12 Spenser and Sidney

Arjun Chaudhuri

STORYBOARD

Section One: Introduction and overview of the lesson

SectionTwo: Tudor England – Literary Cultures and Society

Section Three: Sonnets, Sequences, Sidney and Spenser

Section Four: Selections from Astrophil and Stella 

Section Five: Selections from the Amoretti

Section Six: Conclusion

Section One: Introduction and overview of the lesson

The following lesson aims to introduce the student to the work of Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney in particular, besides engaging in an overview of the rise and the life of the sonnet form in Henrician England, and later. Module Two, titled “Tudor England – Literary Cultures and Society” will trace the poetic stance of early sixteenth century poets in England and the figuration of the new genre of the sonnet in English literary cultures of the age. Module Three, titled “Sonnets, Sequences, Sidney and Spenser” will present a broad overview of the sonnet sequence in Europe and its appearance in England during the time of Sidney and Spenser. It will also introduce the sonnet sequences produced by both these authors and will cursorily examine the field of this genre during that era. Module Four, titled “Selections from Astrophil and Stella” and Module Five, titled “Selections from the Amoretti” will examine and read selections from both representative works mentioned by positing them in their political and cultural contexts. These two sections will aim at introducing a model of reading for the sonnet form in general, as well as Sidney’s and Spenser’s work in particular. Module Six, titled “Conclusion” will provide the closing remarks to the lesson as a whole.

Section Two: Tudor England – Literary Cultures and Society.

Till the time of Henry VIII, a majority of the literature in England was composed by people who had a direct bid in the goings on at court, or were directly employed, or were in some way or the other connected to the extended royal household that was located, for much of the year, at London, the capital of the dominion. Both Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard belong to this category of sixteenth century English writers. As do writers like Stephen Hawes, Thomas More and John Skelton, or Shelton. From works like John Skelton’s The Bowge of Court and Stephen Hawes’ magnum opus The History of Graunde Amour and la Bel Pucel, also known as The Passetyme of Pleasure, in the early decades of the sixteenth century, through the satirical writings of Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Edmund Spenser’s scathing account of London and the royal court in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe to Sir Walter Ralegh’s complaint to his Queen in “The Ocean, To Cynthia”, it is a fairly simplistic cartography of representative texts that takes shape. The poets in these texts present a deep and sometimes profoundly emotional account, on several levels, of what it means to be excluded from the court, from “royal grace”, which during Elizabeth’s reign often turned into impassioned personal affairs, mostly one sided, as it is in these lines from Ralegh’s “The Ocean, To Cynthia”. He says:

She is gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair;

Sorrow draws weakly where love draws not too;

Woe’s cries sound nothing, but only in love’s ear.

Do then by dying what life cannot do.

This poetic stance of the sixteenth century English poet writing about an elusive mistress whose power is great, as is her beauty and state, is something that can be traced back, historically speaking, to the Provencal romances that preceded the sonnet sequences of Petrarch, Dante and others, and was a signature idiom of those poets as well. But in its more later-Renaissance edition, this form of impassioned writing for the beloved grows in its English form from the Tudor court, and included the original Continental model of the anguished lover-poet fashioning from a vacuum of desire, through the welling of sorrow a clear but agonised voice of personal lamentation.

Against this general backdrop rises one solitary generic figuration that, in a way, encompasses the zeitgeist of the age and the cultural tones of the mid-sixteenth century in England. This figuration is the genre of the English sonnet. The traditional structure of the Italian sonnet, or the Petrarchan sonnet that migrated to England included two parts that together  formed a compact form of “argument”. After the sonnet came to England, this traditional structure did not change much with Henrician sonneteers like Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Both these poets’ sonnets were first published in Richard Tottel’s  Songes and Sonnetts, better known as Tottel’s Miscellany. While Wyatt indeed introduced the sonnet in England, it was the Earl of Surrey who started the beginning of the refashioning of the sonnet into its English form. In his English translations of the sonnets of Petrarch from the Italian and of Pierre de Ronsard from the French, Howard introduced a rhyming meter along with a clear structural division of the sonnet form into identical quatrains. On another front, it was Wyatt who developed the couplet ending of the English sonnet, which imparts to it its nearly apophthegmatic façade, a peculiar feature of its own. This is the general structure of the sonnet form that has characterised the English sonnet down the several transitions it has gone through at the hands of later sonneteers like Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Thomas Gray and others. With the sonnet form turning towards significance in sixteenth century Elizabethan England, the names of two poets come to the fore especially – Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Not only because they were the first to practice the art of the sonnet but primarily because of the fact that these two poets drew directly from the Italianate and French cultures of the sonnet and imparted to it an English colour, insinuating it firmly into the tradition of English poetry that had begun with the narrative poetry of Chaucer, the poetry of Langland and of Gower, thereby making it a distinctly English poetic genre.

Section Three: Sonnets, Sequences, Sidney and Spenser. 

Both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser were born at a time when England was thoroughly enmeshed in the fervent, almost missionary in its zeal, contestation between Marian Catholicism and English Protestantism. Sidney was born a year after Spenser, in 1554, and in 1558, Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England, bringing an end to the Marian connections between England and Catholic Rome. Both Sidney and Spenser belonged to entirely different backgrounds, the former being born a nobleman’s son, directly related to Elizabeth I’s close confidante and rumoured lover, Sir Robert Dudley, and the latter’s origins being London gentry, though a bit obscure. Though much is not known about Spenser’s early life or family origins, what is certain is that he was educated at Cambridge through the charity of one Robert Nowell, and later entered the civil services. Moving through a series of positions till 1580, Spenser became secretary to Lord Arthur Grey of Wilton, Lord Deputy to Ireland, and moved to Ireland where he became acquainted with Sir Walter Raleigh, who was later to become a great supporter and admirer of Spenser’s work.

In 1590, Spenser published the first three books of his magnum opus The Faerie Queene, and a second set of three more books were published in 1596. The Faerie Queene is best known for its epic scope and thoroughly allegorical structure. Between the publications of the books of The Faerie Queene, Spenser published his other works Complaints and the Amoretti, a sequence of eighty nine sonnets commemorating his wooing of his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle along with his longer narrative poem Epithalamion. It has been suggested that the sonnets of Amoretti were composed to correspond with the scriptural readings prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer for specific dates in 1594, the year in which Spenser married Elizabeth Boyle. The sequential order of the sonnets begins on January 23 and ends on May 17, and seems to have been arranged specifically to mark the period of time in between the end of January and Spenser’s wedding to Elizabeth Boyle, which took place in the first week of June. Many of the sonnets in Amoretti tend to make a blatant imitation of certain Petrarchan conceits, and are more conventional than the other poems in the volume which do not follow the typical Petrarchan model, for example the eleven odd songs in Amoretti.

The sonnet-sequence fashion that Spenser used in his Amoretti was also, predictably, an import from the Continental sonnet genre, much on the lines of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova and the sonnet cycles of Pierre de Ronsard and the La Pléiade school, introduced by Sir Philip Sidney, in his sonnet sequence titled Astrophil and Stella (though there were earlier attempts at imitating the European sonnet sequence model by poets like George Gascoigne, Thomas Watson and John Soowthern). Astrophil and Stella was written soon after 1580, and remained unpublished till 1591, but it was published much before Spenser’s Amoretti. Astrophil and Stella contained around a hundred and eight sonnets, besides a series of songs. Almost a majority of the poems in Sidney’s work were circulated in manuscript form before the first edition was printed after Sidney’s death in battle. This edition by Thomas Newman included a number of songs by Sidney, a preface by Thomas Nashe along with sundry verses by other poets like Thomas Campion and Samuel Daniel, another lesser known proponent of the sonnet sequence style (Daniel’s sonnet sequence of fifty poems addressed to ‘Delia’ and was called Delia and Rosamond). The arrangement of the sonnets in all the versions of the work remains more or less the same however, in spite of the numerous editions all of the poet’s work went through, including an extensive attempt by Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke. It was deeply inflected with autobiographical elements, as it seems, and the style is distinctly simple, with a direct idiom that does not, in any way turn towards the prosaic, and that primarily because of its stark honesty with emotion and borrowings from a plethora of pastoral imagery.

The decades after Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella was published saw a surge in the production of sonnet sequences by other poets of that age, apart from Edmund Spenser himself.

While the structure of the sonnet in this formative stage was qualified by metrical traditions and norms, the content also was potently moulded by certain conventions of thought considered at the time worthy of the poetic posture. Among these sonneteers who followed in the wake of Sidney and Spenser were Michael Drayton (Idea’s Mirror), Samuel Daniel (Delia and Rosamond), William Shakespeare and much later, Fulke Greville (Caelica), and William Drummond of Hawthornden (Poems), besides others. These cycles, including Fulke Greville’s sonnets (published only in the next century) and those of later poets, are collectively viewed as being distinctly Elizabethan in spirit, shape and structure, the English sonnet sequence being wholly a product of that era. With the exception of Shakespeare’s sequence of one hundred and fifty odd sonnets, most of these sonnet sequences treat with the love of the speaker in the sonnets for a lady who is usually unapproachable, distant, but beautiful and perfect in all ways so as to almost verge on being divine. In some cases, the object of love, the lady, in these sonnet cycles is not named, the address is not direct as well, but the fervour of the lover does not seem abated in any way for that matter too. In the course of this development of the sonnet from version to version, there also grew a resistance against the Petrarchan sensibility and structure of the sonnet in England against which the existing Petrarchanism of the English sonnet writers gathered in resilience. This Petrarchan/ anti-Petrarchan dilemma is something that is noticeable even in the sonnets of Spenser’s Amoretti. Perhaps the agenda of the ‘English-ing’ of the sonnet form that almost all of these poets assiduously followed made it difficult for them to come to terms entirely with the Petrarchan dialectic between love and reason, between the body and the soul, between the moment of resolution and the excruciation of ardent love.

Section Four: Selections from Astrophil and Stella – Readings of Sonnets 4 and 10

“What may words say, or what may words not say, Where truth itself must speak like flattery?” (35.1-2) asks Sidney in Astrophil and Stella. This is almost a poetic manifesto uttered in a bold new voice speaking about a tradition that is old as can be, the tradition of the sonnet, remarking on the intent the poet has to subscribe to the Petrarchan model of convention and strict form accompanied by an arching attitude of rhetorical conceit (“truth itself must speak like flattery”). But, then, as mentioned already, Sidney also looks “into thy (his) heart” in order to write, thereby going further than the Petrarchan convention of agony as content and stricture in form is concerned. And although it is easy to overstate the autobiographical element in Astrophil and Stella, there is little doubt about the identity of the two names in the title. ‘Stella’ is Penelope Devereux, the daughter of the Earl of Essex, who, although it was desired that she marry Sidney, married Robert, the third Baron Rich later. By using the name ‘Stella’, the Latin word for star, in his sonnets, Sidney was surely following the Petrarchan model of guising the object of love in a thin veil of suggestion (Petrarch’s ‘Laura’). The speaker of the sonnets, then, the lover of Stella, is named Astro-phil, or “star-lover” in Greek. It is predictably a story about a lover and his lady love, much like it is generally in Petrarchan sonnets, a story that suggests a close bond of love between the ‘star’ and the ‘star-lover’ while also positing a dilemma next by suggesting the impossibility of any union between the two because of the immeasurably vast distance between them.

Astrophil and Stella has been viewed as a singular variation on Petrarch’s sonnet sequence the Canzoniere, since it followed the Petrarchan model of intricate form and passionate content, but it also was composed, it seems, with the Elizabethan reader in mind, with an overarching Elizabethan poetic idiom making its presence felt at every turn of the text. The sonnet cycle, which in keeping with the general model of Renaissance sequences is not a factual autobiography, records the passionate affair of Astrophil with a married woman called Stella. The cycle ends with sonnets voicing the despair Astrophil has been brought to through the continued refusals of Stella.

One cannot but help associating the name Astrophil with Sidney himself, since the second portion of the word ‘Astrophil’ (‘phil’ meaning ‘lover’) suggestively echoes his own first name, Philip. And there are also other clues throughout the text that do not escape notice easily. For example, in Sonnet 30, Astrophil says “How Ulster likes of that same golden bit/ Wherewith my father once made it half tame” suggesting the fact that Astrophil’s father did ‘tame’ Ulster (Ireland) into dominion, which, coincidentally, Sidney’s own father also did. Sidney’s sonnet sequence does follow the Petrarchan model of creating units of artistic wholes in order to narrativise a bigger pattern of ideas. This pattern is not a ‘story’ per se, or a sequential narrative with plot and resolution, since the form itself is not a direct narrative form, but is, on the contrary, a gradual unfolding of the development of a series of emotions expressed in order to lead up to one final emotion, that of ‘most rude despair’ (108. 7).

Topics and themes conventional to the sonnet sequence such as an impassioned address to the moon, an appeal to Somnus, god of sleep, anguish at the absence of the loved lady, high praise for her ineffable beauty, a berating of her almost frigid chastity, asserting the longings of the lover, of Astrophil for Stella, occur in phases within the sequence, in markedly measured distance from each other. But the primary attitude in the entire sequence is one of hope and longing climaxing into taking the form of indescribable despair, almost a ‘night’ of despair (108.14). It is very evident that Astrophil combines within himself both the besotted lover and the self-critical poet who is concerned primarily with how he may best manifest his muse, and with how exactly he is supposed to write. The emotional and spiritual conflicts that can be observed in plain sight from the very beginning of the sequence continue to develop and become more complicated as Astrophil exhibits both the restraint of the Protestant gentleman of virtuous conduct and the ardour of the Renaissance poet-lover, thus presenting throughout the sonnets a powerful struggle between desire (for Stella) and reason (that she is married to another man). This interplay of opposing points, of paradoxes, of contestations between what is and what may not be but is desired takes shape through various means, both rhetorical and allusive, and can be considered to be a primary feature of the sonnet sequence.

A close reading of Sonnet 10i of the sequence may reveal these analyses above to some extent. The sonnet begins by addressing Reason. This, for all that we know, may be the poet’s own reason, or it may be Astrophil’s reason. The syntax in this poem is simpler than much of the other sonnets in the sequence and is mostly structured in the regular syntactical order of subject, verb and object. The point behind this is uncomplicated structure of the poem is of course to “reason” and “straight to prove” why Stella should love him (Astrophil), even though Reason, in the ineffable glow of “Stella’s rays” will come to kneel and prove with ‘good reason’ why Stella should be loved. This is not an overtly emotional outpouring of affection like some of the other sonnets in Astrophil and Stella, it is rather sedate, and considers Reason’s affect with passion and love, but the emotion that expresses itself in the sonnet is quite dignified, resigned in the sense of its ineffability. It is only in the last three lines that Stella’s predominance (and hence the predominance of love’s passion) and the primacy of Astrophil’s affections for her emerge as a foil to Reason’s ‘reason’. In the first and second quatrain of the sonnet, Astrophil describes the way in which “reason” is at war with “sense and love”. He says, “Reason, in faith thou art well served, that still/ wouldst brabbling be with sense and love in me”. The speaker’s tone is one of studied bitterness, since he (Astrophil) will probably never be able to unite with Stella. But there also is that underlying exhortation to Reason to submit to “heav’n’s course” (love) and to immerse itself completely in “heav’n’s inside” (the passion that love brings and which is beyond reason and thought), implying that reason itself is ignorant of the ineffability of love, and that it would be forced to kneel before the “powerful rays” of love, which is embodied in the star that Stella is.

Astrophil’s reason is battling his desire for Stella, but it would rather be better to immerse himself in the power of love’s passion instead of heeding the badgering that reason brings to his ears. “Reason” and “love” are viewed distinctly with their divergent functions in these lines – “Leave sense, and those which sense’s objects be:/ Deal thou with powers of thoughts, leave love to will”, implying that both serve different purposes and are therefore at odds with each other. In reading the significance of reason, or Reason in this sonnet, what one realises is that it is more the poet’s own reasoning that seeks to exert itself onto Astrophil’s reason, to which this sonnet is addressed. The latter’s reason is one that conforms to the idea that that to pursue perfection or seek inaccessible beauty is unreasonable since the pursuit of something that cannot be reached would merit an injury in the end. But the poet’s own reasoning exhorts Reason (Astrophil’s reason) to “leave love to will” and posits instead that ineffable beauty is to be pursued, in spite of the probability of sure failure in the end, because the process of pursuit is worthy in itself. This play of opposites is something that pervades the entire sonnet sequence thoroughly, sometimes between Reason and passion, and at other times between love and virtue, as is evident in Sonnet 4 of the sequence.

The name ‘Virtue’ takes the place of ‘Reason’ as the addressee in Sonnet 4ii. It would apparently suggest that it is something quite different that Sidney is proposing in this sonnet – probably the repudiation of Virtue as distinct from reason. However, the poetic strategy, as regards syntax and rhetoric that Sidney adopts in this sonnet is markedly similar to the one he employs in Sonnet 10 – both sonnets end with the addressee coming to its knees before Love, Reason to ‘reason’ with love, and Virtue which would itself be “in love”. The sense in each sonnet thus is similar in content as well as in tone. Both poems open in medias res, in the middle of an argument as it were. The speaker censures Virtue (4)/Reason(10) for trying to affect his passion for his love. Significantly, in between the first and second quatrains in both sonnets, both Virtue and Reason are urged to leave for something different, and not continue with their efforts upon his Will.

As Sidney and his contemporaries would have been very familiar with the Neo-platonic idea of the scala naturae, or the Great Chain of Being, and thus with the contemporary idea of the human psyche and its tripartite structure of Reason, Will and Appetite, it is possible to read this divergence (in sonnets 4 and 10) between Reason and Virtue as being nothing more than a clever poetic use of synonyms, in order to assert, again, the ineffability of the object of love. Will, one could say, was in the midst of it all, with Reason and Appetite on either side of it, corresponding to the ordering of the scala naturae, with angels and animals on either side of man. The will is responsible for men’s decisions and is governed by Reason, which again reflects the omnipresent will of God. But the will is constantly under assault by baser tendencies like sense and fancy, passions which lead man to baser actions. Reason, thus performs the same roles that Virtue does, in this model of the human psyche, which makes it fairly clear that Reason and Virtue in both these sonnets are basically synonymous. Thus, it is a contentious turn of phrase that illuminates Sidney’s sonnets in Astrophil and Stella: the songs are a different case altogether and serve as interludes in the sequence. And this contention is something that permeates the entire text, and at multifarious levels, whether it be the contention between Reason and Will, the contention between the Petrarchan convention and anti-Petrarchan impulse, or the contention between being a courtier of Queen Elizabeth, also glorious, ineffable and almost divine in her aura as the Virgin Queen, loved by all but inaccessible to everyone, and paying court to Stella, who, by virtue of being a married woman, may be loved endlessly, but cannot be united with Astrophil.

Section Five: Selections from the Amoretti – Readings of Sonnets 1 and 20 

While Sidney’s is a voice of lament and despair, and Astrophil’s agony is something that being unresolved turns to despair, with the Petrarchan idea of desire being what it is, a site of separation and ineffability; Spenser brings to the history of the sonnet sequence in England a significant, if not remarkable solution. Spenser’s voice in Amoretti and Epithalamion is one of content celebration, of love, of joy, or marital bliss. Though building on the Petrarchan model of the sonnet as a poem of love girded by conventions of content and rhetorical structure, Spenser absorbs and assimilates this Petrarchan legacy in his language and relocates it into a more definite site, that of the Protestant Christian wedding, using his marriage with Elizabeth Boyle, and the time leading up to it, as a tool of emplotment to chart the entire sequence of Amoretti. Coupled with this is his linkage to the Elizabethan pastoral and its imagery, which he meshes within the seasonal aspects of Amoretti while also connecting it to the Petrarchan aspects of convention, form and rhetoric.

As it was in Astrophil and Stella, so it is in the Amoretti; the springboard for the sequence is a ‘factual’ courtship, Spenser’s with Elizabeth Boyle. Whereas the ‘courtship’ of Stella by Astrophil ended in despair and dissolution, this one ends in marriage. It is as if Spenser intently proposes a legitimisation of the fracas of ego and desire that resulted in Astrophil’s despair, and that through the pursuit of a selfless Christian love culminating in holy matrimony. While Sidney’s Astrophil pursues a married woman (almost scandalous during Elizabethan times), Spenser talks about the pursuit of a woman who, after being wooed, will become the wooer’s partner in marriage, and in this process, he interpolates and imbues his “little loves” (the word Amoretti means “little loves”) with a carefully scheduled set of Protestant moral values. While Sidney’s images are of Reason and Sense, derivative allusions from Greek and Roman myth confirming them, Spenser’s images are those of sin and damnation, or of virtue and salvation. But with Spenser, the central play of opposites in the Petrarchan convention is at least challenged, if not entirely subverted, by the ideological pressures of Protestant morality. To add to this perspective remains the fact that the Amoretti, in spite of being love poems, also correspond, as previously mentioned to a Christian, and a Protestant Christian at that, annual schedule of worship.

The Amoretti did, for all ends and purposes, confront this encounter between Petrarchanism and Protestantism in a subtle manner, leaving the general tone of the sonnets in the sequence light as a façade, but insinuating within the configuration of the language in the poems a deep meditation on the problematic of Desire and Will, with Grace and a hallowed Love doing diurnal rounds around this conflictive equation. This is achieved by Spenser through a reworking of the Petrarchan model in his sonnets in ways that are more than one. For example, Amoretti uses many Petrarchan topoi, conceits and rhetorical structures: ‘plaints’, ‘ships in storms’, ‘eyes’, ‘fayre loves’ all find place in the sequence, and Spenser uses a significant number of animal motifs in the Amoretti, motifs which signal an incursion of the humanistic sites of Petrarchanism but also are manifested and occur as significantly English, Christian topoi. A reading of Sonnet 20iii, in which one of these famous Renaissance topoi, that of the greatness of the Lion (Lyon) setting its foot upon the neck of its conquered victim occurs, may justify this point further.

In Sonnet 20, the image is that of “the Lyon that is Lord of power” who “reigneth over every beast in field”. The preceding lines in the first quatrain report the speaker’s love bending him down to subjugation – “her foot she in my neck doth place”. The image here is that of a predator, bending its hunted prey to its will by placing its foot upon the prey’s neck. At first glance, this image may seem to reflect another famous simile from Petrarch’s own Rima Sparsa, sonnet 256, where he speaks of his lover who “e’n sul cor quasi fiero leon rugge / la note” (“Like a fierce lion she roars over my heart in the night.”) But Spenser’s use of this Petrarchan simile is, to say the least, not entirely Petrarchan. While Petrarch’s use of the image of the fiercely roaring lion may have been a signifier of pride and fierceness in power, Spenser’s use of the image of the conquering Lyon or Lyonesse has more than just a virtue or a vice within its interpretive ambit. It could well be an insinuation of Christian pride in morality, of righteous delight in the strength of morality to subjugate the senses and the fancies and to bring forth a more ‘holy’, moral love. Again, the image of the meek Lamb, a very important medieval signifier used for Christ himself, is subverted and used as an embodiment of the conquered senses, or earthly pride conquered by righteous pride, the “Lyon or the Lyonesse” conquering the “sillie lamb” (though “sillie” here is more innocence than silliness as understood in the contemporary sense). The sonnet’s conceit plays upon the lion and the lamb and both animals’ bestiary connections to signify an abiding theme in the Amoretti, that of Desire and Ego humbled by a righteous Passion. But the opening quatrain presents a more general image of the lover presenting his ‘hart’ to his lady (“doe myne humbled hart before her poure”) whereas she, in her imperviousness, does him injustice by presenting not the innocence of the pure that, according to popular belief, is the only thing that the powerful lion may bend before, but the extreme cruelty of the conquering, victorious “Lyon or the Lyonesse” (the idea being from classical sources like Pliny and others that among all predators it is the lion which will spare the supplicant).

While Lyonesse also, it could be pointed out, is a signifier of inaccessibility that has its origin in the fantastic geography of the Arthurian Romances where the final battle between Arthur and Mordred occurs, the liturgical signifiers in the sonnet, like in almost much of the Amoretti, are very prominent. For example, the line “doe myne humble hart before her poure” echoes directly the line from Psalm 62 of the Book of Common Prayer, used in morning prayers “powre out your hearts before him”. The effect in this sonnet thus as a whole is that of a spurned lover agonising over the rejection that his impervious lady has handed to him, conquered him with, and in spite of his anguish, he still sees her as “fayrer than fairest”. But within the complex, intimate network of signification in the sonnet lurks a very clever poetic meditation on the dilemma of the Elizabethan poet, maybe Spenser himself, to decide between the impulses of the heart that seek service in senses, fancies and desires, but not in Reason, or to seek the shelter of the moral impulse and thereby end the constant anguish of not being able to access the ineffable lady.

This attitude of the conflictive Petrarchan and the confirmed Protestant seeking a common shore in poeticising the male lover’s passion for the beloved lady is seen, before Sonnet 20, in Sonnet 7iv where the imbedded conceit of the lady’s eyes being like the basilisik’s eyes occurs as well. In Sonnet 7, Spenser addresses the ‘fair eyes’ of the beloved, as being the same source from which both life and death comes. Even in the European traditions of the sonnet, the eyes of their ladies were of frequent concern to sonneteers. And this particular sonnet being only the first of the many occasions in Spenser’s sequence to use the direct mode of address to eulogise the fair eyes of the lady (see Am. 12, 16, 21, 24-26, 37, 43, 47, 49, 57, 61, and 81). The implied metaphor of the basilisk, the fabulous creature from whose eyes can literally kill anyone on whom they set their sights is a reflection of another sonnet later on in the sequence, Sonnet 49 where he asks “Fayre cruell, why are ye so fierce and cruell,/ Is it because your eyes haue powre to kill?” Whereas Sonnet 20 is an example of the lover’s supplication and defeat in the face of the impervious lady, Sonnet 7, like Sonnet 49, is one that bemoans the lady’s cruelty at not reciprocating the advances of the speaker. In each case, like in many others throughout the sequence, the conceits that Spenser uses are distinct in their origins as Petrarchan, or even European-traditional as regards the traditions of the sonnet form. Coupled with this is an abiding structure of Biblical allusions, specifically to Psalms and sermons that correspond to the day to which the particular sonnet is linked. Spenser’s break with the Petrarchan convention while at  the same time his observance of the conventions of the sonnet merit closer study, of course, in the light of the fact that his innovations in the field of English poetry were most ingeniously done. An example of that is of course his use and invention of the Spenserian Stanza, and a different sonnet idiom than that of Wyatt, Howard and Sidney.

Section Six: Conclusion 

Both Spenser and Sidney have been vastly known for their other works, and not for their sonnet sequences, Sidney for his Arcadia, and Spenser for his Faerie Queene. But in the history of the English sonnet and of the sonnet sequence in England, theirs’ are very important names. Much of the formation of the English sonnet and its conventions is owed to these two poets. Later sonneteers and critics like Samuel Daniel (A Defense of Rhyme) and William Drummond made reference to both Sidney and Spenser’s ideas, divergent though they might have been at points, in the course of their tracing of the genesis of the English sonnet and the development of its many forms. John Hughes, in his edition of Spenser’s works, largely credits the revival of the ‘disused Sonnet’ by Spenser in imitation of the Italians. In later decades, detractors of the sonnet form, like Ephraim Chambers and Dr. Samuel Johnson for example, came to think that the sonnet form was most unsuitable for the English language, and that whatever had been done in that case had been done mostly by Shakespeare and Milton. It is during this time that we see the fading away of the primary importance that both Spenser’s and Sidney’s sonnet sequences had had during the Elizabethan era and even much later, when the sonnet form was still in vogue in England.

But in this, of course, the presence of William Shakespeare and his sonnet sequence largely obscures the relative historical and artistic merits of these two poets, since most of whatever attention was assigned to the sonnet in these times was directed largely towards him and towards Milton with his Latinate sonnets. Even in his Sheet of Sonnets, Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes reference to the ‘present English’ sonnet and cites English poets like William Preston and Anne Seward for their contributions to the art of the sonnet alongside the earliest sonneteers like Petrarch, and even the French poet Boileau. It was only much later, in the nineteenth century that critics like Leigh Hunt and James Appleton Noble began to make reference to the fact that it was indeed Spenser who first embarked on rejecting and breaking out of the shell of the archetypal Italianate sonnet. David M. Main’s Treasury of English Sonnets  was among the first of the earliest sonnet collections ever published, and it was only after such attempts had been made that the true import of Sidney’s and Spenser’s contribution to the sonnet form began to emerge. William Minto’s essay on the Elizabethan sonneteers listed Sidney, Daniel, Constable, Watson and others, but conspicuously left out Spenser. This neglect of Amoretti could be for numerous reasons, one of them being Spenser’s own magnum opus The Faerie Queene dwarfing the “little loves” of Amoretti and Epithalamion, or maybe because of the Protestant morality that, in the eye of the general reader, rid the sonnet of its larger than life love. But there were of course other critics who saw through such attitudes and assigned both Spenser and Sidney with the importance due to them in the tradition of the English sonnet form, chief among them being the literary historian John Erskine, and the essayist Prosser Hall Frye.

In the twentieth century, the sonnet remains one of the most important memory figures of the Elizabethan age, and the numerous crossovers with other cultures that went into the fashioning of this important epoch in the history of English literature. And thus, in studying the history of English poetry and how it turned from merely being a lyric and a narrative poetry into one of the most proliferate literary cultures, spanning continents and cultures vastly different from each other, it is essential to observe the growth of the sonnet as a form and as a tradition and as a literary culture. In doing that, of course, one cannot but direct one’s attention to Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser immediately, since without knowing their work, one would be deprived of the knowledge of an important section of the history of the English sonnet.

Points to ponder: 

1.  What metaphors and images in particular may have migrated to the English sonnet form from the European cultures of sonnet writing?
2. While the sonnet sequence as a form can be said to have originated in the Continent, what changes did the English sonneteers incorporate in the English variant of the sonnet sequence?
3. What are the particular images of the lady who is loved, the elusive mistress that are peculiar to Philip Sidney’s sonnets?
4. How can the sonnet be looked at as a memory figure of the Elizabethan era, considering the fact that the course of its formation remains synonymous with the stabilisation of the Tudor era in England?

Do you know?

1. That Sir Philip Sidney had been one of the main leaders of the strong Puritan faction advancing an active English involvement in the struggles of the Dutch Protestants against the Spanish rulers. In 1585, after Elizabeth I finally acceded to this faction’s demands and sent an army to the Netherlands, Sidney was named governor of Flushing, one of the towns that the Dutch had ceded to the English in return for the Queen’s support.
2. That in 1576 Phillip succeeded his father, Sir Henry Sidney, as Cupbearer to Queen Elizabeth, a ceremonial duty. In the same year, he traveled to Ireland to take part in the campaign with his father, Henry, and Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex.
3. That Edmund Spenser was related to the Spencers of Althorp through his second wife, and so is related to Lady Diana Spencer (Diana, Princess of Wales).
4. That “Blatant Beast” was a phrase Spenser coined for the ignorant, slanderous, clamor of the mob.

Reference

• Cousins, A.D. and Howarth, Peter. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet.
• Cambridge University Press. Cambridge. 2011.
• Cummings, R. M. Ed. Edmund Spenser: The Critical Heritage. Routledge. New York.    2001.
• Hadfield, Andrew. Edmund Spenser. A Life. Oxford University Press. London. 2014.
• Johnson, William C. Spenser’s Amoretti: Analogies of Love. Associated University Presses. New            Jersey. 1990.
• Lethbridge, J. B. Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions. Associated University Presses. New Jersey. 2012.
• Phillippy, Patricia Lerahou. Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance English Poetry. Associated University Presses. New Jersey. 1995.