The Use of Petrarchian Convention in Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella

Astrophil and Stella is without doubt one of the most influential sonnet cycles of the Elizabethan Age. While many people simply dismiss Astrophil and Stella as a typical Petrarchian sonnet sequence filled with the familiar Petrarchian conventions of love and desire, Sidney actually is presenting a new perspective on love, one that is quite different from that of Petrarch, Wyatt, and many other earlier writers. Although many of the sequences are predictable in their course of recitation, Sidney still finds a way to infuse a force and energy into his writing that causes the reader, not only to be caught by the paradoxical verses but also to question the entire psychoanalytical process of love. Sidney effectively creates in his work an anatomy of love. He dissects, explores and analyses love in all its different facets and stages, laying bare to us the mechanism and etiology of love, essentially taking the reader on a tour of the lover’s mind and the psychological voyage that it induces upon all those that it wounds with it’s pointed arrow. More importantly, however, he shows us that the expression of love has no pattern, convention, or set model, and that to try and conventionalize love is impossible, because love follows no set course. He essentially uses the Petrarchian convention to deride not only that very same convention, but also to show that describing one’s love through the words or conventions of others is not only ineffective, but fails to express true love at all.