ENGL362 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sonnet 130, Enjambment, Oxymoron
Document Summary
Bulk of them composed during the beginning of shakespeare"s career. See less shakespeare as the man of the theatre (driven by profit) and more as the writer . Poets had good reputations at the time. Allow for a more linguistic analysis of shakespeare. First popularized by petrarch in 14 c italy. Brought to england in the mid-16 c by thomas wyatt and henry howard. A sonnet craze emerged in england during the 1580-90s. Characterized by rigid form and rhyme scheme, but have a variety of themes. Italian (petrarchan) sonnet: octave (8 lines) followed by a sestet (6 lines, rhyme scheme abbaabba + cdecde (cdcdcd) English (shakespearean) sonnet: three quatrains (4 lines) followed by a couplet (2 lines, rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Many of the early english sonnets were highly derivative of petrarchan themes (e. g. paradoxical language, longing for an object of desire, etc. : a lot of clich s are rooted in the sonnet era.
