Kisses and Comedy in Astrophil and Stella

Abstract

HOW MANY KISSES HAPPEN in Astrophil and Stella? I have always assumed that there is just one, in the Second Song. Astrophil kisses Stella while she is asleep, then flees when she awakes. The Second Song is followed by a group of sonnets that exult over the stolen kiss and fantasise about consensual kisses that might follow, but these other kisses remain fantasy. Stella never kisses Astrophil of her own free will. That at least has been my inference, reinforced by generations of critics who have referred to ‘the kiss’ (singular). So far as I am aware, no one has elaborated a case for there being just one kiss, but until now no one has felt the need to. William Ringler, in his magisterial 1962 edition, had no doubt that the Second Song ‘describes the stealing of the kiss which is celebrated in sonnets 73, 74, and 79-82’.1 Ann Howe, writing two years after Ringler, agreed that ‘the succeeding sonnets celebrate’ ‘the kiss’.2 This assumption was still unquestioned in 2012, when Margaret Simon thought it obvious that the Second Song is followed by ‘a cluster of baiser sonnets … that celebrate the kiss that has alienated Stella’.3 But one year after Simon wrote those words, Melissa E. Sanchez published an important essay that took a different view. Where previous critics had referred the baiser sonnets back to the stolen kiss, Sanchez sees a cluster of new kisses that are both consensual and intimate: ‘Stella not only eschews the role of victim, but also kisses Astrophil of her own accord in sonnets 80 through 82. And, as James J. Scanlon observes with horror, these are not chaste pecks but passionate “ tongue kisses”’.4 In her 2019 book Queer Faith, Sanchez reaffirms her view that Stella gives Astrophil ‘several … passionate “tongue kisses”’, and again names Scanlon in support of this reading, though she now downgrades his ‘horror’ to ‘distaste’.5 She does not share Scanlon’s ‘distaste’ (let alone ‘horror’). Her whole point is to put in a good word for sexual desire – both Astrophil’s and Stella’s. Where previous critics had seen Stella as a virtuous ice queen, Sanchez sees her as a flesh-and-blood woman with needs of her own, trapped (like her real-life counterpart, Lady Penelope Rich) in an unhappy marriage that makes her susceptible to temptation.