'Our poet the Monarch': Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance subjectivity

This dissertation analyzes Renaissance process of self-authorization and uses Sir Philip Sidney as its literary model. It examines how Sir Philip Sidney contests a governance not situated in the self as it attempts to understand how the concept of governance is integrated into private concepts of love and duty. Sidney's body of work focuses on to whom or to what is one's fundamental allegiance--the Queen, the state, or the self. His writings encourage a conception of the self as one's own sovereign, i.e., as one's own master. To be one's own master is to assume responsibility for one's actions rather than to accept the presumed responsibility of one's employer, one's master. At the base of this self-sovereignty is the belief that right judgment resides within the individual--be he poet, subject, or monarch. Thus the individual is conceptually akin to the monarch because of a shared interest in the preservation and development of the state. Correspondingly, the sovereign is as likely as the subject--the individual--to have a vision of the state that deserves consideration and perhaps implementation. Self-sovereignty effectively "restores" subjectivity to the subject who no longer recognizes conceptually the sovereign's position as that of an absolute better but rather as one of a number of negotiated and protean positions. Sidney's writing centers on "mastery" and the construction of a "citizen" subject as an autonomous player in the representation and shaping of the self and the state. Yet an "empowered" citizenry introduces a level of instability that unnerves governments. Early governments assume that monarchical and tyrannical governments present a valuable stabilizing force, based on the belief that rule by a single, consistent will disallows fractiousness. However, even Sidney acknowledges that a single, consistent will is the stuff of fiction and that a state with consistent, equally implemented laws can counter instability to a great extent. Sidney's work spurs an idea of the self that allows the redefinition of the subject as one's own sovereign. As his writing anatomizes the work of self-constitution, it shows the way toward that citizen subject that Milton needed and Hobbes feared.