Sidney, Spencer and Shakespeare Conceptions of Love
Sidney, Spencer and Shakespeare are all masters at the writing of sonnets yet they are very different poets with very different ideas about love. Sidney is the quintessential Petrachan lover; he is unrequited and uses conventional Petrachan metaphors. Stella, the woman Sidney writes about is older and unobtainable. Spencer, on the other hand, is a requited lover and the love he has is made very clear in his sonnets. Spencer was married and his sonnets seem to portray that he was in a happy and successful love. Yet despite the fact that he is a requited lover Spencer uses traditional Petrachan similes in his poems. Shakespeare defies all of the sonnet traditions and even makes fun of them. His loves are not what the sonneteers consider the traditional person to love. Shakespeare loves a boy and a dark lady. At times he seems to despise the Petrachan and Neo-Platonic ideals of love yet at other times he uses these ideals in his sonnets. The main point that Shakespeare seems to harp on is that he shall immortalize his love and make it everlasting. Even though these poets are all very different they all convey a powerful message of love. Sidney embodied the Petrachan lover both in the structure and subject matter of his
poems. He holds true to the Italian structure of a sonnet. He divides his poems into a octet and a sestet both in the structure of the rhyme and in subject matter. He holds the ideals of Petrachan love so dear to him that he even uses the same metaphors that Petrach used. In the second sonnet in Astrophil and Stella Sidney is a soldier wounded by Cupid’s arrow, he is at the mercy of his love for Stella. He is a slave to Cupid and his love of Stella, yet Stella does not know or acknowledge this love. This is a truly Petrachan metaphor that Sidney borrows and uses masterfully in his poem. In sonnet forty one Spencer takes the Petrachan metaphor of a soldier and changes it slightly to one of a knight. In this sonnet the speaker is participating in a tournament of knights. The speaker gives as a reason to why he is not wounded the fact that Stella was watching him. Stella’s eyes looking on him saved him from disgrace if he would have lost the competition. Sidney is the quintessential example of a Petrachan lover. He is unrequited and is a soldier wounded because of his love or a soldier saved from being wounded by his love. Shakespeare further defies the sonnet tradition. He makes fun of the blazon in sonnet one hundred, yet in sonnet eighteen Shakespeare embraces the blazon. Many such contradictions can be found throughout the collection of Shakespeare’s work yet one prevailing
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Approximate Word count = 947
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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