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 sonnets among which were interspersed eleven songs.¹ The appreciation of Sidney's achievement over that of his predecessors is clearly announced by his first critic, Thomas Nashe, in the preface to the 1591 edition:

Tempus adest plausus aurea pompa venit, so endes the Sceane of Idiots, and enter Astrophel in pompe. Gentlemen that haue seene a thousand lines of folly, drawne forth ex vno puncto impudentiae, & two famous Mountains to goe to the conception of one Mouse, that haue had your eares deafned with the eccho of Fames brazen towres, when only they haue been toucht with a leaden pen, that haue seene Pan sitting in his bower of delights, & a number of Midasses to admire his miserable horne pipes, let not your surfeted sight, new come frō such puppet play, think scorne to turn aside into this Theater of pleasure.²

Nashe's prediction proved true, for not only did Astrophil and Stella become a quarry for pickpockets of others' wits but also its 108 sonnets became a symbol to other poets of Sidney's achievement, through which they paid him the compliment of using 108 as a structural device in their own poetry.³ Spenser's elegy for Sidney, Astrophel, to which is added the Doleful Lay of Clorinda (presumed by some to be the work of the Countess of Pembroke) contains 216 lines (2 × 108) and the Lay 108. Mute tribute is also paid by the 108 poems of the anonymous Alcilia (1595) and of Alexander Craig's Amorous Songs, Sonnets, and Elegies (1606), some of which are addressed to Lady Penelope Rich, Sidney's Stella. The 109 poems of Caelica with their numerous borrowings from Sidney may also be an acknowledgment of praise from Fulke Greville, Sidney's closest friend. Of such emulative influence there can be no question; the excellence of Sidney's wit guaranteed that, as Nashe foresaw.

What is surprising is that a story of such moral bleakness should have found such welcome from the moral Elizabethans. Again, Nashe's description is instructive, for his theater of pleasure offers

a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau'n to ouershadow the faire frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, whiles the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight. The chiefe Actor here is Melpomene, whose dusky robes dipt in the ynke of teares, as yet seeme to drop when I view them neere. The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire, videte queso et linguis animisque fauete.

The accuracy of Nashe's description is attested to by the fact that most later critics use it as the starting point of their own critiques of Sidney. Few critics cite the equally instructive dedication by Thomas Newman, who like Nashe appreciates Sidney's achievement in "the famous deuice of Astrophel and Stella, which carrying the generall commendation of all men of iudgement, and being reported to be one of the rarest things that euer any Englishman set abroach," but he nevertheless worries that "the Argument perhaps may seeme too light for your graue viewe" (i.e., the view of Frauncis Flower, to whom it is dedicated). Both Newman and Nashe give unqualified praise to the excellence of the poetry, but Newman's concern for the possible lightness of the argument in the grave view of Mr. Flower should alert us to the discrepancy between Sidney's excellence and his argument, a discrepancy implicit in Nashe's description. His "Theater of pleasure" is nothing more or less than a "paper stage …, an artificial heau'n to ouershadow the faire frame" in which "the tragicomedy of loue is performed by starlight…. The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire." Sidney's rival creation is filled with shadows and false lights and ends in the darkness of despair, facts that have not deterred modern critics from finding cause to praise Astrophil's pursuit of desire. But to the Elizabethans who firmly believed that "all the world's a stage," the pleasures of such theaters lay in their just imitation of nature to teach true morality. As Sidney himself writes in the Defense of Poetry:

that imitation whereof Poetrie is, hath the most conveniencie to nature of al other: insomuch that as Aristotle saith, those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battailes, unnatural monsters, are made in poeticall imitation delightful. Truly I have knowne men, that even with reading Amadis de gaule which God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect Poesie, have found their hearts moved to the exercise of courtesie, liberalitie, and especially courage.⁴

Poetry teaches the lessons of morality, but we must ask then what kind of morality Astrophil's despair teaches. It teaches us about a man pursuing a married woman for whom he has conceived a passion, "Not at first sight," a man who steals a kiss from her while she is asleep, worrying all the while about her anger and later chiding himself for not being more adventurous (Song II), a man who frankly propositions her despite her gentle, "No, no, no, no, my dear, let be" (Song IV), and then churlishly vilifies her because she has not given in (Song V), a man who once more tries rather gawkily to seduce her (Song VIII), is again repulsed and retires into pastoral exile (Song IX), only too soon to be found under her window still refusing to accept her refusal until she sends him packing (Song XI) to the despair of the final sonnets. In a theater this would be viewed as morally reprehensible behavior in spite of the fact that the majority of modern critics feel a necessity to praise Astrophil's actions because he is, after all, driven by love. The poetic success of Astrophil's failure to win Stella has captivated these critics into believing that we should follow his lamentations and praise of Stella with total sympathy for his endeavors. These lenient modern assessments of Astrophil, it seems to me, miss the point of Sidney's poem. I think that Sidney wanted us to be delighted by Astrophil's wit and to be instructed by the image of a man whose reason gives way to his will and whose hopeful desires finally lead him into despair.⁵ Astrophil is not a hero, and he is not a hero precisely because he succumbs to wholeheartedly to the pursuit of his desires. He teaches morality by negative example. The vacancy at the heart of Sidney's poem proclaims in chorus with all the other English sequences: Go, and do not likewise.

The most explicit statement of the virtues of negative example is the advice of the anonymous "gentleman friend" Philaretes to the author of Alcilia:

In perusing your Loving Folly, and your Declining from it; I do behold Reason conquering Passion. The infirmity of loving argueth you are a man; the firmness thereof, discovereth a good wit and the best nature: and the falling from it, true virtue. Beauty was always of force to mislead the wisest; and men of greatest perfection have had no power to resist Love. The best are accompanied with vices, to exercise their virtues; whose glory shineth brightest in resisting motives of pleasure, and in subduing affections…. Yet herein it appeareth you have made good use of Reason; that being heretofore lost in youthful vanity, have now, by timely discretion, found yourself!

Let me entreat you to suffer these your Passionate Sonnets to be published! which may, peradventure, make others, possessed with the like Humour of Loving, to follow your example, in leaving; and move other Alcilias (if there be any) to embrace deserving love, while they may.⁶

Interpreting the sonnets as negative example makes sense of Newman's hesitation about the lightness of Sidney's argument and places Nashe's description in a context that shows that accurate description does not necessarily imply approbation or praise. The "paper stage" betrays the lack of a firmer foundation; the "artificial heau'n" does "ouershadow the faire frame" of God's intended creation; the "tragicomedy of loue is performed by starlight" only for lack of better light. The argument is "cruel! chastitie" only because that chastity will not respond to Astrophil's desires. Sidney, as I hope to prove, is using Astrophil's journey from hope to despair as a fictional device for the analysis of human desire in Christian terms.

Most commentators on Sidney find an irresistible impulse to draw into Astrophil and Stella the final two sonnets of Certain Sonnets, "Thou blindman's mark" and "Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust."⁷ The impulse is entirely understandable not only because those two sonnets analyze the inadequacies of human desire within a context that accounts for the inadequacy but also because the ending of Astrophil and Stella, if read as a justification or glorification of Astrophil's actions, is grievously inconclusive and uninstructive. Those two explicitly Christian poems cry out to be included unless one sees that beneath the witty surface of Astrophil's lamentations and selfish demands lies the old battle of the "erected wit" and the "infected will" that as Sidney assures us in the Defense of Poetry continues to deprive us of the golden world that was once ours by right. Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to include those two poems in the sequence. They show a repentance and a knowledge of desire that Astrophil never achieves. The brilliance of Sidney's negative example is that he realized that Astrophil must end in despair because he never learns from his experience. We the readers are meant to supply the Christian context that will make sense of the insufficiencies of Astrophil's insights into his predicament.

The title itself should give us some hint of the disjunction that is Sidney's subject: Astrophil and Stella, Most sonnet sequences, if titled, use only the name of the lady, the presumed subject and object of the poetry. Sidney uses a copulative title, one part derived from Greek and one from Latin, announcing even before we start to read a disjunction, minor but perhaps significant. Even disallowing the etymological disjunction, inspection reveals a disunity in the title, a doubleness, a duplicity. Two names are joined by a grammatical copula, which we accept out of hand as a unity, which it will not become. We are so used to accepting the unity of a Romeo and Juliet that we forget that the true coupling is the full title: The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Misfortune and not love is their final union, and that is the reason we still read their story. Astrophil and Stella are separate from the moment the title is read, and if we stop to think even for a moment about the title, what possible union is there for a star-lover and a star? Petrarch makes his Laura into a false sun; Scève creates a false moon (Délie), but neither one uses as the major name of his loved one a name from another order of nature. I do not know how common the name Stella was for women in the sixteenth century, but surely Sidney is indicating in his choice of names a being of a different order, distant, unattainable, and reflected, a light that does not illuminate, that leaves us in the dark, a light that is shared and shown by thousands of other Stellas, which goes far to dispute the uniqueness of Astrophil's claims for his Stella.

The ambiguity of the title is carefully demonstrated inthe sequence. The tragicomedy of love performed by starlight is inadequately lighted. Stella's eyes, "nature's chiefest work," are black, "that sweete blacke which vailes the heav'nly eye" (sonnet 20). Astrophil's starlit stage is dark and perilous. His theatre is of the mind "that sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe" (sonnet 1). The face can be none other than his own face, his own rejected desires. Astrophil, in calling for "some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn'd braine" (sonnet 1), is sounding a retreat from the light of common day, a retreat that will engulf him in the blackness of his own mind as figured by the blackness of Stella's eyes. Who ever heard of black stars before the discovery of black holes?⁸

The metaphor of blackness expands under Astrophil's preoccupations. He reaches out to the common sunlit world he has rejected to find the metaphors to describe the blackness he now recognizes as his world:

His painting of the scenery of his starlit world draws upon the common Christian opposition of heaven and hell, but no lover has ever thought that a denial of what he considers heaven is anything else but a hell. By sonnet 86 he has transferred the responsibility for his fate to Stella:

Astrophil at this point is playing a more skillfully feeling game in drawing in other common words from Christian eschatology. "Doome" carries a heavy overtone of Christian damnation, of judgment against the speaker, but in point of fact, the "doome" is nothing more than Stella's judgment of his love suit, which has turned his heaven into his hell. Astrophil has inverted every image he uses. Black has replaced light. Heaven is Stella's submission to him; Hell is her refusal of her grace. Astrophil exploits every ambiguity of common Christian imagery to paint his own case in the most salutary light, which he calls in sonnet 1 "the blackest face of woe." In every way he uses spiritual meanings for physical ends:

So while thy beautie drawes the heart to love,

As fast thy Vertue bends that love to good:
'But ah,' Desire still cries, 'give me some food.'
(Sonnet 71)

These lines are the mid-lines of the entire sequence, a point to which I shall return in the last section of this essay. At this point we need only say that Astrophil is painting most skillfully but only feelingly, that is, selfishly.

This simple technique of inversion is evident even in the light imagery used to describe Stella. The single star that Stella's name implies becomes by sonnet 7 two black stars, her eyes, which Astrophil would have us believe to be Nature's "chiefe worke." By sonnet 68 Stella has become "the onely Planet of my light, / Light of my life, and life of my desire," and by sonnet 76 his star has been metamorphosed into his sun: "But now appeares my day, / The onely light of joy, the onely warmth of Love." By the end of the sequence his sun is only memory because of Stella's absence from him (sonnets 88, 89, 91, 96, 97, 98).

The imagery of light associated with Stella's eyes is, to say the least, contradictory: "When Sun is hid, can starres such beames display?" (sonnet 88). The contradiction is intended by Sidney to alert us to the confusion of Astrophil's apprehension, climaxed most explicitly in sonnet 89, the only sonnet in the sequence to employ just two rhymes:

Every possible inversion of day and night is wrung out of this infernal litany of the lover's despair. The literary sources of this inversion of day and night is Vergil, Aeneid, 4.522-32 and more directly Petrarch's Canzoniere 22, but Sidney complicates the issue by having Astrophil confuse both inner and outer day and night. They have become all one to him, and from this point on the sequence is shrouded in darkness both physical and moral.

The permutations of Stella's light-giving qualities in these later sonnets is anticipated in an earlier block of poems (31-40), which also describe the lover's night world. Sonnet 32, the central sonnet of the first unbroken block of sonnets (1-63), about which I shall speak later, is an invocation to Morpheus, which will require some elucidation because of its importance to Astrophil's predicament. Morpheus, the son of Somnus, god of sleep, is most elaborately described in Ovid's story of Ceyx and Alcyon (Metamorphoses, 11.591 ff.). He is the god who appears to dreamers in human shape, and it is he who appears to the grieving Ceyx to inform her of her husband's death. Ovid describes him:

At pater e populo natorum mille suorum
excitat artificem simulatoremque figurae
Morphea: non illo quisquam sollertius alter
exprimit incessus vultumque sonumque loquendi;
adicit et vestes et consuetissima cuique verba.
(633-38)

[But the father rouses Morpheus from the throng of his thousand sons, a cunning imitator of the human form. No other is more skilled than he is representing the gait, the features, and the speech of men, the clothing also and the accustomed words of each he represents.]¹¹

Ovid emphasizes the artifice of the verisimilitude. sidney undoubtedly knew the Ovidian story because he imitates lines 623-26 in sonnet 39, but he would also have known Chaucer's use of Ovid's story in The Book of the Duchess where the ambivalence of this beneficent dissimulator is more apparent. We should also recall that Spenser has Archimago send to the house of Morpheus to fetch him evil spirits to deceive Una and Red Crosse (FQ I.ii.36-44). Thus, an invocation to Morpheus should not be read as a simple request for sleep:

Morpheus' power over Astrophil is that he is the bringer of Stella's image, but it should be observed that even Astrophil is aware of the artifice. I am not so sure that Astrophil is aware of the double edge of those "blind eyes" or of the earlier "Witnesse of life to them that living die." Sidney's invocation of Morpheus introduces a note of the hellish nature of Astrophil's infatuation. He has closed out every consideration of the waking world. In sonnet 30 he enumerates the great political problems of his time and concludes:

In sonnet 31 he projects his wretched plight onto the moon ("With how sad steps, o Moone, thou climb'st the skies") before succumbing to the blandishments of Morpheus in the sonnet under discussion. Astrophil is busy enclosing himself in the night of his own desires under the dubious patronage of Morpheus.

The complex of metaphors I have been describing derives ultimately from a common Christian metaphor, most forcefully stated in Romans 13. 10-14 (Geneva version):

Loue doeth not euil to his neighbour: therefore is loue ye fulfilling of the law.

And that considering the season, that it is now time that we shulde arise from slepe: for now is our saluation nerer, then when we beleued it.

The night is past, & the day is at hand: let vs therefore cast away the workes of darkenes, and let vs put on the armour of light,

So that we walke honestly, as in the day: not in glotonie, and dronkennes, neither in chambering and wantonnes, nor in strife and enuying.

Paul's injunction to put on the new man of spirituality and to put away the old man of bondage to sin, couched here in metaphors of light and dark, sleep and waking, is picked up again in 1 Thessalonians 5.5-6: "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night neither of darknes. Therefore let vs not slepe as do other, but let vs watch and be sober." The Genevan gloss to these lines is instructive: "Here slepe is taken for contempt of saluation, when men continewe in sinnes, and wil not awake to godlinesse." "Watch" is glossed: "And not be ouercome with the cares of the world." Astrophil's concerns throughout the sequence lock him up in his "sleep of the senses" and prevent his seeing that worship of the idol he himself has created has imprisoned him in his hellish night. Sidney's brilliant inversion of traditional imagery cries out for the Christian context, which finally does give meaning to Astrophil's negative example of what a lover should be.

Notes

¹ The 1591 edition, first quarto, contains 107 sonnets (37, the sonnet punning on Lord Rich's name, omitted) and ten songs (XI omitted). The order of the poems is different in that 55 and 56 are reversed, and the ten songs appear as a block at the end of the sonnets. The many verbal differences are cited in William A. Ringler, Jr., ed., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), to which edition all further citations of the poems are made. Ringler's excellent discussion of the textual history of the poems is on pp. 447-57.

² Thomas Nashe, preface to Syr P. S. His Astrophel and Stella (1591; rpt. Menston-Scolar Press, 1970), Sig A.3.

³ Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 175-76….

⁴The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912-1926), vol. 3, p. 20.

⁵ For example, Leonora Leet Brodwin, "The Structure of 'Astrophel and Stella,'" MP 67 (1969), 25-40, in a very perceptive study leaves Astrophil in a thoroughly untenable situation: "In the first section [1-35], Astrophel sought a virtuous resolution of the conflict between ideal reason and desire caused by a love which had no hope of reciprocation. In the second section [36-86], Astrophel's internal struggle is displaced by the 'new warre' of external struggle with Stella following upon her unexpected show of favor to him. This wrecks the virtuous resolution toward which he had struggled so painfully in the first section and leaves him in the third section [87-108], with no moral armor against the unrelieved despair caused by Stella's final rejection of his love" (p. 27, emphasis added). I do not accept the virtue of Astrophil's dilemma. With Anne Romayne Howe, "Astrophil and Stella: Why and How?" SP 61 (1964), 150-69, I can recognize much poetic talent in Astrophil but no virtue. I do not want to restructure the sequence as she would, nor do I want to divide the persona of Astrophil into pure and impure persuasion as does Richard A. Lanham, "Astrophil and Stella: Pure and Impure Persuasion," ELR 2 (1972), 100-15. James J. Scanlon, "Sidney's Astrophil and Stella: 'See what it is to love' Sensually!" SEL 16 (1976), 65-74, is closer to the points I want to make, but I would like to trace Sidney's use of sonnet themes back to pre-Bembo sources, since Neoplatonism tends to becloud the basic Christian issues at stake. A reading closer to mine is Alan Sinfield, "Astrophil's Self-Deception," EIC 28 (1978), 3-17.

⁶Some Longer Elizabethan Poems, ed. A. H. Bullen (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1903), pp. 321-22. Alexander Craig, another follower of Sidney, makes the same point: "So haue I in middest of my modest Affections, committed to the Presse my vnchast Loue to Lais, that contraries by contraries, and Vertue by Vice, more cleerely may shine " ("To the Reader," Amorose Songes, Sonets, and Elegies [1606], Glasgow: Hunterian Club Publications, No. 5 [1873], p. 11). The basic critical issue is whether one achieves the moral purpose of literature by writing strict doctrine or by slyly using ironic techniques while implying the opposite. The most ancient and common version of the issue is whether Ovid was a lewd or a moral poet. In recent scholarship the problem has been debated on the meaning of Andreas Capellanus's De amore. See D. W. Robertson, Jr., "The Subject of the De amore of Andreas Capellanus," MP 50 (1953), 145-61. An interesting example of the problem, roughly contemporaneous with Sidney, is Robert Greene's Vision in which the supposedly dying author reflects on his own literary practice and has both Chaucer and Gower tell a tale on how to drive out jealousy, Chaucer taking the ironic, witty route and Gower taking the straightforward moral route. Greene describes the business of the true writer not "in painting out a goddesse, but in setting out the praises of God; not in discovering of beauty, but in discovering of virtues, not in laying out the platforms of love, nor in telling the deep passions of fancy, but in perswading men to honest and honorable actions, which are the steps that lead to true and perfect felicity." (Life and Works of Robert Greene, MA, ed. A. B. Grosart, 15 vols. [1881-1886], vol. 12, p. 189). The further irony of Greene, very lively, writing about his death and repentance, deserves further study.

⁷ For example, see David Kalstone, Sidney's Poetry, Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 178.

⁸ For a different interpretation of the star imagery, see Ruth Stevenson, "The Influence of Astrophil's Star," TSL 17 (1972), 45-57….

¹⁰ The phrase "daily unbidden guest" seems to me to foreshadow Milton's "worthy bidden guest" of Lycidas 118, derived from Matthew 22:8: "Truely the wedding is prepared but they which were bidden were not worthie."

¹¹ Text and translation from Loeb edition, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller….