Sidney's Sonneteering Virtue

In composing Astrophil and Stella , Philip Sidney builds on Wyatt&s;s narrative model, but he broadens the use of failure beyond a personal strategy into a fundamental element of English Petrarchism. In adapting these strategies to the sonnet sequence, he wrestles not just with failure but with the necessity of failure—with failure as a requirement of the Petrarchan model. Because falling short is a crucial aspect of the Petrarch&s;s urtext, Sidney builds it into his own sonnet sequence, but this is failure with a difference. As we move through Astrophil and Stella we can see Sidney progressively complicating his relationship to Petrarch. In order to be a Petrarchan hero, Astrophil must fail at love, but in order to move beyond the confinements of his fourteenth-century roots, Sidney must resolutely fail to be Petrarch. In the course of the sonnet sequence his deliberate distortions of Petrarchan expectations create a new model of subjectivity. Love is not simply rooted in failure, it is all but impossible without it. In the process, Sidney&s;s version of failure allows him to expand the possibilities of poetic subjectivity, creating in Astrophil the most complex rendering of a thinking subject to date, and effectively doing so in the cracks and lapses from the Petrarchan ideal.