Note 442b — APPENDIX (continued 2)

Italy was the original home of the sonnet, and it was as popular a poetic form with Italian writers of the sixteenth century as with those of the three preceding centuries. The Italian poets whose sonnets, after those of Petrarch, were best known in England and France in the later years of the sixteenth century were Serafino dell’ Aquila (1466-1500), Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530), Agnolo Firenzuola (1497-1547), Cardinal Bembo (1470-1547), Gaspara Stampa (1524-1553), Pietro Aretino (1492-1557), Bernardo Tasso (1493-1568), Luigi Tansillo (1510-1568), Gabriello Fiamma (d. 1585), Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), Luigi Groto (fl. 1570), Giovanni Battista Guarini (1537-1612), and Giovanni Battista Marino (1565-1625) (cf. Tiraboschi’s Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 1770-1782; Dr. Garnett’s History of Italian Literature, 1897; and Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, edit. 1898, vols. iv. and vi.) The notes to Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Love, published in 1582 (see p. 103, note), to Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody, edited by Mr. A. H. Bullen in 1891, and to the Poems of Drummond of Hawthornden, edited by Mr. W. C. Ward in 1894, give many illustrations of English sonnetteers’ indebtedness to Serafino, Groto, Marino, Guarini, Tasso, and other Italian sonnetteers of the sixteenth century.