Dialogue sonnet
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Like most of the other formal sonnet variations, dialogue sonnets first emerged in Italy. Usually they are comparatively rare, but the approach was taken up as the sonnet form spread to other literatures outside Italy and was practised then by some of the most skilful writers of their time. As the name suggests, the poem consists of a conversation between two or more participants, sometimes speaking no more than a half line each in turn, but at others answering stanza by stanza. The approach could be used for comic as well as dramatic purposes, and sometimes different registers of language distinguish the speakers.
Theatres in miniature rooms
[edit]Almost from the start of the genre in the 13th century, the sonnet was cast as an address to an implied hearer, whether to a male or female companion, or internally to oneself. Sometimes the person or persons addressed might then reply in sonnets of their own, as was the case with Dante da Maiano's account of an erotic dream, in which he invited interpretation and elicited six replies.[1][2] In such ways, a dialogue between sonnets might be initiated. When, however, those early authors began to answer in the voice of the person addressed within the same sonnet, a new subgenre was created, the dialogue sonnet.[3]
In the case of Meo de' Tolomei's Per cotanto ferruzzo, Zeppa, the poet assumes the voice of two characters, his cowardly brother Zeppa and a woman who accosts him in the street and from whom he flees. There the conversation between them is broken into equal parts, couplets in the octave, tercets in the sestet.[4] The acknowledged "master of the dialogue sonnet", especially as this was used for comic effect, however, was Cecco Angiolieri.[5] The witty exchanges between the poet and his inamorata Becchina are divided within the sonnet in various ways, from the same divisions as in the already mentioned Meo de' Tolomei's to a half line back and forth throughout the whole sonnet. The speakers are further distinguished by Becchina's part being decidedly more colloquial. In another tour de force attributed to Cecco, which is set in a market, as many as eight interlocutors take part, each speaking in his own regional dialect.[6]
The use of dialogue in sonnets was by no means limited to such burlesque contexts. Jacopo da Leona writes within the courtly conventions of the troubadour tradition, and at the same time, in his most famous composition, complains of the pains of love to a friend in a staccato conversation that divides each line into three.[7] Dante Alighieri, in more restrained manner, uses the whole of the octave to address himself to the female mourners at the funeral of his Beatrice's father and in the sestet is answered by them in the purest Tuscan.[8] Nevertheless, use of the vernacular continued to be associated with the Italian dialogue sonnet. In later centuries this is attested by the employment of Roman dialect in the Sonetti romaneschi of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli[9] and in Neapolitan in Salvatore di Giacomo's sonnets detailing the everyday life of the poor.[10]
Bibliography
[edit]- Stefano Boselli, "Virtual Theaters in Miniature Rooms: The Early Italian Dialogic Sonnets", Italica, Vol. 88.4 (Winter 2011), pp. 499-514
- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poems & Translations, Everyman, 1954
References
[edit]- ^ Rossetti 1954, pp. 357-8
- ^ Michael Papio (2004), "Dante da Maiano", Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, (London: Routledge), p. 290
- ^ Boselli 2011, p.499
- ^ Boselli 2011, p. 501
- ^ Rajan Barrett, The Self and the Sonnet, Cambridge Scholars 2010, p. 22
- ^ Boselli 2011, pp. 504-11
- ^ Fabian Alfie, Rustico Filippi, 'The Art of Insult', Modern Humanities Research Association 2014, text and translation at pp. 142-3
- ^ Rossetti 1954, p. 312
- ^ Paul Howard, Casus Belli: Giuseppe Gioachino Waging War between Tradition and Experimentation, chapter 2
- ^ Ruth Shepard Phelps, "A Neapolitan Sonneteer", The North American Review, Vol. 214.792 (Nov., 1921), pp. 655-663