Discuss in detail Shakespeare as a Sonneter?
Answers
The sonnet was invented in 13th century Italy: ‘sonneto’, a little sound. The first major practitioner was Dante (1265-1521), who developed from Provençale poetry what he called his ‘rime petrose’, stony rhymes, about the hard, unyielding cruelty of the lady. But literary scholars don’t speak of the Dantean, but of the Petrarchan sonnet. The first important thing to know about Francesco Petrarch is that he has two R’s to his name. If you are having difficulty staying awake already, be of good heart, for if you henceforward spell Petrarch with two R’s, not ‘Petrach’, you can take something educationally valuable away into your dreams. Petrarch – two R’s still, mind you – lived 1304-74. Two of his literary works were in Italian, rather than Latin, the Canzoniere and the Trionfi. The Canzoniere consisted of 366 poems, 317 of them sonnets. Petrarch’s first sonnet, line one, refers to them as ‘rime sparse’, scattered rhymes, and they are often referred to using that expression. So, Petrarch didn’t invent the form we call the Petrarchan sonnet. Nor did he invent the trick of carrying a single metaphor through the 14 lines of a sonnet which gets referred to as a Petrarchan conceit (when the poet compares his state, being in love, to a ship at sea, or to the unmeasureable mountains, that kind of thing).