an edition of 1643. A reprint of the latter appeared at Leyden in 1646.
The collection of sonnets called ‘Astrophel and Stella’ has, of all Sidney's literary achievements, best stood the tests of time. It consisted in its authentic form of 108 sonnets and eleven songs. In 1591, within a year of the first issue of the ‘Arcadia,’ a publisher, Thomas Newman, secured a manuscript version of the sonnets, and on his own initiative issued an edition with a dedication to a personal friend, Francis Flower, with an epistle to the reader by Thomas Nash (doubtless the editor of the volume), and an appendix of ‘sundry other rare sonnets by diuers noblemen and gentlemen.’ Sidney's friends in September 1591 appealed to Lord Burghley to procure the suppression of this unauthorised venture (cf. Arber, Stationers' Registers, i. 555). A month later, apparently, another unauthorised publisher, Matthew Lownes, issued an independent edition, a copy of which, said to be unique, is in the Bodleian Library. Finally Newman, at the solicitation of Sidney's friends, reissued his volume in 1591 without the prefatory matter and with many revisions of the text (cf. copy in Brit. Mus.). The poems were again reprinted with the authorised edition of the ‘Arcadia’ in 1598. There they underwent a completer recension; an important sonnet (xxxviii), attacking Lord Rich by name, and two songs (viii and ix) were added for the first time, and the songs, which had hitherto followed the sonnets en bloc, were distributed among them. This volume of 1598 also supplied for the first time ‘certaine sonets of Sir Philip Sidney never before printed,’ among which was the splendid lyric entitled ‘Love's dirge,’ with the refrain ‘Love is dead,’ which gives Sidney a high place among lyric poets. The sonnets were reprinted from Newman's two editions of 1591 by Mr. Arber in his ‘English Garner,’ i. 493 sq. With the songs and the ‘Defence of Poesie,’ they were edited by William Gray (Oxford, 1829), and by Dr. Flügel, again with the ‘Defence of Poesie,’ in 1889. A compact reissue of ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ edited by Mr. A. W. Pollard, was published in 1891.
The sonnets, which were probably begun in 1575, and ceased soon after Sidney's marriage in 1583, are formed on the simple model of three rhyming decasyllabic quatrains, with a concluding couplet. Whether or no they were designed at the outset as merely literary exercises, imitating Surrey's addresses to Geraldine, they portray with historical precision the course of Sidney's ambiguous relations with Lady Rich. There is no reason to contest Nash's description of their argument as ‘cruel chastity—the prologue Hope, the epilogue Despair.’ The opening poems, which are clumsily contrived, are frigid in temper, but their tone grows by slow degrees genuinely passionate; the feeling becomes ‘full, material, and circumstantiated,’ and many of the later sonnets, in reflective power, in felicity of phrasing, and in energy of sentiment, are ‘among the best of their sort’ (cf. Lamb, ‘Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney,’ in Essays of Elia, ed. Ainger, pp. 286 sq.). Shakespeare was doubtless indebted to them for the form of his own sonnets, and at times Sidney seems to adumbrate Shakespeare's subtlety of thought and splendour of expression.
Next in importance, as in date of publication, comes Sidney's ‘Apologie for Poetrie.’ About August 1579 Stephen Gosson published an attack on stage-plays, entitled ‘The School of Abuse,’ and he followed it up in November with an ‘Apologie of the School of Abuse.’ Both were dedicated to Sidney. On 16 Oct. 1579 Spenser wrote from Leicester House to Gabriel Harvey: ‘Newe Bookes I heare of none but only of one, that writing a certaine booke called The Schoole of Abuse, and dedicating it to Maister Sidney, was for hys labor scorned: if at leaste it be in the goodnesse of that nature to scorne. Suche follie is it, not to regarde afore hande the inclination and qualitie of him, to whom we dedicate oure bookes.’ Sidney at once set about preparing a retort to Gosson, which took the form of an essay on the influence of imaginative literature on mankind. By poetry he understood any work of the imagination. ‘Verse,’ he wrote, ‘is but an ornament and no cause to poetry.’ His ‘Apologie’ is in three parts; in the first, poetry is considered as teaching virtuous action, in the second the various forms of poetry are enumerated and justified, and in the third a sanguine estimate is offered of the past, present, and future position of English poetry. Sidney commended the work of Chaucer, Surrey, and Spenser, but failed to foresee the imminent greatness of English drama. He concluded with a spirited denunciation of the earth-creeping mind that cannot lift itself up to look at the sky of poetry. There is much that is scholastic and pedantic in the detailed treatment of his theme, but his general attitude is that of an enlightened lover of great literature. The work was first printed as an ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ in a separate volume with four eulogistic sonnets by Henry Constable [q. v.] for Henry Olney in 1595. It was appended, with the title of the ‘Defence of Poesie,’ to the 1598 edition of the ‘Arcadia’ and to all the reissues; it was edited separately in
