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:

Sidney’s Philosophical Ascent to Virtue

Alicia Nichols

As partial fulfillment of the requirements for

The Bachelor of Arts Degree

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

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 enact and will not rely on any one

man’s ideas to do it for him. (12)

Essentially, Sidney’s eclectic mixture of poetic conventions and philosophical ideas produced works that display a mastery over the subject of love and show a command of the classical tradition.

This idea of originality and authenticity transcends the prose of Sidney’s

Defense of Poesy and is poetically executed beginning with the first sonnet of his sequence, Astrophil and Stella. “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,/ studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain;/ Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow” (5-7). These lines express Astrophil’s internal struggle

6 concerning how to truthfully capture the love he feels for Stella through his poetry.

When stating “Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow” (7), Sidney once again promotes the imitation of classical traditions as a means to capture the virtuous nature of unrequited love in poetic form.

Coinciding with Sidney’s understanding of the poet’s identity in light of imitation, he also questions the traditional title bestowed upon his artistic vocation - the title of poet. Evident from his treatment of the word poet in his

Defense, Sidney preferred the title for his craft to be that of a maker. This distinction in made clear by the mere number of times each word is mentioned in his treatise. Labeling himself poet only once in his Defense when stating, “I will give you a nearer example of myself . . . having slipped into the title of poet” (212),

Sidney continually makes use of the title of maker. In Astrophil and Stella, Sidney goes so far as to proclaim his disdain for the label of “poet” as “I swear I wish not there should be/ graved in my epitaph a poet’s name” (Klein 29). This title of

“maker” aids in our understanding of Sidney’s views concerning the relationship between the poet and his poetry.

As a critic of poetry, as established in his Defense of Poesy, Sidney writes in the Aristotelian tradition, a tradition that emphasizes the practice of imitation. It relates “matter and manner” with the fundamental aspects of art –imitation and nature- truth. Transitioning from the role of critic to that of a poet in Astrophil and

Stella, Sidney writes “ within a fully articulated literary convention, which is, at least in part, a “manner” supplied from the outside world, related to the matter in

7 question by sanctions of tradition and the rules of the genre” (Young 6). As a

“maker”, Sidney saw himself as being able to mold the contents of life- the matter, into poetry- its manner. In the case of Astrophil and Stella, Sidney chose his matter in the form of unrequited love. Manner, more implicitly, focused on poetry’s ability to instruct or provide insight into man’s pursuit for knowledge, via the poet’s earthly representation of it.

Upon analyzing Sidney’s guiding philosophies concerning the relationship between the poet and his poetry, or the “maker” and his art, two underlying facts must be taken into account. First, the effectiveness of poetry resides in the poet’s ability to select a subject worthy of exalted praise and second, the poet’s ability to masterfully grasp all aspects of that subject. Based on this understanding, the selection of subject matter for artistic expression depended upon the elevated representation of the subject in both its manner and matter.

Sidney’s Defense of Poesy qualifies at length the standards by which poetry should be held to and the heights it should aim to reach. Manifesting from these philosophical paradigms Sidney, in his sequence Astrophil and Stella, establishes a claim for love being a vessel for virtuous ascension. Following in the Petrarchan tradition, Astrophil, in reaction to Stella’s beauty, is moved to praise her inherent goodness; his love for the lady causes his descent from a state of innocence to the hell of unrequited love, and afforded by her inherent virtue, Stella remains free

(Hamilton 206). Although Astrophil is consumed by the love of his lady, he remains free to choose to express his love without fear of his words leading to

8 further devastation. Stella’s “virtue is his security” (Hamilton 206); while she remains elevated in virtue, he is virtuous through his poetic pursuit of her. For as

Hamilton notes, “any Petrarchan poet would rather be frustrated in his desire to satisfy his love than frustrated in his desire to write about his agony of frustration”

(206). Because if the poet has the ability to write about love’s agony and frustration, he is actively participating in his pursuit of virtue and attainment of the divine.

Sidney further supports these sentiments in sonnet 1 when he writes, “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe” (5). Astrophil is able to visualize the face of his sorrow, his unrequited love; he knows full well the pain that stems from his love. However, he is unable to physically manifest the words to truthfully express his pain, and thus, he stalls his ascension to virtue. Astrophil, in his frustration, concludes that he must look inward, finding his inherent “erected wit” and write what he knows.

In order to justify Sidney’s employment of love as representative of leading man towards divine perfection, the philosophical ideals governing love’s power must be understood in relation to classical influences. As previously discussed, philosophers and poets of antiquity heavily influenced the purpose of poetry within Sidney’s context. Therefore the relationship between Sidney’s humanistic values and traditional themes of courtly love require examination.

When examining Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and its description of love within a courtly setting, its applicability to Sidney’s purpose is

9 clear. Castiglione’s book rationalizes how and why love can be representative of virtue. According to the Neo-Platonic theories presented by Castiglione in The

Book of The Courtier, "love is the desire to enjoy beauty” and beauty, in continuation of this theory, is “an effluence of the divine goodness” (Albury 73).

When such beauty is possessed, the soul is “transported by divine love to the contemplation of celestial beauty,” and it “turns to contemplate its own substance.

“The beloved [then] becomes a mere springboard for the lover’s contemplation of the divine in himself” (Horning). Or as Olmsted concludes of Castiglione’s philosophies:

The love of the beauty of a single woman is the first step to the

love of universal beauty. Having moved beyond loving one beautiful

woman, and all love of earthly things, love gives the soul greater

happiness still. For just as from the particular of a single body guides

the soul to the universal of all bodies, so, in the last stage of

perfection, it guides the soul from the particular intellect to the

universal intellect. (62)

This description of love’s ability to inspire mirrors the linear progression inherent to the dualistic nature of Astrophil, the poet and Astrophil, the lover.

Man’s innate longing to possess beauty leads him to contemplate “celestial beauty,” which in Sidney’s context is love. In response to this he must then look inward and contemplate his “own substance”, ultimately making the beloved an abstract concept. The beloved is simply the “springboard” for man’s pursuit

10 towards his own innate reflection of God’s perfection, thus, reflecting Sidney’s goal as a poet through Astrophil’s experience with love.

With this in mind, a parallel can be drawn between Castiglione’s notions of love’s ascent inspiring qualities and Sidney’s notions of love’s greater metaphorical poetic uses. As demonstrated in sonnet 2 of Astrophil and Stella:

Not at first sight, nor with a dribbed shot,

Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed:

But known worth did in mine of time proceed,

Till by degrees it had full conquest got.

I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not;

I loved, but straight not decreed:

At length to love’s decrees, I forced, agreed,

Yet with repining at so partial lot.

Now even that footsteps of lost liberty

Is gone, and now like slave-born Muscovite

I call it praise to suffer tyranny;

And now employ the remnant of my wit

To make myself believe that all is well,

While with a feeling skill I paint my hell. (153)

Aligning love with virtue, in their correlating ascent, can be reasoned by considering the implicit meaning behind, “Love gave the wound which while I breathe I will bleed:/ But known worth did in mine of time proceed.” If love is to

11 be understood as virtue and love has inflicted a wound that bleeds while the victim lives, a conclusion can be drawn indicating that virtue has rendered man wounded so long as he breathes. In relation to the Christian context in which Sidney wrote, the pain which virtue inflicts emanates from man’s emptiness as consequence from his fall from grace – a wound that will never heal or be made whole.

Returning to the dualistic representation of ascent within Sonnet 2, Sidney, while exhibiting Castiglione’s influence, departs momentarily from Petrarchan conventions. In contradiction to the traditional Petrarchan Lover, Sidney chooses, in these lines, to reject the notion of love at first sight and instead renders it ineffectual, “with a dribbed shot” (358). He then goes on to mirror Castiglione’s use of love as a springboard towards a more intimate understanding of one’s “own substance”: “I saw, and liked; I liked, but loved not; I loved, but straight not decreed:” Through this progression from saw to like and like to love, Astrophil, in reference to love, and Sidney, in reference to virtue, demonstrate their gradual uncovering of man’s “erected wit” or as Sidney states “ But known worth did in mine of time proceed, / till by degrees it had full conquest got.”. As Astrophil succumbs to love in “full conquest,” he is able to have knowledge of the inherent

“worth” of love. Thus, for Sidney, the metaphorical representation of Astrophil’s progression towards love represents his own progression towards virtue. In effect,

Sidney demonstrated love’s ability to poetically inspire the poet to be a student to love and virtue, as well as a teacher of it.

Continuing with the thematic element of transcendence within Astrophil and Stella, A.C. Hamilton turns to sonnet 10 of the sequence. Citing the lines,

“Reason, in faith thou art well served, that still/ Would’st brabbling be with sense and love in me./ I rather wished thee climb the muses’ hill,/ Or reach the fruite of nature’s choicest tree” (1-4), and resolves the conception of human love, an earthly creation, being able to elevate man as close to perfection as philosophically possible:

Reason should move upward in stages by climbing the Muses’ hill,

reaching for Nature’s best fruit, seeking heaven, and finally into

heaven. These are the stages through which the Renaissance poet

moved from the lower poetic forms toward heroic and divine poetry.

In Sidney . . . however, Reason chooses instead to move downward

to earthly matters of love and sense. (205)

According to Hamilton, Sidney sought to transcend earthly and thus imperfect virtue in hope of attaining an elevated state of consciousness. This elevated state of consciousness was one aligned with the perfection of God.

Taking into account the Postlapsarian context of Sidney’s philosophies – the state of its imperfection, Sidney ultimately represented his pursuit of transcendence by means of earthly love. Earthly love was therefore partially associated with nature and the divine, or as Robert Kimbrough notes, “ Nature is fallen and cursed, but man is only partially her creature, for man is created in the divine image, which sets “him beyond and over all the works of that second nature” (53).

For Sidney, the poet resides between God and second nature, second nature being the state of humanity after its fall from grace. The poet serves as a mediator, taking the contents of second nature, man’s imperfect reflection of god’s perfection, in the case of Astrophil and Stella, love, and attempts to portray it as truthful to divine perfection as possible. Sidney supports this in his Defense writing; “The poet exercises this ordering, creative power within him when he fashions his imitations of nature” (Kimbrough 53). Thus, the poet must be both fully internally and externally aligned; he must fully know himself and the knowledge inherent to his poetry in order to be true to both second nature and the divine. The relationships between the poet or “maker” and his poetry, and love and nature, are all mediated through man’s pursuit of lost virtue, represented by

Sidney’s employment of earthly love and man’s understanding of “erected wit.”

The product of Astrophil and Stella was Sidney’s unification of love and the purpose of poetry; his imperfect love being born of man’s reflection of God’s perfection and his poetry the physical manifestation of his imitation of this perfection, examined through the lens of unrequited love. By taking Castiglione’s writings into account and examining his philosophies in respect to Sidney’s own, an argument can be made that the authenticity of a poet’s love, specifically that of

Astrophil’s, does not reside in its lack of embellishment or deviation from the truth, but in its ability to move the poet and his audience towards introspection.

This movement towards introspection inspires man to find his own internal virtue that his “erected wit” has given him knowledge of. In reconciling the authenticity

14 of Sidney’s actualized experiences with love and his ability to portray love’s nature truthfully, a strong parallelism can be drawn between poetic authenticity and love’s authenticity.

The biographical association of Sidney with Astrophil has traditionally been attributed to Sidney’s speculated romantic interest in the Lady Penelope Devereux.

Jack Stillinger draws attention to the traditional biographical interpretation of

Sidney’s sequence when commenting on Edward Arber’s 1877 introduction to

Sidney’s sonnets, which states, “ Lady Penelope Devereux eldest child of Walter,

2nd Earl of Essex; and elder sister to his successor Robert . . . was Sir Philip Sidney’s first and only love, his Stella.” (168) Though Arber was a not a Sidney scholar, and thus his standing as a critic is unfounded, his introductory statement draws attention to the biographic interpretation that had long been the current trend.

Though it is my opinion that this lasting precedent of aligning Sidney’s identity with that of Astrophil’s is born out of tradition, it is the argument of many scholars that the two are undoubtedly related.

Prior to analyzing the varying stances on Astrophil and Stella’s biographical truth, Stillinger comments on several objective facts of English lyric poetry, specifically that of Sidney’s:

(1) Lyric poetry is not necessarily autobiographical. (2) As a

Renaissance courtier Sidney would have been expected to write

poetry, whether or not he was in love. (3) An Elizabethan poet who

chose the sonnet for his form would naturally have written about

love, and if he were a good poet his passion might sound sincere. (4)

Sidney, as he himself says many times, regarded poetry as an art, not

as an expression of reality. (178-79)

In response to the autobiographical reality of Astrophil and Stella scholars concede that no definitive resolution can be found without knowing the personal thoughts of Sidney. However, there are several approaches that speculate the reconciliation of what Stillinger terms “the biographical problem of Astrophil and

Stella”. Following Arber’s 1877 introduction a slew of similar introductions and criticism perpetuated the analysis of the biographic significance of Sidney’s sonnets. Stillinger summarizes the traditional views of biographers and editors such as Malcolm W. Wallace, A. W Pollard, and Mona Wilson in their analysis of

Sidney’s identity in relation to Astrophil, quoting phrases like “priceless biographic interest and heart-revelation” and that in writing Astrophil and Stella Sidney’s

“heart . . . laid bare by his pen” and that it was “autobiographic in the most pathetic and truthful way” (168).

Moving past Arber’s commentary to that of a more contemporary era, scholars such as Tucker Brooke, John Buxton, and F.S. Boas still maintained the autobiographic approach to interpreting Sidney’s sonnets. Brooke stating that “ the autobiographic sincerity . . . it evident in nearly all [the sonnets]” and Buxton concluding, “ Stella represents virtue in many sonnets, as well as beauty; but she also represents Penelope Devereux.” (Stillinger 168).

Diverging from the traditional biographical association of Sidney and

Astrophil, and Penelope and Stella, Alexander Grosart insightfully proposed, “some day, surely something of the thought and love given to Shakespeare’s Sonnets will be dedicated to those of Sidney” (Sillinger 168). Grosart’s statement emphasizes that stance that this paper takes in reconciling not only the validity of Sidney’s biographical insertion into Astrophil and Stella, but also, what if any, bearing an autobiographical approach has on the affect of his poetry. Or as Stillinger comments in response to Grosart’s prediction:

If this means that we shall one day have a larger mass of criticism

than can be read in a lifetime, much of it filled with the ill-founded

biographical assertion that neglects the universality, beauty, wit, and

drama of poems, much of it consequently of little or no value, then

were are only modestly on our way. (168)

Therefore, it is the authenticity of Sidney’s philosophical understanding of love in relation to the symbolic qualities of his Christian context that dictates his ability to rhetorically convey love’s true and virtuous nature. Sidney’s success in doing this ultimately gives rise to an authentic and edifying sonnet sequence.

Robert Kimbrough emphasize this relationship asserting that, “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).

Within Astrophil and Stella, the conflict and purpose of both Sidney’s and

Astrophil’s poetic pursuits can be examined through the aforementioned line of sonnet 1, “I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe” (5). The purpose of

Sidney’s writing, as already mentioned, resided in his ability to instruct or give insight into man’s pursuit for knowledge, via the earthly representation of it, and the conflict resided in the poet’s ability to do so truthfully in light of its “infected will”. If taken in more abstract terms, “fit words” still literally means his poetry, however, “the blackest face of woe” can represent the woeful face of humanity since its fall from grace. By seeking “fit words” to represent humanity’s woe, Sidney is in pursuit of attaining insight into the qualities that comprise it. Therefore, he is seeking elevated knowledge and wants to impart this to others through his poetry.

Contrastingly, Astrophil’s conflict resides in his pain or “blackest face of woe” over his love being rejected, and his purpose is to adequately and truthfully express his love for Stella. However, a remedy is found by both Sidney and

Astrophil with the lines “Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,/ ‘fool,’ said my muse to me; ‘look in thy heart, and write”(13-4). The reference to his truant pen can be read as an extension of his mind and its truancy being the inability to produce “fit words”, something that is later solved when he concludes to “look in thy heart, and write.” Astrophil comes to the realization that in order to truthfully portray the love he believes to hold for Stella, he need only to turn inward and write from his heart, using the knowledge obtained through his mastering of classical models of poetry.

The Book of the Courtier perpetuates the idea that a courtier’s love is an unrealistic one, but one that all men strive for. It is this unattainability that gives love, especially that of an unrequited nature, elevation above other earthly experiences as representative of man’s lost perfection. Astrophil’s relentless, yet unattainable, pursuit of earthly love reflects the same state of unattainability concerning man’s quest for wholeness. Without Astrophil’s suffering and experience with the loss, his love would not have possessed qualities representative of Sidney’s philosophical purpose. If Astrophil’s experience with loving Stella had been a joyous and reciprocal one, it would not have held the same implications towards man’s paradoxical problem, his innate need to pursue the unattainable. Astrophil’s pursuit of an unattainable love calls into question the relationship between passion and reason.

A.C. Hamilton comments on the relationship between reason and passion and how Sidney resolves the two in light of man’s pursuit towards the divine. The conflict in need of resolution resides in the fact that both unrequited love and the attainment of “the divine goodness” are inherently imperfect. Unrequited love being unattainable because of its nature, leaving the lover in a state of unrest and the pursuit of the divine being imperfect due to the fact that man has already fallen from grace and can never attain true perfection again. Turning to sonnet 49 of Astrophil and Stella, Sidney discusses the ability of the lover, Astrophil, to not be overthrown by passion and lose his reason.

Sonnet 49 of Sidney’s sequence represents Astrophil dualistically as both a horse and a rider. The metaphorical implications of this sonnet serve to model relationships of a more significant context within the sequence - Sidney’s position that the poet is both a student and teacher of virtue. Corresponding to the contradictory embodiment of the poet as both a student and teacher, Sidney’s reconciliation between reason and passion is uncovered when he writes:

I on my horse, and love on me, doth try

Our horsemanships, while by strange work I prove

A horseman to my horse, a horse to love;

And now man’s wrongs in me, poor beast, descry.

The reins wherewith my rider doth me tie

Are humbled thoughts, which bit of reverence move,

Curbed in with fear but, with gilt boss above

Of hope, which makes it seem fait to the eye.

The want is will; thou, fancy, saddle art,

Girt fast by memory; and while I spur

My horse, he spurs with sharp desire my heart;

He sits me fast, however I do stir;

And now hath made me to his hand so right

That in the manage myself takes delight.

(49)

Astrophil’s role as both a horse and rider can be understood to reflect

Sidney’s philosophical beliefs concerning the dual nature of the poet as both student and teacher. The inseparability of Astrophil’s identity from a horse and a master suggests Sidney’s philosophical stance that love and passion emanate a creative inspiration. This inspiration does not repress the lover but rather leads him to virtuous action that is harmoniously aligned with reason. As illustrated by

Sidney who concludes in his Defense the purpose of poetry to “ lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls . . . can be made capable of (Defense).

The choice of Sidney to employ the words lead and draw “illustrate a non-coercive energy” (Olmsted, 69) that pulls man towards good, almost instinctually. As long as the lover’s intentions reside in the pursuit of virtue and not in the conquest of the emotion of love, then love and passion allow for virtuous ascension rather than enslavement. A sentiment further elaborated on by Jennifer Bess, reasoning that

Astrophil actualizes the Defense’s emphasis on poetic invention as he participates in the inspired power of education. Astrophil is simultaneously improving upon nature for his own benefit, as a lover and for the sake of his audience, to enlighten and draw them to virtue, therefore fulfilling his role as a teacher (188).

Continuing with Sidney’s reconciliation of the traditionally contradictory nature of reason and passion, certain linguistic choices within sonnet 49 further allude to passions ability to inspire virtue. Sidney, when writing, “Git fast by memory; and while I spur/ My horse, he spurs with sharp desire my heart”, represents passion’s fire as a spur. He illustrates that passion does not threaten

21 reason but rather, as Sidney asserts, serves as inspiration, moving man towards virtuous action. Which, as Wendy Olmsted expands upon stating, “Only if the emotions are moved will people change their actions . . . . The split between knowledge and action can be healed by the grand style in which the force of matter moves the ardour of the heart” (64). Because, as Olmsted, who in referencing Anne Ferry, concludes the heart to be “ the source of emotion and the seat of asset” (68). Given that the heart emanates emotion, the fuel of love,

Sidney’s argument logically follows with his conclusion that passion, a manifestation of emotion and love, is conducive to the pursuit of reason. Without passion’s inspiring qualities man would be hindered in his pursuit of virtue.

Sidney’s reconciliation of passion’s instability and reason’s steadfastness, as observed in the context of Astrophil and Stella, can then be recontextualized to reflect the philosophical ideals of his Defense of Poesy. As observed by Olmsted who concludes:

The Defense, like classical, Christian, and Renaissance rhetorical

works, implies that the best way to move others is to be moved

oneself. Just as Valla asserts, ‘ he will not be able to kindle the love of

divine things in the minds of others who is himself cold to love,

Sidney urges that the cold cannot write passionately, and without

passion there is no persuasion, no movement towards knowledge

and virtuous action. (Olmsted 68)

Returning to The Book of The Courtier, Castiglione, in his fourth book, contemplates whether love’s quality as either unrequited or returned makes a difference in the suffering it is able to inflict upon the lover. W.R. Albury discusses this question in his analysis of Castiglione’s position on love, first regarding love that is reciprocated and secondly, love that is unrequited:

Thus he will either turn against the beloved, unjustly blaming her

the fact that physical contact cannot provide what his soul requires,

or else he will endlessly pursue her but become despondent because

of his inability to achieve satisfaction. (73)

Albury’s argument is both a reflection and departure from traditional Renaissance thought. Aligning with Castiglione’s argument, Albury invokes Petrarchan conventions to exemplify the sorrow bringing nature inherent to the general condition of love, in both its reciprocated and unrequited forms. Specifically, the depiction of the lovelorn protagonist now termed the Petrarchan lover, one who is perpetually unhappy in matters of the heart. Departing from Petrarch and

Castiglione’s similarities in thought, Albury expands his argument stating:

There, however, the emphasis is placed on the lady’s rejection of her

lover rather than on the dissatisfaction that result if she yields . . .

the Courtier takes for granted the unhappiness of the Petrarchan

lover if his lady rejects him, and argues that he will be equally

unhappy if she does not. (73)

This stance, taken by Albury, draws attention to a major difference between two of Sidney’s influences regarding the nature of unrequited love. Petrarch’s philosophical ideals, as interpreted by Sidney, instill the belief that love of an unrequited and sorrowful nature is an inherently more truthful representation of man’s loss of divine perfection. For as unrequited love is defined by its unattainability, so too is man’s pursuit of the divine. It can never be fully realized and thus leaves the lover, or in broader terms humanity, in a state of perpetual hollowness.

Castiglione, contrastingly, argues that it makes no difference whether the lover’s feelings are returned or not. Either way the lover will be inflicted with pain.

This is due to the realization that upon attaining the object of his affection, the poet is still left internally hollow. Though earthly love is made in the image of the divine, it is not the equal to its perfection, perfection that mankind once knew and still has knowledge of.

The authenticity of Sidney’s realized experiences with love as either unrequited or fulfilled have little bearing on the effectiveness of his poetry and its ability to exemplify the didactic quality of worthy poetry as outlined in his Defense.

The influences which shaped Sidney’s understanding of the relationships between reason and passion, art and nature, and the poet’s own identity, as both a student and teacher, are merely a synthesis of the traditional ideals of antiquity and of humanists such as Petrarch and Castiglione, all mediated through Sidney’s own poetic lens; one tinted by his Christian context.

Works Cited

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