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A Thesis Entitled from the Defense of Poesy to Astrophil and Stella

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A Thesis Entitled from the Defense of Poesy to Astrophil and Stella A Thesis entitled From The Defense of Poesy to Astrophil and Stella: Sidney’s Philosophical Ascent to Virtue by Alicia Nichols As partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Bachelor of Arts Degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies Thesis Director:___________________ Dr. Andrew Mattison The University of Toledo December 2o14 Abstract Manifesting from his beliefs held in The Defense of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella employs the rhetorical conventions of unrequited love as a vehicle for humanity’s exploration into its most inherent need – the pursuit of God’s perfection lost at man’s fall from grace. It is the purpose of this paper to assess how Sidney validated this understanding of love’s symbolic meaning within his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella and the didactic qualities inherent to its truthful poetic representation. By exploring specific dictional choices found throughout Astrophil and Stella and investigating the metaphorical implications present in his sonnet sequence, I propose what larger implications Sidney is suggesting in light of traditional philosophical ideals of both the classical world and poets such as Castiglione and Petrarch. To support this claim I will examine Sidney’s own reconciliation of the paradoxical topics of imitation and originality, passion and reason, and student and master. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr. Andrew Mattison for his help and guidance. Without his encouragement I would not have been able to complete this thesis. III Table of Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgements….....................................................................................................iii Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………………………………………iv From The Defense of Poesy to Astrophil and Stella: Sidney’s Philosophical Ascent to Virtue.........................................................................1 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………...………..24 The rhetorical conventions characteristic of Renaissance poetics have long been a subject of scholarly examination. Stemming from the historical traditions of antiquity and influential writings of the early Renaissance, late sixteenth-century poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney asserts his philosophical notions concerning poetry’s purpose in his treatise The Defense of Poesy. Manifesting from his beliefs held in The Defense of Poesy, Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella examines the nature of unrequited love and the didacticism of its poetic representation. Although the individual lover’s experience is not to be diminished, I conclude that earthly love, in the context of Sidney, served a higher purpose as the vehicle for man’s inquiry into the attainment of virtue. It is the purpose of this paper to assess how Sidney validated his understanding of the philosophical use of love within Astrophil and Stella and what larger implications are suggested in the context of The Defense of Poesy. In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney presents a clear depiction of what he believes to be the purpose of poetry, asserting it to be, in comparison to other intellectual vocations, the highest of didactic tools. Lisa Klein notes that for Sidney, “it is that poetry, rightly used, can move one to virtuous action; then and only then can poetry claim to be the highest form of learning” (56-57). Above all other liberal arts, poetry, in Sidney’s eyes, rose above in its ability to lead man towards virtue. As his Defense concludes when discussing poetry’s role in the 2 classical world, “[poetry] only reigned with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and what should be” (Defense 219). Sidney’s Defense goes as far as to call poetry “the first light-giver to ignorance” (Defense 213). The darkness, as implied by Sidney, is the tainted and imperfect state of humanity after its fall from grace and introduction to sin. For Sidney, the ability of his poetry to move man towards virtue and out of darkness represented the apex of poetic achievement. For being virtuous meant “Being true to our human potential . To effectively develop one’s positive human qualities through exercise of one’s uniquely human characteristics” (Kimbrough 54). To fully understand Sidney’s philosophical claim for poetry being the vehicle through which man explores his “true human potential,” Sidney’s argument must be placed within a historical context, emphasizing the role of poetics in the classical world and examining how these traditions influenced his ideals, which in turn shaped his poetics. Originally serving to dualistically represent philosophy and history, poetry presented the best qualities of both arts for the classical world. Sidney illustrates this in his Defense of Poesy when describing the writings of Plato, “And truly even Plato . in the body of his work, though the inside and strength were philosophy, the skin, as it were, and beauty depended most of poetry” (213). Emanating from Sidney’s Platonic influences, his perception of the relationship between poetry and philosophy was a symbiotic one. Though elevated in its outcome and ability to teach, the “strength” of poetry resided in its philosophical implications. However, without the beautiful representation of 3 philosophical ideas, there remained a void between the philosopher and his audience. Poetry, according to Sidney, bridged this gap. It and only it could express all things philosophical and historical in their most persuadable form. Representing poetry as the persuader of truth, Sidney writes in his Defense, “Truly neither philosopher nor historiographer could at first have entered into the gates of popular judgments, if they had not taken a great passport of poetry” (214). Thus poetry, for Sidney and the classical world, had always been a vehicle for the pursuit of knowledge. Transcending the poetics of antiquity, Sidney molded these ideals and recontextualized them within Elizabethan society to suit the poetic needs of both his audience and himself, the poet. Heavily influenced by Elizabethan England’s adherence to Christianity, Sidney’s poetics were artistically and philosophically dependent upon the synthesis of classical and postclassical influences. For Sidney and his contemporaries, the Bible and the accounts contained within were not merely guidelines for living one’s life; they were factual events that had taken place in history. Man had fallen from grace, been separated from God, and lost the perfection inherent to union with God. To Sidney, all of Postlapsarian history had been man’s pursuit at regaining its lost perfection (Kimbrough 38). For Elizabethan society, especially poets such as Sidney, Christianity did not promise mankind wholeness, but rather, it offered mankind hope. This hope was simply to improve upon the imperfect state attained by man at his fall from grace. With this in mind, Sidney employed poetry as a means to actively participate in man’s pursuit for wholeness. Through 4 his artistic representation of those philosophical ideals held by the classical world, Sidney was able to transcend that passivity of contemplation and take action towards teaching and inspiring man towards virtuous action. The poet’s ability to actively participate in this pursuit of wholeness was due to what Sidney terms “erected wit.” Sidney discusses in his Defense the idea of “erected wit” and what role it plays in man’s quest for virtue: “Our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it" (217). By wit Sidney means reason, and when speaking of its erected form, he is referencing man’s superiority over other earthly creatures in their ability to comprehend it. The “infected will” of Sidney’s statement refers to the tainted nature of mankind after its fall from grace and introduction to sin. Because humanity now has this “infection” of sin, it can never again be completely pure or perfect. Thus, for Sidney, “erected wit” corresponded to man’s consciousness of the perfection held by the prelapsarian world. It is this consciousness that in turn drives man towards the pursuit of virtue, a remedy for its “infected will.” Though wholeness will never be entirely actualized, man’s “erected wit” keeps him in pursuit of it; he seeks to fill the hole that sin’s infection bore. After considering the cultural contextualization of both classical and postclassical influences on Sidney’s poetics, the originality of Sidney’s poetry comes into question. When analyzing Sidney’s poetics a discrepancy between Sidney’s own poetic authority and his support for the art of imitation arises. Robert 5 Kimbrough suggests a reconciliation to this discrepancy when noting, “the challenge to the Elizabethan poet was not to do something never done before, but to show how well in his own imitation, through art and exercise, he could take what had been done before and make it his own” (110). For Sidney, as interpreted by Kimbrough, originality stemmed not in the formation of new ideas but in one’s own distinct representation of existing ones. John Hunt further remedies the conflict over imitation and originality: Sidney’s eclecticism indicates no lack of intellectual strength and originality, but, to the contrary, shows an aristocratic mind determined to be in control of the intellectual tradition, rather than subservient to it. By not expounding some version of Platonism, or Aristotelianism, or Augustinianism, or Senecanism, Sidney declares that he has his own vision to
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