‘Love with excess of heat’: The Sonnet and Petrarchan Excess in the Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Periods

XVII-XVIII Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 71 | 2014 La Mesure et l’excès ‘Love with excess of heat’: The Sonnet and Petrarchan Excess in the Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Periods Rémi Vuillemin Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/395 DOI: 10.4000/1718.395 ISSN: 2117-590X Publisher Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles Printed version Date of publication: 31 December 2014 Number of pages: 99-120 ISBN: 978-2-9536021-6-6 ISSN: 0294-3798 Electronic reference Rémi Vuillemin, « ‘Love with excess of heat’: The Sonnet and Petrarchan Excess in the Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Periods », XVII-XVIII [Online], 71 | 2014, Online since 17 May 2016, connection on 23 September 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/395 ; DOI : 10.4000/1718.395 XVII-XVIII is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. “LOVE WITH EXCESS OF HEAT”: THE SONNET AND PETRARCHAN EXCESS IN THE LATE ELIZABETHAN AND EARLY JACOBEAN PERIODS In the English Renaissance, the Petrarchan lover was the figure of excess par excellence. In poems and plays of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, his excessive desire and grief were expressed through a rhetoric characterised by a systematic resort to set devices and a repeated use of Petrarchan commonplaces. This has led to a certain misconception of Petrarchism in general, and of the Petrarchan sonnet in particular, as a meaningless juxtaposition of clichés. However, the literary criticism of the last three decades has shown that the excesses of the lover were part of the very issues Petrarchan sonnets sought to address. In that sense, sonnet sequences are not to be set apart from other literary works of the period, though their moral ambiguity is probably responsible for some of their critical misfortune. Drawing from varied sources, this paper explains the literary, cultural and moral reasons why excess was so central an issue for both Petrarchan poets and those who criticised their work in the 1590s and 1600s. En Angleterre, à la Renaissance, l’amant pétrarquiste était la figure de l’excès par excellence. Dans les poèmes et les pièces de la fin de l’époque élisabéthaine et du début de l’ère jacobéenne, sa douleur et son désir excessifs étaient exprimés par une rhétorique spécifique, caractérisée par un recours systématique à certains procédés et un usage répété de lieux communs pétrarquistes. Cet état de fait a favorisé une conception du pétrarquisme en général, et du sonnet pétrarquiste en particulier comme une juxtaposition de clichés vide de sens. Cependant, la critique littéraire des dernières décennies a montré que les excès de l’amant étaient au cœur des problématiques soulevées par les sonnets. En ce sens, il convient de ne pas marginaliser les recueils amoureux dans le paysage littéraire de l’époque, bien qu’il faille reconnaître que leur ambiguïté morale les a probablement desservis. À partir de sources diverses, cet article montre le caractère central de l’excès et ses enjeux littéraires, culturels et moraux pour les poètes pétrarquistes et pour ceux qui critiquaient leurs écrits dans les années 1590 et 1600. Rémi VUILLEMIN. “ ‘Love with Excess of Heat’: The Sonnet and Petrarchan Excess in the Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Periods.” RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 71 (2014): 99-120. 100 RÉMI VUILLEMIN Love with excesse of heat, more yong then old, Death kills with too much cold; Wee dye but once, and who lov’d last did die, Hee that saith twice, doth lye. T hese four lines (7-10) from John Donne’s “The Paradox” (1633) 1 present two forms of excess: on the one hand physiological excess, excessive heat being caused by the fire of love; on the other hand rhetorical excess, as the poem is based on the hyperbolic metaphor of love as death – a Petrarchan metaphor. This poem therefore exemplifies the predominantly excessive nature of desire. It seems indeed logical that discourses about love, and love poetry in particular, should exceed rhetorical, physiological or even moral norms of control, temperance or balance. This is not, however, the way they were initially codified. In the third book of his Arte of English Poesie (1588), Puttenham reminded the reader of the rules of decorum as they had been used in Greek and Latin rhetoric and poetry: […] all hymnes and histories, and Tragedies, were written in the high stile, all Comedies and Enterludes and other common Poesies of loves, and such like in the meane stile, all Eglogues and pastorall poems in the low and base stile. (127) This distribution of style was not just done according to genre: it also had to do with the social status of the characters depicted. The “high stile” was to be used not only for “Gods and divine things,” but also for “the noble gests and great fortunes of Princes”; the “meane stile” for “meane men, their life and business, as lawyers, gentlemen, and marchants, good housholders and honest Citizens”; the “low and base stile,” finally, concerned “the doings of the common artificer, serving man, yeoman, groome, husbandman, day-labourer, sailer, shepheard, swynard.” There is ground for doubting that this rhetorical and social categorisation was systematically put to use in the way Puttenham accounts for it. While “poesies of love” were supposed to be written in the middle style, poets interested in the topic might have had counterexamples in mind. The Italian epic poems of Boiardo, Ariosto 1. This poem was first published in 1633, but was written earlier. It was entitled “The Paradox” slightly later, in 1635. RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 71 (2014) THE SONNET AND PETRARCHAN EXCESS 101 and Tasso, for instance, provided models that dealt with the folly of love. The association of the topic of love with the epic was not restricted to imitations of works like Orlando Furioso. Michael Drayton’s Heroicall Epistles (1597), for instance, a collection of verse letters modelled on Ovid’s Heroids which seems to have been immensely popular, 2 necessarily transgressed the rule of the three styles – not even considering the fact that Drayton’s love sonnet sequence Idea was appended to it in the 1599 edition as well as in the following ones. In a more general way, it hardly seems possible to have abided by Puttenham’s codification of the love discourse as requiring a middle style. As most readers of Elizabethan love sonnet sequences have noticed, the very names of the beloved ladies (Stella, Diana, Delia or Idea, to name but a few) indicate a process of praise that only just falls short of divinisation. In that case, how was the poet to apply the rules of decorum? Would the very nature of the lady not require the use of a high style, even if love was supposed to be sung in a middle style? The three styles are also related to the emotions they are supposed to trigger. In Cicero’s Orator already, the middle style (as opposed to an or (...truncated)