Earl of Surrey and the English Sonnet

 In an age of Tudor courts and multiple marriages, an age of no dominant literary tradition, Surrey, along with Wyatt, offers a breakthrough with this literary experimentations, a hundred years on since Chaucer. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), and one half of the Wyatt and Surrey duo, was the first English poet to publish blank verse. Wyatt and Surrey were also the first English poets to form their own sonnet tradition, that was a move away from the Petrarchan sonnet form. 

Born to an ancient, privileged peerage, Henry Howard, popularly known as Surrey, was, as might be expected, made a part of the Tudor court. As a part of the Court, Surrey was encouraged to display his learning, wit, and eloquence by writing love poems and translating continental and classical works. It was an age when poetry was not just seen as a medium of self-expression but as one of the polite activities undertaken as an extension of the Court, having its own set of conventions that had to be observed in order to be praised and validated. Surrey attempted to translate Virgil’s Aenied and wrote the second and fourth books of the same in Blank Verse. Wyatt and Surrey then translated Petrarch’s sonnets from Italian and due to their extensive work, came to be known as “Fathers of the English Sonnet”. 

Although clubbed together in literature and although Surrey admired and imitated Wyatt, each of them represents a significantly different element in the Henrician court. Despite the fact that critics over the many ages and centuries have shown preference to one over the other, neither Wyatt or Surrey pale in each other’s shadow. While the credit of introducing the sonnets to English goes to Wyatt’s crown, it was Surrey who gave it a rhyming meter and divided it into three quatrains and a couplet—what now characterises the sonnet form known variously as English or Elizabethan or Shakespearean. And while both wrote equally well, it was, however, Surrey's use of it, in all probability, that gave it currency. Adapting his version from the highlydeveloped Italian sonnet, Surrey eventually synthesised an English sonnet containing 14 lines of iambic pentameter following the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Although Surrey originated this form, it was Shakespeare who widely popularised it, towards the end of the century, with his many famous sonnets, leading to the name it now most commonly goes by. 

In the sonnet, “Love that doth reign and live within my thought”, Surrey follows the stylistics of his own sonnet form. He begins with a metrically regular first line, balanced rather than unbalanced by alliterating “Love…live”. Alastair Fowler notes that, “Surrey strives after the effects of balance and symmetry and the often deliberateness of his patterning, even to the point of syllabic distribution, seems more mannerist than neoclassical.” In addition to this, Surrey’s form also serves an aesthetic purpose. His poetic strategy can be observed with his sonnet begins and ends with the word “love”. 

Especially after having suggested in the poem that love is both a coward and a warrior, Surrey in his finalstatement transcends this looming moral difficulty by a declaration of emotional loyalty and the assurance that "Sweet is the death that taketh end by love." 

A.C. Spearing comments that, “Surrey's richness lies in his ability to move beyond individual experience to examine present events in light of the classical past, or emotions in light of social and political contexts”, furthering to note that, “Surrey is the earliest English poet in whom the classicism of the Renaissance is established and dominant." However, if Surrey would venture to vanguard the 

Renaissance movement that set in later in the century remains a question unanswered, having had his life cut prematurely due to political reasons. Nevertheless, in an age of literary ambiguity, Surrey rises as a representative of his times, where, for the first time since Chaucer, language was becoming relatively fixed in the form of words and poetic technique was slowly passing beyond the experimental stage.