Michael Drayton’s Early Career: Reconsidering the Petrarchism of Ideas Mirrour (1594)

Abstract:The title of Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) has often been seen as encapsulating a Petrarchan and Neoplatonic poetics adopted by most Elizabethan sonneteers and countered or subverted by the most canonical poets. This essay suggests that such an interpretation misrepresents the complexity of Elizabethan sonnet sequences in general and of Drayton’s in particular, reassessing Drayton’s Petrarchism and alleged Neo-platonism as well as revising Thomas P. Roche Jr.’s notion of a widely shared Augustinianism among English sonneteers. I turn away from a vision of Drayton as a belated Spenserian or nostalgic Elizabethan to focus on his early career in the 1590s. More specifically, I insist on the connections between Drayton’s three “Ideas”: Idea: The Shepheards Garland (1593), Ideas Mirrour (1594), and Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus (1595) to identify a career pattern in the progression from one to the next. In drawing these connections, I argue for a revaluation of the role of the Sidney family as a social and poetic ideal for Drayton in the 1590s.