STRUCTURE AND SYNTAX IN ASTROPHIL AND STELLA

Abstract

WHEN in The Defence Sidney wrote that the poets of his day should 'exercise to know', not 'as having known' he meant, I take it, that his contemporaries had much to learn about their language and its poetic resources, and that they should write in order to discover what could and what could not be done with the materials available to them. That Sidney practised what he preached has been extensively demonstrated over the past thirty years, and he is now recognized as probably the most versatile and innovatory of the Elizabethan poets. Not apparently concerned to ground his own standing with posterity on his writings, he saw them to a great extent, I believe, as technical experiments which might be useful to contemporary and later writers. For the twentieth century, of course, the technical problems Sidney addressed are no longer topical, and it is inevitable that critical emphasis should have fallen increasingly on what he said rather than how he said it. With regard to Astrophil and Stella such matters as the critique of Petrarchism, or the complex interrelation between Sidney/Astrophil/Penelope/Stella have tended to absorb most critical attention, although of course there has been no lack of concern with the techniques he employed in handling these themes. Sidney would have considered it an impertinence for him to attempt to teach other poets what they should write. The discovery of some fine invention, whether in his own heart or elsewhere, was the business of the individual author. But the demonstration of the capabilities of a particular form, for whatever purpose, was exactly the kind of contribution to English poetry that exercise, as Sidney understood it, could properly make. By focusing attention on a very limited aspect of his work I hope to show that formal considerations had a greater importance for Sidney in Astrophil and Stella than has generally been recognized. My area of concentration is his handling of the sestet, particularly in its English form with the characteristic final couplet. The interest and variety of Sidney's sestets have often been commented on, but not in sufficient detail to reveal their full significance. While experimenting more widely with the sonnet form than any other Elizabethan poet, Sidney showed throughout his career a predilection for the final couplet; he used it in fifteen out of the eighteen sonnets in the Arcadia, in all but one of the sonnets in Certain Sonnets, and in eighty-five ' Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), p. II2.