Middle Ages World View• All books must be written by hand• A lot of people are still illiterate• America doesn’t exist• The sun and all other planets revolve around

the Earth• The earth is flat• England is centuries behind other countries,

culturally/developmentally/politically

The English Renaissance

and the SonnetMarcel, English Language AP

RENAISSANCE!!!• In 1476 an entrepreneur named William Caxton

introduced the newly-invented printing press to England.

• In 1485 Henry Tudor defeated King Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field and became King Henry VII, founder of the Tudor line of English monarchs.

• In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

• In 1512 the astronomer Copernicus defied ancient wisdom and announced that the earth and other planets revolve around the sun.

Changing Times• In 1517 Martin Luther began the split with Rome

that led to the Protestant Reformation;

• in 1534 King Henry VIII, vexed by the Pope's refusal to let him divorce his first wife (Catherine of Aragon), declared himself Supreme Head of the English church. (Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.)

• Meanwhile, an intellectual and artistic movement known as the "Renaissance" had been spreading north from Italy and, early in the sixteenth century, reached England.

• What is the rebirth?

Changing Times• Literacy improved - people were

encouraged to learn to read, and various translators turned classic texts, and more importantly, the Bible into English. This process of translation culminated in the King James Bible of 1611.

Changing Times• Yet things were not all grim. Under Elizabeth (who ruled

from 1558-1603), England began to think of itself as something of a world power. Not only did the Spanish Armada, sent to crush England, end in disaster for Spain in 1588, but the English were successfully competing with Spanish ships on the high seas and in the New World.

Linguistically Speaking…• And, after four hundred years of rapid change, the

English language began to stabilize. Linguistic historians call the period after 1500 "Modern English," and anyone comparing the language of Chaucer and the language of Shakespeare can see why.

• By the second half of the sixteenth century, many English writers began to think that English literature could compete with even the great writers of antiquity. They were right. The years between about 1580 and 1620 mark an amazing efflorescence, or golden age, of English literature.

Early Modern English

• Chaucer vs. Shakespeare: .170 vs. .513

• The words are our words. The grammar is our grammar, except for the occasional use of -th instead of -s to show the third person present of verbs: "lieth" rather than our "lies."

• In short, we have now reached the period of Modern English. The first part of this period--from about 1500-1650 - we call "early modern," but what matters is that in most fundamental respects it is our language.

Early Modern English• What has changed since Chaucer? The pronunciation

has become more like ours (that Great Vowel Shift) and the grammar has continued to grow simpler. And what changes during this period is, first of all, that more and more big words come into the language from Latin and Greek.

– That’s why in studying literature we’re stuck with words like "simile," "metaphor," "iambic pentameter," "lyric," "tragedy"--these words already existed in the critical writings in Greek and Latin, and it seemed easier to import them than to come up with new words in English.

Early Modern English• The second big change involves spelling. Up through

the sixteenth century there was no fixed, right way to spell a word: the same person might spell the same word "clowdie," "cloudie," "clowdy," "cloudye," etc. There were limits to the chaos (you won’t find "kludi," or "chlaothyy").

• The result was a spelling system full of letters that were no longer pronounced ("knight," for example): a delight for historians of the language, a lasting source of misery for children trying to learn how to spell English. But by 1700 the system was pretty much in place. After that, people were expected to spell their words in the single "right" way.

Early Modern English

• No dictionaries, grammar books.

• The result is that throughout this whole period, people felt as if they controlled the language. If they needed a word, they made one up, or borrowed one, or changed the meaning of an existing word. There was no one to tell them that they were doing something wrong. No one exploited this freedom more than Shakespeare.

• The eighteenth century introduced dictionaries and grammar rules to curb this freedom.

The Sonnet

• It seems odd that the first real sign of the Renaissance in English literature should come in the guise of the sonnet, which had been developed in Italy in the thirteenth century and popularized by the Italian poet Petrarch a century later.

• Joint credit for introducing the sonnet into English is usually given to Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and his younger friend, the Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Both were aristocrats who led rather wild, dangerous, and brief lives.

The Sonnet• These two not only introduced the sonnet as a form.

They set the Petrarchan tone that most subsequent English sonnets would take: a lovesick man seeking to win the affection of a cold-hearted woman and describing in verse the complicated mixture of bliss and misery caused by this passionate and unrequited love.

• They also established the sonnet as an aristocratic genre. According to the doctrines of courtly love inherited from medieval literature, only members of the upper classes were capable of true love (it required leisure, refinement, etc.).

Sonnets

• Sonnet - a lyric poem with fourteen rhyming lines (usually in iambic pentameter).

• “Sonneto” is “little song” in Italian.

Sonnet 34 (page 435)1. Lyke as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde, 

2. By conduct of some star doth make her way, 

3. When as a storme hath dimd her trusty guyde, 

4. Out of her course doth wander far astray.

5. So I whose star, that wont with her bright ray, 

6. Me to direct, with cloudes is overcast,

7. Doe wander now, in darknesse and dismay, 

8. Through hidden perils round about me plast.

9. Yet hope I well, that when this storme is past, 

10. My Helice the lodestar of my lyfe

11. Will shine again, and looke on me at last, 

12. With lovely light to cleare my cloudy grief.

13. Till then I wander carefull comfortlesse,

14. In secret sorrow and sad pensivenesse.

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Couplet

Wide Guide

Way Astray

Ray Dismay

Overcast Plast

Past Last

Life Grief

Comfortless Pensiveness

Types of Sonnets

Petrarchan - An octave and a sestetRhyme scheme: abbaabba, then a varying scheme

(often cdcdcd)

Spenserian - Three quatrains and a coupletabab, bcbc, cdcd, ee

Shakespearean - Three quatrains and a couplet abab, cdcd, efef, gg

Sir Philip Sidney

• It was Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, really set off the boom in sonnet sequences. Sidney (1554-1586) was regarded as the ideal Elizabethan courtier. - Page 452, sonnet 1

• Sidney wrote a large numbers of sonnets, each saying essentially the same thing (“I love Stella”), yet each saying it in a new way.

Sir Philip Sidney

• This requires an ingenious use of what came to be known as conceits (governing metaphors or images)

– Conceit: in literature, fanciful or unusual image in which apparently dissimilar things are shown to have a relationship.

– The Elizabethan poets were fond of Petrarchan conceits, which were conventional comparisons, imitated from the love songs of Petrarch, in which the beloved was compared to a flower, a garden, or the like.

• The result was a habit of using language with great metaphorical intensity (Shakespeare).

Edmund Spenser

• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) was born two years before Sidney. His two primary models seem to have been Chaucer and Virgil.

• Virgil had begun his career writing a set of pastoral poems, the Eclogues. Pastoral literature (named for the Latin word for "shepherd") gained popularity: it dealt with shepherds and shepherdesses living an uncluttered, innocent life in the countryside. Why would this gain popularity?

Edmund Spenser

• Spenser's big work was The Faerie Queene, his attempt to win the Match Virgil contest with a massive English epic and at the same time gain the favor of Queen Elizabeth.

• Each book focuses on the adventures of a different knight, the allegorical embodiment of a particular virtue: Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, Courtesy. His style is lush, leisurely, pictorial, full of poetic sound effects.

Edmund Spenser

• Let’s look at his sonnets on page 435– What is the (obvious) governing metaphor?– Theme?– What is the rhyme scheme?– What are the metrical variations?

The Sonnet - Shakespeare• Shakespeare wrote the most famous sonnet sequence in

English, but by the time his collection was published (1609), love sonnets had largely gone out of style; people generally assume that Shakespeare actually wrote most of his in the early 1590s, during the boom years.

• Critics have long bickered over how much biographical content we can find in the events and characters hinted at in the sonnets--the Fair Friend, the Rival Poet, the notorious Dark Lady with her reeking breath and two-timing ways. But even taken out of context (as they usually are) they contain some of the most resonant poetry in the English language.

The Sonnet - Shakespeare• ~ First 126 Fair Friend

– 1-17 – urge the young man to marry and have self-preserving child

– 21-39 – explores various aspects of being in love– 40-42 – hint at intrusion of Dark Lady in lives of two men– 67-70 – friend accused of unspecific sexual fault– 78-86 – youth shows favor to rival poet– 92-98 – absence of youth making spring seem like winter– 116-126 – miscellaneous about fair friend

• Then, the Dark Lady sonnets– 127 – 152 – Dark Lady sonnets

• Conscous repudiation of courtly tradition/conventions• Feeling for her: “finer than lust, cruder than love”

The Sonnet - Shakespeare

• Shakespeare’s sonnet cycle is unlike any other, as he subverts traditional expectations and notions

• Sense of Elizabethan duality– Puritans (earthly ambition is BS)– Zest for life, thirst for beauty vs. a look to the past– Optimism & exuberance vs. anxiety & ambivalence– Patriarchal society yet Elizabeth is in charge

Sonnet 97 – page 505HOW like a winter hath my absence been  

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!  

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!  

What old December’s bareness every where!  

And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;          

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,  

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,  

Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:  

Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me  

But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;   

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,  

And, thou away, the very birds are mute;    

Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.  

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Sonnet 97 – page 1036HOW like a winter hath my absence been  

From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!  

What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!  

What old December’s bareness every where!  

And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;          

The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,  

Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,  

Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:  

Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me  

But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;   

For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,  

And, thou away, the very birds are mute;    

Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer

That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.  

1. HOW like a winter hath my absence been  

2. From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!  

3. What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!  

4. What old December’s bareness every where!  

5. And yet this time remov’d was summer’s time;         

6. The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,  

7. Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,  

8. Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:  

9. Yet this abundant issue seem’d to me  

10. But hope of orphans and unfather’d fruit;   

11. For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,  

12. And, thou away, the very birds are mute;    

13. Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer

14. That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.  

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Sonnet 116LET me not to the marriage of true minds 

Admit impediments. Love is not love 

Which alters when it alteration finds, 

Or bends with the remover to remove: 

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,          5

That looks on tempests and is never shaken; 

It is the star to every wandering bark, 

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. 

Love ’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;   10

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.   

If this be error, and upon me prov’d,   

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d. 

“Sonnet 130” in reply to typical love sonnet

(fictional example…this is not Shakespeare):

My mistress’ eyes are brilliant as the sun,

And coral’s colour matches her lips’ red;

Her snow breasts are like to others none,

And golden wires ornament her head.

A bed of damask roses, red and white,

I find within the confines of her cheeks,

And perfume’s self, conferring all delight,

Breathes in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, and well I know

That only music hath such pleasing sound;

In walking she doth like a goddess go,

Her dainty feet scarce printing on the gourd.

In all, by heaven I think my love as rare

As any she conceived for compare.

Sonnet 130MY mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun 

Coral is far more red than her lips’ red: 

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; 

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 

I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,          5

But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 

And in some perfumes is there more delight 

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:   10

I grant I never saw a goddess go,— 

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:   

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare   

As any she belied with false compare.

Sonnets

• Pay attention to the meter

• The rhyme scheme

• The rhyming couplets will likely tell you what the theme of the poem will be.

T: Title, Thought and Theme

I: Imagery and Figurative Language

M: Music and Sound

E: Emotion (expressed/experienced)

Sonnet 18SHALL I compare thee to a summer’s day? 

Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,          5

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; 

And every fair from fair sometime declines, 

By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; 

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, 

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,   10

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, 

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;   

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,   

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

Sonnet 29WHEN in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes 

I all alone beweep my outcast state, 

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, 

And look upon myself, and curse my fate, 

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,          5

Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d, 

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, 

With what I most enjoy contented least; 

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, 

Haply I think on thee,—and then my state,   10

Like to the lark at break of day arising 

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;   

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings   

That then I scorn to change my state with kings. 

Sonnet 30WHEN to the sessions of sweet silent thought 

I summon up remembrance of things past, 

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, 

And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste: 

Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,          5

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, 

And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe, 

And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight: 

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, 

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er   10

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, 

Which I new pay as if not paid before.   

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,   

All losses are restor’d and sorrows end. 

Sonnet 71NO longer mourn for me when I am dead 

Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell 

Give warning to the world that I am fled 

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell: 

Nay, if you read this line, remember not          5

The hand that writ it; for I love you so, 

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 

If thinking on me then should make you woe. 

O! if, I say, you look upon this verse, 

When I perhaps compounded am with clay,   10

Do not so much as my poor name rehearse, 

But let your love even with my life decay;   

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,   

And mock you with me after I am gone. 

Sonnet 138When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutor'd youth,

Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:

On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love loves not to have years told:

Therefore I lie with her and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be.

The Sonnet• The later career of the sonnet is worth considering. In the earlier

seventeenth century, Ben Jonson, the great proponent of "neoclassicism," scornfully rejects the sonnet form entirely, while John Donne, the great "metaphysical," rejects the traditional love sonnet and addresses his "Holy Sonnets" to God.

• In 1621 Lady Mary Wroth, Sidney's niece, published the only sonnet sequence of the period written by (and from the perspective of) a woman--a refreshing change from all those whining men.

• Milton, the giant peak marking the end of the Renaissance, writes occasional sonnets on assorted themes, none remotely Petrarchan. After Milton, the sonnet disappears for a century and a half, to be resurrected by the Romantic poets in the early nineteenth century.

Sonnet 129The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad; Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.