Narrative strategies in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella

Abstract

In this article I suggest that historically lyric and narrative are not mutually exclusive categories. Focusing on the case of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, “Astrophil and Stella”, I argue that the fundamentally lyric form of the sonnet functions rhetorically and contextually in such a way as to invite narrative construal. I suggest that this is the norm in pre-Enlightenment poetic practice and theory, something which was perhaps occluded by the decline of interest in rhetoric.