Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance

In his 1999 monograph Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, Gordon Braden has defined his major subject as searching for the continuity of a tradition where the poet writes about the “desire for someone you cannot have,” but in fact, “nothing happens” (Braden, Continental, xiii). As a promised sequel, though belated, his Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance (2022) continues to explore this subject matter in English love poetry to search for an English version of the continental reaction, imitation, and parody of the Italian Renaissance, thus providing a more organic and unified picture of Petrarchism across Europe. In this book, Braden is interested not only in the Petrarchan influence contained within the texts but also in the physical process in which they are produced, commented on, annotated, revised, and circulated among the elites. By doing so, Braden provides a comprehensive and detailed synopsis of English Renaissance poetry significant for scholars from relevant fields, and more importantly for students interested in exploring this period of English poetry.Starting from Thomas Wyatt, Braden selectively examines the English poets in approximately chronological order from the beginning of the sixteenth century toward the 1620s when Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus was published. Yet, Braden reserves William Shakespeare’s 1609 sonnet sequence as a concluding chapter to highlight the Bard’s influence and achievement. The book is arranged accordingly with Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Philip Sidney, and Shakespeare each having an individual chapter, while other poets, such as Fulke Greville, Wroth, Samuel Daniel, Walter Raleigh, and so on, are grouped into either the sonneteers chapter or the courtiers chapter.Braden’s insightful analyses of English love poetry begin with a careful reference to the Italian ambassador, whose observation of Henry VII’s court serves as a striking reminder of how England once suffered a lack of “international literary phenomenon that had elsewhere begun to manifest itself under Petrarchan inspiration” (2). It is only until Wyatt, while serving Henry III, that the long process of patriarchization is finally enacted. As Braden sufficiently shows, despite Wyatt’s rejection of using the symbol of laurel or the word poem to identify his own work (7), Petrarch’s influence on him is undeniable since many of his poetic images, as well as the erotic devices, are satisfactorily traced back by Braden to the Italian madrigals and the troubadour tradition of subscribing oneself to a noble and powerful lady (17). Thus, Braden successfully locates Wyatt’s writing of a one-sided desire in a pan-European lineage of erotic literature (37), but Braden also carefully notes that Wyatt “effects an often-incautious generalization of the Petrarchan symptoms to a wide range of erotic experience” (20), and this sets the early mode of English Renaissance poetry before its trajectory returns to the true continental model (21). Unlike Petrarch and his followers, the political anxiety Wyatt has experienced generates a sense of urgency in his work, leading him to register “a complex of terms having to do with stability and permanence” (23). This, as Braden believes, convincingly explains how Wyatt absorbs himself in describing dreams “of constant devotion transcending circumstance” as a response to Petrarch (37).Wyatt’s death in 1542 and the following posthumous circulation of his poetry collection enacted a competition for the laureate title left vacant (42). By a cross-field analysis of the painting Gascoigne dedicated to Elizabeth I in 1576, where he rewrote Petrarch’s motto in an attempt to establish himself before the Queen as an English Petrarch, Braden makes a persuasive case of how the often-neglected literary figures such as Gascoigne would also long for the laureate title. One of the most important contributions Gascoigne made to the English Renaissance is that he brought the actual birth of the Italian sonnet sequence into England when he included three “Sonnets in sequence” in The Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (52) to tell stories about a man’s unrequited passion for an essentially cold woman. This Petrarchan framework of the progression of love is central to Gascoigne’s work, and Braden analyzes it thoroughly with textual details. In addition, Braden provides a revealing connection between the military career of Gascoigne’s characters to the poet’s real-life experience, concluding that those failed attempts in their military career are “just another version of his love life” (67), which is further enhanced in his perceptive annotation of the overlapping incidences between the “Farewell” in the Green Knight sequence and another short poem “Gascoigne’s Wodmanship” (73).Braden’s insistence on English poets’ continued attempts to embrace the continental influence is further elaborated in the reception of Gascoigne some fifty years after his death, achieved by Braden’s innovative interpretation of Sidney’s omission of Gascoigne in his Defense of Poesie, not as a sign of recession of Gascoigne’s fame, but as “one move in availing himself of this opportunity” (86). It is in his Astrophil and Stella that the “authorially ordered [sonnet] sequence” is finally established as a genre in English literature (90). Referring to C. S. Lewis’s assertion that “the sonnet sequence . . . is not a way of telling a story. It is a form which exists for the sake of prolonged lyrical meditation” (Lewis 327), Braden forms a strong reevaluation of Astrophil and Stella as a fully developed narrative sequence, and in an excellent parallel reading of sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella to Canzoniere 248, Braden provides a perfect example of how Sidney follows a specific Petrarchan narrative only to reverse it at the last minute (Braden 94). Braden’s interpretation of Sidney takes into account not only the thrilling mixture of poetic interaction, dialogue, and most importantly emotions (114), but also the careful design of the rhyming scheme that leads readers back to Wyatt’s and Gascoigne’s works (88), reminding readers of a whole generation of a “sustained exploration of formal possibilities within well-defined constraints” (89).To present this continuation of “sustained exploration,” Braden includes an exhaustive list of the sonnet works published intensively from the 1580s all the way to the middle of the seventeenth century when John Milton published his sonnet sequence (149), and among them, there are sonneteers such as Greville and Samuel Daniel, each analyzed and commented individually. Moreover, through a close examination of some of the recurring sensual images, Braden explains the psychological connection between the passionate corporeal description and the unrequited male desire behind the boom of English—and in some places even Scottish—sonnet sequences (155). As for the writer of the first female-authored sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Mary Wroth, Braden specifically emphasizes that she is a typical example of how English sonneteers begin to break from the continental tradition by transforming its erotic passion into noble account, thus constituting their own English Petrarchism (160). This is convincingly proved by Braden’s enumeration of the physical descriptions of the beloved male and how they are different from the erotic methods by which the Petrarchan beloved ladies are described (159). Also, more importantly, Pamphilia is suffering, less from the agony of “unsuccessful courtship” like her Petrarchan male counterpart, but more from a fear of “infidelity and desertion” (168). Thus, Braden powerfully and effectively highlights Wroth’s unique literary value.Apart from the continental influence, Braden also conducts comprehensive research on Elizabeth I’s personal influence on the English literary style reflected intensively in the works of her courtiers. Braden attentively screens and analyzes the letters, poems, and other literary materials exchanged between the Queen and her courtiers, including Henry Constable, the Earl of Leicester, and Robert Devereux (the second Earl of Essex), in an attempt to search for the Petrarchan vocabulary such as “fortune,” “despair,” “love,” and “favor.” By doing so, Braden effectively pushes forward Leonard Tennenhouse’s idea that the Elizabethan court, in some way, becomes a place of “contentious men maneuvering for her favor” (179), and a miraculous venue in which the fusion of the erotic and the political is raised to a level so high that even the Queen herself could become one of the cold beloved ladies (190). A typical case is made in an extensive analysis of the lines exchanged between the Queen and her most beloved man—Sir Walter Raleigh, who boldly questions in his poems the fidelity of the Queen, and protests for being deserted as a Petrarchan lover (191). As such, Braden rediscovers Raleigh as a poet with great potential in writing an epic love story with a strong religious and meditative inclination that makes his work one of the touchstones of English Renaissance poetry.Braden’s synopsis of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence brings a powerful concluding note to the book where he provides a fresh reading that avoids considering Shakespeare’s sequence as a combination of two individual narratives before and after Sonnet 126, but rather one single narrative with two deeply interrelated subsequences which gradually unfold themselves and form a greater whole in the procession of the entire sequence (212). In his analyses of Sonnets 1 to 20, Braden deals more with the procreation theme where Shakespeare transforms the Petrarchan “persuasion to enjoy” into “persuasion to breed” (212). As for the homoeroticism aroused by Sonnet 20, citing Joseph Pequigney’s survey of the homoerotic vocabulary, Braden brings forth an adequate analysis of the homoeroticism in the young man’s subsequence and demonstrates how it is ultimately related to the Platonic concept of self-abstention (222), as well as an absence of carpe diem, suggesting a deviation from “contemporary Petrarchism” and a return to the Petrarchan origins (224). As the desire in the young man’s subsequence culminates, the Petrarchan infidelity-depression motif gradually emerges in the narrative rhythm, and a flow of complex emotions dominates the narrative course till it diminishes and enacts the dark lady subsequence. Thoroughly assessing the academic debate concerning the narrowing of the dark lady subsequence in Sonnet 148, Braden sets the dark lady subsequence as a “retrospective statement . . . sorting through the emotional carnage” in remembrance of things past in the sequence (248). Such a statement, as Braden claims, marks “not just the terminus of Shakespeare’s sequence but a defining limit of Petrarchan love in its full scope” (252).Overall, Braden’s reading of the Petrarchan Love in English poetry includes exhaustive textual analyses and concrete bibliographical studies, focusing not only on the reception of particular poetic images at the time, but also on how they are adapted from their Petrarchan origins into the English context. Subtle variants in different publications or manuscripts of one particular work are also taken into account to draw a larger picture of the authorial conception in the process of composition, and analyses of these are often convincingly accompanied by the in-depth synopses of the authors’ lives. Also, Braden encloses three useful appendices to provide additional and helpful information concerning the subject matter and the necessary background prior to this book.Thus, it is safe to conclude that Petrarchan Love and the English Renaissance is rich in materials, comprehensive in scope, insightful in analyses, and serves great pedagogical purposes for the study of English Renaissance literature, and for the evaluation of some often-neglected figures, opening a whole series of academic possibilities for the new generation of scholars. Some of the authors in this book, such as Gascoigne, Greville, and Raleigh, have not been sufficiently studied in non-English-speaking countries like China, and neither is their work fully translated into Chinese. As a result, great are the challenges, but the prospects are also promising (Zhang and Shen 208). Also, this book makes a strong case for cross-cultural analyses of English Renaissance poetry by identifying it as World Literature that is deeply rooted in the non-English-speaking continents. This is particularly revealing for both the reception of English sonnets in China and the study of Chinese sonnets, since “the Chinese sonnet has largely been developed from the reading and transplantation of Western sonneteers” (Hao 470–71), a developing mode all too familiar with the English Renaissance poetry. At last, it inspires the reader to rethink the meaning of English Renaissance poetry in the twenty-first century when Braden recalls how the actor Patrick Stewart read Shakespeare’s sonnets on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic (213) as a form of consolation during troubled times.This review is supported by the National Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, China (authorization: 19ZDA298).