The Jacobean Sonneteers

"As published in 1609, Sheakespeare's Sonnets was by no means so aberrant and mistimed as those who attempt to pigeon-hole the entire sequence as early work have often maintained. It is true that the great Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering, in the wake of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, had spent its force by the end of the 1590s. But James' accession in 1603 stimulated a second wave. From the viewpoint of Jacobean readers, [Shakespeare's Sonnets] could be received as part of this small bvut vigorous movement to provide the new court culture with its own refashioned sonnet sequences and lyric collections. These were no longer idealistically Petrarchan or Sidneian, but characterized by sportiveness, satirical and epigrammatic touches, and abrupt feverarsals of mood. Drayton's 1605 redaction of Idea, in which he positively boasted of the 'Wilde, mad, jocund, and irregular style' of his verse has already been mentioned. Sir John Davies' Wittes Pilgrimiage...expresses a delight in variety and contradiction [and] is one of the few sequences to match Shakespeare's in length...Most of the other sonneteers of the early Jacobean period were Scottish [William Alexander's Aurora in 1604; Alexander Craig's Amorose Songs, Sonets and Elegies in 1606]...The years 1603-9 also saw a proliferation of satirical and epigrammatic poetry, which the salty, 'humorous' character of most of the Jacobean sonnet sequences seems to match...Two further Jacobean sonnet-sequeunces, however, represent a throwback to the more 'golden,' and Petrarchan style of the 1590s: [David Murray's Caelia in 1611; William Drummond's Poems in 1614]...These late examples tetisfy to the perissitance of the sonnet-sequeunce genre in the first decade of James' reign" (D-J 30).

Shakespeare's Sonnets "consumed in its totality, is salt, satiric, and bitter, taking its place thematically, as well as chronologically, alongside such painfully adult, sexually cynical works as All's Well, Lear, Antonty, Troilus, and TImon" (KDJ 103).