Textuality » 4A Interacting
One of the main consequences of the Renaissance was the birth of lyric poetry and the development of its most famous form, the sonnet, a short, fixed and poetic text.
The English word "sonnet" derived both from the Occitan word "sonet" and from the Italian term "sonetto", that mean "little song" and refer to the sound aspect of the composition: sonnets' musicality was probably very stressed.
The sonnet originated in Italy during the 14th century thanks to Petrarch, who introduced a specific structure that was called "Petrarchean form"; the composition included 14 lines, managed into an octave (made up of two quatrains) and a sextet(made up of two tersest), that had specific functions: the first two stanzas introduced and described a problem, the others gave a possible solution to the problem.
During the following two centuries the sonnet developed in Europe and entered also England: some scholars went to Italy to discover the Italian Renaissance.
Also Thomas Wyatt left home and, when he came back, he introduced the sonnet; at first English sonnets were simply translations of Italian ones. On a second time Wyatt and Surrey changed Italian structure, creating the English form, that became very popular during the reign of Elizabeth I (it was also called Elizabethan sonnet): it consisted of three quatrains (that had to present and describe three aspects of the same problem) and of a final couplet 8that had to give a possible solution to the problem, in an epigrammatic form).
Sonnets were love compositions and they dealt with conventions of courtly love: they spoke about an idealized figure of woman (that is a proud, inaccessible lady, with light eyes and fair hair), about her beauty and virtues, about lover's feelings and his adoration of women. Sonnet's subject matters also concerned human beings' existence and poetry' power of keeping images forever.
Shakespeare was one of the most famous writers of sonnet in the second half of the 16th century. Shakespeare's sonnets were significant exceptions; as a matter of fact Shakespeare didn't treat only with the conventional themes, but he also wrote about time, friendship, rivalry and emotions, like disgust, joy, pride and fear. However the main differences of his poetry concerned the recipients: he wrote to a dark lady and to a young man; the most interesting aspect is that the lady isn't nice as women of others sonnet, and the man is beautiful.