“The course of true love never did run smooth”: The Late Elizabethan Sonnet and Shakespearean Criticism

Abstract

This paper attempts to uncover some of the reasons why the Elizabethan sonnet sequences have received little critical attention in France. It quickly appears that such neglect might be attributed to the continuing centrality of the Romantic construction of Shakespeare as a sublime figure that embodies Nature and as a “man of the mob” (Richard Wilson). Such a conception has been detrimental to the study of the Elizabethan sonneteers, who have often been seen as poetasters slavishly responding to the requests of powerful patrons by producing artificial, derivative and conventional poems. They have also suffered from the consequences of a more or less implicit periodization which values the culture of the early 17th century over that of the late 16th century. Such conceptions have weighed on the formation of the canon in a research field comprising comparatively few academics in France, restricting the range of authors studied and making Shakespeare’s aura even brighter. Other factors, such as the centrality of the competitive exams (CAPES, agrégation) and the format of traditional pedagogical exercises might have played an indirect role as well. A renewal of interest in Elizabethan poetry seems to have occurred in French academia since the mid-2000s notwithstanding.