The First English Sonnet and Its Parodic Essence

The article is devoted to the consideration of questions about which sonnet was the first example of a national genre form in English poetry, and about the relationship between its text and previous traditions and specific monuments. The research material was a fragment of the chivalric romance “Amoryus and Cleopes” by John Metham. Topicality of the study is due to the lack of knowledge of this text. The form of graphic organisation of the selected fragment is analysed against the background of comparisons with various ways of setting up classical Italian sonnets, then the meaningful motifs and the integral plot of the fragment are correlated with the content of Francesco Petrarch’s book “De remediis utriusque fortunae” and in more detail with the plot of Geoffrey Chaucer’s early poem “The Book of the Duchess”. The general A.M. Severinus Boethius’s theme of the Wheel of Fortune is noted, and the movement of the plot in Chaucer and Metham and both figures of their complaining knights, as well as the causes of their suffering, are assessed. In the process of analysis, it is possible to establish that a fragment of the novel, designed by the author on the model of Italian sonnets, yet containing an original rhyme scheme, which will become known as the rhyme of an English sonnet, exhibits a parodic character in relation to the texts of Petrarch and Chaucer.