Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 199
198 Milli mála 13/2021
know that at least one copy of the 1591 Astrophel and Stella supplied
the front and rear endpaper for Edward Lively’s A true chronologie of
the times of the Persian monarchie (1597), the binder using Sidney’s
sonnets as wastepaper.67 Scattered across manuscript and print,
sung and read, authorized and pirated, private and public, pre-
served and damaged, Sidney’s sonnets were caught in the chaos of
early modern textuality.
Although Sidney could not have possibly predicted the future
instantiations of his verse across a range of forms, media, and sen-
sory regimes (nor forms of its destruction), Astrophil and Stella har-
bours an unease about the precarity of its lyric existence. Witness
sonnet 15:
You that do search for euerie purling spring,
Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flowes,
And euerie floure not sweete perhaps, which growes
Neare thereabouts, into your Poesie wring.
Ye that do Dictionaries methode bring
Into your rimes, running in ratling rowes:
You that poore Petrarchs long deceased woes,
With new-borne sighes and denisend wit do sing.
You take wrong waies those far-fet helpes be such,
As do bewray a want of inward tuch:
And sure at length stolne goods do come to light.
But if (both for your loue and skill) you name,
You seeke to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame,
Stella behold and then begin to indite.68
The obvious thrust of the sonnet is to distinguish the speaker from
other imitators of Petrarch and assert his aesthetic and national
independence.69 But the sonnet also offers a more general ars poetica,
and Sidney’s particular attention is focused on lyric ontology. On
the surface, the poets he attacks overprivilege vocality. Not only do
they “sing” their “woes” with “sighes;” they are fond of alliteration
67 Smyth, Material Texts, 163–74.
68 Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 524.
69 Kennedy, Site, 176–77.
“PEN, PAPER, INKE, YOU FEEBLE INSTRUMENTS”
10.33112/millimala.13.8