Customer Reviews

Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry

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Sidney is a great poet and I am not giving him four stars. He prefigures Shakespeare as one of the early great Renaissance (or Early Modern) figures of early English poetry. It's hard to imagine the history of the English Sonnet without him. Whole-heartedly I recommend reading Sidney to anyone interested in 16-17th century English poetry, but let me say a few words about the edition.

I bought this edition after being told that it was the definitive edition of Sidney's works. As a graduate student though, I found the introductions to be pretty useless. They were well informed, but lacked any relevance to a current literary student or scholar. The notes were sometimes useful, but often random. I found myself wondering what a term meant in one of the first ten sonnets of Astrophil and Stella with no clarifying note only to discover that when the terms appeared 40 sonnets later they were well annotated. Seemed a little out of order to me.

In addition, I recently took a graduate course which required reading Sidney and although I had heard this was the premier edition, there were multiple readings absent in this edition that were in others.