ABSTRACT
Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich (1563-1607), who was certainly responsible for the erotic fascination that produced Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella,1 may also thereby have been responsible for the whole Elizabethan sonnetsequence craze: for until she entered Sidney’s life in the early months of 1581 neither he nor anyone else appears to have thought of writing a sequence of English sonnets in the Petrarchan style. This post-Tottel failure to produce, between 1557 and 1582, what the French were writing in enormous numbers and well-structured sequences, has puzzled and even irritated critics: Sidney Lee, in his energetic account of cultural transference at the time, The French Renaissance in England (Oxford, 1910), repeatedly speaks as if a kind of depressive melancholia, a mental blackness, had invaded Britain in these years; and even J.W. Lever accuses the young Spenser of ‘some deeprooted aversion to the sonnet as a mode of self-expression’, and a ‘negative approach’.2
