Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England by Robert E. Stillman;

Author:Robert E. Stillman; [Stillman;, Robert E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780268200411
Publisher: LightningSource
Published: 2021-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

READING IN THE MIXED MODE: MINGLING GENERIC AND RELIGIOUS KINDS IN ASTROPHIL AND STELLA

If it is true that no history of early modern rhetoric is intelligible that fails to include an account of classical rhetoric as it was reformed by Christians, Catholic and Protestant, Erasmus to Melanchthon, then it follows that the same semantic history that recuperates new scope for Sidney’s fascination with oikonomia and energeia has implications for how we read his poetry. The same claim exists for the history of poetics as it was reformed from the brilliant neo-Aristotelian, onetime Jesuit Giovanni Antonio Viperano to that studious, broadly Protestant gentleman from Kent William Scott.71 Put more plainly, keeping an eye on Sidney’s concern for his Maker has real power to illuminate his fiction making, both in regard to the pious argumentations of the revised Arcadia’s saintly Pamela and in regard to that all too obviously fallen Astrophil.

Astrophil is the spectacularly unsaintly protagonist of a sonnet sequence whose mixing of generic kinds exemplifies—as Rosalie Colie anticipates—the power of the genera mista to provoke second-order reflection: thinking about competing “sets” or perspectives on experience. Astrophil and Stella provokes such thinking as a consequence of its own distinctive engagement with what William Kennedy has called Petrarchan “universalism,” that mode of writing lyric poetry that came close to establishing a norm for poetic making in sixteenth-century Europe. Stubbornly English and internationally aware, recognizably courtly even as he disdains the court, artlessly sincere in his romance posturing and artfully conscious of his audience of courtly readers, Sidney’s Astrophil challenges the universalism of the Petrarchan in every act of domesticating it to the vernacular—and, by doing so, makes himself utterly characteristic of sonnet writers (imaginary and real) everywhere in Europe. Astrophil’s quest for distinctiveness is the repetition of a repetition. Such encounters between vernacular poets and their Petrarchan original “display a palimpsest of social change, cultural adjustment, and political development,” writes Kennedy, and they display too (I will argue in regard to Sidney’s sequence) a similarly deep inscription of religious transformations.72 In response to the crisis of confessionalism, Astrophil and Stella domesticates to the English vernacular a cosmopolitan Christianity with claims to a universality all its own.

Exemplary as an instance of its genre, Astrophil’s sonnets multiply from one into many, single lyrics into a sustained narrative, as his romance ambitions for satisfaction eventuate in tragic frustration. Sonnet by sonnet, the sequence puts to the test of individual experience those large claims of Petrarchan poetry (and the still larger claims of Petrarch’s Neoplatonic commentators) about the potential for spiritual ennoblement in romantic love—and accounts such claims, by the sequence’s dreary finale, utterly bankrupt. Such claims are weighed in relation to experience—desire’s motions intruding into every verbal act—and such claims are adjudicated in the courtroom of ultimate resort, the one where the maker provokes reflection about the Maker.73 There is nothing simple about the judgments rendered, or about the process of making them. Understanding Astrophil means locating him between the competing generic claims of romance and tragedy, with their distinctive “sets” upon experience.

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