Love Poetry in the Elizabethan age

Composition 3

During the Elizabethan Age  love-poetry was widespread and surely the key love poets were Philip Sydney, Edmund Spenser and last but not least William Shakespeare.

First of all the sonnet form was incredibly popular at that time, it derived from the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch; English sonneteers modified the classic form of the petrarchan sonnet giving rise to the Elizabethan sonnet composed by three quatrains and one final rhyming couplet, this new sonnet's form best adapted to the English poets that considered the final couplet as a way to sum up all the sonnet content.

Generally speaking the central concerns of the sonneteers were friendship, love, beauty and the effect of the time's flowing upon it.

Furthermore we can see an Italian influence as well in the conception of the courteous love as in the form; in fact the petrarchan conception of the courteous love and of the woman was retaken by Sidney who, in his masterpiece, embodies the central concept of an obsessive love towards an unreachable lady.

Lets talk about Astrophel and Stella; this collection of 108 sonnets charts the unrequited love of Astrophel to Stella; Stella like the Petrarchan beloved Laura, is unattainable, as pure and perfect as an angel.

This work could be considered as a perfect portrait of an obsessive love, which is like a fire that slowly devours the lover.

Focusing on the sonnet 5 I Can find  an indirect reference to Plato and his myth of the cave when the author sustains that true beauty is a virtuous ideal superior to human beauty which is only an inferior copy.

At the end of the poem we discover that Stella means star and in consequence Astrophel means lover of a star; these word-games underline the distance that intercourse between them and is the main obstacle.

After Sidney we have another great poet called Edmund Spencer, he wrote a collection of 88 sonnets which charts his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle.

The main thing to observe is that the poet's adoration of the beloved will not lead to an epilogue of desperation like in Astrophel and Stella but will concurr to the subsequent marriage.

Moreover in the sonnet we have read, "one day I wrote her name" we can see that there isn't a distance between the two lovers, in this way changes the conception of the woman who speaks and is reachable with marked human traits and aspects.

In this sonnet the poet expressed his idea of achieving immortality through poetry. I enjoyed reading the romantic idea of an immortal love, in fact the poet said that their love will survive even the apocalypse and will restore life again!!

William Shakespeare was a well-known poet, he wrote 154 sonnets, 126 addressed to a young man and the others to a mysterious dark lady.

In the first group of sonnets the poet explores and analyses the sentiments the young man inspires in him. In his works Shakespeare wants to preserve the eternal part of the man's beauty against the effects of time.

The poet is conscious that the young man's youth won't last long because it is not in nature but only in art that he will be able to preserve the perfect idea of youth.

In the second much smaller group of sonnets, the poet rejects many of the traditional conventions of the Elizabethan love poetry, for example that of exalting and celebrating the perfect beauty of the beloved.

In his sonnets Shakespeare is careful to underline how few the dark lady corresponds to the classic ideas of beauty and perfection.

Describing her he talks about her defects considered by the author as a guarantee of her "natural beauty".

The defects which characterizes the dark lady make her unique and in Shakespeare's opinion, gorgeous.

To sum up,  during the Elizabethan Age we can observe a changing in both the conception of love and the ure of the woman; love slowly becomes more realistic and with it also the woman's ure which has its realistic peak with William Shakespeare.