- Actual title: Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, and other
- The Star of Songes and Sonettes was Surrey (1517 - 1547).
- The other major poet represented in Songes and Sonettes was Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503-1542).
- Second Edition in 1557. Ninth in 1587.
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- Wyatt: Credited with introducing the Petrarchan style and subject matter into English literature.
- Surrey: Converted the Petrarchan sonnet form into the English form. (It's commonly called the "Shakespearean Sonnet," but that's only because Shakespeare is far and away the most famous figure of the Elizabethan age. By rights, it should be called the "Surreyean Sonnet.")
- Both: By their talent and prestige they established a literary model and a cultural meme.
- The literary model for: Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella (1582?), which is generally credited with being the first sonnet cycle, followed by Caelica (ca. 1580-1600) by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke; Diana (1594?) by Henry Constable; Delia (1592) by Samuel Daniel; Idea (1599), by Michael Drayton; Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593) by Barnabe Barnes; Diella by Richard Linche; and a parody cycle, Gulling Sonnets (1599); and finally, Sonnets (1603) by William Shakespeare.
- As for the cultural meme: first, let's look at:
Love According to Petrarch - Love is at first sight. It enters through the eyes into the heart and never goes away.
- Love is never satisfied. The lady is unavailable, or hard-hearted, or changeable.
- Love is suffering. The lover hopes that the lady will see his suffering and have pity on him, and give him her love. Sometimes the lover thinks that this miracle is about to happen, but it never does, and he is caught in a conflicted state, often stated paradoxically as "freezing fire." The fire is the flame of his true love, which burns eternally, and the freeze is a result of a combo of the lady's coldness and lover's shame and self-doubt. The lover who suffers thus is careless of everything else; he's anti-social, wanders about in a state of gloomy melancholy, says he's sure he will die, and doesn't pay attention to social nicities, such as his clothes.
- Despite, or maybe even because, love is suffering, the lover stays true to love because he is helpless to do otherwise, and it inspires him to creativity (writing poetry), and because being in love makes life worth living.
- Not only does love make life worth living, love becomes a kind of religion, and the lady is the goddess of that religion.
- The Lady's Beauty:
The picture:
The words (by the Earl of Oxford):What cunning can express
The favour of her face?
To whom in this distress,
I do appeal for grace.
A thousand Cupids fly
About her gentle eye.
From which each throws a dart,
That kindleth soft sweet fire:
Within my sighing heart,
Possessed by Desire.
No sweeter life I try,
Than in her love to die.
The lily in the field,
That glories in his white,
For pureness now must yield,
And render up his right;
Heaven pictured in her face,
Doth promise joy and grace.
Fair Cynthia's silver light,
That beats on running streams,
Compares not with her white,
Whose hairs are all sun-beams;
So bright my Nymph doth shine,
As day unto my eyne.
With this there is a red,
Exceeds the Damask-Rose;
Which in her cheeks is spread,
Whence every favour grows.
In sky there is no star,
But she surmounts it far.
When Phoebus from the bed
Of Thetis doth arise,
The morning blushing red,
In fair carnation wise;
He shows in my Nymph's face,
As Queen of every grace.
This pleasant lily white,
This taint of roseate red;
This Cynthia's silver light,
This sweet fair Dea spread;
These sunbeams in mine eye,
These beauties make me die
- Next, some examples of how William Shakespeare made fun, over and over again, of those who embraced the meme:
In The Taming of the Shrew the handsome young Lucentio says, shortly after seeing beautiful Bianca (and knowing virtually nothing about her), "I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio, / If I achieve not this young modest girl."
Lucentio does achieve her, and they marry and they live happily ever after — kind of. At the end of the play there's a contest to see whose wife is most obedient, and Lucentio loses because Bianca has better things to do than come when her husband calls for her. He complains, and gets a reply, the last words we hear her say to her loving husband, "The more fool you, for laying on my duty."And in As You Like It Orlando falls in love with Rosalind (and she with him), but they both have to run away to the Forest of Arden, where Rosalind, unknown to Orlando, has disguised herself as a boy, and that boy, Ganymede, persuades Orlando that he can cure Orlando of his love for Rosalind by pretending to be Rosalind. Got it? In this charade, "Rosalind" says she won't have Orlando, and he therefore says he will just die, but she advises him to have someone else do the dying for him, because, "men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love."
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