6 - The Kiss-Poem in the British Isles

Summary

BASIUM INTO SONNET: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY AND GILES FLETCHER THE ELDER

When we give Astrophil and Stella its eminent station within the landscape of English poetry, we too often miss out the continental scenery which ought to form an important part of the composition. In general accounts of English literature, Sidney's poem falls easily into place as a major precedent and inspiration for English Petrarchan lyric and the English sonnet sequence, which burgeoned thereafter. More careful attention to Sidney's kisses will help to nourish our sense of his own precedents, which came to him from outside the English tradition, but from sources which to him were obvious, familiar and immediate. In Astrophil and Stella the marks of Secundan influence are considerable.

We know for certain that Sidney intimately knew at least one of the many poems of kissing written in Italian, for his Certain Sonnets 6, though it contains no kisses itself, is composed (so the superscription tells us) ‘To the tune of Basciami vita mia’, an Italian kissing-song. It can be no less certain that Sidney was familiar with the Latin Basia of Secundus. Of the three greatest authors of basia after Secundus, poets of his own generation, it is certain he knew Dousa, and it is highly probable that he was acquainted with the works of the other two, Lernutius and Bonnefons, at some point in his life—perhaps before or during the writing of Astrophil in the 1580s.

The connection of Elizabeth's England to the Low Countries, where Secundanism was at that time most vital, was important and indeed fateful for Sidney. His association with Dousa probably dates back as far as the early days of the Dutch Revolt. The two may have met in the Netherlands, and are likely to have been in contact when Dousa visited England as an emissary to Elizabeth's court, first in the winter of 1572–3, and then at least twice in the 1580s—the period when Astrophil must have been underway. It is worth mentioning also that Dousa's Basia were dedicated to Daniel Rogers, a German-born Englishman who had some Dutch blood from his mother's side of the family.