2019-05-07

Sidney was born in a high aristocratic family and learned in Oxford.His three works:Astrophel and Stella,Arcadia,the defense of poesie,can respectively represent his three reputations as poet,romances and critic.

Astrophel and Stella is a sonnet sequence in which Sidney expressed his love to Devereux who he loved and had promising to marry but who later warried with other one.Under the influence of Petrarch,he was among the first in England to confess his love to a real mistress by writing a whole series of sonnets (108) and eleven poems.his genuine feeling in some sections and as presonal emotions of early love represent humanism cryout against midieval ascerticism.

The Defence of Poesie is more or less an answer to a treatise The School of Abuse written by Stephon Goden,it attack the theatre and all secular literature and dedicated to Sidney,in his poem Sidney opposed Goden by pointing that poem is not merely the imitation of nature thence reflect the reality,but should be in the affect to instruct and amuse.But he shared the his view in giving a rather low estimate to.English drama,not so much to criticizing contemporary writers of their immorality as to their departing from the classic Greek and Rome on the observance of Three unities and the separation of comic elements from tragic elements.