The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction.

The sonnet, like the portrait, correct Latinity, or Palladian windows, is a marker of the new style as it arrived in France, England, and Spain in the early sixteenth century and as its shifting performances continued to arrive already new for successive generations. For a courtier to write sonnets in his own language was a stylistic innovation at least as important (and as inscrutable) as choosing the right hat. Like fashionable clothes, the sonnet marks its novelty by seeming as if one could never have lived without it.

The closed form of the sonnet and the figurative repertory of Petrarchism constitute an instant set of European cultural relations and provide a rhetorical model for an eloquent male "I" to "speak" his desire and write himself into experience. The pretty little rooms of the sonnet turn out to be noisy, impossibly overdecorated, and crowded with garrulous guests who have overstayed their welcome. And so unpacking the operations of this textual fetish demands both technical expertise (prosody, sources, stylistics) and critical ambition (describing the complex engagements of rhetorical subjectivity and the ongoing fashioning of historical subjects in European culture). Michael Spiller's book succeeds in just these ways. Although Spiller's title is somewhat misleading about its reach (after initial chapters on the development of the sonnet in Italy, he focuses on its history in English literature from Wyatt to Milton), the grasp of the book is remarkable. He covers a large volume of literary materials and is undaunted by crucial technical concerns, while at the same time he locates the practice of sonneteering in changing matrices of social, political, economic, ideological, and personal relations.

English language readers will be particularly grateful for Spiller's deft summary of scholarship on the history of the sonnet in Italy, from the thirteenth-century court of Frederick II of Sicily through the stilnovisti and Petrarch. In successive chapters he suggests with succinctness and clarity how the forensic style of private amatory pleading favored by notaries in the service of their Sicilian patron yields to the confident stance of a public, political person speaking as if on the piazza as the sonnet moves northward to the growing city-states, how the sonnet for Dante and the stilnovisti becomes an interiorized textual space for inscribing the growth, continuities, and discontinuities of the self, how the reiteration, change, and reinforcement of the Rime sparse as a sequence give a new field for the refraction of the divided self among the glittering surfaces and sudden depths of the sonnets themselves. Subsequent chapters on Wyatt, Surrey, and the re-emergence of the sonnet in the sixteenth century, on Sidney, on the Elizabethan sonnet vogue and Spenser, on Shakespeare, and on Herbert, Drummond, and Milton are written with a similar economy and ambition. Specialists will undoubtedly find points to quarrel with. Has Spiller considered the problem of the Wyatt canon sufficiently? Why does he say so little of Greville and so much about Drummond? Has Spiller missed some critical differences between the ideological positioning of Surrey and Wyatt? Does he overestimate the importance of Della Casa for Milton? But such inevitable questions are perhaps beside the point. For Spiller's wide ranging survey of the development of the sonnet allows the reader - undergraduate and specialist alike - to see how the history of the sonnet as form is the center of its ongoing cultural circulation. So much good criticism of the last decade has suggested new cultural models for the circulation of discourse and the formation of the subject. Spiller's method suggests ways of seeing how those models work in the space of fourteen lines.

STEPHEN MERRIAM FOLEY Brown University