In this article I focus on sonnets from a translingual lexicological point of view, asking what influence the spelling of the word itself might have had on the perception and definition of the poems it served to designate. I treat the word “son(n)et” as a lexical palimpsest, a condensed version of the history of English borrowings from continental Romance languages, asking what it tells us about the transnational character of English literature in the early modern period. Bearing in mind orthographic fluidity at the time, in England as well as in France and Italy, I look at mentions of “sonnets” in Shakespeare’s works and as Shakespeare’s works, compared to other publications from the same period. As opposed to the variety of spellings from one work to another, and even sometimes within one single collection of poems, which is found in most early modern English texts, “sonnet” is always spelt with two n’s when it comes to Shakespeare. What can we infer from this coherence in spelling?
Laetitia Sansonetti (Wed,) studied this question.