Elizabethan Lyrics and Sonnets

Elizabethan Lyrics and Sonnets

Q. Give an account of Elizabethan Lyrics and Sonnets.

👉 Elizabethan lyrics:

Virtually every Elizabethan poet tried his hand at the lyric; few if any, failed to write one that is not still anthologized today. The fashion for interspersing prose fiction with lyric interludes, begun in Arcadia, was continued by Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge (notably in the latter's Rosalynde (1590), the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1598 to 1600), and in the theaters plays of every kind were diversified by songs both popular and courtly.

We can have the good examples in the plays of Jonson, John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Dekker (though all, of course, are outshone by Shakespeare’s). The most important influence on lyric poetry, however, was the extraordinary richness of late Tudor and Jacobean music, both in the local tradition of expressive lute song represented by John Dowland and Robert Johnson, and in the newly imported complex Italian madrigals of Thomas Morley and William Byrd.

The foremost talent among lyricist, Thomas Campion was a composer as well as a poet; his songs (Four Books of Airs, 1601 – 17) are unsurpassed for their clarity, harmoniousness and rhythmic subtlety. Even the work of lesser talent, however, such as Nicholas Breton, is remarkable for the suggestion of depth and poise in the slightest performances; the smoothness and apparent spontaneity of the Elizabethan lyric conceal a consciously ordered and labored artifice, attentive to decorum and rhetorical fitness.

However, the Elizabethan lyrics are not private but public pieces, intended for singing and governed by a neo-platonic aesthetic in which pleasure is a means of addressing moral sentiments, aligning and aligning the mind of the observer with the discipline of reason and virtue. This necessitates a deliberate narrowing of the scope—pastoral or Petrarchan to easily comprehensible conditions of hope and despair—and produces a certain uniformity of effect, albeit an agreed upon one. The lesser talents are well displayed in the miscellanies The Phoenix Nest (1593), England’s Helicon (1600) and A Political Rhapsody (1602).

👉 Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence:

The publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sydney’s principle imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spencer and Shakespeare; his lesser imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield and many more.

Astrophel had recreated the Petrarchan world of proud beauty and despairing lover in a single, brilliant stroke, though in English hands the preferred division of the sonnet into three quatrains and couplet gave Petrarch’s contemplative form a more forensic turn, investing it with an argumentative terseness and epigrammatic sting. Within the common ground shared by the sequence, there is much diversity. Only Sydney’s sequence endeavors to tell a story, the others being more loosely organized as variations focusing on a central (usually fictional) relationship.

Daniel's Delia (1592) is eloquent and elegant, dignified and high minded; Drayton’s Ideas Mirrors (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined passionate intensity; Spencer’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled sexual love achieved within marriage.

Shakespeare’s sonnets (published in 1609) present a different world altogether, the conventions upside down, the lady no beauty but dark and treacherous, the loved one beyond considerations of sexual possession because he is male. The sonnet tends toward purity or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been the rhetorical, its forceful appeal and conscious display of artifice, but, under the pressure of Shakespeare's urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic rigor, and high-charge and shifting irony, the conventional limit of the form is also exploded.

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