A Comparative Study of the Sonnets of Petrarch and Shakespeare

Arushi Bahuguna 789 A Comparative Study of Petrarch’s and Shakespeare’s Sonnets From “scattered” to “powerful rhyme” The sonnet, in its Italian and English traditions, was very different in its origin from what it came to be defined by Petrarch and Shakespeare. Though not its creators, they perfected the form by introducing in it their own techniques of projection and articulation of the desiring self. Tracing the sonnet from its nascent stages to its complex form through a comparative study of its transformation in the hands of Italian and English poets, illustrates how this fourteen line poetic form encompasses a wide range of topics concerning the self and the desired other in the intimately private as well as in the public sphere. The development of the sonnet is marked by radical shifts in how the poet perceives himself in relation to what he desires. This change in self perception affects not only the formulation of the desired object, but a host of other themes like the power relations and hierarchies within and outside the sonnet, nature of desire and its representation and the speaker’s persona as a lover and as a poet writing for the public eye. The further the sonnet develops, the farther is gets from its initially intended role of consolidating political hierarchies and voicing public concerns. The sonnet does not, however, compromise its essentially public nature but synthesises it with its personal aim of “staging the desiring self and its objects of erotic desire.” Cousins A.D., Howarth Peter. The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet, Henderson Diana E. The sonnet, subjectivity and gender. Page 46. 2011 Created in Southern Italy around 1230 CE, its inventors are claimed to be the “professional legal administrators” of Emperor Frederick II (1208-1250) who were adept in the “practice of eloquentia – the ‘speaking out’ of the self in texts that were designed to persuade, control and stabilise power”. Spiller, RG Michael. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction, Routledge, 1992. Historical details about the sonnet, in this paragraph and elsewhere are from this book. They lend the sonnet its “tripartite structure of discourse- statement, development and conclusion” and indicate its political nature as being inherent since its inception. Besides lending a logical trajectory, they also conceptualised the position of the poet’s voice as one coming from “some kind of knowledge or experience” and hence demanding authority and acceptance. There was also the existence of “an extensive courtly poetry”- the poetry of the Troubadours- who gave to the sonnet its musical quality and defined its rhyme schemes. They also had a bearing on its structural style through the ‘canzone’ which Petrarch would later use to voice the “sighs that fed [his] heart”. The poetry of the Troubadours was on matters of love and politics, and thus catered to general themes rather than being structured in a sequence linking sonnets together through a narrative strain like Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Petrarch’s narrative quality allows him to portray the experience of the individual grappling with overpowering desire that becomes interiorised because he cannot express it to the beloved. The lover’s desire undergoes continual sujectification as the sonnet becomes “the poet’s own performance of various actions that are important to him.” Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Chapter 5: The Lady’s Reeking Breath. Oxford University Press. 2005 The inquisitive self of the lover is at once inward and outward looking in the manner that it questions the effect of love on him and turns to the outward world for answers. The theme of transcendence is what the sonnet accomplishes for Petrarch because love for the beloved, even in being unrequited, guides the lover to step outside of the plane of mundane reality where his desire will always remain unsatisfied to a higher plane where it will be acknowledged by God and perhaps rewarded. In the highly idealised achievement that Petrarch manages for his poetic persona, he objectifies the beloved who is the source of his desire. The distance between his lover and the beloved, albeit the source of incessant pain and tribulations, is imperative for the kind of asceticised self that he articulates. The sonnet becomes a celebration of the lover’s ability to withstand pain and achieve a higher stature while the beloved who causes the lover to recognise this ability is at once deified and demonised. “The lady in the [Italian sonnet] tradition is never so much a personality as an occasion for the poet’s own performance of various actions that are important to him.” Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Chapter 5: The Lady’s Reeking Breath. Oxford University Press. 2005 She embodies beauty that inspires love but because she is too distant to respond to the lover’s desire, her very absence becomes a charge of cruelty on her part. This antithetical nature of the beloved is mirrored in the various other contradictions that Petrarch builds upon to stage the divided nature of the self that is caused by his unrequited love for Laura. By dominating his rime by the figure of antithesis, famous as his “dissidio”, Petrarch foregrounds it as one of the eminent preoccupations of the sonnet form. The very nature of desiring the unattainable is paradoxical which demands from the sonnet similar expression of a “scattered” self that is divided between irreconcilable extremities. The beloved, who is held responsible for placing the lover in the divided state of pain and pleasure, is at once the problem that the lover faces and the solution. Petrarch, however, makes clear that the beloved cannot solve the problem she poses and it is the lover’s “sad fate” to suffer. Even though he does acknowledge that he cannot “blame” Laura, he continues to “hope” that she may pity him. This gives the sonnet an instructive or even authoritative tone: Be not niggardly; I hate to bother, Nor is it in your nature to decline, Be generous (Sonnet 32) Bergin, Thomas Goddard, PETRARCH Selected Sonnets, Odes and Letters, Meredith Publishing Co., 1966 The beloved is not only absent in reality and present only through the feelings of the lover, but her nature is also to be judged as “good” in relation to her pity for his pain that she has unconsciously caused. Petrarch exploits the compactness and dialogism of the sonnet to construct a persuasive argument where the beloved accepts the logic of the lover but it is actually the lover enacting a conversation with himself. This problematic construction of the beloved in which she is bereft of action, agency, and knowledge (of the poet’s love and of herself) paves the way for ‘anti Petrarchanism’, through which later poets would put an end to a sonnet convention that had been in vogue for three centuries. The English tradition of the sonnet commenced with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, who gave it the quintessential English couplet, thereby making it more amplified in its immediacy and brevity. Although the Petrarchan sonnet remained as a form to look upon for generic themes that could be modified by “the English straine”, there was no sonnet sequence in the English tradition with its own unifying narrative and thematic frame until Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. Sidney anticipated the need for English poetry to be reformed and he recognised the potential of the sonnet to cater to his theory of poetry as an instructive and delightful medium. In his pursuit of rescuing poetry from being fettered to political interests, he underlined its potency as fiction and that in being a second reality it is also a better one. Drawing on the accusations made against poetry for being false, his tactic of creating a character Astrophel who admits to “feign[ing] love” redefined the sonnet as an essentially fictionalised “tale”. (Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet XLV) Besides remaking the sonnet, Sidney also engaged in deconstructing it and achieved “a tone of absurdity and irony”. He laid bare the levels of fiction within his poetry, which takes the reader “to a metafictional level where s/he is continuously aware of the arbitrary fictionality of the text”. Spiller, RG Michael. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction, Chapter 7: ‘I AM NOT I:’ THE SONNETS OF SIDNEY, Routledge, 1992. His stress on poetry as fiction also projects the poetic self as being at once a creation of but different from the poet and more importantly one that is not the poet. As Michael RG Spiller writes, “through the very immediacy and force with which [he] pretends to represent the living Astrophel, [he] is not him, but only the tale of him” Sidney’s poetry marks an important turn for the English sonnet by deliberately distinguishing itself from the Petrarchan convention. In Astrophel’s unattainable desire for Stella, Sidney is similar to Petrarch’s lover but this only accentuates all other aspects which are different from “Petrarch’s long-deceased woes” (Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet XV). Astrophel falls in love “not at first sight”( Sonnet II), instead of being “ashamed” (Petrarch’s Canzoniere, Sonnet 1), he “feeling[ly] paints [his] hell” (Sonnet II), and is both anti-Petrarchan and anti-Platonic when even after acknowledging the role of love to act as a path to a higher plane as a “truth” five times in Sonnet V, he stresses on the truth that his love exists on an essentially human plane where desire cries for “food” (Sonnet LXI) . A fundamental difference between Petrarch and Sidney in their treatment of unrequited love is that “Petrarch questions the value of his love for Laura, never its reality. Sidney questions the reality of his love for Stella, never its value” Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Chapter 5: The Lady’s Reeking Breath. Oxford University Press. 2005. This reflects Petrarch’s dissatisfaction with his poetry as he called it poor and unworthy of Laura’s name and Sidney’s strong belief in his “rare” fame because of his poetry. Sidney does not, however, present poetry and its persuasive power of fiction as the solution to the helplessness that unrequited love creates. This gives a strain of self doubt to his poetry whereby his poetic persona questions the very “end” (Astrophel and Stella, Sonnet 34) of writing love poetry in which it exists and is also sceptical of his belief in poetry to win the beloved’s pity and grace. Even if pity is won, the “huge desyre” Low, Anthony. Sir Philip Sidney: “huge desyre”, Sidney, Spenser and Donne, Worldview Critical Editions that is the source of his poetry can hardly be satiated by the little sympathy it obtains. The fundamental aspect of the sonnet being the unrequited love of the male persona for the female beloved is displaced by Shakespeare. In his 154 sonnets written to or about a beautiful young man and a dark skinned and dark eyed promiscuous woman, Shakespeare overturns all assumptions about the beloved. His speaker professes love not only to a man many years younger than him, but also to an unchaste woman. In doing this, he dispenses with the idea of the beloved as chaste and also the lover as devoted only to one beloved. The aim of writing sonnets in order to win the beloved is also absent as the speaker’s love is requited by both the fair young man and the dark lady. Shakespeare, in writing sonnets on mutual love, steps ahead of the conventional yearning and suffering of the lover and addresses newer issues. Shakespeare’s speaker is critical of the young man’s actions, doubts his love for him and also forgives his infidelity. Before Shakespeare, far from the possibility of infidelity, the lover’s self abasement in other sonnets gave no room for the lover to be in a position to critique the beloved. Neither did the lover have the chance to question the beloved’s sexuality nor was the beloved capable of even having desires as the sonnet’s compact space was always filled by the desires of the lover. Shakespeare’s deconstruction is different and more radical than Sidney’s questioning of poetry itself because his speaker afflicts his own love by writing sonnets that urge the beloved to marry someone else. This does not make his love an idealistic one where he is concerned only with beauty and not his desire for the young man as he makes a clear demarcation between love founded on desire and a heterosexual match made for progeny. He spells this out in the couplet of Sonnet 20 Mowat, Barbara A., Werstine Paul. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Folger Shakespeare Library. All Shakespeare’s Sonnets are from this edition. But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. Besides the paradox of a lover asking the beloved to marry, the antithesis of homosexual desire being accommodating of heterosexuality presents love between two people as being more than just limited to fidelity. Shakespeare dissects heartfelt emotional bonding from the sexual act of love-making and places the feeling that his speaker shares with the young man as more than the love that is capable of reproducing the beauty of his beloved in a living form. Shakespeare, unlike Sidney, continually addresses the quality of poetry keeping his love alive in posterity. This immortalising not only “distils’’ (S54) his love’s beauty but also reproduces it in a form that will outlive “some child” (S17) of the man who would similarly be limited by mortality. The verse is a more powerful medium of preserving the young man’s beauty because not only does it transcend time but also ceases it and allows the fair youth to remain “[for]ever young”(S19). His verse achieves this immortalisation in “black ink” (Sonnet 65) but is richer in its content than any other means of preserving the man’s beauty. Sexual and poetic reproductions are juxtaposed and it is the latter that emerges from desire while the former is for “use”. The complexity of Shakespeare’s treatment of sexualities is increased by the fact that his speaker thinks the young man to be capable of engaging in a heterosexual relationship, thereby questioning the determination one’s sexuality in the binaries of hetero- and homosexuality. This questioning is pronounced when the sonnets shift from being written about the young man to a dark skinned lady by whom the speaker is repulsed but still continues to desire and love her. This involves Shakespeare in writing love poetry for someone whom he despises- something that is inherently antithetical. Though Wordsworth called this “abominably harsh, obscure and worthless” Matz, Robert. The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The John Hopkins University Press, 2010, it is the ‘dark lady sonnets’ that form the bulk of verse where Shakespeare gives desire free play through his typical wordplays, puns and paradoxes. The predominant paradox that these sonnets address is the conflicted nature of desire itself. A world away from Petrarch’s conflicts of loving most fervently what he can never have, Shakespeare’s speaker is confounded by his insatiable desire for a woman who is sexually available but extremely promiscuous, ugly according to constructs of desirable beauty and even seduces the young man whom the speaker claims to truly love. The dark lady represents the dark side of passion as the sonnets about her present love as a “fever” (S147), “love’s eye” incapable of being true (S148), love as a “sin” (S142) and as “too young to know what conscience is” (S151). While the fair youth inspires love that is well poised between desire and true feeling and has a positive effect on the speaker, the dark lady makes him recognise a love that is ‘young’. He desires her even when he “see[s] just cause of hate” (S150). Sonnet 151 is entirely about “the sexually obsessive nature of his love” as the speaker tells the lady that he “rise[s] at thy name” and “falls by thy side”. In the couplet he declares that he has “[n]o want of conscience” which also speaks at a metafictious level of the poet’s unabashed use of puns and double entendres. The “ferociously bawdy” Spiller, RG Michael. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction, Chapter 9: ‘Thee(My Selfe)’: The Sonnets of Shakespeare, Routledge, 1992 paired sonnets 135 and 136 play on the many meanings of the word “will”, including Shakespeare’s own name. Shakespeare has made these sonnets both thematically and semantically ‘dark’ which is continually heightened by their sexual meaning. The ‘dark lady’ sonnets do not entirely posit the speaker’s feeling for her in physical and contemptuous terms, just like the sonnets about the fair young man are not without feelings of jealousy and betrayal. After expressing love for a man that is akin to the Petrarchan lover in its ideal truthfulness, when Shakespeare does introduce a lady, she is everything that the beautiful golden haired Laura is not. Sonnet 130 presents the dark lady’s portrayal as Laura’s foil most poignantly as “Shakespeare rejects the hyperbolic convention of Petrarchan comparison in order to claim sincerity for his own love. What is different about 130 is the detailed specificity of both the rejection of the Petrarchan conventions and the description of the beloved person.” Rackin, Phyllis. Shakespeare and Women. Chapter 5: The Lady’s Reeking Breath. Oxford University Press. 2005 Shakespeare’s speaker asserts his love in the couplet with evermore force because he distinguishes it from the hackneyed practice of professing love for a beautiful woman. “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.” He uses the sonnet convention even while he departs from it, for he does stick to the practice of using blazon to present the beloved and yet the presentation is to stress on her unlikeness to idealised beauty. Shakespeare experiments further with the blazon in A Lover’s Complaint in which a woman revels in detailed descriptions of the man who betrayed her love. Besides the figure of ‘anti-blazon’, the poem is a hallmark of Shakespeare’s radicalism in being an account of a woman’s experience of desire in a world which exercises a stringent control on female sexuality. The misogyny of the ‘dark lady’ sonnets is overturned in the poem as a female speaker voices her sorrow to a male listener which is “reworded” by the male poet. The genre of female confession is treated very differently as in the end the “reconciled maid” confesses that even if she is given the choice, she would still do it all over again. It is at once a confession and a complaint which presents an interesting paradox because the former was a frequent practice used to hold the woman responsible for her actions while the latter presents her as a victim of the man who uses women for his pleasure and then casts them off. The overpowering nature of desire that comes across as an appreciable ideal in the sonnets is seen in all its dangerous might when applied to a woman who would suffer far graver consequences because of her disadvantaged gender situation in the society. In the sonnets where Shakespeare deals with fairly generic themes of love poetry like distance separating the lovers (Sonnets 50 and 51), love sickness and its bearing upon sight, sleep and memory (Sonnets 43 and 29), and the power of the beloved to make the lover “most wretched” (Sonnet 91); he engages in a display of desire that distinguishes the sonnets as ‘Shakespearean’. As the most eminent dramatist of his age, Shakespeare’s theatrical techniques enable him to create an actor whose speech can express desire in its most sensual form and still adhere to the political and moral demands of society. The metafictional dimension that Sidney added to the sonnet by articulating poetic truth through feigning, is taken forward by the dramatist whose fool agrees with Sidney that “the truest poetry is most feigning” (Touchstone in As You Like It). Under Shakespeare, desire is freed from the hierarchies of lover-beloved, master-slave, and physical-ideal. The speaker is able to stage the desire that otherwise he might not be able to address to his beloved as he is restricted from overtly expressing it in his verse. Sonnet 23 enacts the dramatic nature of the sonnet and here Shakespeare uses the full strength of the dramatic form to present antitheses, flout conventions and develop his actor’s rhetoric: As an unperfect actor on the stage Who with his fear is put beside his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart; So I for fear of trust forget to say The perfect ceremony of love’s rite, And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay, O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might, O, let my books be the eloquence And dumb presagers of my speaking breast, Who plead for love and love for recompense More than that tongue that hath more expressed. O, learn to read what silent love hath writ. To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit. The speaker claims to be the “unperfect actor” in a sonnet where he foregrounds the strength of the very passion that he “forget[s] to say” because he fears the beloved’s mistrust and also because it consumes him and keeps him from properly articulating it. It is a sonnet that expresses the desire that causes the incapability of satisfactory expression. Besides this basic ingenious paradox, Shakespeare makes the lover’s speech “replete” with other antitheses- his own fear makes him unable to be what he is supposed to and the torn state of being and not being is manifest in line 2, his strength is in “abundance” but it only serves to weaken his heart which is the source of that strength, and it gives voice to his desire but that “speaking breast” cannot speak through his tongue that is dumb folded by the beloved. The verse serves as a way of resolving all the contradictions as it is where the speaker achieves “eloquence”. Starting with his inadequacy at professing “love’s rite”, the speaker provides cause for his inadequacy which further asserts his love and paradoxically his ability at conveying it. He concludes by making demands on the beloved’s capacity to understand his love which is the achievement of his rhetoric as in self abasement for fear of the beloved he actually gains certain power over him that allows him to mildly instruct his perception of the speaker’s love. The sonnet, by its very nature is the “staging” of desire and it is this that the English sonnet came to exploit through Sidney. The technique was perfected by Shakespeare as under him it became “a small theatre” Matz, Robert. The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The John Hopkins University Press, 2010. The Sonnets , even though printed in a numbered sequence, are open to debate as to whether they were ordered by Shakespeare or Thomas Thorpe, who ‘illegally’ published them. They are as little autobiographical as possible, being distanced from their author by skilful poetic and dramatic devices unlike Petrarch’s “sighs”, they do not form a narrative like Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and neither do they present a harmonised view in their representation of mutual love like Spenser’s Epithalamion. More than in the Sonnets, the anti- Spenserian strain is particularly severe in A Lover’s Complaint since both are poems that follow after the sonnets. Shakespeare takes up a form fraught with conventions and makes space in its fourteen lines for a lover “who is torn between same-sex and opposite-sex commitments” Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Schoenfeldt Michael, The Sonnets, Cambridge University Press, 2007 and by this nature breaks all codes of not just poetry but constructed morality. Alongside the trailblazing of the sonnet conventions, Shakespeare ‘distils’ his poetic genius in his “sugared” Sonnets to encapsulate all the dynamics of love and desire. Illuminating at once the beauty and carnality of desire; they continue to serve as unparalleled models of love poetry, and enforce his belief in the immortality of his “powerful rhyme”.