‘Never was I the golden cloud’: Ovidian myth, ambiguous speaker and the narrative in the sonnet sequences by Petrarch, Sidney and Spenser

Abstract

While the sonnets of the Petrarchan discourse receive continuous critical attention, mechanisms used to bind sonnet sequences into integrated works of fiction remain unexamined. This essay looks at the way Petrarch, Sidney and Spenser employ refracted Ovidian myth to create ambiguous first‐person speakers for Il Canzoniere, Astrophil and Stella and Amoretti, in order to suggest that the sonneteers used shifting self‐fictionalization and poetics of subtextual ambiguity to foster reader involvement and perception of the sequence as an integral work, a concern which betrays the presence of novelistic thinking. (pp. 637–661)