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The Sonnet Virus

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 10 months ago

The Sonnet Virus

 

Team Members: Kris McAbee

 

Happy, thrice happy, are they whom God hath doubled his spirit upon, and given a double soul unto be poets.

                                                                            -Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveler (1594)

 

 

 

The Project Objective

 

 

This project hopes to expose through modeling and visualization techniques new possible narratives for the rise and fall of the sonneteer in sixteenth-century England and beyond.  New narratives take into account a variety of factors, including thematic and contextual issues, authorial personality, extra-generic appearances, gender, politics, and the very "technologies of reproduction" by which the sonneteer reproduced.

 

Visualizations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About The Sixteenth-Century Sonnet

 

One of the most popular narratives explaining the English sonnet vogue relies on an understanding that then exemplary courtier, philospopher poet, and national hero, Sir Philip Sidney wrote a sonnet sequence, the rest of the country followed suit.  The first sonnet of Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (pub. 1591) exemplifies not only the form, but the crucial themes of the sixteenth-century love sonnet (namely, a pining and self-obsessed lover with the metapoetical and futile hope that his writing can effect a return of his love from his virtuous beloved):

 

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That she (dear She) might take some pleasure of my pain:

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:

Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,

Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,

And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite--

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

 

 

The Iconic Sonneteer

Late sixteenth-century England saw a literary trend so explosive that almost everyone who put pen to paper became a sonneteer. How did the sonnet vogue take over the literary scene of the 1580's and 1590's?  Where did the sonneteer go after the trend fizzled in the early seventeenth century?  And, given that so many of the sonnets written in the Renaissance were dedicatory or religious, why do we continue to understand the personality of the sonneteer as a pining lover... and, frequently, not a very skilled poet?

 

Even our contemporary understanding of the sonneteer evokes the Elizabethan romantic, as evidenced by thesonneteer.org :

 

 

 

 

 

Among terms for poets, "sonneteer" stands alone; other terms like "poet" or "bard" evoke the ideal of the creator of a second, golden nature, as Sidney articulates in his Apology. Other terms such as "rhymer," "versifier," "hack," may connote some of the distrust, negative attitude, or downright vitriol toward poets and hardly harken to Shelley's later articulation that these are the "unacknowledged legislators of the world," but they lack both the generic specificity and the full character portrait offered by “sonneteer.” The only term that comes close in terms of generic specificity with evocative power is "balladeer," which points as often to a notion of "mongering," composing or selling doggerel, libel, or sensationalistic cheap print, as it does to the idea of one who writes ballads specifically.  Likewise, a sonneteer could simply be one who writes bad poetry, he need not write actual fourteen-line sonnets at all.  Of course, in the sixteenth-century, the word “sonnet” need not only connote the genre defined by (fourteen lines of verse, etc.); using its etymological meaning of "little song," in the early Renaissance "sonnet" could simply refer to a short poem.  For example, John Donne's Songs and Sonnettes of (1601) contains no generic sonnets, with the title simply denoting that the contents are short poems.  Moreover, despite publishing this title, La Corona and a number of "Holy Sonnets," (generic sonnets of the religious variety) during his life, John Donne the poet is not the most ready icon of the Renaissance sonneteer.  The term evokes a pining-lover, bent on exposing his pain in verse with the hope that, in Astrophil’s formulation, “Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,/ Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain” (Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 1, 3-4).  For this reason, Donne is most the "sonneteer" in his early carpe diem poems, not themselves formal sonnets, and poems that, in fact, reveal a strong reaction against the Petrarchan tradition.  The late-sixteenth century saw a preponderance of sonneteer characters in the form of  over-blown Petrarchan lovers whose melancholic pursuit of "cold" or "cruel" love objects has little to do with the traditions of dedicatory or religious sonnets.  The pervasiveness of these characters belies the apparent simplicity of the word "sonneteer" as simply one who writes sonnets.

 

Precisely because sonnets are about futile desire that cannot conform to heterosexist ideals of sexual reproduction, the sonneteer reproduces in other ways.  The cultural history of the sixteenth-century sonneteer shows this reproduction through imitation, ultimately resulting in the sonnet "boom" of the 1590s.  The vogue for sonnets was intimately tied to class conditions and a system of pratonage which established the sonnet as not only a trendy literary exercise for members of the court but also the dedicatory form par excellence.  Hence, Sidney closes his Apology with the curse for those who do not appreciate poetry, “that while you live in love, and never get favor for lacking skill of a sonnet” conjuring the notion of the ever-pining sonneteer, yet pivoting on the fact of the dedicatory sonnet’s ability to bring about the favor of the court.  The notion of dedicatory verse emerges since the only sonnets which could gain "favor" are dedicatory ones; the Petrarchan sonnet tradition reveals the sonnets' hope to effect romantic favor, but always in futility.

 

Sixteenth-Century Technologies of Reproduction

 

  • Heterosexual Sex ('Increase and Multiply" was a crucial motive of the growing English nation)
  • Print
  • Mirrors

 

The late sixteenth-century love sonnets themselves expose the limits of sexual reproduction not only by figuring the poems themselves as progeny, but also by positing the contemporary reproductive technologies of mirrors and print as a means of reproducing the subject in impossible, and sometimes homoerotic, desire.  The mimetic desire of Petrarchism produces an impossible desire which so defines the sonneteer character that his appearance is not limited to sequences of fourteen-line poems; instead, in the height of the sonnet vogue the sonneteer is reproduced on the stage, functioning as the emblem and indicator of trendy poetic imitation in Love's Labors Lost, imitated desire in As You Like It, and the impossibility of fulfilled desire and inevitable violence in Romeo and Juliet.  Finally, as new genres find their footing in sixteenth-century England, the sonneteer is reproduced in the doubling of the historical sonneteer Henry Howard Earl of Surrey in the pages of Thomas Nashe's early prose fiction, The Unfortunate Traveler. The repeated appearance of the sonneteer outside of his eponymous genre proves the impact of this character as a cultural figure.  Moreover, the fact of that sonneteer emerges on the English landscape concomittantly with a boom in wealth and population, alongside such technologies as mirrors and print, suggests that the English sonneteer embodies a reaction to England's growing status. Ultimately, the means of the sonneteer's reproduction speak to the cultural conditions of sixteenth-century England, a period of growth and prodigality, in which the repeated story of the failure of heterosexual reproduction signals the impact of technologies of reproduction and the iconicity of the sonneteer.

 

Methodology

 

 Data Sets:

     Timeline:  timeline3_data.xls

      Publication Dates and Reference Values: uploaded_scatter.xls

 

Ranking System for Mention vs. Use of Reproduction Technologies

  0
1
2
3
Print   absence of metaphorically or literally present "print" references placement, subject, preface implies print suggestion of reproduced writing in the narrative of the sequence word "print" appears in a sonnet
Sex
  absence of metaphorically or literally present references to a sex act having occurred within the narrative of the sonnet sequence concrete metaphorical reference to possibility of sex act sex act described in included non-sonnet poem sex act described in a sonnet
Mirrors 
  absence of metaphorically or literally present "mirror" references presence of mirroring phenomena or metaphors, eg. Reflecting poetry, Narcissus and Eccho, mirroring visual effects use of the words glass or mirror, including alternate spelling 3+  references to literal mirrors
Breeding 
  absence of metaphorically or literally present breeding references metaphorical suggestion of birth, procreation, or breeding use of the word "breed," "birth," "bear," "procreate," "born," "bore," and alternate spellings 3+ references to breeding

 

 

Screenshots from Text Searches

 

 

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