Sir Thomas Wyatt Wyatt, Thomas Author Gavin Bone Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

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 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Gavin Bone, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Literature and the Arts Manuscripts Petrarch, Francesco (1304–1374) Sonnets Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Gavin Bone Gavin Bone

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

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 Melissa Walter 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
Introduction

Sir 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

Wyatt 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

Wyatt 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

During 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

Wyatt’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

During 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.

According to scholar Jason Powell, he appears to have approved 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.