1. The poem, which appears in Astrophil and Stella, attempts to solve a dispute concerning Stella’s Voice and Face. They both appear before Common Sence, the Judge, in the court of True Delight. They hire Music and Beauty as lawyers who will plead their causes; and they bring Wonder and Love as character witnesses, and the Ear and Eye as technical witnesses. The Judge, unable to decide, appeals to Reason.

2. debate.

3. the lawyers of line 14.

4. The court.

5. hire.

6. legal objections.

7. arbitrator.

1. ‘My true love hath my hart’ forms part of Sidney’s Arcadia, a pastoral-chivalric romance that exists in three versions. The earliest was written before 1580 in five prose books that are punctuated, like Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, with lyrical poems. Sidney later revised and extended the work, weaving a web of stories into the new structure; his revision had reached Book III when he died, leaving the work unfinished. It was published posthumously in quarto in 1590; and in 1593 the Countess of Pembroke completed the work and published it in folio. ‘My true love hath my hart’, though one of the most exquisite lyrics from Sidney’s Arcadia, has a decidedly comic context within the work: Dorus, in an attempt to get Damaetas’ wife, Miso, out of the way, invents an imaginary scenario, claiming to have seen her husband lying with his head in the lap of the shepherdess Charita. It is she who sings the song.

2. do without.

3. its wound.

4. the sight of me.

5. exchange.