Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney

First published: 1591

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Although an imitation of the much earlier Italian sonnets of Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), better known as Petrarch, Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella helped create the vogue for that genre in late Elizabethan England. It was the first great Elizabethan sonnet sequence, predating William Shakespeare’s by at least a decade. For the student of Sidney’s life and poetry, it has additional interest for its autobiographical implications, reflecting Sidney’s vain attempt to woo Penelope Devereux (1563-1607).

Born to an influential noble family, Sidney considered his most important role in English letters to be that of a patron rather than a poet. His support of poets Edward Dyer, Fulke Greville, and Edmund Spenser (whose The Shepheardes Calender of 1579 was dedicated to Sidney) expressed his conviction that the English language could rival French and Italian in poetic beauty, a conviction he expressed in his posthumously published Defence of Poesie (1595). Sidney’s poetry was well known among Elizabethan noblemen but not published until after his death.

Although it is easy to exaggerate the autobiographical element in the Astrophel and Stella sonnets, there is little doubt about the identity of the two main characters of the title. “Stella” is Penelope Devereux, the beautiful daughter of the first earl of Essex. The earl’s dying wish was for Penelope to marry Sidney, but at that time, in 1576, she was but thirteen, and there is little likelihood that Sidney had even met her. He probably did not meet her until the summer of 1581, and in November of that year she married Robert, third Baron Rich.

By bestowing the pseudonym “Stella” on the object of his sonnets, Sidney was following the pattern in amorous poetry set by Petrarch, who in his sonnets celebrated his beloved under the name of “Laura.” However, with the name Stella, Sidney attains further significance, for as well as being a female name it is the Latin word for “star.” The speaker of the sonnets, then, the lover of Stella, is aptly named Astrophel, or “star-lover” in Greek; moreover, the “phil” coyly echoes Sidney’s first name. There is no doubt about associating Astrophel with Sidney: Sonnet 30 indicates that Astrophel’s father is governor of Ireland, as was Sidney’s, and sonnet 65 describes Astrophel’s coat of arms, which is clearly that of the Sidney family. (Similarly, the Devereux coat of arms is described as Stella’s in sonnet 13.)

Sidney’s sonnets, like Petrarch’s, form a “sequence,” a group of sonnets each of which is an artistic whole, yet which together develop a pattern of ideas. This pattern is not a “story” or “plot,” for the form is not narrative, but a development of character or emotions. Each sonnet explores a slightly different aspect of the love between Astrophel and his Stella, and from one sonnet to another their situation changes. Throughout the sequence, Stella is already married to another (an indication, though not proof, that they were all written after November, 1581); what changes is her treatment of Astrophel. Properly scornful of his advances at first, she gradually relents, giving him a kiss in sonnet 74. Interspersed with the 108 sonnets are eleven “songs” in various meters, the last of which includes Stella’s voice (which does not appear in the sonnets) debating with Astrophel. By that point—only four sonnets follow this last song—Stella regrets having given her heart to Astrophel, and he is constrained to leave.

Sidney shows amazing structural inventiveness in these sonnets and varies their rhyme schemes considerably. Petrarch’s sonnets display the complex rhyming pattern that a rhyme-rich language such as Italian makes possible: It is basically a two-part pattern, in which the first eight lines form a single unit (octave) and rhyme abbaabba, and the last six lines form another unit (sestet) and rhyme variously but with never more than three rhyme sounds. To duplicate this pattern in English is more difficult, since there are fewer rhyming words for any given sound than in Italian. Nevertheless, Sidney does so in many of the sonnets: Even when he varies the abba pattern with alternating rhyme, he still uses only one rhyme sound—abababab—in the octave. Within the basic two-part structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, however, Sidney introduces an innovation that anticipates the Shakespearean form: The octave divides further into two quatrains (sets of four lines), and the sestet is often yet another quatrain followed by a couplet (a rhymed pair).

The first Astrophel and Stella sonnet serves as an introduction to the whole, being a sort of sonnet on how to write a sonnet. Anxious to please Stella, the speaker decides to send her poetry but cannot decide how to go about writing it. After all his ideas are exhausted, the poet-lover finds his answer in the last line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ’look in thy heart and write.’” The second sonnet then flashes back, revealing the course of his love for Stella, which develops gradually, “Not at first sight.” After a few more sonnets declaring his love for Stella, Astrophel admits in sonnet 5 that reason is better than love, that love is an illusion, that true beauty is the eternal beauty of virtue—and yet he still loves Stella.

The sonnet 6 is another sonnet about sonnets. Like the first, it contrasts the imitative nature of other lover-poets with the honest simplicity of the heart that the muse advises Astrophel to consult in sonnet 1. Sidney returns to this topic in sonnet 15, where he lists types of bad poets and contrasts them to himself, whose only muse is Stella. The muses, or goddesses of inspiration in classical mythology, appear in seven of the sonnets (1, 3, 6, 55, 60, 77, and 84) and are contrasted to Stella, who is Astrophel’s muse.

The fact that Stella is married, and thus that Astrophel’s love for her is adulterous, was a long-standing Petrarchan tradition: It allows for an idealization of the lady and of the love, which is usually presented as unconsummated. The troublesome husband is usually not acknowledged in Petrarchan sonnets. In Astrophel and Stella the husband is referred to directly in only three sonnets. All three, however, contain puns on the name of Penelope’s real-life husband, Lord Rich. In the first of these, sonnet 24, “rich” is the first and the last word of the sonnet: “Rich fools there be,” it opens, and after discussing rich fools in general, and the rich fool who happens to be married to Stella in particular, Astrophel curses the fate that made this fool rich in Stella’s love and cries in the last line, “Let him . . . grow in only folly rich.” The pun on Lord Rich’s name recurs in sonnet 35 (“Fame/ Doth grow ever rich, naming my Stella’s name”) and in sonnet 37, which laments that, though Stella is rich in everything, she “Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is”—that is, that her name is Rich.

Despite these broad hints, the major conflict in the sonnet sequence is not between the two rivals for Stella’s heart; since he is not much of a presence in the sonnets, the husband is not much of a threat to Astrophel there, whatever his status outside the world of the sonnets might be. What stands between Astrophel and Stella is not so much a real husband as the idea of a husband—or, to put it in the terms used in the sequence, the conflict is between Love and Virtue. Both Love and Virtue appear as allegorical characters, or personified abstractions. Love, in fact, appears under two names, Love and Cupid. Since Love is often referred to in Astrophel and Stella as the blind boy with the bow, the reader can properly consider them two names for the same character.

Love personified appears in 44 out of 108 (more than 40 percent) of the sonnets and in six out of eleven (more than half) the songs. The characterization of Love as a supernatural being influencing Astrophel is one of Sidney’s triumphs, and it allows him to analyze and record the complex psychology of love in the poetry. Love is in turn a “Lieutenant” in the wars of passion (sonnet 36), a military conqueror (42, 43), a scholar (46), and an eternal boy (sonnet 73 and song 2).

The conflict between Love and Virtue is the subject of sonnet 52, but it appears explicitly in six other sonnets, 5, 25, 31, 48, 62, and 72. The first time Virtue and Love are mentioned together, the conflict is not seen: Virtue is embodied in Stella, who engenders Love in Astrophel. However, the power of Virtue to make Astrophel “burn in love” (sonnet 25) produces an irony: that very Virtue will not allow Stella, while another man’s wife, to return Astrophel’s love. Astrophel turns this moral irony into a sophistical seduction poem in sonnet 52. He argues that, while Stella’s “fair outside” belongs to Love, her soul belongs to Virtue. Until the final couplet, it sounds as if Astrophel is making the argument of traditional morality: The spiritual beauty that is the stuff of Virtue outweighs the merely physical beauty that is the stuff of Love. Then come the last two lines: “Let Virtue have that Stella’s self; yet thus/ That Virtue yet that body grant to us.” Thus Astrophel tries to have his cake and eat it, too, to satisfy both Virtue and Love.

A memorable element of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets is the striking physical description of Stella. Not that description itself is unusual; the “vertical description” of the beloved, from head to toe, is a hallmark of the Petrarchan sonnet tradition. What is unusual is Sidney’s departure from the Petrarchan cliché of the blue-eyed blonde as the feminine ideal to that of a dark beauty. The minor poet Henry Constable, to whom Lady Rich was later a patron, confirmed Astrophel-Sidney’s description when he wrote of Penelope’s “black sparkling eyes.”

In Astrophel and Stella, Sidney extended the range of the Petrarchan sonnet sequence and led the way for other English imitators of the Italian sonneteers. They transcended imitation by inverting many of the conventions and probing various psychological states of the lover. Moreover, they are the first English sonnets to include the voice of the woman, thereby forcing the character of the lover to display greater subtlety than had prevailed before in English verse.

Bibliography

Berry, Edward. The Making of Sir Philip Sidney. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1998. A combination of biography, literary criticism, and social history, in which Berry describes how Sidney created himself as a poet by creating depictions of himself in some of his characters, including Astrophel in Astrophel and Stella.

Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. A critical biography based on original sources, which also analyzes Sidney’s works in the probable order of their composition and provides insight into his development as a poet.

Kalstone, David. Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965. A specialized study focusing on the way Sidney reinvented the Italian poetic genres in English. Offers excellent analyses of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets in a form accessible to the general reader.

Kay, Dennis, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. A collection of essays, most of them previously published, that concern all aspects of Sidney’s writings, among them several dealing exclusively with the Astrophel and Stella sonnets.

Parker, Tom W. N. “Philip Sidney and Proportional Form: Astrophel and Stella, Certaine Sonets, and Bruno’s De gli eroici furori.” In Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A study of Astrophel and Stella and the other sonnet sequences that were popular in the late sixteenth century. Analyzes the work of Sidney, Giordano Bruno, and other poets, describing the patterns of their sonnet sequences. Argues that their arrangement of sonnets enabled the poets to use the “hymns of love” as a vehicle for expressing broader cosmological issues.

Rudenstine, Neil L. Sidney’s Poetic Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. A chronological study of Sidney’s poetic works, which includes a detailed discussion of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets.

Stewart, Alan. Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. The title of this biography refers to the fact that the handsome, well-born, and talented Sidney was belittled in England by Elizabeth I, while he was acclaimed for his writing and statesmanship on the Continent.

Weiner, Andrew D. Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978. Provides helpful readings of Sidney’s poetry, though limited by a critical theoretical approach, then in vogue, that connects sixteenth and seventeenth century theology and poetry. In the case of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets, this critical approach is quite illuminating, though a bit specialized for the general reader.