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The greatest work by Sidney was, no doubt, represented by the sonnet sequence of Astrophel and Stella, consisting of more than one hundred sonnets and eleven songs.
It was written between 1581 and 1583, following Dante's and Petrarch's tradition of celebrating the poet's beloved through a series of conventional sonnets. However, Sidney's sonnets are not as formal as Petrarch's, since most of them are characterized by a spontaneity and passion of feelings, never acknowledged before. In Sidney the formality of the speaker has completely disappeared, except for some poems which stay as mere exercises among the finest sonnets of the period (together with Shakespeare's).
Astrophel and Stella, where Astrophel stands for "star-lover" (the poet), records a partially autobiographical love story between the author and the daughter of the Earl of Essex, Penelope Devereux. The girl had been promised to the poet when he was young, but finally she had become the wife of Lord Rich. This event had greatly disappointed the author, who decided to give voice to his sorrow through a collection of sonnets. The poet's personal sincerity is not as important as one might suppose. In a literary composition what is really relevant to the accomplishment of the work is the sincerity of the tone throughout the whole work. In this case the mood is melancholic, but it is not necessary to know the exact origin of that wistfulness. The poet is dramatically torn by opposite passions, such as love and hate, tenderness and bitterness, hope and despair, which represent the conventional feelings of the period. Sidney, however, succeeds in adding to the Petrarchan imagery and conceits his warm personal experience.
In Astrophel and Stella the author does not always use the same sonnet scheme. The commonest of Sidney's is abba abba ode dee, but sometimes he uses other forms for the quatrains, such as abba abab, and for the tercets, ccd eed (different from Petrarch's).
The sonnet sequence by Sidney set a new fashion for sonneteers who devoted their verses to their beloved women. We can remember Fulke Greville's Caelica (1592), Samuel Daniel's Delia (1595), Spenser's Amoretti (1595), and Shakespeare's sonnets, dated 1590, but published later, in 1609. |
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