Sir Philip Sidney

Professor Herman’s edition – Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts – is an ambitious work, one that “attempts to situate” both texts “within their various cultural discourses” (51). As such, Professor Herman begins by introducing readers to the Elizabethan world of which Sidney was a part. A lengthy discussion is given of Sidney’s parentage, his early education, his political aspirations, his relationship (or lack thereof) with Queen Elizabeth and, finally, his literary ambitions. This information is followed by a joint discourse on the importance that the Apology and Astrophil and Stella hold for Renaissance Literature. Professor Herman locates the Apology alongside contemporary works from the period (i.e., Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse and Julius Caesar Scalinger’s Poetics) and more classical influences (Plato’s Republic). He is quick to critique the Apology for what it is. While pointing out that Sidney’s essay “bring[s] together an extraordinary mosaic of earlier Renaissance thought about the nature and purpose of poetry,” Herman also takes pains to mention the text’s “many […] contradictions” (37, 38). This rather balanced discussion is useful as it not only shows readers a variety of viewpoints, but also allows undergraduates to place Sidney’s work within a larger poetic context. Herman’s discussion of Astrophil and Stella primarily revolves around how Sidney’s sonnet sequence mirrors “the wide variety of verse forms” made famous by Petrarch (42).

Thesis of the essay is 'Poetry deserves the highest regard as a means of human pursuit of knowledge'. Sidney is trying to argue to substantiate that thesis, though, as he himself acknowledges, poetry is in dim light now. However, for Sidney, it deserves to be regarded with high esteem. To prove this, he places a list of logically fashioned arguments. As he himself claims in the opening paragraph that he is "a piece of logician", he puts forward a logical argument in defense of poetry. There are two major points that he raises in this treatise, one, is the defense of poetry and the other is the apology for English poetry. We can consider these two points as two parts of the essay. Poetry is defended that it is above History and Philosophy as a worthy pursuit of learning, and the objections against poetry are claimed to be flimsy. The second part of the essay is where Sidney apologizes for the pathetic state of English poetry despite English being the perfect language for it.

I show how the English authors of the 16th and 17th centuries consistently adapted and transformed Classical conceptions of the nature and purpose of poetry and literature. A collection of the most important source texts follows the presentation body.

An introduction to Renaissance literature, including a discussion of the broader historical context of the Renaissance (humanism, the Reformation, the printing press etc.) as well as the historical context of the Renaissance in England (the War of the Roses, Tudor rule, the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages). The lecture also includes a discussion of literary forms in the Renaissance as well as the Renaissance synthesis of art and truth in the contradistinction to the Platonic critique of poetry -- namely in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poetry.

Love is a common theme in the Renaissance poetry dominating the writings of nearly all great writers of the time. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the most celebrated writers of this period who is able to create love poems at their highest level. His sonnet cycle, Astrophil and Stella, shows the spectrum of love in its many different shades and colours in the relation between Astrophil (the star lover) and Stella (the star). Although the question of love and its various meanings is more or less self-evident in Sir Philip Sidney’s poetry; nonetheless, the unquestionable connection between love and beauty remains to be an interesting subject and can be reexamined in his sonnet cycle in order to reveal the minute details of Astrophil’s love of beauty, physical as well as spiritual. This reading, therefore, attempts to show how Sidney, as one of the pioneers of Petrarchan love poetry, understands the philosophically rich concept of Platonic love and of beauty as a medium for and ideal form of love.

The period of Sidney ownership of Penshurst Place, Kent, and their architectural reshaping of the medieval great house are traced from 1552 to c. 1700, and their creation of a major London house, Leicester House, from the 1630s. Penshurst Place has been celebrated as a literary and historical site, here it is presented as a great medieval fortified residence adapted for early modern living and the rising social status of the Sidneys. Leicester House is shown to represent advanced architectural design, and a significant role for Dorothy Sidney, already a noted collector. Together, these two principal residences offer the basis for stronger readings of the cultural significance of the Sidney family. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the material world of the Sidneys, arguing that a multidisciplinary approach to the arts offers greater possibilities for viewing the early modern environment. Directions in research using Penshurst Place are traceable as two broad strands, distinguished by a primary interest in the physical or the textual. Both strands have the potential to converge on the theme of the fashioning of the self in the early modern period, but there is arguably more ground work to be done on the material aspects of the Sidneys.

This article investigates the circulation and fame of Sannazaro’s Arcadia in early modern England, focusing first on Philip Sidney’s reception of the poem as part of an ongoing pastoral tradition. Sannazaro’s work thus contributed to create a new poetic context and decisively influenced Sidney’s own Arcadia. Significantly enough, after Sidney’s death the name of Sannazaro seems to suffer a deliberate act of ostracism (he does not appear in the works of Sidneian followers and commentators) as if Sidney’s scribal community preferred to exalt the name of their friend and patron by marginalizing one of Sidney’s sources.

This essay reinterprets the interrelated importance of money and diplomatic fame for Philip Sidney’s political career, with an eye to his self-presentation within a grand chivalric spectacle, The Four Foster Children of Desire, performed for the English court and a large French embassy in May 1581.  This approach to the pageantry’s text and context highlights the second marriage of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in terms of its financial ramifications for Sidney.  The study argues that Sidney presented to Elizabeth I a multivalent symbolic appeal for financial aid that also conveyed an impression of solidarity with both the queen and Leicester in condoning a political alliance with the Duke of Anjou (whether or not he married Elizabeth I as negotiated by the French embassy).  Highlighting little-known archival data from ensuing years, we can infer that Sidney’s artistry here in May 1581 commenced his successful campaign later that year for financial support from the crown, which he received from 1582 onward even amid his political appointment in the Low Countries with Leicester in 1585-86.

In this essay I make three related arguments.  First, the ninth sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, “Queene Vertue’s Court,” serves as a virtual substitute for the prodigy house that Sir Philip Sidney hoped to inherit or build and carries out the same political functions vis-à-vis the Queen that an actual prodigy house might have served. Second, neoclassicism inaugurates a slow-moving revolution in thinking about the artist as a creative agent.  Third, neoclassical theory articulates the rudiments of modern theories of creativity not only by seeking to restrain and organize an unruliness associated with femininity in political, material, and literary structures, but also by identifying the generation of the new in art as a masculine power that succeeds by mastering its feminine correlative.

While advice-giving, educational treatises and pedagogical figures abound in sixteenth-century literature, Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella presents its readers with unique claims of love, knowledge and education. Rather than dispensing advice, however, Sidney’s sonnets act as sites of ethical, rational and affective self-education for the poet-speaker. Through examining the agency of “Love” and Love’s tutelary direction of the poet-speaker’s writing, I argue that the sonnets’ claim of relationship—dependence on Stella as audience, subject and interlocutor—is essential to their claims of knowing and self-knowledge. Although Sonnet I centers Stella as the recipient of the sonnets and proposes pleasure, reading and knowing as educational steps Stella might undergo, the poet-speaker is ultimately situated as the “Foole” who, by explicitly working through multiple forms of knowledge, arrives at a form of knowing dependent on the response of the other—Stella herself. Finally, I argue that Astrophel and Stella enacts interdependent claims of intimacy, community and self-education, creating a poetic form of social self-knowledge that would have resonated with, and been performed by, Sidney’s coterie readership.

This paper examines Edmund Spenser’s role as part of a group of Protestants led by the earl of Leicester who pushed for greater English support for Protestant rebels in France and the Low Countries and opposed the negotiations for a marriage between Elizabeth I and the duc d’Anjou. It will analyse his poem The shepheardes calendar in its context as a piece of propaganda against the match, and show how Spenser’s views were part of wider ‘forward Protestant’ opinion in Elizabethan England. It will also examine the Classical influences on Spenser’s work, with particular focus on his use of traditional pastoral forms to convey a very contemporary political message, a tactic also used by several of his peers.

This is the first full-length critical study of country house entertainment, a genre central to late Elizabethan politics. It shows how the short plays staged for the Queen at country estates like Kenilworth Castle and Elvetham shaped literary trends and intervened in political debates, including whether women made good politicians and what roles the church and local culture should play in definitions of England. In performance and print, country house entertainments facilitated political negotiations, rethought gender roles, and crafted regional and national identities. In its investigation of how the hosts used performances to negotiate local and national politics, the book also sheds light on how and why such entertainments enabled female performance and authorship at a time when English women did not write or perform commercial plays. Written in a lively and accessible style, this is fascinating reading for scholars and students of early modern literature, theatre, and women's history.

Love is a common theme in the Renaissance poetry dominating the writings of nearly all great writers of the time. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the most celebrated writers of this period who is able to create love poems at their highest level. His sonnet cycle, Astrophil and Stella, shows the spectrum of love in its many different shades and colours in the relation between Astrophil (the star lover) and Stella (the star). Although the question of love and its various meanings is more or less self-evident in Sir Philip Sidney’s poetry; nonetheless, the unquestionable connection between love and beauty remains to be an interesting subject and can be reexamined in his sonnet cycle in order to reveal the minute details of Astrophil’s love of beauty, physical as well as spiritual. This reading, therefore, attempts to show how Sidney, as one of the pioneers of Petrarchan love poetry, understands the philosophically rich concept of Platonic love and of beauty as a medium for and ideal form of love.

Sidney’s literary career is usually understood to have occurred in two phases: one as a manuscript author and another, posthumously, as a nationally revered print celebrity. This essay complicates that narrative by showing how Sidney’s twin literary alter egos, Philisides and Astrophil, characters whose esoteric personal allegories marked them as written for an audience of familiars, became the touchstones of a countercurrent in Sidney’s reception in the 1590s, a countercurrent that sought to reclaim him for the privacy of the coterie. As a series of poets and prose writers publicly reimagined Sidney’s personae, I argue, they fashioned around Philisides and Astrophil fictions of restricted literary production—fictions that repositioned the manuscript coterie as a means of asserting distinction and exclusivity within the expanding arena of print.

Visibility is proposed in this article as an inverse corollary to Venuti's notion of invisibility and a site of methodological interest for translation history. By historicizing the visibility of translators and of other foreign elements in translations and paratexts, we can trace broader cultural-aesthetic agendas related to translation as they change over time. This essay demonstrates such changes in medieval and Renaissance translations. Impeding the practice and study of visibility have been ideologies strongly favoring invisibility, such as those ultimately derived from the Western discipline's founding myth of Babel, or from post-Romantic notions of literary value. But the visibility of the foreign has been – and is, in contemporary, experimental and digital translations – a potential aesthetic resource, a locus of friction and interest, and an index to historically changing attitudes to alterity.

In his Defence of Poesie, Sidney insists on poetry as a means of attaining "fruitful knowledge" and thus he underlines its profitable nature. This seems quite coherent with the spirit of his narrative production, but reading closely his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, the same conclusion is not so obvious. The poems are quite controversial as regards their moral benefit, and moreover the story-line that can be traced is one of loss and frustration To what extent can these sonnets be read as a profitable composition? The dialogue that can be established between the Defence and Astrophil and Stella will lead the argumentation put forward in this paper. On the SEDERI Conference at Huelva, we delivered a paper in which we analysed how Sidney's Defence of Poesie is pervaded by a vocabulary that makes of poetry a puritan value based on the ideas of profit, usefulness and action. Inspired by the suggestion of an attendant at that lecture, we have decided to pursue thi...

Johannes Crato: Sidneyʼs forgotten mentor?
The paper examines the influence of Johannes Crato and the seminal treatises on medicine and botany written by leading Central European scholars during the early modern period on the erudition and genesis of poetic work of the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney. Johannes Crato (1519-1585), later von Krafftheim, who originally comes from Breslau, is known to be the physician of all three Habsburg emperors, i.e., Ferdinand I., Maximilian II. and Rudolph II., and is a part of the Camerarius-Languet circle. As such he had a huge influence within the European intellectual network.