How is love treated in poetry from the Elizabethan Age?

You dont believe in the
love that corrodes, the love that ruins?

No, laughed Zuleika.

You have never dipped into the Greekpoets, nor sampled the Elizabethan
sonneteers?

No, never. You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of
life has been drawn from life itself.

The above
quotation, from Sir Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, gives a necessarily
cursory and one-dimensional, but not entirely inaccurate, flavor of Elizabethan poetry as
concerning itself with the more tragic and painful aspects of love. The comparison with Greek
pastoral poetry is no accident, since the most influential figure in early Elizabethan poetry
was probably Sir Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia imitated and built upon Greek
pastoral models and whose sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, gave ample
descriptions of the pains of love. Poets such as Michael Drayton, Nicholas Breton and Fulke
Greville wrote along similar lines, but on balance, the corpus of Elizabethan poetry probably
contains at least as much religious verse about the love of God (by poets such as Southwell,
Forrest and Fletcher) as poetry on theof unrequited love.

It is Shakespeare,
though, with the agony and the ecstasy of love described in his sonnets, whose work has survived
the best. There is more of the joy of love in Shakespeare than there is in Sidney, but both
write of love's tragedy most frequently and between them, with the two great sonnet sequences of
the Elizabethan era, can be said to have created the penumbra of the love that pervades and
ruins that looms over Elizabethan poetry.