Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella

Credits

Cover art: The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, New York, Museum of Modern Art (Stock photo, Google Art Project)

Preface

The aim of this book is to help readers understand and appreciate Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, widely regarded as among the great sonnet stories of English literary history.

The heart of the book is the commentary, in Chapter 4, on each of the 108 sonnets and 11 songs. Chapter 4 presents a paraphrase of each sonnet and song. It clarifies any of the historical and biographical contexts referenced in the poems. It explains how each sonnet and song contributes to the narrative structure, the plot, of the story. It confirms Sidney’s technical virtuosity, evident in his striking figurative language; in the extent to which he adapted the sonnet form—its rhythm patterns and rhyme schemes—to augment his themes; and in his skill in using—especially in the songs—rhythm patterns rarely used before in English poetry.

Astrophil and Stella is a story rich in historical and biographical contexts. The character of Astrophil is based upon Sidney himself; the character of Stella is based upon Lady Penelope Devereux Rich, the beautiful daughter of the first Earl of Essex. To help establish this context, the book includes a biography of Philip Sidney, in Chapter 1, and a biography of Lady Penelope in Chapter 2.

Chapter 3 discusses Sidney’s biographical, autobiographical, and literary sources; the dates of the composition of the sonnets; and the order in which the sonnets appear.

Chapter 5 is an epilogue, concluding the life stories of the two principal characters, Philip/Astrophil and Penelope/Stella and recounting some of the more dramatic historical events of English history, in which they played a key role.

Philip Sidney was a Renaissance man, literally because he was born in 1554, and figuratively because he excelled in so many fields. He was a soldier, a scholar, a statesman, a poet. He was well-liked and influential, numbering among his friends Queen Elizabeth I and most of her cabinet ministers and advisors and members of the royal families of several European nations. He was charming, good-looking,¹ well-mannered, and eloquent. He was a formidable athlete, one of the champions of the jousts held regularly in the tilt yards of the castles and palaces of greater London. He was a soldier—a military commander—and a statesman, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s most competent roving ambassadors. He was the author of one of the first great novels in the English language, one of the first great works of literary criticism, and the first great collections in English, of sonnets and lyric poems, Astrophil and Stella, the story which tracks the course the courtier Astrophil’s love for the beautiful if unattainable Stella.

Sidney was born November 30, 1554, at Penshurst, his family’s ancestral home. Set on 11 acres of color-filled flourishing gardens and woodland trails in Kent, about 40 kilometers south east of London, Penshurst was, in those days, a sprawling stone manor house, with expansive bedrooms; great halls for entertaining guests; an impressive library of books secular and religious, classic and modern; winding staircases, lined with the obligatory portraits of the noble ancestors of the Sidney and Dudley families; and, downstairs, of course, comparatively comfortable servants’ quarters. It was the model residence of a Tudor aristocrat, celebrated in verse by Ben Jonson, who praised the beauty of the pheasants and partridges that roamed its grounds, the streams teeming with fish, the fruit trees from which visitors walking through its acres of land could pick ripe apples, figs, and peaches.

Philip’s mother, Mary, might have condemned her son to an ignominious life, for she was the daughter of John Dudley, who, many Englishmen believed, had tried to usurp the English crown. John Dudley was King Edward VI’s chief advisor, and, when the King became seriously ill, early in 1553, though he was only 15, he changed his will, naming his cousin Jane Grey as his heir. Jane was married to Dudley’s son, who was Mary Sidney’s brother, Philip Sidney’s Uncle Guildford. Many believed the father had manipulated the young King into changing his will so that the Dudley family would have one of its own sitting on the throne of England. It is possible, though, that Edward acted of his own volition to deny the throne to his sister Mary Tudor, because Mary was a devout Roman Catholic.

Whoever was responsible, the scheme turned out to be a total debacle. Edward died, and Lady Jane was queen for nine days before Mary Tudor’s troops, supported by most of the English nobility, including many Protestants, marched into London and secured the crown. Philip Sidney’s grandfather John Dudley was beheaded in August of 1553; the following February his uncle Guildford and his aunt Jane, king and queen for not much longer than a week, were also executed. His other Dudley uncles—Ambrose, Robert, and Henry—deemed accomplices in the plot and charged with treason, were imprisoned in the Tower of London. It was likely that they, too, all of them, would be beheaded.

Philip’s father, Henry, likely saved the lives of his wife’s remaining brothers and restored the family’s honor. He, too, was a childhood friend and confidant of King Edward VI, and he was untainted by the machinations of his wife’s family. Indeed, Henry was in the party that brought a Spanish prince, named Philip, to England, for his marriage, in July 1554, to Queen Mary. In the process, Philip and Henry became close friends, so close that Henry named his first son Philip. The future King Philip of Spain was Philip Sidney’s godfather and present at his birth.

Henry Sidney’s close connection with Philip and Mary helped him secure the release of his wife’s brothers from the Tower in October 1554. The release of Robert Dudley was especially significant for the future of Philip Sidney, in that Robert would become, in a few years, the closest advisor to and perhaps the lover of Queen Elizabeth I, from whom Philip would need preferment, if he was to become the influential courtier he wanted to be. Ironically, the Spanish Philip would become England’s bitter enemy—of Spanish Armada infamy—after Queen Mary died and he returned to his homeland to be crowned King Philip II of Spain.

Philip’s father was often absent, in Wales, where he was Lord President of the Marches and, after 1565, in Ireland, where Queen Elizabeth had appointed him Lord Deputy, in effect, the governor. Philip’s mother was often in London, also in the service of the new Queen, and her young family probably accompanied her. In October 1562, the Queen contracted a comparatively mild case of smallpox. Mary Sidney nursed her, and she contracted a serious form of this dreaded illness, which seriously disfigured her once beautiful face. There is a report that Philip also came down with the disease. There are conflicting reports about Philip’s own appearance, his friends claiming he was good- looking, others claiming his face was noticeably pock-marked. The portrait he sat for when he was 22 shows him handsome and clear-skinned, though the portrait may have been the sixteenth-century equivalent of photo-shopped.

In October 1564, Philip became a pupil at Shrewsbury School. He rode off on a horse, a gift from Walter Devereux, then Viscount Heresford. Both the Sidneys and the Devereux were of the Protestant landed aristocracy, knew each other, and were on generally friendly terms, at least until Walter and Henry locked horns, years later, over English policy in Ireland. In Shropshire, close to Wales, where Philip’s father worked, Shrewsbury is far away from London and Kent, but it offered the rigorous Elizabethan education that suited Sidney’s intellectual temperament. At Shrewsbury, he met Fulke Greville, who would become an important official in Elizabeth’s and later James’ I court and the first Lord Brooke. He was Sidney’s life-long friend and his first biographer. Greville reports that Philip was a dazzling student, intellectually insatiable, a voracious reader, and excellent at all subjects. He was friendly and charming, a great speaker, a leader, universally liked and admired. And he received special treatment because of his father’s and his Uncle Robert’s status and political influence.

In 1568, Philip enrolled as a student at Christ Church, Oxford. Philip was certainly precocious, but it was not unusual for a 14-year-old to be an Oxford student then. At Oxford, he maintained his reputation as a brilliant student, debater, speaker, and leader. He would have been, had they had such speculations then, among those voted most likely to succeed. It did not hurt that his Uncle Robert was Oxford’s chancellor. Philip was a student at Oxford for three years.