Sir Philip Sidney, The Critical Heritage

SIDNEY: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

  Martin Garrett has worked mainly on English Renaissance literature and theatre; he is the editor of Massinger: the Critical

  

Heritage (Routledge, 1991). In other areas his publications include

Greece: a Literary Companion (1994), and he is now working on a

  literary companion to Italy and a volume of Interviews and Recollections of the Brownings.

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

  Formerly Department of English, Westfield College, University of London

  The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death.

  For a list of volumes in the series, see the end of the book.

  

SIDNEY

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Edited by

MARTIN GARRETT

  

London and New York

  

First published 1996

by Routledge

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

  

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library,

2003.

  

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by

Routledge

  

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Compilation, introduction, notes, bibliography and index

© 1996 Martin Garrett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  

Sidney: the critical heritage/edited by Martin Garrett.

p. cm.—(The Critical heritage series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586–Criticism and interpretation.

I. Garrett, Martin. II. Series.

  

PR2343.P45 1996

821'.3–dc20 95–36355

  

ISBN 0-203-42077-2 Master e-book ISBN

  

ISBN 0-203-72901-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

  

ISBN 0-415-08934-4 (Print Edition)

  

General Editor’s Preface

  The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near- contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of literature. On one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading-public, and his response to these pressures.

  The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage Series present a record of this early criticism. Clearly, for many of the highly productive and lengthily reviewed nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, there exists an enormous body of material; and in these cases the volume editors have made a selection of the most important views, significant for their intrinsic critical worth or for their representative quality— perhaps even registering incompre hension!

  For earlier writers, notably pre-eighteenth century, the materials are much scarcer and the historical period has been extended, sometimes far beyond the writer’s lifetime, in order to show the inception and growth of critical views which were initially slow to appear.

  In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes will make available much material which would otherwise be difficult to access and it is hoped that the modern reader will be thereby helped towards an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

  B.C.S.

TO MY PARENTS

  

CONTENTS

  4 Edmund Spenser

  A Choice of Emblemes, 1586 102

  8 Geoffrey Whitney 102

  99

  98 Analysis of A Defence of Poetry, c. 1584–6

  7 William Temple

  96

  96 The Arte of English Poesie, c. 1584

  6 George Puttenham

  94

  pleasure, 1581

  94 Howell His Devises, for his owne exercise, and his Friends

  5 Thomas Howell

  93

  93 Two Other very commendable letters, 1580

  92

  PREFACE xiv

  91 (b) Three Proper and wittie, familiar Letters, 1580

  c. 1580

  90 (a) MS notes in The Posies of George Gascoigne,

  3 Gabriel Harvey

  89

  88 (b) ‘To My Deare Ladie and Sister’, 1580?

  88 (a) A Defence of Poetry, 1579–80?

  2 Philip Sidney

  87

  87 Letter to Sir Henry Sidney, 1577

  1 Edward Waterhouse

  1

  INTRODUCTION

  ABBREVIATIONS xvi NOTE ON THE TEXT xvii

  9 Fulke Greville 103 Letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, 1586 104

CONTE NTS

  10 Matthew Roydon 105 ‘An Elegie, or friends passion, for his Astrophill’,

c. 1586–9

  106

  11 King James VI of Scotland 108 ‘In Philippi Sidnaei interitum…’, Academiae

  Cantabrigiensis lachrymae…, 1587 109

  12 George Whetstone 110

  Sir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and

  110

  true vertues, 1587

  13 Angel Day 111

  Upon the Life and Death of the Most Worthy, and Thrise Renowmed Knight, Sir PHILLIP SIDNEY, 1587 112

  14 Edmund Molyneux 112 ‘Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys…’, 1587 113

  15 Sir John Harington 115 115

  Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, 1591

  16 Thomas Newman 118 ‘To…his very good Freende, Ma. Frauncis Flower’,

  1591 118

  17 Thomas Nashe 119 (a) ‘Somewhat to reade for them that list’, 1591 119 (b) The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594 124

  18 Edmund Spenser 127 128

  Astrophel, 1591–5

  19 Gabriel Harvey 129 (a) Foure Letters, and Certaine Sonnets, 1592 130 (b) A New Letter of Notable Contents, 1593 131 (c) Pierces Supererogation: A New Prayse of the Old Asse, 1593 131 (d) Notes in Thomas Speght (ed.), The Workes of our

  132

  Antient and Lerned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer, 1598

  20 Hugh Sanford 133 ‘To the Reader’, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 1593 134

  21 Thomas Moffet136 136

  Nobilis…,1593–4

  22 John King 139

  Lectures Upon Jonas, 1594 139

  23 Henry Olney 139 ‘To the Reader’, An Apologie for Poetrie, 1595 140

  24 Gervase Markham 141 141

  The English Arcadia, 1597?

CONTE NTS

  37 Heroical Epistles 178 Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. f. 9, 1607–23? 179

  34 Richard Carew 171 ‘The Excellencie of the English Tongue’, 1605–14 171

  35 Alexander Craig 172

  The Amorose Songes, Sonets and Elegies, 1606

  173

  36 John Day 174

  The Ile of Guls, 1606 175

  38 Wiliam Heale 186

  33 Dudley Digges 170

  An Apologie for Women, 1609

  187

  39 Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke 188

  The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, c. 1610–12 189

  40 ‘Thus far the worthy Author…’ 194

  The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 1613 194

  Four Paradoxes, or Politique Discourses, 1604 170

  25 Francis Meres 146

  Palladis Tamia, 1598

  154

  146

  26 Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke 147 (a) ‘To the thrise sacred QUEENE ELIZABETH’, 1599 148 (b) ‘To the Angell spirit…’, 1599 149

  27 Ben Jonson 152

  (a) Every Man Out of His Humour, 1599 152 (b) Epicoene, 1609 152 (c) Conversations with Drummond, 1619 153 (d) Timber: or, Discoveries, c. 1623–37 153

  28 John Hoskyns 154

  Directions for Speech and Style, c. 1599–1600

  29 Brian Twyne 157 Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS 263, c. 1600? 158

  The Essayes…of Michaell de Montaigne, 1603

  30 William Vaughan 166

  The Golden-Grove, 1600 166

  31 John Florio 167

  Epistle to the Second Book, The Essayes…of Michaell

  de Montaigne…, 1603 168

  32 Matthew Gwynne 169 ‘To the Honorably-vertuous Ladie, La: Penelope Riche’,

  169

CONTE NTS

  41 Sir William Alexander (Earl of Stirling) 195 (a) ‘A Supplement of the Said Defect’, The Countesse of

  196

  Pembrokes Arcadia, 1621 (1616?)

  (b) Anacrisis: or, A Censure of Some Poets Ancient and 198

  Modern, c. 1634

  42 Lady Mary Wroth 200 201

  The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania, 1621

  43 Love’s Changelings’ Change 204 British Library, MS Egerton 1994, 1621> 205

  44 James Johnstoun 207 ‘A Supplement to the third booke of Arcadia’, 1621–5? 208

  45 John Donne 211

  ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister’, 1621–31 211

  46 Sir Richard Beling 213 213

  A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 1624

  47 ‘Upon Sydneis Arcadia’ 217 _rs ‘Upon Sydneis Arcadia sent to his m. ’, c. 1625–50 217

  48 Michael Drayton 219 ‘To my most dearely-loved friend HENERY REYNOLDS

  Esquire, of Poets and Poesie’, 1627 219

  49 Francis Quarles 220 221

  Argalus and Parthenia, 1629

  50 Thomas Powell 224

  Tom of All Trades: or, The Plaine Path-way to Preferment, 1631 225

  51 Antony Stafford 225 ‘To the Noble Reader’, The Guide of Honour, 1634 226

  52 Edmund Waller 227 (a) ‘At Pens-hurst’, c. 1634–9 227 (b) ‘On My Lady Dorothy Sidneys Picture’, c. 1634–9 227

  53 Henry Glapthorne 228 229

  Argalus and Parthenia, c. 1637–9

  54 Richard Lovelace 232 ‘To the Ladies’, The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe, 1638 232

  55 Anne Bradstreet 232 ‘An Elegie upon that Honourable and Renowned

  Knight, Sir Philip Sidney…’, 1638 233

  56 James Shirley 237 238

  A Pastorall Called the Arcadia, <1639

CONTE NTS

  57 A Draught of Sir Phillip Sidneys Arcadia 241

  A Draught of Sir Phillip Sidney’s Arcadia, 1644? 241

  58 John Milton 247

  Eikonoklastes, 1649 248

  59 Thomas Moore 250

  The Arcadian Lovers: or, Metamorphoses of Princes,

c. 1650–60? 251

  60 Anne Weamys 253

  A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia, 1651 255

  61 ‘Philophilippos’ 256 ‘The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney’, 1655 257

  62 Charles Cotton 259 ‘The Surprize’, c. 1655–60 260

  63 John Aubrey 260 (a) The Natural History of Wiltshire, c. 1670–85 260 (b) Brief Lives, c. 1680 260

  64 John Dryden 262 (a) Defence of the Epilogue: or, An Essay on the Dramatique

  Poetry of the Last Age, 1672 263

  (b) ‘The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry and Poetique Licence’, 1677 263

  (c) A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of

  Satire, 1693 263

  65 Edward Phillips 264

  Theatrum Poetarum: or, A Compleat Collection of Poets, 1675 264

  66 Life of Spenser 265 ‘A Summary of the Life of Mr. Edmond Spenser’, 1679 265

  67 D.Tyndale 266

  ‘Key of Pembroke’s Arcadia’, 1687 266

  68 Sir William Temple 267 ‘Essay IV. Of Poetry’, 1690 267

  69 Anthony Wood 268

  Athenae Oxonienses, 1691 268

  70 ‘J.N.’ 270

  The Famous History of Heroick Acts: or, The Honour of Chivalry. Being an Abstract of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 1701 270

  71 D.Stanley 272

  Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Moderniz’d by Mrs. Stanley, 1725 273

  72 Elizabeth Montagu 275 Letter to Mary Pendarves, 1742 275

CONTE NTS

  The Progress of Romance…, 1785 291

  ‘The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia…’, 1820 308

  88 James Crossley 307

  87 Sir Egerton Brydges 304 ‘Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney’, 1810 304

  86 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 300 (a) The Friend, 1809 301 (b) Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, 1811 302 (c) The Statesman’s Manual, 1816 302 (d) Table Talk, 1833. 303

  The Annual Review and History of Literature for 1808, 1809 299

  85 The Annual Review and History of Literature for 1808 299

  Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, 1808 296

  84 Thomas Zouch 296

  Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808 294

  83 Charles Lamb 294

  The Task, 1785 293

  82 William Cowper 293

  73 John Upton 276

  Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 1746 276

  80 Richard Brinsley Sheridan 290 Letter to Thomas Grenville, 1772 290

  The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1767 288

  79 The Gentleman’s Magazine 288

  The History of Argalus and Parthenia…, c. 1760–85? 287

  78 The History of Argalus and Parthenia 287

  77 Horace Walpole 285 ‘Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke’, 1758 286

  1758 283

  The Shepherd’s Calender…The Subjects partly taken from the select Pastorals of Spencer, and Sir Philip Sidney,

  (c) Letter to Hester Thrale, 1770 282 76 ‘Philisides’ 283

  1765 282

  75 Samuel Johnson 281 (a) Preface to A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 281 (b) Mr. Johnson’s Preface to his Edition of Shakespear’s Plays,

  Philoclea: A Tragedy, 1754 278

  74 McNamara Morgan 277

  81 Clara Reeve 291

CONTE NTS

  89 William Hazlitt 317

  Lectures Chiefly on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, 1820 317

  90 Charles Lamb 324 ‘Defence of the Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney’, 1823 324

  91 Peter George Patmore? 328 ‘Penshurst Castle, and Sir Philip Sydney,’ 1823 328

  92 Nathan Drake 331

  Mornings in Spring; or, Retrospectives, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, 1828 332

  93 William Gray 333 ‘The Life of Sir Philip Sidney’, 1829 334

  94 Henry Hallam 335

  Introduction to the Literature of Europe, during the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, 1839 335

  95 Isaac D’Israeli 337

  Amenities of Literature, Consisting of Sketches and Characters of English Literature, 1841 337

  96 William Stigant 342 1858

  342 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 350 Index

  355

  

PREFACE

  Will you have all in all for Prose and verse? take the miracle of our age Sir Philip Sidney.

  (Richard Carew, No. 34 below) I do almost think the Tyburn Chronicle a more interesting book than Sydney’s Arcadia.

  (Hannah More, September 1788, in William Roberts, Memoirs of…

  Mrs Hannah More, 1834, vol. 3, p. 131)

  the silver speech Of Sidney’s self, the starry paladin. (Robert Browning, Sordello, 1840, 1. 68–9)

  Sidney’s reputation grew with remarkable rapidity after his death and the publication of most of his work in the 1590s. Few authors, not even Shakespeare (himself much influenced by Sidney’s writings), have been exalted further. And, as has not been generally the case with Shakespeare or other contemporaries, Sidney’s life—or heroic constructions of it—continued to affect assessments of the work even after it had ceased to be generally read in the eighteenth century.

  The story of Sidney’s reception for much of the seventeenth century will already be broadly familiar to most readers. (They will also, however, encounter fresh material here, including the first printing of some manuscript material, most importantly of the bulk of Brian Twyne’s notes of c. 1599–1600.) I have included extracts from continuations and dramatizations of Arcadia, in addition to more direct comment.

  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses are, with a few exceptions (Walpole and Hazlitt, for example) less generally known. In view of this—and helped by the relative dearth of responses—I have attempted to cover the eighteenth century in almost as much detail as the earlier periods; space does not permit a very full selection from Victorian writing on Sidney, but entries by Hallam

PRE FACE

  (1839), D’Israeli (1841), and William Stigant (1858) have been included as representative. It seemed appropriate to end with Stigant, because he combines traditional and newer approaches to Sidney: he regards the life of the hero as more important than his literary productions, and has certain traditional reservations about

  

Arcadia, yet is largely enthusiastic about the works and willing to

  discuss them in some detail. Part 3 of the Introduction seeks to give a more general impression of tendencies in Sidney criticism up to about 1900. The work of three Sidney scholars in particular has made editing

  

Sidney: the Critical Heritage an easier task: Katherine Duncan-Jones,

Dennis Kay and Victor Skretkowicz.

  I should like to express my thanks to Jennifer Fellows and Brian Southam for their work on the text, and to Mrs Christine Butler and Dr Hubert Stadler for their help with Brian Twyne’s notes on Sidney in Corpus Christi College MS 263, fols 114–20 (no. 29), which are printed here with the permission of the President and Scholars of Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford.

  Extracts from MS. Eng. poet. f. 9, pp. 224–36 (No. 37) and MS. Rawl. poet. 3, fols 9–10 (No. 59) are included by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and those from MS Add. 10309, fols _{v v} 86v– 87v (No. 47), Harleian MS 4604, fols 22 –23, 24 –25 (No.

  28), and MS Egerton 1994 (No. 43) by permission of the British Library. William Temple’s Analysis of A Defence of Poetry, fols 11–12, is printed by kind permission of Lord De L’Isle.

  Special thanks are due to my wife and children for their help and encouragement, and to my parents, to whom this volume is dedicated.

  

ABBREVIATIONS

  Sidney’s works:

  AS Astrophil and Stella CS Certain Sonnets MP Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine

  Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, Oxford, 1973

NA The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed.

Victor Skretkowicz, Oxford, 1987

OA The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed.

Jean Robertson, Oxford, 1973

  OP Other Poems

  Ringler The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A.Ringler Jr, Oxford, 1962

  Feuillerat The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols, Cambridge, 1962 Other works:

  Beal Index of English Literary Manuscripts, ed. Peter Beal, 2 vols, London, 1980–93. Beal’s classification of his Sidney entries (vol. 1, pp. 465–88)—SiP and number— is followed. Van Dorsten, Baker-Smith, and Kinney Sir Philip Sidney: 1586

  and the Creation of a Legend, ed. Jan van Dorsten,

  Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F.Kinney, Leiden, 1986 Kay Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed.

  Dennis Kay, Oxford, 1987. Kay without further title refers to Kay’s own contribution to this volume, ‘Introduction: Sidney—a Critical Heritage’ (pp. 3–41). Rota Felicina Rota, L’Arcadia di Sidney e il teatro, Bari, 1966

  

Note on the text

  Entries reproduce original texts unless otherwise stated, except that i/j and u/v have been regularized and contractions mostly expanded. References to Sidney’s works are to the Oxford editions listed above. This means that where the authors of entries are in fact quoting from or alluding to the 1593 composite Arcadia, I have supplied references to the equivalent passages in the Oxford editions of The Old Arcadia and The New Arcadia. Most readers will find any resulting inconvenience outweighed by the advantages of being directed to the most reliable and usefully annotated modern texts.

  References to the works and to Beal are given where possible in parentheses in the body of the text.

  

Introduction

  PART 1 1577–1650 Early reputation Sidney drew little public attention to his literary endeavours. Whether his few known remarks on his ‘toyful book’ or ‘idle work’

Arcadia and his enrolment among the poetic ‘paper blurrers’ (No. 2)

are examples more of sprezzatura or of religious scruple, in his ₁ lifetime only ‘some few of his frends’ read these comments and the manuscript works in question. With the possible exception of the two sonnets that may well be Sidney’s which appeared in Henry Goldwell’s account of The Four Foster Children of Desire in 1581 (Ringler, pp. 345–6, 518–19), he avoided the perceived ‘stigma of ₂ print’. The Defence of the Earl of Leicester, with its challenge to the author of Leicester’s Commonwealth, must have been intended for wider circulation. (Print would have seemed particularly inappropriate as a vehicle for the views of a proud ‘Dudley in blood’ (MP, p. 134).) So too, its wide late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century dissemination may suggest, was A Letter to Queen Elizabeth

  

Touching her Marriage with Monsieur (Beal, SiP 181–215). It is these

  works, rather than poetry and romance, that Sidney’s less intimate circle are most likely to have known if they were aware of any of his writings; he was early renowned, the commendation of Edward Waterhouse (No. 1) suggests, for the readiness of his pen in practical affairs like the defence of his father’s fiscal policies in Ireland. He was also known to his father’s secretary, Edmund Molyneux, for letters including ‘a large epistle to Bellerius a learned divine in verie pure and eloquent Latine’.

  Sidney’s poetry, if it is mentioned at all during his lifetime, tends to figure as simply one aspect of the larger construct ‘Sidney’, potential Protestant leader, source of patronage, soldier or military expert. The German scholar Melissus (Paul Schede), hailing ₃

  ‘Sydnee Musarum inclite cultibus’ in 1577, is as likely to be referring to Sidney’s patronage as to his poetry. Giordano Bruno

SIDN EY

  (while exempting Englishwomen, conceivably in deference to

  

Astrophil and Stella) finds it appropriate to attack Petrarchan devotion

  to women in dedicating De gli eroici furori (1585) to Sidney the public ₄ figure. Scipio Gentili calls him ‘that outstanding poet’ in 1579 but ₅ provides no details.

  Such references did, however, contribute to interest in Sidney’s literary activities. To be an early reader of the works, even to know their names or to allude with at least apparent knowingness to Sidney as ‘Astrophel’ or ‘Philisides’, was to obtain or to appear to obtain privileged access to the great man. (According to Edmund Molyneux (No. 14) ‘a speciall deere freend he should be that could have a sight, but much more deere that could once obteine a copie’ of Arcadia.) Perhaps Thomas Howell (No. 5) simply would, as he claims, like the Old Arcadia to be published so that it can reach a wider readership, but since only his own poem responding to Sidney’s romance is printed, the sense of tantalizing, exclusive knowledge is maintained. Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser (Nos 3 and 4) use references to Sidney as writer and theorist of quantitative verse in their published ‘letters’ of 1580 in much the same way. And readers must have been similarly intrigued by the quotations from The Old Arcadia printed in Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike in 1588, George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie in 1589 (No. 6), and, after the appearance of the 1590 Arcadia, Sir John Harington’s preface to Orlando Furioso in 1591 (No. 15).

  The process of familiarization with the idea of Sidney as author was continued by brief allusions in the mourning volumes produced by the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Leiden in 1586–7. There are some specific allusions in the Cambridge Lachrymae and the Oxford Exequiae: William Temple knows A Defence of Poetry (see No. 7), the fact that Arcadia was revised, and perhaps—Sidney is ‘patriae stella…tuae’—Astrophil and Stella; Matthew Gwynne refers to Sidney as a poet, author of Arcadia, and master of ‘Suada’ (possibly an allusion to A Defence); Richard Latewar mourns him as Philisides, Edward Saunders and Charles Sonibank refer briefly to

  

Arcadia, and George Carleton indicates that it was written at Wilton

₆

  (‘Pembrochia…in aula’). Again, the writings are subordinate to a larger aim, as ‘part of a wider political campaign to exploit Sidney’s ₇ death in favour of an interventionist policy in the Netherlands’.

  Even Carleton’s mention of Wilton—strongly associated with the

  

TH E CRITICAL H E RITAG E

  Leicester/ Pembroke political grouping—has its place in this undertaking. But it is also in the interests of the campaign to demonstrate however possible Sidney’s greatness, whence the importance of what he stood for and can still be used to promote. Perhaps as significant as the actual references to Arcadia and A

  

Defence in Lachrymae and Exequiae is the insistence in all four of the

  university volumes on Sidney’s status as follower equally of Mars ₈ and of the Muses (see James VI, No. 11). Sidney is a figure notable in every field, a Protestant achiever some of whose achievements occurred in verse.

  Since Sidney is dead, his achievements can now best be preserved either by continued adherence to his political and familial heirs, or in his poems and prose. Even before publication, his work emerges as crucial to both literature and national identity. Because, however, most of the elegies are in Latin and several are in Greek or Hebrew, the work (known, besides, to only a few) retains to an extent the same remoteness as in the references of Melissus or Gentili: Arcadia is as much a password as the name of a book readers may wish to read. Poems which celebrated Sidney and his work in English—briefly those of 1586–7 by Geoffrey Whitney, George Whetstone, and Angel Day (Nos 8, 12, 13), and more extensively the poems gathered in The Phoenix Nest (1593) and

  

Astrophel (1595)—suggest a greater degree of accessibility. This is

  enhanced, by the time the Astrophel collection appears, by the publication of Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella. Whatever the intention at the time of the individual poems’ original composition, the pastoral frame and the use of the names ‘Astrophel’ and ‘Stella’ could be interpreted as commentaries on, or developments from, Sidney’s use of pastoral and his sonnet sequence. The oblique or transposed references to the works—the ‘laves of love’ of Astrophel ₉ itself (No. 18) and of ‘The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’, the ‘woods of

  

Arcadie’ in Matthew Roydon’s elegy (No. 10), Lodowick Bryskett’s

  Philisides who is also Astrophil, carving ‘the name of Stella, in yonder bay tree’ and leaving behind a flock which echoes that of ₁₀ song ix in Astrophil and Stella —invite readers both to think of the romance and the sonnet sequence and to experience ‘Astrophel’/ Sidney as an independent literary creation. Spenser’s Astrophel flower is at once Astrophil and Stella and Astrophel; ‘verses are not vain’ since they have preserved Sidney’s memory and, in so doing, created Spenser’s poem.

SIDN EY

  Publication and criticism of the works, the response of the

  

Astrophel authors, and Sidney’s still burgeoning reputation as hero

and perfect courtier, combined to broaden Sidney’s literary fame.

  Where Puttenham (No. 6, c. 1584) numbers Sidney as a poet who specializes in ‘Eglogue and pastorall Poesie’, Francis Meres (No. 25, 1598) describes him as a love-poet, a writer of pastoral, and one who wrote his ‘immortall Poem’ Arcadia ‘in Prose, and yet our rarest Poet’, and Richard Carew (No. 34, c. 1605–14) hails him as ‘all in all for Prose and verse’. In some ways, however, detailed responses become more common. The writings themselves, much quoted and extracted, became as indispensable to the authority of the receiving work as references simply to Sidney’s name had been in the 1580s. For example, Francis Davison launches A Poetical Rapsody (1602) with a sequence of poems by or connected with Sidney which he claims, disingenuously, has been inserted by the printer in order to ‘grace the forefront with Sir Ph. Sidneys, and others names, or to ₁₁ make the booke grow to a competent volume’. For at least fifty years after Davison, Sidney’s ‘toys’ continued to bestow such ‘competence’.

  

The Lady of May

  Placed at the end of the 1598 folio, and inevitably separated from its original performative, immediate context, the printed version of Sidney’s Wanstead entertainment generated little known response. Most of what there is is concerned with Rombus, who seems to have shared some of the popularity of Dametas in the reception of

  

Arcadia (see below, p. 18): Brian Twyne (No. 29, c. 1600) is struck

  by ‘Howe the schoole master Rhombus urged Vergill false’ and ‘What Rhombus saide of the syllogisms the sheparde made’; Henry Peacham gives the fact that ‘Sir Phillip Sydney made good sport with

  

Rhombus his Countrey Schoole-master’ as an example of those

  ‘passages of inoffensive Mirth’—like his own Coach and Sedan—with which the wise and learned have ‘ever season’d, and sweetened ₁₂ their profoundest Studies, and greatest employments;’ Thomas Bradford, in a commendatory verse to Robert Baron’s E POTO?AIGN ION. Or the Cyprian Academy (‘an amateur pastoral romance in prose and verse after the fashion of Sidney’s

  

Arcadia’) of 1647 finds Baron superior to Spenser and Jonson and

  

TH E CRITICAL H E RITAG E

  contrasts his pure style with that of Rombus, whose ‘language is ₁₃ pedantick’. (Rombus had earlier—Shakespeare must presumably have seen a manuscript—served as the main inspiration for Holofernes in Love’s Labours Lost). Only Rombus seems to have excited interest outside his original context; the main exception to this, the rival song of Espilus and Therion included in Englands

  

Helicon (1600), was felt, unusually, to require the explanation that

  ‘This song was sung before the Queenes most excellent Majestie, in Wansted Garden: as a contention betweene a Forrester and a ₁₄ Sheepheard for the May-ladie.’

  These responses to the script of the entertainment are of a ₁₅ different order from those to the event itself in 1578. The reactions of those present were affected by the costumes, the singing, the shepherds’ recorders and the foresters’ cornets, the kneeling of the Lady and the suitor, the ‘confused noise’ in the woods and the unspecified ‘many special graces’ which accompany Rombus’ learned oration (MP, pp. 21–5). They were also affected, to an extent to which audiences of a play are usually not, by factors about which we have no information: the skill of the performers, their timing, the weather, the mood of the Queen, how well she could see and be seen, hear and be heard, the manner and costumes of her host, Leicester, and the other courtiers present, no doubt watching each other and the Queen as much as the May Lady. Rombus could have been incommoded by any of these factors as much as by the Lady’s dismissal of him as a ‘tedious fool’ (MP, p. 24). The conventions of progress entertainments meant that he ran little risk of being mocked out of countenance with his progeny Holofernes, but his last speech, preserved only in the Helmingham Hall manuscript, illustrates the extent to which reactions to the piece are likely to have concerned its occasional function as much as any ‘literary’ qualities: it seems likely that, as Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests on the basis of the ‘unusually chaotic and obscure’ nature of the speech, that ‘it was decided only at the last moment to present the Queen with an agate necklace, and the final speech was rapidly devised as a vehicle for this’ (MP, p. 18).

  The only part of the entertainment which we know Leicester to have pondered after the event is this last speech. When the Queen visited Wanstead later in 1578 in his absence, he wrote to Sir Christopher Hatton expressing concern at her possible disfavour (he was about secretly to marry Lettice Knollys) and hoping ‘I may

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  hear that her Majesty doth both well rest, and find all things else there to her good contentment; and that the goodman Robert, she last heard of there, were found at his beads, with all his aves, in his ₁₆ solitary walk’. What Leicester remembered about Rombus was not, or not just, his malapropisms and proud loquacity—Peacham’s ‘passages of inoffensive mirth’—but his role as agate-giver and means of directing attention, through humour, to Leicester’s own presence and alignments.

  The Queen’s reactions have excited the most interest from modern commentators. Her responses were, indeed, an integral part of the event at Wanstead, most obviously in the form of her famous choice of Espilus over Therion. Among the many and various explanations for her decision are that she chose Espilus as a snub to Sidney’s own Therion-like ambition and unpredictability, or to Leicester’s, or to their desire for intervention in the Netherlands; or that, in David Kalstone’s words, ‘Sidney’s unorthodox treatment of the pastoral convention went unnoticed, and the queen chose the shepherd as the usual representative of the contemplative life’, or that Espilus was in fact the intended choice, product of a new liking for the contemplative life on Sidney’s part and a desire to elicit ‘a preference for her old favourite and his nephew, against other, more ₁₇ threatening advisers or even consorts’. Perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence that, as Louis

  Adrian Montrose, Edward Berry and others feel, Therion was the intended choice is the way the script describes the Queen’s verdict: ‘it pleased her Majesty to judge that Espilus did the better deserve her; but what words, what reasons she used for it, this paper, which carrieth so base names, is not worthy to contain’ (MP, p. 30). This may be what Berry and Robert Stillman see as a ‘sly revenge’, a coy ₁₈ refusal to include the royal reasons. Certainly it seems to be the earliest example of Sidney contributing to his own critical heritage in attempting to direct readers’ responses towards the Queen’s choice. (This may have been more immediately apparent to those among whom the manuscript initially circulated than to buyers of the folio twenty years later). Montrose suggests that The Four Foster

  

Children of Desire (1581) enacts another of Sidney’s own responses to

  the earlier event: ‘the outcome of the later contest is made to reflect the queen’s choice in the earlier dispute. Wild foresters have become the attackers of the Lady; docile shepherds have become her defenders.’ In the challenge and submission of the Foster

  

TH E CRITICAL H E RITAG E

  Children Sidney tests the ‘Therion-Rixus model’ and then finally abandons ‘the illusion that it can be effective within the constraining ideological system successfully manipulated by the ₁₉ queen’. The May Lady’s entertainment was part of a process—the

  Queen might make different choices, the manuscript might subsequently incorporate or exclude her reasons, another show could continue the debate. Only later, printed in 1598 and given the solid title The Lady of May in 1725, did it lose this flexibility.

  

Arcadia

  Reading Arcadia

  

Arcadia prompted not only critical comment but a remarkable

  number of continuations, ‘bridging passages’ for the gap between the revised and unrevised portions of Book III, musical settings of the poems, dramatizations, and imitations ranging from whole romances to the letter of 1640 in which Henry Oxinden describes a real marriage entirely in terms borrowed from the wedding of ₂₀ Argalus and Parthenia and other parts of the romance. This fact results not only from the immense popularity of the work, predicated partly on its author’s reputation, but from its very nature. What was perceived by many readers at least as its mixed genre—pastoral, romance, epic—and the rhetorical amplitude, the sentences sown with antithesis and alternative, give an impression of inexhaustible riches, possibilities which do not end when the book is finished.

  Arcadia itself emphasizes the processes of reading, writing, story-

  telling, listening and argument. In The Old Arcadia ‘an indulgent ₂₁ Chaucerian narrator’ addresses the ‘faire ladies’ and invites their identification with the lovers; the abandonment of such addresses once the lovers’ actions become less unambiguously sympathetic forces the reader to make judgements, perhaps to reinterpret the ‘faire ladies’ remarks as ironic, insinuating, forcing complicity.

  Should we listen with the ‘deare Countess’ or look with ‘severer eyes’ (No. 2b)? In The New Arcadia the use of narratives within narratives foregrounds the process of reading, writing and interpretation. Amphialus’ dog, in one of the more complex examples, carries off a ‘little book of four or five leaves of paper’

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  which turns out to be Basilius’ The Complaint of Venus; Pyrocles/ Zelmane reads it, but needs further information, which Pamela supplies by telling the tale of Erona and Antiphilus; since this includes material on the Grecian princes, the reader is aware of Pyrocles as interested listener. The tale of Plangus is then interrupted by Miso’s insistence on telling a different tale, of ‘what a good woman told me, what an old wise man told her, what a great learned clerk told him, and gave it him in writing; and here I have it in my prayer-book’ (NA, pp. 195–213). (Again, the mixing of genres and forms increases the sense of multiplicity.)