“Pen, paper, inke, you feeble instruments”: The Precarity of Lyric Ontology in Elizabethan Sonnets

Abstract

The Precarity of Lyric Ontology inElizabethan Sonnets E lizabethan sonnets have been frequently recruited to substantiate 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 ideological 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 vocabulary for theorizing broader questions of ars poetica, especially lyric.