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Spîlïer, Michael R. G. The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 241 pp., bibliography, index. Cloth: ISBN 0-415-07744-3, $69.95 US, £35.00 UK. Paper: ISBN 0-415-07744-4, $16.95 US, £10.99 UK, $23.20 Cdn.
In 1956 J. W. Lever published a study entitled The Elizabethan Love Sonnet. The topic for the book was suggested, some twelve years before that date, by Lever's Professor, H. B. Charlton, as the subject for "a Christmas vacation essay" (Lever, 1956, p. vii.) The essay expanded to a book and the book went through numerous reprintings as it became a standard reference for undergraduate students interested in the nature and development of the form in the poetry of the English renaissance. Lever's book was important in its time both for the light it cast on specific Elizabethan sonnet sequences - especially those by Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare - and on the background for these sonnets in the poetry of Petrarch and the experimentation of Wyatt and Surrey. In using Lever with undergraduates over the past three decades, though, 1 have increasingly been frustrated both by the fact that the work does not take into account more recent scholarship in the area and because of the rather cursory way in which the work treats the continental background of the sonnet phenomenon. In Michael R. G. Spüler's The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction many of my concerns about the Lever work are addressëd and answered.
A quick glance at the bibliography (pp. 227-233) assures me that Spüler has done his homework. Not only are there a number of works listed from the 1980s - indeed the latest bears a 1988 imprint - but there is also a thorough representation from the old standards....