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As Mary Wroth understood, Philip Sidney’s imitation of Petrarch’s amatory woes allowed her uncle wide scope to represent Astrophil’s self-defeating behavior and his own prospects to mend his ways. As a self-reflexive text, Astrophil and Stella consequently inscribes not just an instance of the Petrarchan mode but also a critical attitude toward it. Sidney’s remarks about love poetry in A Defence of Poetry (1580‒81?) suggest that it is a conflicted attitude. Celebrating the “golden world” of Greek poetry and the “vatic” world of Roman poetry while bracketing as privileged models the divinely inspired Psalms, Song of Songs, and scriptural hymns, A Defence contends that modern Italian forms such as the sonnet and canzone can supplement the former. Among English works suitable for the national canon, Sidney mentions those of Gower and of Chaucer, in general (74), and the Italian-inspired The Knight’s Tale (101) and Troilus and Criseyde (112), in particular. Among recent texts he mentions (though with qualifications) Gorboduc, the Mirror for Magistrates, and The Sheapherdes Calender, and he commends the earl of Surrey’s Petrarchan sonnets, which befit “a noble birth, and are worthy of a noble mind” (112).1 Such “passionate sonnets” as those emulating Petrarch’s Rime sparse nonetheless run the risk that, like corrupting “comedies” whose actions “abuseth men’s wit, training it to wanton sinfulness and lustful love,” they might “rather teach than reprehend amorous conceits” (103). But, if abusive poetry has corrosive power, the converse may also be true. Insisting that good poetry should move the reader to a persuasive end, Sidney argues that “it is not gnosis but praxis must be the fruit” (91). This praxis or capacity for action requires as 198 An Apology for Uncles Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry 10 much a defense of the reader’s immanent response as of the text’s contingent merit.2 Among competing genres, amatory poetry affords a testing ground to assess a lover’s ethos, to detect the latter’s flaws, and to consider one’s like or unlike behavior. The protests of “poore Petrarchs long deceased woes” should move wise readers to question the grounds of such utterances (sonnet 15). A prudent response might prompt derision, “for the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight, and the scornfulness of the action stirreth laughter.” The complaints of “a busy loving courtier” such as Astrophil ought to stimulate reflective judgment and moral discrimination (116). Reflective judgment and moral discrimination are cognitive acts, matters of gnosis rather than praxis, and their psychological complexity thwarts any simple understanding of praxis as an imitation of virtue or vice in lived experience : “And however praxis cannot be, without being moued to practise, is no hard matter to consider” (91). Supremely overdetermined by its triple negative, this sentence could mean, “It is not difficult to fathom how praxis follows from understanding.” But, because Elizabethan usage sometimes construed the double negative as an intensive negation, the sentence could also mean the opposite, “It is indeed difficult to fathom how praxis follows from understanding .” Praxis can and must result from deep persuasion—in Plato’s Protagoras 352c and 356c–358d, for example, Socrates argues that to know the good is to be compelled to do the good—but the precise relationship of stimulus to response eludes definition. It surely encompasses more than any bland counsel to imitate virtuous deeds, despite the allure, some say, of such strange bedfellows as William Bennett’s Book of Virtues and Oscar Wilde’s dictum that life imitates art. Literature may be an imitative art, but it does not necessarily compel an imitative response. Its effect may be gnosis that leads to persuasion, but how persuasion leads to action invites countless possibilities. Support for unbalancing these relations between gnosis and praxis comes from the earliest known commentary upon A Defence. Written probably in 1585 by William Temple (1555‒1627), a Cambridge graduate who became Sidney ’s secretary in November of that year, the Latin Analysis tractationis de Poesi contextae a nobilissimo viro Philippe Sidneio equite aurato ‘An Analysis of the Treatise on Poetry Written by the Most Noble Philip Sidney, Knight,’ attempts a rigorous cross-examination of the text. As a logician trained in Ramist method, Temple had earlier published P. Rami Dialecticae libri duo ‘Two Books Concerning Ramus’s Dialectic’ (1584).3 When he explicates A Defence he draws minute attention to the technical procedures of its argument...

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