author

Bartholomew Griffin

d. 1602

Best known for the sonnet sequence Fidessa, this little-documented Elizabethan poet left behind a small but memorable mark on English Renaissance verse. His surviving work is admired for its musical language and its intensely courtly take on love.

1 Audiobook

Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: Idea, Fidesa and Chloris

Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: Idea, Fidesa and Chloris

by Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, active 1596 William Smith

About the author

Almost nothing certain is known about this Elizabethan writer, which gives his work an added air of mystery. He is chiefly remembered for Fidessa, more chaste than kinde, a sequence of sonnets published in 1596. In the book's prefatory material, he presents himself modestly as a young beginner, and that volume remains the main reason he is still read today.

Scholars have long connected him with a Bartholomew Griffin buried at Holy Trinity Church in Coventry in December 1602, though some details of his life remain uncertain. Older reference works also suggest possible ties to the Griffin family of Dingley in Northamptonshire, but the evidence is not strong enough to treat that as settled fact.

What is clear is that Fidessa earned him a lasting place among the later Elizabethan sonneteers. His poems work within the love-sonnet tradition of the 1590s, yet they stand out for their sweetness, polish, and emotional directness.