Abstract
In late sixteenth-century England Sir Philip Sidney followed Petrarca’s model in composing Astrophil and Stella, a cycle of sonnets which records the poet’s unrequited love for a courtly lady. Composing poetry helps the poet to verbalize his emotions (including sadness, despair, fear, satisfaction and triumph) and come to terms with his passion. Furthermore, Sidney (on the basis of Platonic philosophy) revaluates his desires and directs them towards a pursuit of virtue. The poet’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, obviously made use of Sidney’s sonnets for the purpose of self-fashioning, inspiring the composition of further sonnet cycles on the model of Sidney’s, including Daniel’s, Drayton’s and, apparently, Shakespeare’s. In all of these sonnet cycles the absence of sexual fulfilment spiritualizes the emotion of love and ennobles a love relationship. This central motif certainly fits in with cultural politics of Mary Countess of Pembroke which aimed at combating “barbarism” and fixing the Pembroke household as a centre of English letters.
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Notes
- 1.
On Petrarca’s “reputation as a poet of selfhood” and his “habits of introspection” which “opened into the wider imaginative space of interiority” cf. Whittington 2016, p. 84.
- 2.
Byron 1982, 3.8.8–9.
- 3.
Quoted from: Byron 1982.
- 4.
Cf. Whittington 2016, pp. 84–85.
- 5.
Burckhardt 1988; concerning passions cf. esp. pp. 311–332.
- 6.
Strier 2004, p. 23.
- 7.
On “Renaissance self-fashioning” cf. e.g. Greenblatt 1980. Cf. also Javitch 1978 on the analogies between the Renaissance ideal of courtliness and contemporary poetic conventions, and Marotti 1995 (pp. 214–218) on the social implications of Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), in which Wyatt’s and Surrey’s sonnets were first printed.
- 8.
See e.g. Berry 1998, p. 106.
- 9.
Duncan-Jones 1985, p. xiii.
- 10.
On the practice of circulating poetry in manuscript form see Marotti 1995, 1–73.
- 11.
Cf. Kullmann 2019, esp. p. 155.
- 12.
- 13.
Quoted from: Sidney 1997.
- 14.
- 15.
Cf. Knecht 2021, p. 5.
- 16.
As Katherine Duncan-Jones notices the sonnets and songs from sonnet 86 onwards document the ‘disintegration’ of the relationship between Astrophil and Stella (Duncan-Jones 1991, p. 245).
- 17.
On the “affective turn” which privileges humoral pathology as the central 16th-century discourse with regard to emotions cf. Knecht 2021, pp. 6–8.
- 18.
Hannay 1990, p. 60.
- 19.
Cf. Hannay 1990, pp. 107–109, 127–129.
- 20.
Quoted from Hannay 1990, p. 121.
- 21.
Cf. e.g. Floyd-Wilson 2004, esp. pp. 140–142.
- 22.
- 23.
Daniel 2013.
- 24.
Cf. Hannay 1990, pp. 116–118.
- 25.
Hannay 1990, p. 117.
- 26.
We may notice that Sidney’s Stella is “virtuous” but never “chaste”. She is married to Lord Rich, while Delia is evidently a “maid” (1.13) – which renders her identification with the Countess of Pembroke (a mother of four) unlikely.
- 27.
Quoted from: Drayton 2017.
- 28.
Hannay 1990, p. 115.
- 29.
Auden 1965, p. xxix.
- 30.
- 31.
Quoted from: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1997, p. 109.
- 32.
While the “myth” that sonnets 1–126 are addressed to a young man (and to one man only) has recently been challenged (as in Edmondson, Wells 2020, pp. 22–23, 26–32), I still find it basically convincing. As discussed below, none of the 126 sonnets refers to an attempt to seduce the addressee, or contains an account of her/his refusal – which would be untypical for sonnets addressed to a woman. Cf. also de Grazia 2000, esp. 96–99 and Dubrow 2000.
- 33.
- 34.
Hannay 1990, p. 122.
- 35.
Hannay 1990, pp. 122–123.
- 36.
Hannay 1990, p. 123.
- 37.
See e.g. Melchiori 1998, pp. 12–13.
- 38.
For a survey of some of these projects see Kullmann 2008.
- 39.
Hannay 1990, p. 121.
- 40.
Hannay 1990, pp. 121–122.
- 41.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1997, sonnet 95.3, note.
- 42.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1997, sonnet 96.2, note.
- 43.
Kullmann 2010, p. 51, note 18.
- 44.
This can certainly be inferred from the dedication of Barnfield’s Affecionate Shepherd to Lady Penelope Rich; Barnfield 1990, p. 79.
- 45.
The assumption that Shakespeare in sonnet 20 characterizes his love for the young man as non-sexual has sometimes been contested; cf. e.g. Pointner 2003, pp. 89–110. As the literal meaning fits in with the absence of expressions of desire in the rest of the young man sonnets, I see no reason to consider it invalid.
- 46.
- 47.
As Helen Vendler notices, “the speaker of Shakespeare’s sonnets scorns the consolations of Christianity”, Vendler 1997, p. 25. Vendler, however, does not comment on the antecedents of this ‘scorn’ in Daniel’s Delia sequence.
- 48.
Cf. Schoenfeldt 2000, esp. pp. 310–312.
- 49.
Gumbrecht 2010, p. 5.
- 50.
As has been noted, the sonnet sequence illustrates the “chasm between flesh and spirit”, a notion which was central to sixteenth-century theological debates; see e.g. Freinkel 2000, p. 255.
- 51.
Cf. also Stephen Medcalf’s analysis of Neoplatonic elements in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”, Medcalf 1994, pp. 119–121.
- 52.
Cf. Kullmann 1999.
- 53.
Cf. Hannay 1990, pp. 137–142.
- 54.
These four words formed the Countess of Pembroke’s epitaph, and originated in an elegy by William Browne (Hannay 1990, p. ix). While from today’s point of view these words seem to “present her in a diminished role”, they were obviously meant to summarize the Countess’s pivotal position in English letters.
- 55.
Cf. de Grazia 2000, pp. 91–96.
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Kullmann, T. (2023). Poeticising Emotion in the Sonnets of the Sidney-Pembroke Circle. In: Bremer, K., Grewe, A., Rühl, M. (eds) Spielräume des Affektiven. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66151-2_10
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