Sidney's Purposeful Humor: Astrophil and Stella 59 and 83

Sidney's words, as Rosalie has remarked,"can at once 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.