Theme: sir philip sidney

THEME: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

PLAN:
1. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
2.Life
3.Works.

Sir Philip Sidney seemed to the Elizabethans to embody all the qualities of character and personality they admired: he was courtier, soldier, poet, critic, author of prose romance, friend, and patron. He was Castiglione's perfect courtier come to life.

Sidney was born at Penshurst Place, Kent, in 1554. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney, thrice Elizabeth's Lord Deputy in Ireland from 1559 onwards. He was educated at Shrewsbury School, where he enrolled in 1564, and at Christ Church, Oxford, (1567/8), but he left without taking a degree. From 1572 to 1575 he travelled to Europe, visiting Paris, Germany, Austria and Italy. In 1572 he witnessed the massacre of Protestants in Paris (St Bartholomew's Day Massacre); in 1573 he travelled to Venice and in 1574 he studied in Padua and Venice, visited Genoa, Florence, Vienna, Prague and Antwerp. In his journeys he greatly impressed those who met him and left behind a trail of books dedicated to him. At Frankfurt he met the scholar Languet with whom he ws to exchange a long correspondence and who influenced him.
In 1575 he returned to England and lived the life of a prominent courtier to Queen Elizabeth, serving occcasionally on diplomatic missions, and actively encouraging authors such as Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him as "the president [chief exemplar] of noblesse and chevalree". In 1576 Sidney joined his father in Ireland, possibly travelling home with Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essez, whose dying wish had been that his daughter Penelope ("Stella") should marry Philip. An ambiguous relationship with Penelope Devereux began; for four years there was talk of an engagement, but in 1581 she married Lord Robert Rich. Then he retired to Wilton, the home of his sister, Countess of Pembroke, after a quarrel with the Earl of Oxford. In 1577 at Wilton he may have written a long pastoral romance in prose called "Old"Arcadia, the most important original work of English prose fiction produced before the eighteenth century. Spenser probably began to write The Defence of Poesy. About 1581 began to write his sonnet cycle Astrophil and Stella (i.e."Starlover and Star").
In 1582 Sir Philip Sidney was knighted and in 1583 he married Frances, daughter and heir of the Queen's Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham. In 1585 he was appointed Governor of Flushing, an appointment which prevented him from sailing to the West Indies with Raleigh and Drake. Sidney was strongly devoted to the cause of Protestantism at home and abroad. In 1577 he went on a formal mission in Germany where he met some German princes and there he sounded out the possibility of a Protestant league. His ardent Protestantism, which did not find favour with Elizabeth's more cautious religious policies, took him to the Low Countries in 1585, where as a volunteer and knight-errant he engaged in several battles in the war against Spain. He was involved in an unimportant skirmish at Zutphen and badly wounded in the thigh on 13 September, 1586. The wound did not heal and within 22 days he died of infection, at the age of thirty-two. All England mourned and profound grief was also felt in Europe; he was buried with great ceremony in St Paul's Cathedral, eight days after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Sidney did not publish his works himself and none of his major works were published in his lifetime. In 1590 was published the "New" Arcadia. In 1595 The Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry were published. In 1598 the first "Complete Sidney" was published probably under the supervision of the Countess of Pembroke. Sidney's ability to combine the chivalric virtues of a man of action with the learning and erudition of a man of letters consolidated his reputation as the model Renaissance courtier and his mastery of the sonnet, as exemplified in Astrophil and Stella, represents the height of his artistic achievement.
List of Works
CERTAIN SONNETS. It is a collection of miscellanous poems written over a number of years, probably between 1577 and (at latest) 1581.
THE LADY OF MAY. It was possibly written in 1578 for the entertainment of Elizabeth during the Queen's visit to the Earl of Leicester at Wan stead.
ARCADIA, a massive prose romance interspersed with poems, the finest work of English prose fiction of the period, has been seen as the ance stor of the English novel. It appealed to the Renaissance love of pasto ral but was also read as a courtesy book, a moral treatise, a discussion of love and philosophy, and even rhetorical handbook. Two versions of
the work exist: the first, unrevised, the Old Arcadia, which was never printed in the sixteenth century; the second version, known as the New Arcadia, was published posthumously in 1590. In 1593 The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia was published, perhaps under the supervision of the Countess herself. The book brought together the first three revised
books of the New Arcadia and the last two books of the unrevised Old Arcadia. One of Sidney's sources was Sannazzaro from whom he took his title and the pastoral setting.
ASTROPHIL AND STELLA (published in 1591). It is the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles, which relied heavily upon the conventions established by Petrarch. Sidney's collection has 108 sonnets and eleven songs. it was written, probably, between 1581-82. However, the sequence may well incorporate poems or sonnets written earlier.
THE DEFENCE OF POESY (two editions, one with title An Apology for Poe try) was published in 1595. This is a long essay in which Sidney syste matically defends poetry (all imaginative literature) against attacks and greatly exalts the role of poet and the moral value of poetry. This is the only major work of literary criticism produced in the English
Renaissance.
Themes.
The sonnets of Petrarch and his imitators provided numerous conceits and images for later sonneteers, such as: the servitude of the lover, his sleeplessness, his desire to bestow immortality on his lady, the lover as a huntsman, as a storm-tossed ship, love as ice and fire, pleasure and pain, honey and gall. All these images recur with amazing frequency also in Sidney's collection.

POETRY
ATROPHIL AND STELLA

Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella was probably written in 1581-2; it was first published in 1591. It is composed of 108 sonnets and 11 songs. To some extent at least, the plot of the sonnets tells the story of Sidney's unhappy love for Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex, who married Robert, Lord Rich in November 1581. "Astrophil" means "starlover" with a play on Sidney's Christian name; "Stella" means "star". As several sonnets make it clear, e.g. sonnet 37, "My mouth doth water", referring to one that "Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is" (line 14), Stella is to be identified with Penelope Rich; but the exact nature of Sidney's real, rather than poetic, relationship with her can never be known. It is the first full Petrarchan sequence in English; it adopts both the Petrarchan fiction and the meta-fiction, namely that the fiction exists merely to veil a literal autobiographical situation. The petrarchan mythology exists to provide a muse, a psychology, and a set of relations and images; the use of biography is to support that myth. However not all scholars agree that the sequence is to be read as the story of an unhappy love of a man who is tortured by sexual obsession.
1. ASTROPHIL AND STELLA.
SONNET I:
"LOVING IN TRUTH"
In the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella there are thirteen sonnets which deal with the creation of texts; since they appear throughout the sequence, their recurrence cannot be accidental, and inevitably affect the reading not just of each of themselves, but of the entire sequence. The great opening sonnet is one of of these. In it we can see a highly metafictional interest. According to the critic Geoffrey G. Hiller, "The question of the sincerity of a sonneteer is one which is often raised. The fact is that it is not necessary to be in love to write poetry: it may even be a hindrance, since great poetry depends on the detachment of the writer as well as on his involvement. [...] Whether or not a poet is in love is beside the point: what matters is that his poem should give the impression that he is, and it is this illusion which the sonneteers attempted to create. The fact that sonnets were written in the first person does not prevent them from being fiction, and it is primarily as fiction that we must read them. It is important that the reader should not assume that the "I" of a sonnet is the direct voice of the poet writing the sonnet."
This opening sonnet is written in twelve-syllable lines, and one of six sonnets in alexandrines in the collection. The narrator of this sonnet, Astrophil, says he would like to write about his love in a poem. In this way his beloved Stella might take some pleasure of his pain, and pleasure might cause her to read and know about his love for her: this might help him win her love. At first his search for "fit words" is not successful; in the last line his Muse tells him to look in his heart and find Stella's image there, and write from that image, the source and origin of true poetry.

1. ASTROPHIL AND STELLA.

SONNET I:
"LOVING IN TRUTH"
In the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella there are thirteen sonnets which deal with the creation of texts; since they appear throughout the sequence, their recurrence cannot be accidental, and inevitably affect the reading not just of each of themselves, but of the entire sequence. The great opening sonnet is one of of these. In it we can see a highly metafictional interest. According to the critic Geoffrey G. Hiller, "The question of the sincerity of a sonneteer is one which is often raised. The fact is that it is not necessary to be in love to write poetry: it may even be a hindrance, since great poetry depends on the detachment of the writer as well as on his involvement. [...] Whether or not a poet is in love is beside the point: what matters is that his poem should give the impression that he is, and it is this illusion which the sonneteers attempted to create. The fact that sonnets were written in the first person does not prevent them from being fiction, and it is primarily as fiction that we must read them. It is important that the reader should not assume that the "I" of a sonnet is the direct voice of the poet writing the sonnet."
This opening sonnet is written in twelve-syllable lines, and one of six sonnets in alexandrines in the collection. The narrator of this sonnet, Astrophil, says he would like to write about his love in a poem. In this way his beloved Stella might take some pleasure of his pain, and pleasure might cause her to read and know about his love for her: this might help him win her love. At first his search for "fit words" is not successful; in the last line his Muse tells him to look in his heart and find Stella's image there, and write from that image, the source and origin of true poetry.