Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney, and the Doleful Lay

Abstract

Spenser's Astrophel: A Pastorall Elegie upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney opens a collection of seven elegies published with Colin Clouts Come Home Againe in 1595. The second poem, Ay me, to whom shall I my case complaine, is untitled, but Spenser's pastoral framework presents it as sung by Astrophel's sister, and refers to the following elegies as dolefull layes. Ay me, to whom . . . thus became known as The Doleful Lay of Clorinda, a title which detaches the poem from its context in a way neither poet nor printer authorizes. I shall refer to the poem as the Lay. The five other elegies in the volume had all been registered or printed elsewhere: only Astrophel itself and the Lay were new.' Early Spenser criticism had little interest in the poems, and only recently has the place of Astrophel in the recognition of Philip Sidney as the nation's poet (and Spenser's negotiations with that position) begun to receive attention.2 These studies have been stimulated by work on the English elegy that has placed Astrophel in the culture of mourning,3 but have been hampered by a dispute about the Lay's authorship since Gary Waller claimed the poem for Mary Sidney in 1979.4 Current discussion of Astrophel and the Lay presents either a double elegy by Spenser, or the Lay as an elegy by Mary Sidney, introduced by Spenser's fiction. The issues raised by this critical tugging at the poem are interesting enough to warrant some disentanglement, offering, as they do, a focus for elusive concerns