This essay analyses the use of idolatry in representations of desire in six Renaissance sonnet sequences (Petrarch, Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Daniel and Shakespeare). Seeking to offer a fresh perspective on the relationship between idolatry, gender dynamics and auto‐poetics, the article reviews the changes in the use of idolatrous imagery to argue that they indicate changes in the authorial priorities relating to representations of desire and the writing self.

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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)

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