ABSTRACT
Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella famously begins describing the tortured genesis of Astrophil's art. All subsequent quotations from Astrophil and Stella derive from The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney edition, with the specific sonnet given in parentheses after the quotation where not identified before it. The proliferation of Muses is more than a playful device in Sidney's poetry. Astrophil's divided representation of Stella glances back to a similar confusion of Muses or rather, a similar conflict of representation in Sidney's experience of diplomacy. The last 30 years of criticism on Astrophil and Stella has tended to highlight the intersection of Sidney's poetry and his politics. In Elizabeth's reign, the fiction of metonymy was to some degree exposed both by the gap between the gender of the prince and her ambassador and by the peculiarities of Elizabeth's approach to diplomacy. The Elizabethan government reacted to this situation with a gradual professionalization of the diplomatic service.
