Courtly Love, Platonic Love, and Carnal Lust: Changing Love Conventions in Sonnets

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organized in three quatrains and a final couplet. The couplet typically introduces the volta, or a turn in the thematic content or mood of the sonnet, which generally recaps the theme of the sonnet or introduces a different, sharp contrasting look at the described theme. The meter is in iambic pentameter with the end rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g.

Due to his lyrical genius, Francis Petrarch’s Italian sonnets created many conventions have laid the ground work for future sonneteers. Petrarchan love conventions focused on the idea of courtly love, “an extravagantly artificial and stylized relationship” (Simpson 1). These idealized and idolized relationships often existed only in the imagination of the poet. In Petrarchan sonnets, the male poet addresses the female beloved or Fair Lady, as in the entirety of Petrarch’s romantic sonnets which are addressed to his beloved, Laura, a woman of conventional beauty. In the relationship between the two, the ...

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to sing the praises of woman as a perfect being according to the poet’s ideal, and from the tendency to joining to his earthly love some vague ideas of spiritual love” (Borghesi 109). While the sonnet changed in form during his time, William Shakespeare maintained the traditions of Petrarch and the Italian sonnet, but with a slight twist. While sustaining the idealized beloved, he did so in the form of his romantic friendship with the Fair Youth. Simultaneously, Shakespeare broke from the conventions of former sonneteers by introducing a realistic tone in his realistic relationship with the Dark Lady.

William Shakespeare broke from many of the traditions previously established ...

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