1939/09/01 by William Riley Parker · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship #Renaissance Literature and Culture #Sonnet #Miscellany #Literature #Poetry #History #Art #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.2307/458477
openalex publication_date 1939/09/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
In Tottel's Miscellany there are 310 poems, including the thirty-nine added in the second edition of 1557. Of these 310, ninety-six are noted as by Wyatt, forty by Surrey, forty by Grimald, and 134 by “Vncertain auctours.” There are fifty-four sonnets in Tottel . Wyatt contributed twenty-seven, or exactly half. Surrey contributed fifteen; Grimald, three; the uncertain authors, nine. Rather more than one out of every six poems in the book is a sonnet. It is interesting that, among these fifty-four sonnets, fourteen different rime patterns are to be found. These constitute eloquent evidence of the mood of experimentation in which the English sonnet was conceived. It is a mistake to assume that Tottel contains only two types of sonnets, the Italian (or Petrarchian) and the English (or Shakespearian). Even if we define the first type loosely (and we must, when dealing with its early manifestation), there remain fifteen sonnets in the Miscellany which more or less defy classification. It is instructive to consider the various rime patterns in some detail. From them we may get, not only a suggestion of how the English sonnet evolved, but also a clue to the authorship of at least two sonnets by uncertain authors. A study of rime patterns is a narrow approach to the whole problem of sonnet technique, but, when applied to the English sonnet in its infancy, it has an unusual usefulness.