Word: astrophel
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...ASTROPHEL-Alfred H. Bill-Farrar & Rinehart...
...meet the 350-year-old ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, most moderns would aim chiefly at finding out: 1) how in his own lifetime that Elizabethan poet-statesman-soldier acquired his extraordinary fame, and 2) why. despite the fact that his prose (Arcadia, Defence of Poesie) and poetry (Astrophel and Stella) are today practically unread and unreadable, and his career no more interesting than that of half a dozen forgotten contemporaries, the aura of that fame has clung intact to his name ever since. Biographers have carefully recorded the facts of his career (better documented, less clouded by legend than...
Although the love sonnets of Astrophel and Stella were addressed to a beautiful, blonde, black-eyed married woman (daughter of the Earl of Essex), contemporaries were satisfied that Sir Philip Sidney's love-making remained a strictly literary affair. The single criticism ever to touch his reputation on that score came from Queen Elizabeth, who, always furious at the slur to her own magnetism whenever her young men married, acted when "my Philip" married as though he had gone the limit in Elizabethan sensuality...
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