AN INTIMATE DIALOGUE WITH GOD IN JOHN DONNE’S “HOLY SONNETS”: PETRARCHAN CONTEXT

The poetic sequence Chances are that the word 'sequence' when used of English poetry will first conjure the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, beginning with Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (1582), and including Spenser's Amoretti (1595) and Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609). Not all the sequences of the Golden Age are wholly devoted to the sonnet - Sidney's has ten songs in addition to 108 sonnets, and Spenser concludes his eighty-eight sonnets with 'Epithalamion' - but the sonnet is certainly the dominant form. Each sequence is held together by a complex theme, love, and a loose drama or narrative development: unhappiness in an erotic relationship or, with Spenser, eventual marital bliss. Variation in theme notably occurs with Donne's 'Holy Sonnets' (1610-11), while George Herbert's The Temple (1633) presents a booklength sequence of religious lyrics only some of which are sonnets, and which is structured as much by reference to church architecture as by a narrative of spiritual development. The lyrical sequence detached itself from the sonnet sequence at an early stage, although it took several centuries to find its characteristic level as a medium-length-to-long poem that links together lyrics in a variety of stanzaic patterns. Adjustments to the sonnet form by George Meredith in Modern Love (1862) opened the way for further (mostly deferred) experiments in the sonnet sequence, not all of which were successful. A century after Meredith, Robert Lowell wrote several volumes of fourteen-liners without rhyme or metre, of which very few individual poems have proved memorable.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (1591) represents an important watershed in the history of the English sonnet. In a situation where the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet had long dominated the English literary scene, Sidney’s attempt to claim originality in his sonnet sequence was faced with a challenging task. He couldn’t help imitating the Petrarchan model to a considerable extent; sonnet writing breaking with the Petrarchan tradition was as yet unimaginable. Hence, his fervent desire for originality often places him in a dilemma. There is a constant tug-of-war between imitation and invention in Astrophil and Stella. However, his work at last turns out to be inventive rather than imitative. What seems instrumental in achieving its originality is dramatization—especially, fashioning the lovers as forceful dramatic characters. They are by no means typical of Petrarchan lovers. In contrast to the woman who remains mostly unresponsive to the male speaker’s courtship in the Petrarchan love sonnet, Stella surprisingly confesses her love for Astrophil in the Eighth Song, which constructs a narrative out of quotations of dialogue between the lovers. As for Astrophil, his failure to renounce carnal desire for Stella—which, being dramatized, calls for “some food”—presents him as a physical presence. In addition, the allegory of Astrophil’s relationship to Cupid (who represents erotic passion) dramatizes his rejection of Platonic love, which embraces an ascetic ideal. Consequently, dramatization serves a crucial role in subverting the ideals of Petrarchan love. To conclude, Sidney’s work paved the way for the English sonnet to evolve uniquely, in a way that makes it independent of the influence of Petrarchanism.

Lady Mary Wroth is considered to be one of the most prominent women writers of the Early Modern Period. She comes from the Sidney family, the members of which are well-known with their noteworthy literary accomplishments. Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus has a significant place among the sonnet sequences and early modern women’s poetry as it is “the first sonnet sequence to be composed by an Englishwomen” (Roberts, 1982, p. 43). The Petrarchan tradition with its determined roles of a male poet and an idealized lady, along with its blazons employed to express the consequences of unfulfilled love and desire can hardy accommodate a woman who comes up with such an unaccustomed role. This article, therefore, aims at a study of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, as a sonnet sequence to see how a woman poet manages to employ the sonnet tradition in her own way. How Wroth as a woman poet accommodated herself and her persona to the poetic tradition of the time will be the main point of argumentation. It is in this respect that, the focus will be on Pamphilia and how she is represented with a new role. She is depicted as a woman with a voice, talking about her experience and the destructive outcomes of grief, quite often questioning the nature of love. Pamphilia appears not as the silent object of some other poet’s work, but writing her own poems, metaphorically redefining her place in the literary production. Furthermore, Wroth’s choice of genre, how she employed and revised it, the role she assigned to the female speaker, the major themes, along with her ideas on writing as a woman poet will be further elaborated on.

Could it be that heart & life were devastated to make for you? --Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Robert Browning, November 17, 1845 (1) At the end of Sonnets from the Portuguese Elizabeth Barrett likens her thoughts to flowers that have grown into verse, both seeming if they grew / In room (Works 2: 44, ll. 3-4). (2) In that phrase, this she points to two different, though not entirely separate, spaces: the she occupies in her father's house, where she has lived, written, and been reawakened by an unexpected love; and the lyric that is the sonnet itself, the fourteen-line stanza. Her on Wimpole Street does not merely provide the poet with a space in which to write her sonnets but also becomes an integral part of their construction and an influential force in any experience of reading them; in addition, the experiences these sonnets record is often governed by that physical space. The poet dwells within a that is figuratively represented as a bower, but the poetic production taking place in that makes the figurative bower both a literary and a literal one. Speaking within both the literal and figurative rooms, she proposes that the enclosed and solipsistic space of a traditionally strict verse form need not preclude intimacy with a beloved. Even though her sonnets are written in private as reflections upon her intimate meetings with Robert Browning in a close she imagines the lyric space as another in which she may not only test out terms of proximity and distance but also create an alternate space in which they may meet. Yet, Barrett's Euclidian sense of space clashes with an abstract one whereby the logic of the rooms she occupies and draws in verse comes into conflict with the illogic of the metaphysical spaces she has occupied in literature. The endeavor to reconcile the man standing beside her and the man in the imagined space of the text plays out in sonnet rooms that exemplify tension between the physical reality of place and the unconventional spatial logic of figurative settings. Barrett's particular relationship to space and her spatial imagination, evident in her letters to Browning, inform nor only the dynamics of enclosure and accommodation in Sonnets from the Portuguese hut also its idiomatic poetics. Specifically, Barrett negotiates concerns with spatial configurations and relationships within a literary and literal space using what I call a proximal poetics whereby prepositional play, enjambment, and deictics create a linguistic topos of distance and intimacy. This article focuses on how Sonnets from the Portuguese builds, and builds upon, a multi-dimensional language of space: the space between a female speaker and her beloved, the enclosed space of the sonnet room, and the real space in which those sonnets were written. Consideration of all three categories of space must attend to the complex dynamics of the Petrarchan tradition in which Barrett writes. (3) Unlike the speakers in traditional amatory sonnet sequences by Petrarch and Dante who maintain a distance from their object of affection, Barrett speaks from a position in which consummation is a viable option. While we cannot locate moments in Petrarch's sonnets where lovers meet, share intimate spaces, hold hands, or kiss, such physical proximity is the characteristic crux of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Indeed, traditional amatory verse depends upon maintaining a breach between subject and object because such unfulfilled desires generate the necessary tension for poetic production. In contrast, the tension in Barrett's sonnet sequence arises precisely from the fact that the distance between subject and object cannot be sustained and, indeed, has already collapsed; the speaker cannot hold the beloved at a distance because he places himself to her. Consequently, Sonnets from the Portuguese challenges putative understandings of lyric subjectivity and address, particularly as it relates to a Petrarchan tradition of sonnet writing, in the way it turns a self-oriented space into a discursive one. …

<i>Jessica Rosenfeld</i> Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle<i>Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle</i>. Jessica Rosenfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+245.

172 Reviews experienced by Christian mystics as an actual metaphysical identity, but rather was perceived by them only as the 'appearance' of such: given the background psychological development. This, I think, is better explained as an identity of 'operation' with God, who, by then, was perceived more in Aristotelian terms. These details, however, are not the main point of Pike's argument, and do not detract from it. They are presented as a tentative framework to allow a proper characterization of the mystics' perceptions of their own experience. His aim is to argue for an approach to such texts that is not reductive of then experiential content. Walter Stace, William Forgie, Ninian Smart, and others, have argued that there is no specifically theistic mystical experience, but only a common, experientially contentless, experience of Self, an introvertive state, upon which theistic interpretations of various kinds supervene. Ecclesiastic pressure is often the reason given to explain the Christian 'dualistic' account, rather than a more 'natural', monistic picture. Their thesis, Pike argues, fails to do justice to the texts, being similar to reducing all 'aches' to one particular kind. In fact, he concludes, it is misleading to say that their contentless state 'is even one among the various states that constitute the extension of this class' (p. 115). This is an important book. Pike's analysis is not concerned with the epistemological status of the texts. His purpose is rather to defend the possibility of perception and identification as immediately presented discernible givens of medieval Christian mysticism. In conclusion, he endorses Garside's Revised Principle that, in the cases studied at least, their accounts should be counted as 'an interpretation not descriptive of phenomenological content only if there are adequate phenomenological and conceptual (including epistemological) reasons to do so' (p. 174). Neil W . Brown Catholic Institute of Sydney Price, Betsy B., Medieval thought: an introduction, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1992; paper; pp. ix, 261; R.R.P. AUS$34.95 [distributed in Australia by Allen & Unwin]. This a very brave effort 'to introduce the Middle Ages, which, designated here as from the late fourth through the late fifteenth century, was an intellectually vital era' (p. 2). Within these ultimately unmanageable parameters, the task is accomplished. W e have at last a worthy successor to David Knowles's Evolution ofmedieval thought and one which might safely take the place of the latter upon class reading lists. The book is organized upon the basis of a single assumption, namely that medieval thought was Christian thought. This assumption allows a unity Reviews 173 satisfying to the reader. The eight chapters into which the exercise is divided rest firmly upon a first which analyses the Christian concept of the person, and the person's relationship with God and the community. The importance of the doctrine of creation in Christian history and in the emergence of the individual, and that of the liturgy in community discipline, arerightlysingled out. Chapter two copes with the early organization of doctrine in support of the Christian community. The tensions between classical and Christian learning, in their various forms, occupy the next and central sections. There are some excellent pages on auctoritates and a useful discussion of the impact of the different European vernacular languages upon the intellectual scene. This prepares for interesting suggestions about the nature of scholasticism, and that diminution of the Roman Church's intellectual authority which preceded the Reformation. The book pays welcome attention to the sheer energy of the period and the atmosphere of constant debate within its inhabitants lived. Those who persist in regarding the Middle Ages as a period of intellectual darkness and superstition are sent on their way with a determination wholly delightful to medievalists. Equally delightful is the way in which those who wish to stop and listen to the message are equipped, encouraged, and given energy for their own efforts. Thoughtful notes for further reading accompany each chapter and seven impressive appendices supply the student with excellent aids, including glossaries, lexicons and dictionaries, sources and translations, guides to abbreviations, palaeographical and linguistic tools, further bibliographies, and an outline chronology. There is no quarter allowed, however, to feminists. N o woman's name appears in the...

Chapter 4 reflects on the creation of the posthuman, concentrating on the genetic manufacture of life in Vincenzo Natali's film Splice (2009). In shifting the medium of the discussion, the more private perspectives of posthuman creation and especially the creature itself are foregrounded by foregoing the larger, social discussion of the consequences provided in chapter 3. Instead, the chapter analyzes liquid modern realities and the loss of stability in its personal dimension, such as love, sex, and procreation. The film, as a biopunk adaptation of the classic Frankenstein-story, makes elaborate use of the metaphor of the monstrous to characterize contemporary society and its desire to liquefy personal bonds and relations. The posthuman becomes monstrous allegory for the liquid modern wish to forego social commitment, especially and most frighteningly reflected in concepts of love and motherhood, where the film warns about the interpersonal consequences of relegating procreation to science and extracting it from stable, secure social relations.

Psalms and sonnets were the most popular lyric genres in early modern English writing. Little scholarly attention, however, has been paid to the common ground between the two forms, largely because they have been perceived as incompatible, with one epitomizing the sacred, and the other, the secular, literature of their day. Nonetheless, sixteenth‐century writers often moved from one genre to the other; the first sonnet sequence in English (Anne Lock's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, 1560), takes the form of a translation of Psalm 51; and paraphrases of other psalms appear in sonnet sequences by Barnabe Barnes and Henry Lok. The figure of David as psalmist and poet is invoked in sonnets as well as psalms, and the diction of the biblical texts was harnessed and remade for the secular tradition. This essay argues for a close relationship between psalms and sonnets, and through an examination of the influences exerted on both genres, including contemporary poetics and Petrarchism, it suggests that both the biblical Book of Psalms, and the broader tradition of psalm translation, provided an important model for the early modern English sonnet sequence.

Enjoying and enduring: groups reading aloud for wellbeing

Secularization, which claims to be attributable to the ideological trends of the modern world, in the process of its «offensive» meets with obvious «resistance» in the face of the renaissance of the religious world perception. Representatives and apologists of various religions, according to the symbol of faith, authentic to their religion, tend to ask themselves eternal questions of being, and the multiplying problems of sociocultural reality multiply their (representatives and apologists) number. In particular, questions of the mutual influence of religious traditions and modern sociocultural / civilizational transformations are relevant for scientific (epistemological) understanding. The author of the article proceeds from the fact that Islam today is characterized by the spread of its spiritual influence, while, unlike other confessions, it is stable ideologically, socially and culturally. It seems that Islam, being a «spiritual family with clear boundaries» (as opposed to “spiritual families of Europe with fuzzy boundaries, such as Protestantism), has a strong socio‑political charisma that has the potential to grow. The main intention of the article is that the reforms that translate Islam into a plane of constructive interaction with a secular state, and therefore signify a path to mutual understanding at all levels of interaction, are feasible thanks to religious and philosophical ideas of Jadidism. Attention is also drawn to the need to mitigate the extremes in interpreting the dogma of Islam (a kind of its ideological perversion), which is available today mostly in the West (in Europe) due to the increasing number of terrorist attacks. In Russia, where Islam has an autochthonous character, these manifestations are less pronounced, including due to the incessant work of domestic scientists in rethinking it. The study was based on conceptual statements and conclusions contained in the works of domestic and foreign philosophers and sociologists, using the methods of textual and comparative analysis, as well as the method of hermeneutics – interpretation. Секуляризация, претендующая на атрибутивность мировоззренческих трендов современного мира, в процессе своего «наступления» встречается с очевидным «сопротивлением» в лице ренессанса религиозного мировосприятия. Представителям и апологетам различного вероисповедания, сообразно символу веры, аутентичному их религии, свойственно задаваться вечными вопросами бытия, а лавинообразно множащиеся проблемы социокультурной действительности множат их (представителей и апологетов) число. В частности, актуальными для научного (эпистемологического) осмысления являются вопросы о взаимовлиянии религиозных традиций и современных социокультурных/цивилизационных преобразований. Автор статьи исходит из того, что ислам сегодня характе­ризуется распространением своего духовного влияния, при этом в отличие от других конфессий, он устойчив идеологически, социально и культурно. Представляется, что ислам, будучи «духовной семьей с четкими границами» (в отличие от «духовных семей Европы с нечеткими границами», как‑то протестантизм), обладает сильной социально‑политической харизмой, имеющей потенциал к нарастанию. Основная интенция статьи заключается в том, что реформы, переводящие ислам в плоскость конструктивного взаимодействия со светским государством, а значит, обозначающие путь к достижению взаимопонимания на всех уровнях взаимодействия, осуществимы благодаря религиозно‑философским идеям джадидизма. Обращается внимание и на необходимость смягчения крайностей в интерпретировании догматики ислама (своего рода его мировоззренческой перверсии), имеющейся сегодня по большей части на Западе (в Европе) в связи с увеличением числа террористических атак. В России же, где ислам имеет автохтонный характер, эти проявления выражены в меньшей степени, в том числе благодаря непрекращающейся работе отечественных ученых по его переосмыслению. В основу исследования легли концептуальные положения и выводы, содержащиеся в трудах отечественных и зарубежных философов и социологов, использованы методы текстологического и компаративного анализа, а также метод герменевтики – интерпретирование.

This research article aims to establish the specifics of intertextual connections between the Baroque works of the German poet, mystic and visionary Quirinus Kuhlmann (1651–89) and the biblical Book of Psalms. The philosophy of dialogue (M. Buber), the concept of dialogue of cultures (M. Bakhtin and V. Bibler), especially the “dialogue of texts”, as well as the theory of intertextuality (J. Kristeva, R. Barthes, G. Genette) provide the theoretical and philosophical basis for the research. The author uses cultural and historical, biographical, comparative, hermeneutic methods and holistic analysis to analyze the poetics of The Book of Psalms and of Kuhlmann’s works. She shows that for Kuhlmann The Book of Psalms is an “axial” archetext, or a primary meaning- and text-generating text. This biblical book vividly represents the dialogue between man and God, between I and the Eternal Thou. This very aspect was the most important for Kuhlmann’s perception of the world. First of all, the archetextual role of The Book of Psalms is manifested in Kuhlmann’s chief poetic collection, his own Psalter – Der Kuhlpsalter – which contains 150 religious-philosophical hymns. The general motifs of Der Kuhlpsalter have much in common with the Biblical Psalms’ motifs: appeals for help and for growing in fortitude, sincere repentance and confidence in God’s constant concern and love for man and His kinship with humans despite His inscrutability and transcendence, sincere love for God and admiration for His might, ecstatic ascent of human spirit to God. It is the ecstatic principle and aspiration to render verbally unio mystica – a mystical union of soul and God (Jesus) – that are the most important for Kuhlmann, together with messianic and eschatological motifs. That is why the whole Bible as an archetext is important for him, especially the prophetic books, The Song of Songs and the Gospels in addition to The Psalter. Unlike other German poets of the 17th century who paraphrased the Psalms (M. Opitz, P. Fleming, A. Gryphius and others), Kuhlmann does not paraphrase The Psalter but recreates it according to his religious-mystic and sociopolitical views, the concept of Jesuelism based on peculiar ecumenism. The text of the Psalms in Kuhlmann’s oeuvres is used as their intertext, paratext and archetext, but the whole Book of Psalms plays the role of a “text-code”, “text-pattern”, i. e. the archetext upon which the poet bases his works. At the same time, Kuhlmann dares to treat it as his own rival: he davidisiert, that is, in the process of creation he turns ecstatic and thus acts as if he were David the Psalmist himself. The dialogue with The Book of Psalms leads not only to the use of its stable topoi, concepts and rhythmic structures, but also results in a poetic experiment: Kuhlmann actively creates new words and word forms, he often destroys conventional syntax and paves the way for vers libre. Kuhlmann’s poetic experiments influenced the late Baroque, the poetry of Pietism and the pioneering works of F. G. Klopstock, numerous poets of Modernism (especially Expressionism) and Postmodernism.

During the Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophical doctrine contributed to the affirmation of the concepts of love and beauty. Love was perceived as the effect of beauty on the beholder, and physical beauty the outward manifestation of inner beauty, was rehabilitated and prized as the external visible sign of spiritual perfection and goodness.1 For women, therefore, beauty was the necessary compound of moral virtue. Beautiful women achieved a special status as recipients of Platonic love and were extolled as objects of perfection. In particular, a woman's physical appearance was expected to conform to stylized and conventional images, a cultural construct derived from literary and pictorial representations far removed from the actual appearance of real women of the time.2 In literature, perfect feminine beauty is codified through the model proposed by courtly love poems in Petrarchan style, and by courtesy books and tracts. Around the second half of the sixteenth century, we notice the emergence of a critical discourse which, through the practice of parody, urges a reexamination of the representational models of feminine beauty in literature. Francesco Berni, Anton Francesco Doni and Agnolo Firenzuola, among others, composed paradoxical praises which transgressed the model of representing women's physical perfection as sanctioned by Petrarchan poetry and Neoplatonic treatises.3 In this paper I shall first outline the features of perfect physical beauty as they appeared in Petrarca and in his Renaissance imitators, and then I shall focus on texts by Francesco Berni, Anton Francesco Doni and Agnolo Firenzuola, which parodied the models of feminine perfection canonized in the Petrarchan tradition. By using parody and self-parody these authors carried out a discourse of dissent, which

The Fictive Origins of Secular Humanism Justin Neuman The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie. New York: Random House, 2008. Pp. 368. $26.00 cloth. Shortly before the novel's release in the United States, the Sunday edition of the New York Times hailed Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence as a work of serious literary ambition destined to draw critical and popular attention back to Rushdie's prose and away from the political and personal imbroglios that have overshadowed his fiction since 1989. As of yet, this has not been the case; early reviews were mixed at best, and though it is undeniably a captivating and compulsively readable book, The Enchantress of Florence eschews the significant stylistic innovation and overt, high-stakes cultural commentary that energizes Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). Instead, Rushdie's newest novel seeks sanctuary in the mirror of history—in this case, a mirror veiled in gauzy multiculturalist platitudes. Despite its preening, The Enchantress of Florence proves an essential book; in its strongest moments, The Enchantress of Florence repudiates linear, Eurocentric histories of the Renaissance and conjures in their stead a synchronous world of parallel realities in which the seeds of secular humanism flower not once but twice—once in northern Italy and simultaneously in northern India. Read reparatively, Rushdie's novel invites us to reconsider axiomatic tenets about modernity, secularism, and humanism—chief among them the relation between the ethos of modernity and the rejection of an enchanted world. [End Page 675] In terms of genre, The Enchantress of Florence is a globe-traversing prose romance about the vicissitudes of love, power, and storytelling—a romance dressed in the guise of an impeccably researched historical novel (complete with an extensive bibliography). The book's opening vignettes transport the reader, along with a golden-haired stranger, by bullock cart into Fatehpur Sikri, the city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great in the sixteenth century. The stranger, who calls himself Mogor dell'Amore (the "Mogul of Love") and whose real name is Niccolò Vespucci—cousin of Amerigo and namesake of Niccolò Machiavelli—has journeyed from his birthplace in the New World via Florence to Mughal Hindustan with a story he will reveal only to Emperor Akbar himself. Gaining entry to the Mughal court through a series of bold stratagems, feats of linguistic virtuosity, and magic tricks, Mogor dell'Amore garners the favor of Akbar and so begins the teasing, digressive weaving and unweaving of a story that captivates the emperor for longer than Scheherazade plied Shahryar with her tales in The Arabian Nights. The story that emerges unites the lives of three Florentines (Niccolò Machiavelli, Antonino Argalia, and Ago Vespucci) with Akbar's dynasty by way of an intrepid princess named Qara Köz ("Lady Black Eyes")—the tragic heroine of Niccolò's tale and the erstwhile enchantress of Florence. Fictive and real, Florence and Hindustan, East and West evolve as parallel worlds—as "mirrors" of one another, to use one of the novel's favorite metaphors. But so enthralled is the novel with symmetry, parallel, and simultaneity ("We are their dream . . . and they are ours," as one character puts it) that The Enchantress of Florence underplays points of contrast (48). Rushdie's depiction of the birth of modernity in the budding secular humanisms of Florence and Mughal India severs the link—common to Renaissance self-understanding and to centuries of subsequent scholarship—between the rise of humanist sensibilities and the recovery of classical antiquity. According to regnant narratives of the Enlightenment, in fourteenth-century and fifteenth-century Florence the pietistic, feudal social matrix of medieval Christianity deformed in the crucible of the city-state under the twin pressures of mercantile capitalism on the one hand and a revival of classical aesthetics on the other. Individualism, the emergence of linear temporality, and a powerful critique of Christianity depend in no small part on the scholarly methods of textual analysis, hermeneutics, and archival research pioneered by Italian humanists in the fifteenth century—all of which parallel a steady repudiation of the enchanted world of medieval Christendom. Not only can no equivalent milieu of forces be found in Mughal India, Rushdie's depiction [End...

Although many critics credit (or charge) Shakespeare with the first sonnet sequence to depict lovers who not only consummate their sexual relationships but also generally make themselves excessively erotically available, earlier Italian, French, and English sonnet writers had pushed these boundaries. This article contextualizes Shakespeare's unfaithful Petrarchan lovers in relation to those of contemporary and near-contemporary writers who significantly influenced aspects of the English Petrarchan tradition that critics have thought most uniquely Shakespearean: the excessive eroticism, the ambiguously complimentary or unambiguously insulting "praise," and the multiple lovers and beloveds who engage in emotional and sexual triangulation. Chaucer first translated into English Petrarch's Rime Sparse 132 as the first Canticus Troili in Troilus and Criseyde . At least since the mid-sixteenth century, when Wyatt and Sidney had renewed interest in Chaucer, and his versions of Petrarch, there were two distinct strands in English writers' generic developments of Petrarchan lyric. One of these strands directly draws on Petrarch's unattainable because constant, immovable, and chaste love; the other revises that into an intolerable, fickle, and free-wheeling love whose unattainable status is a result of at least one person's promiscuity and all parties' painful awareness of it. Shakespeare's sonnets draw on this second strand. Shakespeare's sequence details its lover's stages of denial, pain, and rage in relationship to two other lovers who are not merely conventionally tortured and torturing but disconcertingly sadistic and masochistic. This significantly revises the conventions of Petrarchan truth, beauty, constancy, and idealized love. These revisions to the Petrarchan tradition place Shakespeare alongside writers who were most influential at the time and therefore would have been important models for imitatio and inventio among English sonnet-writers: Bembo in Italian, Du Bellay and Ronsard in French, and Chaucer, Wyatt, Sidney, Lodge, Daniel, and Drayton in English.