Stella
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How do these propositions relate to Astrophel and Stella? Dinah Birch places Sidney at the heart of court politics in the 1570s and early 1580s. She stresses the way in which his writing united political and literary objectives, as well as the fact that the manner of his death made him a figure of myth; For Sidney both poetry and prose should bear a “moral weight — a public significance,” but for her his writing remains, like his life, ambiguous, and his political career was a failure, albeit that it created space for his work as a poet. She sees Astrophel and Stella as an attempt to confront and transcend his public situation, and as a result, she suggests, it contains patterns of realisation and evasion that need to be recognised if the sequence is to be understood. Her account emphasises both Sidneys revival of Petrarchism and the way he emulates Petrarchan patterns in both form and content. The impact of Protestant faith and Calvinist assumptions about the self and the soul, however, mean that the work represents not just imitation, but parody and critique, and contains layers of ambiguity, contradiction and reasoning which are not necessarily resolved.
I am sure she is broadly right about all this; for Sidney and Spenser, the fundamental problem with Petrarchan love was that its male personae were indulgers of sinful desire, the product of egotism and pride. Fox suggests that Petrarchan imitation therefore became a means of exploring the sources and effects of spiritual culpability in erotic experience in order to show not just the problem of remedying this, given the fact of sinful human nature, but also why there was a need to do so in the first place. The love that Sidney was trying to come to terms with seems to have been his foolish infatuation with the married Lady Penelope Rich; the poetry is a means of purging his moral being, reconciling himself to unattainable desire and clarifying the moral meaning of his experience. The strategy followed is to explore the ways in which Astrophels experiences as a lover had been faulty. He de-romanticises the Petrarchan commonplaces to present the lover as guilty of wilful self-deception; he is immature; his poetry is self-advertisingly contrived; he perversely refuses to heed his conscience. Petrarch equates love and virtue; for Sidney, Petrarchan love is defined as carnality. His depiction of desire exposes his sin of wilful concupiscence.
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