A few days ago
Bijou

Questions About Elizabethan English and Poetry?

I have two questions I’m hoping someone might be able to help me with:

1) One group of letters (a, e, i, o, u) changed its pronunciation; another group was no longer pronounced at all but was retained in the spelling. This latter group is called ____.

2) Are the poems “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (by Christopher Marlowe) and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (by Sir Walter Raleigh) considered sonnets?

Top 3 Answers
A few days ago
synopsis

Favorite Answer

letters which are lost in pronunciation but retained in spelling are usually spoken of as ‘elided’.

examples are ‘b’ in ‘lamb’ (most dialects of english); ‘gh’ in ‘through’; ‘p’ in ‘psychiatry’.

but your question is strangely phrased. i am not sure that this is the answer being looked for.

….

marlowe’s ‘passionate shepherd’ and raleigh’s bitter riposte to it (raleigh and marlowe seem to have known each other well) are not sonnets (in the modern sense) since they do not have fourteen lines. they are pastoral ballads.

interestingly they could have been called sonnets at the time, when the term sonnet had a much broader meaning; but not in modern english usage.

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A few days ago
DanaElayne
1. I think you’re talking about dipthongs– [i] and [u] became [aj] and [aw] respectively.

2. The Passionate Shepherd is an example of a pastoral poem written in iambic tetrameter. Since the poem has more than 14 lines, technically it is not a sonnet.

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5 years ago
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1. England (Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England) 2.The Renaissance and the end of the Reformation, Shakespeare, the invincible armada, the plague 3. big and insane look at link below 4. they were educated very intensely learning all the modern languages, astronomy, sciences, maths, Greek philosophy, etc.
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