The logic of sonnets

During her summer workshop, Revision as Regeneration, Leatha Kendrick cited a paucity of rhyme words in English as one reason that Shakespeare and other Elizabethan practitioners of the sonnet deviated from the Italian/Petrarchan form. The classical Petrarchan sonnet works with only two sets of rhymes — ab in the octave, cd in the sestet. This kind of rhyming is easy enough to do in Italian, with its inflected endings, but bloody hard in English. By contrast, the English/Shakespearean sonnet allows twice as many sets of rhymes — ab, cd, ef, gg.

While such practical craft may have driven the change, Paul Fussell implies, in Poetic Meter & Poetic Form (Random House, 1965), that there is something essentially English about the Shakespearean form. The Italian sonnet is shaped for emotion, the English for wit:

Although the basic action of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets is similar, it is the proportioning that makes the immense difference between them. Both present and then “solve” problems, the Petrachan sonnet form in its octave and sestet, the Shakespearean in its comparatively hypertrophied initial twelve lines and then its couplet. In the Petrarchan sonnet the problem is often solved by reasoned perception or by a relatively expansive and formal meditative process, for the sestet allows enough room for the undertaking of prudent, highly reasonable kinds of resolutions. But in the Shakespearean sonnet, because resolution must take place within the tiny compass of a twenty-syllable couplet, the “solution” is more likely to be the fruit of wit, or paradox, or even a quick shaft of sophistry, logical cleverness, or outright comedy. In the Shakespearean sonnet, the turn tends to pivot on one of the logical adverbs — for, then, so, but, yet, lest, thus, therefore — words which constitute syntactical figures of self-conscious dialectic. The crucial operations of such words in assisting the Shakespearean sonneteer to “solve his problem” tend to make the Shakespearean sonnet a little showplace of rhetoric or advocacy or logic—or mock logic. Furthermore, the very disproportion of the two parts of the Shakespearean sonnet, the gross imbalance between the twelve-line problem and the two-line solution, has about it something vaguely risible and even straight-faced farcical: it invites images of balloons and pins.

And even when the final couplet does not resolve the conflicts or entanglements presented by the preceding quatrains, there remains something ineffably witty about the form of the Shakespearean sonnet, something that distinguishes it essentially as a form from the Petrarchan. If the shape of the Petrarchan sonnet, with its two slightly unbalanced sections devoted to pressure and release, seems to accord with the dynamics of much emotional experience, the shape of the Shakespearean, with its smaller units and its “commentary” couplet, seems to accord with the modes of the intellectual, analytic, and even satiric operations of the human sensibility. [pp. 122-123]

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