¹ F. M. Padelford, The Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Seattle, 1920, p. 40.

² Following Professor Saintsbury I adopt this term in preference to the more common but less accurate term ‘Shaksperian’ used by Professor Padelford.

³ “Wyatt resteth here that quick could never rest...”, 1. 13.

⁴ “The Sonnet Forms of Wyatt and Surrey,” (Mod. Phil. II, 463). Mr. Lathrop gives most of his space to the Surrey-Wyatt relationship. He limits his treatment of Wyatt's source to the suggestion that he was following Mellin de Saint Gelais, citing as the basis for this suggestion the “fact” that Wyatt had translated one of the French poet's sonnets. But as it has since been proved that Wyatt was translating this sonnet from Sannazzaro, not from Saint-Gelais, and that (if there was any relationship here between them) it was Saint Gelais that translated Wyatt rather than vice versa, his whole hypothesis falls through. Mr. Lathrop does add, indeed, that “The type, however, is not unknown in Italian poetry before Wyatt,” but he adduces no evidence to support this statement.

⁵ My references for Wyatt's sonnets are all to The Poems of Sir Thomas Wiat, ed. A. K. Foxwell, London, 1913: those for Surrey's to Professor Padelford's edition. With one exception I have accepted as valid the attributions of these two editors. My single exception consists in not counting as Surrey's the “Brittle beautie...” poem more often ascribed on good authority (as Professor Padelford himself observes) to Vaux. Mr. Lathrop omitted from his analysis the three of Wyatt's sonnets least agreeable to his theory, on the ground that they only appeared in Tottel; but in the absence of any other attribution this omission hardly seems justifiable.

⁶ Cf. Professor Padelford's statement, cited above, that Surrey “in the thought division of the sonnet...followed no fixed practice.”

⁷ Nos. 6, 10, 16, 20, 28, 32.

⁸ Nos. 1, 3, 9, 38.

⁹ Nos. 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31. Mr. Lathrop credits him with only fourteen; but all those here listed show a decided pause.

¹⁰ Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 29, 38, 44, 47.

¹¹ Cf. below, note 35.

¹² See E. H. Wilkins, “The Invention of the Sonnet,” Mod. Phil. XIII. 79-110.

¹³ George Puttenham(?), The Arte of English Poesie, Lib. I, ch. xxxi.

¹⁴ Bandello, it is true, wrote what has been called a sonnet with the scheme abbacdedceeffa; but is this a sonnet? No Italian prosodist and no other poet of the Cinquecento or earlier recognised such a form. See Nuova Antologia CXXIX (1907), p. 730.

¹⁵ V. infra, p. 740.

¹⁶ Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 28, and 29, from Petrarch nos. 112, 140, 190, 82, 224, 19, 49, 134, 189, 173, 57, 124, 21, 258, 169, 222, and 267 respectively. (Bibliotheca Romanica edition, Strasburgo, n.d.)

¹⁷ No. 19, from Sannazaro's Rime, Parte III, Sonetto iii.

¹⁸ Turning over the first half-dozen pages of the Bibliotheca Romanica Petrarch, I find sonnet 9 has the sestet punctuated thus:-1.9, period; 1.10, comma; l.11, comma; l.12, period; l.13, comma. And sonnet 10, thus:-1.9, semi-colon; l.10, no stop; I.11, comma; l.12, colon; l.13, no stop. And a sixteenth century Petrarchino has essentially the same punctuation. It is perhaps also worth noting that both these sonnets likewise show the second feature of sense division Mr. Lathrop considers as more or less peculiar to Surrey: both have no pause after the octave. These are the ‘Quando ‘l pianeta...“ and the ”Gloriosa Colonna...“ sonnets.

¹⁹ George Saintsbury, Hist. of Engl. Prosody, London, 1906, I, 311-312.

²⁰ Loc. cit. p. 308.

²¹ A. K. Foxwell, A Study of Sir Thomas Wyatt's Poems. London, 1911. Page 83.

²² Especially as Wyatt's translation of the madrigal in question follows an entirely different scheme!

²³ Joseph Vianey, Le Pétrarquisme en France au Seizième Siècle. Montpellier, 1909, p. 105.

One important point may perhaps be noted here, once for all. In a brilliant article on Marot et le premier sonnet français (Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, XXVII Oct.-Dec., 1920, pp. 532-547), Pierre Villey clearly established the fact that the earliest known French sonnet dates from the year 1536. As several of Wyatt's sonnets unquestionably antedate this, any suggestion of possible French influence on the English sonnet form would henceforth seem futile.

²⁴ Romanic Review, I, 215-216.

²⁵ Charles Tomlinson in his elaborate work (The Sonnet, its Origin, Structure, and Place in Poetry, Lond. 1874), to which may be traced most of the erroneous ideas as to the Italian sonnet still current with English and American writers, expressly denies the possibility of Italian sonnets ending with a couplet. On the other hand it should be mentioned that Dr. E. W. Olmsted, in his dissertation on The Sonnet in French Literature (Ithaca, N. Y., 1897, pp. 28-29), had noted the mention of both our quatrain plus couplet forms by the Italian Francesco Saverio Quadrio in 1739. But Dr. Olmsted merely repeated Quadrio's table, without, apparently, taking into account the fact that it was compiled over two centuries after the period in question. Professor Saintsbury (op. cit. p. 307) makes the amazing statement (putting it, it is true, a trifle obscurely) that both Dante and Petrarch used the English form. This is, of course, entirely at variance with the facts; they did both use a form ending with two lines rhymed together: zyyyxx; but this form defies the possibility of the quatrain-couplet division so essential to establish.

²⁶ John S. Smart, The sonnets of Milton. Glasgow, 1921, pp. 17ff.

²⁷ I myself had pointed this out to the members of a course at Harvard University some two years before, but in the absence of any established connection between this ancient poet and Wyatt I did not then consider the point worthy of publication. Antonio da Ferrara's use of it, also cited by Dr. Smart, is really of no significance: he is only known to have used it once, in reply to a sonnet of Fazio's in the same form, and it was a practically invariable rule of Italian sonnet correspondences that an answering sonnet must be written with the same rhymes as the sonnet to which it replied. Thus the use of Wyatt's forms is in reality established not for two Italian poets of the fourteenth century but only for one.

²⁸ Jno. M. Berdan (Mod. Lang. Notes XXIII, 33-36) speaks of Wyatt “in Rome in 1526,” and mentions as his authority John Bruce (Gentleman's Magazine, September 1850, p. 258). But Bruce states that Wyatt left for Italy in January 1526-27, and we naturally follow the new style designation. Cf. Foxwell, “The Poems of Sir Thomas Wiat” I, xiii-xiv.

²⁹ Sonetti e Canzoni di diver si antichi Autori Toscani in died libri raccolte. Firenze, Eredi Giunta, 1527.

³⁰ I have not had an opportunity of examining the second and third books. They could not, in any event, weaken my case; they might possibly confirm my conclusions.

³¹ On pages 20, 37, 150, 226, 246, 247, 256, and 264 of the edition cited below.

³² On pages 44, 213, 215, 258, 272, and 297, ibid.

³³ i.e. it was at the end of August, or of September; for Astrea, as a constellation, is identified by some with Virgo, by others with Libra.

³⁴ De' Sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi. Parte Prima. Fiorenza, MDLV. Page 20.

³⁵ It will be noticed that my translation introduces a new set of rhymes in the second quatrain of the octave. Poverty forced me, as it had forced a better poet, to this expedient. (Cf. above.) It should be noted that lines 5, 6, and 7 of the Italian become respectively lines 6, 7, and S of the English, which is an almost word for word rendering.

³⁶ Cf. Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, I, ix; II, xxxv; et al; Benvenuto Cellini, Vita, I, xxx; II, xc, xci; Pietro Aretino, I Ragionamenti, passim: etc.

Note. A final note should perhaps be added on the Italian prosodists of the period. Three significant books on poetic theory printed in Wyatt's life-time treat in detail of sonnet form.

Antonio da Tempo's work de Ritmis Vulgaribus (written two centuries earlier, but first printed in 1509), though much read and quoted by theorists, was little followed in practice. It gives for the normal sestet scheme what we should denote as xyxyxy, and mentions four variants. Of these the first is an xxyyzz form, which obviously suggests the couplet ending, and does not entirely preclude consideration of the preceding four lines as a quatrain.

Trissino's Poetica, published in 1529 and probably begun about 1525 or earlier, mentions six regular sestet schemes, one of which is the xyyxyy form. He then adds “other forms of the sestet scheme are very rarely used,” which implies, of course, that various other forms were at least not unknown to him.

Mario Equicola in his Institutioni al comporre in ogni sorte di Rima, published in 1536, and probably summing up the usage of the preceding ten or fifteen years, says that in the sestet various types of rhyme are used; usually the first and fifth, second and fourth, and third and sixth rhyme together, but any order may be followed. He also speaks of the general divisions of the sonnet as follows: “Every regular sonnet has fourteen lines and is divided into two parts, Piedi and Volta. The first eight lines are called Piedi, the last six, Volta. The first four are one Piede, the first three of the six, one Volta. The two first lines are named first couplet, the two next second couplet, and so following. This is Antonio da Tempo's division.” It is to be noted that his statement implies that the whole sonnet could be considered as made up of couplets; da Tempo had only spoken of the octave as being so divided, though his xxyyzz sestet scheme clearly suggested a couplet division continuing throughout.

Besides these, Pietro Bembo, the arch-authority of the early Cinque-cento, wrote in Book II of his Prose della Volgar Lingua: “In the sonnet the number of the lines is fixed, and to some extent the number of the rhymes; but in the order of these rhymes, and to some extent in their number, there is no definite rule in force except that of pleasing [the ear.]”

I do not attach much importance to these theorists, however, as I think it extremely improbable that Wyatt was acquainted with them or any of their works. Miss Foxwell thinks he studied Trissino's Poetica (The Poems...cit., vol. II, Appendix E), but most of her arguments on this point seem quite unconvincing. In any case, the prosodists only make it additionally evident that tercet rhyme schemes ending with a couplet, and permitting of any division one pleases, were allowed, de facto and de jure in the Italian sonnet of the early sixteenth century.