselves excessively erotically available, earlier Italian, French, and English sonnet writers had pushed these boundaries. This article contextualizes Shakespeare's unfaithful Petrarchan lovers in relation to those of contemporary and near-contemporary writers who significantly influenced aspects of the English Petrarchan tradition that critics have thought most uniquely Shakespearean: the excessive eroticism, the ambiguously complimentary or unambiguously insulting "praise," and the multiple lovers and beloveds who engage in emotional and sexual triangulation. Chaucer first translated into English Petrarch's Rime Sparse 132 as the first Canticus Troili in Troilus and Criseyde. At least since the mid-sixteenth century, when Wyatt and Sidney had renewed interest in Chaucer, and his versions of Petrarch, there were two distinct strands in English writers' generic developments of Petrarchan lyric. One of these strands directly draws on Petrarch's unattainable because constant, immovable, and chaste love; the other revises that into an intolerable, fickle, and free-wheeling love whose unattainable status is a result of at least one person's promiscuity and all parties' painful awareness of it. Shakespeare's sonnets draw on this second strand. Shakespeare's sequence details its lover's stages of denial, pain, and rage in relationship to two other lovers who are not merely conventionally tortured and torturing but disconcertingly sadistic and masochistic. This significantly revises the conventions of Petrarchan truth, beauty, constancy, and idealized love. These revisions to the Petrarchan tradition place Shakespeare alongside writers who were most influential at the time and therefore would have been important models for imitatio and inventio among English sonnet-writers: Bembo in Italian, Du Bellay and Ronsard in French, and Chaucer, Wyatt, Sidney, Lodge, Daniel, and Drayton in English.