“Dr. McCoy has taken a clear-sighted look at what actually happens in Sidney’s major works, and finds that many critics have made inflated claims for his achievement and artistic omniscience. He sets out to explain the contradictions and uncertainties that he has found by setting them in the context of Elizabethan politics, and of Sidney’s biography. Sidney is seen as above all preoccupied with the conflict between authority and the autonomy of the individual. In the Arcadia, the conflict is to be found in two spheres: between the authority of the ruler and the subject; and between the tyranny of love and the submissive or rebellious lover, or between the lover’s reason and his passion. Sidney’s own metaphors authorize an extension of the terms of politics into the arena of love; all the same the word itself loses its proper connotations when we are informed that the “politics” in Astrophil and Stella are “exclusively sexual.” Perhaps because previous discussions of the sonnet sequence have on the whole been more sensible than those of the Arcadia, Dr. McCoy’s straightforward reading offers few new insights. Another reason is the greater assurance and artistic control that Dr. McCoy finds in it.” Review by Jean Robertson