The early modern English sonnet

Ever in motion

Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, Enrica Zanin, Laetitia Sansonetti, Rémi Vuillemin, Enrica Zanin

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526144393
• eBook ISBN: 9781526144416
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume questions and qualifies commonly accepted assumptions about the early modern English sonnet: that it was a strictly codified form, most often organised in sequences, which only emerged at the very end of the sixteenth century and declined as fast as it had bloomed, and that minor poets merely participated in the sonnet fashion by replicating established conventions.
Drawing from book history and relying on close reading and textual criticism, this collection offers a more nuanced account of the history of the sonnet. It discusses how sonnets were written, published and received in England as compared to mainland Europe, and explores the works of major (Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser) and minor (Barnes, Harvey) poets alike. Reflecting on current editorial practices, it also provides the first modern edition of an early seventeenth-century Elizabethan miscellany including sonnets presumably by Sidney and Spenser.

Index

Note: ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page

amateur see profession

anthology 9n.2, 20, 34–6, 44, 78, 82, 87–8, 108–9, 145, 148–9, 175, 181, 184

see also collection; miscellany

artifice 45, 80, 99

authorship 1, 4, 28, 34, 61, 80, 89, 98, 117, 131, 133, 136, 147–8, 176, 178–80, 188

and anonymity 21, 107, 116, 124, 131, 147

and authority 7, 17, 47–8, 97, 100–4, 116, 123, 143

unauthorised publication 23, 42, 85–8, 144

ballad 6, 38, 41–7, 55n.74, 56n.94, 56n.106, 56n.107, 66, 69–72, 80, 145, 149, 176

Barnes, Barnabe 1, 5, 8–9, 128–39 passim

Beaumont, Francis

The Woman-Hater 70

beauty 27–8, 57n.112, 67, 69, 71, 81, 164–70, 178, 179, 193

physical or spiritual 22–5, 128

of the poem 38, 41, 100, 193

Bembo, Pietro 2, 17, 31, 33–7, 50n.4, 51n.13, 51n.17, 76n.50, 137n.8

blazon 5, 67, 70, 73, 76n.49

Bodenham, John 108–9, 148, 175

Bracciolini, Francesco 100

Breton, Nicholas 146–9...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Shaping the sonnet, from Italy and France to England
• II Performing the English sonnet
• III Placing the sonnet: sonnets isolated or sequenced
• IV Editing the sonnet
• Bibliography
• Index