An introduction to women who contributed to English literature in the 16th and 17th centuries

The sonnet sequence

The publication of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella in 1591 generated an equally extraordinary vogue for the sonnet sequence, Sidney’s principal imitators being Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, Spenser, and Shakespeare; his lesser imitators were Henry Constable, Barnabe Barnes, Giles Fletcher the Elder, Lodge, Richard Barnfield, and many more. Astrophel had re-created 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 a 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 sequences, there is much diversity. Only Sidney’s sequence endeavours 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 Mirror (1594; much revised by 1619) rises to a strongly imagined, passionate intensity; Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) celebrates, unusually, fulfilled sexual love achieved within marriage. Shakespeare’s sonnets (published 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 tended to gravitate toward correctness or politeness, and for most readers its chief pleasure must have been rhetorical, in its forceful pleading and consciously exhibited artifice, but, under the pressure of Shakespeare’s urgent metaphysical concerns, dramatic toughness, and shifting and highly charged ironies, the form’s conventional limits were exploded.