The Courtly “I” of the English Renaissance:

A Study of Selfhood and Rhetorical Alienation

in Sixteenth Century Verse

Alexandra Caitlin Sweeney

Professor William Morse
English Honors Program
College Honors Program
2009 – 2010
 College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, Massachusetts

The Thesis of __Alexandra C. Sweeney____________ _____________________________

Entitled ______The Courtly “I” of the English Renaissance: A Study of Selfhood and Rhetorical

Alienation in 16th Century Verse_______________________________________

submitted to the Center for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with College Honors
at the College of the Holy Cross has been read and approved by the following:

__Professor William Morse______________ _______________ __

Advisor Advisor

___Professor Helen Whall____________ _____________________________________

Reader Reader

Approved for the College Honors Program:

_______________________________
Director of College Honors

____________________
Date
 College of the Holy Cross
Department of English
Worcester, Massachusetts

The Thesis of __Alexandra C. Sweeney____________ _____________________________

Entitled ______The Courtly “I” of the English Renaissance: A Study of Selfhood and Rhetorical

Alienation in 16th Century Verse_______________________________________

submitted to the English Department in partial fulfillment of the requirements for

graduation with English Honors, has been read and approved by the following:

Advisor______________________________________________________

Reader_______________________________________________________

Approved for the English Honors Program:

________________________________________________________________
Director of English Honors

___________________
Date
 ABSTRACT

This study focuses on the ways in which the development of a poet’s personal identity is

manifest in his strategic use of language. In particular, my work examines the relationship between

rhetoric and the formation of a sense of self as it pertains to the poetic and dramatic traditions of

the English Renaissance. I argue that while man fashions himself as a predominantly rhetorical

creature at the dawn of the Renaissance, an aspect of a central serious self is always present, and that

as we move further towards modernity, this equilibrium between homo rhetoricus and homo seriosus

progressively shifts towards the latter By the close of the sixteenth century, we see that the rhetorical

is no longer dominant or even a mode, but rather a linguistic tool employed by predominantly

serious individuals. With a chronological study of Renaissance literature, beginning with Sir Thomas

Wyatt’s lyrical poetry, proceeding to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, and

concluding with Shakespeare’s HenryIV Part I, this thesis illustrates a startling evolution in the ways

in which man has come to think of himself and his relationships to the greater world through a

strategic use of language.

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

§ Acknowledgements 1

§ Introduction Renaissance Courtly Rhetoric and the Phenomenon 2 7

of Personal Identity

§ Chapter I Wyatt’s Rhetorical Style and the Potential for 8 28

Expression of a Serious Inner Self

§ Chapter II Sidney’s Exploration of the Tensions Troubling 29 56

both Style and Selfhood in Astrophil and Stella

§ Coda Shakespeare’s HenryIV, Part I and the Dominance 57 64

of the Serious Self in Early Modernity

§ Bibliography 65 68
 1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First and foremost, I offer my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Bill Morse, for the
invaluable guidance, advice, and knowledge that he has generously shared with me not only this year,
but over the course of my undergraduate career. His true passion for the literature of the English
Renaissance fostered my own interest, inspiring me to embark on this study. Furthermore, I deeply
appreciate his dedication to this project, and am grateful for the many long hours spent discussing
Wyatt’s rhetorical lyrics or debating Sidney’s self-presentation in Astrophil and Stella. Our
conversations always challenged my level of understanding, and continually increased my capacity to
think critically, all the while deepening my desire to learn. It has been an honor and a pleasure to
work with him.
I would also like to like to thank my reader, Professor Helen Whall, for her input and
encouragement throughout the entire process (and then some). She has been a truly generous
mentor throughout my time at Holy Cross. Likewise, special thanks is due to Professor Debra
Gettelman, Director of the English Honors Program, for her unwavering support and enthusiasm,
particularly in the early stages of this project, which are necessarily the most daunting. I also
appreciate the guidance of Professor MatthewSchmalz, Director of the College Honors Program.
Finally, I am eternally grateful for the love and support of my family and friends who have
patiently endured this process with me and provided endless encouragement. I am truly fortunate to
be surrounded by such invested and involved individuals as my parents, Maria and Kevin, who never
once hesitated to spend a moment listening to my questions and concerns, despite the esoteric
nature of my study. Their moral support has been invaluable. And of course, my sincerest thanks to
Steve, who has helped with this project beyond measure by acting as my sounding-board and
personal cheerleader from the start. All of my love and gratitude are due for his daily reassurances.
 2

Introduction:

Renaissance Courtly Rhetoric and the Phenomenon

of Personal Identity in Wyatt, Sidney, and Shakespeare

We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,

Neither mortal nor immortal,
So that with freedomof choice and with honor,
As though the maker and molder of thyself,
Thou mayst fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
- Oration on the Dignityof Man, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola 1

One of the most fascinating phenomena to come about during the English Renaissance was

the drastic shift in man’s concept of his personal identity, and the way in which this change

registered in the courtly poetry of the period.2 Broadly speaking, we begin to see at the very dawn of

the era a newfascination with the notion that personal identities can be deliberately produced or

fashioned, a process Stephen Greenblatt calls “the achievement of … a distinctive personality, a

characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving.” 3 This

understanding of man as the maker of his self, when combined with an aristocratic revival of

classical antiquity’s emphasis on the art of rhetoric, resulted in a flourishing of multivalence in

language and character.4 Particularly in the courtly milieu, poets and their royal patrons prized

rehearsed spontaneity, wore an endless array of social masks, and relished the playful multiplicity

available in words, especially as a reflection of the self. Clearly, this rhetorical ideal of life stands in

direct contrast with the worldviewof modern Western society, where the serious mode of speech

and identity is considered normal. We value consistency and sincerity over protean changeability or

1 Pico della Mirandola. “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” Trans. Elizabeth Livermore Forbes. The Renaissance Philosophyof
Man. ed. Ernst Casser. (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1948) 225.
2 For a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of identity in the Renaissance, good sources to begin with are

Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy(London: Routledge, 1985); Katherine Eisaman Maus’ Inwardness and the Theater of
the English Renaissance. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985); Stephen Greenblatt. Renaissance Self Fashioning: From
More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).
3 Greenblatt, Fashioning2.
4 For a more comprehensive explanation of the “rhetorical ideal of life,” see Richard Lanham. The Motives of Eloquence.

(NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1976).

 3

duplicity, and appreciate a tight correlation between a person’s words, character, and action.

Recognizing that the Renaissance is largely regarded as the dawn of modernity, we are apt to wonder

exactly when man underwent the transition from a predominantly rhetorical sense of identity to

highly valuing a serious central self. This study aims to explore that very question by paying careful

attention to the ways in which courtly poets’ understanding of selfhood, made manifest in their

strategic use of language, develops over the course of the sixteenth century. 5

Many sophisticated critics, like Stephen Greenblatt, Francis Barker,6 and Jean Howard,7

maintain that writers of the English Renaissance exhibit very little serious interiority in terms of

personal identity. Discussing the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt, Greenblatt insists that “there is no

privileged sphere of individuality in Wyatt, set off from linguistic convention, from the shaping

forces of religious and political power.”8 In this same vein, Catherine Belsey even goes so far as to

protest the critical technique of those who make the case for characters’ central identities in

Renaissance drama, believing that anything to this effect is really an imposition of the modern reader

rather than a feature of the Renaissance text.9 Jonathan Goldberg contends that identity in the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not something intrinsic, but rather that “the individual derived

a sense of self largely from external matrices,” and that one’s place in the world was one and the

same with self-definition.10 Though the specifics of their arguments differ, on the whole these

scholars agree that a modern central self is simply not present to any significant degree in the

5 The burgeoning phenomenon of constructing a self through the premeditated and strategic use of language was
particularly magnified in the milieu of the royal court, the central locus of the shaping forces of political and social power
(Greenblatt, Fashioning, 120). Thus, if we approach the courtly poetry of courtiers and diplomats, such as Sir Thomas
Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, with the understanding that art does not stand independent of the cultural, social, historic,
and political atmosphere which gave rise to it, we are able to explore the ways in which a courtly poet’s finely tuned
perception of the manipulative power of words and phrases impacted his development of a central and genuine sense of
self.
6 See Francis Baker. The Tremulous Private Body. (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1984). 31, 58.
7 See Jean Howard. “The NewHistoricism of Renaissance Studies.” English LiteraryRenaissance 16 (1986), 15.
8 Greenblatt, Fashioing, 120.
9 See Catherine Belsey. The Subject of Tragedy: Identityand Difference in Renaissance Drama. (NewYork: Routledge, 1985) 48.
10 See Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) 86.
 4

Renaissance, and that man is entirely dominated by the rhetorical mode from this age through to the

eighteenth century.

This line of reasoning stems in part from the understanding that self-aware intellectuals, such

as the Italian philosopher and humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, were conceptualizing man’s

identity as utterly malleable, and without a fundamental core as early as the 1480s. In his famous

manifesto, Oration on the Dignityof Man, which became widely known throughout Europe by the

height of the Renaissance, Pico expressed an innovative vision of mankind as “the maker and

molder” of himself, a creature given the power to “fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt

prefer.”11 This significant and novel understanding of personal identity as transformable through

human will is one that truly blossomed with the dawn of the sixteenth century and the rise of

aristocratic court culture. The popularity of ideas such as Pico’s likewise coincided with the

Renaissance revival of the classic art of rhetoric, which also promoted a conception of the self as

flexible and as having indefinite dimensions. Linguistic tutoring of this age taught men not only a

way of speaking, but also a way of being. This quintessential logocentric man of the Renaissance, to

whom Richard Lanham refers as homo rhetoricus, never develops a natural verbal spontaneity. 12 His

use of language is always premeditated; his behavior, performance. His ‘role’ or identity is dictated

by the demands of a given social situation, and he never subscribes to a single value structure or

empirical viewof the world. The rhetorical man thinks first of mastering the rules of the current

game, and develops a natural agility in changing orientations. With the perpetual motive of using

words for delight and persuasion, the ideal Renaissance courtier develops a connoisseurship of

language which enables him to manipulate reality while perpetually adopting various roles or

personas that obscure and refract his central self to suit his objectives.

11 Pico della Mirandola, 225.

12 Richard Lanham. The Motives of Eloquence: LiteraryRhetoric in the Renaissance (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1976) 2.
 5

However, I largely disagree with the evidently popular critical assertion that the cultural and

literary dominance of the rhetorical ideal during the Renaissance precluded man from possessing or

expressing a serious dimension of his personal identity. Although writers of the sixteenth century

lacked modern vocabularies for what we call the ‘real’ self or the ‘inner life,’ they still conceived of a

serious dimension of identity and referenced it in their work. Asserting that people of any era can

never be completelyserious or completelyrhetorical, Richard Lanham notes, “the Western self has from

the very beginning been composed of a shifting and perpetually uneasy combination of homo

rhetoricus and homo seriosus, of a social self and a central self …[and] it is their business to contend for

supremacy.” 13 In this study, I take particular interest in the notion of a tension in the Renaissance

man between this multifaceted rhetorical existence and the emergence of what we may call a ‘central

self’ or irreducible identity, that nowtends to characterize our modern mode. In subsequent

chapters of this thesis, I aim to illustrate howthis central conflict is expressed through various works

of Renaissance poetry and drama.

On the most fundamental level, this project is a study of the ways in which the development

of a poet’s personal identity is manifest in his strategic use of language. In particular, I explore the

relationship between rhetoric and the formation of a sense of self as it pertains to the poetic and

dramatic traditions of the English Renaissance. Contrary to critics like Greenblatt and Belsey, I argue

that while man fashions himself as a predominantly rhetorical creature at the dawn of the

Renaissance, an aspect of a central serious self is always present, and that as we move further

towards modernity, this equilibrium between homo rhetoricus and homo seriosus progressively shifts

towards the latter. By the close of the sixteenth century, we see that the rhetorical is no longer

dominant or even a mode, but rather a linguistic tool employed by predominantly serious

individuals. With a chronological study of Renaissance literature, beginning with Sir Thomas Wyatt’s

13 Lanham, 6.
 6

lyrical poetry, proceeding to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, and concluding

with Shakespeare’s HenryIV Part I, I will illustrate a startling evolution in the ways in which man has

come to think of himself and his relationships to the greater world through a strategic use of

language.

In the first chapter on Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542), a transitional figure between the late

Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, I begin with a discussion of the poet’s historical identity and

the factors which arguably influenced his relationship with language and self-conception. As a

diplomat and courtier of King Henry VIII, Wyatt produced poetry for the court in an environment

where fashioning the right kind of personal identity was a matter of life and death. We see from the

voice in his verse that while he largely rejects such a static molding of identity as foolish and

disadvantageous, Wyatt nevertheless recognizes and understands the concept of a serious central

self. Both the style and content of his poetry point to an immersion in and mastery of the rhetorical

mode. However, often overlooked poems, such as “Each Man Me Telleth,” and “It May be Good,

Like it Who List,” arguably contain a longing for the freedom on the inner self, derailing

Greenblatt’s assumption that Wyatt’s personal identity was bereft of a serious dimension.

Moving chronologically, the second chapter of this study focuses on Sir Philip Sidney’s

renowned sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (early 1580s), written roughly half a century after

Wyatt’s lyrics, just before the peak of the English Renaissance. Sidney’s innovative poetry cycle

serves as the primary text for this section of the thesis because while it is a meditation on courtly

love on one level, it is also on another level a dramatization of man’s struggle to fashion an identity

in the aristocratic milieu. My argument, supported by sonnets such as 1, 3, 15, 34, 45, and 93, is that

by this point in history, man’s preoccupation with the rhetorical ideal has yielded to a concentration

on the task of mediating the central and social selves. This fixation on man’s need to negotiate

aspects of his identity, as seen through Sidney’s persona of Astrophil, indicates that the serious
 7

dimension of selfhood has become a legitimate threat to the traditional supremacy of the rhetorical

mode since the time of Wyatt.

Rounding out this discussion of the development of selfhood and language over the course

of the Renaissance, I conclude my study with a coda on Shakespeare’s popular history play, Henry

IV, Part I (1597). Though the dramatic medium sets this text slightly at odds with the work of Wyatt

and Sidney, it is nevertheless important to this thesis for the way it illustrates man’s conception of

self at the close of the Renaissance. By exploring the character of Prince Hal as a fundamentally

serious individual who only uses the rhetorical as a device, and not a mode of being, we see that only

fifteen years after the work of Sidney, man has already undergone even more of a shift in his

understanding of selfhood. Arguably, the weight and priority that we see given to the central self in

Shakespeare’s work indicates that by the end of the sixteenth century, man had become a

predominantly serious – and an increasingly more modern – creature. Moreover, while many critics

understand Shakespeare’s HenryIV plays as one of the first true attempts at illustrating the

importance of man’s interiority, this study provides the necessary context to understand that such an

interest was really in effect as early as Wyatt and Sidney.

 8

Chapter I:

Wyatt s Rhetorical Style and the Potential for Expression of a Serious Inner Self

Throughout the world, if it were sought,

Fair words enough a man shall find.
Theybe good cheap; theycost right naught;
Their substance is but onlywind.
But well to sayand so to mean –
That sweet accord is seldomseen.
-Epigram LXX, Sir Thomas Wyatt 1

Chapter Introduction

As an early poet of the English Renaissance, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542) stands apart

from his contemporaries in having endured as a prominent figure in the tradition of English

literature from the early sixteenth century through to modernity, despite the changing tastes and

trends of the times. Most often celebrated for his revolutionary introduction of the Italian sonnet

form to the English language, Wyatt is a highly rewarding figure to examine in relation to the

fashioning of personal identity through language during this period. Though his verse – regarded as

some of the best written in England during the Henrician Age – has come under the scrutiny of

various mid-twentieth century critics like H. A. Mason, 2 Hallet Smith, 3 and C.S. Lewis 4 for being

drab, barren, and too much an anonymous product of courtly convention, recent attention from

scholars like Kenneth Muir, 5 Stephen Greenblatt, 6 Anne Ferry, 7 and Elizabeth Heale 8 has

collectively reaffirmed the notion that there is a thought-provoking, if flawed, persona to be found

emanating from his work. Described by Patricia Thompson as “in some ways the heir to the English

1 Wyatt. “Throughout the world.” No. LXX in Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, R. A. Rebholz, ed. (London:
Penguin) 1978. 101.
2 See H.A. Mason. Humanism and Poetryin the EarlyTudor Period. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) 1959.
3 See Hallet Smith. Elizabethan Poetry. (Boston: Harvard University Press) 1952.
4 See C.S. Lewis. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. (Oxford: Clarendon Press) 1954.
5 See Kenneth Muir. Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press) 1963.
6 See Stephen Greenblatt. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)

1980.
7 See Anne Ferry, The Inward Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. (Chicago: Chicago University Press,

1983).
8 See Elizabeth Heale. Wyatt, Surrey, & Early Tudor Poetry. (London: Longman) 1998.
 9

Middle Ages, [and] … in others the Tudor ‘newman,’” 9 Wyatt has also remained a noteworthy poet

of the early Renaissance as a result of having participated in an important cultural moment at the

dawn of a formative century which would, in later years, host a fundamental transformation in man’s

relation to himself, his word, and the greater world. His poetry is relevant and important to this

study not only for its exemplary form, but also for the way in which it captures certain attitudes and

ideas about self-fashioning and personal modes of identity at this particular point in English history.

Specifically, we will see from the voice in Wyatt’s verse that while he recognizes and understands the

notion of a serious central self, he largely rejects it in favor of self-fashioning in the rhetorical mode.

However, there is a telling flicker in often overlooked poems like “Each Man Me Telleth” and “It

May be Good, Like it Who List” of a longing for the freedom of the inner self.

Historical Context

Before we move on to examine howWyatt conceives of the “I” in his verse, it is beneficial

to first develop an understanding of the poet’s actual historical identity and the factors which

influenced his relationship with language and self-conception. Around 1503, Sir Thomas Wyatt was

born at Allington Castle near Maidstone in Kent to Sir Henry Wyatt, a well-favored knight who had

risen in King Henry VII’s court as an agent, administrator, and soldier, eventually securing the

honorable position of Keeper of the King’s Jewels. Like his father, Thomas would also come to

serve in the English Royal Court, nowof Henry VIII, in this same post after completing his studies

at St. John’s College of Cambridge University, as well as at Oxford. Wyatt’s high degree of learning,

deftness with the flexibility of words, and outstanding fluency in multiple languages seems to stand

behind his perpetual promotion during his time of service to Henry VIII. Starting out at as Clerk of

the King’s Jewels in 1534, Wyatt successively entered a career of diplomacy which included such

posts as High Marshal of the garrison city of Calais, Chief Ewer at the coronation ceremony of

9 Patricia Thompson. Sir Thomas Wyatt and His Background. (Stanford: Stanford University Press) 1964. ix.
 10

Anne Boleyn, sheriff of Kent, and foreign ambassador of the King in Italy and Spain. In an elegy

written upon his death in 1542, Wyatt’s close friend and fellowpoet, Earl Henry Howard of Surrey,

remembers him for having “A Tonge that served in foraine realms his king; / Whose curtoise talke

to virtue dyd enflame / Each noble harte, a worthy guyde to brynge / Our Englysshe youth, by

travayle unto fame” (ll. 17-20). 10 This patriotic account of unwavering allegiance to crown and realm

echoes Wyatt’s own words in “Tagus, Farewell”: “My Kyng, my Contry, alone for whome I lyve”

(ll.8). 11 Heale notes that the portrait of Wyatt which emerges from Surrey’s verse is “a model of a

certain kind of service to the state: counselor, diplomat and writer, devoted selflessly to the common

weal,” though such service was not always justly repaid. 12

That Wyatt was accused of wrong-doing or arrested by the King nearly as frequently as he

received promotions within the court speaks to the fickleness and instability of the high-stakes

political and social environment, which undoubtedly had an impact on Wyatt’s rhetorical sense of

self. Though Wyatt was “endeared to the king … who was as much pleased with his repartees as his

politics” 13 according to Thomas Warton, the royal court of the Renaissance was nevertheless a

milieu characterized by “tensely conjoined” elements of “playfulness and danger… idealism and

cynicism, aggression and vulnerability, self revelation and hypocrisy,” as Greenblatt reminds us. 14

Though he was a trusted knight and agent, not even Wyatt’s elite status as he who “some work of

Fame / … dayly wrought, to turn to Brytayns gayne” (ll.7-8) could keep him safe from dangerous

accusations of “envy,” “gyle,” and “dysdayne” (ll.4, 24, 2) .15 In 1536, Wyatt was imprisoned in the

Tower of London by Henry VIII as one of Anne Boleyn’s many suspected adulterous lovers, and

10 Surrey. “Wyatt Resteth Here.” English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse. Richard Sylvester, ed. (NewYork: W. W. Norton) 1974.
209 – 210.
11 Wyatt. “Tagus, Farewell.” English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse. 154 – 5.
12 Heale, 20.
13 Thomas Warton, “Warton on Wyatt From The Historyof English Poetry(1781).” Thomas Wyatt: The Critical Heritage.

Patricia Thompson, ed. (London: Routledge) 1974. 40 – 46.

14 Greenblatt, 137.
15 Surrey. “Wyatt Resteth Here.”
 11

may have watched her (or her suitors’) execution from his cell (as alluded to in “Who Lyst His

Wealthe and Eas Retayne”). Though the facts of this risky romance between the poet courtier and

Queen are nowindistinguishable from legend, it does seem probable from Wyatt’s poems like “If

Waker Care,” Whoso List to Hount” and “What Wourde is that that Chaungeth Not” that he was at

the very least one of Anne’s admirers. Two years later in 1538, Wyatt became ensnared by political

cunning once again as his fellowcourtier, foreign ambassador, and competitor Edmund Bonner

accused him of treason. As Heale correctly asserts, “Back-biting and the spying of fellowdiplomats

was only one of the dangers attendant on service abroad.” 16 Wyatt cleverly used the patronage of

Thomas Cromwell, the Earl of Essex and Chief Minister of Henry VIII, to get the charges

dismissed, but Bonner revived the accusations once more in 1541 after Cromwell had fallen from

power and been executed. Wyatt was arrested and thrown in the Tower, where he put his “Hand,

that taught what might be saide in rime; / That refte Chaucer the glorye of his wytte,” (ll. 13-14) 17 to

use in composition of a persuasive ‘Defense’ that he hoped would save his life if ever he stood trial.

Ironically, Wyatt was freed on this occasion not by his rhetorical skill, but by another political

alliance; Surry petitioned his cousin Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, for his friend’s

release. Ostensibly, a large part of navigating such a fickle atmosphere lay in a courtier’s ability to

continually craft and re-craft his self-presentation as well as social connections so that he could

appear to others in the most self-advantageous light possible.

Apart from the political realm, contemporary accounts also showus that Wyatt had a highly

multidimensional persona like that of a true Renaissance Man. Not only a gifted diplomat, Wyatt was

also a prolific literary mind remembered for his contribution of the sonnet, a court entertainer

distinguished by his lyrical repartees, a knight renowned for his valiant foreign service, a sportsman

singled out for his competitive spirit, a successful University scholar, and chivalric lover. As

16 Heale, 15.
17 Surrey. “Wyatt Resteth Here.”
 12

Greenblatt remarks, “in … cultural competition, [Sir Thomas Wyatt] proved himself a superior

performer.” 18 In his elegy, Surry echoes this sentiment of Wyatt’s multifaceted character by

describing his masculinity as both brazen and reserved, noting that his friend had “A Vysage, sterne

and mylde,” “A valiaunt Corps, where force and beautye met,” and that he was quintessentially “Of

manhodes shape, where [nature] the mold did loos” (ll. 9, 29, 32).19 Similarly, the sixteenth century

English antiquary John Leland calls Wyatt “the noble mold of cunning Nature” and in a funeral

song, “Nature made Wyatt tall with powerful muscles, / And sinews strong; adding thereto a face /

As beautiful as any. On his brow/ Serene, played joyful lights, like starbeams bright” (ll. 14, 4-7).20

From these accounts, we certainly get the impression that Sir Thomas Wyatt was to his

contemporaries everything a man of the Renaissance should be. As we will see in examining Wyatt’s

verse, his well roundedness and mastery of many facets of courtly life can be seen as analogous to

his rhetorical self-conception.

Wyatt’s Recognition of Man’s Serious and Rhetorical Dimensions

Turning nowtowards Sir Thomas Wyatt’s literary art and the relationship between self-

fashioning and language, we must start out with recognition of the historical fact that sixteenth

century and even early seventeenth century writers simply lacked modern vocabularies for what we

nowcall the “real self” or “inner life.” As Anne Ferry notes in her critical study The “Inward”

Language, the terms we use to locate aspects of identity – particularly those pertaining to the struggle

between the interior and exterior, central and social, serious and rhetorical selves – were fewer than

today. Similarly, modern phrases which were also available at the dawn of the Renaissance, such as

“individual” and “self,” carried different meanings than they do presently. Ferry notes that the

adjective “individual,” though rarely used during this period, described the quality of being

18 Greenblatt, 120.
19 Surrey. “Wyatt Resteth Here.”
20 Muir, 267.
 13

indivisible. 21 According to the Oxford English Dictionary(O.E.D.), this word was not in popular use

with reference to self-identity until nearly half-way through the seventeenth century. 22 Likewise, the

development of the usage of “person” is also telling. While the word has always been used to refer

to the physical entity of the human being, today we tend to think of it in reference to the unique and

elemental self particular to a given individual. However, in the mid-sixteenth century, the most

popular definition of “person,” apart from “a man or woman considered as a physical presence,” 23

was “a role or character assumed in real life… a persona; a semblance or guise.” 24 This development

of denotation over time highlights the difference between our natural modern orientation towards

the central, serious self and the Renaissance proclivity towards the dramatic rhetorical mode.

However, to equate the limited linguistic resources in the English language for articulating

the phenomenon of identity during the early Renaissance with a general lack of awareness regarding

selfhood and individuality is to significantly underestimate the self-conscious nature of the period.

Sir Thomas Wyatt’s courtly poetry, which is often dedicated to the expression of personal conflict in

sense of self, is testament to this fact. Though Wyatt probably had no vocabulary equivalent for

what critics like Richard Lanham in Motives of Eloquence would later come to call “a central,

irreducible self” or a “social, rhetorical self,” the sentiments of tension regarding the “I” in his verse

do, I think, give us reason to believe that the early Renaissance poet was acutely aware of these

modes of personal identity.25 Support for this understanding is readily found in one of Wyatt’s

21 Ferry, 34.
22 “individual, a.3 ”Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.
23 “person, n. 3b ”O.E.D
24 “person, n.1” O.E.D.
25 It should be made clear that in drawing conclusions from his poetry about Wyatt as a Renaissance individual, I do not

wish to make the unacceptable mistake of conflating author with speaker of the work, but rather operate from the
understanding that “the poem itself is a kind of agent, sent forth to perform the bidding of its master … The poem [may
not be] the direct expression of the speaker’s mind … but it is governed by its overarching purpose which is to enhance
its creator’s personal position” (Greenblatt, 142).
 14

rondeaux well known for illustrating the similarities between disillusionment in love and diplomatic

service, “What Vaileth Trouth?” 26

What vaileth trouth? Or by it to take payn?

To strive by stedfastness for to be tayne?
To be juste and true, and fle from dowbleness?
Sythens all alike, where rueleth craftiness,
Rewarded is boeth fals and plain. 5
Sonest he spedeth that moost can fain,
True meaning hert is had in disdain.
Against deceipte and dowbleness,
What vaileth trouth?

Deceved is he by crafty trayn 10

That meaneth no gile and doeth remain
Within the trapp, withoute redresse,
But for to love, lo, suche a maistres,
Whose crueltie nothing can refrain,
What vaileth trouth? 15

Like many of Wyatt’s poems, this lyric finds its immediate subject matter in the literary and

cultural tradition of courtly love, or l’amor courtois as Gaston Paris originally coined it, which is a

highly stylized system of chivalric devotion on the behalf of a knightly figure for his nearly divine

beloved lady. This ritual of sorts originated with the troubadours of the eleventh and twelfth

centuries in France and is closely related to the notion of fin amor. In the noble institution of courtly

love, the virtuous lover devotes himself to the service of the lady, making himself her subject and

thus modeling the feudal relationships between a vassal and his lord. Accordingly in this lyrical

poem, we see that Wyatt’s speaker is a purportedly sincere lover whose gift of a “true meaning hert”

(7) to his beloved “maistres” (13) has ultimately been rejected, casting him into disillusionment after

the endurance of much “deceipt and dowbleness” (8). Though the source of the speaker’s cynicism

is finally cited in the fourth line of the second stanza as the woman he worships, critics like Jon

Robinson and Stephen Greenblatt value this Wyatt poem for the way in which the delay of her

26No. 1 (p.129) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology. This poem appears in the Egerton MS and the
Wyatt section of Tottel’s Miscellany, meaning that it is highly probable that it belonged to Wyatt. For a useful discussion of
authorship and authority of manuscripts, see Rebholz’s Preface to Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems.
 15

introduction creates an intentional space of ambiguity where we may insert more controversial or

political subjects as the source of the harmful “crafty trayn” (10), or cunning stratagem designed to

victimize the speaker. 27 Indeed, it does reveal a certain unsettling interchangeability between the

public and private spheres of Renaissance life, which we see traces of even in Wyatt’s own

biography.

Yet for our purposes of exploring the development of identity through language, Sir Thomas

Wyatt’s lyric poem “What Vaileth Trouth?” holds even greater resource in its illustration and

evaluation of two primary modes of self-fashioning. Throughout the rondeau, Wyatt sets up a

dichotomy between the identity of the courtly male speaker and that of his beloved which arguably

corresponds to Lanham’s notion of the central serious self, and the social rhetorical self. Lamenting

the apparent purposelessness of “trouth” (1) and “stedfastness” (2) when held up against the

prevailing social values of “gile” (11), “fain[ing]” (6), “craftiness” (4) and “dowbleness” (3), the

speaker actively seeks to align himself with the virtues of stability, honesty, and genuineness. The

reference to his “true meaning hert” (7) directly alludes to a kind of sincerity and interiority that we

associate with the serious self; “hert” or “heart” can mean not only “will or desire,” 28 but also “the

seat of one’s inmost thoughts and secret feelings; one’s inmost being; the depths of the soul; the

soul, the spirit.” 29 Ostensibly, the speaker implies that he has presented his central self, “juste and

true” (3), to the object of his affection, and received not the same honesty in return, but rather

“disdain” (7). In addition to occupying the candid position, the speaker also frames himself

passively, using his posture of subservience as though it were a corollary of the genuine nature of his

central self. In line 7, we see that his heart is not actively given but instead “is had,” and in line 10 we

27 Greenblatt, 143. See also Jon Robinson. “The ‘Honestye’ of Thomas Wyatt’s Court Critique and the Unstable ‘I’ of
his Verse.” Court Politics, Culture, and Literature in Scotland and England 1500 – 1540. (Hampshire: Ashgate
Publishing) 2008. 106.
28 “heart, n.7 ”O.E.D.
29 “heart, n.6a. ”O.E.D.
 16

see the same construction as the speaker is acted upon by outside forces: “Deceved is he by crafty

trayn.” The speaker’s submissive position cultivates a sense of blamelessness for having landed

“Within the trapp, withoute redresse” (12), as a result of simply having loved another.

Just as the speaker makes himself out to inhabit the serious end of the identity continuum

through his use of language, the identity of his “maistres” (14) seems to fall on the opposite

rhetorical end. The masculine persona links his love with words such as “dowbleness” (3), “crueltie”

(14), “decipte” (8) and “gile” (12), which negatively invoke the kind of crafty protean mutability

classically associated with the rhetorical stance. Likewise, the fact that the woman has little interest in

the kind of transcendent truth the speaker claims to put forth, and instead simply seeks to

manipulate the current situation for the purpose of securing dominance also points to her rhetorical

self-conception. As Lanham notes, the rhetorical individual “has dwelt not in a single value-structure

but in several… [and] is thus committed to no single construction of the world; much rather, to

prevailing at the game at hand.” 30 While the speaker is concerned with discerning a true reality, we

see that the lady is oriented toward manipulating it in order to gain the upper hand in this power

relation, as she manages to figuratively keep the masculine speaker “Within the trapp, withoute

redresse” (12). Wyatt’s use of the recurring noun “dowbleness” (3, 8), which can be defined as

“being ‘double’ in action or conduct; duplicity, deceitfulness, and treachery,” seems particularly tied

to the rhetorical mode, as it suggests a multiplicity of self or character that stands at odds with the

“stedfastness” (2) of the “True meaning hert” (7).

Furthermore, Wyatt’s conception of the rhetorical mode seems to pertain not just to the

lady, but to a more encompassing general atmosphere. Returning for a moment to Robinson’s and

Greenblatt’s preoccupation with the deferral of the mistress as subject, we see that the speaker’s

highly abstract tone of the broad questions and proverbial statements in the first stanza paints a

30 Lanham, 4.
 17

portrait not of a particular individual, but of a complete milieu which the rhetorical “maistres” of

line 14 then comes to embody. She “whose crueltie nothing can refrain” (14) becomes emblematic

of a world where maxims like “he spedeth that moost can fain” (6) (or, “he who can most aptly

profess falsehoods will prosper”) comprise the social and ethical constitution. Wyatt seems to be

putting forth in this courtly rondeau an isolated speaker oriented towards a serious self-conception,

who seeks legitimate connection in a predominantly rhetorical world “where rueleth craftiness” (4)

and “Rewarded is boeth fals and plain” (5); the inevitable outcome of such opposite orientations

towards the world, the self, and language, Wyatt tells us, is bound to end in bitter disillusionment for

he who “meaneth no gile” (11). While he seems to not only recognize but also value what we might

presently call man’s serious “I,” Wyatt’s perpetual and tormenting question, “What vaileth trouth?”

points towards his lamentation of the dominant rhetorical mode, as it leaves no safe place for the

central self to be expressed. This rondeau, in addition to being a piece of light entertainment for a

group of sophisticated courtiers, convinces us that the poet has personal investment in it as it

illustrates Wyatt’s familiarity with the complex tensions of personal identity.

Wyatt’s Preference for the Rhetorical Ideal

While it is nowclear from the contents of his verse that Wyatt possessed an intimate

understanding of the two primary modes of self-fashioning – the serious and the rhetorical – we are

instinctively left to wonder about what might drive the poet to create such a delicate and inept, if

morally superior, masculine voice in his work. If putting forth one’s “True meaning hert” (7) only

begets “crueltie” (14), then why would Wyatt allowhis speaker to adopt such a vulnerable mode of

self-expression and become victimized? Especially when we consider Greenblatt’s astute assertion

that, “diplomacy … along with courtship seems to have influenced Wyatt’s conception of the

essential function of discourse, which he grasped as a shifting, often devious series of strategic

maneuvers designed to enhance the power of the speaker. … [The] poem itself is a kind of agent,
 18

sent forth to perform the bidding of its master,” 31 we feel as though Wyatt must have had a

purposeful agenda in fashioning his male speaker – an extension (to some degree) of his own self –

in such a manner. Robinson, who buys into the innocence and sincerity of the speaker, believes that

this poem can be read as a truthful reflection of the poet’s own life experience:

The repetition of the question, “What vaileth truth?” implies that the speaker really wants
to knowthe worth of honesty in an environment dominated by treachery. This suggests that
Wyatt, although an active courtier, is a decent man trying to find an honest and appropriate
stance towards his experience. 32

Yet something tells us that a man immersed in such a complex world, surrounded by multivalent

individuals like the “maistres” (14), would resist writing poetry as simple as Robinson seems to

suggest. Tradition provides another, perhaps more plausible, answer, since masculine singleness

contrasted with feminine doubleness was a popular trope of Renaissance literature.33 Though

recalling that Wyatt possessed a connoisseurship of language and took pleasure from exploiting the

resources of words as a courtier, diplomat, ambassador, knight, entertainer, and lover, it seems

counterintuitive that the poem should have only one level of meaning. For such a sophisticated

artist, the black and white dichotomy of man as unwavering and honest and woman as changeable

and treacherous likewise seems too primitive to constitute the full picture.

Returning to the specific language of “What Vaileth Trouth” and paying particular attention

to the aural quality of the words (since Wyatt’s art was most likely intended to be heard out loud

rather than read on the page), we realize that Wyatt has not created as much of a serious and feeble

masculine persona as we first apprehended; the sincere stance of the speaker in this rondeau is not

real, but rather a crafty tool used by a rhetorical individual to dissemble his true intent of self-

promotion and retribution against the lady who rejected his advances. The element of the poem

which alerts us in to the speaker’s rhetorical strategy is the operative word “vaileth” (1,9,15) found in

31 Greenblatt, 142.
32 Robinson, 106.
33 Greenblatt, 141.
 19

the refrain. If we listen carefully, we notice that “valieth,” repeated three times throughout, is a

modern homophone of “veileth,” meaning “to cover, enshroud, or screen as or in the manner of a

veil; to serve as a veil to (something).” 34 According to the O.E.D., “veil” was actually a homonym of

“vail” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 35 and shared that same spelling, though it

retained the meaning of “to conceal.” If we apply this alternate definition to the speaker’s perpetual

cry, “What vaileth trouth?” the phrase morphs from a sad and disillusioned lament of a steadfast

man to a drastically different boastful declaration of a rhetorical master: “What is my purported

stance of truthfulness in this poem allowing me to ‘veil’ or keep hidden?”

The answer to this form of the question is that ‘truth’ hides the speaker’s actual objectives,

which are significantly less than “juste and true” (3). On one level, he laments the rhetorical and

protean mode of self-fashioning in the Renaissance world that makes personal relationships

treacherous; on a more covert level, the male speaker posits this serious self as a façade for his

rhetorical aims of slandering his mistress and promoting himself above her as the ultimate master of

manipulation of perception through language. Throughout the first stanza, Wyatt’s speaker implies

that the relative value of truth is worth nothing in a milieu where “deceipte and dowbleness” (8) are

central. Yet when we see in the second stanza that the speaker’s convenient alignment with all that is

just and genuine allows him to malign without blame the woman who would not accept his amorous

affections, we begin to question our first estimation of truth as useless. It is the speaker’s artful self-

fashioning as “he … / That meaneth no gile” (10-11) that allows him to besmirch the lady as a

wicked female “whose crueltie nothing can refrain” (14), and humbly exalt his own moral

righteousness. As Richard Lanham notes, “The real deceiver is the plain stylist who pretends to put

all his cards on the table. Clarity, then, is a cheat, an illusion. To rhetorical man at least, the world is

34 “veil, v.3 ” O.E.D.

35 See Forms under “veil, v.1 ” O.E.D.
 20

not clear, it is made clear. The clear stylist does it with a conjuring trick.” 36 We see that the speaker is

essentially committing the same act of “dowbleness” (3) that he accuses all others of utilizing to

unfairly gain the upper hand. The literal truth may be of no service or profit, but a constructed truth,

like a constructed self, “a manner that denies its own cunning,” 37 ostensibly has immense advantage.

While this crafty technique of “veiling” within Wyatt’s poem allows for some things to be

dissembled, it also puts other aspects of the speaker on prominent display, namely his adroit ability

to manipulate others through the use of rhetoric. By inconspicuously exploiting the multiple

meanings of the word “vaileth” to reveal multiple aspects of himself, the speaker (and by extension,

the poet) garners our admiration for his linguistic skill and deftness in adopting various masks in a

highly convincing manner. Indeed, it seems as though the masculine voice in “What Vaileth Trouth”

is the “he” from line 6 who profits from being the one that “most can fain.” In only fifteen lines, he

manages to equally convince us of two opposing truths: first, that he has a “true meaning hert” that

“strive[s] by stedfastness” (7, 2), and secondly that he is perfectly at home in an atmosphere “where

rueleth craftiness” (4). Though we first assumed that “he” in line 10 who is “deceived… by crafty

trayn” is the speaker, we recognize by the end of the poem that the pronoun more aptly refers to the

reader who ends up caught in Wyatt’s rhetorical “trapp” (12). Naturally, we have to be impressed

with such cleverness. We also have to feel somewhat intimidated by it. Not only has Wyatt showed

us through his masculine persona the instability of what we perceive to be reality, but also that he is

always in a formidable position of power and dominance, even when it appears otherwise.

It is ostensible from this poem that Wyatt not only had a clear conception of the modes of

self-representation that we nowcall the serious and the rhetorical, but also that he had a particular

relationship with the advantages and perils of each. In “What Vaileth Trouth,” Wyatt proves himself

to be a true master of the rhetorical ideal who simultaneously recognizes the benefit and inherent

36 Lanham, 22.
37 Greenblatt, 143.
 21

danger in both the social and central conceptions of self; openly constructing a transparent

rhetorical “I” invites accusations of deception and hypocrisy, while using one’s irreducible interior

self as a means by which to interact with the world leads to hazardous vulnerability and eventual

victimization. The fact that the speaker adopts various personas, and even goes so far as to reduce

the element of the serious self into another guise, to be readily adopted or discarded at his

advantage, points not only to his rhetorical self-fashioning, but also to an innate distrust of anything

purportedly true or genuine. As Greenblatt notes (echoing Lanham), “The single self, the

affirmation of wholeness or stoic apathy or quiet of mind, is a rhetorical construct designed to

enhance the speaker’s power, allay his fear, and disguise his need.” 38

This highly rhetorical style, as seen in “What Vaileth Trouth,” is characteristic of much of

Wyatt’s poetry from his songs to his satires. As an adept master of manipulating words, the early

Renaissance poet uses stylized language like a garment, creating not a single revealing uniform for

himself but a diverse and mutable collection of costumes that permit him to easily switch between

an array of selves, veiling and dissembling his central, irreducible identity nearly to the point of

obscurity. The courtly refrain song “In Eternum,” 39 in which a masculine persona again bemoans

the lady’s fickle rejection of his amorous pursuit, is another well suited example of Wyatt’s

orientation toward the rhetorical mode. As we sawin “What Vaileth Trouth,” the masculine “I” of

this poem likewise exhibits a cultured distrust and dislike of all that which proclaims to be constant

and absolute. As Lanham tells us, “from a rhetorical point of view, transparent language seems

dishonest, false to the world.” 40 The six stanzas, each concluding with the Latin refrain “In

eternum” meaning “unto eternity,” “forever,” or “in eternity,” trace the speaker’s journey of joining

38 Greenblatt, 141.
39 No. 27 (p.150) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology. This poem appears in the Wyatt section of
the Devonshire MS and the Egerton MS (though the first part of every line is missing due to the torn leaf), meaning that
it is highly probable that it belonged to Wyatt. It is suspected that the lost portion of the poem in the Egerton MS also
contained a written attribution.
40 Lanham, 28.
 22

love’s “daunse” (9); he begins with a theoretical conception of courtship in his mind, puts it into

practice through wooing, and to his own disillusionment discovers that experiential reality differs

greatly from the idyllic model. Though the speaker’s plain language seems to suggest a serious self at

first glance, we quickly recognize the rhetorical caveats at work in the first stanza:

In eternum I was ons determed

For to have lovid and my mynde affirmed
That with my herte it shuld be confermed
In eternum. (ll.1-4)

Literally, the speaker tells us in these lines that he was once resolute to love a lady forever, and that

his mind agreed with his heart’s desire that such a love should actually be established for eternity.

However the contradiction and tension created in the very first line by the placement of the phrase

“In eternum” (1) and the word “ons” (or “once”) (1) which ironically modifies it, clues us in to the

speaker’s disbelief that something as ceaseless and irreducible as the temporal measurement of

“forever” can really exist in the protean world – an indication of his rhetorical orientation.

Furthermore, we see in the telling construction of the line that Wyatt has intentionally caught the “I”

of the speaker between “eternum” (1) and “ons” (1), between the singular and the plural, between

the forces of constancy and changeability, between the serious and the rhetorical mode, dramatizing

within the line the very identity conflict of the Western self. 41

We can also detect the dominance of the speaker’s rhetorical self-construction through the

way that the refrain remains constant throughout the poem, while the significance of the phrase

alters through the material that precedes it. Like the speaker of “What Vaileth Trouth,” the

masculine persona soon discovers in stanza four that his “trowghthe” (ll.13) or faithfulness and

constancy to the lady does not guarantee “assurans to stonde in her grace / In eternum” (ll. 14-5). In

41 This motif of framing the “I” of the speaker between words representing constancy and mutability is a recurring motif
in Wyatt which appears again most notably in “It May be Good.” To the extent of my knowledge and research, such a
telling construction has gone largely un-analyzed by critics and scholars in relation to the concept of identity and self-
fashioning.
 23

other words, putting forth one’s serious central self does not necessarily beget reward. The result is

disillusionment and an abrupt, even violent, reversal:

In eternum then from my herte I kest

That I had furst determed for the best,
Noewin the place another thought doeth rest
In eternum. (ll. 21-24)

Though Wyatt’s intentionally enigmatic phrases “That [which] I had furst determed for the best”

(22) and “another thought” (23) allowthese lines to be interpreted on a number of levels (as is

characteristic of the rhetorical mode), the suddenly contemptuous tone of the refrain leads us to

initially presume that the lady, who “I shulde not se the like [of] / In eternum” (ll. 7-8), is the thing

the speaker casts from his heart. In this sense, the last stanza becomes one of embittered revenge on

behalf of the masculine persona, a thinly veiled attempt perhaps (like the one seen in “What Vaileth

Trouth?”) to strike back at his love for having wronged him. The new“thought” (23) may be either

another woman, or the idea that his lady is nowthe worst. In this fickle reversal, the speaker

ironically proves himself to be just as inconstant as the woman he brings that charge against. At the

same time, these lines also suggest that the speaker has rid from his mind the principles of stability

and constancy, “which [he] had first determed for the best” (22), affirming that there is no feasible

alternative apart from the protean rhetorical mode of life. If “In eternum” (21) is the object of the

verb phrase “I kest” (21), then “another thought” (23) that nowresides in his heart must be the

flexibility of the rhetorical ideal. Yet we see from the highly ironic reappearance of the refrain in the

final line that Wyatt’s speaker can never successfully banish the concept of ‘forever’ from his mind,

as he uses the phrase “in eternum” to accentuate his newcommitment to that which is protean and

ephemeral. Patricia Thomson seems to have truly hit the mark with her estimation that this poem
 24

invites the reader “to consider again the idea that a conventional Wyatt is far from being, necessarily,

a dull Wyatt.” 42

Wyatt’s original sonnet “Eche Man Me Telleth,” 43 which resembles “What Vaileth Trouth?”

in its thematic preoccupation with constancy and diversity as they pertain to personal identity, is

likewise an example of Wyatt’s rhetorical style and conception of self worthy of our critical

attention. We immediately recognize that the poet is operating within the Italian sonnet tradition,

partly because of the tightly patterned rhyme scheme (ABBAABBA CDDCEE), but more for the

classic manner in which the first eight lines explicate a problem – namely, others’ dislike of the

speaker’s rhetorical instability– which the remaining six lines seek to resolve:

Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise,

And on my faith me thinck it goode reason
To chaunge propose like after the season,
For in every cas to kepe still oon gyse
Ys mytt for theim that would be taken wyse, 5
And I ame not of suche manner condition,
But treated after a dyvers fashion,
And thereupon my dyvernes doeth rise.
But you that blame this dyvernes moost,
Chaunge you no more but still after oon rate 10
Trete ye me well, and kepe ye in the same state;
And while with me doeth dwell this weried goost,
My wordes nor I shall not be variable,
But always oon, your owne boeth ferme and stable.

Before we go on to explore the ways in which the rhetorical mode operates in this particular poem,

it’s beneficial to first note the abundance of further evidence found here that Wyatt was intimately

familiar with the various modes of personal identity and self conception, though terms such as

“rhetorical ideal” and “serious self” were not at his disposal. In the very first line of the octave, the

42Thompson, 135.
43No. 4 (p. 131-132) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology. This poem appears in the Egerton MS
with the attribution of “Tho” in the margin, as well as in the Wyatt section of Tottel’s Miscellanyand the Arundel-
Harington MS, meaning that we are as near certain as possible that it belonged to Wyatt. It is also interesting to note that
unlike many of Wyatt’s sonnets which were translations of Petrarch, “Eche Man Me Telleth” appears to be a completely
original composition. This fact seems to somewhat add authenticity to the claims and the emotions of the speaker.
 25

speaker confronts numerous personal accusations from his peers brought against his exceedingly

protean nature as he tells us, “Eche man me telleth I chaunge moost my devise” (1). According to

the O.E.D., “devise” is the sixteenth century form of the noun “device,” which in this context most

nearly means, “will or desire as expressed or conveyed to another.” 44 What do we call the rhetorical

mode, if not the perpetual mutability of one’s outwardly expressed disposition? Interestingly, we see

that the words “propose” (or “purpose”) of line 3, meaning “an intention or aim,” 45 and “gyse”

(modernly, “guise”) in line 4 referring to “the manner of carrying oneself” 46 are used as variant

synonyms of “devise” (1), all of which pertain in some sense to one’s constructed identity. The

understanding that man has the power to change his “devise,” or expression of self used to interact

with the greater world, points directly to Wyatt’s awareness of being able to shape and manipulate

personal identity. In this same vein, the principle dichotomy Wyatt identifies through his speaker

between “chaung[ing] propose like after the season” (3) and “in every cas … ke[eping] still oon

gyse” (4) seems to be fundamentally related to the understanding, as developed in part by Richard

Lanham, that all humans possess in some combination a multifaceted rhetorical self, as well as a

central and irreducible serious self. The speaker’s open admission at the end of the octave that he is

marked by a “dyvernes” (7) (“diverseness”) of character suggests that the speaker – and most likely

Wyatt by extension – leans heavily towards the rhetorical end of the self-fashioning scale.

Examining nowthe prominently rhetorical stance of Wyatt’s speaker in this sonnet, we see

that he proceeds to defend himself against “Eche man” (1) in lines 3 through 5 by retorting that

changeability is the current fashionable trend (a fact corroborated by Wyatt’s historical biography),

and that varying one’s aim “like after the season” (3) is actually sound reasoning; only those that

would have others take them for wise men maintain the same disposition in all circumstances. This

44 “device, n. 3b” O.E.D.

45 “propose, n. 2” O.E.D.
46 “guise, n. 3” O.E.D.
 26

pattern of the speaker being separated from the popular majority is a motif well worn in Wyatt’s

verse, appearing in both “What Vaileth Trouth?” and “In Eternum,” though typically the speaker is

poised as the isolated serious self who stands out in a predominantly rhetorical world. In this case,

we see a masculine persona openly owning his rhetorical self-construction set against “Eche man”

(1) who is purportedly serious. Yet it seems more likely than not that these other selves making the

accusations against the protean speaker are merely utilizing the central self as a rhetorical tool to

disguise their true aims, a crafty technique we have seen Wyatt himself employ from time to time.

When Wyatt’s speaker tells us in line 6 that he is not “of [a constant] manner condition,”

that he is not of such a character to have others think he is wise and would rather be thought a fool

for his changeability, we feel the full effect of his mocking tone and rhetorical self-construction.

Recognizing that the propositions in lines 2 through 5 are actually variants of the well known

proverbs of Wyatt’s day – “A wise man need not blush to change his purpose” and “A wise man

changes his mind, a fool never” 47 – we see that Wyatt is criticizing popularly held beliefs about the

relative value of genuine constancy. Similar to the masculine speaker in the lyric “In Eternum,”

Wyatt’s persona seems to entirely dismiss the merit of reliability and of a central self in the first eight

lines. With the reasoning that like begets like, the poet notes that his changeability is merely a

response to having been “treated [by others] after a dyvers fashion” (7), which recalls Lanham’s

assertion that “the lowest common denominator of [the rhetorical man’s] life is a social situation.” 48

Yet we see that this statement also functions as a crafty rhetorical twist, which allows Wyatt’s

speaker to cleverly shift the blame for his protean nature onto the rest of society and those who

attack him. The speaker’s defense, we see, also functions as an offensive, putting him once again in

the dominant position. Ostensibly, it is this kind of overwhelming prevalence of the rhetorical mode

in the poet’s verse that impels Stephen Greenblatt to brazenly claim “that there is no privileged

47 Rebholz, 358.
48 Lanham, 4.
 27

sphere of individuality in Wyatt, set off from linguistic convention, from social pressure, from the

shaping forces of religious and political power,” 49 that the poet (and thus his speaker) possesses no

central self, though I consider evidence in support of the contrary to be readily found, among other

verses, in the very sestet of this sonnet.

Wyatt’s Acknowledgement of the Potential for a Serious Self

Though it is carefully concealed by the multifaceted persona of the rhetorical man, Wyatt

does, in fact, like all Western individuals, possess a central self. He not only acknowledges the

existence of a serious dimension to man’s identity throughout his poetry as we have seen, but then

legitimately entertains the possibility of its dominance for a fewselect moments in his verse. We may

start to uncover this aspect of Wyatt’s fashioned identity in part by close reading the last six lines of

“Eche Man Me Telleth.” With the anticipated volta at the beginning of line 9 in this sonnet, we see

something more radical and drastic than just the usual transition from proposition to resolution.

Starting with an imperative command directed at the accusers, “But you that blame this dyvernes

moost, / Chaunge you no more, but still after oon rate” (9), the speaker’s tone shifts from witty

bantering to terse candidness as he proposes a resolution to others’ dislike of his protean and

rhetorical nature. Without any palpable ulterior motive at work, the speaker proposes that the

greater milieu must become constant themselves before they can expect the same irreducibility of

character in return from him. Wyatt’s speaker postulates that in order for words and selves to not

“be variable” (13), there must be a mutual commitment between parties to be “ferme and stable”

(14) in identity. Here we see the classic association between vulnerability and a central self that

appears in Wyatt’s other poems, though in a more serious and honest tone than ever before.

Characteristically, when Wyatt represents the serious self in his courtly poetry, it is used as a

false rhetorical construct designed to enhance the power of the speaker, or it is dismissed out of

49 Greenblatt, 120.
 28

hand for the dangerous exposure and susceptibility that it engenders in a world where everything

and everyone is oriented towards the rhetorical mode of life; yet this particular instance speaks of

legitimate hope for a different mode with which to relate man to his own word and other men. In a

world where people and their words are never just one thing, all relationships between individuals

are necessarily competitive. Greenblatt correctly observes that in the Renaissance, power dynamics

were envisioned so that, “the gain of one party [was] inevitably the loss of the other … love is like

the rupture of a treaty and a consequent loss of power … even an erotic triumph seems most often

to be achieved at the expense of one or the other of the lovers.” 50 This is perhaps best captured by

Wyatt’s apt line from a translation of one of Petrarch’s sonnets, “I love an othre, and thus I hate my

self” (ll. 11), 51 which emphasizes devotion to another as a betrayal of the self, because it undermines

the perpetual need for supremacy. With this cultural standard in mind, we see just howextreme and

utterly novel the proposition of self-fashioning found in the sestet of “Eche Man Me Telleth” truly

is. Wyatt’s speaker seems to suggest in earnest that he could be a completely different kind of

person, his “words” and his “I” no longer “variable” (that is to say, rhetorical) but “always oon” (or

serious) (13-14), if others would commit to such an ideal of life as well.

It is safe to say that Wyatt never experienced this sort of cultural orientation towards the

inner self over the rhetorical self during his lifetime, but he certainly seems to anticipate in this poem

the movement towards more frequent expression of a central identity which will become dominant

by the end of the period. Though Heale characterizes “Eche Man Me Telleth” as a “typical” Wyatt

sonnet, 52 this study has cleared substantial room for disagreement. It should in fact be considered

among the most unusual and significant of Wyatt’s works for the way in which it reveals important

insight about Wyatt’s sense of identity, and the nature of self-fashioning at this moment in history.

50 Greenblatt, 141.
51 “I Fynde No Peace and All My Warr is Done.” No. 9 (p. 135) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An
Anthology.
52 Heale, 100.
 29

Chapter II:

Sidney s Exploration of the Tensions Troubling both Style and Selfhood in

Astrophil and Stella

This you hear is not mytongue,

Which once said what I conceived
For it was of use bereaved,
With a cruel answer stung.
No, though tongue to roof be cleaved
Fearinglest he chastised be,
Heart and soul do singin me.
-Certain Sonnets, No. VII – Sir Philip Sidney 1

Chapter Introduction

As one of the most celebrated and iconic figures of the English Renaissance in both his own

age and ours, the Elizabethan poet-courtier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) is presently remembered

most for his innovative and ground-breaking contributions to the then-burgeoning tradition of

English literature. As Donald Stump notes, “Other writers of the age may have been greater, but

none did more to inspire the movement in literature and the arts that we call the ‘Elizabethan

Renaissance.’” 2Among his many influential works are An Apologyfor Poetry(1579), a critical treatise

that seeks to assimilate the teachings of Aristotle’s Poetics with neo-platonic thought, remaining

integral to modern literary theory; The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1580), a highly ambitious

pastoral narrative in prose that revived and popularized the genre of Hellenistic romance; and last

but hardly least, the paradigmatic sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (1581-3), an innovative set of

108 poems and 11 songs, which was the first of its kind in adapting the Italian sonnet form to the

English language. Sidney had no previous models in vernacular English to use as a blueprint for his

sonnet sequence, making Astrophil and Stella a truly comprehensive marvel and a revolutionary

1 Sidney. “O fair, O sweet, when I do look on thee.” No. VII in The Oxford Authors:: Sir Philip Sidney. Katherine Duncan
Jones, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). pp. 17.
2 Donald Stump. “History of Sidney Scholarship.” Sir Philip Sidney: World Bibliography. 1 Jan 2005. Saint Louis University,

Web. 3 Mar 2010. <http://bibs.slu.edu/sidney/history.html>

 30

benchmark in the English literary tradition.3 Through this work, Sidney is also responsible for having

incited the Elizabethan fascination with sonnet cycles, a trend which would continue well through

the end of the century, and pave the way for works by Spenser, Drayton, Greville, Shakespeare, and

Wroth, among others.

Frequently regarded as the greatest of all the poet-courtier’s achievements, Sidney’s sequence

Astrophil and Stella is of particular interest to this study not only for its strikingly original reinvention

of Petrarchanism or its avant-garde influence, but also for the artful ways in which it dramatizes the

struggles of mans interiority and the challenges of fashioning one’s identity in the courtly milieu of

the English Renaissance. On the most literal level, the sequence tells a classically Petrarchan story of

the trials and tribulations of unrequited love from the first-person perspective of a young poet,

Astrophil (“star-lover” in Greek), who translates into verse his painful desire for his beloved lady,

Stella (Latin for “star”). The sequence even has a loose courtly love narrative binding the sonnets as

a whole: 4 in the early poems, Astrophil hopelessly loves Stella and professes his adoration; in time

she grants him her heart with the stipulations that his love remains virtuous, Platonic, and distanced;

Astrophil struggles with Stella’s righteous demands and eventually steals a kiss; this transgression,

among others, leads to a period of Astrophil’s separation from Stella; finally the sequence concludes

with sonnets that give voice to Astrophil’s desire for respite from the torment of love. Captivated by

this conventional yet seemingly sincere courtly love element, many scholars of the nineteenth and

even the twentieth century, such as J. A. Symonds,5 Mona Wilson,6 and Patrick Cruttwell, 7 devoted

their analytical energies to decoding the sequence as an autobiographical revelation of Sidney’s

historical love for Lady Penelope Rich. Indeed, there are quite a fewintentionally tantalizing puns,

3 See Anne Ferry. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983) pp. 24.
4 See Jack Stillinger. “The Biographical Problem of Astrophil and Stella.” Essential Articles: Sir Philip Sidney(Hamden:

Archon Books, 1986) pp. 167-191.

5 See J.A. Symonds. English Men of Letters: Sir Philip Sidney. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1902).
6 See Mona Wilson. Sir Philip Sidney. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950).
7 See Patrick Cruttwell. The English Sonnet. (London: Longmans, 1966).
 31

riddles, and half-allusions sprinkled throughout the sequence – such as the inclusion of Sidney’s

Christian name (Phil) in the name of his crafted persona (Astrophil) – that suggest potential parallels

between Sidney’s own life and his literary fiction.8

Yet Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, a rich and highly complex literary tapestry woven together

from many themes, postures, and tones, may also be interpreted in a more conceptual and

philosophical manner. Using NewCriticism to elucidate the sequence, we discover that Sidney did

not merely aim to reproduce the Petrarchan model of unrequited courtly love, but to overhaul the

paradigm, and subversively redirect the focus away from worship of the beautiful lady. Instead,

Sidney places the masculine poet-lover at the center of the verse, as modern critic David Kalstone

acknowledges: “Without dethroning Stella, Sidney’s sonnets shift a great deal of the energy and

poetic attention to Astrophil.” 9 In light of the undeniable centrality of the male persona, many

modern critics, like Marotti,10 Ferry,11 Kalstone, 12 Young,13 Berry, 14 and Rudenstine, 15 have

entertained the notion that the romantic element of Astrophil and Stella is not the direct subject of the

cycle, but rather a convenient vehicle for addressing larger theoretical issues in the realms of politics,

identity, interiority, and artistic style. Indeed, C.S. Lewis even likens Astrophil and Stella to a

“prolonged lyrical meditation.”16 Though their specific arguments vary in nature, most of these

scholars essentially agree with Marotti’s assertion that “Lady Rich was [in context] a symbolic figure

8 Some poems of interest in this line of thought are No. 24, 35, and 37 in Astrophil and Stella. For an interesting
evaluation of the connections between Sidney and Astrophil (and likewise Lady Rich and Stella), see “The Biographical
Problem of Astrophil and Stella” by Jack Stillinger in Essential Articles: Sir Philip Sidney. Arthur Kinney, ed. (Hamden:
Archon Books, 1986) pp. 167-191.
9 David Kalstone. Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1965) 130.
10 See Arthur F. Marotti. “Love is not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order.” (ELH. Vol. 49, No. 2

(Summer, 1982)), 396– 428.

11 See Anne Ferry. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1983).
12 See David Kalstone. Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations.
13 See Richard B. Young. “English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.” Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney,

Jonson, Milton. (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1958). 5–88.

14 See Edward Berry. The Makingof Sir Philip Sidney. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
15 See Neil L. Rudenstine. Sidney’s Poetic Development. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967).
16 C.S. Lewis, Literature in the Sixteenth Century. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 104.
 32

for Sidney … [and] her fictionalization as Stella puts her at the center of a constellation of issues

larger than those involved in a private ‘tragic-comedy’ of love.” 17 Astrophil and Stella ultimately serves

as “an imaginative and social retreat” for the poet. 18 With this critical foundation, our discussion in

this chapter will focus on the way in which each sonnet in the cycle can be said to capture, in very

subtle and delicate ways, certain ideas about modes of personal identity and selfhood which are

particular to this point in English history. Specifically, we will see that the sequence provides Sidney

with an imaginative space where he can articulate his struggles with the intractability of language,

and also with tensions found between the serious and rhetorical modes of literary and self

expression, making the sequence not only about conventional courtly love, but also a study in

expressing a complex personality.

Historical Context

Before we move on to examine howSidney conceives of the “I” in his verse, it will benefit

us to first understand the poet’s actual historical identity and the major factors which many have

impacted his relationship with language and self-fashioning, for as critic Edward Berry notes, “The

crisis that precipitated Sidney’s literary self-explorations [most likely] arose out of the sense of

identity he developed as a young man.” 19 On November 30th, 1554, Sir Philip Sidney was born at

Penshurst Place to a politically prominent family of Kent. Like his predecessor Sir Thomas Wyatt,

Sir Philip Sidney was intimately linked with the Royal Court of England from a young age, and was

perpetually groomed to serve the state throughout his adolescence. His father, Sir Henry Sidney

(1529-1586), was a prominent courtier and politician who enjoyed the favor of the crown under

King Henry VIII, Edward VI, and finally Queen Elizabeth I. In this latter reign, he was appointed to

the esteemed position of Lord Deputy Governor of Ireland. Sidney’s mother, Mary Dudley, was

17 Marotti, 400.
18 Marotti, 406.
19 Berry, 8.
 33

servant to the Queen and daughter of the 1st Duke of Northumberland. Included among Sidney’s

uncles were the highly favored 1st Earl of Leicester and the wealthy 3rd Earl of Warwick. Like much

of his family, Sidney would also come to serve in the English Royal Court of Queen Elizabeth, but

only after receiving a comprehensive humanist education first at the Shrewsbury School, later at

Christ Church College of Oxford University, and finally at the Inns of Court in London.

With this prominent familial background and a first rate education from England’s finest

institutions, Sidney’s future as a successful courtier was more than promising. In May of 1575, after

his Grand Tour of the continent for the purpose of mastering foreign languages, Sidney returned to

England and devoted himself to becoming the ideal courtier and paradigmatic “Renaissance Man.”

Far from ending his intellectual pursuits, Sidney studied ‘chemistry’ under John Dee, worked to

adapt classical metrics to English poetry with Edward Dyer, and discussed matters of art and verse

with Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser. For the next three years, Sidney also played a very public

role in Elizabethan high society as an organizer and participant in royal pastimes. For the

amusement of the Queen, Sidney produced playlets, tiltyard appearances, and pastoral shows during

courtly galas. Between 1575 and 1579, the promising courtier with “great expectations” 20 also

sought military employment abroad, and involved himself in his father’s political duties in Ireland.

Sidney’s most notable success, however, was a trip to Italy to aid the Holy Roman Emperor

Rudolph II on behalf of the Queen in 1577, an excursion which he was certain would win him the

favor of Elizabeth. As a rising political player, court entertainer, scholar, sportsman, and diplomat,

Sir Philip Sidney was, as Katherine Duncan-Jones notes, “in the eyes of some, almost a crown

prince.” 21 This estimation confirms our conception of Sidney during these years as a bona fide

master of the rhetorical role of Elizabethan courtier.

20 Sidney. Astrophil and Stella, No. 21 ll. 8.

21 Duncan-Jones, xi.
 34

It follows without surprise, then, that Sidney’s consummate navigation of the highly

theatrical world of the Elizabethan court is reflected in the literature he produced during this period.

Rather than engaging in literary self-exploration, we see that Sidney was preoccupied by both acting

and writing in the role of a courtier. In 1577, he composed a treatise, titled A Discourse of Irish Affairs,

in which he used his talent with words and language to artfully defend his father Henry Sidney’s

foreign policies. In a similar manner in 1578, Sidney put together The Ladyof Mayas entertainment

for Elizabeth at Wanstead. Using the genre of a pastoral romance in an allegorical manner, Sidney

designed a fictional plot of the Queen choosing among suitors to persuade her Royal Majesty to

adop a newattitude toward her political relationships. As Berry notes, “Sidney’s development of

personas in this period is rhetorical rather than exploratory and offers neither the introspective

quality nor the literary energy of later self-representations.”22 Ostensibly, this kind of rhetorical

composition entailed the kind of skilled self-endorsement advocated by authorities of courtly

conduct, like Puttenham in The Art of English Poesie and Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier.

Yet in spite of his apparent mastery of this courtly role, Sidney seems to have felt an inner

tension between the artificial and studied air demanded by his social position and a desperate need

to express a serious dimension of his identity. This internal struggle manifested itself as early as

1579, the year in which Sidney both initiated a quarrel with the Earl of Oxford on the tennis court at

Whitehall, and wrote a dangerously sincere letter to the Queen regarding her intentions to marry the

Duke of Anjou. In the first case, Sidney flatly refused to submit to his superior, the Earl of Oxford,

in a disagreement, and subsequently challenged him to a duel – a forbidden activity in the court. He

was later reprimanded by the Queen, who insisted (according to Fulke Greville’s account) that he

respect ‘the difference in degree between Earls and Gentlemen.’ Dissatisfied with this imposition of

rhetorical behavior, Sidney disobeyed Elizabeth and asserted that “although Oxford was a ‘great

22 Berry, 50.
 35

Lord,’ he was no ‘Lord over him.’”23 Later that year, Sidney penned a lengthy letter to the Queen

about the prospect of her marriage, blatantly arguing against the proposed match. While the letter

opens with traditional complimentary embellishments, Sidney soon abandons the rhetorical ideal in

favor of treacherous honesty, leaving little to no fictional distance between himself and his

argument: “I will, in simple and direct terms (as hoping they shall only come to your merciful eyes),

set down the overflowing of my mind in this most important matter, importing, as I think, the

continuance of your safety…”24 The surprising bluntness of this presumptuous letter, referred to by

Berry as yet another “fine example of Sidney’s apparent inability to submerge himself in the

rhetorical conventions of the courtier,” 25 likely figured into Sidney’s decision to take a leave of

absence from court in the following year. Though he would eventually return, Sidney was

forevermore underemployed and poorly remunerated by the Queen for a man of his birth and

intelligence. Sidney’s near certain hopes of becoming a prominent courtier were permanently

disabled.

Without a real future at the court, and bereft of an outlet for his abounding wit, it makes

sense that from this point forward Sidney poured most of his energies into writing. Yet the works

produced after his outbursts represent a very different kind of endeavor from Sidney’s initial forays

in literature, which were designed to be highly political and persuasive. The Countess of Pembroke’s

Arcadia, An Apologyfor Poetry, and Astrophil and Stella, which were all composed after Sidney’s leave of

absence from the Royal Court, have a distinctly imaginative and self-reflexive quality that the earlier

and less mature works clearly lack. Moreover, as we shall see in our discussion of selfhood and

identity in Astrophil and Stella, much of the restlessness and tension between serious expression and

the rhetorical mode of the ideal courtier that Sidney experienced firsthand seems to be artistically

23 Berry, 55.
24 Sidney. “Letter to Queen Elizabeth, 1580.” 289.
25 Berry, 56.
 36

explored in his poetry. His historical struggles with self-definition almost certainly provided the poet

with a wealth of material to drawon for his craft. After all, Sidney himself asserts in his Apologyfor

Poetrythat “the works of nature [are the] principle object” of all “art delivered to mankind,”26

insinuating that even the most imaginative and finely wrought verse originates from the experiential

reality of the poet.

Sidney’s Recognition of the Serious and Rhetorical Modes through the Motif of Style in
Astrophil and Stella

Let us turn nowto the text of Astrophil and Stella, and begin our discussion by exploring the

ways in which Sidney illustrates his familiarity with the various aspects of the self. While appreciating

the innovative, protean, and remarkably witty nature of Sir Philip Sidney’s comprehensive sonnet

sequence, even the most perceptive of critical readers is apt to overlook the unique way in which

Astrophil and Stella addresses the tension between the serious and rhetorical dimensions of the

western self. Indeed, we are hard pressed to find in Sidney’s sonnets any of the explicit nods to the

cleverly labeled dichotomies of “doublness” and the “true meaning heart,” 27 or of “chaung[ing]

propose like after the season” and “ke[eping] still oon gyse,” 28 which are woven throughout his

predecessor Sir Thomas Wyatt’s verse. As we sawin Chapter One, some of Wyatt’s work, such as

“What Vaileth Trouth?” and “Eche Man Me Telleth,” clearly seek their subject matter in man’s

modes of personal identity and self-conception in relation to postures of sincerity and feigning.

While much of Sidney’s verse also plays with the notion of selfhood as fashioned by the dynamics of

courtly and erotic relationships, his manner of speaking about the uneasy combination of man’s

central and social self is on the whole different from Wyatt’s explicit framework. Arguably more

preoccupied with the experience of the poet as artist, and self-fashioning through language, Sidney

26 Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry.” The Norton Anthologyof Theoryand Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. (NewYork: W.W.
Norton & Co., 2001) 330.
27 Wyatt, “What Vaileth Trouth?” No. 1 (p.129) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology.
28 Wyatt, “Eche Man Me Telleth.” No. 4 (p. 131-132) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology.
 37

(through his poet-lover Astrophil) uses the concept of poetic style as an avenue through which to

reference the serious and rhetorical dimensions of the self, and illustrate his intimate familiarity with

man’s perpetual task of mediating the two modes.

As I have implicitly affirmed in earlier discussion, verbal or literary style – man’s mode of

self expression through language – can be understood as having a direct relationship with shaping

and projecting a sense of identity. If we return for a moment to Richard Lanham’s argument about

the social and central selves in The Motives of Eloquence, we find that his notion of developing and

articulating selfhood actually originates from his discussion of verbal and literary style in the West.

He reminds us that “expression sustains the self,” 29 and that the serious and rhetorical not only

belong to modes of being, but ultimately correspond to man’s linguistic articulation. Of course, the

analogy between man’s identity and his style is hardly limited to a concept pioneered by Lanham in

the twenty-first century. Recognition of this relationship between linguistic manner and projection

of identity is found as far back as the classical period among philosophers, orators, and literary

figures such as Plato and Ovid. Likewise, appreciation of this connection between mode of

expression and selfhood is referenced frequently throughout early modernity, as Robert Burton

asserts in his 1621 edition of The Anatomyof Melancholy, “It is most true, stylus virum arguit – our style

bewrayes us.”

In light of this tradition, it comes as no surprise that Sidney too may be counted among

those captivated by this relationship between linguistic style and the self. As one of the most

sophisticated connoisseurs of poetic form and vernacular English to flourish during the Renaissance,

there is little doubt that Sir Philip Sidney was greatly preoccupied with style and, by implicit

extension, the negotiation of personal identity. Sherod M. Cooper Jr. affirms this notion for us in his

work, The Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella:

29 Lanham, 28.
 38

Sir Philip Sidney makes frequent references in his works to the problems of style, not only
those inherent in poetry and other artistic means of expression, but also in such mundane
activities, such as the way a woman arranges jewels in her hair. He recognizes that matters of
style are involved in even the most prosaic activities that affect nature as well as the creative
arts.30

In this same vein, Sidney’s critical treatise, An Apologyfor Poetry, written between 1579 and 1581, can

be seen as a testament to the courtier-poet’s pressing interest in issues surrounding style as a

mediation between the truths innate to man, as part of nature, and the multifaceted possibilities of

art. Although Sidney never ultimately works out a formal statement of aesthetic or stylistic theory, he

does explore in the Apologyhowwe might define ‘good’ style, and takes care to point out the

inherent tensions between reality and the world contrived through poetic making. We see these same

concerns about the poet’s task of using literary style to navigate the space between life and art

reflected in the subject matter of Astrophil and Stella. Not simply focused on the romantic

relationship of love, the poet-lover of Sidney’s sonnet sequence is often concerned with literary style

and the way in which feelings belonging to the private self cannot be adequately conveyed to others

through the artful crafting of language. Sonnet 1 is a masterful meditation on writing love poetry, as

well as literary technique, but it holds even greater importance in its illustration and evaluation of

two primary styles of self-fashioning: the serious, and the rhetorical:

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,

That she (deare she) might take some pleasure of my paine:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine.
But words came halting forth, wanting Inventions stay,
Invention Natures child, fled step-dame Studies blowes, 10
And others feete still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating my selfe for spite,

30 Sherod M. Cooper, Jr. The Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella (The Hague: Mouton, 1968)11.
 39

Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart and write. 31

In addition to elucidating on the most literal level Astrophil’s reason for writing love poems

to Stella, Sonnet 1 also uses the language and terms of poetic style more abstractly to speak about

man’s identity as fashioned through language, and the difficulties posed by this process. Closely

analyzing the stylistic dichotomy established by Sidney through Astrophil in this first sonnet, we are

able to see the poet’s intimate familiarity and knowledge of the tensions between the serious and

rhetorical mode that comprise the Western self. The first line of Sonnet 1, “Loving in truth, and

faine in verse my love to show,” opens Astrophil and Stella with the witty exposure of a fundamental

dichotomy between man’s act or state of “Loving in truth” (1) and his subsequent eagerness “to

show” his emotive experience “in verse” (1). Arguably, these two modes of being correspond to the

concepts of the central serious self and the social rhetorical self. Anne Ferry tells us,

“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show” opens the first poem in the first
English sonnet sequence, and with that line changes poetry in our language. This sonnet is
the earliest poem in English to make its central concern the relation between what may be
felt “in truth” and what may show“in verse” … explor[ing] and complicat[ing] the ways in
which newuses of language portray inward experience.32

In the first part of the line, the poet-speaker evokes a certain a priori sense of private inwardness with

the phrase “Loving” (1), which is the counterpart to the act of show[ing]” (1), and qualified by the

phrase, “in truth” (1). While able to function as a prepositional intensifier, “in truth” (1) is placed

after “Loving” (1), suggesting the alternate meaning of “truly, verily, really, or indeed,”33 all of which

carry overtones of irreducible sincerity. Strongly echoing Wyatt’s “true meaning hert,”34 we see that

the phrase “Loving in truth” (1) – referring either to man’s quality of being earnestly devoted or his

genuine act of adoration – is intimately related to the serious style, characteristic of man’s central

31 The text of Astrophil and Stella presented here is based on Richard Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse. This
anthology uses the 1598 edition of the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia … with sundrynewadditions.
32 Ferry, 128.
33 “truth, n.14 a” O.E.D.
34 Wyatt, “What Vaileth Trouth?”
 40

self. The speaker’s willingness to identify this genuine and uncrafted aspect of his nature points

toward a familiarity with, and understanding of, the honest and straight-forward aspect of man’s

character.

The other half of the first line then completes the dichotomy with the reference in stylistic

terms to man’s zeal for “show[ing]” love “in verse” (1), which arguably corresponds to the rhetorical

mode of language and self. The verb “to show” (1), meaning “to bring forward or display in order

that it may be looked at,” 35 correlates with the outward, social dimension of the rhetorical style.

Interestingly, we see that unlike “Loving” (1), to show” (1) is not connected to any words imparting

a sense of truthfulness or sincerity. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case; while the adjective

“fain” (1) in the second half of the first line means “gladly, willingly, with pleasure”36 in its direct

context, Sidney undoubtedly intended for us to take into account the implications of its sixteenth-

century homonym, ‘feign,’ meaning “to put a false appearance upon; to disguise, dissemble, or

conceal.”37 In this sense, the phrase “faine in verse my love to show” (1) can be understood as the

poet’s oblique acknowledgement of the way in which the rhetorical mode often puts forth an artfully

contrived fiction for the sake of concealing the “truth” (1) of the central self.

Furthermore, the notion of “verse” (1) accentuates our understanding of “show[ing]” (1) as

a reference to the rhetorical, as it automatically carries the implication of contrivance and artifice.

Verse, particularly a highly formalized genre like the sonnet, is by nature finely crafted and artificial,

with its careful meter and meticulously selected language designed to give a very controlled and

fashioned exhibition of the self. And indeed, we see that this very verse itself is highly wrought, as

David Kalstone calls our attention to the rhetorical qualities of Sonnet 1: “[This] is a sonnet about

style, the relation of style to matter, and it makes its declaration in splendid, controlled alexandrines,

35 “show, v.2 a” O.E.D.

36 “fain, adj.4 b” O.E.D.
37 “feign, v.6” O.E.D.
 41

drawing the reader’s attention immediately to the boldness of the sequence and to its capacity, at

will, to vary from the accepted pentameter line.”38 Instead of composing Sonnet 1 in iambic

pentameter, the meter which most closely resembles the natural pattern of speech in English, Sidney

opts for the less organic and more artful iambic hexameter line, accentuating the inherently

rhetorical nature of “show[ing]” “in verse” (1). Finally, the framing of “verse” (1) as means to an end

in subsequent lines, “That she (deare she) might take some pleasure of my paine:/ Pleasure might

cause her read, reading might make her know,/ Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace

obtaine” (2-4), further associates versification with man’s rhetorical self, since it is ultimately

designed to enhance the poet’s position. Astrophil tells us in these lines that he is eager to

demonstrate his emotions in crafted poems because that might convince his beloved, Stella, to

bestowher grace upon him. Thus, we see that in accordance with the aims of the rhetorical style and

sense of self, Astrophil’s poetry is the means to an end, rather than the end in itself.

Through the figure of Astrophil, Sidney continues to display his intimate familiarity with the

two styles of self-fashioning through language in lines 5 through 8 of Sonnet 1, which describe the

poet’s first attempts at versification. We see that the poet-lover looks to the highly rhetorical style in

order to express his “Loving in truth” (1) in art, as he explains:

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:
Oft turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine.

Astrophil’s reference to “paint[ing] the blackest face of woe” (5), an activity of representing the self

through language, strongly evokes a sense of the rhetorical mode. While the verb “paint” can mean

“to depict, describe, or call to the mind through the use of words,”39 it may also be defined as “to

38 David Kalstone. Sidney’s Poetry: Context and Interpretations. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965) 125.
39 “paint, v.1.4a” O.E.D.
 42

represent or portray in a false or deceptive way.”40 Indeed, the very notion of crafting a metaphorical

“paint[ed] … face” (5), a “mask of woe” (AS 69, ll.5), to obscure the real thing relates to the

rhetorical strategy of self-expression. The use of the article “the” (5) in reference to “face” (5), rather

than the personal possessive pronoun “my,” likewise accentuates the suggestion of artifice and a

degree of removal from a serious, central self. Furthermore, Astrophil’s reference to seeking

inspiration by “studying inventions fine” (6), with “inventions” doubly signifying “a work as

produced by exercise of the mind or imagination”41 and “a fictitious statement or story,”42 the poet-

lover concerns himself not with organic experience and inward feeling, but with convention and

artfulness. Sidney’s speaker even goes so far as to turn “others’ leaves” (7) – that is, look at other

poets’ manuscript pages – to find “fit words” (5) that strategically convey his love, ostensibly

connecting the concept of rhetorical style with following literary tradition. In the subject matter of

these lines, we see that the poet-lover’s style is purely rhetorical without any trace of the serious

mode, and that he has turned away from his true impetus for writing, his experience of “Loving in

truth” (1).

Sidney continues to illustrate a deep understanding of the different facets of the self through

a discussion of literary style in the sestet, focusing in these lines on the serious dimension. By the

transition from octave to sestet in line 9, Sidney’s Astrophil admits that the purely outward method

of self-representation doesn’t work. Despite his best efforts, “words came halting forth” (9).

Delivering unsolicited advice on howto overcome his difficulty of self-expression through verse to

Astrophil the “Fool” (14), the straight-talking Muse of the very last line commands the struggling

poet-lover to “look in thy heart and write” (14). While some critics, such as Rosemond Tuve and

David Kalstone, maintain that the image of Astrophil’s “heart” (14) is a Renaissance trope which is

40 “paint, v.1.4b” O.E.D.

41 “invention, n.7” O.E.D.
42 “invention, n.8” O.E.D.
 43

said to hold the image of the poet’s mistress (thus making the muse’s instruction about beholding

the beauty of Stella),43 the monosyllabic words and frank tone of the Muse’s advice are meant to

contrast the poet’s rhetorical efforts and undoubtedly embody the serious style. The word “heart”

(14) can also stand for the seat of one’s inmost thoughts and secret feelings, the depths of the soul,

the inner central self. Ostensibly associated with Astrophil’s initial experience of “Loving in truth”

(1), Sidney suggest here that verse-making, and by extension, expression of selfhood, is best

achieved not through complete reliance on rhetorical artifice or the serious mode, but rather a

negotiated combination of the two, emphasizing their dualistic nature. Evidently, Sidney must have

been intimately familiar with what we nowcall the serious and rhetorical modes of self-fashioning,

seeing as he was able to write nuanced poems about their proper relationship.

Sidney’s Consummate Masteryof the Rhetorical Style

Yet even as Sidney expertly demonstrates his knowledge of the two styles of selfhood and

literary expression in Sonnet 1, we notice an established preference for the rhetorical mode which

characterizes many of the early sonnets of Astrophil and Stella. In the opening line, “Loving in truth,

and faine in verse my love to show” (1), which arguably describes the serious mode and the

rhetorical mode in the two clauses, we notice that the second clause carries much more weight than

the first, illustrating a preoccupation with the rhetorical style. While Sidney, through the persona of

Astrophil, acknowledges the importance of serious style and the expression of a central self by

closing the sonnet with the muse’s advocation of the serious mode, the remaining 13 lines – that is

to say, the majority of the poem – are devoted to exploring the prevalent dominance of the

traditional rhetorical style in both literary composition and self-expression. Furthermore, if we

evaluate the content of Sonnet 1, Astrophil’s complaints of difficulty and fruitless exertion, in light

of its elegant construction and nuanced style, we realize that the poet-speaker himself is actually

43 Kalstone, 126.
 44

using a rhetorical strategy throughout the poem. The content of each line paints a picture of Sidney’s

Astrophil as a humble and struggling amateur poet who is “helpless in [his] throes” (12) and must

look to “others feete” (15) for instruction on how“to entertaine” (6) Stella’s wit. In some ways, his

persona even recalls Wyatt’s naïve and inept masculine speaker of “What Vaileth Trouth?” who

struggles in love. Yet just as we see in Wyatt’s verse, the construction of the line itself contradicts

this portrait, as it illustrates a high degree of metrical skill, literary knowledge, and artistic expertise.

As Kalstone tells us, “With its elaborate rhetorical figures and its attention to Stella’s image, [Sonnet

1] uses a formal literary manner and … conventions quite ostentatiously.”44 The unusual use of

Alexandrines and the tightly patterned rhyme scheme are evidently the work of an expert poet, and

within the context of tradition, even the careful choice of subject matter attests to rhetorical mastery.

Admiring the already-novel nature of this poem for the way it opens the very first Petrarchan

sequence in English, the original audience of Astrophil and Stella would have recognized a great irony

presented by the speaker’s supposed trouble with composing verse, considering it mark of

distinguished wit. They also would have been impressed with Sidney’s innovative technique of

opening his love sonnet cycle with a poem not about love, but about writing and self-expression.

Sidney presents himself, through his creation of Astrophil, as a talented artist and veritable master of

the rhetorical mode.

As if looking to exhibit his remarkable command of linguistic manipulation and to confirm

his status as a master of this art, Sidney writes many of the early poems of Astrophil and Stella in an

aggressively self-promoting fashion, aligning himself with the tradition of his poetical and political

predecessors, while simultaneously rejecting it. Perhaps reflecting his early efforts to assert his

rhetorical abilities in the silver-tongued milieu of the Elizabethan Court, we see that in Sidney’s early

sonnets in this sequence, such as 1, 3, 6, 15, and 28, Astrophil uses the themes of composition and

44 Kalstone, 129.
 45

literary style to establish himself in a dominant social position. Of these intensely multivalent poems,

Sonnet 15, in which Astrophil praises Stella as the ultimate source of poetic inspiration, is a well

known work and great illustration of Sidney’s rhetorical abilities:

You that do search for everie purling spring

Which from the ribs of old Parnassus flows,
And everie floure, not sweet perhaps, which growes
Near thereabouts into your Poesie wring.
You that do Dictionaries methode bring
Into your rimes, running in ratling rows:
You that poore Petrarch's long-deceased woes
With new-borne sighs and denisend wit do sing.
You take wrong ways those far-fet helps be such,
As do bewray a want of inward tuch: 10
And sure at length stolne goods do come to light
But if (both for your love and skill) your name
You seeke to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame,
Stella behold, and then begin to endite.

On the most literal level, we see that Sonnet 15 is a Petrarchan courtly love poem in which Astrophil

exalts his beloved Stella – just as Petrarch idolized the beautiful Laura – by claiming that she is the

ultimate muse for aspiring poets. Astrophil’s estimation of Stella as the supreme source of creativity

is conveyed as he uses the accusatory pronoun, “You” (1, 5, 7, 9) to point out other poets who find

their inspiration in “Parnassus” (2), “Dictionaries methode” (5) and “Petrarch’s long deceased woes”

(7), and then criticizes them for lacking originality: “You take wrong waies those far fet helps be

such, / As do bewray a want of inward tuch” (9-10). Instead, Astrophil suggests in the final line,

“Stella behold, and then begin to endite” (14), insinuating that his beloved is far superior to the

classical Greek muses of Mount Parnassus, literary devices, and Petrarch’s poetry.

However, the striking deferral of Stella’s introduction to the very last line of the sonnet

implies that Astrophil the poet must have higher priorities, just as the speakers in Wyatt’s poems had

motives other than bemoaning the impossibility of seriousness in a rhetorical world. Following this

notion that Stella is an afterthought rather than the centerpiece of the poem, we see an emerging

picture of a highly rhetorical poet who not only takes part in the courtly love tradition by emulating
 46

Petrarch, but also spins the characteristics of the given paradigm to make it represent his own

concerns. The role of the beloved becomes a resource of the courtly love model that can be

manipulated to accentuate his true point of interest: belittling other poets and their traditional

writing. Downplaying Stella and confining her to the final line, the poet has thirteen verses in which

to squash his competitors and establish himself as the dominant figure.

For example, the word play on “Poesie” in line 4 as both nosegay and written verse indicates

the speaker’s emasculation of the verse-maker who looks to “old Parnassus” (2) for stimulation.

Astrophil’s phrase “everie floure, not sweet perhaps” (3) similarly accuses other poets of being

tasteless in incorporating embellished words into their verse, while the slippery adjectives “deceased”

(7) and “poore”(7) discredit those who copy the Petrarchan paradigm: “You that poore Petrarchs

long deceased woes, / With new-borne sighs and denisend wit do sing” (7-8). Sidney’s Astrophil

raises the degree of ridicule with the use of “poore;” it can be sympathetic to the Italian sonneteer

who died without ever winning Laura, yet may also signify something “of little excellence or

worth.”45 Arguing that those who partake in a great literary tradition are really copying a worthless

model is a serious condemnation. Similarly, “deceased” (7) can refer to the fact that Petrarch’s literal

cries of unrequited love departed from life with him, but it also connotes that the tradition which

lives on is out-dated. All of these cruel blows are carefully worded so as to be scornful yet appear

inoffensive on the surface.

Yet Sidney’s illustration of his consummate command over the rhetorical mode continues on

another more sophisticated level, as we evaluate the content of Sonnet 15 in light of its mechanics.

While Sidney’s Astrophil derides, “You that poore Petrarch's long-deceased woes / With new-borne

sighs and denisend wit do sing” (7-8), we both see and hear his adherence to the Italian tradition

reflected in the end-rhymes, such as “spring” (1) and “wring” (4), that followthe expected

45 “poor, adj.2s” O.E.D.

 47

ABBAABBA CCDEED pattern, breaking the sonnet up into a classic Italian octave and sestet.

Likewise, the poet-lover is guilty of using the very techniques he labels “far fet helps” (9), such as

alliteration (“rimes, running in ratling rowes” (6), “poore Petrarch” (7), “wrong waies” (9)) and fancy

flowery phrases (“everie purling spring,” (1) “fullest breasts of Fame” (13)). In effect, the accusatory

“You” (1, 5, 7, 9) could refer to Astrophil himself. Though these unoriginal “stolne goods” (11)

place Sidney among everyone else in his field that he attempts to rise above, this measure of irony

can also function on another level to undermine Stella’s greatness. By making use of the techniques

he deems as suitable only for B grade poets, Astrophil makes us wonder to what degree Stella is a

superlative muse, establishing the poet-speaker above his beloved in our minds. Who, we may ask,

does the poem pay tribute to now?

Astrophil (and by extension, Sidney the meta-poet) has become the true ‘star’. As J. G.

Nichols reminds us, “To disclaim the artistry and ingenuity in the act of using them is a stroke of

artistry and ingenuity in itself.46 When we read Sonnet 15, we cannot help but admire the deftness of

Sidney’s craft through the guise of Astrophil. In only 14 lines, the poet-speaker persuades us to

believe him on opposing matters: first that Stella is the ultimate source of fame-worthy inspiration

and he is better at his art than all of his competitors; and secondly, that he uses the same traditions

as other inferior poets, and that in all her greatness, Stella is ultimately inferior to Astrophil himself.

Naturally, we marvel at Sidney’s cleverness, the same variety of which we sawearlier in Wyatt’s

multivalent work. The delicate and intentional ironies of Sonnet 15 actually elevate our admiration of

Astrophil. Even when emulating a given literary paradigm, he rearranges and explores its resources

to leave his personal mark.

Hints of Sidney’s Struggle to Mediate the Serious and the Rhetorical Mode as Seen through Astrophil

46 Nichols, 19.
 48

While we have seen that there are many masterfully rhetorical poems throughout the early

part of Astrophil and Stella which confirm that Astrophil (and by extension, Sidney) is indeed a

worthy practitioner of the political and aesthetic art of his predecessors, we notice that the poet-

speaker significantly modifies his consummately rhetorical self-portrayal about one-third of the way

through the sequence. Both Richard Young and David Kalstone agree that “a newmovement in

Astrophil and Stella crystallizes in the sonnets numbered in the low30s,” and that these poems

“suggest almost immediately Astrophil’s [stylistic] doubts.”47 As though moving beyond the

artificially boastful expression of confident selfhood found in Sonnet 3, “…in Stella’s face I read /

What love and beauty be; then all my deed / But copying is, what in her nature writes” (AS 3, ll. 12-

14), we begin to hear somewhat more authentic, if jarring, notes of uncertainty and dissatisfaction

with the prevailing rhetorical mode as Astrophil and Stella progresses: “What may words say, or what

may words not say, /When truth it selfe must speake like flatterie?” (AS35, ll. 1-2). This probing

inquiry in the opening lines of Sonnet 35 stands out boldly from the rest of the verse we have

encountered thus far, as a serious lament of the denigration of veritas into a verbal style

indistinguishable from falsehood. While it does not automatically set the tone for the poems that

follow, this simple question regarding the efficacy of language and its various modes is a miniature

testament to Astrophil’s growing anxiety about the uncontrollable plurality of the rhetorical world.

Despite the fact that the rest of Sonnet 35 becomes a verbal game hinged on the word “praise,”

obscuring Astrophil’s serious dimension, the two outstanding opening lines represent an important

gesture on the poets behalf toward the ever-increasing weight of the serious style.

Another flicker of serious expression amidst Astrophil’s rhetorical style occurs in Sonnet 45,

a supremely crafted and subsequently well known piece in which Astrophil decides to present

himself as a complete work of fiction in order to win Stella’s love. In the octave, the poet-speaker

47 Kalstone, 161.
 49

rhetorically laments his inability to garner any “pitie” from his beloved for “the verie face of wo /

Painted in [his] beclowded stormie face” (AS 45, ll. 3, 1-2). Undoubtedly, the connotations of

artifice carried by the article “the” in place of “my” in line 1, and the verb “Painted” in line 2, point

towards Astrophil’s artful self-fashioning. However in the sestet, we see Astrophil frankly assert his

rhetorical tactics in a moment of serious expression as he pleads:

Alas, if Fancy drawne by imag’d things

Though false, yet with free scope more grace doth breed
Than servants wracke, where newdoubts honor brings;
Then thinke my dear, that you in me do reed
Of Lovers ruine some sad Tragedie:
I am not I, pitie the tale of me. (AS 45, ll. 9-14)

In these lines, we see that Astrophil adopts the stratagem of Fancy in order to gain power to

persuade Stella, who is more moved by “imag’d things / Though false” (9-10) than the actual

“wracke” (11) of Astrophil. Yet the poet-speaker’s plea for Stella to “thinke” (12) of him as “the tale

of me” (14) – that is, to see him as a rhetorically constructed persona rather than as an irreducible

central self or “I” (14) –confirms in an earnest admission of selfhood that he is fundamentallya

serious “I.” Astrophil verifies here that he can never really be anything beyond his own central self,

such as the rhetorical “tale of me” or the mask of “some sad Tragedie” (14, 13); he can only be

thought of as such by Stella and others. Confirming that Astrophil is more than a merely rhetorical

creature, Anne Ferry notes that the phrase ““I am not I” lays claim to what it wittily denies: that

behind the pitiable “tale of me,” admittedly false and calculated to move Stella, is an “I” with an

identity distinct but unexpressed, held in reserve. … The lover is distanced from the general

representations of art.”48 Moreover, if we extend our critical sight beyond the persona of the poet-

speaker, we realize that the phrase, “I am not I” (14) can also be interpreted as Sidney’s reminder to

his audience that the figure of Astrophil is not an independent entity, but rather another rhetorical

mask adopted by the poet.

48 Ferry, 135.
 50

More than a simple plea for Stella to look past the serious dimension of Astrophil’s being,

the aphorism “I am not I” (14) is also significant for the way that it voices a legitimate crisis of

selfhood. In Sonnet 35, Astrophil nearly violates his own identity as he attempts to deny his serious

self, a fundamental aspect of his being, in favor of embracing the rhetorical mode more ambitiously.

Indeed, Sidney himself must have been intimately familiar with the social pressure to negate or at

least stifle his earnest inner self with a more pleasing rhetorical demeanor – a “tale of me” (14) better

suited to the decorum of the Royal Court – in order to garner the “grace” (10) of the Queen.

Striking a feasible balance between the fictional mask of the courtier and his serious self was

historically challenging for Sidney, as we noted earlier in our discussion, exemplified by his

outstanding political ambassadorship to Rome, followed abruptly by his overly frank letter to

Elizabeth, and his uncouth quarrel with the Earl of Oxford. As we sawin Sonnet 35, and will

continue to see in subsequent poems, this great inner tension that Sidney experienced when it came

to mediating the serious and rhetorical aspects of his identity gets repeatedly explored through his

self-reflective poetic art.

Another noteworthy piece from Astrophil and Stella that articulately conveys Sidney’s desire to

parse the perpetually strained relationship between man’s serious and rhetorical dimensions is

Sonnet 34. A partial reprise of the themes from Sonnet 1, this poem delineates Astrophil’s desire to

write from his heart as the Muse originally demanded. However, we see that the process of verse-

making is greatly delayed and ultimately arduous because Astrophil’s rhetorical instincts derail the

efficacy of his serious self:

Come let me write, and to what end? to ease

A burthned hart, howcan words ease, which are
The glasses of thy dayly vexing care?
Oft cruell fights well pictures forth do please.
Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare:
But will wise men thinke thy words fond ware?
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
 51

What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?

What harder thing than smart, and not to speake? 10
Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard.
Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreak
My harms on Inks poore losse, perhaps some find
Stellas great powrs, that so confuse my mind.

Taking the form of a debate poem, an acknowledged means within the literary tradition of

representing conflict within the speaker,49 this sonnet is unique in the sense that the dispute taking

place in lines 1 through 10 is not between typical adversaries like Wit and Will, or Love and Reason,

but rather between the two opposed voices of Astrophil’s identity: his serious and the rhetorical

selves. This sonnet in effect seeks to dramatize man’s task of mediating between his central and

social selves. Opening the dialogue in line 1, the first voice asserts, “Come let me write,” with the

intent of unburdening Astrophil’s “hart” (2). Echoing Sonnet 1, this notion of writing from one’s

heart carries the implication of engaging one’s inner self, making it clear that this voice is

representative of the serious mode. Given the pride of place at the very opening of the poem, the

central self is established as the primary voice. Yet we see that the rhetorical voice, routinely striving

for personal gain from self-presentation, immediately checks the speaker’s central self by asking

“and to what end?” (1). In classic fashion, Astrophil’s rhetorical self precludes his serious dimension

from expressing earnest feeling in words without evaluating their final “end” (1), since “rhetoric’s

practical purpose is always to win or persuade,”50 as Richard Lanham reminds us.

Furthering the tension between these two aspects of the speaker’s identity, we see that while

the earnest central self is concerned with expressing “thy daily vexing care” (3), the social self works

against this desire for fear of being “ashamed” (5), or violating society’s cultural values with his

words. In these lines, it becomes clear that the inward orientation of the serious self inherently

opposes the rhetorical mode’s outward concern for the opinions of other “men [who might] think

49 Ferry, 146.
50 Lanham, 2.
 52

thy words fond ware” (7), creating a great deal of strain. This dramatic difference in bearing is

highlighted again by Sidney in lines 9 and 10. On one hand, rhetorical Astrophil can not fathom

anything “idler … than [to] speak and not be heard” (9), illustrating an understanding that all

behavior is dramatic performance for the purpose of moving an audience. On the other hand, his

serious self can not think of anything “harder … than [to] smart and not speak” (10), conveying the

sense that one’s innermost sentiments naturally deserve expression and validation regardless of

whether or not they are received publicly.

Yet as different as these two voices are, Sidney reminds us that they are still parts of the

same whole: a complex self. End stopped lines dominate most of the debate, accentuating the

serious and the rhetorical as two contrasting entities, as in lines 7 and 8: “But will not wise men

think thy words fond ware? / Then be they close, and so none shall displease.” However the sonnet

opens with a startling instance of enjambment, “Come let me write, and to what end? to ease / A

burthned hart, howcan words ease” (1-2), giving the impression that the voices of the serious and

rhetorical run together and that man’s multifaceted interiority cannot be neatly cleaved by lines.

Sidney seems to employ this particular syntactical construction to remind us that although they are

fundamentally opposed, one mode depends on the contrast of the other to exist, like the principles

of light and dark. This kind of tension is, I think, what Lanham is referring to in Motives of Eloquence

as he notes, “The Western self has from the beginning been composed of a shifting and perpetually

uneasy combination of homo rhetoricus and homo seriosus, of a social self and a central self. It is their

business to contend for supremacy.” 51 Astrophil’s “uneasiness” about this process of negotiating

aspects of his identity is particularly clear in the framing conclusion of the sonnet as he notes, “Thus

write I while I doubt to write” (12). Sidney’s precarious syntactical placement of the speaker’s “I” in

51 Lanham, 6.
 53

combination with the emphasis on “doubt” gives us a strong impression that the serious and

rhetorical selves are nowmore equally weighted contenders than ever before.

While Sidney’s manner of speaking about the serious and rhetorical dimensions of the self

through the avenue of literary style and the selfhood of the poet is in many ways less clear and direct

than Wyatt’s illustration of feminine “doublness” and the masculine “true meaning heart,” 52 the

particular vehicle of the poet-lover in poems such as Sonnet 1, 34, 35, and 45 afford us a different

viewof the relationship between the central and social modes of man not permitted by Wyatt’s

work. In poems such as “Eche Man Me Telleth” or “In Eternum,” Wyatt uses the social situation of

two separate individuals interacting with one another to illustrate his familiarity with the various

modes of self-representation. Most often, Wyatt’s masculine speaker intentionally labels himself as

the serious lover who has become in his naiveté the victim of the rhetorical lady’s deceptive language

and self-presentation, even though the speaker’s words and poetic strategies betray his own truly

rhetorical nature. However, Sidney effectively combines Wyatt’s two individuals into one,

dramatizing the serious and rhetorical through Astrophil, a single individual who is both “loving in

truth, and faine in verse [his] love to show” (1); a writer who must access and negotiate various

stylistic modes that correspond to aspects of his being. This method shifts the primary focus from

the styles themselves to the inherent tension that exists between them. Ultimately, we see that Sidney

is concerned not simply with man’s relationship to the serious and rhetorical selves, but with man’s

perpetual task of mediatingthe two, meaning that the serious dimension of man’s identity has become

a legitimate threat to the traditionally dominant rhetorical mode.

Sonnet 93 as a Culmination of Sidney’s DifficultyNegotiatingthe Serious and Rhetorical Styles

In concluding our discussion of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as an exercise in self-

representation through the motifs of literary style and writing, it beneficial to briefly examine Sonnet

52 Wyatt, “What Vaileth Trouth?” No. 1 (p.129) in Sylvester’s English Sixteenth-CenturyVerse: An Anthology.
 54

93, a reprise of the themes explored in Sonnet 1, so that we may get a clearer picture of the way in

which Astrophil’s method of self-fashioning, and negotiating a balance between the serious and the

rhetorical, dramatically shifts over the course of the sequence. As Kalstone notes, “The progression

of Sidney’s sequence is linear, [and] we often find him questioning and redefining his attitudes rather

than reinforcing or deepening an initial impression,”53 making it possible for us to trace the

development of his “I” through Astrophil’s unfolding expressions of selfhood. In this poem from

the end of the sequence, we see that the poet-speaker’s initial, boastful confidence in the rhetorical

mode has nowbeen replaced by serious expression that actually bemoans the shortcomings of the

rhetorical ideal:

O fate, o fault, o curse, child of my blisse,

What sobs can give words grace my griefe to show?
What inke is blacke inough to paint my wo?
Through me, wretch me, even Stella vexed is.
Yet truth, (if Caitifs breath may call thee) this
Witnesse with me, that my foule stumbling so,
From carelessnesse did in no manner grow,
But wit confus’d with too much care did misse.
And do I then my selfe this vaine scuse give?
I have (live I and knowthis) harmed thee, 10
Tho words quite me, shall I me selfe forgive?
Only with paines my paines thus eased be,
That all thy hurts in my harts wracke I reede;
I cry thy sighs; my deere, thy tears I bleede.

Though the closing sestet of this poem can be said to regress back to the rhetorically aggressive style

seen in earlier sonnets like 15 and 3, this work is largely unique in that it starts out as an honest and

sustained admission of the failings of the rhetorical style that Astrophil once held in such high

esteem. Opening with the exclamatory sound, “O,” instead of a word with specific meaning, this

poem immediately brings to the forefront the recognition that there are feelings of such intensity

which no combination of embellished words could ever reflect, giving the poem a serious rather

than rhetorical tone. As Cooper notes, “this sonnet is intended to convey an impassioned, sincere

53 Kalstone, 160-161.
 55

attitude,” 54 contrasting Sonnet 1 in which Astrophil masterfully “sought fit words to paint the

blackest face of woe” (AS 1, ll.1). We nowsee that inarticulate “sobs” (2) from the depths of his

central self come closer than artful “words” (2) to showing his “griefe” (2), and that there is no “inke

… blacke inough to paint my wo” (3). Astrophil’s once inscrutable confidence that “I can speake

what I feele” (AS 6, ll. 12) has given way to the sense that the process of articulating selfhood

through language is far more complicated – here, too complicated.

In addition to admitting the inadequacy of language – particularly in the rhetorical style – to

represent all dimensions of self, this sonnet is remarkable for the way that Astrophil presents an

honest portrait of his own failings. Though we are not privy to the exact nature of Astrophil’s

transgression, he makes it clear in lines 6 through 8 that his “foul stumbling” is related to his overly

rhetorical style – “wit confused with too much care” (8) that has “vexed” (4) and “harmed” (10)

even his beloved Stella. Unlike his self-fashioning in Sonnet 1, where he hoped “that she (deare she)

might take some pleasure of my paine: / Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her

know, / Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine” (AS 1, ll. 2-4), there seems to be no

ulterior motive behind Astrophil’s painful self-presentation as a “wretch” (4) in Sonnet 93. In a

manner far from backhanded self-promotion, Astrophil frankly admits that his “wit” (8) has been

unsuccessful in persuading Stella, as he imagined it would in Sonnet 1. Such an open confession of

self blame and failure to charm others with one’s rhetorical skill – something we never sawin

Wyatt’s work – is an extreme rarity in the highly self-conscious Renaissance world, and illustrates

Astrophil’s relative degree of comfort in expressing his serious central self, even if it means placing

himself in the vulnerable a position of social subservience.

Unmistakably, we have seen throughout our discussion of both style and content in Astrophil

and Stella that Sidney has become increasingly more engaged in giving voice to his serious self (at

54 Cooper, 107.
 56

least through the distancing persona of Astrophil) over the progression of his sonnet sequence. The

existentially secure and exceedingly rhetorical nature of early poems written in the highly stylized

tradition of Sidney’s courtly predecessors, such as Sonnet 1, 3, and 15, gradually gives way to a

definite preoccupation with negotiating a balance between the serious and rhetorical aspects of

man’s addresses to the world. Later poems such as 34, 45, and 93 are marked by a pressing (and

even desperate) interest in finding a feasible equilibrium between these two facets of identity, a

challenge that Sidney himself arguably faced on a regular basis during his time at court. These

subsequent sonnets seriously call into question the nature of the speaker’s “I,” and indicate a quite

radical shift in man’s conception of self. In Sidney’s masterful sequence, we see plain evidence of the

fact that by this point in history, the serious dimension of man’s identity has become a valid

counterweight to the traditionally favored rhetorical mode, confirming Berry’s estimation that “as an

exercise in self-representation, Astrophil and Stella is Sidney’s most sophisticated achievement.” 55

55 Berry, 102.
 57

Coda:

Shakespeare s Henry IV, Part I and the Dominance

of the Serious Self in Early Modernity

I shall hereafter, mythrice-gracious lord,

Be more myself. – HenryIV, Part I (3.2.91 – 92), Shakespeare 1

In the previous chapters of this study, we have seen through the poetic works of Sir Thomas

Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney that man’s concept of personal identity, made manifest through his

strategic use of language, underwent significant changes and developments over the course of the

English Renaissance. At the dawn of the era, transitioning out of the Middle Ages, Wyatt’s

exemplary lyrical poems, such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “In Eternum,” illustrated that man

fashioned himself as a predominantly rhetorical creature, despite a continual awareness of the

serious mode. Moving towards the height of the Renaissance, the voice in Sidney’s acclaimed sonnet

sequence, Astrophil and Stella, helped us to see that man had become less existentially secure in

embracing the rhetorical style than in the earlier years, and that his newpreoccupation was with

striking a feasible balance between the inner central self and the outward multifaceted self. Rounding

out our discussion, we will conclude by exploring William Shakespeare’s famous history play, Henry

IV, Part I (1597) for some final insight on man’s attitudes towards identity and conceptions of self as

we approach the high Renaissance and of early modernity. Specifically, we will see from

Shakespeare’s dramatization of Prince Hal’s character that by the close of the sixteenth century, the

rhetorical style has been reduced from the prevailing mode of being to a linguistic tool employed by

serious individuals.

While the dramatic genre of Shakespeare’s HenryIV, Part I may initially brand it as a misfit

within the context of this study, we see that this late Renaissance text in fact complements the other

1 William Shakespeare. “Henry IV, Part I.” The Norton Shakespeare. ed. Stephen Greenblatt. (NewYork: W. W. Norton,
2008) 1188 – 1254.
 58

works, and is vital to the conclusion to this project, as it deals with the courtly milieu, captures

certain ideas about man’s identity and the end of the era, and artfully dramatizes the emergence of

the serious self. Despite its generic differences from the works of Wyatt and Sidney, Shakespeare’s

history play is likewise intimately invested in the aristocratic culture that highly influenced the earlier

court poets, putting it on similar ground with the works explored in earlier chapters. Though the

bard never served as a royal diplomat like the literary figures with whom we have hitherto been

concerned, he still seems to have had a nuanced understanding of the many pressures affecting one’s

presentation of selfhood at court. Using historical accounts from Holinshed’s Chronicles,2 Shakespeare

focuses his play in part on the character of Hal, the prodigal son of England’s King Henry IV, and

his radical transformation in personal identity. As Daniel Seltzer astutely notes:

These two plays [HenryIV, Parts I and II] are about the development of a personality, and
the choices made in the course of that development. The character is that of a man in flux,
and we should attach more importance to that sense of changing, of continual process, than
is implied in our more or less common academic understanding that this is a prince
educating himself. 3

Over the course of the performance, Prince Hal (who becomes King Henry V later in Part II) must

apply lessons learned in the bawdy and lewd world of Eastcheap, ruled by his errant companion Sir

John Falstaff, to the realm of the Royal Court, governed by his father. Both geographic domains

demand that Hal wear specific rhetorical masks in order to manipulate others. Yet what makes the

play truly remarkable as a milestone in the development of man’s self conception, as we shall see, is

Shakespeare’s ability to subtly convey – without totally revealing – the serious central self that

perpetually stands behind these rhetorical tools.

2 G. K. Hunter. “Introduction.” Shakespeare: HenryIV Parts I and II: A Casebook. ed. G. K. Hunter. (London: Macmillan,
1970) 11.
3
Daniel Seltzer. Prince Hal and Tragic Style.” Shakespeare Survey: HenryIV to Hamlet. 30 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977) 22.
 59

As early on in the play as Scene 2 of Act 1, Shakespeare artfully delineates for his audience

an understanding of personal identity in which man is no longer a seamlessly multifaceted being, but

rather an irreducible serious self that dons and discards various masks at will. At the beginning of

the second scene, we are introduced to the character of Hal, a young man of a profligate and

immoral nature, who, like his comrade Falstaff, is ostensibly more concerned with “a purse of gold

most resolutely snatched on Monday night and most dissolutely spent on Tuesday morning” (1.2.30-

31) than with aristocratic activities. However, Shakespeare deftly rounds out this initial character

portrait by ending the scene with an extensive soliloquy on behalf of the future king. Many critics,

such as Wolfgang Clemen, assert that in revolutionizing the monologues of classical tragedy,

“Shakespeare was the first to turn the rigid pattern [of the soliloquy] into a vehicle capable of

expressing an intimate relationship” that man has with his inner dimension.4 In this moment of

privacy, designed to reveal the innermost thoughts and earnest secrets of the serious central self,

Prince Hal confesses that his prodigal temperament and penchant for disreputable company is little

more than a rhetorical device:

I knowyou all, and will a while uphold

The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
…
So when this loose behavior I throwoff
And pay the debt I never promised,
By howmuch better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes … (1.2. 173 – 181; 186 – 189)

In these significant and revelatory lines, Shakespeare offers us a brief glimpse of Hal’s central

identity, his serious mode of address to the world, which he uses to earnestly expose his rhetorical

4 Wolfgang Clemen. Shakespeare’s Soliloquies. (NewYork: Methuen & Co., 1987) 33.
 60

techniques of self-fashioning. His opening admission, “I knowyou all” (173), figuratively addressed

to his ne’er-do-well Eastcheap companions, suggests that Hal is actually an astute judge of character,

despite his social self-presentation to the contrary. Furthermore, we see that his outwardly prodigal

nature and participation in his friends’ “unyoked humor of … idleness” (174) is no more than a

strategic persona adopted for a time by an essentially serious self – “loose behavior” (186) that Hal

can (and will) readily “throwoff” (186) without fundamentally altering any aspect of his personal

identity. As Richard Lanham notes, “Hal plays his royal role without being absorbed by it, without

forgetting its precarious dramatic construction.”5 This understanding of man’s self as a stable and

fixed concept that may only be made to outwardly appear different to others is reinforced by Hal’s

descriptive metaphor for his scallywag cohort as a group of “base contagious clouds” (176) or “foul

and ugly mists” (180) and himself as the inherently superior “sun” (175). Not entirely unlike

Astrophil’s inadvertent admission in Sonnet 45 that he can never really be anything beyond his own

central self, and that the rhetorical “tale of me” or the mask of “some sad Tragedie” are only

outward performances (AS 45, ll.14, 13), so too does Hal confirm his own self-presentation as one

with the tavern crowd to be in reality an intentional “smother[ing] up” (177) or a covering over of

his true identity.

Moreover, the understanding of selfhood offered by Shakespeare through Hal’s phrase, “By

howmuch better than my word I am, / By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes” (188-189) is

interesting for the way in which it relates man’s sense of personal identity to his use of language.

Essentially, we see here that man is not a protean and fluidly multivalent creature that invents his

self through a strategic manipulation of words, but rather an entity with an “I” necessarily unrelated

to, or at least potentially reserved from, his self as fashioned through language. This is to say that by

the high English Renaissance at the end of the sixteenth century– only fifteen years after Sidney’s

5 Richard Lanham. The Motives of Eloquence. (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1976) 207.
 61

completion of Astrophil and Stella – man’s sense of self is nowgoverned by the serious mode, with

the rhetorical style used as a manipulative device rather than a worldview6. Additionally, Prince Hal’s

intent to “falsify men’s hopes” (189) with his political strategy of self-presentation suggests that no

one suspected that his words and his identity might be disassociated, or that he may someday

“please again to be himself” (178). This detail confirms that men of this age already viewed the

dominance of the serious self to be normative, just as we do in modernity.

While Shakespeare’s remarkable literary technique does much throughout Hal’s soliloquy to

reveal that the equilibrium of man’s personal identity had thoroughly shifted towards the serious end

of the style spectrum by the late 1590s, such references to the growing importance of the central self

are not limited only to moments of confidentiality. Indeed, we hear a direct echo of Hal’s soliloquy

again in Act 3, Scene 2 as the young prince meets with his father, King Henry IV. After the

displeased monarch rebukes Hal for having allowed,

Such inordinate and lowdesires,

Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As [he] is matched withal … to
Accompany the greatness of [his] blood,
And hold their level with [his] princely heart, (3.2.12 -17)

Hal responds by assuring him: “I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, / Be more myself”

(3.2.91-92). As to the exact implication of this passage, NewHistoricist Stephen Greenblatt argues:

‘To be oneself’ here means to perform one’s part in the scheme of power rather than to
manifest one’s natural disposition, or what we would normally designate as the very core of
the self. Indeed, it is no means clear that such a thing as a natural disposition exists in the
play, except as a theatrical fiction.”7

6 Of course, Shakespeare’s dramatization of the state of man’s identity is anachronistic for the Middle Ages, in which
this history play takes place. Though his characters belong to an earlier age, the bard arguably represents their interiority
as he understood it as a member of Elizabethan society at the end of the Renaissance.
7 Stephen Greenblatt. “Invisible Bullets.” Shakespearean Negotiations. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

46.
 62

While it is perhaps true that Hal’s pledge to “be more himself” is meant in part to assure his father

that he will from this point forward fulfill more of his royal duties as an heir to the throne,

Greenblatt’s ambitious claim that these lines are not indicative of interiority – and moreover, that

there is not a single presentation of serious selfhood in the entire play – is unarguably misguided. In

keeping with the themes of the soliloquy regarding modes of self presentation and language, Hal’s

vowagain implies that his Eastcheap identity is not part of his serious character. Likewise, the

notion underlying Hal’s aphoristic reply is precisely that there must be another “I” to contrast with

the one he has put forth thus far. Man’s ability to present his character as being more or less like

“himself” implies that we must all possess a fundamental and irreducible central self that stands

behind the various social masks we wear to manipulate others.

If we still need additional confirmation of the fact that Shakespeare’s Prince Hal effectively

represents man’s arrival at a modern conception of personal identity, we need look no further than

Act 2, Scene 5, in which Falstaff and Hal take turns role playing imaginary dialogues between the

King and his prodigal son. Speaking with the very voice of his father, Prince Hal demands for “that

villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan” to be exiled

(2.5.421-422). Pleading against such a devastating verdict (and arguably permitting his serious central

self to supersede his rhetorical role), Falstaff, in the character of the prince, begs, “Banish not him in

thy Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (2.5.437-438). Hal’s terse

response, “I do; I will” (2.5.439), in two tenses is significant for the way in which it elucidates his

conception of personal identity. Shakespeare arranges Hal’s reply in this play scene so as to call

attention to the difference between the prince’s capacity to play a role, and his ability to express his

serious self. The “I” of the present tense declaration is understandably Hal speaking in the persona

of the king, a mask that he has adopted momentarily for the sake of the rhetorical exercise. The

second “I,” expresses the same intention of banishing Falstaff, but in the future tense, indicating
 63

Hal’s plans for when he finally discards his mask. The latter half of this line provides us with a brief

glimpse of the irreducible serious self that stands behind the rhetorical devices, a moment, according

to Daniel Seltzer, in which “Shakespeare brings the internalizing technique to perfection, and

through it denotes truly the silent, wordless motion of the mind and heart.”8

As a point of summation, it is worth noting that in regard to representing man’s

understanding of personal identity through language, Shakespeare’s HenryIV history plays hold a

special place in the canon of Renaissance literature for the way in which they artfully dramatize the

new, modern priority of a serious interiority. Produced immediately before Shakespeare’s turn to the

tragedies, HenryIV, Part I and II are seen by many critics as prefiguring later plays with remarkable

depictions of man’s sense of selfhood, such as Hamlet, Othello, and KingLear. Scholars like Katherine

Eisaman Maus, Wolfgang Clemen, Norman Sanders,9 and David Seltzer collectively agree that

Shakespeare first began experimenting with conveying the full depths and legitimate weight of the

serious inner dimension of his characters during his composition of the Henryplays and his creation

of Prince Hal in the late 1590s. Seltzer tells us:

Although Shakespeare shows us earlier that he was aware of the need for such a technique
(for a technique it is, after all), he did not render it fully in plays written before I and II Henry
IV … the technique itself, while no doubt Shakespeare did not acquire it as a conscious
exercise, was a pre-requisite for the creation of the central figures of those plays we call the
major tragedies … Therefore, Hal himself becomes the stage character whose ‘personality’ is
one of the most pivotal in the playwright’s career, for in its composition he acquired the
ability to make a character change internally.10

Yet at the same time, one would be naïve to believe that this development in man’s identity, “the felt

existence of an inner life from which motivation and action both spring,” 11 and the author’s ability

to convey such an inward dimension came about only at the very height of the Renaissance.

8 Daniel Seltzer. “Prince Hal and Tragic Style.” Shakespeare Survey: HenryIV to Hamlet. 30 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977) 27.
9 See Norman Sanders. “The True Prince and the False Thief: Prince Hal and the Shift of Identity.” Shakespeare Survey:

HenryIV to Hamlet. 30 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 29 – 34.

10 Seltzer, 14.
11 Seltzer, 13.
 64

As this study has attempted to illustrate, the serious aspect of man’s identity (and an interest

in conveying it), which blossoms with Shakespeare’s HenryIV at the end of the sixteenth century,

did not come about inexplicably and without precedent. Arguably, aspects of Shakespeare’s designs

in the character of Hal had been in the works since Wyatt’s recognition of the serious and rhetorical

modes of self fashioning in his lyrics and Sidney’s expression of the difficulty man faces in mediating

the two in Astrophil and Stella. Recognizing this fact, Eisaman Maus rightly insists:

When one looks at the wide variety of printed materials produced in the reigns of Elizabeth
and James, it becomes difficult to claim that Hamlet’s boast of “that within” is anachronistic
– that Shakespeare has mysteriously managed to jump forward in time and expropriate the
conceptual equipment of a later era.12

We have seen in each chapter of this study that man’s identity has always been composed of both a

serious dimension, and a rhetorical one, some variable combination of an inner self, and a social self,

from the start of the English Renaissance. In the verse of Sir Thomas Wyatt, the most exemplary

poet of the early sixteenth century, both style and content point to an immersion in and mastery of

the rhetorical mode, though Wyatt’s speaker nevertheless recognizes and understands the concept of

a serious central self. Moving closer to modernity, we sawfrom Sidney’s sonnet sequence, that man’s

previous preoccupation with the rhetorical ideal had, for the most part, yielded to a concentration

on the task of mediating the central and social self. By exploring each poet’s developing conception

of selfhood through language in this way, we have come to understand that the dominance of the

serious style and aspect of human identity in today’s world is not an entirely newphenomenon that

springs up in the highly rational seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as some literary critics would

like to insist. Rather, we have seen that the modern serious self has always been present in some

degree, even in the highly rhetorical culture of the early Renaissance from which is seems so

estranged.

12 Katherine Eisaman Maus. Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
3.
 65

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