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

Abstract

This essay investigates how Elizabethan sonnet sequences deploy the signatures of Petrarchan desire to attend to the question of lyric ontology—the material mode of existence of lyric poetry. The issue acquired special urgency in late Elizabethan England, in the context of rapid technological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic change that affected the material conditions of production and circulation of poetry. The uneasy coexistence of manuscript and print technologies, the practices of reading that included various forms of
material alteration (cutting, marginalia, collage etc.), paper shortage, destruction of books, musical appropriations of lyric as well as a host of other factors, created a volatile and multi-layered environment in which lyric poems were instantiated across forms and media. Through a close reading of selected sonnets by Philip Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Edmund Spenser, Giles Fletcher, and
Barnabe Barnes, this essay argues that in their poetry the affective work of Petrarchism tropes the uncertainties and instabilities inherent in the contemporary conditions of poetic ontology. Allegorizing erotic longing for the beloved and the impossibility of its fulfilment as a thwarted desire for a perennially elusive lyric text, these sonnets exist at the point of vanishing, which puts under pressure—to a point of unviability—their identity as speech acts and integrity as material objects. Sensing the contemporary crises of textuality,
these Elizabethan sonnets make audible, legible, and visible the precarious ontology of lyric poetry.

Keywords: lyric; Elizabethan sonnets; poetic ontology; book history;
Petrarchism; poetic imagination