period and in no other country did the love-sonnet dominate literature to a greater extent than in England between 1591 and 1597.
Of sonnets to patrons between 1591 and 1597, of which detached specimens may be found in nearly every published book of the period, the chief collections were:
II. Sonnets to patrons, 1591-7.
A long series of sonnets prefixed to ‘Poetical Exercises of a Vacant Hour’ by King James VI of Scotland, 1591; twenty-three sonnets in Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Four Letters and certain Sonnets touching Robert Greene’ (1592), including Edmund Spenser’s fine sonnet of compliment addressed to Harvey; a series of sonnets to noble patronesses by Constable circulated in manuscript about 1592 (first printed in ‘Harleian Miscellany,’ 1813, ix. 491); six adulatory sonnets appended by Barnabe Barnes to his ‘Parthenophil’ in May 1593; four sonnets to ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s soul,’ prefixed to the first edition of Sidney’s ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595); seventeen sonnets which were originally prefixed to the first edition of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene,’ bk. i.-iii., in 1590, and were reprinted in the edition of 1596; [440] sixty sonnets to peers, peeresses, and officers of state, appended to Henry Locke’s (or Lok’s) ‘Ecclesiasticus’ (1597); forty sonnets by Joshua Sylvester addressed to Henry IV of France ‘upon the late miraculous peace in Fraunce’ (1599); Sir John Davies’s series of twenty-six octosyllabic sonnets, which he entitled ‘Hymnes of Astræa,’ all extravagantly eulogising Queen Elizabeth (1599).
III. Sonnets on philosophy and religion.
The collected sonnets on religion and philosophy that appeared in the period 1591-7 include sixteen ‘Spirituall Sonnettes to the honour of God and Hys Saynts,’ written by Constable about 1593, and circulated only in manuscript; these were first printed from a manuscript in the Harleian collection (5993) by Thomas Park in ‘Heliconia,’ 1815, vol. ii. In 1595 Barnabe Barnes published
a ‘Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets,’ and, in dedicating the collection to Toby Matthew, bishop of Durham, mentions that they were written a year before, while travelling in France. They are closely modelled on the two series of ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ which the Abbé Jacques de Billy published in Paris in 1573 and 1578 respectively. A long series of ‘Sonnets Spirituels’ written by Anne de Marquets, a sister of the Dominican Order, who died at Poissy in 1598, was first published in Paris in 1605. In 1594 George Chapman published ten sonnets in praise of philosophy, which he entitled ‘A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy.’ In the opening poem he states that his aim was to dissuade poets from singing in sonnets ‘Love’s Sensual Empery.’ In 1597 Henry Locke (or Lok) appended to his verse-rendering of Ecclesiastes [441a] a collection of ‘Sundrie Sonets of Christian Passions, with other Affectionate Sonets of a Feeling Conscience.’ Lok had in 1593 obtained a license to publish ‘a hundred Sonnets on Meditation, Humiliation, and Prayer,’ but that work is not extant. In the volume of 1597 his sonnets on religious or philosophical themes number no fewer than three hundred and twenty-eight. [441b]
Thus in the total of sonnets published between 1591 and 1597 must be included at least five hundred sonnets addressed to patrons, and as many on philosophy and religion. The aggregate far exceeds two thousand.