Giles Fletcher’s Licia: A Forgotten Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The focus of this week’s column is an Elizabethan poet who wrote, among other things, a sequence of love sonnets in the early 1590s and a work often referred to, in short, as Richard III. This writer was born in the Tudor era but actually died, in the 1610s, in the Jacobean period. His name was Giles Fletcher, the Elder (c. 1548-1611).

Fletcher was an MP as well as a poet. His father, Richard Fletcher, had been a vicar, and his son – Giles Fletcher, the Younger – would be both a vicar and a poet. Giles Fletcher the Elder is little-read now, but he’s worth his moment in the ‘neglected poet’ spotlight on this blog because he was part of the 1590s craze for sonnet sequences in England (of which more in a moment) even if his poem about the car-park-dwelling Yorkist monarch, The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the Third, can hardly compare in power and poetic quality to Shakespeare’s more famous play on the same topic.

But Fletcher’s sonnet sequence, Licia, is worth a little more of our time. It was published in 1593, two years after Sir Philip Sidney’s brilliantly innovative sequence, Astrophil and Stella, was posthumously published and took Elizabethan England by storm. Suddenly you couldn’t move for sonnet sequences, and they appear to have become part of the literary gentleman’s rite-of-passage.

So, in the space of just a few years, we got Samuel Daniel’s Delia (1592); Barnabe Barnes’ Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593); Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593); Henry Constable’s Diana (1594); Anon’s Zepheria (1594); William Percy’s Coelia (1594); and Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), among others. Of these also-rans, only Spenser’s has continued to attract some (much-deserved) attention.

It’s true that many of these other sequences are often either unremarkable or dull (or both). But occasionally, when reading these lesser-known and largely forgotten and out-of-print sonnet sequences, you come across the kind of sonnet you never find in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella or in Shakespeare’s famous sequence (begun in the early 1590s though not fully published until 1609).

Giles Fletcher’s Licia is a case in point. George Saintsbury, in his late Victorian survey A History of Elizabethan Literature, called this sequence a ‘pale and colourless performance’ when compared with some other sonnet-writers of the period, especially Thomas Lodge (whose Phillis I will have to write about at some point), though he went on to add that Licia was ‘not wanting in merit’.

We don’t know who Licia was, or even if there was a real-life counterpart, as there was with Sidney’s Stella (Lady Penelope Rich). But then, we can’t even be absolutely sure who Petrarch’s ‘Laura’ definitely was, or if she was modelled on an actual woman at all. The point of the woman in the Petrarchan sonnet sequence is to be admired from afar, pined after, longed for, and put on the pedestal as paragon of beauty and virtue. These sequences are less about the putative subject (the woman) than they are about the poet’s clever and effective ways of (trying to) immortalise her in verse.

Some of the sonnets in Fletcher’s Licia are your standard off-the-peg Elizabethan conceits: Fletcher sees a comet in the sky, only to realise it’s the sun, before realising that, no, actually, it’s Licia’s eyes: ‘Now never after, soule shall live in darke, / That hath the hap, this westerne Sunne to marke.’ There’s nothing wrong with this, but after Sidney had already done so much to interrogate and retouch (or even poke fun at) this sort of thing in his sequence, it feels like a retrograde step.

Sonnet VI is better, because it’s the sort of thing we don’t find in either Sidney or Lodge, or even Shakespeare:

My love amazed did blush herself to see,
Pictured by Art, all naked as she was.
‘How could the Painter know so much by me,
Or Art effect what he hath brought to pass?
It is not like he naked me hath seen,
Or stood so nigh for to observe so much.’
No, Sweet; his eyes so near have never been,
Nor could his hands by Art have cunning such;
I showed my heart, wherein you printed were,
You, naked you, as here you painted are;
In that, my Love, your picture I must wear,
And show’t to all, unless you have more care.
Then take my heart, and place it with your own;
So shall you naked never more be known.

Fans of poetic form may note that this is a Shakespearean sonnet – three quatrains of alternate rhyme, with a concluding rhyming couplet, so abab cdcd efef gg – reminding us  that Shakespeare didn’t invent the sonnet form that bears his name (it was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a courtier during the reign of Henry VIII, who devised that form; he also invented blank verse).

And Fletcher’s argument in the poem is daring and bold in the extreme: showing Licia, the object of his desire, a painting of her naked. It’s the Elizabethan version of sending nudes, except he’s showing her a picture of herself naked. But how did the painter come to paint her naked, without ever having seen her so? (The object of Petrarchan courtly love must be demure and chaste, after all.) Why, Fletcher answers, I showed the painter my heart, because I’ve imagined what you look like with all your kit off there so many times the image is emblazoned on my mind.

I’m not sure how flattering an Elizabethan woman (or a modern-day woman, come to that) would find such an idea, but then this is to overlook the implied audience of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence (chiefly, other gentlemen). And the sonnet stands out for the brazenness of its conceit. After all, at the end of the sonnet, Fletcher threatens poor Licia with emotional blackmail, saying the only way to cover her nakedness (because he’s otherwise going to show his heart, and thus her naked form, to everyone he meets) is for her to accept his love and join their hearts together, with hers concealing his.

So, not the ideal love poem, perhaps, but a striking example of where some Elizabethan sonneteers took their conceits and riffs on the standard Petrarchan courtly love ideal. The notion of having an ‘image of the lady graven on her lover’s heart’ was, as J. W. Lever noted in his The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, ‘a familiar Renaissance theme’, but it took Fletcher’s ‘lively fancy’ to make the lady naked.

But despite his fine treatment of the conceit, it still probably won’t work as a chat-up line, or, for that matter, as a defence in court.