The Project Gutenberg EBook of Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles, by
Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher

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Title: Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles
Phillis - Licia

Author: Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher

Editor: Martha Foote Crow

Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18841]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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ELIZABETHAN SONNET-CYCLES

EDITED BY

MARTHA FOOTE CROW

PHILLIS

BY THOMAS LODGE

LICIA

BY GILES FLETCHER

KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER AND CO.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE LONDON W.C.

1896

INTRODUCTION

The last decade of the sixteenth century was marked by an outburst of
sonneteering. To devotees of the sonnet, who find in that poetic form
the moat perfect vehicle that has ever been devised for the expression
of a single importunate emotion, it will not seem strange that at the
threshold of a literary period whose characteristic note is the most
intense personality, the instinct of poets should have directed them to
the form most perfectly fitted for the expression of this inner motive.

The sonnet, a distinguished guest from Italy, was ushered to by those
two "courtly makers," Wyatt and Surrey, in the days of Henry VIII. But
when, forty years later, the foreigner was to be acclimatised in
England, her robe had to be altered to suit an English fashion. Thus
the sonnet, which had been an octave of enclosed or alternate rhymes,
followed by a sestette of interlaced tercets, was now changed to a
series of three quatrains with differing sets of alternate rhymes in
each, at the close of which the insidious couplet succeeded in
establishing itself. But these changes were not made without a great
deal of experiment; and during the tentative period the name "sonnet"
was given, to a wide variety of forms, in the moulding of which but one
rule seemed to be uniformly obeyed--that the poem should be the
expression of a single, simple emotion. This law cut the poem, to a
relative shortness and defined its dignity and clearness. Beyond this
al