Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:23:25.411Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

A. Kent Hieatt
A. Kent Hieatt*
Affiliation:
University of Western Ontario, London
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Sonnets has appeared to draw on antique topoi of permanence and change and to escape other sonnet sequences' intertextuality and attachment to a set of narrative and lyric conventions. In fact, Shakespeare extensively followed Spenser's nearby nonamatory sequence, translated from Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome. Numerous verbal and thematic resemblances (some exclusive to Ruines and Sonnets) show Shakespeare transmuting Spenser's image–a preeminent city ruined by time and the conflicts of will and of appetite among its contentious sons but immortalized in the literature inspired by its greatness–into another image: a preeminent youth, vulnerable to time and moral decay, who endures in Sonnets. Also, Shakespeare's early histories borrow verbally and thematically from Ruines' weakening of an otherwise invincible nation by strife. The nature of Shakespeare's transaction with Ruines remains to be investigated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 98 , Issue 5 , October 1983 , pp. 800 - 814
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1983

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barnfield, Richard. Cynthia, with Certaine Sonnets. In The Poems of Richard Barnfield. Introd. Montague Summers. London: Fortune, 1936.Google Scholar
Cercignani, Fausto. Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Cheney, Donald. “Tarquin, Juliet, and Other Romei.” Spenser Studies 3 (1982): 111–24.Google Scholar
Constable, Henry. The Poems of Henry Constable. Ed. Grundy, J. Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Daniel, Samuel. Delia, with the Complaint of Rosamond, 1592. Facsim. Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1969.Google Scholar
Donow, Herbert S. A Concordance to the Sonnet Sequences of Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Spenser. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969.Google Scholar
Du Bellay, Joachim. Les Antiquitez de Rome. In his Les Regrets et autres œuvres poétiques. Ed. Jolliffe, J. Genève: Droz, 1966.Google Scholar
Duncan-Jones, K. “The Date of Raleigh's ‘21th: and Last Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia.‘ ” Review of English Studies 21 (1970): 143–58.Google Scholar
Evans, G. Blakemore. “Chronology and Sources.” In The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore. Boston: Houghton, 1974.Google Scholar
Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare's Pronunciation. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Lee, Sidney, ed. Elizabethan Sonnets. Westminster, Eng.: Constable, 1904.Google Scholar
Lever, J. W. The Elizabethan Love Sonnet. London: Methuen, 1956.Google Scholar
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Allen & Unwin, 1979.Google Scholar
Osgood, C. G. A Concordance to the Poems of Edmund Spenser. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Inst., 1915.Google Scholar
Patterson, R. F., ed. Ben Jonson's Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden. London: Blackie, 1923.Google Scholar
Prescott, Anne Lake. French Poets and the English Renaissance. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Raleigh, Sir Walter. The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh. Ed. Latham, A. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952.Google Scholar
Rebhorn, Wayne A. “Du Bellay's Imperial Mistress: Les Antiquitez de Rome as Petrachist Sonnet Sequence.” Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 609–22.Google Scholar
Ringler, William Jr., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Clarendon, 1962.Google Scholar
Schaar, Claes. Elizabethan Sonnet Themes and the Dating of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Lund, Swed.: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1962.Google Scholar
Scott, Janet. Les Sonnets élisabethains. Paris: Champion, 1929.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works. Ed. Harbage, Alfred. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1969.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Sonnets. Ed. Booth, Stephen. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Ed. E. Greenlaw et al. 11 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932–57.Google Scholar
Spevack, Marvin. A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare. 9 vols. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968–80.Google Scholar
Upham, A. H. The French Influence in English Literature from the Accession of Elizabeth to the Restoration. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1908.Google Scholar
Watson, Thomas. The Hekatompathia …. Introd. S. K. Heninger, Jr. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1964.Google Scholar