‘Love with excess of heat’: The Sonnet and Petrarchan Excess in the Late Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Periods

Abstract

In the English Renaissance, the Petrarchan lover was the figure of excess par excellence. In poems and plays of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, his excessive desire and grief were expressed through a rhetoric characterised by a systematic resort to set devices and a repeated use of Petrarchan commonplaces. This has led to a certain misconception of Petrarchism in general, and of the Petrarchan sonnet in particular, as a meaningless juxtaposition of clichés. However, the literary criticism of the last three decades has shown that the excesses of the lover were part of the very issues Petrarchan sonnets sought to address. In that sense, sonnet sequences are not to be set apart from other literary works of the period, though their moral ambiguity is probably responsible for some of their critical misfortune. Drawing from varied sources, this paper explains the literary, cultural and moral reasons why excess was so central an issue for both Petrarchan poets and those who criticised their work in the 1590s and 1600s.