The Predecessors of Shakespeare in Poetry

№1232, г. Москва

Queen Elizabeth I, that is why another name for this

historical and cultural epoch is the Elizabethan Age.

Queen Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII and

his second wife Anne Boleyn.

of England.
Elizabeth succeeded her half-sister Mary to the

throne when she was only 25. Elizabeth was a Protestant, however she had many Catholics among her subjects. The Queen was a remarkable personality: she was thin, red-haired, very clever, she possessed audacity and wiliness, she couldn’t help making favourites out of her most handsome courtiers.

greatest powers, though it was progressing fast under the government

of the Tudors.

Elizabeth needed time to make England a powerful country.
All the chief glories of the Elizabethan Age in literature came after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Though the Spanish fleet was the finest in Europe, it was outmatched by the smaller and faster English fleet, which was handled by the best seamen in the world.

sources of confidence, energy and delight.
All these features were

expressed in literature.

important of which was the sonnet, the poetic form which

is originally Italian.

It was brought to perfection by the great Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (1304 – 1374). ( Petrarch is the English spelling of his name.)
A Petrarch sonnet is a poem of 14 lines: two quatrians ($-line stanzas) and two terzets (#-line stanzas).The rhythmic pattern of the quatrians is abba abba (the rhymes in both quatrians are the same); the rhymes of the terzets could vary: cde cde; cdc dcd; ccd eed.

strict form and alteration of lines.
Besides, in a classical

sonnet a thought is put forth in the first quatrian,
another thought (contradicting the first) in the second,
these two thoughts intersect in the first terzet, usually in the last line of the sonnet.
If the author is skilful enough, he makes the last line the most significant, this word is called the key of the sonnet.

century who were the first to bring the sonnet into

English literature were

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 -1542)

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
(1517 -1547).

a sonnet, but it may serve as an example of

an elaborate verse form with a strictly observed rhyme pattern:

The Lover’s Appeal
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay! Say nay! For shame!
To save thee from the blame
Of all my grief and grame.
And wilt thou leave me thus?
Say nay! Say nay!

Howard Surrey. It consisted of three quatrians and a couplet:

abab cdcd ef ef gg.

From Tuscane came my Lady’s worthy race;
Fair Florence was sometimes her ancient seat:
The western isle, whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Camber’s cliffs, did give her lively heat.
Foster’d she was with milk of Irish breast:
Her sire an Earl; her dame of Prince’s blood.
From tender years, in Britain it doth rest,
With Kinges child; where she tasteth costly food.
Hudston did first present her to mine eyen:
Bright in her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first to mine;
And Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can obtain her love.

verse, and such sonnets were called “Shakespearean”. However, it is

wrong, as the real creator of the form was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.
Another great innovation of Surrey is blank verse ( unrhymed 5-foot iambic), which he used in his translation of virgil’s “The Aeneid”.
Half a century later the Elizabethan dramatists used blank verse, when their characters spoke on the stage of the first professional theatres.

birth, seemed to his contemporaries to embody all the traits

of character and personality they admired.

After studying at Oxford, he travelled widely on diplomatic missions and served at the court of the Queen. He retired from his duties in 1580 and turned to writing literature, just for amusement. He wrote a pastoral romance in prose
” Arcadia”, a sonnet cycle
“ Astrophel and Stella” , a critical work “ Apology for Poetry”.

Renaissance Edmund Spenser (1552 -1599).
His father was

a cloth-maker, but Edmund had an opportunity of going to Cambridge as a “sizar”- a poor student who paid less for his education than others, but had to serve the richer students during meals. In that way he acquired some intellectual friends, Sir Philip Sidney among them.

deputy of Ireland, and lived in this country to his

death. Sir Walter Releigh was deeply impressed by Spenser’s poem “The Fairie Queen” and he persuaded Spenser to go to London and supervise its publication.
In 1590 the first three books were printed and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.
( it’s worth mentioning that only six books out of the planned twelve were completed.)

so many later English poets learnt the art of versification

from his works.
He is famous as an experimenter in verse forms, many of which became traditional in England.
He created a sonnet form of his own, the Spenserian sonnet, and the Spenserian stanza which consists of 9 lines, the last line is in 6-foot iambic, while the others are in 5-foot iambic, with the rhymic scheme: ababbcbbcbcc.

strand
But came the waves and washed it away;
Again I wrote

it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
“Vain man”, said he, “that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize!
For I myself shall like to his decay,
And eke my name be wiped out likewise”.
“Not so ( quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name,
Where, whenas Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

been unknown before. Among the English poets who later used Spenserian

stanza are Robert Burns, George Gordon Byron, Percy Byshe Shelly and John Keats.

1997г.
Иллюстрации:
http://club.rc-mir. com/topic2821324_50 html
http://www.books.ru/shop/ibooks/1978185794294
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/when-world-collide/timeline/
http://www.ec-dejavu.net/p-2/Petrarch.html
http://lalaluvu.com/page/2/
http:www.thepoetsgarret.com/elizabethan/jun2.html
http://www.artchive.com/web_gallery?J/John-de-the-Elder-Critz/Portrait-of-Sir-Philip-Sidney-(1554-86)-c1620.html
http://nahaplaneta.pp.ua/raznoe-2/kultura+iskusstvo/anlijskaya-literatura-v-period-renessansachast-4