The Construction of the “ Self ” in Astrophil and Stella

In the late 16th century, Sir Philip Sidney produced the first influential English sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella, inspired by his life at the Elizabethan court. Relative to his contemporaries Shakespeare and Spenser, Sidney’s work has attracted little scholarly attention in recent years, a curious phenomenon in light of the importance accorded his Defense of Poesy and given the excellent fit between the self-fashioning framework introduced by Stephen Greenblatt, who makes scant mention of Sidney himself, and both the tone and the development of Sidney’s sonnet sequence. Earlier criticism either divorced the life from the poetry, or collapsed them into one, reading the sonnets as a personal account of Sidney’s love for Lady Penelope Devereux. My thesis studies Sidney’s self-conscious project of literary self-fashioning, when “self” is understood to represent a particular role (that of poet) within the context of a particular world, the Elizabethan court. To understand the complexity of this project, this thesis establishes the relevant traditions of Petrarchism, explores narrative structures across the sequence as a whole, conducts highly layered readings of individual poems as they demonstrate particular methods of textual fashioning, and considers the striking self-awareness that characterizes Sidney’s work. The primary aim of my study is to enlarge the critical discussion of Sidney as a highly deliberate artist and as a courtier, characteristic of his age not on account of his heroic feats but due to his deep understanding of the court and his talent for fashioning his experience within it into an artwork with its own life and agency.