Reason, Faith, and Shipwreck in Sidney's New Arcadia

The three shipwrecks of the New Arcadia are key structural moments in this complex work, each one signaling a major transition in the narrative's plot. This article considers shipwreck as a trope through which Sidney's fiction explores the relative merits of reason and faith in understanding human experience. Shipwreck provides a critical lens to reconsider both Sidney's humanist Neo-Platonism and his religious faith. While Sidney's romance clearly treats faith as superior to reason, he also imagines the two conceptual systems as interactive, a position which allows him to qualify the Reformation's attack on this-worldly values with his hopes for human intellect.