We may also wonder about the continual recurrence of the date 6 April in Petrarch’s narratives. On that date he first saw Laura (1327), on that date she died (1348). On that date he was first inspired to begin his epic Africa (1338). On that date he arrived in Rome to begin the occasion of his laureation (1341). The recurrence of this date beggars coincidence. In sonnet 3 he states that he first saw Laura on the day that Christ died. This statement has caused much consternation among Petrarch scholars because 6 April 1327 was the Monday, not the Friday, of Holy Week; but they need not have feared Petrarch’s accuracy because according to the best chronologies of the fourteenth century, Adam was created on 6 April and Christ was crucified on that same date. Hence the Old Adam and the New Adam were linked to a date in the calendar. In using this date Petrarch is reinforcing the opposition he continually repeats throughout the Canzoniere of his love for Laura and his love of God.
In fact, the two-part structure of the poems of the Canzoniere repeats this crucial opposition. The Canzoniere consists of 366 poems, divided into a first part of 263 poems, In vita di Laura, and a second part of 103 poems, In morte di Laura. If we take Petrarch seriously (and we always must) and imagine his Canzoniere as a leap-year of 366 days, and take the further step of faith in imagining that sonnet I is a 6 April date, we come to the beginning of In morte on the 25th of December, the date on which we celebrate the birth of Christ. Thus, Petrarch celebrates the initiation of his love for Laura on the same day that Christ died and the death of Laura on the day that Christ was born. It is a genuine opposition that only the poems themselves can fully engage and disentangle, but it should already be clear that this story, or concatenation of myths, is not the simple story of a young man who could write poetry, falling in love with a married woman.
What makes Petrarch’s love for Laura different from almost all other love stories is that within the sequence he tries to use his errant love as a symbol of the malaise affecting his age. He introduces poems that are clearly political, and from the time of Alessandro Vellutello’s printed edition of the Canzoniere (1525; 26 editions thereafter) these political poems were printed in a separate section, a dreadful violation of Petrarch’s intention. Ovid’s prophecy about the laurel intended that garland both for poets and Caesars, and Petrarch projected not only his personal but his political desires into his poetic aspirations. It must be remembered that Petrarch was born in exile, his parents along with Dante banished from their native Florence in 1302. He lived in exile all his life, the exile of his fallen condition, the exile of a totally disunited Italy, in which he was given preferment by many of the dukes and princes of Italy’s city states, the exile of a Christian whose pope had abandoned Rome in favour of a Babylonian Captivity in Avignon, where he laboured for those popes and where he first saw Laura. He fought all his life to bring the papacy back to Rome, which he saw as the proper site both of Ovid’s prophecy and Peter’s chair. His life-long association with the noble Colonna family, whom he celebrates in Petrarch (P) 10, P28, P266, P269, etc., his early espousal of Cola di Rienzo (P53), all point towards a return to a revivified Rome as the proper political solution. Petrarch’s love is directed both towards a woman and a city. His laurels come from his intercession to both, and the signature emblem of this double quest is the image of the old man (il veccheriel, P16) – not a Dickensian whimsy, but an allegory of St Paul’s Old Man, stumbling toward Rome to see the Veronica, that venerated image of the face of Christ in St Peter’s.
What caught the fancy of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not only this extremely convoluted story but the supple elegance of Petrarch’s verse. It has the limpidity of Tennyson matched with the strength of Milton, which goes far to explain the lack of praise for Petrarch by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics, for whom the limpidity seemed mere simplicity and the strength mere rhetorical stance. Hence Petrarch achieved adjectival status – of a bad sort.
It is a fortuitous coincidence that Petrarch should make his first appearance in English poetry by the hand of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400), the father of English poetry. That Chaucer knew of Petrarch is beyond doubt; in the Canterbury Tales he makes his Clerk refer to ‘Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriat poete… whos rethorike sweete / Enlumyned all Ytaille of poetrie’ in the Prologue to ‘The Clerk’s Tale’. That Chaucer knew Petrarch personally is possible but doubtful. Chaucer’s journey to Italy in 1368 as part of the entourage accompanying Prince Lionel to his marriage with Violante Visconti, daughter of the Duke of Milan, provides a provocative possibility because Petrarch also attended this wedding. We will have to leave the fictive encounter to Tom Stoppard. Chaucer’s second trip to Italy presents another possibility, but Petrarch’s erratic presence in the northern city of Arguà during the last years of his life because of the war between Venice and Padua and Chaucer’s own diplomatic concerns in 1372 make that later meeting doubtful unless new records are found. That Chaucer knew at least one of Petrarch’s sonnets is undeniable because he translates sonnet 132, ‘S’amor non è’, into three rhyme royal stanzas in Troilus and Criseyde, Book 1.400–420 as ‘Canticus Troili’, Troilus’s first declaration of his love for Criseyde. It is a typical medieval statement of the submission of the lover’s will to the power of the God of Love, the substance of which could be documented in countless examples from the period. What makes this example important is that Chaucer clearly has his eye on the progress of Petrarch’s diction and imagery in 132. Chaucer must have seen or owned a manuscript of Petrarch to have such a controlled knowledge of 132. At any rate, the ‘Canticus Troili’ is the introduction of Petrarch to English literature.
The next important appearance of Petrarch in English is more than a century and a half later just before the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I. In 1557 a small volume of poems, Songes and Sonnettes, written by the ryght honorable horde Henry H[o]ward, late Earle of Surrey, and other, was printed by Richard Tottel; this first anthology of English poetry is now more generally known as Tottel’s Miscellany. It ran through ten editions by 1587 and is important because it was the first time that the poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517?–47), and Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (c. 1503–42) were printed. It is the most important collection of poetry written during the reign of Henry VIII, but for the purposes of this volume its importance rests in the fact that it introduces the sonnet form to English and that this form appears mainly in translations of Petrarch: five by Surrey, twenty-three by Wyatt and two by anonymous authors. It cannot be said that Tottel is mainly responsible for popularizing Petrarch in England because he was already known and read in the Italian, but the enormous influence of Tottel on later collections such as The Paradise of Dainty Devises (1576), A Handful of Pleasant Delights (1584), The Phoenix Nest (1593), England’s Helicon (1600) and A Poetical Rhapsody (1602), in addition to his having made Wyatt and Surrey available in printed form, gives Tottel a significant role in the promotion of Petrarch in English. At the same time, nonetheless, manuscript collections of English poetry such as the Hill MS (Add. MS 36529) and the Arundel Harington MS (Egerton MS 2711), the second of which contains autograph copies of Wyatt’s poems, continued the earlier tradition of collecting manuscript poetry.
Such printed and manuscript evidence from the Elizabethan period makes it very clear that Petrarchan influence was everywhere, whether that influence ended up in translation or not. What is difficult to determine is whether the influence on the English poets is from Petrarch, from Petrarch’s already abundant Italian and French imitators, or from the general psychology of love that dominated the medieval and Renaissance periods. In attempting to answer these questions it is better to avoid imputing Bloomian anxiety of influence to the translators but rather to recall Pope’s ‘True wit is nature to advantage dress’d / What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d’. Poetry expresses thoughts already in the public realm; the trick of the poet is simply to express them better.
Another complicating factor is the form that the translation takes. Sinc
e Italian is an inflected language, it is almost impossible not to rhyme; English, even with its much greater lexicon, is relatively poor in rhymes – something that Spenser might well have considered with more care before inventing his rhymed stanza, a point that Milton saw only too well in choosing blank verse for his epic.
It is conventional in English studies to distinguish three basic forms for the sonnet: the Italian, or Petrarchan, the Spenserian and the English, or Shakespearean. The Italian form divides the fourteen lines into an octave (ab ba ab ba) and a sestet, using some combination of cde rhymes that will avoid a final couplet. The form of both the Spenserian (abab bcbc cdcd ee) and the Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg) insist on a final rhyming couplet. Beyond this basic discrimination it is pointless to make generalizations about the form of the sonnet – unless one has a specific sonnet in mind. This is particularly true of the earlier sixteenth century in England. Writers were trying to make their language sit in a form something like an Italian sonnet. Beyond that there were no rules, just attempts. Surrey translated five of Petrarch’s poems: four sonnets and one ballata.3
In the first three of the sonnets, he chooses what has come to be called the ‘Shakespearean sonnet’: three quatrains rhymed abab and a concluding couplet. Surrey carries this form to extravagant limits in Tottel 2, with only two rhymes, which tends to destroy any sense of progressive argument in the poem. It seems a brilliant exercise in testing the rhyming power of the English language. This interest may also account for the fact that Tottel 276 and 277 by an anonymous author, or authors, included in this selection, translate Petrarch 1 and 3 into rhyming septenary couplets. Wyatt, on the other hand, tends to retain the Petrarchan division into an octave and a sestet, but even this observation pales as a significant statement about poetic form when one considers the problems that Tottel faced in rendering to the public of the mid sixteenth century Wyatt’s and Surrey’s renderings of the Petrarchan Italian of the fourteenth century.
It is clear from all the poetry in Tottel, for which we have manuscripts (most notably those of Wyatt – his personal copy is Egerton MS 2711), that Tottel knew that he had a literary winner (the poetry of an earl and a knight!), and also that he wanted to make them pass as au courant contemporaries; therefore he edited whatever manuscript material he had to achieve his purpose. One example must suffice.
The first poem in Wyatt’s copy is a translation of P121, a madrigale of 9 lines, which Wyatt translated into a rondeau of 15 lines, which Tottel then tried to shape into a regular sonnet. The course of this successful fiasco must be traced by quoting the originals
P121, ‘Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna’, was a late imposition on the structure of the Canzoniere, the madrigale replacing an earlier ballata, ‘Donna mi vene spesso nella mente’, which had been in place from the time of Petrarch’s earliest plans for his collection.
Or vedi, Amor, che giovenetta donna
tuo regno sprezza, et del mio mal non cura,
et tra duo ta’ nemici è sí secura.
Tu se’ armato, et ella in treccie e ‘n gonna
si siede, et scalza, in mezzo i fiori et l’erba
ver’ me spietata, e ’ncontra te superba.
I’ son pregion; ma se pietà anchor serba
l’arco tuo saldo, et qualchuna saetta,
fa’ di te et di me, signor, vendetta.
The jaunty and tricky rhythms and rhymes of the Italian were not known to Wyatt as a form, and so he turned to models he knew from the French. The rhythms suggested the French rondeau and its connection to the dance, and Wyatt made this spirited English rondeau:
Behold, love, thy power how she dispiseth!
My great payne how litle she regardeth!
The holy oth, wherof she taketh no cure
Broken she hath: and yet she bideth sure,
Right at her ease: and litle she dredeth
Wepened thou art and she vnarmed sitteth:
To the disdaynfull, her liff she ledeth:
To me spitefull, withoute cause, or mesure,
Behold, love!
I ame in hold: if pitie the meveth
Goo bend thy bowe: that stony hertes breketh
And, with some stroke, revenge the displeasure
Of thee and him, that sorrowe doeth endure,
And, as his lorde, the lowly entreateth
Behold, love!
The abb acc cdd rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan poem gets translated into the francophile English: aabbaaab x aabba x. This form was apparently not to the taste of Tottel, and so he converted it into a 14-line sonnet, by filling out the first refrain line Behold, love! and deleting the second refrain line.
Behold, Loue, thy power how she despiseth:
My greuous payn how litle she regardeth,
The solemne othe, wherof she takes no cure,
Broken she hath: and yet, she bydeth sure,
Right at her ease, and litle thee she dredeth.
Weaponed thou art, and she vnarmed sitteth:
To the disdainful, all her life she leadeth:
To me spiteful, without iust cause, or measure.
Behold Loue, how proudly she triumpheth,
I am in hold, but if thee pitie meueth
Go, bend thy bow that stony hartes breaketh:
And with some stroke reuenge the great displeasure
Of thee, and him that sorow doth endure,
And as his Lord thee lowly here entreateth.
But the metamorphosis from madrigale to rondeau to sonnet is a most parlous transformation, especially into the sonnet form, with its rhyme scheme: aabb aaab aaab ba, a form not seen before nor after. The rough meter and rhyme of Wyatt gets lost in an attempt to be ‘regular.’ And so the achievement of Tottel.
The next step in getting Petrarch into English introduces another problem of translation. Edmund Spenser in 1569, when he was in his late teens, was probably asked by his headmaster Richard Mulcaster of the Merchants’ Taylor School to translate Petrarch 323, ‘Standomi un giorno’, a visionary canzone, previously translated by Clément Marot, for an English version of a Dutch Protestant polemic by Jan van der Noot, A Theatre for Worldlings. It is Spenser’s first published work and is important not only for that reason but also because it shows Petrarch’s poems to Laura taking on a political significance, not often accorded them by readers of the original Italian.
The other selections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are examples of the vast sonneteering vogue of the period, many of which will appear very familiar but which may not have been fully associated with the petrarchizing passion of those centuries. One can detect a tendency to domesticate the love affair, which Spenser had already achieved in his Amoretti and Epithalamium (1595) by writing the only sonnet sequence that ends in marriage; but Spenser, after his early encounter with P323, did not include Petrarchan translations in his own sequence. Other sonneteers did, and their contributions will be more fully described in the headnotes to the selections.
The Renaissance seems to have expended the English enthusiasm about Petrarch. He is still there, through his well-known tropes and rhetorical ploys, but there is little activity in making him over into English verse. The eighteenth century gave as much attention to Petrarch as they did to the sonnet form: very little. Just as in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no first-rate poets turned their hand to the translation of Petrarch, neither ‘great Anna’ nor any of the Georges attempted to vie with their Tudor predecessor. Those poetasters who did include translations of Petrarch in their poetic outputs fall into three distinct social groups: peers, gentry, academic clerics.
Peers
James Caulfeild, Earl of Charlemont (1728–99)
Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee (1747–1813)
Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges (1762–1837)
Barbarina Brand, Lady Dacre (1768–1854)
Gentry
John Langhorne (1735–79)
George Hardynge (1743–1816)
C
harlotte Turner Smith (1749–1806)
Dr John Nott (1751–1825)
Thomas Le Mesurier of Guernsey (1757–1822)
John Penn (1760–1834)
Clerics
Basil Kennet (1674–1715)
Reverend William Collier (1743–1803)
Archdeacon Francis Wrangham (1767–1843)
(Biographical details may be found in the headnotes to their selections; Hardynge and Le Mesurier are not included in this volume.)
Petrarch in English Page 2