Labyrinth of Desire: Invention and Culture in the Work of Sir Philip Sidney

In Labyrinth of Desire, William Craft argues that Sir Philip Sidney's work reveals the limits of Tudor cultural codes invented to manage political and erotic experience, even as that work leads readers to see invention as a necessary and constant human act. Sidney's friend Fulke Greville saw in his fiction "directing threads" to guide readers out of the "labyrinth of desire," enabling them to escape the instability of experience. Modern readings of Sidney generally either endorse Greville's judgment, defining a poet who transcends through art the conflicts of public virtue and private desire, or they reverse it, presenting a Sidney trapped by cultural demands and expectations he could neither abandon nor reform. But Craft makes Greville's labyrinth a metaphor for a Tudor humanist culture both constraining and liberating, a culture whose very limitations helped provoke in Sidney a revised understanding of human nature and human work.
What Sidney's fiction imitates is not the classical and Petrarchan paradigms of justice and love so dear to his own courtly class but rather the shifting patterns of experience in which the partiality of these cultural constructs is revealed.
Craft finds Sidney's Elizabethan culture neither an obstacle surmounted by his art nor a self-contained system organizing and defeating all challenges to its authority. In ways that Craft shows to be parallel to the written work of Luther and Montaigne, Sidney developed within that culture a Protestant and skeptical humanist vision of invention as an act provoked by the unfinished status of the world and of the self. As such, invention becomes work undertaken in imitation of the ongoing creation of nature and God. This invention is a labor of human wit "lifted up" in consciousness and mimetic power but not lifted out of the cultural labyrinth of desire.