/ 2008-09-17 00:00:00

EBOOK ELIZABETHAN SONNET CYCLES ***


Produced by David Starner, Taavi Kalju and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net




ELIZABETHAN SONNET-CYCLES
EDITED BY
MARTHA FOOTE CROW

PHILLIS
BY THOMAS LODGE
LICIA
BY GILES FLETCHER

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER AND CO.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE LONDON W.C.
1896


INTRODUCTION

The last decade of the sixteenth century was marked by an outburst of
sonneteering. To devotees of the sonnet, who find in that poetic form
the moat perfect vehicle that has ever been devised for the expression
of a single importunate emotion, it will not seem strange that at the
threshold of a literary period whose characteristic note is the most
intense personality, the instinct of poets should have directed them to
the form most perfectly fitted for the expression of this inner motive.
The sonnet, a distinguished guest from Italy, was ushered to by those
two "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, in the days of Henry VIII. But
when, forty years later, the foreigner was to be acclimatised in
England, her robe had to be altered to suit an English fashion. Thus
the sonnet, which had been an octave of enclosed or alternate rhymes,
followed by a sestette of interlaced tercets, was now changed to a
series of three quatrains with differing sets of alternate rhymes in
each, at the close of which the insidious couplet succeeded in
establishing itself.
Read more


Parts: 1 2 3 4 5