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Petrarch's sonnets are all about a girl (Laura), but we actually never find out much about the girl herself - the sonnets focus completely on what Petrarch feels about her. (Petrarch was the Italian poet who made the Sonnet so fashionable, and was the poet most English renaissance sonnet writers tried to imitate).

Most early English sonnets are also mainly about how the poet feels. They may be about a girl, but they don't say much about her.

In Spenser's Sonnet 75, the girl actually gets to speak. The sonnet starts out as a typical "Oh, oh, oh I love that girl so much ...", but suddenly at line 5 we find the girl herself is speaking:

Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assayA mortal thing so to immortalize,For I myself shall like to this decay,And eek my name be wiped out likewise.

It was unusual, even revolutionary, to let a girl speak for herself in a sonnet. It almost made the girl seem like a real person.

Once Shakespeare got hold of this idea, he let Juliet share a sonnet with Romeo in the Capulets' Ball scene of Romeo and Juliet.

Before Spenser, sonnets were about girls - but the girls never got to speak for themselves.

After Spenser, and especially after Shakespeare, women get to say what they want from a relationship.

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