Coming rather late to this thread on Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s sonnet sequences, I have a short list of things to say.  Anne Prescott and others have spoken well to the complexity and likeness to real life of Spenser’s Amoretti.  Let me see what I can add.

1. I can’t agree that “Shakespeare likes the world as it is,” so I question the soundness of that presumption as a basis for comparing the two poets and their views on Platonism.  I’d say that both poets found much to praise in the world as they found it, and much to deplore.
2. Praising and pleading were the two primary rhetorical strategies used in lyric discourse.  Sometimes, in both poets’ sonnets, a praise strategy involves idealization of the beloved that could be called Platonic: see Amoretti 8 and Shakespeare’s #53 for two examples.
3. Literary riffs on motifs from the legacy of Plato appear, along with un-Platonic and anti-Platonic material, in lyric poetry from the stilnovisti of Dante’s time, and from Petrarch and his many imitators, down to Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare.  In his edition of Petrarch’s Rime (with a detailed and imaginative commentary), widely reprinted in the 16th c., Giovanni Andrea Gesualdo singled out Petrarch’s “Platonic sentiments” for special attention. 
4. I don’t believe that Spenser in the Amoretti “accepts a Platonist philosophy,” nor do I think that Shakespeare rejects one.  The sonnet form and the sonnet sequence, in the hands of these and other poets, invites and accommodates many experiences, reflections, ideas, and unresolved dilemmas.
5. Both Spenser and Shakespeare present in their sequences thoroughgoing revisions of the lyric tradition descended from Petrarch: Spenser with his coherent narrative of a successful courtship, Shakespeare with his less straightforward account of “two loves . . . of comfort and despair.”
6. It’s fair to say that Spenser was more comfortable than Shakespeare within the bounds of convention: if courtship, like courtiership, wasn’t conventional, it was bound to fail.  But people who admire the Amoretti find the many conventions to which Spenser pays homage to be vehicles of rich-textured meaning.

(This was composed without reference to Colin Burrow's contribution to the discussion, which I'm very happy to have.)

Cheers, Jon Quitslund

-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: lipke <[log in to unmask]>
>
> I have been re-thinking my way through Spenser's Amoretti and Shakespeare's
> Sonnets.  My interest at this time is not with FQ.  I wonder how scholars on
> the List react to issues like these:
> 
>  
> 
> (a)    Amoretti can be interpreted as a game played between Elizabeth Boyle
> and the persona of the poet; the sequence remains strictly within the bounds
> of convention while promoting transcendence; it accepts a Platonist
> philosophy.  Spenser is an abstractionist, an idealist, a Platonist.
> 
> (b)   Shakespeare's Sonnets promote an effect of reality (concreteness,
> materialism), are anti-convention, reject transcendence, and are
> anti-Platonist because Shakespeare likes the world as it is; he isn't an
> idealist.  His Sonnets do not demonstrate that he has any idea of Platonism.
> 
> 
> (c)    Is there any agreement that Shakespeare's Sonnets display a grasp of
> reality that we find in the mature dramas i.e. a sense of human drama, a
> representation of the action of thought, feeling, the same concrete grasp of
> human complexity that many of the plays (soliloquies in particular) do?
> Does this make him more realistic than Spenser?
> 
>  
> 
> I'd welcome your thoughts and specific references if you have them to mind.
> I've been amazed at the in-depth knowledge you have about the FQ, Milton,
> and so on.
> 
>  
> 
> Ian Lipke (University of Queensland, Australia)
> 
>  
>