"I call it praise to suffer tyranny": The rhetoric of love as wholly painful in Astrophil and Stella's Sonnet II

For Sidney's tortured protagonist of his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, effective rhetoric is the only way in which he can articulate anguished feelings about his desired. This essay will contend that in Astrophil and Stella, and Sonnet II in particular, Astrophil uses rhetoric to deplete love of any joy or positivity and present it as a wholly painful experience without merit. To examine this idea, this essay will scrutinise each of the first three stages of oration in turn: inventio (external location of source material), disposition (textual arrangement of material), and elocutio (textual stylization of material).