ABSTRACT
In 1575, the poet George Gascoigne put it on record that ‘I have beene willing heretofore to spende three houres in penning of an amorous Sonnet’;1 twenty-six years later, the production rate seems to have increased, for Ben Jonson has his Matheo declare, in Every Man in His Humour (1601), that ‘I am melancholie my selfe divers times sir, and then do I no more but take your pen and paper presently, and write you your halfe score or your dozen of sonnets, at a sitting’.2 This spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings is a comic symptom of lateElizabethan melancholia, but shows both how common and how easy sonnetwriting could be for the would-be gentleman. If the reader will refer at this point to the Appendix, which gives a chronological table of the sonnet sequences published after the appearance of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, s/he will see that the sonnet craze was concentrated in four years, from 1593 to 1597, with the addition that at that time a number of poets who published later, like Shakespeare, in the reign of James VI and I, were writing and circulating sonnets privately. The only major sonneteer to compose wholly outside this period is Drummond of Hawthornden. One has the impression that after the publication of Astrophel and Stella (which also contained sonnets in Sidney’s manner by Samuel Daniel) there was a hushed period of intense scribbling, after which, in 1593, the presses began to clatter, and even after 1597 continued to reprint sonnet collections of the most popular authors. The market was also favourable to late printings of juvenile verse; and while it is possible that Shakespeare’s reputation as a dramatist encouraged the publication in 1609 of his sonnets, probably written ten years before, the same cannot be said for Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, or Sir David Murray of Gorthie, who published their youthful sequences in 1604 and 1611. Fulke Greville, who as a close friend of Sir Philip Sidney had probably begun writing sonnets earlier than any of his living contemporaries, continued to work on his sonnet sequence, Caelica, till his death in 1628 (it was published in 1633); and thus the oldest poet of the Sidney generation just overlapped at that point with the young Milton, who was beginning to experiment with the sonnet at that time.
