Sidney, Sir Philip | Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (essay date 1982)
Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (essay date 1982)
SOURCE: "Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading," in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual III, University of Pittsburg Press Vol. III, 1982, pp. 139-91.
[In the following excerpt, Roche contends that Sidney meant Astrophil to represent a negative example, someone who "must end in despair because he never learns from his experience."]
Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, although the third English sequence in order of publication, holds pride of place as the most influential of the English sequences. Its author was a young nobleman who died a hero's death in 1586; its heroine a beautiful lady of the court. The story of Astrophil's love for Stella, as told in the poem, was well known through circulated manuscripts before it appeared posthumously in 1591 in a pirated edition by Thomas Newman and in 1598 in an edition authorized by Sidney's sister, the countess of Pem-broke, which contained 108...
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