REPOLITICISING RENAISSANCE SONNETS

At the end of Act 1 of Love's Labour's Lost, the pretentious Spaniard Armado declares his love for the country wench Jaquenetta: ‘Adieu, valor! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for, I am sure, I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit; write pen; for I am for whole volumes in Folio’ (1. 2. 160–4). As he turns his back on ‘manly’ qualities and pursuits (valour and warfare) and embraces the new role of sonneteer, Armado typifies the recurrent presentation of sonneteering as an inconsequential activity, divorced from what early moderns saw as the proper vocation of the educated man, namely ‘to serve abrode [i.e. outside the home] in publik functions of the common weal’. The marginalisation of sonnets is certainly found in The Arte of English Poesie, which lists the functions of poetry in descending order of importance:

The final, lowliest category is ‘the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitorie life’, which ‘may allowably beare matter not alwayes of the gravest, or of any great commoditie or profit, but rather in some sort, vaine, dissolute, or wanton, so it be not very scandalous & of evill example’.