Journal Article

\Matters of Love as of Discourse\: The English Sonnet, 1560-1580

Shrank, Cathy

2008

Overview

Possibly, the decision to attach the label \"sonnets\" to these heterogeneous poems was an attempt to market the collections to the same audience who flocked to buy Tottel's Songes and Sonettes, a Tudor bestseller-also known as Tottel's Miscellany-that went through two editions and a resetting in seven weeks when it was first printed in 1557 and which was published a further seven times over the next three decades.\\n Indeed, in many ways, the mixed form and, above all, subject matter of the earlier Tudor collections provide a much more pertinent background against which to place a text like Shakespeare's Sonnets than those of his immediate predecessors, Sidney and Spenser. A4^sup v^.52 Contrary to Marotti's analysis of lyric poetry as \"a genre for gentlemen-amateurs who ... essentially thought of poems as trifles to be transmitted in manuscripts within a limited social world and not as literary monuments to be preserved in printed editions for posterity,\" there were thus-in the mid-Tudor period-\"gentlemanly\" poets who at once insisted on their social status and who sought the \"monumentality\" of print.53 As Neville writes in his prefatory poem to Googe's Eglogs Epytaphes, and Sonettes, \"Thy famous wrytyngs are[:] by them / Thou lyuest and euer shalt\" sig.

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Subject: Anthologies / Audiences / Classical literature / Collectanea / Collections / Elegies / English language / Epigrams / Latin literature / Literary criticism / Love poetry / Lyric poetry / Monuments / Ovid (43 BC-17 AD) / Philology / Poetic meter / Poetry / Poets / Social classes / Social status / Sonnets