J. W. Lever – författare

This classic study of the Elizabethan sonnet, first published in 1956 and as a second edition in 1965, describes the development of the English sonnet from the early poems of Wyatt and Surrey, which were strongly influenced by Petrarch, to the great original sonnets of Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. The book’s underlying theme is the literary tradition which inspired the greatest Elizabethan sonnets. The tradition reaches back to a European, especially an Italian past, but it was adapted and transformed by distinctively English attitudes, the resulting tension supplying the main dynamic of development.

The domination of the state over the lives of individuals is, arguably, a problem of the present-day world. In this book, first published in 1971, the author finds essentially the same problem in Jacobean tragedy in the shape it assumed during the rise of the first European nation-states. The English dramatists of the early seventeenth century a