ABSTRACT
As most readers will be aware, Sir Philip Sidney never compiled a miscellany called Astrophil and Stella. What he did write, some time during 1581-83, was a collection of 108 sonnets and eleven songs, in which the lady is repeatedly addressed as Stella and her Petrarchan lover is twice identified as Astrophil. The latter was, of course, a transparent mask for Philip himself, but it is unlikely that Stella’s identity constituted a mystery to the sequence’s first readers. As critics have maintained since the 1930s (for example, Hudson), Stella was a thinly disguised-and easily decodable-allusion to Penelope Devereux (1563-1607), whom Sidney had known from the 1570s, but apparently fell in love with at court in 1581. However, soon afterwards she was married to Robert, third Baron Rich, and Sidney himself married Frances Walsingham two years later; but their unhappy love-or, in most radical versions, adulterous affair of 1581 or 1582-provided the occasion and subject matter for Sidney’s Petrarchan sequence.
