This debt of England to Italy in the matter of our literature began with Chaucer.  Truly original and national as was the framework of the ‘Canterbury Tales,’ we can hardly doubt but that Chaucer was determined in the form adopted for his poem by the example of Boccaccio.  The subject-matter, also, of many of his tales was taken from Boccaccio’s prose or verse.  For example, the story of Patient Grizzel is founded upon one of the legends of the ‘Decameron,’ while the Knight’s Tale is almost translated from the ‘Teseide’ of Boccaccio, and Troilus and Creseide is derived from the ‘Filostrato’ of the same author.  The Franklin’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale are also based either on stories of Boccaccio or else on French ‘Fabliaux,’ to which Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, had access.  I do not wish to lay too much stress upon Chaucer’s direct obligations to Boccaccio, because it is incontestable that the French ‘Fabliaux,’ which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property of the mediaeval nations.  But his indirect debt in all that concerns elegant handling of material, and in the fusion of the romantic with the classic spirit, which forms the chief charm of such tales as the Palamon and Arcite, can hardly be exaggerated.  Lastly, the seven-lined stanza, called rime royal, which Chaucer used with so much effect in narrative poetry, was probably borrowed from the earlier Florentine ‘Ballata,’ the last line rhyming with its predecessor being substituted for the recurrent refrain.  Indeed, the stanza itself, as used by our earliest poets, may be found in Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Ballatetta,’ beginning, Posso degli occhi miei.

Between Chaucer and Surrey the Muse of England fell asleep; but when in the latter half of the reign of Henry VIII. she awoke again, it was as a conscious pupil of the Italian that she attempted new strains and essayed fresh metres.  ‘In the latter end of Henry VIII.’s reign,’ says Puttenham, ’sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom Sir T. Wyatt the elder, and Henry Earl of Surrey, were the two chieftains, who, having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Ariosto, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre and style.’  The chief point in which Surrey imitated his ‘master, Francis Petrarcha,’ was in the use of the sonnet.  He introduced this elaborate form of poetry into our literature; and how it has thriven with us, the masterpieces of Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Rossetti attest.  As practised by Dante and Petrarch, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, divided into two quatrains and two triplets, so arranged that the two quatrains repeat one pair of rhymes, while the two triplets repeat another pair.  Thus an Italian sonnet of the strictest form is composed upon four rhymes, interlaced with great art.  But much divergence from this rigid scheme of rhyming was admitted even by Petrarch, who not unfrequently divided the six final lines of the sonnet into three couplets, interwoven in such a way that the two last lines never rhymed.[17]