Philip Sidney

Abstract Gascoigne’s standing as England’s leading poet was growing at his death in 1577 and was sustained for a few years afterward, but was soon eclipsed by the talent and personal charisma of the young Philip Sidney. During the 1580s, attempts by two other poets to write a Petrarchan lyric sequence in English were published, to little effect; Sidney, working in aristocratic privacy, was during this time finishing his self-education as a poet and composing the language’s first proper sonnet sequence in the Petrarchan mode. Its technical virtuosity is matched with a strong narrative drive related to Sidney’s own well-attested connection to the recently married Penelope Devereux Rich, who becomes the “Stella” of Astrophil and Stella. The sequence of individual poems presents a carefully paced story of obsessive desire, first at an intimidated distance, then by degrees more open and sexually aggressive, leading to kissing, expressions of love on both sides, and eventually a direct attempt at seduction. The attempt has an explosive effect on the relationship, in the wake of which Astrophil is definitively banished from Stella’s presence and left expressing his still powerful desire in sonnets of now hopeless Petrarchan isolation.