The Isolated Courtier of Castiglione and Sidney

Abstract

<p>We tend to associate the Renaissance period with a time in which man reaches out for new knowledge and discoveries. This is due partly to the discovery of the new continent and the many scientific breakthroughs which dissolved archaic and religious explanations for natural phenomena. These developments led man to believe his potential was untapped and enormous. In the frenzy to obtain the maximum of one's capabilities moving outward into the world, Renaissance man, adversely, finds himself isolated from it.</p> <p>The two writers of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which I compare are Baldesar Castiglione and Sir Philip Sidney and how they describe situations in which man retreats from his surroundings. The first segment of this thesis focuses on the alienation of II Cortegiano, how the courtier relates first, to his superior and later, how the intimacies which the courtier shares with women are weakened by his refusal to participate equally in this relationship. There are positive side-effects to this withdrawal from society, according to Castiglione, who shows how the Urbino nobility's impulse to create is stronger in a cloistered environment than in a more public climate. The depiction of the perfect man aspirations while serving as a beneficially political means by which to instruct the prince.</p> <p>In Chapter Two the shift of the thesis moves to Sir Philip Sidney's youthful courtier in Astrophil and Stella. The poet retreats from society in order to develop his own truthful language of love to Stella. Sidney's poet rejects the trappings of his culture, his religion and the literary past of England in his effort to rebuild a more expressive poetry. While the experience is a futile and solitary one for the lover, the art which he creates serves to rejuvenate the Elizabethan sonnet sequence.</p> <p>I conclude that although alienation carries along with it the negative baggage that we in modern times impose on it, for the Renaissance artist isolation provided the atmosphere necessary for fruitful invention.</p>