Avant l’âge d’or : pour une histoire du sonnet imprimé en Angleterre (1547-1592)
The history of the early modern English sonnet is well known. However, the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the relative absence of the sonnet (strictly defined) in the 1560s and 1570s, and, on the other hand, its sudden success in the 1590s, remains largely unexplained. Analysing the mise en p...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Institut du Monde Anglophone
2022-06-01
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| Series: | Etudes Epistémè |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/15112 |
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| Summary: | The history of the early modern English sonnet is well known. However, the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the relative absence of the sonnet (strictly defined) in the 1560s and 1570s, and, on the other hand, its sudden success in the 1590s, remains largely unexplained. Analysing the mise en page of sonnets printed from 1547 to 1592, this paper argues that what put an end to the low circulation of the printed sonnet was the specific conditions of the 1580s – a decade marked both by the sudden rise of the book in Italian and by a brief economic boom of the book industry in London. The role of John Charlewood, in particular, has largely been neglected: exploiting the features of the quatorzain and putting his experience as a printer to good use, he created a new aesthetics for the sonnet sequence, the most successful example of which is undoubtedly Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592). After Charlewood died in 1593, the editorial frame of the sonnet sequence was widely appropriated by printers for other pursuits than just sonnet books. One of the factors that made the golden age of the Elizabethan sonnet possible at all was therefore a de facto alliance between the interests of the poets and the printers, at a moment when such an alliance was relevant to the book industry. |
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| ISSN: | 1634-0450 |