The Performance of Astrophel and Stella in the 1591 Quartos

Abstract

The two quartos of Astrophel and Stella published in 1591 for Thomas Newman started the late Elizabethan sonnet craze. Although Astrophel and Stella was not the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, it was obviously the most influential. Between 1591 and 1609, the year in which Shakespeare’s sonnets were published, about forty sonnet sequences were published, so various in form that no single definition of a “sonnet sequence ” is quite adequate.1 While the Elizabethans recognized the difference between fourteen-line poems with particular rhyme schemes and other lyric forms, they used the term “sonnet” to comprise all those kinds. In the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, in fact, the fourteen-line “sonnets” go without labels or numbers, but the poems we call Sidney’s “songs” are labeled “sonnets,” including the fifteen-stanza, ninety-line song v. Sonnet sequences in my count comprise mostly standard sonnets arranged in groups and divided by shorter sections of more variable poetry, frequently designated “odes,” “madrigals,” “pastorals,” or “songs.”