Francis, Thou Art Translated: Petrarch Metamorphosed in English, 1380-1595


Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, 1.1 (2011) 
ISSN: 2158-3846 (online) 
http://journals.oregondigital.org/hsda/ 
DOI: 10.5399/uo/HSDA.1.1.1196  
 

  80 

 

Francis, Thou Art Translated:  
Petrarch Metamorphosed in English, 1380-1595 

Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University 

Abstract: English translation of Petrarch—translation that is also 
metamorphosis in a manner that Petrarch would have recognized—begins 
with Chaucer's rendition of Rvf 132 as the canticus Troili in the first book of 
Troilus and Criseyde, an inaugural moment of lyric imitation long thought 
unique in Chaucer's work. Yet suggestive claims have been made that Rvf 189 
was also rendered by Chaucer as Troilus' second canticus in book V, within a 
context inclusive of additional Petrarchan influences on Chaucer. Chaucer's 
versions, and their contextualization in the Troilus, had definite 
consequences for Petrarchan translation when it resumed with the Henrician 
poets Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard a century and a half later. For the 
Tudor poets living under the tyranny of Henry VIII the Petrarch-inspired 
sonnet offered a richly articulated space of private reflection that did not fail 
to register the pressure of court politics. Wyatt's Petrarchan translations in the 
Egerton manuscript represent a privileged part of his lyric production, a 
preference that the Earl of Surrey absorbed for his very different poetic 
program, one designed to exalt both aristocratic lineage and an aureate 
genealogy of poets including Virgil, Dante, and Chaucer along with Petrarch 
and Wyatt. Mediated by multiple editions of Tottel's Songs and Sonnettes 
between 1557 and 1594, the legacy of Wyatt's and Surrey's Petrarchan 
translations reached the Elizabethans with an emphasis on Petrarch's poetic 
supremacy that stimulated emulation by the young Shakespeare. His tragedy 
Romeo and Juliet threw down a challenge to Petrarch with respect to sonnet 
forms, sonnet rhetoric, and the typical story of enamorment, a story still 
discernibly affiliated with Chaucer's Troilus. 

 
“And I exhort the unlearned, by reding to learne to bee more skillful, 
and to purge that swinelike grossenesse, that maketh the swete majerome 
not to smell to their delight.” (Richard Tottel, “To the reder,” 1557) 

 
“‘Assist me, some extemporal god of rime, for I am sure I shall turn  
sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio.’” 
(William Shakespeare, Love’s Labors Lost, I.ii.105-106) 

My title alludes, with an apotropaic nod to Bottom’s appearance in Shakespeare’s 
Midsummer Night’s Dream, to translation as metamorphosis. Or perhaps rather to 
metamorphosis as a way of speaking about translation, specifically Tudor translation of 

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Petrarch into English as a principal agent for “purging that swinelike grossenesse” Tottel 
deplores (a counsel that could fairly be directed at Bottom himself). The book that the Tudor 
poets reckoned with, Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (hereafter Rvf), though titled 
after its formal dispersiveness, is indebted for thematic coherence to the idea of 
metamorphosis: Laura’s image is constantly metamorphosed in the speaker’s memory and 
his passion subjects him to metamorphosis; most important, the poetry itself results from 
metamorphosis. As Robert Durling remarked, there are some transformations in “Nel dolce 
tempo de la prima etade” (Rvf 23) that are figures of sublimation, while some suggest that 
poetry is an expression for emotions otherwise blocked by sexual fear (Petrarca Lyric, 22-
29). Petrarch offers an etiology of poetry as the therapeutic discharge in language of 
repressed desire (23.4: “perché cantando il duol si disacerba”): as a translation of desire, in 
other words. Indeed, explicitly so in a scene representing internal experience transmuted 
into language, the speaker of the canzone, his voice silenced by Laura’s interdict, cries out 
his self-alienation through ink and paper: “gridai con carta e con incostro: / non son mio, 
no…” (23.99-100; see Barkan 211). The cry was destined to resonate as “I am not myne, I am 
not myne” in an anonymous translation of the canzone, published in Richard Tottel’s 
influential anthology of 1557 (no. 154.154; see also no. 206), and would be reiterated in 
various guises by English Petrarchan personae such as Sidney’s Astrophil (Astrophel no. 
45.14: “I am not I: pity the tale of me”) and Shakespeare’s Romeo (Romeo and Juliet [Rom.]: 
I.i 196-97 “Tut, I have lost myself; I am not here / This is not Romeo, he’s some other 
where”).1 

In a more prosaic sense Petrarch’s vernacular poetry, which harvests rich traditions of 
Latin and Romance lyric, is always already translation, if not always as transparently as in 
the case of Rvf 145, “Ponmi ove’l sole occide i fiori e l’erba” a consistent imitation of 
Horace’s Carmen I.22.17-24, with a conclusion that alludes to Propertius. In a letter to 
Boccaccio, relying on Senecan precedents, Petrarch himself described his preferred practice 
of creative imitation through the analogy of the son’s resemblance to his father, to suggest 
how a new work might resemble but differ from its original (Fam. 23.19.11-12; see Pigman; 
Greene, “Petrarch”; Rossiter 21-22). Like Boccaccio and Dante, Petrarch, despite his 
excursion into direct translation in the case of Boccaccio’s Tale of Griselda, eschewed and 
probably disdained the serviceable form of translation known as volgarizzamento, aiming 
instead at a transformative art of imitation.2 His most talented imitators followed his 
example: it has been observed of Wyatt’s translations of the psalms that “the translator at 
once pays homage to the original text and transforms it into the representation of his own 
voice and culture” (Greenblatt 120). 

The instances discussed in this essay are a minute sampling of the reception of 
Petrarch’s poetry in Renaissance English letters and exemplify only a few of the ways 
Petrarch’s texts are translated so as to generate new works. Chaucer incorporated Petrarchan 
lyric into the narrative development of Troilus and Criseyde. Thomas Wyatt and Henry 
Howard, Earl of Surrey, adopt the voice of the Petrarchan subject and a form—the “pretty 
roome” of the sonnet, in John Donne’s phrase, or “small parcells” in Tottel’s—where a 
politically resistant kind of writing and self-fashioning finds shelter (Greenblatt 155-56, 



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Foley 37). For these two poets the Petrarchan sonnet “creates a tiny private space in which, 
while bewailing its own powerlessness, the speaking voice can assert its superiority of 
judgment and feeling, its integrity, or at least its ironic self-knowledge in a faithless and 
unsympathetic world” (Heale 105). For Shakespeare, Petrarch the laureate poet furnishes 
both mythologized characters and rhetorical devices for The Most Excellent and Lamentable 
Tragedie of Romeo, and Iuliet. As it happens, these three moments of Petrarchan influence 
display a suggestive coherence and continuity. 

In this metamorphic context even what appears to be close translation, such as “Set me 
wheras the sonne dothe perch the grene” (Howard no. 3), a version, atypically faithful for 
Surrey, of Rvf 145—Petrarch’s version, as we saw, of lines from a Horatian ode—is rather a 
carefully calibrated imitative gesture in which the poem’s theme of fidelity resonates 
metapoetically with the fact of translation itself. In transforming his classical models, 
Petrarch’s poem enumerates twenty-six conditions. These are deployed in lines 1-4 as 
oppositions expressed by pairs of verses, in lines 5-8 as pairs of opposed conditions divided 
by caesurae, and in lines 9-11 in groups of three and even four per verse: only in the last 
line does the poem regain a verse-filling phrase. Petrarch’s poem, in effect a highly 
organized list, was doubtless congenial to the additive, paratactic style Surrey adopted in 
his sonnets (Thomson 201-203, Zitner 523, Ferry 79, Heale 90-91), for Surrey follows 
Petrarch’s articulation closely and adopts Petrarch’s anaphora on “Ponmi” for the quatrains 
and tercets with his own “Set me” for all but the last three lines, where a departure is 
required by the final couplet. George Puttenham, in his Arte of English Poesy (published 
1589) cited Surrey’s version for its use of anaphora and quoted it as an example of the 
“distributor” [merismus], a strategy of amplification for orators. The rhetorical elaboration is 
necessary, however, for Surrey’s poem begins as a lover’s boast but ends as a promise of 
faith, “a mnemonic epigram equal to a vow.” As William Sessions observes, “Surrey enacts 
an objective and historically liturgical performance. A great deal of the text appears, in fact, 
to be a reinscription of the exchange of wedding vows, pronounced in 1532, the year of 
Surrey’s wedding, in English in the middle of a Latin ceremony” (201). In this context, even 
Propertius’s Latin (Elegiae 2.15.36: “huius ero vivus, mortuus huius ero”), reminiscent of 
the Roman legal formula of exchange that stands behind Petrarch’s penultimate line (“sarò 
qual fui, vivrò com’io son visso”), proves functional in underwriting the transformation of 
the Italian poem into an English liturgical act, “the original epigrammatic drive of the 
sonnet becoming ceremonious language” (Sessions 200). Surrey’s claim of fidelity, at once 
personal affirmation and historical document, is also metapoetically “faithful”: cognizant of 
the Latin sources transferred into Petrarch’s vernacular, Surrey makes his translation of 
Petrarch’s Italian the pledge of a literary constancy and continuity worthy of the “courtly 
maker,” the humanist and laureate poet that Surrey aspired to be. 

Petrarch in Troilus and Criseyde 
Early studies by E.H. Wilkins and Patricia Thomson emphasized the supposed mistakes 

and padding of Chaucer’s translation of the fourteen lines of Rvf 132, “S’amor non è,” into 
twenty-one lines of rhyme royal in the Troilus (I.400-421). Thomson acknowledges that the 



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canticus “anticipates future developments in the hero’s personality” and that the sonnet 
“does make its own contribution to Troilus and Criseyde” but her treatment tends to 
minimize Petrarch’s impact on the narrative text, and thus on Chaucer in general (Thomson 
164-65). I will rather proceed with the assumption, which I borrow from several recent 
critics, that to consider the lyric in its context explains Chaucer’s choices as translator better 
than taking the stanzas in isolation. In short, we are dealing not with volgarizzamento, but 
imitation, and with a long and ambitious poem demonstrably articulated as a dialectic of 
lyric and narrative modes (Boitani, Tragic 56-74; Rossiter 109-31). 

Thus for each stanza of his translation, Chaucer adopts different expedients. In the first 
line, Chaucer notoriously takes the first line to mean “If no such thing as love exists” rather 
than—as Petrarch’s line is usually understood—that love is the cause of what he feels (“S’ 
amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento?”). But Chaucer’s version is in fact consistent 
with traditional poetic renderings in Italian of the scholastic quaestio regarding the 
existence and nature of love, and it is thus both conceivable and defensible that his 
translation is a willful departure from the received interpretation.3 The first four lines of the 
stanza mirror the first four of Petrarch’s quatrain, but after the fourth Chaucer inserts an 
additional three lines, not found in Petrarch, which frame Troilus’s desire in terms at once 
sensual (Love’s adversities are “savory”) and suggestive of an unslakable spiritual thirst 
(V.406: “For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke”), or perhaps a parody of such a thirst, 
thus glossing Troilus’s besotted idolatry of Criseide.4 The second stanza is the least altered: 
Chaucer retains Petrarch’s quatrain topics in order, filling out the rhyme royal stanza with 
one added line in the middle (410: “I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte”). In the third stanza 
Chaucer follows Petrarch’s continuation of the argument regarding the lover’s consent from 
the second quatrain into the sestet (lines 8-9: “…s’io nol consento? / E s’io ‘l consento…”). 
But by end-stopping the topic that runs over into the midst of the stanza’s second line and 
by inserting the logical connective “thus,” with no counterpart in Petrarch (414-15: “…I 
wrongfully / Compleyne, iwis. Thus passed to and fro”), Chaucer spotlights the turn to the 
nautical metaphor and to Troilus’s state of being “Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two” 
(417). Troilus’s fluctuation summarizes the to and fro of the debate undertaken in the 
previous stanzas: an effect more marked in Chaucer’s version than in Petrarch’s, further 
enhanced by the insertion of a medical metaphor opening the final couplet (419: “Allas, 
what is this wondre maladye?”). The language of disease gives a new and serious context to 
the Petrarchan antitheses of heat and cold, which for Chaucer have the power to bring about 
Troilus’s death (line 420), and the medical metaphor also ties the three stanzas together by 
resuming the interrogative mood of the first stanza. Justified, too, in retrospect, are the 
thirsting and drinking images of the first stanza, now appearing medicalized as symptoms of 
lovesickness, aegritudo amoris (Thomson 161; Boitani, Tragic 72; Rossiter 125-26). As we 
will see in a moment, Chaucer’s focus on the nautical and medical metaphors also prepares 
later developments. 

Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch’s sonnet, sometimes known as the Canticus Troili, 
although it has always been admired, has also long been thought an isolated incident 
(Thompson 165; Boitani 5): at once the sole textual trace of Petrarch’s vernacular lyric 



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production in Chaucer’s work and the only translation of Petrarch until the Tudor versions 
of Wyatt, Surrey, and anonymous others. But Tom Stillinger has ably defended the claim 
that the other song of Troilus (also designated in some manuscripts as a canticus Troili), in 
the fifth book (V.596-601), should be thought of as inspired by another sonnet by Petrarch, 
Rvf 189 (“Passa la nave mia colma d’oblio”), though it is far from a direct translation. 
Stillinger’s analysis proposes that the non-linear, not to say scrambled, representation of 
Petrarch’s original be taken as symptoms of Troilus’s psychic disintegration and of a 
strategic crisis of representation in the Troilus in general (Stillinger 165-72, 183-89, 194-95, 
204-205). What is of interest to my subject here, however, is the fertile premise of 
Stillinger’s argument: that Chaucer knew not an isolated sonnet of Petrarch, but a version of 
the Canzoniere—perhaps a manuscript of the Chigi version, since Chaucer’s text of Rvf 132 
reports the correct reading of the poem according to the Chigi version (Wilkins 169). As 
Stillinger argues, Chaucer, while in Italy in 1368, 1372-73 or 1378, was more likely to have 
encountered a manuscript of the Chigi or later version than to have happened upon isolated 
poems or fascicles (172-78). What is more, since the Chigi concludes the first part of 
Petrarch’s collection with Rvf 189 (Petrarca, Canz. 820), that poem may have been 
conspicuous to Chaucer’s view. It is also clear that Rvf 132 and 189 are themselves closely 
related verbally: although the nautical metaphor is frequent in Petrarch’s collection (e.g. Rvf 
80, 132.10-12, 235.5-14, 366.67-71), in the case of these two poems the parallels are multiple 
and coordinated, as Diani has exhaustively tabulated (157). The second text often referred to 
as canticus Troili is as follows: 

O sterre, of which I lost have al the light, 
With herte soor wel oughte I to biwaille, 
That evere derk in torment, nyght by nyght, 
Toward my deth, with wynd in steere I saille; 
For which the tenthe nyght, if that I faille 
The gydyng of thi bemes bright an houre, 
My ship and me Caribdis will devoure. (TC V.596-601) 

The contrasts between the polished account of Rvf 132, which celebrates Troilus’s long-
delayed surrender to Love by embellishing its source (perhaps to suggest how Troilus’s 
heart expands in love), and the disordered, diminished version of Rvf 189, marking the 
beginning of the end for Troilus’s affair with Criseyde, are strongly motivated thematically: 
if the first sonnet requires amplificatio to fill three stanzas, the second canticus is literally a 
half-sonnet, articulated within a single stanza of rhyme royal as a single quatrain and single 
tercet. Chaucer’s sequence of topics inverts Petrarch’s, who mentions the obscuration of the 
lady’s eyes at the end of the sonnet, while for Chaucer this event is placed first; but Petrarch 
names Scylla and Charybdis early, while in Chaucer Charybdis is mentioned in the last line, 
as the fatal destination. Petrarch’s sonnet is thus upended: the tormented logic of the 
fragment results in part from this inversion. The topsy-turvy sonnet mirrors Troilus’s 
disintegrating confidence in the prospects for his love: thus the “word is cosyn to the dede” 
(Canterbury Tales I.742). 



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The beginning and end of the fragment also register strong Chaucerian modifications 
with respect to Rvf 189. Although the “dolci usati segni,” of Rvf 189 stand for Laura’s eyes, 
Chaucer’s placement of “O sterres” to begin the canticus distances him from Petrarch, who 
never begins a poem in Rvf addressing his lady’s eyes, and the fragment ends with “devour,” 
never found in Petrarch’s lyrics. For a parallel we must go to Dante’s Inferno, where this 
term describes how the bottom of Hell swallows its damned (“al fondo che divora / Lucifero 
con Giuda” Inf. 31.142). This last Chaucerian modification exceeds Petrarch’s tempered 
lyric diction to reflect the gravity of Troilus’s condition within the narrative: indeed, Troilus 
“at sea” evokes Dante’s Ulysses, swallowed up by the ocean and found in Hell. Again, 
Troilus’s narrative situation conditions the lyric text, or, if we accept Picone’s reading of 
Petrarch’s sonnet, supplements it by realizing the narrative implications of Rvf 189, which 
for Picone alludes to the disaster of Dante’s Ulysses (Picone 170-76). 

Thus as Stillinger observes, even if we were to reject Chaucer’s direct knowledge of Rvf 
189, we would still have a second Troilian canticus that is unmistakably a development of 
the first canticus, where the third stanza contains the same Petrarchan topos, as we saw, 
suitably emphasized in order to enter into dialogue with the canticus in the final book. The 
narrative consequence of the close relation of the two cantici is to juxtapose in the reader’s 
mind the scene of Troilus’s enamorment, which occurs before the first canticus, and the 
moment that heralds his ruin. 

This plurality of lyrics is itself significant in Chaucer’s poem, which, as readers have 
pointed out, is a translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato, where lyric insets are seamlessly fitted 
into the narrative texture (Stillinger 179-89; see also Natali). The presence of the narrator’s 
Boethian hymn (TC III.1-49), and Troilus’s own lyric apostrophe to Love, near the center of 
the work (III.1254-74), and Pandarus’s canzone-like apostrophe of Love in III.1743-1771, 
again in Boethian terms, suggests that Troilus, too, is a lyric “anthology” including poems 
ranging from love lyrics and canzoni to a philosophical hymn; nor is this an exhaustive list. 

Indeed Chaucer, after inserting Troilus’s first song where there is none in Boccaccio, 
replaces a discrete lyric when he finds one in the Filostrato (V.62). The text he replaces is 
Boccaccio’s version of a five-stanza canzone by Cino da Pistoia, “La dolce vista e’l bel 
guardo soave,” which Boccaccio digests into four stanzas of ottava rima (he omits the third), 
after which he adds a further stanza of his own devising, consistent in theme with Cino’s 
canzone (Boccaccio 217, 330). The canzone is further a model for Chaucer in that Boccaccio 
must adapt the canzone stanza to the narrative octave, an exercise that requires the solution 
of problems similar to those Chaucer faces accommodating Petrarch’s sonnet to the rhyme 
royal stanza of Troilus.5 We cannot be sure that Chaucer knew the authorship of Cino’s 
canzone inserted by Boccaccio,6 but we can conclude that he recognized it as a distinct 
lyric, since he replaced it with a distinct canticus of his own. If, moreover, we take the two 
cantici Troili as a system, the fact that Chaucer inserted as the first canticus a poem by an 
author different from that of his proclaimed source (the enigmatic Lollius) may suggest he 
was aware that the Cino insertion was by an author different from the author of Filostrato. 
Chaucer may thus have been cognizant of participating in a multiauthorial system of 
transferring, deleting, and inserting poems, an activity not unlike Petrarch’s in compiling 



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the Rvf. Indeed, Chaucer calls special attention to the insertion of the first canticus by 
insisting that he goes beyond his immediate source in giving “naught only the sentence / As 
writ myn auctor called Lollius,” but the whole text, and further warrants that the reader (or 
copyist) will find that full text immediately following: “and whoso list it here, / Loo, next 
this vers he may it fynden here” (I.398-99). He thus announces the prestige of the original, 
as well as foregrounding his active collection and compilation of texts. 

For my purposes it is significant that lyric patches are especially abundant in the same 
regions of the poem as the Petrarchan borrowings, though only in Chaucer, as we saw, are 
both of Troilus’s lyric moments marked with the insert of a canticus. Troilus’s first canticus, 
for example, comes immediately before his formal submission to the god of Love, three 
stanzas that seem like another song, and that in some manuscripts were in fact conflated 
with the Petrarchan material; moreover, the first stanza of Chaucer’s version subsequently 
circulated separately (Chaucer 1028, Stillinger 251). The context of the second canticus 
Troili is even richer in lyric insets: Troilus V.561-81 recalls, distributed in seven clauses 
beginning with yonder, the places of Troilus’s meetings with Criseyde, including his first 
sight of her: “And in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, Me kaughte first my righte lady 
dere” (566-67); and his winning of her: “in that yonder place / My lady me first took unto 
hire grace” (580-81). The equivalent passage in Boccaccio’s poem is coordinated with five 
anaphoric iterations of quivi and four of colà (Fil. V.54-55), a passage that scholars have long 
noted is closely related to Petrarch’s Rvf 112, a sonnet to Sennuccio del Bene that recalls 
Laura “qui tutta umile, et qui la vidi altera” and so on, with ten iterations (Petrarca, Canz. 
520-21). If Chaucer had a complete Petrarch he might have noted the resemblances with 
Boccaccio’s narrative. It may thus be significant that although both Petrarch and Chaucer 
recall Laura and Criseyde singing (Rvf 112.9: “Qui cantò dolcemente”; Troilus V.577-78: “so 
woomanly, with voice melodyous / syngen so weel”), Boccaccio’s Troilo does not so recall 
his lady. 

Beyond these multiple lyric moments leading up to the second canticus, which consist 
of a typically Petrarchan act of recollecting the lady (562: “And every thyng com hym to 
remembrance”) we can consider the immediate framing of the song. Troilus is “between 
hope and drede” (630) just before beginning his song as Boccaccio’s Troilo is not, but as 
Petrarch’s speaker definitely is in Rvf 134.2: “et temo e spero, e ardo, e son un giaccio / in 
questo stato son, donna, per voi.” 7 Troilus wishes “his woful herte for to lighte” (634), 
where Boccaccio has “alcuna sosta quasi al dolor dando” (Fil. V.61.4)—not as close as Rvf 
293.10: “pur di disfogare il doloroso core,” from the sonnet that begins the in morte portion 
of the Chigi version, and that echoes, from the canzone of metamorphoses, Petrarch’s 
familiar assertion of what motivates his song, “perché cantando il duol si disacerba” (Rvf 
23.4). After his song, Troilus remarks of the air that drifts from the Greek camp that “or is 
eyr, that is so soote / that in my soule I fele it doth me boote” possibly recalling Rvf 109.12-
13: “quasi un spirto gentil di paradiso / sempre in quell’aere par che mi conforte.” 
Boccaccio mentions the breath of wind, but not the air: “ciò che soffiarsi sentia del viso, / sì 
come mandati sospiri da Criseida” (Fil. V.70.4-6). Considering that Petrarch’s sestet to the 
same sonnet begins with “L’aura soave che dal chiaro viso / move col suon de le parole 



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accorte…” it might be asked if Chaucer’s eyr echoes l’aura, one of the homonyms for Laura 
in the Rvf and thus an intimately Petrarchan signature. In this context and spirit one also 
wonders if the line in Boccaccio’s author’s preface, “E voi, amanti, priego ch’ascoltiate…” 
(Fil. I.6.1), imitates the first lines of Rvf 1 or instead suggested Petrarch’s opening to him 
(and a common source, such as Lam. 1.12, cannot be excluded; see Martinez 1-10). And of 
course Troilus is surprised by love in a “temple,” the narrative situation that Petrarch stages 
in poems 2-3 of Rvf: a scene already topical with Dante in the Vita nuova and that after 
Boccaccio and Petrarch becomes a commonplace, not to say a banality in narratives of 
courtly love (Chaucer 1027, Thomson 164-65). 

The many parallels between Filostrato and Rvf, and the direction of the influence, are 
aspects of a longstanding debate that cannot be settled here, although the current trend 
seems to be in favor of Boccaccio’s precedence more often than not.8 David Wallace suggests 
that the winds tugging at Troilus at the heart of his first canticus represent Chaucer’s two 
Italian masters Boccaccio and Petrarch, which makes of Chaucer’s sonnet the earliest 
contested ground of the debate itself (63). Whichever way the influence went, far more than 
the textual traces of Rvf 132 and 189 in Troilus exist to suggest that Chaucer framed his story 
in a broadly Petrarchan context and that he enjoyed more than anecdotal access to some 
form of Rvf. Looking to the future, Chaucer’s example generated a substantial literary corpus 
based on the amorous Troilus and sparked a pair of Tudor versions of Rvf 132 and, in light 
of Stillinger’s claims, may also have inspired versions of Rvf 189, notably Wyatt’s “My galy 
charged with forgetfulnes” but also several attempts by Thomas Lodge and an important 
adaptation by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. 

Trial by Sonnet: Wyatt and Surrey 
Recent studies of the poets of the Henrician era have emphasized that under the 

violently imposed reforms of Henry VIII, in a period of shifting loyalties, reversals of 
fortune, and catastrophic consequences to imprudent speech, Thomas Wyatt and Henry 
Howard, Earl of Surrey, developed forms of writing that were not merely constative of royal 
glory or offered as counsel to the King, in the tradition of the Mirror of Princes, but instead 
explored an “inward language” in Anne Ferry’s phrase: what Greg Walker has called 
“writing under tyranny” (Walker 299-334, Sessions 143-318, 352-420). In Wyatt’s case, his 
writing was abstracted from, though always in relation to, the royal focus of power. For 
Surrey, writing fostered an aristocratic cultural prestige independent of, even antagonistic 
to, the king’s: a strategy that was to prove fatal. For these two poets, the Petrarchan persona 
of the Rvf—hopeful but abashed, narcissistic, reticent and secretive in the public eye, but 
anxious, passionate, even tumultuous in his internal life, and consequently both internally 
conflicted and sharply aware of his difference from the world around him—was highly 
suitable. The Petrarchan persona served whether the conflicts the poets expressed were 
internal struggles with shifting desires or vulnerabilities to external events and restraints on 
behavior; it served whether the dangers of the outside world were erotic, or political—in the 
case of Wyatt’s relationship to Anne Boleyn, mistress and the queen of Henry VIII, the likely 
subject of a number of poems, necessarily both.9 



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The high-water mark of direct Tudor Petrarchan translation, and a chief literary 
monument of the Henrician period (though first published in 1557, during the last months 
of the reign of Catholic Mary Tudor), where the bulk of Wyatt and Surrey’s translations and 
imitations of Petrarch are included (Parker 1939), is Tottels’s Songs and Sonnettes. Modern 
students of the work discern a Petrarchizing tendency in the editor’s titling of a wide variety 
of poems as reflecting the predicaments of an afflicted lover, even when the content of the 
poems is evidently political, and this occultation explains in part why considerable recent 
study of both Wyatt and Surrey has been devoted to filling in the implicit political tensions 
behind the poetry.10 Through Tottel’s popularizing anthology the idea of Petrarch as the 
supreme lyric poet reached Elizabethans like Sidney and Shakespeare. 

In Wyatt’s particular case, a collection of his poetry, the Egerton manuscript, unbound in 
Wyatt’s lifetime but consisting of leaves that likely retained their order, reveals his own 
hand at work in the copying and revision of many of his poems.11 The majority of the poems 
are fairly copied into the manuscript by an amanuensis; many of the poems (some 59) were 
approved by Wyatt himself (Harrier i-xiii; Powell 261-64). The placement among the first 32 
poems of 16 sonnets or other poems translated or imitated from Petrarch gives a clear 
indication of the high importance Wyatt attributed to the difficult exercise of Petrarchan 
imitation. A return to Petrarchan exemplars at the end of the portion of the manuscript 
given to Wyatt’s shorter poems (folios 67r-70r, including Wyatt’s version of Rvf 360 in 
poulter’s meter, with corrections in his handwriting, and the opening two lines of Rvf 129, 
in his handwriting), though perhaps merely fortuitous, may imply Wyatt’s decision to frame 
the collection of shorter lyrics with Petrarch-inspired compositions (Collected Poems 
[hereafter M&T] 79-82, 84). 

Most interesting for my purposes, the Egerton manuscript begins with a rondel (rondeau) 
based on Petrarch’s madrigal Rvf 121 (“Or vedi, Amor”) and offers in third position a sonnet 
closely imitated from Petrarch, Rvf 102, “Cesare, poi che’l traditor d’Egitto” (M&T, no. 3). 
With regard to the political inflection of courtly life under Henry VIII, Wyatt’s translation, 
“Caesar when the traytour of Egypt,” closely follows Petrarch’s humanist parable, one that 
well-informed readers might have seen flavored with Machiavellism: with an explicit 
invocation of bookish lore (“si come è scritto,” Wyatt’s “as it is writt”), the historical 
examples of Caesar and Hannibal occupy the quatrains, as if miniature Plutarchan parallel 
lives. The pair is in multiple chiastic relation, for Caesar is a winner, Hannibal a loser; 
Caesar hides his delight at Pompey’s death, Hannibal his disappointment in the face of 
defeat. The first tercet of the sestet generalizes the principle of simulazione and the second 
tercet specifies it of the speaker, whose singing and laughing (“rido o canto”) conceal the 
anguished tears (“angoscioso pianto”) he weeps because of his hopeless love for Laura. The 
almost riddling syntax of lines 9-13, which Wyatt emphasizes in his translation by reversing 
the order of the terms, itself exemplifies an ambiguous language of dissimulation (Ferry 102-
103, 107). 

Tottel’s rubric for Wyatt’s translation of Rvf 102, “Of others fained sorrow, and the lovers 
fained mirth” (Tottel, no. 50) reads Petrarch rather than Wyatt, for Wyatt’s poem neither 
requires nor excludes an erotic context. However, in bringing together humanist learning 



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(Petrarch relies on Lucan’s unflattering portrayal of Caesar in the De bello civili) with the 
compressed elaboration of a sonnet to graph the sharp differentiation of the speaker from 
external circumstances, Wyatt’s version of Petrarch’s poem can stand at the center of his 
concerns as a poet, lover, and ambassador inured to the necessity of feigning in the 
languages of love and diplomacy.12 As Greenblatt observes (144-45), the “doubleness” of 
translation, which strives for equivalent terms in two languages, is homologous with the 
negotiation typical of diplomacy and a reflection upon the inevitable distortions of the truth 
and of the self-consequent on practicing it. 

With the exception of the couplet, where Wyatt’s formal principles dictated divergence 
from Petrarch, Wyatt maintains Petrarch’s rhyme scheme. In the first quatrain, his rhymes 
Egypt and writt calque those of Petrarch (Egitto, scritto). One departure takes its cue from 
Velutello’s gloss of “or chiara or bruna” as “hor allegra ora mesta” rendered by Wyatt as 
“now sad, now merry” (M&T 264, Thomson 191-200). In the couplet, Wyatt uses assonance 
to capture, with the otherwise redundant “any time, or season” (“alcuna volta” in Petrarch) 
the unusual internal rhyme on —una in lines 12-13 of Petrarch’s sonnet: 

Però, s’ alcuna volta io rido o canto,  Whereby, if I laught, any time, or season 
facciol, perch’ i’ non ò se non quest’ una It is for bicause I have nother way 
via da celare il mio angoscioso pianto. to cloke my care but vnder spoort and 

play. 

Wyatt’s poem concludes with pretended jollity rather than Petrarch’s inner torment, 
sealing the poem with the necessity of dissimulation. But the most striking moment of 
Wyatt’s version, combining fidelity to the source with poetic innovation, is the account of 
Hannibal’s intense disappointment, which renders Petrarch’s “rise fra gente lagrimosa et 
mesta / per isfogare il suo acerbo dispitto” (lines 7-8) as “Laught to his folke whome sorrowe 
did torment, / His cruel dispite for to disgorge and qwit.” Included in Egerton in a version 
almost certainly revised for that manuscript by Wyatt (M&T xxiii), the rare and forceful 
disgorge,13 nearly a homophone for isfogare, seems emblematic of a courtier’s revulsion 
before the double-dealing of court politics. It is thus suggestive that Wyatt’s line translates 
what is close to being the stated motive of Petrarch’s poetry, manifest in Rvf 293.10, “pur di 
sfogare il doloroso core” but announced much earlier in the collection, as we saw, with Rvf 
23.4, “perché cantando il duol si disacerba.” 14 Just as the first poem in Egerton takes up the 
topic of the injustice of love, which transfixes the speaker but leaves the lady untouched—
an imbalance Petrarch first records in Rvf 2.13-14—the first sonnet in Wyatt’s manuscript 
nods to a fundamental impulse driving Petrarch’s poetic collection. 

The paradigmatic status of Wyatt’s first proper sonnet in the Egerton manuscript may 
also help to explain the placement of a poem found near the end of the shorter poems (M&T 
no. 81). Wyatt’s strambotto, whose two first lines (“Off Cartage he that worthy warrier / 
Could overcome, but cowld not use his chance”) imitate the first two lines of Petrarch’s Rvf 
103 (“Vinse Hanibàl, e non seppe usar poi / ben la vittoriosa sua ventura”) adopts the same 
deductive logic of the contiguous Rvf 102.9 (“Et così aven…” vs. “And I like wise… “) to 
portray the tension between Wyatt’s official diplomatic duties at the Spanish imperial court 



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in 1537—which required simulazione—and a new love interest left behind in England, a 
tension made explicit in language that at once conflates and contrasts the uncertainties of 
political fortune with those of the heart’s desire (Foley 52-53): 

So hangith in balance  
Off warr, my pees, reward of all my payne; 
At Mountzon thus I restles rest in Spayne. (M&T 81.6-8) 

As we will see below, the “restless rest” of the last line is one of Wyatt’s signatures, 
which Surrey would seize on in glorifying his predecessor. Although the Egerton 
manuscript is a far cry from being Wyatt’s Canzoniere, the high finish of the poems 
transcribed by the amanuensis (continuously to poem 89 in M&T) suggests that at some 
point in its existence Wyatt intended it as “an album of fair copies ready for final correction 
and polishing” (Harrier 3). Whether the poems are ordered by any principle other than sheer 
chronology appears unlikely (Daalder), but an internal patterning among the poems might 
nevertheless be discernible. One example might be how the strambotto (M&T no. 81), with 
its use of a historical exemplum to model the speaker’s erotic circumstances, answers the 
poem regarding Caesar and Hannibal (M&T no. 3), itself based on the same juxtaposition, 
but in which the speaker’s erotic preoccupation remains obscured, possibly because the 
earlier love-sonnets in the collection concerned Wyatt’s risky relations with Anne Boleyn 
(Greenblatt 145-50; Foley 99-101; Walker 110-111, 286-92). From this perspective, the 
announcement of dissimulation in poem no. 3 is thematic for the collection. 

An equally intense existential situation gives rise to Wyatt’s sonnet “The piller pearisht 
is whearto I Lent,” not in the Egerton manuscript, but in large part a translation of Petrarch 
(M&T no. 236; Thomson 188-89). The poem signals the low point of the poet’s 
circumstances after his patron and friend Thomas Cromwell was executed in 1543. The 
poem again illustrates the entangled relation of erotic and political contexts in Wyatt’s 
verse, since he adapts Rvf 269, “Rotta è l’alta colonna e’l verde lauro,” the lament for the 
deaths of both Laura and Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, Petrarch’s friend and patron, but 
leaves out references to the lady and the laurel as irrelevant to the shock of Cromwell’s 
removal. In the Rvf poem 269 is one of the first poems to register Laura’s death (first 
mentioned in poem 267) and forms part of a suite of mourning poems including Rvf 268 and 
270 (Martinez 10-23). As readers have observed, Wyatt thus marks a personal catastrophe 
with a poem from that part of Petrarch’s collection that demarcated what Renaissance 
editors identified as the parts in vita and in morte of Rvf (Walker 279-82). Wyatt’s first 
quatrain follows Petrarch’s text closely, but the second departs from it; the third quatrain is 
a recognizable adaption of Petrarch’s first tercet, while the last three lines are completely 
unrelated—as if Wyatt wished to reflect in formal terms the omission of half of Petrarch’s 
explicit content. Wyatt also insists on an extreme display of sorrow, so that lines 10-12 
dissolve into verbal redundancy: 

What can I more but have a woful hart, 
My penne in playnt, my voice in wofull crye, 
My mynde in woe, my body full of smart? 



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The lines deploy Wyatt’s plain, monosyllabic native style, his “gauge of integrity” 
(Greene, Light 256), but upon inspection the verses prove surprisingly Petrarchan in 
inspiration. Their stimulus arrives not, however, from Rvf 269 (Petrarch’s line 11 mentions 
only “humidi… occhi” and “viso chino”) but from the contiguous Rvf 268. Cued perhaps by 
“Questa è del viver mio l’una colonna” (268.48), which attributes to Laura the column 
reserved for Colonna in sonnet 269—that is, performs a shift of reference that Wyatt’s poem 
precisely reverses—Wyatt draws for his lines 11-12 on Rvf 268.9-10 (“ogni mia gioia / per lo 
suo dipartire in pianto è volta”), which resonates in turn with Wyatt’s lines 5-6: “… for 
happe away hath rent / of all my joye, the verye bark and rynde,” while 268.33 (“e questo 
solo anchor qui mi mantene…”) is far closer to Wyatt’s line 2 (“the strongest stay of myne 
unquyet mynde”) than Petrarch’s Rvf 269.2, where tree and pillar cast protective shadows 
rather than acting as supports. Most surprising, Wyatt’s despairing final couplet, “and I 
myself, my self always to hate / Til dreadfull death do ease my doleful state,” with its 
archaizing, alliterative pattern, is clearly an intensification of Rvf 268.29-30: “Ma io, lasso, 
che senza / lei né vita mortal né me stesso amo.” Despite its absence from Egerton, this 
sonnet also seems to find a consoling and specific answer in the final section of short lyrics 
in that manuscript, where Wyatt in a more positive key affirms in the sonnet “If waker care” 
(M&T no. 97) his love for Elizabeth Darrell using a similarly plain style (“She hath in hand 
my witt, my will, and all”). The sonnet adopts for the four occurrences of the B rhyme in the 
quatrains (“playne,” etc.) the same rhyme as the couplet in “Off Carthage he” discussed 
above (“payne, Spayne”), and an assonant final couplet (“staye, daye”). If Petrarch closes his 
collection with a turn to the Virgin, Wyatt winds up the portion of Egerton dedicated to 
shorter poems addressing a new lady love (Braden, “Wyatt” 251-52). 

The name of Henry Howard commands the title page of Richard Tottel’s Songes and 
Sonettes written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other 
published in 1557. Himself a descendant of Edward I and III, Surrey’s notoriety as a 
martyred aristocratic antagonist of Henry VIII lent panache to the collection, published 
while the Catholic Mary Tudor was still on the throne (Marquis, “Politics”; Sessions 273-
77). In Tottel’s volume, Surrey’s glamour, and his first place in the order of texts, in part 
obscures the elder Wyatt, a prudent gesture as Thomas Wyatt the younger had recently been 
beheaded as a rebel. But Surrey’s conception of his task as a poet is in fact heavily 
dependent on the literary model suggested by Wyatt’s imitations of Petrarch. Jonathan 
Crewe is right to see in Surrey’s treatment of Wyatt virtually an attempt to transform himself 
into the elder poet (75-76). Thus Surrey lamented Wyatt’s death in two sonnets (Howard 
nos. 29, 30) and in an elegy in heroic quatrains published anonymously in 1542 (Zitner; 
Sessions 240-59; Walker 377-413). Another sonnet (Howard no. 31, “The Great Macedon”) 
was inserted in the Egerton manuscript to introduce Wyatt’s terza rima versions of the 
Penitential Psalms (M&T 98). Wyatt’s imitation of Petrarch, “Caesar, when that the traytour 
of Egypt” (M&T no. 3) is echoed in one of the Wyatt epitaphs (Howard no. 29), and Wyatt’s 
‘The piller pearisht,” also imitated from Petrarch, furnished the impresa of the broken 
column for the anonymous Arundel castle painting of Surrey surrounded by Howard 
emblems, made in 1543, an image closely related to the Howard heraldic claims Surrey’s 



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enemies exploited to have him condemned to death (Sessions 333-420, esp. 348-49, 369-72, 
391-99). Surrey was moreover probably responsible—a bold gesture of condescension for an 
aristocrat—for the publication of John Leland’s Latin panegyric Naeniae to Wyatt, where 
Wyatt is represented as the founder, along with Chaucer, of a national literature in 
emulation of the classics and the Tuscan poets (Foley 30-31, Sessions 250-51). These 
formulations led directly to the positive estimates of Surrey and Wyatt in Puttenham’s Arte 
of English Poesy in 1589, and of Surrey in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie in 1595, years when 
Shakespeare is consolidating his career. 

Surrey’s epigrammatic style, though markedly different from Wyatt’s pithiness, 
consciously imitated that of the elder poet (Heale 104) and reiterated some of Wyatt’s 
characteristic verbal formulae, e.g. his characterization of court life as “the slipper wheele / 
of hye astate” (Tottel no. 128.1-2; Howard no. 13.49: “that slipper state I know”). The title of 
Wyatt’s Quyet of Mynde, a translation from Plutarch for Queen Catherine of Aragon (Walker 
284-85), recurs as a formula in Surrey (Howard no. 23.32, “my restless mind”; no. 24.34, 
“my unquyet mynd”), in part because it recalls the sorrows of Vergil’s Dido, of which more 
below.15 Such infusions of Wyatt’s vivid phrases in Surrey’s poems are consistent with the 
fact, as readers have noted, that several of Surrey’s most effective poems are epitaphs: for 
Wyatt, for Surrey’s beloved squire John Clare, and in a sense proleptically for himself 
(Howard no. 26, no. 38). For Surrey, the language of epitaphs is continuous with his 
affirmation of noble literary traditions; he thus adapts, for Wyatt’s elegy (“the earth his 
bones, the heavens possesse his gost,” Howard no. 28.38) and for Clare’s (“Norfolk sprang 
thee, Lambeth holds thee dead,” Howard 35.1), Donatus’s famous epitaph for Vergil: 
“Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere; tenet nunc Parthenope.” 16 

Wyatt and Surrey both translate Rvf 140, “Amor, che nel penser mio vive e regna,” the 
only instance of such duplication (M&T no. 4; Howard no. 4; Thomson 169-79). With its 
presentation of Love in feudal and chivalric terms the poem had an obvious appeal to the 
two Tudor poets, who inhabited, each at his different rank, a refeudalized absolute 
monarchy, and it follows that for each poet matters of loyalty and lordship guide their 
adaptations of Petrarch’s sonnet. Given that in Wyatt’s version “love” is neither the first 
word nor immediately personified, the figure of Love is demoted both in rhetoric and in 
rank. Nor does Wyatt, as Surrey does, have love “raine and live,” but only “harbar” in his 
thought and “take up residence” in the speaker’s heart. Wyatt’s love thus appears 
delegitimated, a challenger with “bolde pretence” to the lady’s regime of self-repression 
(M&T no. 4.7: “… rayned by reason, shame and reverence”). Indeed, Wyatt’s only instance 
of rayned alters its meaning by describing the restraints (“reins”) emanating from the lady, 
which in effect displace love’s power to reign and rule. Defeated by the lady’s disapproval, 
love’s manifestation in the speaker flees to “the heart’s forest,” an expression, not found in 
Petrarch, that makes of love’s latency a form of lurking in the wild, as if love were living in 
banishment as a brigand. Wyatt’s final line, closely translating Petrarch’s statement of the 
ethical dilemma of divided loyalties, “but in the field with him to lyve and dye,” again 
evokes a real, possibly remembered space of shared military adversity (Petrarch gives only 
“star seco”). The poem ends less a love sonnet than a celebration of brothers-in-arms, 



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lending an air of outlaw activity to Wyatt’s erotic adventures (Greene, Light 252-53, Ferry 
114-16, Heale 96-97, Foley 95). 

Surrey’s version continues Wyatt’s trend toward more concrete and experientially vivid 
feudal contexts: Petrarch’s Love armato is expanded to “clad in the armes wherein with me 
he fought.” 17 But the conclusion of Surrey’s version modifies his models dramatically (lines 
12-14):  

Che poss’io far, temendo il mio signore, For my lordes gylt thus fawtless byde I 
payne: 

Se non star seco infin a l’ora extrema? Yet from my lorde shall not my foote 
remove. 

Ché bel fin fa chi ben amando more. Sweet is the death that taketh end by 
love.  

Casting the scene as a suicidal last stand with a heart entirely pure is unalloyed Howard 
mythmaking, a heroic and romanticized gesture authorized, beyond Petrarch or Wyatt, with 
a subtext from Vergil’s Aeneid. Line 13 reflects Aeneas’s promise to stay by his father 
Anchises during the sack of Troy, “mene efferre pedem, genitor, te posse relicto / sperasti 
…?” (Aeneid II.657-58; see Howard 105), which Surrey in his translation of the Aeneid 
renders as: “Father, thoughtst thow that I may ones remove … a foote, and leave thee here 
behinde?” (Howard no. 41.864-66).18 Indeed the preceding lines of Aeneas’s account, as 
Englished by Surrey, are a precise gloss on Surrey’s deepest motives: “Driven I was to 
harness then againe, miserably my death for to desire. For what advise or other hope was 
left?” (Howard no. 41.862-64). The idea of dying nobly for a lost cause resonated all too 
strongly with the aristocratic pretensions and cultural politics of the Howards, attitudes 
increasingly risky in the final years of Henry’s tyranny. 

Much of Surrey’s poetic program and aristocratic politics are thus implicit in line 13, 
“fawltless byde I payne,” a phrase nonexistent in Petrarch’s text. Surrey’s rhyme scheme is, 
anomalously for most sonnets, ABAB, CDCD, ECEC, FF, with “payne” concluding the C 
rhymes that begin in the second quatrain. But the progress of the C rhyme into the sestet, 
though a fault in Italian sonnet aesthetics, is part of Surrey’s point. By insisting on the 
importance of the -ayne rhyme, Surrey puts into high relief the distinctive “raine” in the 
first line and also links his sonnet metrically with his two elegiac sonnets for Wyatt, which 
also bring a rhyme from the first two quatrains into the third.19 Through a similar pattern of 
rhymes and other verbal echoes, further links to Wyatt’s work and biography emerge in a 
sonnet of Surrey’s with no known model, Petrarchan or other, “The fansy which that I have 
served long” (Howard no. 10).20 Surrey’s final couplet, “Where I am now, as restlesse to 
remayne, / Against my will, full pleased with my payn”—another carefully crafted double-
bind—echoes the first line of Surrey’s own epicedium for Wyatt in heroic quatrains, “Here 
rests Wyatt, who could never rest” and alludes to the conclusion of Wyatt’s strambotto on 
his forced residence during his Spanish embassy, “At Mountzon thus I restles rest in 
Spayne,” a situation existentially replayed by Surrey’s own encampment “amiddes the 
hylles in base Bullayn” (no. 10.12). The reiterated “restless rest” has special resonance as an 



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epigram for Wyatt’s characteristically conflicted energy, indeed constitutes a behavioral 
impresa transferred into the language of Surrey’s epicedium for Wyatt from the epitaph of 
the celebrated Italian general Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, the victor of Agnadello and 
Marignano, who died in 1518: “Hic mortuus requiescit semel / qui vivus requievit 
nunquam” (Hudson 543). 

Both the Virgilian intertexts deposited in the Petrarchan adaptations and the insistent 
associations with Wyatt are aspects of Surrey’s strategy of self-authorization, by which, as 
many readers have suggested, Surrey fashioned what for eighteenth-century readers was the 
first flowering of a native English classicism (Howard xi), while for William Sessions (240-
59) Surrey’s program aimed at nothing less than the renovatio of English poetry and English 
nobility. The strategy permeates Surrey’s entire oeuvre and is the chief vector of his 
Petrarchan adaptations, for Surrey does not attempt close translations like those of Wyatt. 
Instead, in the case of two sonnets springing from Petrarchan originals, “The soote season” 
(cf. Rvf 310, “Zefiro torna”) and “Alas, so all thinges” (cf. Rvf 164, “Hor che’ l ciel”), he 
articulates his poems around the same Virgilian locus classicus that organizes Petrarch’s 
two sonnets: Dido’s nocturnal anguish contrasted to the peaceful repose of nature (Aen. 
IV.522-32).21 Thus Surrey transfuses into his own poetry not only Aeneas’s heroic bravado, 
as in “Love that doth rayne,” but Petrarch’s recurrent staging of Dido’s passion, which 
serves as an expression of Surrey’s vulnerability and of that “unquyet mynde” (as we saw, a 
formula also imparted by Wyatt). 

Surrey’s Petrarchan, but also Vergilian, Dantean, and Chaucerian tradition—nor can 
Wyatt be absent—is summarized in the first poem anthologized in Tottel, a capitolo in terza 
rima that functions as a posthumous manifesto of Surrey’s planned renovatio. Though the 
poem proclaims an overt purpose of erotic persuasion (lines 50-51, “oneless this carefull 
song / Prynt in your hert some percell of my will”) it is more the proclamation of a poetic 
and cultural program. That Surrey’s “percell of my will” is echoed in Tottel’s preface to the 
reader (“that to have wel written in verse, yea and in small parcelles, deserveth great 
praise”) brands the poem as the prime example of how English poets can match the “works 
of divers Latines, Italians, and other” (Tottel 1). This attempt at the edification of a literary 
tradition through the emulation of Latins and Italians is visible in the translation of 
Petrarchan passages where Virgil is also implicit, and in Surrey’s wielding of the terza rima, 
a gesture that does homage to Wyatt, who first uses the form in English in his satirical 
epistles and penitential psalms, as well as to Petrarch’s Trionfi, a portion of which Surrey 
translates in his “Such waiward wayes has love” (Howard no. 13, see 113-14)—and 
ultimately to Dante. 

“The sonne hath twyse brought forthe the tender grene” is a catalogue of the speaker-
lover’s disquiet and alienation, a melancholy brought on by repression (“so doth each place 
my comfort cleane refuse”; see Sessions 185-87). After a Chaucerian opening imitated from 
Troilus commenting on the approaching winter (V.8-11), the poem runs through a series of 
Petrarchan borrowings: line 18, “at hand to melt, farr off in flame to bourne” originates in 
Petrarch’s “s’arder da lunghe et agghiacciar da presso” (Rvf 224.12, a poem translated by 



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Wyatt); lines 21-29 follow the opening of Petrarch’s first sestina, Rvf 22.1-6, a borrowing that 
modulates seamlessly into Surrey’s  

And me withdrawe from everie haunted place, 
Lest in my chere my chaunce should pere to playne; 
And with my mynd I measure paas by paas 
To seke that place where I myself hadd lost… (Howard no. 11. 32-35) 

These lines render the first quatrain of “Solo e pensoso i più deserti campi / vo 
mesurando a passi tardi e lenti”—the only known translation into English of these lines 
until the eighteenth century—and, from Rvf 175.1-2, “Il tempo e’l loco / ov’ i’ perdei me 
stesso.” Lines 40-43 develop the ship allegory (“My sayles do fall…”) familiar from 
Chaucer’s and Wyatt’s versions of Rvf 189. Finally, lines 47-49 derive from Rvf 209.9-11: 

e, qual cervo ferito di saetta     And yf I flye, I carrey with me still 
ch’el ferro avvelenato dentr’al fianco  the venymed shaft which doth his force 

restore  
fugge, e più duolsi quanto più s’affretta  by hast of flight… 

But Surrey is also mindful of Aeneid 4.69-73, which describes Dido afflicted by love as a 
wounded deer (“Qualis coniecta cerva sagitta…”), thus returning to the topic of Dido’s 
nocturnal anxiety, already touched on in the borrowing from the sestina (line 24, “save I, 
alas, against all others use”) that renders Petrarch’s adversative conjunction “Et io…” (Rvf 
22.6), which echoes in turn Vergil’s “At regina…” from Aeneid 4.1 and 4.529.  

A half dozen Petrarchan borrowings in a poem of 55 lines constitutes a tour de force of 
quasi-centonic poetry, but from the point of view of Surrey’s politics, the poem exhibits 
more than poetic colors: the reference to long-hidden unhealed wounds (lines 5-6, “Sins I 
have hidd under my brest the harme / that never shall recover helthfulness”) is a formula in 
Surrey’s poetry for his long-simmering aristocratic resentment under the Tudor yoke. 
Sessions suggests that for Surrey Dido’s wound represents “the vulnerability of all human 
nature” (284-86) and thus it is no accident that Surrey paraphrases, near the beginning of his 
capitolo, Virgil, Aen. 4.67 (“tacitum vivit sub pectore volnus”).22 The fixation on the wound 
also comes explicitly through Wyatt. Surrey concludes a strambotto with “But Wiat said 
true, the skarre doth aye endure,” (Howard no. 34) echoing, from Wyatt’s double sonnet 
preserved in Tottel (which is significantly given the profoundly Petrarchan heading “The 
lover describeth his restlesse state”) 23 Wyatt’s statement on the ineradicable scars of love: 
“From whence no toole away the skar can race” (Tottel no. 105.14; see also M&T no. 101.9-
10).24 The association of the wound, the stricken deer, and the vulnerability of even a royal 
self would return at the end of the century to inform Hamlet’s satisfied observation of 
Claudius’s conscience stung by the players’ performance of “The Murder of Gonzago”: 
“Why, let the stricken deer go weep…” (Hamlet, III.ii.206). 

Shakespeare’s Petrarch berhymed 
If Tottel’s anthology institutes a Petrarchizing program, it also concludes an epoch: 

George Watson (1-3) has commented that after Tottel Petrarch is rarely the object of direct 



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translation among English sonneteers, possibly for reasons of religion and ideology, since 
Petrarch was a Papist, but also possibly because translating Petrarch is so difficult. In any 
case, after Surrey’s establishment of the English sonnet including up to seven rhymes, there 
was no going back to the Petrarchan sonnet in four or five rhymes that Wyatt strove to 
master. Despite this shift in his reception, Petrarch’s reputation remained intact, even 
though the primary reason for invoking him is in order to rival or outdo him, or, as in 
Sidney’s case, in order to accuse rivals of borrowing from him too liberally (Astrophel no. 
15.7-8). 

The idea of rivaling and besting Petrarch did not escape Shakespeare’s ambition. Tottel’s 
Songs and Sonettes is mentioned in the first scene of Merry Wives, and one of its songs (no. 
182) is paraphrased in Hamlet’s gravedigger scene (V.i.55-62), suggesting Shakespeare’s 
ownership of a book that had been reprinted eleven times from 1557 to 1593 and that 
included some thirty Englished lyrics by Petrarch. Judging from Shakespeare’s celebrated 
parody of fulsome Petrarchan comparisons in one of his own sonnets, “My Mistres eyes are 
nothing like the Sunne” (no. 130), it has been convincingly argued that Shakespeare knew 
the seventh poem in Thomas Watson’s collection Hekatompathia (1582). Significantly, the 
poem is placed amid a series of poems (nos. 5-8) that either translate or refer to Petrarch 
(Pearlman; Mortimer 20, 63). 

Most readers agree that Shakespeare’s sonnets as published in 1609 betray scant 
employment of Petrarch,25 although lines 11-12 of Sonnet 130 itself, “I graunt I neuer saw a 
goddesse goe; / My Mistres when shee walkes treads on the ground,” have been perceived as 
targeting Petrarch’s praise of Laura’s walk beginning the sestet of Rvf 90 (“Non era l’andar 
suo cosa mortale / ma d’angelica forma…”). If Shakespeare did indeed fix on Rvf 90 as 
symptomatic of Petrarchan hyperbole, he showed a shrewd selectivity. It may be that the 
negations that articulate Shakespeare’s sonnet (line 6, “But no such Roses see I in her 
cheekes”) derive from Petrarch’s strong negation, though with contrary intention, beginning 
his sestet—the very lines Shakespeare imitates. In other words, Petrarch is challenged on his 
own ground. But if Shakespeare refuses to call his own mistress’s eyes solar, he does permit 
his character Romeo to address Juliet more than once as a sun (“it is the East, and Juliet is 
the sun”) a comparison plausibly authorized by Petrarch’s praise of Laura in these terms 
(Rvf 90.12-13: “… un vivo sole / fu quel ch’ i ‘ vidi.”).26 

Romeo and Juliet is indeed more promising as a site of Shakespeare’s confrontation with 
Petrarch and Petrarchism. The date of 1594 or 1595 for composition of the play would 
justify viewing the prominence of sonnet form and sonnet topics in the text as, in part, 
Shakespeare’s response to the barrage of English sonnet sequences published between 1591 
and 1594. In a larger sense it is part of the continuous exploitation of the sonnet that goes 
back to the many editions of Tottel, the collections of Thomas Watson (1576, 1582), and the 
enhancement of Petrarch’s status by his treatment as a past master in such works as Leland’s 
eulogy for Wyatt (1542), Puttenham and Sidney (Parker 1939, Harris, Pearlman). The better 
sonnetteers of 1591-94 allude to Petrarch, typically but once (e.g. Sidney, Astrophel no. 15; 
Daniel, Delia no. 35; Drayton, Ideas Mirrour, dedication). Thus it is striking that the only 
mention of an Italian poet in Shakespeare’s entire corpus is Mercutio’s of Petrarch, a 



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1.1 Winter 2011  97 

mention all the more significant, as Peter Holland notes in his introduction, considering the 
importance given to proper names in the play (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet xxxvi): 

Without his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Now  
he is for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in. Laura, to his lady, was a kitchen  
wench (marry, she had a better love to berhyme her…"), Dido a dowdy, Cleopatra  
a gypsy, Helen and Hero hildings and harlots, Thisbe a grey eye or so…  
(Rom. II.iv. 37-43) 

The single mention of Petrarch may reflect that in Shakespeare’s most immediate source 
for his script, Broke’s versified Romeus and Juliet (published by Tottel in 1562), it is another 
Tuscan author, Boccaccio, who is cited as fitter than Broke himself to tell the tale.27 As in 
Tottel’s two poems that name Petrarch (nos. 188-89), Mercutio sets up Petrarch as the expert 
sonneteer and Romeo as his inadequate challenger.28 The comparison implies that Romeo, 
unmanned by love, is like the chaste Petrarch who “flows in numbers” to “berhyme” his 
lady. Both lady and lover are part of the competition, since the business of praising Laura is 
one of coining comparisons (to Dido, Helen, Hero, Thisbe) to their detriment (they are mere 
“kitchen wenches”). Mercutio’s mocking mention of Petrarchan verse is a kind of fulcrum in 
the play for Shakespeare’s engagement with Petrarch’s text and example, and the insistence 
on the question of rival poets and rival ladies tips us off that the play itself is Shakespeare’s 
bid to outdo Petrarch within the arena of the sonnet and its poetics. 

As many readers have observed, the formal principle of the sonnet itself, in the form that 
Surrey bequeathed to the Elizabethans, has a prominent role in the play. Complete sonnets 
appear both as the prologue to the play and, in the second Quarto, at the beginning of Act 
II.29 Some who write on this subject claim that after Act II Shakespeare loses interest in the 
sonnet as a formal principle, or abandons it as Verona descends into violence, as if the 
sonnet represented civic harmony: both ideas result from a limited view of what sonnet 
form could mean in Shakespeare’s time. Not only could “sonnet” refer to any short poem (as 
in the title to Tottel’s collection), but typographical convention often isolated the sestet of 
sonnets from the octave, as occurs in Sidney’s Arcadia (1590 and 1593), Thomas Lodge’s 
Rosalynd (1593) and Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (Harris 467). More radically, Watson’s 
translations of Petrarchan sonnets expanded the form from quatorzains to three sestets 
(quatrains rhyming ABAB and an added couplet). What this means for Shakespeare is that 
the final six lines of Romeo and Juliet, a quatrain and a couplet, functions as a sonnet-
fragment, or as a strambotto (the form cultivated by Wyatt and Surrey), concluding the work 
in the same way the sonnet-prologue begins it. In this light, a number of other passages are 
recognizable as sestets, or strambotti, including speeches by Benvolio (I.ii.45-50), Romeo 
(I.ii.90-95), and Paris, this last late in the play (V.3.12-17) (Shakespeare Rom. xxxiv-v). Thus 
in no sense does Shakespeare forget about sonnet form after Act II, and the persistence of 
sonnet form is one of the ways in which, as Anne Slater as argued (132-36), a myriad of 
elements in the play realize the poetics of the sonnet, including its rhetoric, figurative 
language (e.g. oxymoron), and its implicit narratives. 



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The chief example of how Shakespeare adapts the sonnet to the requirements of a play is 
of course the meeting of Romeo and Juliet (I.v.94-111), where Shakespeare gives the first 
quatrain to Romeo, the second to Juliet, and shares the lines of the third quatrain between 
them (one to Juliet, three to Romeo); the witty final couplet is then divided between the two: 

[Juliet]: “Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.” 
[Romeo]: “Then move not while my prayers’ effect I take.” (I.v.106-07)  

As if starting another sonnet, the pair then shares a further quatrain, alternating lines, 
but are interrupted by the Nurse.30 In doling out the lines, Shakespeare uses the articulations 
of the form to suggest the coming together of the pair and the joining of their hands and lips: 
some modern stage directions indicate the kiss after the first line of the additional quatrain, 
but the kiss must occur immediately after Romeo’s “I take,” with the physical kiss mirroring 
the conclusion of the couplet, a conceit that the new quatrain continues, such that the first 
hemistich of its last line is divided by the second kiss (“‘give me my sin again’”).31 “You kiss 
by th’ book,” Juliet’s remark chiding Romeo’s facile expertise, alerts the reader to the literary 
artifice of the scene, with its conceited metaphors (pilgrims, hands, lips, etc.), and Juliet’s 
casuistical defensive reasoning (“Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss”) (Rom. xxxiv). But the 
sonnet transgresses the Petrarchan canons that Mercutio, in chiding Romeo in Act II.v, 
mistakenly applies to a Romeo no longer besotted with Rosalind. In having Romeo and 
Juliet touch hands and touch lips, Shakespeare flouts Petrarchan prohibitions as does 
Sonnet 130, where unlike the ethereal Laura, Shakespeare’s love “treads on the ground.” 
The sonnet itself is the weapon of choice in Shakespeare’s duel with Petrarch, in whose 
songbook love never touches the pitch of the physical. 

The meeting of the lovers is the most important scene in the play, since everything 
follows from it: everything also follows, therefore, from the kiss that the sonnet enacts. 
Shakespeare indicates the generative implications of the scene for the plot by placing just 
before the sonnet Tybalt’s hostility to Romeo’s attendance at the Capulet feast and his vow 
of revenge in terms that defy the hospitality old Capulet offers Romeo: “this intrusion shall / 
now seeming sweet, convert to bittrest gall” (I.v.92-3)—terms that nevertheless remain 
within a sonnet idiom and which then recur in the sonnet opening Act II.i.14, “tempering 
extremities with extreme sweet.” Just after the shared sonnet in Act I the lovers realize that 
their love spawns oxymora and contradiction (I.v.119-20: “Is she a Capulet? / O dear 
account, my life is my foe’s debt”) and (I.v.139; “my only love, sprung from my only hate”), 
and this predicament too appears in the Act II sonnet, where the lovers must “steal love’s 
sweet bait from fearful hooks” (line 8). Long recognized as a chief example of Petrarchan 
rhetoric in the play (Slater 132-33), these oxymora begin with Romeo’s outburst in Act 
I.i.174-197. Watson is again the probable immediate source (Hekatompathia 18 and 98), but 
also the vector through which Romeo’s account of “brawling love, O loving hate” pays 
homage to the “icy fire” of the same Petrarchan topos that animates Wyatt’s version of Rvf 
134 (M&T 25: “I fynde no peace and all my warr is done”) and possibly even reaches back to 
the last line of Chaucer’s version of Rvf 132 (“For hete of cold, for cold of hete I dye”). In 
Friar Laurence’s metaphor of raging eros (“violent delights”) Shakespeare develops an image 
of love as an explosive force (II.vi.9-11: “like fire and powder, / which as they kiss, 



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consume”), so that the lovers’ physical kiss, the verbal kiss of the couplet, and the 
metaphorical “kiss” of explosive, fatal eros are on a figurative continuum that realizes the 
compressed force of the English sonnet couplet as developed by Wyatt, Surrey, and their 
heirs. 

Mercutio’s mockery of Romeo’s lovesickness offers further clues to how Shakespeare 
mines the cardinal difficulty of sonnet form—its rhyme scheme—for vigorous verbal effects 
in the play. Mercutio allows that Laura had “a better poet to berhyme her”; even before that 
he had conjured Romeo to “appear though in the likeness of a sigh; speak but one rhyme, 
and I am satisfied. Cry but ‘Ay me,’ pronounce but ‘love’ and ‘dove’” (II.i.8-10), unaware 
that Romeo had already fulfilled this task in the previous scene (I.v.49: “so shows a snowy 
dove trooping with crows”). Shakespeare turns into a rich poetic resource the acoustic 
effects of reiterated rhymes as well as the stereotypical syllables of a lover’s lament.32 
Mercutio’s “Ay me,” emerges right on cue in Juliet’s meditation overheard by Romeo below 
her balcony (II.ii.25: “‘Ay me!’” “‘She speaks’”), and shortly thereafter she characterizes 
Romeo’s consent to her love—which she assumes is done lightly—with the same word 
(II.ii.90, “I know thou wilt say ‘Ay’”). Exemplifying what we might call the insistence of the 
letter in the shaping of character and plot, the lovers use the punning “Ay” ( = “I”) in 
passages rich with dramatic irony and authorial self-reflexiveness: the Nurse had 
prophesied Juliet’s erotic predisposition as a child, in her answer of “Ay” to the Nurse’s 
remark that she would one day fall backward (I.iii.42-50), while Romeo’s first “Ay” 
identifies him as a reader—of amatory verse, no doubt—when asked to decode the list of 
guests to Capulet’s ball (I.ii.61-62: “Ay, if I know the letters and the language.”).33 “Ay” is 
thus fateful, and its fatality, in both senses of the word, is announced in Mercutio’s punning 
use of Italian “hai” to mark a rapier’s fatal thrust (II.ii.26). The gravity of the term is 
confirmed when Juliet fears to hear the “Ay” that will certify Romeo’s death after the brawls 
in Verona’s streets (III.ii.45-47): “say thou but ‘Ay,’ and that bare vowel shall poison more / 
than the death-darting eye of a cockatrice”; also 48: “I am not I, if there be such an ‘Ay’…” 
In a deeper sense, Shakespeare’s punning on Ay/I inherits the turn toward “the inward 
language” of Tudor subjectivity explored by Wyatt and Surrey (Greenblatt 155), as in lines 
such as “Withoute Iyen I se; and withoute tong I plain” from “I fynde no peace,” an 
insistence on the first-person pronoun that results in part from translation, as the subject 
pronoun is normally suppressed in Italian. But Juliet’s conclusion to the same speech also 
alerts us to another crucial series of rhymes in the play (III.ii.50-51): “If he be slain, say 
‘Aye’: if not, ‘No.’ / Brief sounds determine of my weal or woe.” 

To focus on a term so natural to a tragedy as “woe” might seem pointless. But the word’s 
onomatopoeia proclaims its poetic usefulness. It may also have carried Petrarchan 
associations in 1595, thanks to Sidney’s dismissal of “Poor Petrarch’s long-deceased woes” 
(Astrophil 15.7) and its prominence in the versified “passions” of Thomas Watson already 
identified as targets for Shakespeare’s transformative wit (Hekatompathia 18, 98: 
Shakespeare’s own sonnets 44, 90, and 127 use woe in the final couplet). Scrutiny of the 
play suggests a careful strategy to Shakespeare’s deployment of “woe” and of thematically 
significant terms rhyming with it: “foe,” but also, of course, the name “Romeo,” used over 



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thirty times in the play but rarely in rhyme. When Tybalt espies Romeo at Capulet’s feast he 
brands him “Montague, our foe,” rhyming with “that villain Romeo.” Mercutio’s prose 
chaffing of Romeo’s Petrarchism, quoted above, concludes with the phrase “Thisbe, a gray 
eye or so” rhyming with “Signor Romeo” (II.iv.42-43). In this same speech Romeo’s name is 
the emblem of his own sorrow, for Mercutio’s claim that he lacks his “roe,” his masculine 
sexual heft, exposes the Petrarchan melancholy embedded in the remaining Oh me of his 
name, a lament that also complements Juliet’s “Ay me” and presages his future griefs. When 
Mercutio is killed, Shakespeare has his name rhyme with that of Romeo, as if as a parting 
verbal embrace of the two friends (III.i.143-4). Although there are further important uses of 
“woe,” as when the newlyweds contemplate their separation (III.v.35-36: “lighter and lighter 
it grows / more dark and dark our woes”), Shakespeare rhymes “woe” with Romeo’s name 
only once, and this occurs in the final couplet of the play, where, as we saw, the formal 
principle of the sonnet, in this case a sestet or strambotto, and a rhetorical principle, the 
emulative comparison identifying a superlative, reach a simultaneous consummation: “For 
there was never story of more woe / than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” 34 As we saw, the 
powerful closure obtained with this rhyme is prepared from the beginning of the play (its 
first appearance is at I.i.78-79) and it attests to Shakespeare’s understanding of the challenge 
of the English sonnet: finding and placing the rhymes, the “berhyming” of it, in short, with a 
view to setting up the final couplet. The triumph of the couplet is thus also the triumph of 
English sonnet form and formalizes the supersession of Petrarch, just as on the level of 
content Shakespeare’s married Romeo outperforms Petrarch’s chaste lover. 

Much more could be said regarding Shakespeare’s exploration of Romeo as a Petrarchan 
persona informed by the English sonnet tradition. One of the striking continuities in 
Shakespeare’s treatment of his male protagonist is the use of the trope of the lover as a ship 
in describing Romeo’s destiny. First deployed as Romeo approaches the Capulet’s ball 
(I.iv.112-113: “but he that hath the steerage of my course, / direct my sail”), it recurs as he 
prepares to drink poison (5.3.117-18: “Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on / The 
dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark”), thus framing his amatory life within the terms 
sketched out in Petrarch’s Rvf 189. Shakespeare’s practice was stimulated by Broke, who 
repeatedly applies the trope to Romeo (Broke 9, 13, 30, 51), but Shakespeare was likely not 
unaware that the ship-allegory of the lover ultimately derives from Petrarch, mediated by 
Chaucer’s second canticus Troili and Wyatt’s “My galy charged with forgetfulness.” 35 Other 
passages where the Rosalind-besotted Romeo behaves in extreme Petrarchan fashion, albeit 
mocking the mannerisms of a mutable infatuation, also reveal Shakespearean uses of topics 
from sonneteering tradition. Mercutio’s remarks on Romeo transfixed by love’s arrow and 
Rosalind’s invulnerability to it are commonplaces (I.i. 207-15; I.iv.19-22; II.iv.13-16), but 
they are emblematic ones, and they link Romeo specifically to Rvf 2.13-14 (translated, 
anonymously, in Tottel, no. 227), to Troilus smitten by Criseyde in Chaucer’s romance, and 
to Wyatt’s “Behold, Love” beginning the Egerton manuscript. Montague’s observation that 
Romeo repairs in the morning to his darkened room is in the spirit of Petrarch’s sonnet on 
his chamber and his bed, his cameretta (Rvf 234), a poem imitated by Wyatt in three stanzas 
of rhyme royal (Tottel, no. 67, using the same measure Chaucer used for Rvf 132), and 



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marked by the “unquyet mynde” formula (67.4: “quieter of mynde, mine unquiet fo”). 
Indeed, the whole account given by Benvolio of Romeo’s solitary morning walks and 
concealment in the woods (I.i. 17-42), a disappearing act Romeo repeats just after Capulet’s 
ball (II.i.30-42), is arguably an homage to Surrey’s capitolo where it draws on Rvf 6 (“Solo e 
pensoso”) and 22 (“A qualunque animale”), passages the more conspicuous given that 
Surrey’s capitolo holds first place in Tottel’s anthology.36 In short, Shakespeare’s account of 
Romeo as a Petrarchan lover owes a debt to Surrey’s own extensive self-fashioning,37 and 
both acts of myth-making draw, directly and through intermediaries like Broke, on 
Chaucer’s Troilus as the model of the noble lover undone by frustrated love and frustrated 
ambition.38 Viewed from this angle, Shakespeare’s sonnet tragedy is a lineal descendant of 
Chaucer’s Petrarchan translations in Troilus and Criseyde. 

 

 
                                                
1 See Levenson 24, also Ferry 73, citing Tottel no. 206.35-36. 
2 In a forthcoming study, Alison Cornish, drawing on the translation theory of Walter 
Benjamin, argues that Boccaccio and Petrarch, along with Dante, avoided volgarizzamento 
in favor of translation directed to produce a new, living work. 
3 Coluccio Salutati’s Latin version of this hemistich (“Si fors non sit amor,” drawn from an 
earlier version of the sonnet) appears consistent with Chaucer’s (see Wilkins 169; Rossiter 
119); on the poetic quaestio, see Petrarca Canz. 643; Kaylor cites Boece I, pr. 4: 201 (“And 
yif God ne is, whennes comen gode thynges?”) as impinging on Chaucer’s translation. Cf. 
Boccaccio, Filostrato 6.15.1-2, which conforms to the usual reading. 
4 Cf. Dante’s “dolce ber che non m’avria mai sazio” (Purg. 33.138). 
5 For Petrarch’s treatment of the canzone stanza, see Durling in this volume. Rossiter (117) 
suggests that Chaucer might have read Rvf 189 transcribed as two adjacent seven-line 
blocks, possibly suggestive of his own seven-line stanza; this is not the format used for 
sonnets in the Chigi ms., however. For the implications of sonnet transcription formats, see 
Storey in this volume. 
6 If in possession of a complete Petrarch, Chaucer could of course have seen Boccaccio’s 
incipit to Filostrato V.62 as Rvf 70.40. 
7 See Santagata’s note to 105.90 (Petrarca 501) for this predicament in Rvf (e.g. Rvf 182.5) 
8 On the debate, see Balduino, Velli 183-99, Branca 323-25, Santagata 246-70, Petrarca Canz. 
520-21; Tonelli 206-219. 
9 On the complex placement of these poets as subjects in Tudor society and power politics, 
see Greenblatt 126-39, 154-56, Ferry 107, Heale 87, and Foley 37. 
10 Seventy-eight poems of 280 in the second edition give “the lover” as subject of the poem’s 
heading. See Kamholtz, Tottel xv-lxii; Marquis, and especially Marquis, “Politics,” on the 
implications of revisions in Tottel’s second 1557 edition. 
11 Muir and Thompson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (hereafter M&T) print the 
poems of the Egerton ms. in order, with some slight modifications concerning the end of the 
manuscript; see M&T, xi-xii.  



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12 On Wyatt’s poetic language as conditioned by his diplomatic skill, see Greenblatt 139-45, 
Heale 97, 104, Foley 22-25, Crewe 46, and Walker 335-50. It was probably during Wyatt’s 
diplomatic missions to France in 1526 and Rome in 1527 that he encountered copies of Rvf.  
13 Only one attestation in OED previous to Wyatt’s use: “disgorgith their veneme” (Skelton, 
1529).  
14 Tottel’s anonymous version of Rvf 23 (no. 154) makes this line the poem’s incipit, “Syth 
singyng gladdeth oft the harts.” 
15 The “unquyet mind” of course also evokes Augustine’s “inquietum cor noster” 
(Confessions I.1), a text that informs Petrarchan self-consciousness. 
16 On the Clare sonnet-epitaph, see Zitner; Crewe 64-65; on Surrey’s Windsor poems, 
Sessions 108-139. For Zitner, Surrey’s application of the Virgilian epitaph to Clare, never a 
poet, suggests the epitaph rebounds on Surrey himself (524-25). 
17 Ferry 114-16; see Sessions 207 on Surrey’s highly successful jousts in 1540 in honor of 
Anne of Cleves. 
18 On the Aeneid translations, published by Tottel in the same year as Songes and Sonnettes 
see Sessions 268-77.  
19 See in “In the rude age” (Howard no. 30, D rhyme -ayme from the second quatrain is also 
in the third; E rhyme is ayle, assonant with -ayne, -ayme); “Dyvers thy death” (Howard no. 
29: first quatrain B rhyme -edd, also in third quatrain; final couplet rhyme -ayle). Tottel 
gives as Surrey’s first line “Love that liveth and reyneth in my thought” and “corrects” to 
Playnes and pains the second set of rhymes on -ayne in the third quatrain, obscuring the 
affiliation with the sonnets for Wyatt. 
20 Petrarchan topics are echoed, however: the first line rephrases Rvf 140 translated by 
Wyatt, and lines 8-9, “…Alas, those dayes / In vayn were spent…” evoke Rvf 1.13-14. 
21 The sonnets are also linked by anomalous rhyme schemes: “Soote season,” three quatrains 
ABAB, CDCD, etc., and couplet AA; “Alas, so all thinges,” three quatrains ABAB, etc., and 
couplet BB, suggesting that the poems are complementary by design. 
22 Surrey in his version of Aen. 4.83 renders the lines as “whiles in the breast the silent 
wound keeps life”; see Sessions 272-73. 
23 Tottel includes six headings that describe poems as voicing the “restless state” of the 
lover: nos. 1, 4, 24, 67, 104, 156. 
24 Wyatt versifies “Etiam sanato vulnere, cicatrix manet,” attributed to Publilius Syrus and 
used in texts of canon law, to denote the persistence of infamy after penance and absolution. 
The relevance of the concept, given Wyatt’s and Surrey’s imprisonments, is obvious. Thanks 
to Justin Steinberg for bringing the legal concept to my attention.  
25 An echo of Rvf 1.9-10 (“Ma ben veggio or sì come al popol tutto / favola fui gran 
tempo…”) has been detected in the opening of Sonnet 110 (“Alas ‘tis true, I have gone here 
and there / and made my selfe a motley to the view”): see Rollins, cited in Braden 163.  
26 The sun as object of comparison is a fixture of Romeo and Juliet: see I.i.117, I.ii.94-95, 
II.ii.2-4, II.iii.1-6, III.ii.1-4, III.v.1-36, etc. 
27 Broke, p. 1, line 15: “Which Boccace scant, not my rude tongue, were able forth to tell.” 



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28 Compare Tottel no. 188.1-3: “O Petrarke hed and prince of poets al, / Whose lively gift of 
flowing eloquence / Wel may we seke…”; and line 13: “But ther was never Laure more then 
one.” But no. 189.11 in Tottel claims that Laura has been excelled; “If Lawra livde she 
would her cleane deface” (Heale 105). Samuel Daniel acknowledges his insufficiency as the 
berhymer of Delia in no. 35.3 of his 1592 collection: “though thou a Laura hast no Petrarch 
found.” 
29 Broke’s poem also begins with a preface consisting of a pair of sonnets and a sonnet-
argument (lxvii-lxix; see Harris 455-56). 
30 On this sonnet and sonnet poetics in Romeo and Juliet in general, see Colie 143-44, Foster 
51, Laird 206-07, Levenson 23-28, Whittier 35-36, Vendler 166-68. 
31 For the placement of the kiss, see Franson 2-3. The kisses may echo Sidney’s sonnets 
ending with Astrophil kissing Stella, e.g. 73,74, 79, 80, 81,84, the only “conquest” of 
Astrophil’s courtship. 
32 On acoustic effects in the play, see Slater 142-44 and Patricia Parker 368. For 
Shakespearean autobiography in Romeo and Juliet see Brezius 23-25.  
33 The list has thirteen proper names; Paris makes fourteen (I.ii.22-23; but the real fourteenth 
is Romeo); on the number fourteen in relation to Juliet’s age and association with the sonnet, 
see Whittier 40, and Franson 2-3, 6. 
34 Broke’s ending does not rhyme on the name: “there is no monument more worthy of the 
sight / than is the tombe of Juliet and Romeus her knight”(112). 
35 Old Capulet’s use of the ship-allegory for Juliet at III.v.130-39 (“In one little body / thou 
counterfeit’st a bark, a sea, a wind”) is taken by Slater as an allusion to Wyatt’s version of 
Rvf 189 (Capulet’s mention of it emphasizes his age) (129). See also Laird 208.  
36 Thomson cites John Harington, in the preface to Orlando furioso in English Heroical Verse 
of 1591, describing Dante’s selva oscura as “that wandring wood of which the dolefull 
Petrarke complaines so often in those his sweet mourning sonets…” (174).  
37 On Elizabethan fictions about Surrey, including Thomas Nashe’s portrait of the Earl as the 
lover of the “Tuscan” Geraldine, see Sessions 187-92. 
38 Surrey imagined himself a Troilus during his happy youth at Windsor (Howard no. 27.4); 
the dead faithful shepherd of Howard no. 16, a projection of Surrey, is buried next to 
Troilus. 

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	Francis, Thou Art Translated:  Petrarch Metamorphosed in English, 1380-1595
	Ronald L. Martinez, Brown University
	Petrarch in Troilus and Criseyde
	Trial by Sonnet: Wyatt and Surrey
	Shakespeare’s Petrarch berhymed
	Works Cited