THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

of Sidney’s work in prose and verse, most of it unpublished at the time of his death in 1586. When he died at Arnhem
of
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wounds received during one of Queen Elizabeth’s half hearted campaigns in support of Dutch independence, he was
accorded a hero’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, 200-odd formal elegies and, some twenty years later, an adulatory
biography by Fulke Greville which helped provide the strands from which national myths about suave soldiers and
patriotic decorum were woven. The memory of Sidney the courtier, the diplomat, and the soldier became public
property; his writings, circulated privately in his lifetime, emerged as crucial to the political, literary, and sexual
discourses of the late sixteenth century. The Arcadia, his long prose romance interspersed with poems and pastoral
elegies, his royal entertainment The Lady of May, and his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella all suggest processes
of negotiation, persuasion, self-projection, and self-fashioning which interrelate affairs of state with affairs of the
heart. The Lady of May, performed before the Queen at Wanstead in 1578 or 1579, takes the form of a dignified
dispute between a shepherd and a forester for the hand of the Lady of the title. Having seen the masque the Queen was
called upon to act as the judge between the suitors, though, misreading the entertainment’s subtext, she is said to have
chosen the wrong candidate.
Although the formal speechifying of The Lady of May is relieved by the comic Latinate pedantry of the
schoolmaster, Rombus (‘I am gravidated with child, till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities’), it is the
innovative variety, mastery of register, and narrative shaping of Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582 and published in
1591) that most clearly distinguishes it from Sidney’s earlier treatment of the interaction of courtship with the courtly
graces. The 108 sonnets, and the eleven songs which diversify the sequence, describe the development of the
unrequited love of a star-lover (Gk. astrophil) for a distant star (Lat. stella). The difference between the two classical
tongues from which the names of the lovers are derived itself suggests the irreconcilable nature of the relationship, but
Sidney’s poems do not merely play with the idea of distance and unattainability nor do they slavishly follow the
pattern of amatory frustration and exultation first established in the fourteenth century by Petrarch. Sidney readily
acknowledges that he is working in a well-tried Petrarchan tradition, but he rejects the ‘phrases fine’ and the ‘pale
dispaire’ of earlier love-poets in the third and sixth of his own sonnets and he is prepared to play ironically with the
decorative imagery of the Italian imitators of ‘poore Petrarch’s long deceased woes’ in sonnet 15. Where Petrarch’s
Laura remains coolly unresponsive, Sidney’s Astrophil holds to the hope that his Stella might still favour him, and he
ends his long campaign aware of his failure, not with Petrarch’s expressions of having passed through a purifying
spiritual experience. Astrophil and Stella is both an extended dialogue with the conventions of the Italian sonneteers
and a varied Elizabethan narrative which, by means of a constantly changing viewpoint, considers the developing
conflict between private and public obligation. Stella is from the first the ungiving beloved and the generous inspirer
of poetry, the object of the poem and the provoker of it, the dumbfounder and the giver of eloquence. The opening
sonnet proclaims
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the ambiguities of the sequence as a whole; the frustrated lover at first searches for the words which ‘came halting
forth, wanting Invention’s stay’, but as he nervously bites his ‘truant’ pen the responsive voice of the Muse (who is
also the unresponsive Stella) directs him to ‘looke in thy heart and write’. In sonnet 34 the potential confusions and
conflicts between public statement and private silence are expressed in the form of an internal dialogue:
Come let me write, ‘And to what end?’ To ease
A burthned hart, ‘How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy dayly vexing care?’
Oft cruell fights well pictured forth do please.
‘Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?’
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare:
‘But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?’
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
‘What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?’
What harder thing then smart, and not to speake?
Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard.
Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake
My harmes on Ink’s poore losse, perhaps some find
Stella’s great pow’rs, that so confuse my mind.