Unauthorized Orpheus of Astrophil and Stella.pdf

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Rice University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. http://www.jstor.org SEL35 (1995) ISSN 0039-3657 The Unauthorized Orpheus of Astrophil and Stella MARIA TERESA MICAELA PRENDERGAST When Harold Bloom claimed in 1973 that "Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness," he indirectly set forth a kind of challenge to Renaissance critics, inviting them to investigate for themselves whether Renaissance authors engaged themselves in the problematics of originality.l Critics who have since taken up this challenge tend to agree that the Renaissance is something of a liminal period during which authors attempted at once to find room for an autonomous poetics of their own and to ground their works in the authority of convention.2 The continued invocation of one's auctor during this period suggests that Renaissance authors, if anything, suffered from an anxiety of originality, an anxiety which, according to David Quint, derives from the concept that an original artist sets himself apart from an absolutely prior, authorizing origin. The imprint of his own individuality and historicity upon his creations reveals the counterfeit nature of their meaning, a man-made significance that stands in place of divine truths.3 If originality allows writers to call attention to an autonomous craftsmanship, its alienation from convention is also associated with the severance of one's words from authority, truth, and the originating Word of God. As Quint goes on to add, originality comes to be aligned with such problematic concepts as subversion, deceit, and narcissism. Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast is assistant professor of English at the University of Miami. She is completing a book titled "Renaissance Fantasies: Debate Fiction and the Aesthetics of Femininity in Early Modern Literature." 20 A S TR OP H IL AN D ST E LLA This contrast between originality as subversive and selfindulgent on the one hand and convention as authoritative and moral on the other is crucial to understanding the aesthetic underpinnings of Astrophil and Stella; for I propose that Sidney represents Stella as a figura for a conventional poetics, much as Astrophil emblematizes an aesthetics of originality. By viewing Sidney's protagonists from this perspective, I differ from most critics of the sequence, who (focusing on the autobiographical roots of the sequence) tend to read Astrophil and Stella almost exclusively as complex psychological characters that dramatize certain aspects of Philip Sidney's and Penelope Devereux's personalities.4 But if we look at Astrophil's and Stella's personality traits as embodying certain aesthetic concepts that exist prior to Astrophil and Stella as characters, then the work may be read not only as a psychological drama between a lover and his beloved but also as a dramatic enactment of the popular Renaissance debates on the nature of fiction.5 Just as debates on the nature of the Divine Comedyand on Tasso's and Ariosto's works grow out of the tension between an authoritative didactic literature and a subversive literature of pleasure, so the conflicts between Astrophil and Stella dramatize the tension between Stella's conventional, didactic voice and Astrophil's problematic, seductive utterances.6 This is not to say that Astrophil and Stella are not fully drawn fictional characters, but rather that they may also be read as quasi-allegorical figures that act out the psychomachia of Renaissance poetical theory-the struggle between the acknowledgement of conventional authority and the desire for an autonomous poetics.7 In examining Astrophil as a figura for originality, I will focus not only on how this poet-persona attempts to estrange his poetry from sonnet conventions, but also on how this attempt becomes increasingly problematic: as Astrophil drifts progressively into a solipsistic space that is isolated from any authoritative meaning, he ironically finds himself losing any coherent, unified conception of self.8 The paradoxical loss of selfhood that results from the search for autonomy can be recovered from the sequence's scattered references to the mythical originator of Allusions to this figure who embodies elepoetry-Orpheus. mental fantasies of poetic origin, autonomy, and power betray the ambivalences in Sidney's originary enterprise by recalling problems inscribed in both Virgil's and Ovid's versions of the myth. For if both classical authors represent Orpheus as a tragic author whose unparalleled poetry is inspired by the loss of his beloved, they point as well to a narcissistic, even idolatrous impulse underlying this poetics of loss. As Quint has noted, MARIA TERESA MICAELA PRENDERGAST 21 after Eurydice's death, Orpheus comes to worship not so much the memory of his beloved, as his own autonomous transformation of Eurydice into art.9 The analogies between an autonomous poetry, narcissism, and originality are even more telling in the Ovidian version of the tale, which deviates from Virgil's source in ways that draw attention to Orpheus's rhetorical powers, his self-love, and his immorality. As W. S. Anderson has commented, Ovid's Orpheus wins over his underworld audience by depending on flashy, sophistical rhetoric, rather than by employing icastic, moral arguments.'0 And just as Orpheus's flamboyant rhetoric calls attention more to itself than to any external, didactic significance, so his movement from a heterosexual love for Eurydice to a homosexual love for young men suggests that the origin of his passion lies not so much in any one young woman or man, as in the poet's own self-perpetuating desire. For, throughout The Metamorphoses, Ovid associates homosexuality (like incest and idolatry of art) with narcissism-with desiring one's mirror image."1 By looking back to the influential works of Virgil and Ovid, Renaissance authors appear to have inherited aJanus-like notion of Orpheus as a figure who represents at once a conventional didactic poetics and an originary sophistical poetry. This dual identity is dramatized in Astrophil and Stella, where Stella comes to be associated with the conventional Orphic poet (didactic, virtuous, and authoritative), while Astrophil identifies himself increasingly with Ovid's problematic Orpheus (seductive, deceitful, and subversive). Rather than assume that Sidney identifies himself narrowly with Astrophil, I argue that this antipodal portrayal of the poet represents a dialectical testing ground that pits a conventional and authoritative poetics of truth against an unconventional and subversive poetics of seduction. When Sidney invokes Orpheus as a symbol for a conventional, magisterial poetics, he exploits not the Virgilian or Ovidian version, but rather a third, less problematic Orphic tradition. In An Apologyfor PoetrySidney makes use of Horace's Orpheusa figure whose unparalleled didactic and rhetorical gifts endow him with power over the elusive beloved, over death, and, most of all, over barbaric, chaotic nature.'2 Because Orpheus can "draw with . . . charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge," he is said "to be listened to by beasts-indeed stony and beastly people" (p. 96). Curiously, though, Sidney's affirmation of the poet's almost superhuman ability to charm and civilize his auditors follows closely upon a 22 A S TROPHIL AND STELLA passage in which we are told that poetry is "fallen to be the laughing-stock of children" (p. 96). This conscious appropriation of poetical power within a larger context that subtly questions such power is, in fact, common to the Apology for Poetry, Astrophil and Stella, and the Old Arcadia-in which Sidney refers to the Orphic ability to inspire "Trees [to] dance" within a poem about the speaker's inability to attract his beloved's attention.13 Sidney's problematic and contradictory invocation of the Orphic paradigm appears to be part of a larger sixteenthcentury literary pattern; for, in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo tellsJessica that the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage But music for the time doth change his nature.14 Incantatory and powerful as Lorenzo's language is, it is isolated within a troubling "if' clause. Such examples suggest that the Orpheus myth, as it is articulated in the sixteenth century, symbolically embodies a collective fantasy that the poet can dominate his culture with magisterial rhetoric, while covertly acknowledging that such power is, ultimately, ephemeral.15 Although Sidney does not refer explicitly to Orpheus until later in the sequence, the tension between the two modes of creativity associated with Orpheus-one conventional, magisterial, and Neo-Platonic, the other unconventional, sophistical, and seductive-is already invoked in the first lines of the first sonnet: Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That she, dear She, might take some pleasure of my paine; Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine.'6 In this quatrain the apparent meanings of "fain" and "in verse" express how love for a woman (faining) inspires the speaker to write poetry (verse); this initial assertion is supported by the ensuing Neo-Platonic gradatio, which gestures toward Stella's from earthly "pleasure" to heavenly idealized progression "grace." But the punning implications of "fain" and "in verse" encode a ("feign" and "inverse") suggest the opposite-they desire to invert conventional meaning by validating the feigning, MARIA TERESA MICAELA PR ENDERGAST 23 sophistical poetics to which both Ovid's Orpheus and Sidney's Astrophil adhere. In fact, the gradatio that follows may also be interpreted as containing a series of sexual puns on the words "pleasure," "reading," "knowledge," "pitie," and "grace"puns that direct the reader (and Stella) away from spiritual love and toward carnal desire. If, then, Astrophil purports to win Stella by employing language that would encourage her to transcend physical preoccupations (and thus embrace a spiritualized love), his language reveals a covert fixation on Stella's body and on a poetics of feigning that would alienate him from didactic, Neo-Platonic sonnet conventions.17 As the sonnet develops, apparent (Neo-Platonic) meanings and sexual allusions continue to multiply until both implications come to a crescendo in the last line: "'Foole,' said my Muse to me, 'looke in thy heart and write."' As critics have told us, the conventional meaning of "heart" is Stella, the Neo-Platonic love object who inspires Astrophil to write;s18yet it is also true that "thy heart" may refer to the autonomous center of the author's inspiration-the desiring self.19 This alternative reading implies that it is from one's own passions, rather than from love for a woman, that original poetry derives. The first sonnet, then, locates the poet's courtship of Stella in the interplay between conventional wooing of the beloved through praise and an unorthodox idolatry of the self through poetical feigning. This temptation to create a self-satisfying world of poetical feigning is concentrated in the desire to isolate the self from any self-fragmenting encounter with the Otherproblematic, embodied as Stella. The paradoxical desire to escape the source of inspiration in whom one's poetry is ostensibly grounded is common to a number of sonnet practitioners. Perhaps the most famous of these is Petrarch, who, as John Freccero and others have noted, appears almost to celebrate his beloved's absence, because he may fill the space left by his absent beloved with his own controlled re-imagining of her.20 From this perspective, sonnet sequences may be read as dramas that portray how a male poet, threatened by his chaotic passion for the female Other, regains his autonomy when he replaces the wild, elusive original with an artificial representation of her-a "snowy maiden" in place of each fleeing Florimell. This revision of the process of creativity allows the poet to fantasize that he is the Horatian Orpheus who controls-even elusive beloved. creates-his It is this temptation the beloved into a to transform mastered-piece that inspires Astrophil to turn Stella's face into architecture, as, early in the sequence, he compares her forehead to an "Alabaster" front, her mouth to a door of "Red 24 A S TROPHIL AND S T E LL A Porphir," and her cheeks to "Marble, mixt red and white" (sonnet 9, lines 3-7). Astrophil's recasting of Stella as a fetishistic art As Harry object invokes the metonym of Orpheus-Pygmalion. BergerJr. comments on this mythical artist, "his fear of loss or betrayal motivate[s] Pygmalion's incarnation of desire into a semblance whose seductiveness lies precisely in its being fictive and therefore uncontaminated by the life process . . .What he falls in love with is the manifestation of his art."21 By replacing the elusive source of inspiration with his own artificial rendering of her, the poet is able to compensate for his problematic passion by worshiping his controlled version of the beloved. Astrophil's attempt to master the elusive Stella by envisioning her as his art object is dramatized by his hypnotic repetition of her name throughout the sequence-a repetition that recalls Orpheus's own echoing call to Eurydice in both Virgil's and Ovid's versions of the tale.22 This compulsive naming, which, according to Quint, attests to Orpheus's desire to replace the elusive Eurydice with the "memorializing artifact" that is her name, calls attention to Astrophil's desire to master and contain Stella with words.23 But ifAstrophil (like Orpheus) attempts to master his beloved by naming her, the sonnets in which he calls her name reveal an anxiety that, by invoking her, he is allowing her to disrupt his mastery of the sequence. By sporadically Stella's ability to disrupt his master plan, acknowledging Astrophil betrays a growing awareness that he can only write significant poetry if he compromises his autonomous project by allowing Stella a voice in the sequence.24 As a result, the early poems either betray his loss of autonomy (sonnets 2, 7, 14), assert his dependence on Stella's inspiring powers (sonnets 3, 6, 15), or reflect his inability to write poems on his own (sonnets 1, 19, 34). Most often, Astrophil is forced to acknowledge his inability to outdo the two figures who rival his claims to poetic autonomy: first Nature (sonnets 7, 9, 16), then, eventually, Stella herself, who increasingly gains influence over the poems that Astrophil would write, until she finally appears to usurp poetic power from Astrophil: IF Orpheus' voyce had force to breathe such musicke's love Through pores of sencelesse trees, as it could make them move: If stones good measures daunc'd, the Theban walles to build, To cadence of the tunes, which Amphyon's lyre did yeeld. More cause a like effect at leastwise bringeth: O stones, 6 trees, learne hearing, Stella singeth. (Third Song, lines 1-6) MARIA TERESA MICAE LA PRENDERGAST 25 If the first lines of this stanza introduce the conventional emblems of poetic virtuosity (Orpheus and Amphion), Sidney disrupts androcentric tradition with the last two words of the stanza; these announce that Stella, not Astrophil, is the Orphic voice that shapes the sequence. In Virgil's story the masculine poet may animate stones and trees, but here a woman performs these magical transformations. In granting Orphic power to the female audience rather than to the male poet, Sidney may have been aware that he was doing something unusual, if not audacious, for he appears to be the only sixteenth-century English poet to have inverted the Orphic paradigm in this way. The notion that certain women, because they are beautiful, virtuous, and spiritual, have authority over the men who love them is not, of course, alien to medieval and Renaissance literature; it appears in medieval courtly love poems, Petrarchan sonnets, and Neo-Platonic philosophy.25 Sidney departs from convention not so much by insisting on Stella's power over Astrophil as by making it increasingly clear, as the sequence progresses, that hers is an Orphic power-that she is, by implication, the author who governs the sequence. In the Third Song, as in the other poems about Stella's artistic power, it is clear that the source of Stella's power is her adherence to the Neo-Platonic aesthetic of a pure, abstract, and divine love that governs the universe, for Sidney associates Stella variously with virtue (sonnets 25, 48, 52), chastity (sonnets 42, 48, 61), and spiritual love (sonnets 61, 62, 63). That these traits, for Sidney, are also associated with a magisterial "masculine" poetics is reinforced by the voices that Stella replaces in the sequence. The sequence begins as a sort of psychomachiain which Astrophil's reason attempts to govern his emotions (sonnets 4, 5, 10); as the sequence develops, however, a male friend takes over the role of reason-a friend that critics have identified with Fulke-Greville, Sidney's cautious and politic fellow writer (sonnets 14, 21). Significantly, beginning with sonnet 30, this figure is replaced by Stella, who takes on the voicings of reason, virtue, and authority; she now becomes the person whom Astrophil emulates, competes against, and whose authority he attempts to displace.26 Clearly, in Astrophiland Stella, conventional constructions of gender have been inverted: where Renaissance conventional wisdom saw woman as a passionate animal and man as the embodiment of reason and truth, the masculine poet here represents lust, while woman symbolizes a more heavenly, Orphic love.27 In fact, as Stella is increasingly linked with a sublime "masculine" love, Astrophil associates himself more and more 26 A S TROPHIL AND S T'ELLA with "feminine" lust.28 Unexpected as this reversal is, it has a significant precedent. Although the concept that the beloved represents Orpheus is not itself a convention of Petrarchism, Petrarch himself employed it in his sonnets. If Petrarch usually compares himself to Orpheus, at times he notes that Laura "sighs sweetly and grows angry with words that could break the stones"; or she may "make a stone weep."29 Petrarch's suggestion that Laura is a female Orpheus clearly had a certain resonance for Sidney; for if Sidney is not the only English Renaissance poet to suggest that his beloved is an artist, he is unique in implying that she has complete authority over poetry, and that the poetprotagonist is, by implication, a charlatan. Indeed, as Stella increasingly takes on the role of masculine poet, Astrophil appears more like the feminized, subordinated audience to the work-the position into which he had originally hoped to place Stella. But Stella speaks, With so sweete voice and by sweete Nature so That not my soule, which at thy foot did fall, Long since forc'd by thy beames, but stone nor tree By Sence's priviledge can scape from thee. (sonnet 36, lines 9-14) Stones and trees are, of course, the traditional Orphic audience. By associating himself with these aspects of nature, Astrophil reinforces our awareness that Stella is the Orphic power behind the sequence, whereas Astrophil, for all his attempts at aggression, is but its passive recipient. Astrophil's forty-fifth sonnet to Stella exemplifies the extent to which the Aristotelian distinctions between empowered masculine poet and subordinated female audience have collapsed: STELLA oft sees the verie face of wo Painted in my beclowded stormie face: But cannot skill to pitie my disgrace, Not though thereof the cause her selfe she know: Yet hearing late a fable, which did show Of Lovers never knowne, a grievous case, Pitie thereof gate in her breast such place That, from that sea deriv'd, teares' spring did flow. Alas, if Fancy drawne by imag'd things, Though false, yet with free scope more grace doth breed Then servant's wracke, where new doubts honor brings; Then thinke my deare, that you in me do reed MARIA TERESA MICAELA PRENDERGAST 27 Of Lover's ruine some sad Tragedie: I am not I, pitie the tale of me. This sonnet, one of the more complex of the labyrinthine sequence, blurs accepted distinctions between aesthetic categories. The poem begins conventionally enough by presenting the female beloved as the passive audience; but Astrophil disrupts convention when he portrays himself not only as a young latter, as Elizpoet but also as a "painted" representation-the abeth Cropper has shown, is an image traditionally associated with the female beloved.30 Astrophil calls attention to this confusion of identity at the end of the poem when he cries: "I am not I." He has erased his identity as subject, thus allowing Stella to turn him into a poetic "idol"-a transformation dramatized by the metrical substitution of a trochee for an iamb ("I am") at this point in the sonnet. As the poet recognizes his loss of identity, the once passive Stella is placed in the shaping role that one normally associates with the author.31 On the surface, then, the poem is an elaborate device for attracting Stella's sympathy; but Astrophil, it turns out, seeks not so much her emotional as her sexual pity, a meaning enhanced when he asks her to pity his "tale" ("tail"). In this radical inversion of the poet-audience relationship, Astrophil indirectly reveals the source of his weakness as a poet; his insistence on a sexual relationship (a relationship from which Stella remains aloof) inspires him to deny all aspirations to honor and integrity in return for the prospect of one night in Stella's bed. By placing such emphasis on sexuality, he enacts a role more reminis"feminine" lust, deceit, cent of a Maenad than of Orpheus-his and subversion cause him to write himself out of the position of "masculine" poetic authority.32 We have seen that disclosures of the Orphic paradigm in the interplay between Horace's magisterial, authoritative, and "masculine" Orpheus on the one and "feminine" hand, and Ovid's narcissistic, unconventional, Orpheus on the other. It might, then, appear that by aligning Stella with Horace's authoritative Orpheus, Sidney would have his readers accept the notion that women could be taken seriously as poets (even if this woman happens to be the fictional creation of a male poet). Undoubtedly the radical implications of associating Orpheus with Stella were not lost on Sidney, for the rare references to the beloved as an artistic figure in sixteenth-century lyrics are based on "feminine" domestic arts rather than on "masculine" poetry: Spenser associates his Astrophil and Stella illuminate 28 A ASTROPHIL AND STE LLA beloved's words with weaving; Wyatt returns obsessively to his beloved's malignant powers of embroidery; and Gascoigne dwells on a woman singing a lullaby.33 But despite the apparent feminist implications inherent in associating Stella with Horace's Orpheus, the dynamics of the work suggests that Sidney has a more self-interested reason for granting Stella the position of authority in the work. Since it is almost always through Astrophil's consciousness that we experience the drama of passion, it would seem that Sidney is not, finally, granting Stella the kind of poetical power that Astrophil claims she has; rather the implication is that Astrophil is happy to grant Stella the traditional position of masculine authority because the "feminine" position of deceit, least subversion, and lust, is a more advantageous position-at from an aesthetic perspective. Sidney grants Astrophil greater sympathy and focus than Stella not in spite of but rather because of this character's self-centered, deceitful, and sensual ways.34 These "feminine" character traits, in fact, describe most of the poet-figures in Sidney's works: in the Apology Sidney clearly associates his poet-narrator with those writers that he terms "mountebanks," and "paper-blurrers" (pp. 131-2), while in the Arcadias he chronicles his hero's fall from a selfless, heroic way of life to which inspires him a self-indulgent, deceitful experience-one to dress like a woman and write poetry.35 The implication is that deceit, subversion, and seduction all have something to do with poetic inspiration. In other words, Sidney is associating Stella with Orpheus, as he is aligning her with a conventional Neo-Platonic poetics of virtue in order to illuminate, by contrast, the aesthetic implications of Astrophil's originary poetics-the poetics with which Sidney appears to be most in sympathy. Astrophil's enterprise thus recalls the playful fictions Orlando Furioso, The Decameron, and Pantagruel-works that were at once praised for their originality and condemned for their immorality. By contrast, Stella's more virtuous, spiritual personality exemplifies a didactic, moral notion of fiction, one more in keeping with such works as the Paradiso, GerusalemmeLiberata, and The Faerie Queene, works which (despite their inherent ambiguities) claim the Word of God as their enabling authority. When Astrophil cavalierly states, Let Vertuehave that Stella'sself; yet thus, That Vertuebut that body graunt to us, (sonnet 52, lines 13-14) MARIA TERESA MICAELA PRENDERGAST 29 he is, then, making an aesthetic as well as a sexual statement: he is allowing Stella to identify herself with a virtuous, icastic poetics of "masculine" truth and transcendence, if, in return, she will let him indulge in a sensual, fantastic poetics that draws its energy from "feminine" passion, deceit, and subversion. The ever-pregnant Astrophil identifies with these "feminine" attributes, since they stand in opposition to all that convention represents-didactic, authoritative, and (by implication) masculine constructions.36 Astrophil's paradoxical, perverse, and inverted poetics suggests that to fall into love and poetry is to rebel against conventional art, accepted morality, "masculine" reason, and society in general. In fact, part of the reason that we often find the immoral Astrophil to be so engaging is that his subversive poetics has a strong rebellious and liberating (if also narcissistic) streak in it. Yet in his covert celebration of an originary poetics, Sidney charts the troubling as well as liberating implications of originality. For, in moving towards an autonomous self-definition (one that depends on transforming the elusive subject into an idolatrous art object), Astrophil finds himself losing rather than gaining a centered sense of self. Astrophil's greatest moments of self-confidence as poet and lover come not when he, Pygmalion-like, makes a blazon of his beloved, but rather when he is in conflict or dialogue with Stella's authorizing voice. In fact originality in this work appears to have no intrinsic value: on its own it leads to a solipsistic and finally absurd fantasy of poetical empowerment; instead, originality has value only insofar as it presents an alternative to convention. For all of his celebration of originality as a mode of rebellion and self-affirmation, Sidney seems to accept the limits of this heady poetics. His sonnet sequence, unlike Astrophil's poetry, finally draws back from the more troubling implications of originality by granting convention (embodied in Stella) a significant, if secondary, role in the work. Astrophil's paradoxical desire to repress yet depend upon an external authority, along with Sidney's insistence on a prodigal, feminized alter ego, illuminate the ways in which Astrophil's dilated fantasy of desire gestures toward a larger aesthetics of originality.37 Invoking and exploiting the long-standing association between the feminine and creativity (woman as muse and art object), Sidney shapes an apology for originality, an apologue, or fable, that figures forth a powerful aesthetics of originality out of an apparent position of weakness (the traditional position from which an apologist makes his argument).38 Such 30 ASTROPHIL A AND STELLA a conceptualization, however, depends on projecting a strong, authoritative antagonist against whom the prodigal poet may rebel. It is, in part, because of this need that Sidney shapes a sonnet heroine who is almost unparalleled for her wit, energy, and notable powers of articulation; as such, her representation-a deviation from that of conventional sonnet heroines reinforces Sidney's claims to originality.39 Yet the ambivalences and anxieties inscribed in the work gesture to the very problematics inherent in shaping a poetics that depends so strongly on negation. Whether it be a negation of authority, of conventional truths, or even of masculinity, Sidney's tendency to associate originality with negativity and, by extension, with absurdity, marks him as the product of a period when originality was not yet considered a desideratum. Drawing back from the radical implications of originality, Sidney locates the energy of his text not so much in the self-desiring poetics ofAstrophil as in the fissures and gaps between the positions of Stella and Astrophil, authority and originality, Other and self, in a self-perpetuating poetics of desire and contention.40 NOTES 1Harold Bloom, TheAnxietyof Influence(London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 11. For a more recent articulation of this theory, see Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths:Poetryand BelieffromtheBibleto thePresent(Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). 2See especially David Quint, Origin and Originalityin RenaissanceLiterature: Versionsof the Source(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983). See also Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy:Imitation and Discoveryin RenaissancePoetry (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982); John Guillory, PoeticAuthority:Spenser,Milton, and LiteraryHistory(New York:Columbia Univ. Press, 1983); William Kerrigan, "The Articulation of the Ego in the English Renaissance," in TheLiteraryFreud: Mechanismsof Defenseand the PoeticWill,ed.Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 261-308; andJacqueline T. Miller, PoeticLicense:Authority and Authorshipin Medievaland RenaissanceContexts(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986). 3Quint, p. 20. Richard Helgerson applies this issue specifically to English "amateur poets" like Sidney, in "The Elizabethan Laureate: Self-Presentation and the Literary System," ELH 46, 2 (Summer 1979): 193-220. 4One exception to this pattern is Miller, pp. 139-75. Although she is less interested in Stella as a potential artistic rival to Astrophil, she does see Astrophiland Stella as dramatizing an agon between the authoritative source, Stella, and Astrophil's desire for poetic license. 5The variety of Renaissance debates on the nature of literature has been discussed in the most detail by Bernard Weinberg, in A Historyof LiteraryCriticism in theItalian Renaissance,2 vols. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961). See also J. E. Spingarn, A History of LiteraryCriticismin the Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1899; rprt. 1908), and Baxter Hathaway, TheAge of Criticism:TheLate Renaissancein Italy (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962). On MARIA TERESA MI CAEL A PRENDERGAST 31 the notion that certain concepts exist prior to the protagonists that embody them, see S. K. Heninger, "Sidney, Spenser, and Poetic Form," SP88, 2 (Spring 1991): 140-52. 6On the Tasso-Ariosto debates, see especially DanielJavitch, Proclaiminga Classic: The Canonization of "Orlando Furioso" (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991); and Weinberg, 2:954-1073. 7My project is not to identify where Sidney is being "authentically" original, but to map out the tension between convention and originality in Astrophil and Stella.For discussions of places where Sidney is, in fact, original, see Anne Ferry, The "Inward"Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare,Donne (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 128-69. See also Douglas Peterson, TheEnglishLyricfrom Wyattto Donne:A IHistoryof thePlain and EloquentStyles (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 186-201; and Germaine Warkentin, "Sidney and the Supple Muse: Compositional Procedures in Some Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella," in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Crit- icism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 174-84. 8In his article on Astrophil as a product of the conflict between Petrarchism and protestantism, Gary Waller gives a similar reading of Astrophil's fragmented selfhood ("The Rewriting of Petrarch: Sidney and the Languages of Sixteenth-Century Poets," in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore [London: Croom Helm, 1984], pp. 69-83). For Paul Allen Miller, in contrast, the fragmented self is a symptom of changes in the construction of the aristocratic self that resulted from the breakdown of the feudal system ("Sidney, Petrarch, and Ovid, or Imitation as Subversion," ELH 58, 3 [Fall 1991]: 499-522). Anthony Low makes a similar argument in The Reinventionof Love: Poetry, Politics, and Culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 21-30. 9Quint, p. 41. Virgil's story of Orpheus is found in Georgics4; Ovid's is found in Metamorphoses 10 and 11. '0W. S. Anderson, "The Orpheus of Vergil and Ovid: flebile nescio quid,"in Orpheus:The Metamorphosesof a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982; rprt. 1985), pp. 25-50. This reading echoes Plato's own interpretation of the myth in The Symposium,a reading that Pico della Mirandola inherits in his Sopra una Canzone de Amore, Composta da Girolamo Benivieni. For a somewhat different reading of the myth, see Charles Segal, Orpheus:The Mythof the Poet (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989). The notion that self-indulgent poets may seduce their audiences with doubtful, even devious rhetoric carries over into Renaissance poetical treatises, which commonly associate sophistical rhetoric with problematic originality. See especially Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, book 2; Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d'Aristotele Vulgarizzata et Sposta, 6.1-6; Gioseppe Malatesta, Della Nuova Poesia Overe della Difesa del "Furioso";andJacopo Mazzoni, Discorso della Comedia del divino poeta Dante, 1.9-29, 45-63, 73-9. '1See especially the stories of Ganymede, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Pygmalion, and Cinyras and Myrrhain book 10 of the Metamorphoses-allthree stories are told by Orpheus after he turns from his love for Eurydice to the love of young men. On homosexuality and narcissism in Ovid, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986). 12Allquotations from An Apologyfor Poetryare from Geoffrey Shepherd's edition (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1973), and will appear parenthetically in the text. This presentation of Orpheus as empowered by both rhetoric and didacticism is exemplified in Horace's Ars Poetica,lines 391-3. 32 A S TR OPH IL AND S TELLA 13SirPhilip Sidney, The Countessof Pembroke's Arcadia(The Old Arcadia),ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 84, line 12. '4William Shakespeare, The Merchantof Venice,ed. Brents Stirling, in William Shakespeare:The CompleteWorks,gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969; rprt. 1974), IV.i.79-82. 15This shuttling back and forth between Orphic power and impotence is itself a reflection of the paradigm's mythical roots. The story of Orpheus is about a poet with unparalleled rhetorical power who was nonetheless unable to recover his lost wife and prevent his own murder at the hands of the Maenads. For other sixteenth-century expressions of Orphic power and impotence, see Spenser, The Faerie tQueene, 4.10.58; Castiglione, IlLibro del Cortegiano, book 2; Garcilaso de la Vega, soneto 15; and Pierre de Ronsard, LAmour de Cassan- dre,poems 12 and 26. 16SirPhilip Sidney, Astrophiland Stella, in The Poemsof Sir Philip Sidney,ed. William A. Ringlerjr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962; rprt. 1971). Parenthetical references in the essay refer to sonnet and line numbers. I have, however, accepted Katherine Duncan-Jones's emendation (following the 1598 folio) of "the" in the second verse to "She" (Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Sir Philip Sidney:SelectedPoems [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973; rprt. 1979], pp. 117, 214). 17Ferry,pp. 129-39, presents a number of other words in the sonnet that have covert associations with deceit: "love," "show," "paint," and "invent." Astrophil's preference for seduction and deceit over morality and truth has been commented on by a number of critics, most of whom focus on Astrophil's immoral character rather than on the aesthetic implications of this unexpected self-positioning. See especially Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," in Kay, pp. 61-80; Richard A. Lanham, "Astrophiland Stella:Pure and Impure Persuasion," ELR 2, 1 (Winter 1972): 100-15; Alan Sinfield, "Astrophil's SelfDeception," FIC 28, 1 (January 1978): 1-18; and Gary Waller, pp. 69-83. One critic who does comment on the aesthetic implications of this seductive stance is Ronald Levao (RenaissanceMinds and TheirFictions: Cusanus, Sidne, Shakespeare[Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985], pp. 157-60). 8See, for example, Ringler's commentary on this poem. See also David Kalstone, Sidneys Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations(Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 126-7; and Richard Helgerson, TheElizabethanProdigals (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1976), p. 144. 19RichardLanham makes a similar point in "Astrophiland Stella,"pp. 10015. 20JohnFreccero, "The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics," Diacritics 5, 1 (Spring 1975): 34-40. See also Robert M. Durling, TheFigureof thePoet in RenaissanceEpic (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 67-86. For a reading of this process in Sidney's poetry, see Gordon Braden, "Unspeakable Love: Petrarch to Herbert," in Soliciting Interpretation:Literary Theory and Seventeenth-CenturyEnglish Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 253-72. 21HarryBergerJr., "Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser's Critique of Pastoral Love and Art," ELH50, 1 (Spring 1983): 27-60, 32. 22See especially sonnets 5, 15, 16, 21, and 23. 23Quint, p. 41. Murray Krieger discusses the significance of naming as an attempt to invoke Stella's presence in Astrophiland Stella,in "Presentation and Representation in the Renaissance Lyric," in Mimesis:FromMirrorto Method, Augustine to Descartes,ed.John D. Lyons and Stephen G. NicholsJr. (Hanover: Univ. of New Hampshire Press, 1982), pp. 110-31. For Daniel Javitch, in M A R IA T E R E S A M I C A E L A P R E N D E R GA ST 33 contrast, Astrophil's repeated naming of Stella reveals how Astrophil claims to ground his sequence in his desire for the beloved, rather than in a desire for courtly advancement ("The Impure Motives of ElizabetharnPoetry,"'Genre 15, 1/2 [Spring/Summer 1982]: 225-38). 24On this point, see also Braden, p. 261. 25On Stella's moral power, see Robert L. Montgomery, "Astrophil's Stella and Stella's Astrophil," in Sir Philip Sidneyand the Iterpretatzonof Renaissance Culture,pp. 44-55. 26Anumber of critics have noted how Astrophiland Stellaulnfolds as a power struggle between the two protagonists. See Clark Hulse, "Stella'sWit: Penelope The Discourses Rich as Reader of Sidney's Sonnets," in Rewritingthe Renlzaissance: of SexualDifferencein EarlyModernEurope,ed. Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and NancyJ. Vickers (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 272-86; Ann RosalindJones and Peter Stallybrass, "The Politics of Astrophiland Stella," SEL24, 1 (Winter 1984): 53-68; William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, T'heIdea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1989), p. 172; and Jacqueline T. Miller, "'Love Doth Hold My Hand': Writing and Wooing in the Sonnets of Sidney and Spenser," ELH 46, 4 (Winter 1979): 541-58. 27Renaissance conventions of masculinity and femininity have been articulated by a number of scholars. See especially Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara McManus, Half Humankind: Contextsand Textsof the Controversyabout Womenin England, 1540-1640 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 3031, 49-54, 67-8; Ian Maclean, The RenaissanceNotion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980; rprt. 1985); and Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Rewritingthe Renaissance,pp. 126-7. 28See especially sonnets 36, 42, 48, 52, 58, 59, 61, 62, and 71. On Astrophil's lust for Stella, see also Lanham, pp. 100-15; Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney:Rebellionin Arcadia (Rutgers: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979); and Sinfield, pp. 1-17. '29"Sospira/ dolcemente, et s'adira / con parole che i sassi romper ponno (359.68-70); "far piangere un sasso" (286.14), in Petrarch'sLyricPoems,trans. and ed. Robert Durling (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). 3'Elizabeth Cropper, "The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Portraiture," in ariting the Renaissance,pp. 175-90. 31Ronald Levao (pp. 167-8) gives a pessimistic reading of the sonnet; as I show later on, I read this undoing of the self as a potentially constructive strategy on Astrophils part. Anne Ferry (pp. 134-5) presents an alternative reading of "I am not I";she interprets this negation of the self as a means by which Astrophil may paradoxically affirm his selfhood. 32Fora historical account of Sidney's identification with the feminine, see Nona Fienberg, "The Emergence of Stella in Astrophiland Stella," SEL 25, 1 (Winter 1985): 5-19. 3Edmund Spenser, Amoretti23; Thomas Wyatt, "Who hath heard of such cruelty before?"; and George Gascoigne, "The Lullaby of a Lover." The other expression of female artistry is with the playing of a lute or a spinet. See Giles Fletcher's Parthenoph i, sonnet 31, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, sonnet 128. 34Millermakes a similar point in "Love Doth Hold my Hand," pp. 554-5. 35Sidney'spattern of presenting himself at a disadvantage for strategic reasons has been discussed by a number of Renaissance scholars. See especially Margaret W. Ferguson, TrialsofDesire:RenaissanceDefensesof Poetry(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 151-62; Alan Hager, "The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney's Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader," ELH 48, 1 (Spring 1981): 1-16; Miller, PoeticLicense,pp. 152-5; and Maureen 34 ATROPHIL AS AND STELLA Quilligan, "Sidney and His Queen," in The HistoricalRenaissance:NewEssays on Tudorand StuartLiteratureand Culture,ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 171-96. 36Astrophil is conceptually pregnant in sonnets 1, 37, 50, 95. Moira Baker discusses Astrophil's pregnancy without going on to explore how this imagined state implicates Astrophil in symbolizations of femininity ("The Uncanny Stranger on Display: The Female Body in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Love Poetry," SoAR56, 2 [May 1991]: 7-26). 37The prodigal aspects of Sidney's writings have been explored extensively by Helgerson in The ElizabethanProdigals,pp. 124-55. Helgerson, however, is more interested in the cultural and biographical implications of prodigality in Sidney than in gender and aesthetic concerns. 380n An Apologyfor Poetryas itself an apologue,see Ferguson, pp. 152-62. Although she is less interested in the ways that the sonnet sequence as a whole may be read as an apologue,Germaine Warkentin, p. 175, notes that some of the sonnets may be classified as apologues.I am grateful to Dan Kinney for calling my attention to the string of etymological associations between apology, apologue,and apologist. 39Sonnet heroines are not, of course, noted for their powers of articulation. Sidney did, however, have a precedent in Petrarch, whose Laura does speakbut only after she has died. Stella, in contrast, is quite alive as a character when she speaks to Astrophil. Perhaps influenced by Petrarch and Sidney, Spenser in his Amorettiand Drayton in his Idea (sonnet 5) endow their beloveds with occasional powers of speech. 401would like to thank Gordon Braden, Dan Kinney, Clare Kinney, Mihoko Suzuki, and Tom Prendergast for their comments on this essay.