Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works

This review relates to the volume: -Sir Philip Sidney: MajorWorks-. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by KatherineDuncan-Jones. Oxford World's Classics. 2002. 416 pp.This volume contains the works: A dialogue between twoshepherds...Wilton/ Two Songs for an Accession Day Tilt/Philisides, the shepherd good and true/ Sing, neighbours,sing/ The Lady of the May/ Certain Sonnets (32 sonnets)/The lad Philisides/ The Old Arcadia (Complete)--FourEclogues, as well as, "What tongue can her perfections tell",and "Since nature's works be good"/Lamon's Tale/Astrophil and Stella (Complete, a sequence of 108 sonnets with11 numbered songs interspersed!)/ The Defense of Poesy/4 poems from -The New Arcadia-/ Sidney's poetic versionsof Psalms 6, 13, 23, 29, 38/ Letters (15)/ and 4 Appendices(Henry Goldwell, "Shows Performed, 1581"/ Edmund Molyneux,"A historical remembrance of the Sidneys"/Anon., "The manner of Sir Philip Sidney's Death"/ Three elegies onSidney from -The Phoenix Nest-, 1593/ Extract from FulkeGreville, 16 October 1586)/ and excellent Notes to theworks from pp. 332 - 408.Sir Philip Sidney was born on 30 November 1554 and died on17 October 1586, from complications of a battle wound, at theage of 31.Perhaps the two best insights into Sidney are supplied byKatherine Duncan-Jones in her "Introduction" -- the firstis a quote by the modern critic, Theodore Spencer, whosaid: "Once the poet has set himself the task of writing an amorous complaint, that deep melancholy which lay beneath the surface of glamour of Elizabethan existence, and which was so characteristic of Sidney himself, begins to fill the conventional form with more than a conventionalweight. It surges through the magical adagio of the lines;they have the depth of reverberation, like the sound ofgongs beaten under water, which is sometimes characteristicof Sidney as of no other Elizabethan, not even Shakespeare."["Introduction," p. xi]. The other quote follows somecritical introduction by the editor herself: "Tellingly,Sidney's own persona, Philisides, is described on his firstappearance as diabled by unhappiness: "Another young shepherdnamed Philisides...had all this time lain upon the groundat the foot of a cypress tree, leaning upon his elbow, withso deep a melancholy that his senses carried to his mind nodelight from any of their objects."But these poems rarely dwell in melancholy. The slighthindrance, sometimes, is Sidney's versification itself.The reader may find it slightly stilted and a bit toopoetically "artificial" to meet the rhythm or the rhyme.However, the glories far outweigh the slights. A furtherhelp to understanding Sidney might come from applyingdeeper SYMBOLISM and interpretation to his works, innames and themes. There is this left to end: Love makes the earth water to drink,Love to earth makes water sink;And if dumb things [without speech] be so wittyShall a heavenly grace want pity?[from: -Astrophil and Stella-.] -- Robert Kilgore.