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The Italian Sonnet in EnglandThe rules for the Italian sonnet were strict: 14 lines in two stanzas. The first stanza had to be 8 lines, the second 6, with some sort of turn or shift in mood between them. The pattern of end rhymes was also predetermined. Wyatt kept the most common rhyme patterns but gradually changed the structure to three quatrains (a four-line stanza) and a couplet (a two-line rhymed "clincher").
Was the strictness of the form meant to demonstrate just how desperate and eager to please the lover was? Or perhaps laboring late with quill and parchment was a kind of indulgence, a painful pleasure for the fevered lover. It seems so in this Wyatt translation of a paradoxical Petrarch Sonnet, "I Find No Peace." I find no peace and all my war is done,Henry Howard sounds just as mixed up in his translation of a different Petrarchan sonnet, "Alas! So All Things Now Do Hold Their Peace": Calm is the sea, the waves work less and less;Sounds as if these poor guys need some heavy metal amplification. But back then, the tight knot of the sonnet did it for them. The Sonnet Matures
The sonnet in Shakespeare's hands would evolve so much that it came to be called the "Shakespearean" or "English" sonnet, as distinguished from the "Italian" or "Petrarchan" sonnet. And the conventional subject matter expanded to include meditations on time, beauty, poetry, rivalry, friendship, and the meaning of life. Love, of course, was still big, but the range of moods broadened greatly as can be seen in Sonnet #29. And then my stateNow the pallette of emotions includes intense joy, pride, disgust, and fear. Before Tottel's Miscellany, English verse was a ragged, undisciplined thing an old barrow with crooked wheels. But by the second half of the century, when Shakespeare came along, the sonnet had helped shape it into an elegant and sturdy coach that could carry his highest sentiments to his loves, and to all posterity.
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