¹ Grosart, A. B., The Complete Poems of … Sidney, 1877; Symonds, J. A., Sir Philip Sidney (English Men of Letters Series), 1886; Pollard, A. W., Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, 1888; Fox-Bourne, H. R., Sir Philip Sidney, 1891; Lee, S. L., Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, 1904; Drinkwater, J., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Muses Library), 1910; Wallace, M. W., The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 1915; Denkinger, E., Immortal Sidney, 1931; Wilson, Mona, Astrophel and Stella, 1931; Wilson, Mona, Sir Philip Sidney, 1932; Purcell, J. M., Sidney's Stella, 1934. In addition to these authors, there are comments in the important histories of English literature, and in special studies of Renaissance and Elizabethan literature.

² I can find no spark of genuine passion, and hence no change of tone, in the following: 42, Turn not away your eyes; if they kill me, a death caused by love is a triumph; 43, Cupid plays in Stella's eyes, lips, etc., but when he wishes to be undisturbed he retires to her heart, for no one can approach there; 44, Stella is pitiless; her nature is so heavenly that his complaints turn to tunes of joy at her ears; 46, He pities Cupid whom she has banished from her face, and will intercede for Cupid; 48, He is wounded by her eyes; let her keep gazing at him and slay him with speed; 49, As he rides his horse, so love rides him; the curb is fear, the saddle is fancy, etc.

³ In 79 her kiss is the sweetness of sweetness, the pleasingest consort which guides Venus's chariot, the best charge and bravest retreat in Cupid's fight, a double key to her heart, a nest of young joys, a schoolmaster of delight, a friendly fray, a pretty death, poor hope's first wealth, a hostage of promised weal, and the breakfast of love; in 80 her sweet swelling lip is a succession of equally striking things; 89 is a tour de force, with every line ending in either “night” or “day”; in 101, when Stella is sick, Sweetness, Grace, and Beauty are sick, Joy weeps, Love moans, and Nature “sweats with care”; in 102 Stella's cheeks are pale in order that love may have paper perfectly white on which to write his story in beauty's reddest ink.

⁴ My view is shared by Fox-Bourne (Sir Philip Sidney, p. 241), Courthope (A History of English Poetry, ii, 228), Fletcher (Modern Philology, v, 264), and Drinkwater (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 52). Wallace, the only one of the opposition who seems conscious of this difficulty, says that Sidney would have condoned moral lapses and justified himself in his own eyes during the affair with Stella (The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 237 and 255). In my opinion, Wallace makes Sidney indulge in far too much sophistry that is modern in tone.

⁶ Such are the following:

She heard my plaints, and did not only hear,

But them, so sweet is she, most sweetly sing,

(Sonnet 57)

How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease

My thoughts I speak; and what I speak doth flow

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please?

(Sonnet 74)

My Muse, to some ears not unsweet; (Sonnet 84)

I thought each place was dark but where thy light would be,

And all ears worse than deaf that heard not out thy story.

I said thou wert most fair …

And all I said so well, as no man it denied. (Song 5)

⁶ Only three critics have faced this difficulty: Miss Denkinger argues that only Stella would recognize the signs of true passion. The others, looking merely for convention, would find that and no more (Immortal Sidney, p. 180). This argument is too flattering to our self-esteem. How could a fact obvious to us be hidden from Sidney's contemporaries? We are in possession of no evidence unknown to them. I do not think our brains more acute than any then functioning in Elizabeth's court. Symonds (Sir Philip Sidney, p. 148) and Wallace (The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 255–256) say that the poems did not circulate and Wallace adds that “probably many of his best friends, like Languet, were unaware of their existence” (ibid., p. 231). Yet, as we have just seen, the fact of their general circulation is proved.

⁷ Grierson, H. J. C., Donne's Poetical Works (1929), ii, xxiii.

⁸ This fact is of course connected with Sidney's membership in the Areopagus, a group interested in metrical experiment.

⁹ There is one passage that Wallace (The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 248) finds significant: “But as I never desired the title [of poet] so have I neglected the means to come by it. Only, overmastered by some thoughts, I yielded an inky tribute unto them.” Of this Wallace says: “Surely the natural interpretation of these words is that Sidney sought in his sonnets, or in those of them which he has in mind, to give expression to an overmastering passion which possessed him.” To my mind a more natural interpretation is that Sidney is yielding to the poetic urge, to the overmastering desire for artistic expression which every artist must feel.

¹⁰ The historical argument may be reinforced by a psychological one. The poem is a mere rhetorical exercise. A series of questions are asked Sidney regarding, in order, Turkey, Poland, France, Holland, Ireland, Scotland; he answers at random because he is thinking of Stella. It seems likely that he would begin the poem with references to what would first occur to him, the political events most in his mind at the time. In Italy in 1573 there was great concern over a possible Turkish naval attack, and Sidney was anxious to visit Poland, as he later did. In England in 1581, neither of these countries had any importance for him. Elizabeth's French marriage was the question that was of first importance, to which the sonnet makes no allusion.

¹¹ This estimate is based on the bibliography of Hugues Vaganay, Le Sonnet en Italie et en France en XVI^e Siècle.

11a Miss L. E. Pearson (Elizabethan Love Conventions, 1933, pp. 84–103) feels that Astrophel and Stella is a deliberate exposition of Sidney's philosophy of love: the necessity of the triumph of spiritual over physical love.

¹² Mrs. Wilson feels that the action is very complicated and that “its advance and recoil, its recurrent and varied crises” were beyond Sidney's dramatic power (Sir Philip Sidney, p. 203). I feel that Mrs. Wilson confuses variety of mood with subtlety of plot. Sidney reacts in various ways to the same fundamental situation.

¹³ Stella is as usual married. But in sonnet 33 Sidney has one really original and dramatic idea which he makes the most of: he might have married her himself if only he had not hesitated. This fact makes his despair the greater.

¹⁴ Epigramme CCXVIII, which points out that a certain rich man is distinguished only for his wealth; and Chanson XIX, which curses the wealth that has caused his mistress to marry another.

¹⁵ The spelling of “Rich” with a capital in this line in the 1598 edition, a point which militates against my theory, may be due solely to the printer.

¹⁶ These were: Sonnet 37, the second “rich” sonnet; stanzas 18–25 of song 8, giving Stella's refusal to yield; stanzas 5, 6, and 7 of song 10 which detail the delights of Stella's love that he bids his thoughts to dwell on; song 11, which records an interview under Stella's window. These are said to be the most intimate of the series, and to have been withheld from circulating with the others because of a desire on Sidney's part to spare Stella from too intimate an avowal of passion in public. Why 24, the other “rich” sonnet, was allowed to circulate when 37 was withheld is unexplained; but it is said to have been placed before 33, which mentions Stella's marriage, in order to disguise its intimate nature. No other sonnet is supposed to be so displaced. Again I think that the critics are reading passion into the text. These poems are no more revealing than many others.

¹⁷ The argument for autobiography derived from the last line of sonnet 1, “Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write,” is based on the fallacy discussed earlier, that of taking the statements of lyric poetry literally. The more Sidney protests his sincerity, the more he compliments the lady. Moreover, the line may be interpreted as meaning that when he looks in his heart he sees Stella's image there, in which case it is merely a variant of one of the tritest of Renaissance conceits.