Characteristics
- Songs were written and published in anthologies like Richard Tottle’s Songs and Sonnets
- Song writers: Nicholas Grimald, Thomas Nashe, Robert Southwell, John Dowland, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelkes, Thomas Morley.
- Elizabethan poems were written in Iambic Meters
- Courtly poems were written in large number to impress the queen.
- Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen
- Philip Sidney’s Shepheardes Calender
- Elizabethan Classicism
- Virgil’s Aeneid, Thomas Campion’s metrical experiments
- Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender
- Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
- Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis
- Christopher Marlow/George Chapman’s Hero and Leander
- Arthur Golding (1565-67) and George Sandy’s(1626) translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis
- Chapman’s translation of Homar’s Iliad (1611) and Odyssey (1615)
- Elizabethan lyric poem
- Lyric poetry in Elizabethan age were short poems about personal, romantic topics. The lyrical expressions first began with the effort of Wyatt and Surrey, whose works were influenced by Petrarch. Lyric consists of forms of sonnet, song, pastoral, ode, elegy, epithalamion
- Lyric poems:
- Spenser’s faerie Queene
- The Paradise of Dainty Devices 1576
- A Gorgeous Gorgeous Gallery of the Gallant Inventions 1578
- A Handful of Pleasant Delights 1584
- The Phoenix Nest 1593
- The Passionate Pilgrim 1599
- England’s Helicon 1600
- England’s Parnassus 1600
- Sonnets
- Generally a sonnet is a 14 lines poem in Iambic pentameter, with an intricate rhyme scheme.
- Elizabethan sonnets were of two types: Italian sonnets or Petrarchan sonnets and English sonnets or Shakespearean sonnet.
- Petrarchan Sonnet
- Petrarchan sonnet was brought to England by Thomas Wyatt, he used Iambic pentameter to write it.
- An Octave and a Sestet
- Rhyme scheme: abba abba cde cde or abba abba cdc cdc
- Shakespearean sonnet
- Three quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet
- rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg
- his 154 sonnets published in a 1609 quarto
- Spenserian Sonnet
- Three quatrains and a couplet in Iambic Pentameter
- Rhyme scheme: abab bcbc cdcd ee
- Spenser used in The Faerie Queene
- Sonnet Sequences in Elizabethan Age:
- Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella 1591, 108 sonnets and 11 songs to Penelope Rich
- Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti 1594, 88 sonnets and an Epithalamion to Elizabeth Boyle
- Samuel Daniel’s Delia 1592, 50 sonnets
- Michael Drayton’s Idea’s Mirror 1594, 64 sonnets to Phoebe, later reworked as Idea 1619, 73 sonnets
- Fulke Greville’s Caelica 1633, 109 sonnets
- Shakespeare’s sonnets 1609, 154 sonnets, first 126 addressed to a fair youth, next addressed to a Dark Lady
- Lady Mary Wroth’s pamphilia to Amphilanthus 1621, 48 sonnets included in Urania. The only notable sonnet sequence during english renaissance to be written by a woman.
