Quiz on relationships between sonnet form, theme of love and other subject matter, and historical context Flashcards
To improve ability to hit AO2 and AO4 when analysing Renaissance-era sonnets
What were typical subjects that Renaissance poets linked the ‘love’ theme to in their sonnets?
Love’s relationship to physical feelings, time, mutability (=the way things change over time), religion and death
How did poets use the sonnet structure to explore the effects of love on the human psyche?
They might express the contradictions of the effects of love- e.g. its capacity to raise or lower emotion, be violent or gentle, or fleeting or eternal- in switches between the quatrains in Shakespearean sonnets, or between octave and sestet in Petrarchan sonnets
What other literary techniques did they use to express the contradictory effects of love? Give an example.
They might express paradoxes through oxymoron or antitheses (balanced oppositions.) E.G. Philip Sydney in Sonnet 6 of ‘Astrophel and Stella’ writes how “Some lovers speak…/Of living deaths, dear wounds, fair storms, freezing fires.”
How did their consideration of the mutability of love lead poets towards exploring the relationship between love and religion?
If love can be seen as a giver of hope and warmth in a society faced with the inevitability of death, then it shares many of its effects with religion; if for mortals God is the highest object of love, then inevitably poets started to explore parallels between their love of ‘the lady’ (or whoever) and their love of God, seeing both the idea of earthly love as a route to the divine, and the idea of divine love being appealed to at an earthly level, to help a sense of harmony and belonging to be encouraged between lovers. Sometimes, though, poets expressed an opposition between duty to either mortal or divine love.
What sort of new humanist concerns were sonnets used to explore when they became popular during the Renaissance?
The extent to which religious devotion should be indulged, and what was the proper balance that should be struck between the heavenly world and earthly existence; love was often presented as a battlefield for these conflicting questions, encapsulated in sonnets.
What exactly was Renaissance humanism, anyway?
A movement emerging from the late 1300s onwards in Europe which sought to educate more people in subjects such as literature, philosophy and the arts, in order to develop a more eloquent, morally sensitive and purposeful society. It led to the growth of the sonnet as a form which celebrated and explored the conscience of the individual, especially when faced with unrequited love or mortality. Petrarch was its most famous early proponent.
When, how and why did the sonnet become popular in England?
Humanist ideas spread particularly quickly among those involved with the Protestant Reformation; by the late 1500s it was very popular at Queen Elizabeth’s court, becoming shaped by courtly codes of conduct and social interaction. For example the form’s use of courtly terms of address, idealisation of femininity, natural and elemental imagery all combined to confer an implied immortality on both subject and poet (with some success, obviously!) Shakespeare’s use of the witty concluding couplet reflected the intellectual cut-and-thrust of court life.
