"Matters of love as of discourse": The English Sonnet, 1560–1580

In 1575, some years before what is traditionally seen as the heyday of the English Renaissance sonnet, George Gascoigne published a definition of the form in "Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English." The first printed discussion of English verse and meter, this little treatise appended to The Poesies categorizes sonnets as poems "of fourtene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The first twelve do ryme in staves of four lines by cross meetre, and the last two ryming together do conclude the whole" (sig. U1^v). Gascoigne's strictures preempt what would become the standard form of the "English," or "Shakespearean," sonnet. When he wrote these guidelines, however, his words were reactive, working against a tradition in which the term sonnet was being freely applied to poems of varied rhyme scheme, length, and meter, and where-as Gascoigne complains-"some thinke that all Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets" (Ibid.). His comments are thus not so much descriptive as prescriptive, seeking to restrict a looser and then more culturally-dominant use of the term, which was assumed by most mid-Tudor authors to be a diminutive denoting any short lyric poem.

Epitomizing this strand of what now appear, through the distorting lens of hindsight, as "rogue" sonnets is Barnabe Googe's Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes, printed by Thomas Colwell in 1563 for the Fleet Street bookseller Rafe Newberry. The volume, the title page of which prominently asserts its freshness (being "newly written") and generic range, is the first of a series of poetic miscellanies, issued over the following years, that were promoted above all as collections of sonnets, ostensibly single authored, although often the product of more than one pen. These miscellanies include George Turberville's Epitaphes, Epigrams, Songs and Sonets, printed by Henry Denham in 1567 and again in 1570; and Thomas Howell's Newe Sonets and Pretie Pamphlets, entered into the Stationers' Register in 1567-68 and printed by Thomas Colwell in 1570,² with another edition in 1575. Contrary to Hyder Rollins's declaration that-surprisingly-the sonnet "did not spring into immediate favour" after the success of Richard Tottel's Songes and Sonettes in 1557, there is thus a vein of English lyric poetry which does respond to this publishing phenomenon and at least distinguishes itself as sonneteering.³ Instead of discounting the term as a misnomer, as literary critics and historians we need to take this description seriously. In doing so, we can uncover a strand of the English sonnet tradition that bears further examination, revealing both an understanding of Petrarchanism and hitherto unrecognized continuities between the "courtly makers" of Henry V III and the later Elizabethan sonneteers, including-as we shall see-an habitual resistance to the idealization of the woman, found in English sonnets from Wyatt to Shakespeare.⁴

Recognizing the Mid-Tudor "Sonnet ": "Oddities " of Form and Content

As their reprints and reissues would suggest, mid-Tudor miscellanies were clearly popular. Yet they have left little obvious mark in later accounts of the English sonnet tradition, omitted from both anthologies and critical studies, which habitually leap from Wyatt and Surrey-sonneteers active in the 1530s and 1540s-to Spenser and Sidney, who wrote their sonnets in the 1580s and 1590s. The reasons for this neglect are, I would suggest, fourfold and come down to form, meter, content, and a lack of critical interest in the poetry of the mid-century, scorned by C. S. Lewis as a period in which poets attempted to struggle free of what he terms "the late medieval swamp."⁵ The sonnets contained in these mid-Tudor collections do not assume the familiar fourteen-line form. They can therefore only be identified as sonnets because the poets or printers chose to call them such: on title pages, in section headings, in titles of individual poems, in descriptions, or in errata.⁶ And the poems they label sonnets might be as little as two lines long, like "Maister Googe his Sonet of the paines of Loue" first printed in Eglogs Epytaphes...