Early Modern England Encyclopedia: Sir Thomas Wyatt

Sir Thomas Wyatt

Introduction

Para1Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) was a prolific poet of the 16th century whose literary work became famous after his death. Wyatt is credited for helping develop the English sonnet by adapting Italian forms. He popularized an English sonnet style based on the work of the early Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch. Using Petrarchan style, he featured allegorical themes while using Italian metrical forms like terza rima, sestine, and canzoni. Wyatt was a courtier in the court of Henry VIII, and he was thus acquainted with Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn. One of his most memorable poems, They Flee from Me is believed to be an allegory about Anne.

Early Life

Para2Wyatt was born at Arlington Castle in Kent, England in 1503, where his father served in the courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. He began his education at St. Johns College at the University of Cambridge. During his youth, Wyatt was known for being tall, handsome, skilled with music, and proficient at the courtly sport of jousting. Beginning in the 1520s, he served on diplomatic missions for Henry VIII, some of which dealt with Henry’s request to divorce Catherine of Aragon.

Romance and Tragedy

Para3Wyatt married and had two children, but his marriage ended in scandal in 1525 when he charged his wife Elizabeth Brooke with adultery. Wyatt soon developed a love interest in Henry VIII’s paramour and later Queen, Anne Boleyn, for which he was eventually sent the Tower of London in 1535. From his cell window, Wyatt witnessed her execution in 1536. This inspired his poem, My Enemies Surround My Soul (Circumdederunt Me Inimici Mei). The poem provides a solemn tone of grieving by a speaker experiencing a loss of someone he adored dearly.

Poetic Experimentation

Para4During the 16th century, poets like Wyatt began experimenting in English by adapting classical and Italian poetic forms. Wyatt also found inspiration from the late medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who first used the word newfangleness, which went on to appear in Wyatt’s poem They Flee from Me to indicate a lover’s fickle affections. Wyatt adapted Petrarch’s poems from Italian into English, making them his own. He incorporated the pattern from Petrarch of one set of eight lines (an octave) followed by a set of six lines (a sestet) for his sonnets, often with a rhyme scheme of cddc ee in the sestet. Some scholars believe this pattern eventually led to the favored pattern for the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet of three quatrains and a couplet at the end of the fourteen line poem.

Famous Poem: They Flee From Me

Para5Wyatt’s most famous poem They Flee From, provided by the Poetry Foundation,

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be Fortune it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

And therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.

But all is turned, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go, of her goodness,

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindely am served,

I fain should know what she hath deserved.

Wyatt’s Publication History

Para6During his life, Wyatt did not sign his full name in his work. As was the custom for gentlemen poets of the era, he circulated his poems in manuscript to friends, who then might copy a poem and send it to another friend or connection. The British Library holds one poem in his handwriting today.

Para7According to scholar Jason Powell, he appears to have ‘approvedʼ fifty-nine of the poems as finished copies by marking them with his signature (Tho” in the margin; in the later parts of the manuscript, he entered a number of his own poems himself (261). Furthermore, his work was not published in book form until after his death. The majority of poems attributed to Wyatt appeared in a collection called Totell’s Miscellany in 1557.

Key Print Sources

Caldwell, Ellen C. Recent Studies in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1970–1987). English Literary Renaissance, vol. 19, no. 2, 1989, pp. 226–246.

Meyer-Lee, Robert J. Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Powell, Jason. Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry in Embassy: Egerton 2711 and the Production of Literary Manuscripts Abroad. Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 2004, pp. 261–282.

Key Online Sources

Bach, Eric. Thomas Wyatt—a Miscellany of Sonnets, 1530s. British Heritage, https://britishheritage.org/thomas-wyatt-poet. Accessed 4 Feb. 2023.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Encyclopedia Britannica, 1 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Wyatt.

Jokinen, Annina. Sir Thomas Wyatt. Luminarium, https://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wyattbio.htm. Accessed 16 Feb. 2023.

Thomas Wyatt. Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poet/thomas-wyatt. Accessed 2 Feb. 2023.

Prosopography

Gavin Bone

Gavin Bone was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title	Sir Thomas Wyatt
Type of text	Critical
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source	By Gavin Bone, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration	This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition	Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)	Early Modern England Encyclopedia Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship
License/availability	Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.