25-) English Literature
Literary writings
Like
the best of the Elizabethans, Sidney was successful in more than one branch of
literature, but none of his work was published during his lifetime. His finest
achievement was a sequence of 108 love sonnets. These owe much to Petrarch and
Pierre de Ronsard in tone and style, and place Sidney as the greatest Elizabethan
sonneteer after Shakespeare. Written to his mistress, Lady Penelope Rich,
though dedicated to his wife, they reveal true lyric emotion couched in a
language delicately archaic. In form Sidney usually adopts the Petrarchan
octave (ABBAABBA), with variations in the sestet that include the English final
couplet. His artistic contacts were more peaceful and significant for his
lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote Astrophel and Stella
(1591) and the first draft of The Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy. His
pastoral romance The Arcadia (1598) is an intricate love story, embodying the
ideals of the medieval chivalry, so congenial to Sidney's own spirit. The story
is diffused and involved, and the many secondary love stories interwoven with
the main one distract attention. The characters are vague and idealized. The
style, in its strength and its weaknesses, is that of a poet writing prose;
melodious, picturesque, rather artificial and ornamental. The story contains a
number of fine lyrics. Somewhat earlier, he had met Edmund Spenser, who
dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him. Other literary contacts included
membership, along with his friends and fellow poets Fulke Greville, Edward
Dyer, Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, of the (possibly fictitious)
"Areopagus", a humanist endeavour to classicise English verse.
Because
the queen would not give him an important post, he had turned to literature as
an outlet for his energies. In 1578 he composed a pastoral playlet, The Lady of
May, for the queen. By 1580 he had completed a version of his heroic prose
romance, the Arcadia. It is typical of his gentlemanly air of assumed
nonchalance that he should call it “a trifle, and that triflingly handled,”
whereas it is in fact an intricately plotted narrative of 180,000 words.
Early
in 1581 his aunt, the countess of Huntington, had brought to court her ward,
Penelope Devereux, who later that year married the young Lord Rich. Whether or
not Sidney really did fall in love with her, during the summer of 1582 he
composed a sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, that recounts a courtier’s
passion in delicately fictionalized terms: its first stirrings, his struggles
against it, and his final abandonment of his suit to give himself instead to
the “great cause” of public service. These sonnets, witty and impassioned,
brought Elizabethan poetry at once of age. About the same time, he wrote The
Defence of Poesie, an urbane and eloquent plea for the social value of
imaginative fiction, which remains the finest work of Elizabethan literary
criticism. In 1584 he began a radical revision of his Arcadia, transforming its
linear dramatic plot into a many-stranded, interlaced narrative. He left it
half finished, but it remains the most important work of prose fiction in English
of the 16th century. He also composed other poems and later began a paraphrase
of the Psalms. He wrote for his own amusement and for that of his close
friends; true to the gentlemanly code of avoiding commercialism, he did not
allow his writings to be published in his lifetime.
The
incomplete revised version of his Arcadia was not printed until 1590; in 1593
another edition completed the story by adding the last three books of his
original version (the complete text of the original version remained in
manuscript until 1926). His Astrophel and Stella was printed in 1591 in a
corrupt text, his Defence of Poesie in 1595, and a collected edition of his
works in 1598, reprinted in 1599 and nine times during the 17th century.
Although
in July 1585 he finally received his eagerly awaited public appointment, his
writings were to be his most lasting accomplishment. He was appointed, with his
uncle, the earl of Warwick, as joint master of the ordnance, an office that
administered the military supplies of the kingdom. In November the queen was
finally persuaded to assist the struggle of the Dutch against their Spanish
masters, sending them a force led by the earl of Leicester. Sidney was made
governor of the town of Flushing (Dutch: Vlissingen) and was given command of a
company of cavalry. But the following 11 months were spent in ineffective
campaigns against the Spaniards, while Sidney was hard put to maintain the
morale of his poorly paid troops. He wrote to his father-in-law that, if the
queen did not pay her soldiers, she would lose her garrisons but that, for
himself, the love of the cause would never make him weary of his resolution,
because he thought “a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth
play his own part truly, though others be out.”
The
dominance of women in the poet's early life was doubtless formative. Sidney's
skill in portraying female characters, from the bewitching, multifarious Stella
of Astrophil and Stella (1591) to Philoclea and Pamela, the bold, beautiful,
and articulate princesses of the Old Arcadia (written circa 1581) and the New
Arcadia (1590; written circa 1583-1584) is, as C. S. Lewis notes in his English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), without equal
before William Shakespeare. The two versions of the Arcadia, Sidney's most
ambitious works, were written under the guiding spirit and often in the
presence of Mary Sidney Herbert, his "dear Lady and sister, the Countess
of Pembroke," herself a great patron of writers, to whom the two versions
of the Arcadia are dedicated. Mary went on to serve as Sidney's literary
executor after his death.
Nor
can the benevolent influence of Sidney's mother, Lady Mary, be doubted.
Lady-in-waiting to the queen, she contracted the smallpox in October 1562 while
caring for Elizabeth during her bout with the sickness. Her face severely
disfigured, Lady Mary thereafter avoided appearing at court. According to Ben
Jonson in the Conversations with Drummond, when Lady Mary could not avoid
appearing in public she wore a mask. Four of Sidney's Certain Sonnets (8-11)
that lament the damage done to a beautiful face by disease may owe something to
his memory of his mother's ordeal. And his portrait of the long-suffering
Parthenia in the New Arcadia, whose lover Argalus, marries her despite her
ruined beauty, clearly echoes his mother's plight and his father's continuing
devotion.
Military
activity
Sidney
played a brilliant part in the military/literary/courtly life common to the
young nobles of the time. Both his family heritage and his personal experience
(he was in Walsingham's house in Paris during the Saint Bartholomew's Day
Massacre), confirmed him as a keenly militant Protestant.[citation needed]
In
the 1570s, he persuaded John Casimir to consider proposals for a united Protestant
effort against the Catholic Church and Spain. In the winter of 1575-76 he
fought in Ireland while his father was Lord Deputy there. In the early 1580s,
he argued fruitlessly for an assault on Spain itself. Promoted General of Horse
in 1583, his enthusiasm for the Protestant struggle was given free rein when he
was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands in 1585. Whilst in the
Netherlands, he consistently urged boldness on his superior, his uncle the Earl
of Leicester. He carried out a successful raid on Spanish forces near Axel in
July 1586.[citation needed]
Injury
and death
Later
that year, he joined Sir John Norris in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting for the
Protestant cause against the Spanish. During the battle, he was shot in the thigh
and died of gangrene 26 days later, at the age of 31. One account says this
death was avoidable and heroic. Sidney noticed that one of his men was not
fully armoured. He took off his thigh armour on the grounds that it would be
wrong to be better armored than his men. As he lay dying, Sidney composed a
song to be sung by his deathbed. According to the story, while lying wounded he
gave his water to another wounded soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is yet
greater than mine". This became possibly the most famous story about Sir
Philip, intended to illustrate his noble and gallant character. Sidney's body
was returned to London and interred in Old St Paul's Cathedral on 16 February
1587. The grave and monument were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
A modern monument in the crypt lists his among the important graves lost.
Already
during his own lifetime, but even more after his death, he had become for many
English people the very epitome of a Castiglione courtier: learned and politic,
but at the same time generous, brave, and impulsive. The funeral procession was
one of the most elaborate ever staged, so much so that his father-in-law,
Francis Walsingham, almost went bankrupt. As Sidney was a brother of the
Worshipful Company of Grocers, the procession included 120 of his company
brethren.
Never
more than a marginal figure in the politics of his time, he was memorialised as
the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser's 'Astrophel', one of the
greatest English Renaissance elegies.
An
early biography of Sidney was written by his friend and schoolfellow, Fulke
Greville. While Sidney was traditionally depicted as a staunch and unwavering
Protestant, recent biographers such as Katherine Duncan-Jones have suggested
that his religious loyalties were more ambiguous. He was known to be friendly
and sympathetic towards individual Catholics.
Works
The
Lady of May – This is one of Sidney's lesser-known works, a masque written and
performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579.
Astrophel
and Stella – The first of the famous English sonnet sequences, Astrophel and
Stella was probably composed in the early 1580s. The sonnets were
well-circulated in manuscript before the first (apparently pirated) edition was
printed in 1591; only in 1598 did an authorised edition reach the press. The
sequence was a watershed in English Renaissance poetry. In it, Sidney partially
nativised the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion
from poem to poem, with the attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure,
narrative; the philosophical trappings; the musings on the act of poetic
creation itself. His experiments with rhyme scheme were no less notable; they
served to free the English sonnet from the strict rhyming requirements of the
Italian form.
The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia – The Arcadia, by far Sidney's most ambitious
work, was as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance
that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model
of Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a highly idealised version of the
shepherd's life adjoins (not always naturally) with stories of jousts,
political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published in the
sixteenth century, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested
within each other, and different storylines are intertwined. The work enjoyed
great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William
Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; parts of
it were also dramatised by John Day and James Shirley. According to a widely
told story, King Charles I quoted lines from the book as he mounted the
scaffold to be executed; Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded after Sidney's Pamela. Arcadia exists in two
significantly different versions. Sidney wrote an early version (the Old
Arcadia) during a stay at Mary Herbert's house; this version is narrated in a
straightforward, sequential manner. Later, Sidney began to revise the work on a
more ambitious plan, with much more backstory about the princes, and a much
more complicated story-line, with many more characters. He completed most of
the first three books, but the project was unfinished at the time of his death
– the third book breaks off in the middle of a sword fight. There were several
early editions of the book. Fulke Greville published the revised version alone,
in 1590. The Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister, published a version in
1593, which pasted the last two books of the first version onto the first three
books of the revision. In the 1621 version, Sir William Alexander provided a
bridge to bring the two stories back into agreement. It was known in this
cobbled-together fashion until the discovery, in the early twentieth century,
of the earlier version.
An
Apology for Poetry (also known as A Defence of Poesie and The Defence of
Poetry) – Sidney wrote Defence of Poetry before 1583. It has taken its place
among the great critical essays in English. It is generally believed that he
was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who
dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in
1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as
those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and
Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defence is that poetry, by
combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is
more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to
virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the
Elizabethan stage.
Sidney
also read widely in Italian poetry and criticism, which he chose not to mention
to Languet. Like many of his contemporaries he held Italian literature in high
esteem, and his work was significantly shaped by Italian influences. His
reference in The Defence of Poetry to Dante's Beatrice (in the Paradiso rather
than the Vita nuova) is the first by an Englishman. Jacopo Sannazaro, twice
mentioned as an authority in The Defence of Poetry , through his Arcadia (1504)
contributed to Sidney's understanding of pastoral romance. The valiant hero of
Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, (1532), also twice mentioned in the
Defence, helped shape the characters of Pyrocles and Musidorus in the Arcadia .
Though he resists the influence of Petrarch and his followers in Astrophil and
Stella, Sidney's awareness of Petrarchism is everywhere apparent.
To
the modern reader Sidney's reasoning seems shockingly brutal, yet the
repression he advocates is typical of English attitudes toward the Irish during
Elizabeth's reign. He does argue that a tax that exempted no one would ease the
suffering of the many, who had traditionally borne the brunt of taxation: "this
touches the privileged ... persons [who] be all the rich men of the Pale, the
burden only lying upon the poor, who may groan, for their cry cannot be
heard." But this argument seems ingenuous, for further on he advocates a
policy of complete subjugation, saying that severe means are more justified in
Ireland than lenity. In the end Sir Henry's fortunes in Ireland worsened, and
he was recalled as Lord Deputy in February 1578.
In
the years after 1577 Sidney's political career was frustrated by Elizabeth's interest
in balancing the power of Spain against that of France, a balance she feared
would be upset by the creation of a Protestant League. Thwarted in his
political ambition, Sidney turned his attention briefly to exploration,
investing in three New World voyages by Martin Frobisher. He also began,
perhaps as early as 1578, what soon became an intensive writing career.
Among
his first literary projects Sidney experimented with a type of drama that would
reach its most sophisticated form in the seventeenth-century court masque. In
1578 or 1579, for the queen's visit to his uncle Leicester's new estate at
Wanstead, he wrote the pastoral entertainment known as The Lady of May. The
only published version, included in a 1598 edition of Arcadia, is not a text, but
rather a detailed transcription of the production, perhaps done at Sidney's
request. Ostensibly a tribute to Elizabeth, it is a work of some literary merit
and considerable political and propagandistic import.
The
Lady of May, a young and beautiful maiden much pursued by country bachelors,
faces an emblematic choice of marriage between two men she likes but does not
love: the wealthy shepherd Espilus, a man "of very small deserts and no
faults," and the pleasing but sometimes violent forester Theron, a man of
"many deserts and many faults." The drama combines several elements
that were to figure prominently as themes and issues in Sidney's later
writings, especially Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadias: the Petrarchan
stance of stylized veneration of a lady by her lover, the pastoral mode of
setting and plot, and some dramatized speculations about the uses and abuses of
rhetoric. But like many of his contemporaries, Sidney adapts convention to
topicality; and Elizabeth's own unmarried status together with her apparent
pleasure at the courtship of François, Duke of Alençon and (after 1576) of
Anjou are deeply implicated in this superficially innocuous entertainment. The
action was designed to favor Theron the forester over Espilus the shepherd, in
whose country blandness Sidney intended to reflect Alençon. But "it
pleased her Majesty to judge that Espilus did the better deserve" the Lady
of May. Although Sidney left open the way to such a resolution--the final
verses of Espilus and Theron allow for either choice--Elizabeth's selection of
Espilus over Theron illustrates the degree to which Sidney and his queen saw
things differently.
Late
in 1579 Sidney made his opposition to Alençon's suit explicit in an open letter
to the queen. By that time the issue had focused the divided loyalties of
English Protestants and Catholics. The queen had been considering Alençon's
proposal of marriage for some time. Her childlessness invited a bitter struggle
over succession, and many English Protestants feared a Catholic consort.
Sidney's faction, which included his father and his powerful uncle Leicester,
believed that a French marriage might lead to civil war.
To
the modern reader this letter, "Written ... to Queen Elizabeth, Touching
Her Marriage with Monsieur," seems remarkably frank and fearless of the
displeasure it might bring. Sidney addresses the queen forthrightly as a
courtier whose function it is to advise his monarch. He reminds her that the
peace of the land, no less than her own power, depends upon the confidence of
her subjects, a confidence likely to be eroded by an unpopular marriage.
Although he does not mention Alençon's famed ugliness, as others did, he does
rehearse much about her prospective husband that she already knew and did not
need to hear from one of her subjects: that Alençon was "a Frenchman, and
a papist"; that his mother was the notorious Catherine de Médicis,
"the Jezebel of our age" (though he does not directly say that she
had engineered the massacre of Huguenots in 1572); that Alençon himself had
sacked La Charité and Issoire "with fire and sword"; and that his
race was afflicted with congenital "unhealthfulness." Sidney
concludes with the warning that "if he do come hither, he must live here
in far meaner reputation than his mind will well brook, having no other royalty
to countenance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your
kingdom, and live at his discretion."
There
is no evidence that Elizabeth took umbrage at the letter, but it is difficult
to imagine that it did anything to smooth the troubled relationship that
persisted between the Sidney family and the queen throughout Philip's lifetime.
Perhaps Sidney's tone in the letter owes something to a liminal resentment he
felt because of her niggardly treatment of his father, who, as president of the
Marches of Wales and twice as her lord deputy of Ireland, had been among her
ablest subjects. Perhaps too it reflects on an incident that embroiled Sidney's
politics with his personal dignity. Greville reports that sometime in 1579 Edward
de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a staunch supporter of Alençon's suit, had ordered
Sidney off a tennis court in the presence of the French delegation, calling
Sidney "a puppy." Sidney issued a challenge the next day, but the
queen herself intervened to prevent the duel and reminded him of his inferior
status--a rebuke that may have recalled to him as well that de Vere had married
Anne Cecil after her father had found the Sidney family unworthy.
Sidney
was absent from the court the next year and probably spent much of the time at
Wilton, his sister's home, composing the Old Arcadia. When he returned to court
after a year in seclusion, Sidney presented Elizabeth with a 1581 New Year's
gift of a "whip garnished with diamonds," signifying by this astonishing
Petrarchan gesture his complete submission to the queen's will in the Alençon
affair. That summer his personal fortunes received a blow when the countess of
Leicester bore the earl a son, thereby depriving Sidney of both lands and title
that he stood to inherit as Leicester's heir presumptive. On the following tilt
day, Sidney bore the device S-P-E-R-A-V-I ("I hoped"), dashed
through.
Around
1578 Sidney had begun writing poetry. It was an "unelected vocation,"
as he says in The Defence of Poetry , "in these my not old years and
idlest times having slipped into the title of a poet." None of his works
was published before 1590, four years after his death. This fact, together with
the brevity and intensity of Sidney's writing career--no more than seven or eight
years, during which he worked simultaneously on different texts--only
complicates the problem of determining when his works were composed.
Among
Sidney's earliest ventures, undertaken with his friends Greville and Dyer, were
attempts at writing a new kind of English poetry grounded not in accentual
stress but in duration of syllables. The work that was in progress by October
1579, when Edmund Spenser reported it in letters to Gabriel Harvey. These
experiments in quantitative verse, examples of which Sidney incorporated into
the Old Arcadia, were efforts to make English verse conform to the rules of
Latin prosody. Although they never exerted a significant influence upon English
metrics, they have long interested scholars and critics. The dactylic
hexameters of Old Arcadia 13 are an example of what Sidney achieved:
Lady,
reserved by the heav'ns to do pastors' company honor
Joining
your sweet voice to the rural muse of a desert,
Here
you fully do find this strange operation of love,
How
to the woods love runs as well as rides to the palace.
In
his correspondence with Harvey, Spenser also claimed that Sidney, Greville, and
Dyer had formed an English Academy or Areopagus to advance the cause of the new
metrics, a claim that has been investigated many times and is at present widely
doubted.
The
years 1579 through 1584 represent the peak of Sidney's literary activity. The
winter of 1579-1580 seems the best conjectural date for his composition of The
Defence of Poetry , probably written in response to Stephen Gosson's School of
Abuse, which was printed in the summer of 1579 and dedicated to Sidney without
permission. The connection with Gosson's work, along with a reference to
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, also published in 1579 and dedicated to Sidney,
indicate that Sidney began The Defence of Poetry in that year, whereas the
sustained intensity of his argument would seem to make it equally likely that
he completed the work in a relatively short time. It did not appear in print,
however, until 1595, which saw two editions by different printers. William
Ponsonby, the established printer for the Sidney family, entered The Defence of
Poetry in the Stationers' Register on 29 November 1594 but seems to have
delayed publication until the next year. Before Ponsonby's text appeared,
another edition, titled An Apology for Poetry, was published by Henry Olney. An
unknown number of copies was sold before Ponsonby, claiming precedence,
interceded and halted further sales. Ponsonby's edition was then printed and
sold, and the title page of his edition was also fixed to some liberated copies
of the Olney edition. The Ponsonby text and the De L'Isle manuscript at
Penshurst form the basis of Jan van Dorsten and Katherine Duncan-Jones's
definitive modern edition in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney.
(1973).
The
Defence of Poetry is undoubtedly the most important critical treatise on poetry
written by an Englishman during the Elizabethan period. It has achieved the
status of a classical text. Although it reflects Sidney's Protestantism, it is
nevertheless a worldly work. Drawing on an extraordinary range of classical and
Continental texts, Sidney sets out to defend "poor poetry" against
its attackers and to argue positively that poetry, whose "final end is to
lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by
their clayey lodgings, can be capable of," is the best vehicle for the
"purifying of wit." He disposes his argument according to a
traditional seven-part classical structure, beginning with an introduction or
exordium and moving through the stages of proposition, division, examination
and refutation to a final peroration, and including, as custom permitted, a
digressio on a related issue.
Sidney
opens his argument by claiming that poetry gave rise to every other kind and
division of learning. For this reason the Romans called the poet vates,
"which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet," such as David
revealed himself to be in his Psalms. With equal reverence the Greeks called
the poet a "maker," as do the English (from the Greek verb poiein,
"to make"). In all cases true poetry makes things "either better
than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in
nature." Nature's "world is brazen," Sidney argues; only the
poets bring forth a golden one.
Sidney
next explains that the poet is able to create this heightened fictive world by
coupling an idea with an image: "the skill of each artificer standeth in
that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the
poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as
he had imagined them." The union of fore-conceit and image results in a
poetic event that has extraordinary "energaic" capacity, that is, the
power to move the human will and thus to motivate its own reproduction.
Xenophon's Cyrus is then, a poetic creation so forceful that if readers
comprehend the character, they will be prompted to reproduce its virtues in
their own medium: "so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a
Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done,
but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if [readers] will
learn why and how that maker made him." It is the replicability of the
poetic image among those who understand why and how it was created that
distinguishes poetry from nature. The ongoing replication of poetic images is
what enables our "erected wit" to mitigate against the effects of our
"infected will."
Sidney
concludes this narration by presenting his central proposition, the crucial
definition of the process of encoding fore-conceits in images to create
energaic poetic constructs: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for
so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis--that is to say, a representing,
counterfeiting, or figuring forth--to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture--with this end, to teach and delight." This definition--a tightly
composed amalgam of ideas lifted from Aristotle (mimesis), Plutarch
("speaking picture"), and Horace ("teach and
delight")--with its emphasis upon activity, informs all the theoretical
matter of The Defence of Poetry.
In
the section devoted to the divisions or kinds of mimetic poetry and their
practitioners, Sidney conceives three types: divine poets who imitate the
"inconceivable excellencies of God," of whom David, Solomon, and
pagan poets--Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer, "though in a full wrong
divinity"--are cited as examples; poets who imitate "matter
philosophical," of which there are four subtypes (moral, natural,
astronomical, and historical); and "right poets." Sidney is primarily
concerned with the right poets: "these third be they which most properly
do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, has
been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the
divine consideration of what may be and should be." They are arrayed in a
hierarchy from "the most notable" heroic poets down to pastoral poets
"and certain others, some of these being termed according to the matter
they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in."
But Sidney is quick to point out that verse is but "an ornament and no
cause to poetry." Rather, the "feigning" of "notable images
of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching ... must be the
right describing note to know a poet by.
The
right poet is then set off against other masters of "earthly
learning" who claim to lead men to "virtuous action," an ancient
contest developed at length in Aristotle's Poetics. The poet's principal
competitors are two: the moral philosopher, a figure of "sullen gravity
... rudely clothed ... casting largess ... of definitions, divisions and
distinctions" before him; and the historian, "laden with old mouse-eaten
records," who knows more about the past than his own age, who is "a
wonder to young folks and a tyrant in table talk." The philosopher
maintains that there is no better guide to virtue than he who "teacheth
what virtue is; and teach it not only by delivering forth his very being, his
causes and effects, but also by making known his enemy, vice, which much be
destroyed, and his cumbersome servant, passion, which must be mastered."
For his part the historian claims a significant advantage over the philosopher
in that he teaches an "active" virtue rather than a
"disputative" one. The philosopher delivers virtue "excellent in
the dangerless Academy of Plato," but the historian "showeth forth
[Virtue's] honorable face in ... battles." The philosopher "teacheth
virtue by certain abstractions considerations," adds the historian,
"but I only bid you follow the footing of them that have gone before
you." Sidney can see no end to this tedious dispute and so interrupts it
by noting only "that the one giveth the precept, the other the example.
The
poet, of course, "standeth for the highest form in the school of
learning" because he is the moderator between the philosopher and the
historian. Through the art of mimesis the poet unites in one event the
philosopher's precept and the historian's example. Rephrasing his earlier
argument on fore-conceit and image, Sidney proclaims that the poet gives
"a perfect picture" of something, "so as he coupleth the general
notion with the particular example." He then lists exemplary precepts that
poets encode in speaking pictures: anger, wisdom, temperance, valor,
friendship, remorse, pride, cruelty, and ambition. But the greatest of these is
"the most excellent determination of goodness," as in Xenophon's
"feigning" of the prince in Cyrus, in Virgil's fashioning of a
virtuous man in Aeneas and in Sir Thomas More's representation of an entire
commonwealth in his Utopia (1516). The reference to the Catholic More prompts a
brief digression in which Sidney states a general tenet of mimesis he has not
made before: if the poetic artifact is flawed, the fault lies with the poet,
not with poetry. Having made this point, he caps his list by citing the
practice of Jesus, who couched his teachings in lively stories.
Because
of its forcefulness, the poet's "feigned example" has as much
capacity as the "true example" for teaching what is to be shunned or
followed. Moreover, Sidney remarks wryly, by reading a representation of,
rather than actually duplicating, the strategy of Darius's faithful servant
Zopyrus, who severed his own nose and ears to persuade the Babylonians that he
was a traitor, "you shall save your nose by the bargain." Conversely,
the poet's "moving is of a higher degree than [the philosopher's]
teaching," for which he cites as his authority Aristotle's comments on
gnosis (knowing) and praxis (acting, doing) in the Ethics.
The
poet emerges from this examination transformed from "moderator" to
monarch. "Either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting
skill of music," poetry has the capacity to transmute even
horrors--"cruel battles, unnatural monsters"--into delightful
experience. The effects of poetic invention are such that orators and prophets
have employed it for their several purposes. Menenius Agrippa, Livy tells us,
calmed the mutinous population of Rome not with "figurative speeches or
cunning insinuations" but with a tale of the rebellious body attempting to
starve the stomach and so hurting itself. Similarly, the prophet Nathan
revealed to David a precept "most divinely true" by means of a
feigned discourse.
In
a second examination section of The Defence of Poetry, Sidney considers the
various subgenres in which poetry is arrayed, with a cautionary comment about
overly rigid distinctions. At the very outset he warns against overdetermining
such matters, noting that "some poesies have coupled together two or three
kinds, as the tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragicomical."
Anticipating the design of his Arcadias , he recommends Jacob Sannazaro and
Boethius, who "mingled prose and verse," and others who "mingled
matters heroical and pastoral." If severed genres be good, he concludes,
"the conjunction cannot be hurtful."
Sidney
moves up the hierarchy of genres from the lowest to the highest, discussing
pastoral, elegy, comedy, lyric, and epic or heroic, "whose very name (I
think) should daunt all backbiters." Characteristically, he reserves his
highest praise for the epic, whose champions--Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus,
Tydeus, and Rinaldo--"not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and
moveth to the most high and excellent truth." Epic is, in short, "the
best and most accomplished kind of poetry." He concludes this second
examination with a summary of his major points: that poetry deals with universal
considerations; that (unlike the historian and the philosopher) the poet is not
confined to already delimited parameters of inquiry but brings his own
"stuff" to the act of mimesis, so that he "doth not learn a
conceit out of a matter, but maketh a matter out of a conceit"; that
poetry teaches goodness and delight; and that the Scriptures--indeed Christ
himself--employed poetry. All this indicates that "the laurel crown
appointed for triumphant captains doth worthily (of all other learnings) honor
the poet's triumph."
Yet
such reasoning is not likely to dissuade the misomousoi, the poet-haters, who
wrongly identify poetry with rhyming and versifying, although, Sidney concedes,
poetry often employs verse because "verse far exceedeth prose in the
knitting up of memory." But laying this complaint aside, Sidney begins his
refutation with the claim that poetry and poets stand accused of four principal
crimes: that they divert men from the pursuit of "other more fruitful
knowledges"; that poetry "is the mother of lies"; that poetry
"is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires";
and that Plato banished poets from his ideal commonwealth in the Republic.
These
charges are, of course, made by straw men whom Sidney will easily hew down. The
first charge he has already demonstrated to be spurious, since of all learning
poetry alone "teacheth and moveth to virtue." "I still and
utterly deny," he writes, "that there is sprung out of the earth a
more fruitful knowledge." The second charge, that poetry fosters lies,
occasions a spirited rebuttal that anticipates several hallmark concepts of
structuralist and poststructuralist assumptions about language, such as
arbitrariness and difference. The confidence with which he addresses the third
charge, that poetry fosters "not only love, but lust, but vanity, but (if
they list [please]) scurrility," would seem to belie Astrophil's failed
attempt to transmute his desire into spirituality. Nevertheless Sidney
maintains that if love poetry leads man astray, we "need not say that poetry
abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry." Moreover, rather
than enervating the spirit of warriors, implicit in the charge that it is the
nurse of abuse, poetry is often "the companion of camps." Thus,
Plutarch tells us, when Alexander went to war he left his teacher Aristotle
behind but took Homer with him.
Of
the four charges against poets issued by the poet-haters, Sidney devotes the
most space to refuting the final one, that Plato banned poets from his ideal
republic. "But now indeed," he begins, "my burden is great; now
Plato's name is laid upon me, whom, I confess, of all philosophers I have ever
esteemed most worthy of reverence," for Plato "is the most
poetical." Yet if Plato would "defile the fountain out of which his
flowing streams have proceeded," Sidney says, "let us boldly examine
with what reasons he did it." He claims that philosophers have made a
"school-art" out of the matter that poets have conveyed "by a
divine delightfulness," and then cast off their "guides, like ungrateful
apprentices." Yet as Cicero noted, though many cities rejected
philosophers, seven cities wished to claim Homer as a citizen. Simonides and
Pindar made of the tyrant Hiero I a just king while, and here again Sidney
follows Cicero, Plato was made the slave of Dionysius. For a clinching
rhetorical effect Sidney, whose debt to Plato is everywhere apparent in The
Defence of Poetry, reminds his readers that both Plato (in the Symposium and
the Phaedrus) and Plutarch condoned the "abominable filthiness" of homosexuality.
Having
thus exposed in Plato crimes far exceeding those of poets, Sidney rehabilitates
his straw man. When he claims that in banning the poet from his republic Plato
places the onus "upon the abuse, not upon poetry," one should
remember that he began this passage by confessing that Plato was the most
poetical of philosophers. Plato's strictures were directed toward practitioners
of mimesis rather than mimesis itself: "Plato therefore ... meant not in
general of poets ... but only meant to drive out those wrong opinions of the
Deity (whereof now, without further law, Christianity hath taken away all the
hurtful belief...) nourished by the then-esteemed poets"--as can be seen
in the Ion, where Plato "giveth high and rightly divine commendation unto
poetry." Indeed Plato, who "attributeth unto poesy more than myself
do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force," has been misread:
witness Plato's mentor Socrates, who spent his old age turning Aesop's fables
into verse, and Plato's student Aristotle, who wrote the Poetics--"and
why, if it should not be written?" Nor Should one forget Plutarch, who in
writing philosophy and history "trimmeth both their garments with the
guards of poesy."
Following
this stirring refutation--actually a set piece with unanticipated ramifications
for his own later work--Sidney considers, in a relevant digression, the
lamentable condition of poetry in England, directing his criticism,
characteristically, at poets rather than poetry. "Sweet poesy," he
begins, "that hath anciently [claimed] kings, emperors, senators, great
captains," and which had heretofore flourished in Britain, is in
"idle England" now little more than flimflam, poets having
"almost ... the good reputation as the mountebanks at Venice."
"Base men," he asserts, "with servile wits undertake it ... as
if all the Muses were got with child to bring forth bastard poets."
Feigning as burdensome the task of defending poets and their work, only to be
"overmastered by some thoughts" and thus yielding "an inky tribute
to them," he defers authority in the matter of poetry to those who
practice it. Restating the hugely problematic conditions of mimesis he had
already presented in the Cyrus passage, he concludes that "they that
delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and how they do and
especially look in the unflattering glass of reason" (emphasis added). For
poetry must be led gently--or rather it must lead, as it cannot be acquired by
"human skill." "A poet no industry can make," Sidney claims
in a reaffirmation of the poet as vates, "if his own genius be not carried
into it."
Yet
there are English poets who warrant commendation. Sidney is typical of his age
in praising Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) but
exceptional in acknowledging that Englishmen of his time had not mastered
Chaucerian metrics: "I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in
that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this age go so stumblingly
after him." He also approves of the brief tragedies gathered in the Mirror
for Magistrates (1563) and commends the lyrics of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,
who regularized the English sonnet form.
None
of this is controversial. However, Sidney's subsequent discussion of The
Shepheardes Calender raises the question of how well, if at all, Sidney and
Spenser were acquainted. He acknowledges that Spenser, who dedicated The
Shepheardes Calender to him in 1579, "hath much poetry in his eclogues,
indeed worthy of reading, if I be not deceived." In his correspondence
with Gabriel Harvey, Spenser claimed to have had Sidney "in some use of
familiarity." The two poets may have met at Leicester House, where Spenser
was employed and where Sidney was a frequent guest at the time. Yet they were
of vastly different social rank, Sidney being the earl's nephew and Spenser the
earl's secretary. Sidney does not mention Spenser by name in his discussion of
The Shepheardes Calender in The Defence of Poetry. Indeed, after praising its
poetry, Sidney criticizes its author for the "framing of his style to an
old rustic language." After his death in 1586, Sidney's influence upon
Spenser was pervasive. Yet his only comments upon Spenser's work do not suggest
the intimacy between them that Spenser claimed to enjoy.
It
is noteworthy that Sidney devotes more of his survey of English literature to
drama than to poetry. He possessed an instinctive sense of dramatic structure,
as The Lady of May demonstrates. Readers since Thomas Nashe have been impressed
by the dramatic character of Astrophil and Stella, and the first version of
Arcadia is divided into acts. Yet although he offers here the first example of
sustained dramatic criticism in English, Sidney's discussion utterly fails to
anticipate the maverick forms of English theater that were to explode with such
brilliance in the decade after his death. Except for Thomas Sackville and
Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1561), the first English tragedy in blank verse,
which he endorses with qualifications, and the tragedies of his friend George
Buchanan, Sidney dismisses the rest of English drama he has seen as
"observing rules neither of honest civility nor skillful poetry." He
criticizes English playwrights for failing to observe the rigid program of
unities (time, place, and action), a prescription generally attributed to
Aristotle, and he praises ancient exemplars such as Terence (Eunuchus), Plautus
(Captivi and Amphitruo), and Euripides (Hecuba).
Though
he has claimed to see no harm in mixed poetic genres per se, he is especially
harsh in his comments on English tragicomedy, which, he remarks, is guilty of
promiscuously "mingling kings and clowns" and "hornpipes and
funerals." English comedy also fails to make the necessary distinction
between delight and laughter, a distinction he develops in considerable detail.
He concludes that he has spent too much time on plays because "they are
excelling parts of poesy" and because "none [other poetry is] so much
used in England, and none can be more pitifully abused."
Just
before his peroration Sidney returns to the subject of lyric poetry,
"songs and sonnets," which poets should direct toward the Platonic
end of "singing the praises of immortal beauty: the immortal goodness of
that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive." In a passage
rife with implications for Astrophil and Stella , he complains of the wooden
language of so many love poets who, "if I were a mistress, would never
persuade me they were in love." He attacks pseudo-Ciceronianism at some
length, allowing himself to stray "from poetry to oratory." But he
finally excuses the slip because it allows him to include penultimately a
tribute to the ease, grace, and beauty of the English language, which "for
the uttering sweetly and properly [of] the conceits of the mind ... hath not its
equal with any other tongue in the world."
Apparently
Sidney was serious in his private, concurrent hopes of introducing a
quantitative metrics into English poetry, for he writes that of the two methods
of versifying, by quantity and stress, "the English, before any vulgar
language I know, is fit for both." Of other poetic qualities loosely
grouped under the heading of rhyme, he argues that English is superior to other
modern languages in its use of the caesura and in its ability to rhyme with
masculine, feminine, and medial formations.
The
brilliant peroration to The Defence of Poetry is a masterly composite of
summary, exhortation, and admonition. Every praiseworthy poem is full of
"virtue-breeding delightfulness" and possesses all traits of
learning; the charges against it are "false or feeble," and bad
poetry is produced by "poet-apes, not poets." The English language is
"most fit to honor poesy, and to be honored by poesy." Then, in the
name of the Nine Muses, Sidney enjoins the reader of his "ink-wasting
toy" to believe with Aristotle that poets were the keepers of the Greek
divinities; with Pietro Bembo that poets first brought civility to mankind;
with Joseph Justus Scaliger that poetry will sooner make an honest man than
philosophy; with the German Conrad Clauser that in fables poets communicated
"all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy natural and moral, and quid
non"; with Sidney himself "that there are many mysteries contained in
poetry, which of purpose were written darkly"; and with Cristoforo Landino
that poets are so loved by the gods that "whatsoever they write proceeds
of a divine fury." Alluding wryly to the often fulsome tone of dedications
and patron-seeking prefaces, he reminds potential defenders of poetry that
poets will make them "immortal by their verses," that their names
"shall flourish in the printers' shops," and that poets shall make
laymen "most fair, most rich, most wise," so that their souls shall
dwell with Dante's Beatrice and Virgil's Anchises.
His
concluding admonition, directed to anyone who might have "so
earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of
poetry," is a masterpiece of tone, combining the witty with the deadly
serious for an audience that knew both the triviality of much fashionable
rhetoric and the crucial role of literature and language in resisting the
monument-destroying power of mutability and relentless time. As for those who
refuse to value poetry, in the name of all poets Sidney offers the malediction
that "while you live, [may] you live in love, and never get favor for
lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for
want of an epitaph."
Literary writings
Like
the best of the Elizabethans, Sidney was successful in more than one branch of
literature, but none of his work was published during his lifetime. His finest
achievement was a sequence of 108 love sonnets. These owe much to Petrarch and
Pierre de Ronsard in tone and style, and place Sidney as the greatest Elizabethan
sonneteer after Shakespeare. Written to his mistress, Lady Penelope Rich,
though dedicated to his wife, they reveal true lyric emotion couched in a
language delicately archaic. In form Sidney usually adopts the Petrarchan
octave (ABBAABBA), with variations in the sestet that include the English final
couplet. His artistic contacts were more peaceful and significant for his
lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote Astrophel and Stella
(1591) and the first draft of The Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy. His
pastoral romance The Arcadia (1598) is an intricate love story, embodying the
ideals of the medieval chivalry, so congenial to Sidney's own spirit. The story
is diffused and involved, and the many secondary love stories interwoven with
the main one distract attention. The characters are vague and idealized. The
style, in its strength and its weaknesses, is that of a poet writing prose;
melodious, picturesque, rather artificial and ornamental. The story contains a
number of fine lyrics. Somewhat earlier, he had met Edmund Spenser, who
dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him. Other literary contacts included
membership, along with his friends and fellow poets Fulke Greville, Edward
Dyer, Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, of the (possibly fictitious)
"Areopagus", a humanist endeavour to classicise English verse.
Because
the queen would not give him an important post, he had turned to literature as
an outlet for his energies. In 1578 he composed a pastoral playlet, The Lady of
May, for the queen. By 1580 he had completed a version of his heroic prose
romance, the Arcadia. It is typical of his gentlemanly air of assumed
nonchalance that he should call it “a trifle, and that triflingly handled,”
whereas it is in fact an intricately plotted narrative of 180,000 words.
Early
in 1581 his aunt, the countess of Huntington, had brought to court her ward,
Penelope Devereux, who later that year married the young Lord Rich. Whether or
not Sidney really did fall in love with her, during the summer of 1582 he
composed a sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella, that recounts a courtier’s
passion in delicately fictionalized terms: its first stirrings, his struggles
against it, and his final abandonment of his suit to give himself instead to
the “great cause” of public service. These sonnets, witty and impassioned,
brought Elizabethan poetry at once of age. About the same time, he wrote The
Defence of Poesie, an urbane and eloquent plea for the social value of
imaginative fiction, which remains the finest work of Elizabethan literary
criticism. In 1584 he began a radical revision of his Arcadia, transforming its
linear dramatic plot into a many-stranded, interlaced narrative. He left it
half finished, but it remains the most important work of prose fiction in English
of the 16th century. He also composed other poems and later began a paraphrase
of the Psalms. He wrote for his own amusement and for that of his close
friends; true to the gentlemanly code of avoiding commercialism, he did not
allow his writings to be published in his lifetime.
The
incomplete revised version of his Arcadia was not printed until 1590; in 1593
another edition completed the story by adding the last three books of his
original version (the complete text of the original version remained in
manuscript until 1926). His Astrophel and Stella was printed in 1591 in a
corrupt text, his Defence of Poesie in 1595, and a collected edition of his
works in 1598, reprinted in 1599 and nine times during the 17th century.
Although
in July 1585 he finally received his eagerly awaited public appointment, his
writings were to be his most lasting accomplishment. He was appointed, with his
uncle, the earl of Warwick, as joint master of the ordnance, an office that
administered the military supplies of the kingdom. In November the queen was
finally persuaded to assist the struggle of the Dutch against their Spanish
masters, sending them a force led by the earl of Leicester. Sidney was made
governor of the town of Flushing (Dutch: Vlissingen) and was given command of a
company of cavalry. But the following 11 months were spent in ineffective
campaigns against the Spaniards, while Sidney was hard put to maintain the
morale of his poorly paid troops. He wrote to his father-in-law that, if the
queen did not pay her soldiers, she would lose her garrisons but that, for
himself, the love of the cause would never make him weary of his resolution,
because he thought “a wise and constant man ought never to grieve while he doth
play his own part truly, though others be out.”
The
dominance of women in the poet's early life was doubtless formative. Sidney's
skill in portraying female characters, from the bewitching, multifarious Stella
of Astrophil and Stella (1591) to Philoclea and Pamela, the bold, beautiful,
and articulate princesses of the Old Arcadia (written circa 1581) and the New
Arcadia (1590; written circa 1583-1584) is, as C. S. Lewis notes in his English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), without equal
before William Shakespeare. The two versions of the Arcadia, Sidney's most
ambitious works, were written under the guiding spirit and often in the
presence of Mary Sidney Herbert, his "dear Lady and sister, the Countess
of Pembroke," herself a great patron of writers, to whom the two versions
of the Arcadia are dedicated. Mary went on to serve as Sidney's literary
executor after his death.
Nor
can the benevolent influence of Sidney's mother, Lady Mary, be doubted.
Lady-in-waiting to the queen, she contracted the smallpox in October 1562 while
caring for Elizabeth during her bout with the sickness. Her face severely
disfigured, Lady Mary thereafter avoided appearing at court. According to Ben
Jonson in the Conversations with Drummond, when Lady Mary could not avoid
appearing in public she wore a mask. Four of Sidney's Certain Sonnets (8-11)
that lament the damage done to a beautiful face by disease may owe something to
his memory of his mother's ordeal. And his portrait of the long-suffering
Parthenia in the New Arcadia, whose lover Argalus, marries her despite her
ruined beauty, clearly echoes his mother's plight and his father's continuing
devotion.
Military
activity
Sidney
played a brilliant part in the military/literary/courtly life common to the
young nobles of the time. Both his family heritage and his personal experience
(he was in Walsingham's house in Paris during the Saint Bartholomew's Day
Massacre), confirmed him as a keenly militant Protestant.[citation needed]
In
the 1570s, he persuaded John Casimir to consider proposals for a united Protestant
effort against the Catholic Church and Spain. In the winter of 1575-76 he
fought in Ireland while his father was Lord Deputy there. In the early 1580s,
he argued fruitlessly for an assault on Spain itself. Promoted General of Horse
in 1583, his enthusiasm for the Protestant struggle was given free rein when he
was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands in 1585. Whilst in the
Netherlands, he consistently urged boldness on his superior, his uncle the Earl
of Leicester. He carried out a successful raid on Spanish forces near Axel in
July 1586.[citation needed]
Injury
and death
Later
that year, he joined Sir John Norris in the Battle of Zutphen, fighting for the
Protestant cause against the Spanish. During the battle, he was shot in the thigh
and died of gangrene 26 days later, at the age of 31. One account says this
death was avoidable and heroic. Sidney noticed that one of his men was not
fully armoured. He took off his thigh armour on the grounds that it would be
wrong to be better armored than his men. As he lay dying, Sidney composed a
song to be sung by his deathbed. According to the story, while lying wounded he
gave his water to another wounded soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is yet
greater than mine". This became possibly the most famous story about Sir
Philip, intended to illustrate his noble and gallant character. Sidney's body
was returned to London and interred in Old St Paul's Cathedral on 16 February
1587. The grave and monument were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.
A modern monument in the crypt lists his among the important graves lost.
Already
during his own lifetime, but even more after his death, he had become for many
English people the very epitome of a Castiglione courtier: learned and politic,
but at the same time generous, brave, and impulsive. The funeral procession was
one of the most elaborate ever staged, so much so that his father-in-law,
Francis Walsingham, almost went bankrupt. As Sidney was a brother of the
Worshipful Company of Grocers, the procession included 120 of his company
brethren.
Never
more than a marginal figure in the politics of his time, he was memorialised as
the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser's 'Astrophel', one of the
greatest English Renaissance elegies.
An
early biography of Sidney was written by his friend and schoolfellow, Fulke
Greville. While Sidney was traditionally depicted as a staunch and unwavering
Protestant, recent biographers such as Katherine Duncan-Jones have suggested
that his religious loyalties were more ambiguous. He was known to be friendly
and sympathetic towards individual Catholics.
Works
The
Lady of May – This is one of Sidney's lesser-known works, a masque written and
performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579.
Astrophel
and Stella – The first of the famous English sonnet sequences, Astrophel and
Stella was probably composed in the early 1580s. The sonnets were
well-circulated in manuscript before the first (apparently pirated) edition was
printed in 1591; only in 1598 did an authorised edition reach the press. The
sequence was a watershed in English Renaissance poetry. In it, Sidney partially
nativised the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion
from poem to poem, with the attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure,
narrative; the philosophical trappings; the musings on the act of poetic
creation itself. His experiments with rhyme scheme were no less notable; they
served to free the English sonnet from the strict rhyming requirements of the
Italian form.
The
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia – The Arcadia, by far Sidney's most ambitious
work, was as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance
that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model
of Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a highly idealised version of the
shepherd's life adjoins (not always naturally) with stories of jousts,
political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published in the
sixteenth century, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested
within each other, and different storylines are intertwined. The work enjoyed
great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William
Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; parts of
it were also dramatised by John Day and James Shirley. According to a widely
told story, King Charles I quoted lines from the book as he mounted the
scaffold to be executed; Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded after Sidney's Pamela. Arcadia exists in two
significantly different versions. Sidney wrote an early version (the Old
Arcadia) during a stay at Mary Herbert's house; this version is narrated in a
straightforward, sequential manner. Later, Sidney began to revise the work on a
more ambitious plan, with much more backstory about the princes, and a much
more complicated story-line, with many more characters. He completed most of
the first three books, but the project was unfinished at the time of his death
– the third book breaks off in the middle of a sword fight. There were several
early editions of the book. Fulke Greville published the revised version alone,
in 1590. The Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister, published a version in
1593, which pasted the last two books of the first version onto the first three
books of the revision. In the 1621 version, Sir William Alexander provided a
bridge to bring the two stories back into agreement. It was known in this
cobbled-together fashion until the discovery, in the early twentieth century,
of the earlier version.
An
Apology for Poetry (also known as A Defence of Poesie and The Defence of
Poetry) – Sidney wrote Defence of Poetry before 1583. It has taken its place
among the great critical essays in English. It is generally believed that he
was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who
dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in
1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as
those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and
Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defence is that poetry, by
combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is
more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to
virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the
Elizabethan stage.
Sidney
also read widely in Italian poetry and criticism, which he chose not to mention
to Languet. Like many of his contemporaries he held Italian literature in high
esteem, and his work was significantly shaped by Italian influences. His
reference in The Defence of Poetry to Dante's Beatrice (in the Paradiso rather
than the Vita nuova) is the first by an Englishman. Jacopo Sannazaro, twice
mentioned as an authority in The Defence of Poetry , through his Arcadia (1504)
contributed to Sidney's understanding of pastoral romance. The valiant hero of
Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, (1532), also twice mentioned in the
Defence, helped shape the characters of Pyrocles and Musidorus in the Arcadia .
Though he resists the influence of Petrarch and his followers in Astrophil and
Stella, Sidney's awareness of Petrarchism is everywhere apparent.
To
the modern reader Sidney's reasoning seems shockingly brutal, yet the
repression he advocates is typical of English attitudes toward the Irish during
Elizabeth's reign. He does argue that a tax that exempted no one would ease the
suffering of the many, who had traditionally borne the brunt of taxation: "this
touches the privileged ... persons [who] be all the rich men of the Pale, the
burden only lying upon the poor, who may groan, for their cry cannot be
heard." But this argument seems ingenuous, for further on he advocates a
policy of complete subjugation, saying that severe means are more justified in
Ireland than lenity. In the end Sir Henry's fortunes in Ireland worsened, and
he was recalled as Lord Deputy in February 1578.
In
the years after 1577 Sidney's political career was frustrated by Elizabeth's interest
in balancing the power of Spain against that of France, a balance she feared
would be upset by the creation of a Protestant League. Thwarted in his
political ambition, Sidney turned his attention briefly to exploration,
investing in three New World voyages by Martin Frobisher. He also began,
perhaps as early as 1578, what soon became an intensive writing career.
Among
his first literary projects Sidney experimented with a type of drama that would
reach its most sophisticated form in the seventeenth-century court masque. In
1578 or 1579, for the queen's visit to his uncle Leicester's new estate at
Wanstead, he wrote the pastoral entertainment known as The Lady of May. The
only published version, included in a 1598 edition of Arcadia, is not a text, but
rather a detailed transcription of the production, perhaps done at Sidney's
request. Ostensibly a tribute to Elizabeth, it is a work of some literary merit
and considerable political and propagandistic import.
The
Lady of May, a young and beautiful maiden much pursued by country bachelors,
faces an emblematic choice of marriage between two men she likes but does not
love: the wealthy shepherd Espilus, a man "of very small deserts and no
faults," and the pleasing but sometimes violent forester Theron, a man of
"many deserts and many faults." The drama combines several elements
that were to figure prominently as themes and issues in Sidney's later
writings, especially Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadias: the Petrarchan
stance of stylized veneration of a lady by her lover, the pastoral mode of
setting and plot, and some dramatized speculations about the uses and abuses of
rhetoric. But like many of his contemporaries, Sidney adapts convention to
topicality; and Elizabeth's own unmarried status together with her apparent
pleasure at the courtship of François, Duke of Alençon and (after 1576) of
Anjou are deeply implicated in this superficially innocuous entertainment. The
action was designed to favor Theron the forester over Espilus the shepherd, in
whose country blandness Sidney intended to reflect Alençon. But "it
pleased her Majesty to judge that Espilus did the better deserve" the Lady
of May. Although Sidney left open the way to such a resolution--the final
verses of Espilus and Theron allow for either choice--Elizabeth's selection of
Espilus over Theron illustrates the degree to which Sidney and his queen saw
things differently.
Late
in 1579 Sidney made his opposition to Alençon's suit explicit in an open letter
to the queen. By that time the issue had focused the divided loyalties of
English Protestants and Catholics. The queen had been considering Alençon's
proposal of marriage for some time. Her childlessness invited a bitter struggle
over succession, and many English Protestants feared a Catholic consort.
Sidney's faction, which included his father and his powerful uncle Leicester,
believed that a French marriage might lead to civil war.
To
the modern reader this letter, "Written ... to Queen Elizabeth, Touching
Her Marriage with Monsieur," seems remarkably frank and fearless of the
displeasure it might bring. Sidney addresses the queen forthrightly as a
courtier whose function it is to advise his monarch. He reminds her that the
peace of the land, no less than her own power, depends upon the confidence of
her subjects, a confidence likely to be eroded by an unpopular marriage.
Although he does not mention Alençon's famed ugliness, as others did, he does
rehearse much about her prospective husband that she already knew and did not
need to hear from one of her subjects: that Alençon was "a Frenchman, and
a papist"; that his mother was the notorious Catherine de Médicis,
"the Jezebel of our age" (though he does not directly say that she
had engineered the massacre of Huguenots in 1572); that Alençon himself had
sacked La Charité and Issoire "with fire and sword"; and that his
race was afflicted with congenital "unhealthfulness." Sidney
concludes with the warning that "if he do come hither, he must live here
in far meaner reputation than his mind will well brook, having no other royalty
to countenance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your
kingdom, and live at his discretion."
There
is no evidence that Elizabeth took umbrage at the letter, but it is difficult
to imagine that it did anything to smooth the troubled relationship that
persisted between the Sidney family and the queen throughout Philip's lifetime.
Perhaps Sidney's tone in the letter owes something to a liminal resentment he
felt because of her niggardly treatment of his father, who, as president of the
Marches of Wales and twice as her lord deputy of Ireland, had been among her
ablest subjects. Perhaps too it reflects on an incident that embroiled Sidney's
politics with his personal dignity. Greville reports that sometime in 1579 Edward
de Vere, Earl of Oxford, a staunch supporter of Alençon's suit, had ordered
Sidney off a tennis court in the presence of the French delegation, calling
Sidney "a puppy." Sidney issued a challenge the next day, but the
queen herself intervened to prevent the duel and reminded him of his inferior
status--a rebuke that may have recalled to him as well that de Vere had married
Anne Cecil after her father had found the Sidney family unworthy.
Sidney
was absent from the court the next year and probably spent much of the time at
Wilton, his sister's home, composing the Old Arcadia. When he returned to court
after a year in seclusion, Sidney presented Elizabeth with a 1581 New Year's
gift of a "whip garnished with diamonds," signifying by this astonishing
Petrarchan gesture his complete submission to the queen's will in the Alençon
affair. That summer his personal fortunes received a blow when the countess of
Leicester bore the earl a son, thereby depriving Sidney of both lands and title
that he stood to inherit as Leicester's heir presumptive. On the following tilt
day, Sidney bore the device S-P-E-R-A-V-I ("I hoped"), dashed
through.
Around
1578 Sidney had begun writing poetry. It was an "unelected vocation,"
as he says in The Defence of Poetry , "in these my not old years and
idlest times having slipped into the title of a poet." None of his works
was published before 1590, four years after his death. This fact, together with
the brevity and intensity of Sidney's writing career--no more than seven or eight
years, during which he worked simultaneously on different texts--only
complicates the problem of determining when his works were composed.
Among
Sidney's earliest ventures, undertaken with his friends Greville and Dyer, were
attempts at writing a new kind of English poetry grounded not in accentual
stress but in duration of syllables. The work that was in progress by October
1579, when Edmund Spenser reported it in letters to Gabriel Harvey. These
experiments in quantitative verse, examples of which Sidney incorporated into
the Old Arcadia, were efforts to make English verse conform to the rules of
Latin prosody. Although they never exerted a significant influence upon English
metrics, they have long interested scholars and critics. The dactylic
hexameters of Old Arcadia 13 are an example of what Sidney achieved:
Lady,
reserved by the heav'ns to do pastors' company honor
Joining
your sweet voice to the rural muse of a desert,
Here
you fully do find this strange operation of love,
How
to the woods love runs as well as rides to the palace.
In
his correspondence with Harvey, Spenser also claimed that Sidney, Greville, and
Dyer had formed an English Academy or Areopagus to advance the cause of the new
metrics, a claim that has been investigated many times and is at present widely
doubted.
The
years 1579 through 1584 represent the peak of Sidney's literary activity. The
winter of 1579-1580 seems the best conjectural date for his composition of The
Defence of Poetry , probably written in response to Stephen Gosson's School of
Abuse, which was printed in the summer of 1579 and dedicated to Sidney without
permission. The connection with Gosson's work, along with a reference to
Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, also published in 1579 and dedicated to Sidney,
indicate that Sidney began The Defence of Poetry in that year, whereas the
sustained intensity of his argument would seem to make it equally likely that
he completed the work in a relatively short time. It did not appear in print,
however, until 1595, which saw two editions by different printers. William
Ponsonby, the established printer for the Sidney family, entered The Defence of
Poetry in the Stationers' Register on 29 November 1594 but seems to have
delayed publication until the next year. Before Ponsonby's text appeared,
another edition, titled An Apology for Poetry, was published by Henry Olney. An
unknown number of copies was sold before Ponsonby, claiming precedence,
interceded and halted further sales. Ponsonby's edition was then printed and
sold, and the title page of his edition was also fixed to some liberated copies
of the Olney edition. The Ponsonby text and the De L'Isle manuscript at
Penshurst form the basis of Jan van Dorsten and Katherine Duncan-Jones's
definitive modern edition in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney.
(1973).
The
Defence of Poetry is undoubtedly the most important critical treatise on poetry
written by an Englishman during the Elizabethan period. It has achieved the
status of a classical text. Although it reflects Sidney's Protestantism, it is
nevertheless a worldly work. Drawing on an extraordinary range of classical and
Continental texts, Sidney sets out to defend "poor poetry" against
its attackers and to argue positively that poetry, whose "final end is to
lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by
their clayey lodgings, can be capable of," is the best vehicle for the
"purifying of wit." He disposes his argument according to a
traditional seven-part classical structure, beginning with an introduction or
exordium and moving through the stages of proposition, division, examination
and refutation to a final peroration, and including, as custom permitted, a
digressio on a related issue.
Sidney
opens his argument by claiming that poetry gave rise to every other kind and
division of learning. For this reason the Romans called the poet vates,
"which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet," such as David
revealed himself to be in his Psalms. With equal reverence the Greeks called
the poet a "maker," as do the English (from the Greek verb poiein,
"to make"). In all cases true poetry makes things "either better
than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in
nature." Nature's "world is brazen," Sidney argues; only the
poets bring forth a golden one.
Sidney
next explains that the poet is able to create this heightened fictive world by
coupling an idea with an image: "the skill of each artificer standeth in
that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the
poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as
he had imagined them." The union of fore-conceit and image results in a
poetic event that has extraordinary "energaic" capacity, that is, the
power to move the human will and thus to motivate its own reproduction.
Xenophon's Cyrus is then, a poetic creation so forceful that if readers
comprehend the character, they will be prompted to reproduce its virtues in
their own medium: "so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a
Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done,
but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if [readers] will
learn why and how that maker made him." It is the replicability of the
poetic image among those who understand why and how it was created that
distinguishes poetry from nature. The ongoing replication of poetic images is
what enables our "erected wit" to mitigate against the effects of our
"infected will."
Sidney
concludes this narration by presenting his central proposition, the crucial
definition of the process of encoding fore-conceits in images to create
energaic poetic constructs: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for
so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis--that is to say, a representing,
counterfeiting, or figuring forth--to speak metaphorically, a speaking
picture--with this end, to teach and delight." This definition--a tightly
composed amalgam of ideas lifted from Aristotle (mimesis), Plutarch
("speaking picture"), and Horace ("teach and
delight")--with its emphasis upon activity, informs all the theoretical
matter of The Defence of Poetry.
In
the section devoted to the divisions or kinds of mimetic poetry and their
practitioners, Sidney conceives three types: divine poets who imitate the
"inconceivable excellencies of God," of whom David, Solomon, and
pagan poets--Orpheus, Amphion, and Homer, "though in a full wrong
divinity"--are cited as examples; poets who imitate "matter
philosophical," of which there are four subtypes (moral, natural,
astronomical, and historical); and "right poets." Sidney is primarily
concerned with the right poets: "these third be they which most properly
do imitate to teach and delight, and to imitate borrow nothing of what is, has
been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the
divine consideration of what may be and should be." They are arrayed in a
hierarchy from "the most notable" heroic poets down to pastoral poets
"and certain others, some of these being termed according to the matter
they deal with, some by the sorts of verses they liked best to write in."
But Sidney is quick to point out that verse is but "an ornament and no
cause to poetry." Rather, the "feigning" of "notable images
of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching ... must be the
right describing note to know a poet by.
The
right poet is then set off against other masters of "earthly
learning" who claim to lead men to "virtuous action," an ancient
contest developed at length in Aristotle's Poetics. The poet's principal
competitors are two: the moral philosopher, a figure of "sullen gravity
... rudely clothed ... casting largess ... of definitions, divisions and
distinctions" before him; and the historian, "laden with old mouse-eaten
records," who knows more about the past than his own age, who is "a
wonder to young folks and a tyrant in table talk." The philosopher
maintains that there is no better guide to virtue than he who "teacheth
what virtue is; and teach it not only by delivering forth his very being, his
causes and effects, but also by making known his enemy, vice, which much be
destroyed, and his cumbersome servant, passion, which must be mastered."
For his part the historian claims a significant advantage over the philosopher
in that he teaches an "active" virtue rather than a
"disputative" one. The philosopher delivers virtue "excellent in
the dangerless Academy of Plato," but the historian "showeth forth
[Virtue's] honorable face in ... battles." The philosopher "teacheth
virtue by certain abstractions considerations," adds the historian,
"but I only bid you follow the footing of them that have gone before
you." Sidney can see no end to this tedious dispute and so interrupts it
by noting only "that the one giveth the precept, the other the example.
The
poet, of course, "standeth for the highest form in the school of
learning" because he is the moderator between the philosopher and the
historian. Through the art of mimesis the poet unites in one event the
philosopher's precept and the historian's example. Rephrasing his earlier
argument on fore-conceit and image, Sidney proclaims that the poet gives
"a perfect picture" of something, "so as he coupleth the general
notion with the particular example." He then lists exemplary precepts that
poets encode in speaking pictures: anger, wisdom, temperance, valor,
friendship, remorse, pride, cruelty, and ambition. But the greatest of these is
"the most excellent determination of goodness," as in Xenophon's
"feigning" of the prince in Cyrus, in Virgil's fashioning of a
virtuous man in Aeneas and in Sir Thomas More's representation of an entire
commonwealth in his Utopia (1516). The reference to the Catholic More prompts a
brief digression in which Sidney states a general tenet of mimesis he has not
made before: if the poetic artifact is flawed, the fault lies with the poet,
not with poetry. Having made this point, he caps his list by citing the
practice of Jesus, who couched his teachings in lively stories.
Because
of its forcefulness, the poet's "feigned example" has as much
capacity as the "true example" for teaching what is to be shunned or
followed. Moreover, Sidney remarks wryly, by reading a representation of,
rather than actually duplicating, the strategy of Darius's faithful servant
Zopyrus, who severed his own nose and ears to persuade the Babylonians that he
was a traitor, "you shall save your nose by the bargain." Conversely,
the poet's "moving is of a higher degree than [the philosopher's]
teaching," for which he cites as his authority Aristotle's comments on
gnosis (knowing) and praxis (acting, doing) in the Ethics.
The
poet emerges from this examination transformed from "moderator" to
monarch. "Either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well-enchanting
skill of music," poetry has the capacity to transmute even
horrors--"cruel battles, unnatural monsters"--into delightful
experience. The effects of poetic invention are such that orators and prophets
have employed it for their several purposes. Menenius Agrippa, Livy tells us,
calmed the mutinous population of Rome not with "figurative speeches or
cunning insinuations" but with a tale of the rebellious body attempting to
starve the stomach and so hurting itself. Similarly, the prophet Nathan
revealed to David a precept "most divinely true" by means of a
feigned discourse.
In
a second examination section of The Defence of Poetry, Sidney considers the
various subgenres in which poetry is arrayed, with a cautionary comment about
overly rigid distinctions. At the very outset he warns against overdetermining
such matters, noting that "some poesies have coupled together two or three
kinds, as the tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragicomical."
Anticipating the design of his Arcadias , he recommends Jacob Sannazaro and
Boethius, who "mingled prose and verse," and others who "mingled
matters heroical and pastoral." If severed genres be good, he concludes,
"the conjunction cannot be hurtful."
Sidney
moves up the hierarchy of genres from the lowest to the highest, discussing
pastoral, elegy, comedy, lyric, and epic or heroic, "whose very name (I
think) should daunt all backbiters." Characteristically, he reserves his
highest praise for the epic, whose champions--Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus,
Tydeus, and Rinaldo--"not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and
moveth to the most high and excellent truth." Epic is, in short, "the
best and most accomplished kind of poetry." He concludes this second
examination with a summary of his major points: that poetry deals with universal
considerations; that (unlike the historian and the philosopher) the poet is not
confined to already delimited parameters of inquiry but brings his own
"stuff" to the act of mimesis, so that he "doth not learn a
conceit out of a matter, but maketh a matter out of a conceit"; that
poetry teaches goodness and delight; and that the Scriptures--indeed Christ
himself--employed poetry. All this indicates that "the laurel crown
appointed for triumphant captains doth worthily (of all other learnings) honor
the poet's triumph."
Yet
such reasoning is not likely to dissuade the misomousoi, the poet-haters, who
wrongly identify poetry with rhyming and versifying, although, Sidney concedes,
poetry often employs verse because "verse far exceedeth prose in the
knitting up of memory." But laying this complaint aside, Sidney begins his
refutation with the claim that poetry and poets stand accused of four principal
crimes: that they divert men from the pursuit of "other more fruitful
knowledges"; that poetry "is the mother of lies"; that poetry
"is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires";
and that Plato banished poets from his ideal commonwealth in the Republic.
These
charges are, of course, made by straw men whom Sidney will easily hew down. The
first charge he has already demonstrated to be spurious, since of all learning
poetry alone "teacheth and moveth to virtue." "I still and
utterly deny," he writes, "that there is sprung out of the earth a
more fruitful knowledge." The second charge, that poetry fosters lies,
occasions a spirited rebuttal that anticipates several hallmark concepts of
structuralist and poststructuralist assumptions about language, such as
arbitrariness and difference. The confidence with which he addresses the third
charge, that poetry fosters "not only love, but lust, but vanity, but (if
they list [please]) scurrility," would seem to belie Astrophil's failed
attempt to transmute his desire into spirituality. Nevertheless Sidney
maintains that if love poetry leads man astray, we "need not say that poetry
abuseth man's wit, but that man's wit abuseth poetry." Moreover, rather
than enervating the spirit of warriors, implicit in the charge that it is the
nurse of abuse, poetry is often "the companion of camps." Thus,
Plutarch tells us, when Alexander went to war he left his teacher Aristotle
behind but took Homer with him.
Of
the four charges against poets issued by the poet-haters, Sidney devotes the
most space to refuting the final one, that Plato banned poets from his ideal
republic. "But now indeed," he begins, "my burden is great; now
Plato's name is laid upon me, whom, I confess, of all philosophers I have ever
esteemed most worthy of reverence," for Plato "is the most
poetical." Yet if Plato would "defile the fountain out of which his
flowing streams have proceeded," Sidney says, "let us boldly examine
with what reasons he did it." He claims that philosophers have made a
"school-art" out of the matter that poets have conveyed "by a
divine delightfulness," and then cast off their "guides, like ungrateful
apprentices." Yet as Cicero noted, though many cities rejected
philosophers, seven cities wished to claim Homer as a citizen. Simonides and
Pindar made of the tyrant Hiero I a just king while, and here again Sidney
follows Cicero, Plato was made the slave of Dionysius. For a clinching
rhetorical effect Sidney, whose debt to Plato is everywhere apparent in The
Defence of Poetry, reminds his readers that both Plato (in the Symposium and
the Phaedrus) and Plutarch condoned the "abominable filthiness" of homosexuality.
Having
thus exposed in Plato crimes far exceeding those of poets, Sidney rehabilitates
his straw man. When he claims that in banning the poet from his republic Plato
places the onus "upon the abuse, not upon poetry," one should
remember that he began this passage by confessing that Plato was the most
poetical of philosophers. Plato's strictures were directed toward practitioners
of mimesis rather than mimesis itself: "Plato therefore ... meant not in
general of poets ... but only meant to drive out those wrong opinions of the
Deity (whereof now, without further law, Christianity hath taken away all the
hurtful belief...) nourished by the then-esteemed poets"--as can be seen
in the Ion, where Plato "giveth high and rightly divine commendation unto
poetry." Indeed Plato, who "attributeth unto poesy more than myself
do, namely, to be a very inspiring of a divine force," has been misread:
witness Plato's mentor Socrates, who spent his old age turning Aesop's fables
into verse, and Plato's student Aristotle, who wrote the Poetics--"and
why, if it should not be written?" Nor Should one forget Plutarch, who in
writing philosophy and history "trimmeth both their garments with the
guards of poesy."
Following
this stirring refutation--actually a set piece with unanticipated ramifications
for his own later work--Sidney considers, in a relevant digression, the
lamentable condition of poetry in England, directing his criticism,
characteristically, at poets rather than poetry. "Sweet poesy," he
begins, "that hath anciently [claimed] kings, emperors, senators, great
captains," and which had heretofore flourished in Britain, is in
"idle England" now little more than flimflam, poets having
"almost ... the good reputation as the mountebanks at Venice."
"Base men," he asserts, "with servile wits undertake it ... as
if all the Muses were got with child to bring forth bastard poets."
Feigning as burdensome the task of defending poets and their work, only to be
"overmastered by some thoughts" and thus yielding "an inky tribute
to them," he defers authority in the matter of poetry to those who
practice it. Restating the hugely problematic conditions of mimesis he had
already presented in the Cyrus passage, he concludes that "they that
delight in poesy itself should seek to know what they do, and how they do and
especially look in the unflattering glass of reason" (emphasis added). For
poetry must be led gently--or rather it must lead, as it cannot be acquired by
"human skill." "A poet no industry can make," Sidney claims
in a reaffirmation of the poet as vates, "if his own genius be not carried
into it."
Yet
there are English poets who warrant commendation. Sidney is typical of his age
in praising Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (circa 1385) but
exceptional in acknowledging that Englishmen of his time had not mastered
Chaucerian metrics: "I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in
that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this age go so stumblingly
after him." He also approves of the brief tragedies gathered in the Mirror
for Magistrates (1563) and commends the lyrics of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey,
who regularized the English sonnet form.
None
of this is controversial. However, Sidney's subsequent discussion of The
Shepheardes Calender raises the question of how well, if at all, Sidney and
Spenser were acquainted. He acknowledges that Spenser, who dedicated The
Shepheardes Calender to him in 1579, "hath much poetry in his eclogues,
indeed worthy of reading, if I be not deceived." In his correspondence
with Gabriel Harvey, Spenser claimed to have had Sidney "in some use of
familiarity." The two poets may have met at Leicester House, where Spenser
was employed and where Sidney was a frequent guest at the time. Yet they were
of vastly different social rank, Sidney being the earl's nephew and Spenser the
earl's secretary. Sidney does not mention Spenser by name in his discussion of
The Shepheardes Calender in The Defence of Poetry. Indeed, after praising its
poetry, Sidney criticizes its author for the "framing of his style to an
old rustic language." After his death in 1586, Sidney's influence upon
Spenser was pervasive. Yet his only comments upon Spenser's work do not suggest
the intimacy between them that Spenser claimed to enjoy.
It
is noteworthy that Sidney devotes more of his survey of English literature to
drama than to poetry. He possessed an instinctive sense of dramatic structure,
as The Lady of May demonstrates. Readers since Thomas Nashe have been impressed
by the dramatic character of Astrophil and Stella, and the first version of
Arcadia is divided into acts. Yet although he offers here the first example of
sustained dramatic criticism in English, Sidney's discussion utterly fails to
anticipate the maverick forms of English theater that were to explode with such
brilliance in the decade after his death. Except for Thomas Sackville and
Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1561), the first English tragedy in blank verse,
which he endorses with qualifications, and the tragedies of his friend George
Buchanan, Sidney dismisses the rest of English drama he has seen as
"observing rules neither of honest civility nor skillful poetry." He
criticizes English playwrights for failing to observe the rigid program of
unities (time, place, and action), a prescription generally attributed to
Aristotle, and he praises ancient exemplars such as Terence (Eunuchus), Plautus
(Captivi and Amphitruo), and Euripides (Hecuba).
Though
he has claimed to see no harm in mixed poetic genres per se, he is especially
harsh in his comments on English tragicomedy, which, he remarks, is guilty of
promiscuously "mingling kings and clowns" and "hornpipes and
funerals." English comedy also fails to make the necessary distinction
between delight and laughter, a distinction he develops in considerable detail.
He concludes that he has spent too much time on plays because "they are
excelling parts of poesy" and because "none [other poetry is] so much
used in England, and none can be more pitifully abused."
Just
before his peroration Sidney returns to the subject of lyric poetry,
"songs and sonnets," which poets should direct toward the Platonic
end of "singing the praises of immortal beauty: the immortal goodness of
that God who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive." In a passage
rife with implications for Astrophil and Stella , he complains of the wooden
language of so many love poets who, "if I were a mistress, would never
persuade me they were in love." He attacks pseudo-Ciceronianism at some
length, allowing himself to stray "from poetry to oratory." But he
finally excuses the slip because it allows him to include penultimately a
tribute to the ease, grace, and beauty of the English language, which "for
the uttering sweetly and properly [of] the conceits of the mind ... hath not its
equal with any other tongue in the world."
Apparently
Sidney was serious in his private, concurrent hopes of introducing a
quantitative metrics into English poetry, for he writes that of the two methods
of versifying, by quantity and stress, "the English, before any vulgar
language I know, is fit for both." Of other poetic qualities loosely
grouped under the heading of rhyme, he argues that English is superior to other
modern languages in its use of the caesura and in its ability to rhyme with
masculine, feminine, and medial formations.
The
brilliant peroration to The Defence of Poetry is a masterly composite of
summary, exhortation, and admonition. Every praiseworthy poem is full of
"virtue-breeding delightfulness" and possesses all traits of
learning; the charges against it are "false or feeble," and bad
poetry is produced by "poet-apes, not poets." The English language is
"most fit to honor poesy, and to be honored by poesy." Then, in the
name of the Nine Muses, Sidney enjoins the reader of his "ink-wasting
toy" to believe with Aristotle that poets were the keepers of the Greek
divinities; with Pietro Bembo that poets first brought civility to mankind;
with Joseph Justus Scaliger that poetry will sooner make an honest man than
philosophy; with the German Conrad Clauser that in fables poets communicated
"all knowledge, logic, rhetoric, philosophy natural and moral, and quid
non"; with Sidney himself "that there are many mysteries contained in
poetry, which of purpose were written darkly"; and with Cristoforo Landino
that poets are so loved by the gods that "whatsoever they write proceeds
of a divine fury." Alluding wryly to the often fulsome tone of dedications
and patron-seeking prefaces, he reminds potential defenders of poetry that
poets will make them "immortal by their verses," that their names
"shall flourish in the printers' shops," and that poets shall make
laymen "most fair, most rich, most wise," so that their souls shall
dwell with Dante's Beatrice and Virgil's Anchises.
His
concluding admonition, directed to anyone who might have "so
earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the sky of
poetry," is a masterpiece of tone, combining the witty with the deadly
serious for an audience that knew both the triviality of much fashionable
rhetoric and the crucial role of literature and language in resisting the
monument-destroying power of mutability and relentless time. As for those who
refuse to value poetry, in the name of all poets Sidney offers the malediction
that "while you live, [may] you live in love, and never get favor for
lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory die from the earth for
want of an epitaph."
The
Defence of Poetry emerges today, in the hindsight of literary history, as a
fulcrum in Sidney's career, gathering, organizing, and clarifying the critical
energies developed in his early work (such as The Lady of May and the
experiments in quantitative verse) and discharging these energies into the
mature creations of the 1580s, Astrophil and Stella and the revised Arcadia .
Sidney's attractiveness as a critic, like that of John Dryden in a later age,
derives partly from his authority as a practicing poet who speaks as much from
experience with what works and what does not as from familiarity with abstract
notions of art. This is not to say, however, that his later works simply
actualize conceptual blueprints from The Defence of Poetry.
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