ABSTRACT
In studying the varying presence of Petrarch in English culture from the late fourteenth century onwards, John Roe reports that Petrarch’s oeuvre has had a threefold division which produced three separate waves of influence: “the Latin works, peaking in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Trionfi, in the fifteenth to sixteenth century, and the Canzoniere, in the sixteenth century”. He then detects the forms of this influence in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, in Lord Morley’s imperfect translation of the Trionfi, and in Tottel’s, Wyatt’s, and Surrey’s different appropriations of the Canzoniere in which, especially in the case of Wyatt, Petrarch’s adaptations involve questions of style and metre, which the English poet accommodated to his own use, transforming the act of imitation into the creation of his individual voice. With the vogue of the sonnet form in the late sixteenth century, a fresh wave of English Petrarchism can be discerned in the poems of Thomas Watson, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
