Giodano Bruno's 'Degli Eroici Furori' and Elizabethan poets in the context of sixteenth-century Italian Petrarch-commentaries

Giordano Bruno spent the years 1583-5 in London, during which time he published three Latin mnemonic treatises and the six Dialoghi Italiani, two of which were dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney : the Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante and the Degli Eroici Furori. The main purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the influence of the latter - a Petrarchan sonnet sequence with Neoplatonic commentaries - on Elizabethan poetry, in particular on the sonnet-cycles of Sidney and Fulke Greville, and the philosophical poetry of George Chapman. In this I am pursuing lines of research suggested by Dr F.A.Yates in her Study of Love's Labour's Lost (1936) and her essay on the Eroici and Elizabethan sonneteers (J.W.C.I, VI, 1943). My immediate aim was to test Yates' hypothesis that the Eroici Furori was the "supreme experience" for the English Petrarchists of the 1580s, and an influential model for their poetic practice. Ultimately I felt it was fairer to look at the Elizabethan sonnet in the wider context of the long and diverse Italian Petrarchan tradition, and to this end I undertook a prefatory historical sketch of the Italian Petrarch-comentary in the sixteenth-century from Pietro Bembo to Lodovico Castelvetro, including annotated editions of the Canzoniere, and less obvious forms of exegesis such as the lezzioni of Academicians and the "corrections" of spiritualizzamenti. In my comparison of the sonnets of Bruno, Sidney and Greville I assess the congruence or disparity of their uses of mutual mythical or Petrarchan topoi, and their relationship to the diverse typology of Neoplatonic love offered by the Petrarch-commentators. to Yates' assertion :hool of Night" or examining the possible and other poems, I Chapman's patron of Bruno texts and In my study of George Chapman I addressed myself that the poets, as well as the scientists, of the "Sc "Northumberland circle" were influenced by Bruno. In influence of the Eroici on Chapman's Shadow of Night have considered the potential role played in this by Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, whose collection annotations to the Eroici are also examined.