Latin lyric was both changed in mode by the Renaissance and increased in volume. The fifteenth century turned from the modes of the medieval Latin lyric to more direct imitation of Vergil and Ovid, Catullus and Horace. Meantime the tradition of writing Latin verse in school continued to make every Renaissance author familiar with this metric. The difference was that he now used it in his own mature composition. For humanism demanded even of vernacular poets such Latin stanzas as might introduce the works of their friends, compliment their patrons, or celebrate state weddings, victories, and solemn entries. Though even published Latin lyrics were often themes, they at least promoted and confirmed two pervasive Renaissance literary habits: control of classical metric, and imitation. Throughout the Renaissance there is to be assumed in the back of a poet’s mind a fund of classical measures and phrases.
But Renaissance Latin lyrics are by no means all themes. For some poets Latin was really the lyric medium. Humanistic anxiety and pretense about classical diction might, indeed, hinder lyric, but could not suppress it. Pontano (1426-1503), whose Latin poems fill nearly seven hundred modern pages, wrote not a few as directly and utterly lyrical as his Naenia. Jan Everaerts of Mechlin, known to literature as Secundus (1511-1536), even started a lyric vogue in Italy and France, and later in England, with his Basia. Obviously inspired by Catullus, they had a quality and influence of their own.
(b) Italy and England
The progress of vernacular lyric was steadiest in Italy because there the vernacular triumph had been recognized earliest and most consistently. The medieval lyric forms derived generically from Provençal—canzone, ballata, sestina, and sonetto—had all been explored by Dante; and one of them, the sonnet, had received from Petrarch a stamp that gave it European currency. Beside the humanist cult of Augustan Latin rose a cult of Petrarch as a vernacular classic. From Petrarch himself and through his fifteenth-century imitators the sonnet became the most widespread lyric mode both for a single, self-sufficient lyric and as a lyric unit in a narrative chain.
In England, where the range of medieval stanzas had been narrower, fifteenth-century lyric was meager. “The age of transition,” as it has been called apologetically, was a period of medieval decadence, of stalling in medieval patterns. Without much stir of ideas, without general sureness in verse technic, it is often diffuse and straggling, as in Lydgate. Skelton’s Latin learning remained quite apart from his slack and boisterous English verse; and English fifteenth-century lyric generally is both conventional and feeble. The sixteenth-century revival that was sought in Petrarch led here, as elsewhere, to the prevalence of sonnets. Its pioneer was Sir Thomas Wiat (1503-1542). Starting with that connection of lyric with music which was to be a preoccupation of Ronsard, appreciating Chaucer, but reading him in imperfect texts, he turned early from a few rondeaux of the Marot type to the Petrarchan sonnet. Two thirds of his sonnets are translations or echoes of Petrarch himself, or are derived from his imitators. Wiat pursued Italian further in octaves and terza rima and seems to have read, besides Ariosto, Alamanni, Navagero, and Castiglione, the Poetica of Trissino (1529). The previous century had brought Italian influences on English learning; Wiat brought the first clearly literary influence since Boccaccio’s on Chaucer. His friend Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), carried this forward. Similarly following Petrarch and the Petrarchans, and experimenting with terza rima and other stanzas, he made Italian metric more familiar, and in particular helped to establish among the Elizabethans that form of sonnet which is called Shaksperian.
(c) France
France shows most distinctly the whole Renaissance lyric history. The beginning of the history in the medieval vernacular art of refrain stanzas had shown there the most systematic elaboration. In 1501 Antoine Vérard printed at Paris the huge collection of balades, rondeaux, and virelais entitled Le jardin de plaisance et fleur de rhétorique. Rhétorique, or more specifically seconde rhétorique, means the art of verse; the introduction expounds this in an anonymous treatise. Pierre Fabri incorporated the treatise in his Grande et vraie art de pleine rhétorique (Rouen, 1521). The pleine signifies merely the inclusion of both prose (Part I) and verse (Part II). Fullness in any other sense is hardly to be found in the rhétoriques of the period. They furnish mainly figures of speech and verse forms. They are style books; for the so-called school of the rhétoriqueurs was devoted mainly to verbal and metrical ingenuities.
But as Villon had shown in the early fifteenth century that the balade was not dead, so as the century waned Jean Lemaire (1473 to about 1520) was poet enough to be more than rhétoriqueur. True, he continued the jingling iteration. A double virelay composed on two rhymes begins as follows:
Hautains esprits du grand royal pourpris,