Sir Phillip Sidney

As one of the earlier figures of the English Renaissance, he's pretty important, but I don't know that his works are likely to appear on the exam.

Astrophel and Stella

The first of the famous English sonnet sequences, "Astrophel and Stella" was probably composed in the early 1580s. They were well-circulated in manuscript before the first (apparently pirated) edition was printed in 1591; only in 1598 did an authorized edition reach the press. The sequence was a watershed in English Renaissance poetry. In it, Sidney partially nativized the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion from poem to poem, with the attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure, narrative; the philosophical trappings; the musings on the act of poetic creation itself. His experiments with rhyme scheme were no less notable; they served to free the English sonnet from the strict rhyming requirements of the Italian form.

This is often called a "sonnet cycle" because it tracks in linked sonnets the progressive rise and fall of a love relationship. However, typically for Sidney who was an avid experimenter in poetic forms, the 108 sonnets are interrupted by 11 songs of varying forms, usually using shorter lines than the sonnet's pentameters (mostly tetrameters [four feet per line]). The Norton editors include the fourth and eleventh songs as examples, and also because they record crucial turning points in the affair celebrated in the sonnets. They also are where you can hear "Stella"'s voice, ventriloquized by the speaker, as he describes her response to his pleas.

Characters: The lover, characterized as the "star lover" [astro-phil with a pun on Sidney's first name] and the beloved, "Stella" or star, often are the speaker and spoken-to in these sonnets. However, Sidney's persona often talks to entities he allegorically personifies as "Reason," "Love," "Love," "Queen Virtue," "Sleep," "the Moon," "Patience," "Desire," dawn, and other cognitive phenomena in sonnets that not infrequently describe allegorical struggles among them which we might compare with the dialogues in Everyman. The court surrounding them is populated by friends (loyal), enemies (jealous), and various other characters including her fool of a husband.

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

Prose punctuated by poems, including "Ye Goatherd Gods," a poem remarkable because it is a double sestina--a form so dedicated to rhyming structure that it is very rarely seen. The Arcadia, by far Sidney's most ambitious work, was as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model of Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a highly idealized version of the shepherd's life adjoins (not always naturally) with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published in the sixteenth century, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested within each other, and different story-lines are intertwined. The work enjoyed great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela.

A Defence of Poesy

(Also known as the Apology for Poetry): Sidney wrote the Apology before 1583. It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage.

John Skelton

An example of skeltonics can clearly be seen in the following short excerpt from Phyllyp Sparrowe:

Somtyme he wolde gaspe
Whan he sawe a waspe;
A fly or a gnat,
He wolde flye at that
And prytely he wold pant
Whan he saw an ant;
Lorde, how wolde hop
After the greesop!
And whan I sayd, Phyp, Phyp,
Than he wold lepe and skyp,
And take me by the lyp.

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