English Sonnet Research Articles

Translations of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets: a Variant Translation by Sigitas Geda

The article examines the translation of William Shakespeare’s sonnets into Lithuanian by the poet Sigitas Geda (Vilnius: Žara, 2009). The authors discuss the importance of translations and interpreting via a third language for the formation of Italian and English sonnet structure; provide a short overview on Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets and their research; present some modern theoretical principles of poetry translation including translation adequacy, equivalence and cultural transfers (James S. Holmes, Francis R.Jones, Raymond van den Broeck, Theodore Horace Savory); examine general linguistic and cultural issues of Lithuanian translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A detailed analysis of the translation of six sonnets by Geda is done applying comparative and close reading methods. The article focuses on the transfer of figures of speech (sonnets 18, 73 and 116) and the deciphering and transformation of meaning (sonnets 27, 66 and 13). The resources include the edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets with commentaries (ed. Katherine Duncan Jones), the research of sonnets and their translations carried out by foreign authors (Manfred Pfister, Niveen Aziz Muhammed Tinah, Douglas Trevor, Lukas Erne, Catherine Belsey, Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells, Zacharij Plavskin, Michail Morozov, Aleksandr Anikst). Occasionally, comparisons are made with translation by Samuil Marshak that had a greatly influence on Geda and with other variant translations of Russian and Lithuanian authors (Aleksys Churginas, Alfonsas Tyruolis-Šešplaukis, Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, Antanas Danielius). In conclusion, sonnets translation by Geda preserves the text structure of the original, its syntactic and semantic nexus – extended metaphor and antithesis; however, it results in a great loss of poetic and semantic features and does not reveal the poetic talent of the translator.

Coleridge: "Work without Hope"

Previous articleNext article No AccessColeridge: "Work without Hope"Graham DavidsonGraham Davidson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 45, Number 1Winter 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24044350 Views: 16Total views on this site © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

English Anti-Petrarchism: Imbalance and Excess in "the Englishe straine" of the Sonnet

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.

Memorializing Mary Tudor: William Byrd and Edward Paston's 'Crowned with Flowers and Lilies'

The manuscript books compiled by Edward Paston (1550–1630) shed light on the musical interests of a Norfolk gentry family at the turn of the seventeenth century, as well as on the contemporary circulation of the music of William Byrd. This article interprets one of the composer’s English-texted songs unique to the collection—the elegy for Mary Tudor, Crowned with Flowers and Lilies —against the context of the Pastons’ religious identity as Catholics. As a through-composed setting of an English sonnet, most likely written by Edward Paston himself, this musical memorial for the late queen reveals another aspect of Byrd’s craft as a composer of vernacular song. The circumstances behind the song’s survival in Paston sources, and analysis of Byrd’s responsive word-setting, suggest a degree of creative collaboration between the two men, including connections with Lady Penelope Rich and the court of Mary Tudor.

“Let Wits Contest”: George Herbert and the English Sonnet Sequence

“Let Wits Contest”: George Herbert and the English Sonnet Sequence

Introduction

Introduction Chauncey Wood Readers of The Temple soon realize that it is comprised of three parts: “The Church-porch,” “The Church,” and “The Church Militant.” However, more advanced readers discover that “The Church Militant” stands apart from the other two in several ways. The first published edition of The Temple in 1633 acknowledged a separation between “The Church” and “The Church Militant” by introducing a printer’s border at the top of the first page of “The Church Militant,” and by having its title as a running header on each succeeding page. In the printed volume the word “FINIS” appears at the end of “The Church,” while in the manuscripts “The Church Militant” is separated from “The Church”: by five pages in the Williams manuscript and by one page in the Bodleian. For many readers this would be reason enough to assume that the volume called The Temple is comprised of two parts: a section called “The Church,” which has its own subdivision into two (“The Church-porch” and “The Church”), and another called “The Church Militant.” But Herbert is a decidedly Christian writer, with a penchant for the number three, as seen in his poem “Trinitie Sunday,” which has three rhymes and three stanzas of three lines each. Accordingly, the desire to see two parts of The Temple as three has proven irresistible to many readers of the volume. There are other problematic structures in the volume as well. Herbert himself invites consideration of internal links and complex patterns by giving the same title to more than one poem: there are five poems entitled “Affliction”; three entitled “Love”; two entitled “Prayer,” and so on. Moreover, there are some clear thematic groupings such as the Easter sequence comprising “Good Friday,” “Redemption,” “Sepulchre,” “Easter,” and “Easter-wings,” as well as the perplexing closing group on the traditional four last things, which omits Hell, has two poems on Judgment, and adds a poem on Love. We therefore need to revisit the structures of The Temple from time to time. [End Page v] These intriguing issues prompted the planning of a conference, co-organized by Chauncey Wood and Patricia H. Ward. We gave the conference the working title “The Structure of The Temple; Structures in The Temple.” Scholars from around the country and from as far away as Japan gathered at the College of Charleston on March 8, 2013, to discuss these kinds of structural questions, and the nine papers gathered here represent both the vigor and diversity of response critical attention and commentary that the conference encouraged. The first essay in our collection is “The Poet as Prophet: Ending The Temple,” by Adele Davidson, which offers a detailed argument for a tripartite structure of The Temple based upon the traditional three offices of Christ: prophet, priest, and king. In addition, the essay opens up a new avenue of Herbertian research by unearthing a number of acrostics in “The Church Militant.” Debra Rienstra also takes a broad view of The Temple, arguing that the English sonnet sequences not only served as a convenient antagonist for Herbert, because of its adoration of the physical rather than the spiritual, but also furnished him with the secular pattern of digression, retreat, and recapitulation that came to serve him well in his poetic presentation of the spiritual life. Paul Dyck undertakes another overview of Herbert in “Approaching the Table: Invitation and the Structure of Herbert’s ‘The Church.’ ” Noting that “The Church” both begins and ends with a table, thereby pointing towards a Eucharistic structure, Dyck nevertheless notes that Herbert cycles back and forth through his perspectives, now focusing on the physical church, now on the metaphysical. Moving to a more specific focus on individual poems, Kensei Nishikawa’s essay, “God and the Poet Transposed: The Thou-I Chiasmus in George Herbert’s Poetry,” examines the reciprocal relationship that the chiastic form underlies, and demonstrates how this form shows “the mutual submission of selves which paradoxically restores their respective freedom.” Robert Kilgore’s essay “From ‘Employment’ (I) to ‘Grace’: George Herbert’s Restructuring of Work,” discovers a sequence of interrelationships among five poems – “Employment” (I), “The Holy Scriptures” (I) and (II), “Whitsunday,” and “Grace” – based upon a...

An Obscured Tradition: The Sonnet and its Fourteen-Line Predecessors

The sonnet in English is usually located as a sixteenth-century innovation, firmly linked to Italian influences, and frequently associated with a distinctively modern consciousness. Yet the speed and comfort with which the form settled into English reflects the fact that the sonnet per se was preceded by a longstanding tradition of 14-line poems in English written in forms derived from French. Indeed, in terms of formal features, the earliest sonnets in English frequently fray into earlier forms, sharing more with the roundel than with later sonnets. This article considers a number of features of style and content that various writers on the sonnet have argued to be characteristic, sometimes definitive, of the sonnet. These features include repetition, formal unity/division of octave and sestet, use of the volta, asymmetry, argument and development, and a preoccupation with contradictions and the self. The article shows that, while it is true that these features are characteristic of many sonnets, they are not peculiarly characteristic of sonnets, and they can all be found in earlier 14-line poems. Furthermore, a number of the earliest sonnets in English do not themselves possess these ‘sonnet-like’ characteristics. The otherness and the modernity of the sonnet have thus been overstated.

The art of the sonnet

Few poetic forms have found more uses than the sonnet in English, and none is now more recognizable. It is one of the longest-lived of verse forms, and one of the briefest. A mere fourteen lines, fashioned by intricate rhymes, it is, as Dante Gabriel Rossetti called it, 'a moment's monument'. From the Renaissance to the present, the sonnet has given poets a superb vehicle for private contemplation, introspection, and the expression of passionate feelings and thoughts. Art of the Sonnet collects one hundred exemplary sonnets of the English language (and a few sonnets in translation), representing highlights in the history of the sonnet, accompanied by short commentaries on each of the poems. The commentaries by Stephen Burt and David Mikics offer new perspectives and insights, and, taken together, demonstrate the enduring as well as changing nature of the sonnet. The authors serve as guides to some of the most-celebrated sonnets in English as well as less-well-known gems by nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets. Also included is a general introductory essay, in which the authors examine the sonnet form and its long and fascinating history, from its origin in medieval Sicily to its English appropriation in the sixteenth century to sonnet writing today in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking parts of the world.

Naissance et vie éditoriale du recueil de sonnets amoureux anglais (1557-1599): quelques enjeux génériques et socio-littéraires

Cécile Alduy’s and Daniel Maira’s recent works on the French canzoniere have prompted the writing of this article. Its aim is to tackle the issue of the materiality of the English sonnet sequences, exploring how they were shaped as books, and raising hypotheses about the significance of editorial forms. The sonnet sequence originated in Tottel’s Miscellany, a poetic collection first published in 1557. A lesser-known major event in the history of the sonnet sequence was the 1582 publication of Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia or a Divine Centurie of Love, in which the codes of the published sonnet sequence are established. The 1590 sonnet sequence is then characterized by a desire for unity, and by an increased visual dimension conveyed by the use of ornament. The book then becomes akin to a precious object. If there was any mannerism in the sonneteer’s writing, it was matched by the stationers’ desire for recognition as craftsmen.

‘Oft turning others’ leaves’ : la contrainte de l’imitatio dans les sonnets anglais des xvie et xviie siècles

L’application des notions de code et de contrainte à la poésie anglaise des xvie et xviie siècles paraît à première vue aller de soi, puisque la littérature de cette époque est fondée sur l’imitation de codes et de topoï. Sir Philip Sidney, dans son recueil de sonnets Astrophil and Stella, semble pourtant amorcer une révolte poétique contre cette obligation. Néanmoins, il se conforme à une nouvelle contrainte, celle de la poésie pétrarquienne de l’amour impossible, exprimée dans les poèmes par une réflexion sur l’écriture poétique qui semble vouée à l’échec.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Linguistics in the Study and Teaching of Literature

Linguistics can provide a technical vocabulary for talking about language, and an understanding of how everyday language is structured and functions. Literary texts are made from language, and although the relation between language in literature and language in general is not fully understood, linguistics can help theorize literary language, and suggest ways of thinking about literary form, and the relation between form and meaning in literature.

The Sonnets of Lea Goldberg

This article examines the sonnets of Lea Goldberg. In contrast to the idea of Modernity, which is associated with the attempt to remove the chains of tradition and the past and to forget them entirely, Goldberg confronted the history of traditional structures of poetry precisely at the time of the Second World War, composing sixty-six sonnets, six elegies, eleven terzinas (terza rima), and in complete structural contrast, but with accordance with a new cultural-historical awareness, also many folk songs. Her choice of an accepted and routine aesthetic style was not simply an aesthetic reaction, or act of excessive admiration for the ancient, nor was it a paradoxical attempt toward an independent expression, but, instead, a persistent and ambitious choice, filled with the sense of historical responsibility. Lea Goldberg's first acquaintance with the sonnet was probably with the Russian and the German versions. Through German and Russian translations, she was surely acquainted with the Italian, as well as with the French and English sonnets. She immersed herself in the work of Emmanuel Ha-Romi, and undoubtedly knew as well the Hebrew sonnets of Tchernichovsky, Shteinberg, Fichman, Shalom, and Karni. Surely, Lea Goldberg does not treat her sonnets in the most conservative traditional manner, and at a second and a third glance, it is surprising to recognize the measure of liberties taken by her. Petrarchan and Shakespearian pangs of love and romantic themes are the subject of most of the sonnets, but several of them are directly concerned with the historical experience of the war, and they are, I would like to suggest, the exception that proves the rule. Significance: On the occasion of the publication of the first complete collection of Goldberg's published and unpublished sonnets, including manuscript versions and translations. The article includes a first general detailed description of Goldberg's use of the genre and a detailed close reading analysis of a sonnet.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's New Arcadia

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Men Who Weep and Wail: Masculinity and Emotion in Sidney's <i>New Arcadia</i>

"Matters of love as of discourse": The English Sonnet, 1560–1580

"Matters of love as of discourse": The English Sonnet, 1560–1580

The Romantic Sonnet Revival: Opening the Sonnet's Crypt

AbstractDiscussions of the sonnet tradition often claim that the sonnet is ‘the most popular, enduring, and widely used poetic form in English.’ At first glance, the Romantic period in English seems to bear out these claims fully. Keats and Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake – the six, standard male authors of the Romantic‐period canon – all wrote sonnets of some type, and undeniably the form achieved extraordinary popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, after its Elizabethan heyday, the sonnet in English had languished as a neglected and decidedly unfashionable form. Before the rise of Romanticism, the sonnet form in the 18th century appeared to be dead, a defunct and antiquated genre. Romanticism resurrected the sonnet and in doing so invented our notion of its widespread favor and timeless appeal. The sonnet, even a Shakespeare sonnet, only becomes a preeminent poetic genre in the age of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote some of the most familiar sonnets in British literature. More accurately, however, we should credit the sonnet's revival to an age of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anna Seward; poets, notably women poets, who, lying now at the margins of the male‐dominated Romantic canon, were essentially responsible for engaging and recuperating the moribund sonnet tradition in English. The question is repeatedly asked: Why did Romantic poets choose to revive such an outmoded form? A recent surge in critical attention to the Romantic sonnet, as part of Romanticist criticism's larger project of reclaiming texts and authors (especially women authors) long neglected and excluded by the standard canon, explores how the compact and demanding form of the sonnet could open up a space outside of the dominant literary authority in which poetic voices, excluded by gender or class, could appropriate for themselves the legitimacy of a cultural tradition that had long been closed. In opening the sonnet's 18th‐century crypt, Romanticism translates the abject relics of a dead poetic structure into a revitalized poetic space in which natural, spontaneous sentiment and diction could find expression.

Zayde: A Spanish Romance by comtesse de Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne Lafayette (review)

160Women in French Studies Finch's translations are simultaneously bold and elegant; this is notably the first translation of Labé's poetry that employs the original Italian rhyme scheme used by Labé rather than that of the English sonnet. Because of working within the confines of the rhythm and rhyme of the Italian sonnet in modem English, Finch's word choice may determine meanings that are left more nuanced in the original text. However, Finch succeeds at soliciting parallel emotional intensity, one of the hallmarks of Labé's poems. Overall, both translations at times favor readability and flow over precision, but never, in my opinion, to the extent that it compromises Labé's intent. After all, the beauty ofthe double-face style is that it compels the reader to examine and experience first-hand the sixteenth-century text in spite of varying levels of training and competency. Because ofits researched bibliography and extensive notes in addition to the knowledgeable textual presentation, this text will become the critical point de départ for critical studies on Labé's corpus for years to come. Appearing in tandem with the publication of Mireille Huchon's controversial study, Louise Labé : une créature de papier (Geneva: Droz, 2006), where she argues that Labé's works essentially amount to a literary hoax by an enthusiastic and playful group ofLyonnais male poets, students and scholars alike will utilize this edition as they ponder the mysteries of one of the most remarkable females of the Northern European Renaissance. Sinda K. VanderpoolBaylor University Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de. Zayde: A Spanish Romance. Ed and trans. Nicholas D. Paige. The Other Voice in Early Modern Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. ix-xxix; 210. ISBN: 978-0-226-46851-8. $45.00 (Cloth). ISBN: 978-0-22646852 -5. $18.00 (Paper). As a dix-septièmiste who has studied the early modern novel, I am delighted with this latest addition to the series The Other Voice in Early Modem Europe, published by the University of Chicago Press. Fellow dix-septièmiste Nicholas Paige has brought us an English version of Madame de Lafayette's Zayde, the first translation available in more than 200 years. It contains the translated novel, two introductions and two bibliographies. The series editors' introduction, by Margaret L. King and Albert Rabil Jr., provides an historical and cultural overview of early modern Europe and in particular the role of the "other voice." A section entitled "The Old Voice and the Other Voice" is followed by "Traditional Views of Women, 500 BCE-1500 CE," which discusses Greek, Roman, and Medieval perspectives, including the importance of Christianity, economic concerns, and family roles. The Introduction concludes with "The Other Voice, 1300-1700," which addresses humanism, Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies, the querelle des Book Reviews1 6 1 femmes, the witch trials, women authors, women patrons, and issues of chastity, power, speech, and knowledge. Next comes Paige's volume editor's introduction, which contains three categories: his reflections on "the other voice," a biographical sketch of Madame de Lafayette's life and works, and an analysis of Zayde itself. There is an especially useful summary of the history of the novel and the marginalization of its non-realist sub-genres, in which Paige notes that it is no accident that these now lesser-known genres were often associated with women. Key amongst these is the romance, popular in France in the first part of the seventeenth-century and made famous by Honoré d'Urfé's L 'Astrée. While the genre was later dismissed, in its day the romance was well-respected and even considered to be a virtual catalog of the knowledge of the time. Thus, Paige suggests, it is not surprising that a literary icon such as Lafayette should choose to take it up. However, as with many of her works, Lafayette herself never openly admitted to authoring Zayde. The novel was instead attributed to Jean-Regnault de Segrais; it was only after her death that Segrais would reveal Lafayette's authorship oíZayde. Paige proposes that the text be read as a "pastiche of romance." Although...

“The Soote Season”: Surrey and the Amatory Elegy

There is still little understanding of the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. For many, he is simply the man who introduced the forms (English sonnet and blank verse) that Shakespeare was to p...

Ottava Rima and Novelistic Discourse

In Discourse in Novel, Mikhail Bakhtin goes to some lengths to distinguish novelistic from poetic discourse. And yet, as noted by Neil Roberts (1), he uses a poetic text, Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, as one of his prime examples of novelistic discourse (Bakhtin 322-24, 329). Bakhtin's theory is that poetic genres are monologic, presupposing the unity of language system and . . . of poet's individuality, as opposed to novel, which is dialogic, heteroglot, multivoiced, multistyled and often multi-languaged (264-65). This paper contends that, by Bakhtin's own criteria, some verse forms are especially well designed for novelistic discourse. The form chosen for particular scrutiny is ottava rima, a stanza that has been used for narrative purposes for many centuries, originating in Italian oral tradition of cantastorie (Wilkins 9-10; De Robertis 9-15). Clearly, ottava rima could not have originated as an English oral form, for it requires too many rhymes for this rhyme-poor, relatively uninflected language. Using a heroic line-in Italian hendecasyllabic, in English iambic pentameter-the stanza's rhyme scheme is ABABABCC. Thus it resembles English sonnet in a sense, for it begins with an alternating structure and concludes with a couplet that is alien to both rhymes and rhyme pattern that precede it. As with this type of sonnet, a potential appears for a rupture in discourse between alternating structure and couplet. Alternating verse tends to lean forward not to next line but

Juan Ramon Jimenez, traductor de Shakespeare

Juan Racoon Jimenez, traductor de Shakespeare. By Carmen Perez Romero. Huelva: Ediciones de la Fundaci6n Juan Racoon Jimenez. 1999. 325 pages. Serious students of Juan Ramon Jimenez know of his longstanding and great admiration for English, Irish and North American poetry, and, in particular, for William Shakespeare, whom he regarded as the greatest figure in Western culture. They may also recall that he informed his friend Juan Guerrero Ruiz of his interest in translating the complete works of Shakespeare. Carmen Perez Romero, in the present study, has provided us with significant new evidence of the seriousness and importance of this intention. She has in her possession, thanks to the good offices of Francisco Hernandez-Pinzon Jimenez, a copy of the handwritten manuscripts of Jim& nez's translations of the first 35 sonnets of Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets, 154 poems that constitute without doubt the most important of Shakespeare's nondramatic works. Perez Romero's solid, scholarly study points out that this is the first time that the systematic translation into Spanish of all the English sonnets was attempted and provides a convincing demonstration that Jimenez's Sonetos espirituales, as well as Monumento de amor and Estio, are at least partially impregnated with the spirit and style-themes, images and expressive patterns-of Shakespeare's sonnets. Perez Romero is eminently qualified to undertake this study. She has spent years tracking down the traces and echoes of English and North American poetry in the Spanish Nobel Laureate, in her many valuable articles and most notably in her book, Juan Ramon Jimenez y la poesia anglosajona (Universidad de Estremadura, 1992). She has also done important work on the English sonnet in both the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The plan of her present study is threefold: to examine the first sonnets of Jimenez included in Ninfeas (10 sonnets), Almas de violeta (3 sonnets) and Rimas (4 sonnets), with a view to studying his early sonnet production and its evolution; to provide the reader with a bilingual edition of the 35 Shakespearian sonnets, giving the original English version on one page and the Spanish poet's translation on the opposite page, with very good commentary of the English sonnets, and variant readings of the Spanish translations drawn from the manuscripts; and to carry out a comparative study of Jimenez's translations of the English sonnets and his own poetry, included in the Sonetos espirituales, Monumento de amor and Estio. During the course of this detailed and well-documented study, one reads with pleasure the excellent stylistic analyses of Jimenez's early sonnets, with attention to their evolution and the poet's disciplined control of this demanding genre. Perez Romero gives convincing reasons for the dating of the Spanish translations as occurring between 1913 and 1915, the most important of which was his intense involvement with the person who was soon to become his wife, Zenobia Camprubi, without whose help the translations would have been impossible. Perez Romero is also careful to point out that these are rough, unfinished and literal translations, by no means ready for publication. …

“An Englishe box”: Calvinism and Commodities in Anne Lok’sA Meditation of a Penitent Sinner

Anne Lok’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner (1560), the first sonnet sequence in English, articulates changing conceptions of social authority in early Elizabethan England through the formal tension of the sonnet sequence—the strain between sonnet and sequence, lyric and narrative. This strain is apparent in the complex relation between the individual sonnets of the sequence and the text of Psalm 51 which appears in the margin. The psalm provides a model for the speaker’s lyric authority, but it also provides a narrative of the founding of the New Jerusalem which tacitly celebrates England’s return to Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth. By creating a lyric authority out of the logic of commodity circulation and Calvinism, however, the speaker tacitly challenges Elizabeth’s assertion of absolute monarchical power. The authority of Lok’s speaker consequently points to the need to reimagine the class dynamics embodied in the English sonnet.