- Composed in the 1580s
- Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella is an English sonnet sequence containing 108 sonnets and 11 songs.
- The name derives from the two Greek words, ‘aster’ (star) and ‘phil’ (lover), and the Latin word ‘stella’ meaning star. Thus Astrophil is the star lover, and Stella is his star.
- Sidney partly nativized the key features of his Italian model Petrarch, including an ongoing but partly obscure narrative, the philosophical trappings of the poet in relation to love and desire, and musings on the art of poetic creation.
- Sidney also adopts the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, though he uses it with such freedom that fifteen variants are employed.
- Some have suggested that the love represented in the sequence may be a literal one as Sidney evidently connects Astrophil to himself and Stella to Lady Penelope, thought to be Penelope Devereux (1563–1607), later Lady Rich, the wife of Robert Rich, 3rd Baronet. Sidney and Lady Penelope had been betrothed when the latter was a child. Sidney dearly loved Penelope who was engaged to him, but she was married off to another gentleman in 1581. Thereupon, Sidney poured his passionate feelings of love and despair into the sonnet series, which appeared posthumously in 1591.
- The publication of “Astrophel and Stella” generated a vogue for the sonnet sequence, and among the English poets who responded was Edmund Spenser, who also wrote the elegy “Astrophel” after his friend Sidney’s death in 1586.
Astrophil and Stella – Philip Sidney
About the Author: Abirlal Mukherjee
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