ABSTRACT
The crisp explanation for this decline, which did not occur in France or in Italy, is that British poets so identified the sonnet with Petrarchan love that when a queen who governed through the rituals of erotic flattery was replaced by a king who prided himself on his academic learning the Petrarchan mistress was replaced as an ideal by the philosopher king. There is a certain truth in this-Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, curried favour with Queen Elizabeth by writing Petrarchan verse to her; but he curried favour with James VI and I by dedicating his History of the World (1614) to him instead (with disastrous results). And one notes that several other things seemed to come to an end with the sonnet sequence and with its century-courtesy manuals are rare after 1600, until the seventeenth century invented its own forms; and poetical miscellanies, of the kind that dispersed the ‘honied eloquence’ of the Petrarchan poets, almost disappear after A Poetical Rhapsody of 1602.
