SOURCE: “Sidney's Purposeful Humor: Astrophil and Stella 59 and 83,” in ELH: A Journal of English Literary History, Vol. 49, No. 4, Winter 1982, pp. 751–64.

In the following essay, Traister offers a close analysis of two sonnets, and concludes Sidney forces readers to reconsider experiences and approach the sonnets with the knowledge of their new implications.

Sidney's words, as Rosalie L. Colie has remarked, “can at once, in triumph, assert and deny the truth of what they say.”¹ They give to Astrophil a verbal dexterity—or ambidexterity—that is one of his many attractions. Few characters in the literature of the English Renaissance are as engaging as the protean Astrophil who speaks to us from the sonnets and songs of Sidney's sequence. Capable of virtuoso emotional somersaults, of a gentle self-mockery in which most readers find Sidney's lightly ironic view of himself, and of an urbane wit which flashes sonnet after sonnet, song...