Mini: Shakespeare and Petrarch

In today's episode, we will be continuing our series on Shakespeare's Language Framework and our Shakespeare's Sources by taking a closer look at Petrarch.

First, we will dive into the biography of Francesco Petrarca, more commonly known as Petrarch in English, the 14th century poet who had a huge influence on European humanism, the Renaissance, and poetry.

Then, we will explore Petrarch's influence and how it spread across Europe before covering how we can see his influence in the works of William Shakespeare. 

Kourtney Smith (K): In today's episode, we'll be talking about Shakespeare and Petrarch.

Elyse Sharp (E): We've already talked about Petrarch a little bit in our Twelfth Night episode, Gender and Queer Theory, but now we want to do a deeper dive into this cultural figure who greatly inspired Shakespeare's plays and poems.

K:  While this episode is primarily a Shakespeare's Language Framework episode, we do want to first share some historical background about Petrarch and his legacy.

E:  Petrarch, or Francesco Petrarca in full Italian, was an Italian scholar, poet, and humanist born in 1304 in Tuscany and died in 1374 in Padua. While he was a boy, Petrarch and his family moved to the Provence region of southern France. His father was a lawyer, so he might have been looking for employment with the exiled Papal Court in Avignon. This was a period between 1309 and 1376 in which popes resided in Avignon instead of Rome due to conflicts between the Papacy and the French Crown.

K:  Petrarch, allegedly at his father's insistence, was sent to study law at Montpellier in 1316. A few years later, he returned to Italy to continue his studies at Bologna. Even though he was studying law, he was writing during this period. Many of his earliest surviving poems date back to his days at Montpellier or Bologna. He wrote vernacular poetry, the speech of common people, rather than in Latin or Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period and Roman and Byzantine empires respectively.

E: Petrarch left his law studies after his father's death in 1326 and returned to Avignon.He took ecclesiastical orders and entered the household of the Cardinal Giovanni Colonna of a noble Roman family descended from the 10th century. Fun fact, this Colonna family had feuded with two other families throughout the Middle Ages, the Caetani and the Orsinis. Yes, this is the same Orsino family whose name might have been used in Twelfth Night to suggest Illyria is more Italian than English. As we mentioned in that series’ “Stuff to Chew On” episode, a member of the family, Virginio Orsini, visited the English court in December 1601 for the Christmas revelries and would have been entertained by Twelfth Night. It is said that Queen Elizabeth danced a galliard for him to show off her vigor in her old age. Thereby, it is likely that Orsino was named in his honor, although we don't know if the character is actually based on him any further.

K: Now back to Petrarch.

E: There is a famous description of Petrarch and his brother Gerardo, quote, “as dandies in [Avignon's] polished courtly world.” unquote. He continued to write, and he also developed a religious faith that led him to his famous chaste love for a woman known as Laura. Laura's identity has never been identified in spite of efforts. We do know that Petrarch first saw Laura on April 6th, 1327, and he loved her from a distance until his death.

K: This love is the basis of Petrarch's most famous poems from his Il Canzoniere, or Song Book, in English. Canzoniere was originally titled Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, or Fragments of Common Things, but is also now known as Rome sparse, or Scattered Rhymes. He collected and revised these poems throughout his life.

E:  He continued to work within the church, and in 1335 he received a canonry, or position as a member of the clergy on the staff of a cathedral in Lombez, France. In spite of this position, he resided at Avignon in the service of the Cardinal. This was a period of travel, study of classical texts, and time away from Laura. Petrarch also began to advocate for the continuity between classical culture and Christianity, two seemingly conflicting ideals, and is therefore credited as the founder of European Humanism.

K:  There are many more details involved in Petrarch's life. Like we said, he traveled, studied, wrote, and influenced both European Humanism and the cult of poetry. The concept of a “Dark Age” in Europe also originated with Petrarch. The term is often used to characterize the Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness–but that simply wasn't true, and most scholars reject the usage of this concept to describe the period. If you would like to know more about Petrarch and the term “Dark Ages”, we recommend checking out Dr. Eleanor Janega's graphic novel, The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, as she sheds more light on the period, as well as Petrarch's inaccuracy.

E:  But now we want to focus on one aspect of Petrarch's legacy, his Rime poems.

K: Around 1351, in Vaucluse, France, when Petrarch was 47, he worked on a new plan for the Rime. He divided the project up into two parts, the Rime in Vita di Laura, or “Poems During Laura's Life,” and, you guessed it, Rime in Morte di Laura, “Poems After Laura's Death.” The poems were “governed by an exquisite aesthetic taste” (which I'm sure 2014 Tumblr users would appreciate) and were arranged chronologically: from falling in love to his theory of “solitary life” and dedication to God.

E: Petrarch wrote more than 300 Italian sonnets to Laura. The poems encompass a variety of moods and subjects, and his poetry is an intense reaction to his beloved. He uses similes to evoke these feelings. For example, he writes of burning like fire and freezing like ice. Thomas Wyatt's translation of sonnet 134 begins: “I find no peace and all my war is done.” Following Laura's death, Petrarch expressed his sorrow and described her return to him in dreams.This poetic style was repeated by sonneteers of Elizabethan England and later became poetic cliches in the great love sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer, Michael Drayton, and William Shakespeare.

K: Petrarch died in 1347 in Arqua at the age of 69, and it's said that he was found with his head resting on a manuscript of Virgil.

E: So that's a brief history of Petrarch's life. Now let's talk more about how these poems influenced early modern literature.

K: Petrarch's style of poetry was embraced by both amateur writers and professional poets. Writers such as Giovanni Boccaccio and Chaucer borrowed features of Petrarch's poetry during Petrarch's lifetime. By the late 16th century, Petrarchism, or the imitation of Petrarch's style, in European literature was widespread and had become “the dominant mode of poetic expression” in Italy and throughout Western Europe.

E:  In the later Renaissance, books of Petrarch's poetry, specifically the Canzoniere and Rime collections, were published with accompanying biographies of Petrarch and editor commentaries that projected various and often competing views of Petrarch and his poetry. Some editions of the Rime collection, for example, rearranged the order of the poems in the collection to create a more coherent narrative of Petrarch's love for Laura. Others highlighted Petrarch's use of allusion, myth, and other rhetorical devices.

K: This variety of collections available to readers and would-be sonnet writers led to a greater diversity of sonnets by those who chose to imitate Petrarch's style. In Italy alone, writers wrote sonnets that celebrated great men and public deeds, some were more amatory, some noblewomen wrote sonnets about their virtuous widowhood while professional courtesans wrote about their experiences. Sonnet writing even crossed artistic disciplines. Michelangelo “wrote scores of Petrarchan sonnets and madrigals about patronage, art, and religious faith.”

E: Petrarch's influence spread from Italy to Spain, then to France, before entering England during the reign of King Henry VIII with Thomas Wyatt, who we mentioned earlier. In 15th century France, the Blason emerged as a genre of poetry that found its roots in imitation of Petrarch. These poems, written by poets who were following in the style of Clément Marot, use Petrarch's convention of representing the beloved, as he only depicts Laura as parts of a woman instead of providing a complete picture. The Blason can also be considered a subversive reaction to the popularity of Petrarch, because while it utilizes some of his conventions, many Blasons also move away from Petrarch's adulatory tone.

K: When Petrarchism arrived in England, it was met with both the same mixed reactions that all Italianic cultural exports were at the time, both fascination and revulsion. The reading and writing of Petrarchan love poems was incredibly popular at the Inns of Court. However, as we've discussed in our episodes on masculinity, patriarchy, gender, grief, the four humours, and witchcraft, English culture in the late 1500s was obsessed with the expression of self-control, temperance, and moderation as evidence of achieving the humanist ideal of reason. The hyperbolic nature of Petrarchism was considered a form of excess in comparison and, therefore, was seen by detractors as antipodal to the pursuit of temperance and moderation, which led to English parodies and satires of the Petrarchan conventions, as well as a shift in how Petrarchan-style sonnets were written.

E: And Shakespeare seems to have mostly gone with the trend of satirizing Petrarch or at least pointing out the worst of Petrarchan conventions. In Twelfth Night, Olivia mocks the hyperbolic Petrarchan inventory of body parts sans poetic metaphor, saying:

O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out divers schedules of my beauty: it shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil
labelled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me?

K: In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare also rejects the typical stock metaphors for the body parts of a female lover:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

E: And in As You Like It, Phoebe initially rejects Silvius largely because of his Petrarchan approach to wooing her.  He laments “the wounds invisible / That love’s keen arrows make” and describes a look from Phoebe as the source of his suffering. Because of his hyperbolic language, she believes him to be insincere as “there is no force in eyes that can do hurt.” In contrast, Phoebe is instantly wooed by Rosalind as Ganymede, who appraises Phoebe's physical appearance in more direct (and less excessive, metaphor-ridden) terms.

K: Shakepeare also depicts this Petrarchan lover trope in Romeo and Juliet, with a subtler depiction of critiques of Petrarchan tropes. The character of Romeo begins the play as a Petrarchan lover, which situates him in opposition to the other male characters in the play who are focused on and entrenched in the feud. According to Shakespeare scholar Gail Kern Paster's essay, A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet:

“Shakespeare uses the language and self-involved behaviors of the Petrarchan lover to dramatize Romeo’s experience of love…The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial. Such a love—like Romeo’s for Rosaline—is founded upon frustration and requires rejection. The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display.”

E: And as Rene Weiss, editor of the 2012 Arden Edition of Romeo and Juliet, points out in the introduction to the play, “up to the moment where he sees Juliet, Romeo's language of love consists of strings of self-conscious oxymorons, lifeless cliches incapable of expressing true emotion, mere verbiage of melancholy suitable for moping in groves of sycamores.” It is a dense pile of Petrarchan language, copied and pasted repeatedly. However, when Romeo meets Juliet, he sheds this Petrarchan density and shifts to a shared love sonnet that features one metaphor, love as religious devotion, woven throughout. This shift not only demonstrates the difference between Romeo's false love for Rosaline and his true love for Juliet, but also mirrors the late Elizabethan-era shift in love poetry. The Elizabethan and Jacobean era saw a trend of reducing the amount of Petrarchan conceits in a love poem, not a complete rejection of the use of metaphor and simile to express the heightened experience of love.

K: And that's Petrarch.

E: Thank you for listening to this episode.

K: Our kind listeners, we can no other answer make but thanks and thanks and ever thanks to our Patreon patrons, Anne Connors and Kathleen Owen.

Quote of the Episode, featuring guest Dr. Mia Escott

Dr. Mia Escott: Hi, I'm Dr. Mia Escott from Berry College. You can follow me at dr.shakesfeare on TikTok.  I will be reading from Richard II Act 3, Scene 2. King Richard: 

Not all the water in the rough rude sea 
Can wash the balm away from an anointed king;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose 
The deputy elected by the Lord:
For every man that Bolingbroke hath press’d 
To lift shrewd steel against our golden crown, 
God for his Richard hath in heavenly paid 
A glorious angel: then if angels fight, 
Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.

Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.

Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.

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Works referenced:

Paster, Gail Kern. “A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet.” Folger Shakespeare Library, 2024, www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/romeo-and-juliet-a-modern-perspective/.

"Petrarchism." The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. Credo Reference. Web. 21 January 2015. 

Shakespeare, William, and Keir Elam. Twelfth Night. Arden Shakespeare, 2008.

Vuillemin, Rémi. “‘love with excess of heat’: The sonnet and Petrarchan excess in the late elizabethan and early jacobean periods.” XVII-XVIII, no. 71, 31 Dec. 2014, pp. 99–120, https://doi.org/10.4000/1718.395.

Whitfield, John Humphreys. “Petrarch.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., 25 Jan. 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Petrarch.