"Astrophil and Stella"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Philip Sidney's series of sonnets that are gathered together under the name of "Astrophil and Stella." The paper describes how the sonnets are representative of the way love was conceived of during the Elizabethan England. It describes Sidney's reflections on conflict between virtue and love, or chastity and sin and discusses how he portrays these conflicts.

From the Paper:

"In Sonnet 52, the conflict between virtue and love is stated very poignantly, as a dispute in which both virtue and love fight over the possession of Stella. The poet associates the body of his mistress with love, while Stella's self belongs to virtue. This dissociation is part of the way in which love was constructed by convention in the Elizabethan society: Stella's body inspires Astrophil with sensual desire, while Stella's self is the correspondent of virtue. This division between the body and the spirit of the mistress as it is apparent in the sonnet is the token of the inner division of Astrophil, who hesitates between convention and the accepted ideas of the time, according to which desire was something impure, and his own states of mind which compel him to advocate desire."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Castiglione, Baldassare ."The Courtier". The University of Victoria. http://www.engl.uvic.ca/Faculty/MBHomePage/ISShakespeare/SonCourse/courtier2.html
• Kinney, Arthur. Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from English Literary Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988
• Parker, Tom W. N. Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998
• Sidney, Philip. "Astrophil and Stella". The Gutenberg Project. www.gutenberg.com

More papers on "Astrophil and Stella":

• Comparison Essay # 120418 : "Women in Sidney's and Lanyer's Poetry"
• Comparison Essay # 57539 : "Artistic Self-Consciousness"
• Comparison Essay # 25840 : "Sir Philip Sidney"

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