Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Seccombe and Arber, comps. Elizabethan Sonnets. 1904.

Introduction

VII. The Zenith of the Sonneteering Vogue in Elizabethan England—Daniel and Constable

Before Sidney and Watson had laid down their pens, and before the vogue of the quatorzain had completed its conquest of England, there emerged in a very low rank of the literary hierarchy a writer of English sonnets, whose grotesque rusticity and plagiaristic habit were curious omens for the future. In 1584 there was printed a volume entitled ‘Pandora. The Musyque of the beautie of his Mistresse Diana. Composed by John Soothern, Gentleman, and dedicated to the ryght honorable Edward Deuer, Earle of Oxenforde, etc.’ In discordant doggerel, and in a vocabulary freely strewn with French words and idioms, this writer composed a series of sonnets, odes, and ‘odellets,’ which were translated with an unsurpassable crudity from the French of Ronsard. Soothern’s ‘Diana’ is avowedly Ronsard’s ‘Cassandre’ or ‘Astrée.’ He declares himself a close observer of Ronsard’s worship of ‘an Astre divine.’ The eulogies which the French poet bestows on Henry II. of France and his courtiers, Soothern transfers without qualification to his patron, the Earl of Oxford. Ronsard’s recurring boasts that his pen is capable of making his patrons immortal are absorbed in Soothern’s verse with grotesque effect. Soothern affects to emulate the example of Ovid and Petrarch as well as of Ronsard. Pindar and Anacreon were, he pretends, also among his masters. But there is very little in his uncouth writing which is not the original property of the French poet. It was probably only in Ronsard’s adaptations that he studied Greek. Such rustic lines as

are merely Soothern’s grotesque rendering of Ronsard’s boast—

The brutality with which Soothern ravaged Ronsard’s sonnets admits of endless illustration. The following parallelism is typical:—

A contemporary English critic, Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesie, writing in 1589 in ignorance of the exalted English poetry that the near future had in store, blindly credited this halting English sonneteer with ‘reasonable good facility in translation.’ But the critic at the same time justly complained of his impudent thefts from Ronsard. The episode of Soothern’s strangely contrived robberies is merely of value as a straw denoting the quarter from which the wind was about to blow in full blast on the Elizabethan sonnet.

With 1591, the date of the publication (although not of the composition) of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, the sonneteering rage opened in England in earnest. Between that date and 1597 amorous sequences came from the printing presses of London in a continuous stream. Many of the writers acknowledged that they emulated Sidney’s example. Of discipleship to him they made repeated boast; but their imitative temper did not restrict them to so narrow a field of study. Most of them pitched their tents in France, making occasional excursions into Italy. All worshipped at the shrine of Petrarch, but they were often content with second or third-hand knowledge of his achievement. Ariosto and Tasso were at times more immediate sources of inspiration; but the most popular of the French sonneteers, notably Ronsard and Desportes, were the masters who boasted the largest following. The names which the Elizabethans bestowed on their sonnet-sequences were invariably borrowed from France. ‘Delia,’ ‘Diana,’ ‘Idea,’ all did duty as titles of French collections of love-poetry before they were enlisted in the like service in Elizabethan England. The Elizabethans rang bold changes on the conventional phrases and sentiments to which the French tongue introduced them. They quickly proved that Soothern’s clumsy endeavour was a crude freak, and that theft from France could be made with grace and dexterity. The frigid conceits were not always literally produced; they were at times amplified with a good deal of ingenuity, and were clothed in warmer tones. But they rarely bore any trace of genuine passion or substantive originality. The Elizabethan sonnet, as it multiplied, travelled further and further from personal emotion or experience.

Samuel Daniel may be reckoned Sidney’s first successor on the throne of Elizabethan sonneteers. The adventurous publisher Newman issued piratically twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel at the end of his unauthorised edition of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. In self-defence Daniel published on his own account a collection of fifty-five sonnets to which he gave the general title Delia.

Daniel pretends to be a follower of Petrarch, although at a long interval. His ‘attire,’ he says, is ‘base’ compared with the great master’s. His ‘pen’ cannot achieve the same ‘consistent style.’ He tells his poetic mistress that, ‘thou, a Laura, hast no Petrarch found’ (Sonnet xxxviii.), yet he hopes that his affections are not inferior to Petrarch’s in warmth. This precise form of self-depreciation is a convention of the French sonneteers of the Pléiade, and serves as a warning that Daniel’s claim of discipleship to Petrarch should not be taken too literally. Du Bellay had lately written in a sonnet which was probably the foundation of Daniel’s:—

There is a likelihood that Daniel was better read in the later Italian poetry which was produced in his own lifetime than in the Italian poetry of Petrarch. The verses entitled ‘The Description of Beauty,’ the last of three poems which he appended to his collected sonnets, are honestly described as ‘translated out of Marino.’ With a more characteristic secrecy Daniel failed to disclose that the immediately preceding ‘Pastoral’ was a literal rendering of a song or ‘choro’ in Tasso’s recently published pastoral play of Aminta.

But on the whole the signs of French influence in Daniel’s sonnets are far greater than those of Italian influence. It was not Daniel’s ordinary custom to adapt Italian poetry at first hand. Reminiscences of Petrarch undoubtedly abound in Daniel’s sonnets, but they prove on examination to be borrowed from the adaptations of Petrarch’s work by recent French disciples. Nor did he disdain recourse to the original work of French writers, especially Ronsard and Du Bellay. From the work of the former he clearly drew those pathetic sonnets in which he prophetically describes the havoc that old age will work upon his strength and his mistress’s beauty. To the example of Ronsard must be assigned, too, Daniel’s insistence on his belief that his verses have the power of immortalising those whom they celebrate. That conceit spread from classical literature through the whole of Renaissance poetry. But Ronsard was mainly responsible for its universal vogue among the Elizabethan sonneteers.

But the French contemporary Desportes, of all foreign writers, is Daniel’s most conspicuous creditor. It is to the French renderings of Petrarch’s poetry by Desportes that Daniel’s sonnet-sequence is at nearly all points indebted. The student of Petrarch will often detect a resemblance between the Italian text and Daniel’s words, but will recognise at the same time variations in the English sonnet which he might easily be misled into assigning to the invention of the English poet. A reference to Desportes’ adaptation of the same poem of Petrarch is needed to explain the situation. Daniel borrowed from Desportes the latter’s version of the Italian, occasionally changing the French phraseology, but more often exhibiting a servility that a nice literary morality could hardly justify.

The evidence on this point is conclusive. Daniel’s Sonnets xv. and xxxii. closely reflect Petrarch’s Sonnets xxxvii. and clxxxviii. In the first, Petrarch reproaches Laura’s looking-glass with absorbing her interests; in the second, he generally deplores the misery which comes of his loyalty to his mistress. Daniel worked alone on Desportes’ renderings of the Italian.

Another example of Daniel’s relations with Desportes may be quoted as an effective illustration of his ingenuity as a translator.

A fourth instance may be cited in which Daniel, while following Desportes at no great interval, yet contrives somewhat greater changes in the phraseology.

Probably the best known of all Daniel’s sonnets is the finely phrased appeal to

This is again for the most part a mere adaptation from Desportes (Amours d’Hippolyte, lxxv.):—

Even the epithet ‘care-charmer’ is borrowed. It renders the conventional chasse-soin, which is commonly applied to sleep (sommeil) by French sonneteers.

Sleep was, indeed, one of the most constant themes of French poetry of the epoch. Daniel was only one of a number of Elizabethans who applied to the topic the phraseology and imagery which prevailed in France. But his handling of it especially impressed the Elizabethan public, and was itself a fruitful parent of later English imitations. Bartholomew Griffin boldly plagiarised Daniel, when in his sonnet-sequence of Fidessa (No. xv.) he penned an address to ‘Care-charmer sleep,’ ‘brother of quiet death.’ So endless is the chain which links sonneteer to sonneteer in the sixteenth century.

The imitative habit of Daniel’s Muse renders it unnecessary to inquire, with former critics, into the precise identity of the lady to whom he affected to inscribe his sonnet miscellany. Delia is a mere shadow of a shadow—a mere embodiment of what Petrarch wrote of Laura, and Ronsard wrote of Marie, and the other ladies of his poetic fancy. To Petrarch ultimately belong such lines by Daniel as these which have hitherto been mistaken for an attempt at a portrait from the life:—

The theory that the hazy features of this phantom of Italian and French poetry were drawn directly from a lady residing in the west of England, whose home was on the banks of a river Avon, possibly that in Wiltshire, hardly merits discussion. There is no reason to quarrel with the suggestion that Daniel may have been acquainted with a lady dwelling by the Avon. He resided in the part of the country through which the Wiltshire Avon runs. Accordingly he wrote:—

But the example of Petrarch and his French imitators made it obligatory for sonneteers to apostrophise rivers of their acquaintance. Sidney had lately addressed a sonnet to the Thames. ‘Avon shall be my Thames’ echoed Daniel (Sonnet liii.) by way of friendly emulation. Anxiety to conform at all points to the sonneteering fashions of his day at home and abroad, was Daniel’s dominating impulse. His Delia does not admit of examination from any more human point of view.

Despite the lack of originality, Daniel’s sonnets enjoyed vast popularity. Spenser lauded their ‘well tuned song.’ ‘The sweet-tuned accents’ of ‘Delian sonnetry’ rang, according to another admirer, through the whole country. Their influence is especially perceptible in the sonnet-sequence called Diana, by Henry Constable, which came from the press immediately after the appearance of Delia—in the autumn of 1592.

Constable’s rare volume contains only twenty-three poems. It was licensed for the press 22nd September 1592, and its full title ran: ‘Diana, the praises of his Mistres in certaine sweete Sonnets, by H. C.’ (London, Printed by I. C. for Richard Smith, 1592.) The publisher, Richard Smith, reissued the collection with very numerous additions in 1594. That reissue is a typical publishing venture of the age. The new title ran: ‘Diana, or, The Excellent conceitful Sonnets of H. C. augmented with divers Quatorzains of honourable and learned personages. Divided into VIII. Decades.’ With this miscellany Constable had small concern.

The printer, James Roberts, and the publisher, Richard Smith, who supplied dedications respectively to the reader and to Queen Elizabeth’s ladies-in-waiting, had swept together sonnets in manuscripts from all quarters, and presented their customers with a disordered assembly of what they called ‘orphan poems.’ Besides the twenty-three sonnets which Constable claimed for himself in the original edition, the new issue contained eight by Sir Philip Sidney. Seventy-six sonnets were included in all; the ‘honourable and learned personages,’ to whom the remaining forty-one quatorzains belonged, were not indicated, and have not been positively identified.

Apart from internal evidence, the Franco-Italian spirit of Constable’s work is betrayed, both by the general title Diana, which is directly borrowed from Desportes’ chief sonnet-sequence, and by the Italian words—sonetto primo, sonetto secundo, and so forth—which form the headlines of each poem in the authentic issue. Echoes of Sidney, Watson, and Daniel mingle with the foreign voices. Constable’s 3rd Decade, Sonnet i., on his mistress’s sickness, shows the influence of Astrophel and Stella (Sonnet ci.), as well as of Petrarch’s lamentations on Laura’s failing health (Sonnets cciii., cxcv., cxcvii.). The sorrow which the sonneteer affects at the waywardness of his mistress usually paraphrases Ronsard—at times clumsily and unimpressively.

is an awkward rendering of Ronsard’s lines—

Most of the familiar conceits—how the lady’s lips make the roses red (Decade I. Sonnet ix.), how the eye and heart accuse each other of causing love’s wounds (Decade VI. Sonnet vii.), how verse has the faculty of immortalising its hero or heroine (Decade VIII. Sonnet iv.)—reappear with due precision. Obedient to convention, Constable likens Diana to sun, moon, and stars (Decade VI. Sonnet i.), and when he complains of the wounds with which Love’s arrows have tortured his heart, he follows the old French poet Melin de St. Gelais in comparing his state with that of Saint Francis. Constable’s language, which can be on occasion tuneful and dignified, seems at times to owe more than Daniel’s diction to the poet’s invention. But the main poetic ideas offer convincing testimony of foreign origin. Evidence that Shakespeare read Constable’s verse and borrowed from it probably gives it its most lasting interest.