Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 188
Milli mála 13/2021 187
Danila Sokolov
University of Iceland
“Pen, paper, inke, you feeble
instruments”:
The Precarity of Lyric Ontology in
Elizabethan Sonnets
Elizabethan sonnets have been frequently recruited to substanti-
ate claims about early modern English literature, culture, and
society which transcend the notion of Petrarchan language as a
conventional idiom of heterosexual love. Protean and elastic,
Petrarchan metaphorics provided a vehicle for many forms of ideo-
logical labour across Renaissance Europe and the Americas. In early
modern England, the lexicon of frustrated love has been shown to
resonate with a panoply of sociocultural discourses: the politics of
courtliness under Elizabeth I;1 the emergence of class as a category
of social distinction;2 the vicissitudes of early modern gender;3 the
articulation of nationhood;4 the pursuit of acquisitive desires;5 the
legal imaginary;6 and the project of colonial expansion.7
But Petrarch’s Rime sparse, which insistently thematises its own
textuality, also furnished Renaissance poets with a nuanced vocabu-
lary for theorizing broader questions of ars poetica, especially lyric.
1 Marotti, “‘Love Is Not Love;’” Villeponteaux, Queen’s Mercy, 67–106.
2 Warley, Sonnet Sequences.
3 Dubrow, Echoes of Desire; Estrin, Laura; R. Smith, Sonnets.
4 Kennedy, Site of Petrarchism.
5 Correll, “Terms of ‘Indearment;’” Kennedy, Petrarchism at Work.
6 Cormack, “Strange Love;” Zurcher, Shakespeare and Law, 57–102; Sokolov, Renaissance Texts,
175–219.
7 R. Greene, Unrequited Conquests.