English Petrarchism / anti-Petrarchism: ‘Poetics of doubleness'

Abstract

English Renaissance poetry was among the last to join a powerful tradition of European Petrarchism with its dominant genre — the sonnet. The late advent determined the double nature of the English sonnet, justly located in the domain of ‘poetics of doubleness' (Brooks-Davies) where Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism were blending one into the other (Heather Dubrow). All through its century-long history English Petrarchism was engaged both in mastering the convention and in its witty estrangement, sometimes making fun of it but more often seriously undermining it (cf. the opposition of the two types of parody introduced by Yury Tynianov). The vertical axis was not rejected but turned over in a new vision opened both to the heavens and the earth related in a metaphoric analogy. In the sonnet, as nowhere else previously, this new vision was processed in the generic nature of its word, reflective and metaphoric. If Sidney was famous for his witty play with words and with convention, toppling it upside down, Shakespeare was engaged in the exploration of the inwardness of the mind, making it the keyword in his presumably later sonnets. In the literary evolution of the Renaissance genre system the function of the sonnet is in its own way similar to that of the novel, conceptualized by Bakhtin as the first literary form with the speaking man as its hero. Reflection and wit are the generic features inherent in the verbal nature of the sonnet.