oracle is technically fulfilled; yet all ends well.Arcadia is high-spirited play – its
persons are princes, its plot improbable, its prose artificial. Its fortunes fell as the
nobility fell, and romance gave way to the novel, the more plausible diversion of
plainer folk.
In his Defence Sidney says that ‘Nature never set forth the earth in as rich tapes-
try as divers poets have done .... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.’
Accordingly, in Arcadia:There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys
whose base estate seemed comforted with refreshing of silver rivers; meadows enamelled
with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets, which, being lined with most pleasant
shade, were witnessed so to by the cheerful deposition [testimony] of many well-tuned
birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs
with beating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping as though
he should never be old; there a young shepherdess knitting and withal singing, and it
seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her
voice’s music.The elaborately patterned rhetoric is alleviated by Sidney’s sense of fun: birds testify
and sheep are sober. Prince Musidorus is described as having
a mind of most excellent composition, a piercing wit quite void of ostentation, high
erected thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy, and eloquence as sweet in the uttering as
slow to come to the uttering, a behaviour so noble as gave a majesty to adversity, and all
in a man whose age could not be above one and twenty years ....Love’s adversity soon dents this majesty; the action is often tragicomic. Among the
ec logues are much-imitated poems, such as ‘My true love hath my heart and I have
his’ and ‘Ring out your bells’. Sidney’s 286 extant poems try out 143 stanza-forms.
He was a virtuoso in rheto ric and metre, in symmetrical structure and paradoxical
perspectives – qualities we accept more easily in verse than in prose.
Astrophil and Stella is a suite of 108 sonnets of various kinds, moments in the love
ofStarlove r (Astro phil: Gk.,masculine) for Star (Stella:Lat.,fe minine).The set-up is
liter ary, but Phil is Sidney’s name (a character in Arcadia is called Philisides), and
Stella is modelled on Penelope Devereux, who married Lord Rich. The first sonnet,
‘Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show’, climbs a long ladder of logic and
rhetoric, only to fall off in the last line: ‘ “Fool,” said my muse to me; “look in thy
heart and write.” ’ Sincerity is hard work.
This is the first sonnet sequence in English, a robust variation on Petrarch’s
Canzoniere, interspersed with songs. It has gravely perfect sonnets, such as ‘Come
sleep,O sleep, the certain knot of peace’ and ‘With how sad steps, O moon, thou
climb’st the skies’. Its lightest virtuosity comes in its Eighth Song, ‘In a grove most
rich of shade’. Astrophil speaks:
‘Stella, in whose body is
Writ each character of bliss;
Whose face all, all beauty passeth,
Save thy mind,which yet surpasseth:
Grant, O grant – but speech, alas,
Fails me, fearing on to pass;
Grant – O me, what am I saying?
But no fault there is in praying:94 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603