Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer

Also by Richard Hillyer


HOBBES AND HIS POETIC CONTEMPORARIES: Cultural Transmission in Early Modern England (2007)


Richard Hillyer



Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, CULTURAL ICON Copyright © Richard Hillyer, 2010.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10238–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hillyer, Richard. Sir Philip Sidney, cultural icon / Richard Hillyer. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10238–5 (alk. paper) 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586.—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and society—England—History—16th century. I. Title. PR2343.H55 2010 821 .3—dc22 2009035739 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



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Preface

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1 “Yet Verses Are Not Vaine”: Sidney, Spenser, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum

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2 “Equall Portions”: Sidney, Prince Henry, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity

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3 “Intent, and Scope”: Sidney, Greville, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity

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4 “For Freedom’s Sake”: Sidney, Sidney, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association”

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5 “All We Can”: Sidney, Waller, and the Courtly Love Tradition

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6 “Tam Marti, quam Mercurio”: Sidney, Lovelace, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum

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7 “Beyond Comparison”: Sidney, Lord Herbert, and the Problem of Scale

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8 “The Revolution Then Effected”: Sidney, Bruno, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association”

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Notes

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Works Cited

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Index

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Contents



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A soldier at the end of his brief life (1554–86), Sir Philip Sidney had occupied other roles previously—author, courtier, diplomat, jouster, member of parliament, patron, scholar, and translator. John Buxton’s question remains the best summary of Sidney’s first phase, as a European traveler whose charm and learning hypnotized all, wherever he went: How did the boy of seventeen who set out . . . in the spring of 1572 achieve, in three years’ residence on the Continent, a reputation from Italy to the Low Countries, from France to Poland, that no other Englishman would rival till the days when Marlborough went there to war, and that only Byron among the English poets has ever equalled?1

Neither soldier nor poet at so young an age, Sidney still achieved this imperious conquest. However personally gratifying (as when fostering his relationship with his mentor and frequent correspondent Hubert Languet), his eminently successful grand tour also makes perfect sense as the best preparation for his next phase, as a budding diplomat and statesman at the court of Elizabeth I. But here he had a hard time making himself useful. After much inaction, he clearly jumped at the chance to join Drake in a colonial expedition to the Caribbean. Nothing came of this quintessential odd-couple venture, however: probably with Drake’s connivance, Elizabeth summoned Sidney to become instead the Governor of Flushing, a military-administrative position that gave him an opportunity to aid his Dutch co-religionists in their revolt against Philip II, his own godfather. “It is by the success of Axel that Sidney should be remembered as a soldier,” stresses Roger Howell: “It was here, rather than in the careless heroism of Zutphen, that he demonstrated his ability to plan and execute a military operation.”2 The bravado with which he perished in a mere skirmish at the age of just 31 nonetheless immortalized him on that account alone. James Osborn notes that this hero received “the most splendid funeral ever given to anyone below the rank of royalty, an occasion on such scale and accompanied by such a demonstration of national grief that it remained unrivalled for a commoner until the death of Sir Winston Churchill.”3 The same figure compared with Byron by Buxton and with two different Churchills by Buxton and Osborn struck Robert Kimbrough as resembling



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John F. Kennedy: “an ambitious, dedicated, and philosophically oriented public servant whose sudden death in mid-life shocked the Western world into a self-conscious moment of honest reflection.”4 But Alan Hager cites as an example of “the Machiavellianism that lay behind the artifice of Elizabeth’s court” the possibility that she artfully delayed Sidney’s lavish funeral until it could serve a “propagandistic” function as a “smokescreen” deflecting attention from the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.5 “The charge at Zutfen which ended Philip Sidney’s career was the first step in Essex’s” remarks S. T. Bindoff, further diminishing Sidney.6 This sole reference to him in a book about the Tudor era also accords with Howell’s assessment: “One could not write a political narrative of Elizabethan England and leave out his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, or his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, but one could, without too many qualms, write that history and leave out Philip, or perhaps relegate him to a footnote” (6). Such a judgment recalls the fate of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart: “The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.”7 These words voice the reflections of the British Commissioner whose administration has replaced the self-rule of Okonkwo and his fellow Iboans and who now plans, as a consequence, to write a triumphalist account: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” (215). Achebe’s own narrative ends with this title, underscoring how the winners of any conflict also prevail in establishing the terms of its commemoration. Though Howell exhibits no such cultural insensitivity as Achebe’s Commissioner, his Sidney resembles Okonkwo in achieving so slight a return on vast expectations generated from within and without. But whereas Okonkwo failed to realize his potential when a colonial invader’s insidious proselytizing and superior technology rendered him obsolete as an African Achilles, Sidney’s political impotence did not leave him without alternative means of fulfillment. Unlike Okonkwo, a larger-than-life figure who so fully embodies his culture’s most prized traits that he despises anything but action and is fit for nothing else, Sidney could write. Though he routinely dismissed his works as trifles, his profound literary gifts will always serve as their own justification. Even so, writing did not represent his first choice. “There may be a relationship between Sidney’s engagement with literature and his political career,” Richard Dutton acknowledges, “but in many ways writing is on the margins of his central concerns as an aristocrat and courtier; it is likely that he would have written much less if his talents had been better appreciated by the queen or his uncle, Leicester.”8 Similarly, Osborn recounts how Sidney



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To relieve his enforced inactivity . . . returned to the Arcadia, the continuation and completion of which occupied the winter months during his sister’s pregnancy. The study of poetry, especially poetic techniques, renewed its fascination. He and his friends Dyer and Spenser . . . had begun to ask why English poetry could not be as fresh and various in rhythm and form as the verse written in Italian, French, and other Continental languages. They set out to free English poetry from its “balde Rymers” and succeeded in doing so. The golden phase of Elizabethan poetry grew out of these sessions, in which Philip Sidney was the leader. Seldom has political frustration yielded such a glorious harvest, one of the happiest paradoxes of cultural history. (504)

More simply, A. C. Hamilton remarks that Sidney “seems to have lived two separate lives: a known life as a Renaissance courtier seeking political office, and a private life as a poet.”9 All such comments nonetheless divorce literature from politics in a manner not inevitable in the context of Sidney’s own time and distinctly unfashionable today, when a major preoccupation in relation to all of the arts has been revealing their ideological content. In line with this perspective, many historians and literary critics writing during the four decades since Howell downplayed Sidney’s role in any “political narrative” have promoted his status from that of “footnote” at most to “reasonable paragraph” at least, if not “whole chapter” or even entire book. At the same time, a related paradigm shift has removed Sidney with his compatriots and contemporaries from a late chapter of Europe’s Renaissance to reinstall them in early modern England. Though proponents of this newer model have not denied the diversity of Sidney’s accomplishments, neither have they insisted that he embodied an early modern ideal instead of a Renaissance one. “Our contemporary appellation for a polymath—‘Renaissance man’—resonates with both our temporal dissociation from this ideal, and its pre-eminence for the contemporaries of Sidney and Spenser,” notes Tom Parker.10 But just as “our” age of specialization has not hindered the recent efflorescence of interdisciplinary studies, including versions of “political narrative” produced by literary critics assigning Sidney an importance denied him by Howell, so discussions of Sidney’s ideological impact in or on early modern England have augmented and diminished “temporal dissociation,” depending on whether early or modern receives the primary emphasis. Though the question of whether to accentuate Sidney’s pastness or presentness becomes more acute with the passage of time, all retrospective assessments of his life and work belong to an age more modern than he lived to see. As a Janus-headed figure in a Janus-headed era that witnessed



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not only the Restoration of Charles II but also the founding of the Royal Society, the pioneering antiquary John Aubrey proved modern enough to engage in a self-conscious retrieval of knowledge and traditions rapidly disappearing, but early enough to be able in many cases to call on his own memory or that of other living witnesses, to visit crumbling but still extant archaeological sites, and to recognize which pieces of data eluded his grasp—and where, if at all, they might yet be found. The miscellaneous fragments he gathered during his most active years as a magpie encompass much of value, including material about Sidney. For instance, Aubrey recognized that jousting and its related pageantry played a larger role in English cultural life during the Elizabethan period than they would during the first two Stuart reigns, and far more so than they would after the Restoration: Tilting was much used at Wilton in the times of Henry Earle of Pembroke, and Sir Philip Sydney. At the Solemnization of the great Wedding of William the 2d Earle of Pembroke to one of the Co-heires of the Earle of Shrewsbury, here was an extraordinary Shew: at which time a great many of the Nobility, and Gentry, exercised: and they had Shields of Past-board painted with their Devices, and Emblemes: which were very pretty and ingenious: and I believe they were most of them contrived by Sir Philip Sidney. There are some of them hanging in some houses at Wilton to this day; but I did remember many more.11

When he refers to “the 2d Earle of Pembroke,” he seems to mean the third such figure, another member of the Herbert dynasty, but in any case shows less concern with who married whom than with what sort of “Solemnization” could occur in such distant “times.” The rituals surrounding Sidney’s burial also appealed to Aubrey’s sensibility, and again gave him an opportunity to supply his own testimony as an attentive eyewitness: His body was putt in a leaden coffin (which, after the firing of Paule’s, I myselfe sawe) and with wonderful greate state was carried to St Paules church, where he was buried in our Ladie’s Chapell. There solempnized this Funerall all the Nobility and great Officers of Court; all the Judges and Serjeants at Lawe; all the Soldiers and Commanders and Gentry that were in London; the Lord Mayer and Aldermen, and Liverymen. His body was borne on men’s shoulders (perhaps ’twas a false coffin). (338)

That closing speculation reveals the practical streak in Aubrey’s mind, which likewise emerges in his many admiring portraits of mathematicians and scientists.



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When I was a boy 9 yeares old, I was left with my father at one Mr Singleton’s an Alderman and Wollen-draper in Glocester, who had in his parlour over the Chimney, the whole description of the Funerall, engraved and printed on papers pasted together, which at length was, I beleeve, the length of the room at least; but he had contrived it to be turned upon two Pinnes, that turning one of them made the figures march all in order. It did make such a strong impression on my tender Phantasy that I remember it as if it were but yesterday. I could never see it elsewhere. The house is in the great long street, over against the high steeple, and ’tis likely it remaines there still. ’Tis pitty it is not re-donne. (338)

According to A. J. Colaianne and W. L. Godshalk, Aubrey “recalled seeing” a series of engravings, based on sketches by Thomas Lant, “designed to be connected end to end so that one would have a complete representation of the procession more than thirty-five feet in length.”12 Aubrey’s life’s work would involve sundry redoings of this ingenious contrivance, whereby he would honor any contemporary similarly capable of extracting value from “two Pinnes,” and with his own writing sought to reanimate past “figures” to “march” (even though “order” as such eluded him), for their world, which he could “remember” in part “as if it were yesterday,” was continually slipping away, even when not abruptly destroyed by such disasters as the Fire of London.13 Of those recent scholars formally or informally reevaluating Sidney as an early modern, only new historicists have shared Aubrey’s love of anecdote and penchant for collapsing what might otherwise be conceived as foreground and background; but most have tended to make Sidney himself “march” to an ideological drumbeat too inaudible for that purpose, if heard at all. To that extent, they exhibit a general failing indirectly denounced by Gale Carrithers and James Hardy when establishing their own approach as both out of the mainstream and (for that reason) free of eccentricity: “We are not writing about modern politics using Renaissance examples.”14 Such a statement nonetheless reasserts the very gulf that studies of early modern cultures seek to narrow or bridge. Not only they but also much additional scholarship about sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Britain recently produced by otherwise diverse literary critics and historians treat past, present, and future as a perpetual agon between agents or forces of suppression and subversion. Like Antaeus, this model draws strength from its chosen grounding: the British Civil Wars. The sheer number of studies devoted to these struggles gives some idea of their



Both his love of pageantry and his practicality came together in a further Sidney-related reminiscence that Aubrey himself traces back to ca. 1635:

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complexity, as does Robert Ashton’s analysis of “conservatism and revolution” during this period not as embodied in the eventual opposition between two armed camps but as both fostering and complicating their initial formation, by grouping individuals equally prone to conservative and revolutionary impulses.15 But so many of the myriad narratives about the Civil Wars disdain such subtlety as mere sophistry: readers keep being taught what they are assumed already to know. Contrasting treatments of Sidney’s relationship with two key figures in his life well illustrate the distorting impact of a historical vision whereby he can only enforce or undermine the status quo. To all appearances, Sidney got on well with his father and badly with his queen. In recent scholarship, however, this dichotomy has yielded to another. Studies imparting the maximum possible weight to tensions between Sidney and Elizabeth evaluate him as alienated from her court, assigning him republican or otherwise antimonarchical views. Repeated frustration thus converts into an ideological program. This approach obviously risks exaggerating the significance of limited evidence and fails to explain how far Sidney resembled or differed from other frustrated courtiers: the unspoken assumption seems to be that any participants in the intensely competitive arena of court life who found this experience unfulfilling might qualify as disenchanted, except that hardly any of a legion jaded courtiers transformed from foiled insiders into agents or theorists of constitutional change. Whereas portraits of Sidney as turning against the court he once sought to adorn make the most of his clashes with Elizabeth, they typically attach no equivalent emphasis to his support for her colonial administration of Ireland. Though Sidney’s outwardly harmonious relationship with his father might have played the leading role in his favorable evaluation of the same man’s conduct as Lord Deputy of Ireland, no hints have survived that he privately disagreed with his father on any point. In his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (ca. 1582), Sidney portrays Astrophil in varying degrees of proximity to himself, but never aligns the two more closely than when including among “questions busie wits to me do frame” this example: “How Ulster likes of that same golden bit, / Wherewith my father once made it halfe tame.”16 Classing Sidney’s Discourse on Irish Affairs (ca. 1577) as “a clear, manly defence of his father’s record,” Malcolm William Wallace notes the imperceptiveness this required: “Sidney’s mind was untroubled by the idea that there was anything in the Irish obstinacy in papistry which was akin to the Dutch obstinacy in Protestantism.”17 “There are few Elizabethans whose career it is possible to review with greater satisfaction than that of Sir Henry Sidney,” Wallace nonetheless proposes of a figure “responsible for his full share of this wild work of ruthless injustice and bloodshed,” as “an enthusiastic advocate of the solution of the Irish problem by means of colonists”



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(361, 83). Whereas Wallace stresses that the son’s “share . . . in these strenuous operations is not recorded” (168), Blair Worden claims that he “briefly served against the Irish rebels in 1576”; but Wallace admits that an incomplete picture makes little difference, for “Philip had an opportunity to learn at first hand the terribly effective methods which his father employed against Irish rebels” (167).18 Inasmuch as Worden sufficiently embraces new historicism to characterize Sidney with some ambivalence as a harbinger of late seventeenthcentury republicanism (278 n.65), he should be less clear eyed about the possibility that the son’s contribution to his father’s work encompassed not only words but also deeds. Inasmuch as Wallace published during World War I and with a much older conception of history than Worden’s as his guide, he should not have been as sentimental about those on the receiving end of “ruthless” treatment as he was about those perpetrating or justifying such “wild work.” This partial swapping of roles confirms that scholars capable of nuanced judgments cannot simply be tidied away under whichever label best seems overall to fit their outlook or approach. But it also suggests that sentimentality arises in different forms, as well as degrees. “He quickly became ‘a paragon of our time,’ ” Worden remarks of Sidney, quoting George Whetstone with this amplification: “He came to seem something more than he was. Quirks and faults of character—the tendencies to violence and impetuousness and intolerance, the nervous and often tense disposition—were ironed from the record” (68). Wallace does not simply erase all wrinkles when contemplating Sidney’s ideological ties with his father; Worden preserves rubs in the cloth, even as he traces a smooth continuity linking Sidney’s ideology with that of his great-nephew Algernon. Any impulse to renew “a paragon of our time” as belonging to a later one involves flattening as well as purging, and dramatizes the extent to which “our” functions as the most labile category of all. On both counts, Yeats offers an illuminating perspective through his poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (1918). Grouping its subject among other companions whom Yeats has had to mourn, his elegy also acknowledges this difference: I am accustomed to their lack of breath, But not that my dear friend’s dear son, Our Sidney and our perfect man, Could share in that discourtesy of death.19

Gregory stands out in Yeats’s mind as an all-rounder: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he.” This line serves as a refrain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh stanzas of the poem: the first repetition adds, “And all he did done



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perfectly / As though he had but that one trade alone”; the second adds, “As ’twere all life’s epitome” (151). “He had periodically expressed impatience at the younger man’s casual and dilettante approach,” R. F. Foster nonetheless relates of Yeats’s prior feelings about Gregory, whom “In Memory” also depicts “mostly as artist,” according to George Bornstein, “particularly if we remember that the eighth stanza, on horsemanship, was added to the poem later at his widow’s request.”20 Yeats, however, proved quite insensitive in another way—as an Irish poet remembering a compatriot killed by friendly fire when fighting on behalf of the British empire. Yeats compounded this gesture with the pastoral elegy “Shepherd and Goatherd” (1919), again written on Gregory’s behalf, and according to Norman Jeffares an avowed attempt at “a poem in manner like one that Spenser wrote for Sir Philip Sidney”: neither Elizabethan had been a friend to Ireland.21 If Yeats had written no more than these poems about Gregory, he would seem merely oblivious of the charged political climate in which that figure had died: “Since the executions of 1916, opposition to the British war effort had spread widely even among political moderates, while the tone of nationalist propaganda was vitriolic,” Foster explains (118). In “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919), however, Yeats repudiates the English acculturation of its Harrow-, New College-, and Slade-educated subject, though Foster sees little warrant for the poem’s endeavor to “posit Gregory’s commitment to fighting as purely existential, and even attribute to him an alienation from empire” (119). Noting how Gregory’s ghost also features in Yeats’s “Reprisals,” directed against the Black and Tans, Frank Tuohy points out that its author “left this poem unpublished, in order not to offend Gregory’s widow, who was English.”22 Both “In Memory” and “Shepherd and Goatherd” practice another kind of muting by avoiding altogether the topics of Sidney’s descent from and support of a Lord Deputy of Ireland “ruthless” enough to qualify as an efficient administrator in the eyes of his own government. In “No Better than a ‘Withered Daffodil’ ” (1959), by contrast, Marianne Moore could imagine herself “like Sidney, leaning in his striped jacket / against a lime— // a work of art” (referenced in her notes as “Sir Isaac Oliver’s miniature on ivory”): under the right circumstances she “too seemed to be / an insouciant rester by a tree.”23 Drawing on another version of Sidney to extol a dead friend caught up in a web of civil as well as global conflict, Yeats’s “In Memory” only feigns Moore’s level of detachment in contemplating so timelessly “perfect” an image; his poem invites a quarrel with others by imposing the consensus of “our” perspective to appraise it thus. Through eight chapters discussing him in tandem with other individuals, my book attempts to preserve Sidney’s autonomy while acknowledging his frequent subjection to tugs-of-war that began during his own lifetime.



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Of these variously linked foils, only Algernon Sidney and Edmund Spenser have featured thus far in this preface: I have not written chapters centering on Sidney’s father, Okonkwo, Kennedy, Byron, or either Churchill. An important point nonetheless emerges from adding these names to those focusing my six other chapters (Prince Henry; Sir Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke; Edmund Waller; Richard Lovelace; Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury; and Giordano Bruno): the almost universal esteem for Sidney as a special or even unique case has repeatedly involved matching him with so many diverse others as to enshrine him collectively in a very capacious hall of differently distorting mirrors. This paradox houses another: through his versatility, he fulfilled an ideal expected of every gentleman both during the period in which he lived and for some time to come. He thus became special by embodying a norm more fully than any other “Renaissance man,” except in the dozens and dozens of instances in which just praise or hyperbole hails some different exemplar as no less complete on that very dimension. Each chapter pairing incorporates a related theme, also announced in its title. Chapter 1 thus links Sidney not only with Spenser but also with “the poet-soldier conundrum.” I identify Sidney’s dual status as both poet and soldier a “conundrum” because Spenser and other poets not also soldiers risked halving themselves when praising both parts of Sidney. To that extent, his identity has always involved some potential degree of “dissociation”: even those close to him in time had to figure out whether he put his gifts as “Renaissance man” to the best possible use, given the many choices he ended up making or deferring with nine jealous muses to serve but not the same number of lives. Modern scholars addressing Sidney’s reputation during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods often slight his significance as a literary figure, not only in absolute terms but also by doubling his impact as a soldier in assessing his views about both foreign and domestic policy as those of an activist or militant. Both at home and abroad, he thus espoused a specific brand of Protestantism having implications for the future, most notably in the Civil Wars. Though this version of Sidney and of Protestantism clearly entailed hostility to the military threat posed by the Counter-Reformation, it less clearly relates to parliamentarianism, patriotism, and Puritanism, as factors often invoked to explain how those internecine conflicts occurred. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop this theme of Sidney’s doubleness: as a literary figure significant for his contemporaries and near successors (but largely forgotten in that capacity by recent scholars) and as a literal or figurative soldier regarded by recent scholars as significant for his contemporaries and near successors (but little remembered in that capacity by them). Here, my focus shifts from “the enforcement of ‘Protestant’ solidarity” in relation to Sidney as linked with



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Henry (2) and Greville (3) to “the vogue for ‘radicalism’ ” in relation to Sidney as linked with his great-nephew (4), a form of ideological bonding loosely sanctioned by a single “our” usage of Milton’s, but not otherwise justified by anything in the historical record. Chapter 5 resists Waller’s treatment as indirect evidence of Sidney’s twinship with his great-nephew, bringing out instead another kind of “our” usage involving Sidney’s continuing importance as a literary figure a half-century and more after his death. Focusing on another cavalier poet, Chapter 6 returns to “the poetsoldier conundrum” as involving not only Sidney but also Lovelace and others who both wrote and bore arms before or during the Civil Wars—a period of conflict that on the military and literary dimensions alike tested many a “Renaissance man.” Chapter 7 addresses “the problem of scale” as it applies to Sidney from a number of perspectives, including that of Walpole, who mocked him as both producer and product of fantasy, in part by juxtaposing him with Lord Herbert. This mythical version of Sidney recurs in Chapter 8, as both the target of Hazlitt’s Walpole-like attacks and linked with Bruno by Swinburne and others. Here, I also bring my discussion full circle by returning to “the vogue for ‘radicalism’ ” and by concluding my demonstration of the overlap between nineteenth- and twentieth-century evaluations of Sidney. In these respects and others, my study of Sidney’s reputation differs from broadly comparable projects. Unlike John Gouws, who focuses an essay on Sidney’s profile during the nineteenth century, I devote portions of several chapters to that subject in a book-length survey extending from his own day.24 Unlike Martin Garrett, whose collection of verdicts on Sidney spans from the late sixteenth century to the mid-Victorian period, I cover not only that ground but also judgments voiced up to the present, and thus bring out more fully the implications of his phrase “radicalism by association.”25 Though Dennis Kay’s introduction to his own anthology of extracts about Sidney resembles my book on a smaller scale by summarizing an entire tradition to the point of its own publication, the material he reprints dates from the modern period alone.26 Most importantly, these forerunners give pride of place to literary criticism (as conventionally understood), whereas I have sought to present a greater variety of content, in recognition of the range of responses generated by Sidney’s versatility. Here, I owe a debt to the anthology of miscellaneous passages compiled by Thomas Zouch to buttress his hagiography of Sidney (1809).27 Whereas these quotations often strike predictable notes of praise about Sidney, some do little more than mention him, or have other axes to grind, so that their net effect disrupts the seamless panegyric incorporating them. Partly through the stimulus afforded by Zouch’s precedent, then, I discuss perspectives on Sidney given by authors not typically considered



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major developers of his reputation within the evolution of literary studies generally. “The creators of the Sidney legend invented a fictional self less interesting and perhaps less ‘true’ than the fictional selves that Sidney had created before them,” observes Edward Berry, noting this paradoxical outcome of a “single-minded pursuit of the perfect hero.”28 Insofar as such a verdict directs readers back to the works housing those “selves,” its value lies beyond dispute. But many retrospective assessments of Sidney produced before the twentieth century remain “interesting” by failing or not aspiring to be “single-minded.” Their testimony clashes with “the perfect hero” as reconstructed in modern scholarship often reading as if Sidney’s life and work would seem boring without the stimulus that only an overexcited conception of the Civil Wars can supply, thereby imposing a “single-minded” focus not apparent in the historical record. Though Mark Kishlansky passionately defends such a way of viewing the Civil Wars as essential for its capacity to inspire readers, he thereby proposes a model of history filling the role that Sidney assigned to fiction in his Defence of Poesie (1595), and precisely so as to stress its superiority to history, by contrast “captived to the trueth of a foolish world,” and hence “many times a terror from well-dooing, and an encouragement to unbrideled wickedness.”29 My pages therefore document older versions of Sidney that might lack merit as set beside his “fictional selves,” but have more of a historical grounding than fictionalized history, and thus deserve more attention than they have received, especially as supplanted by newer versions that I also discuss. I therefore focus on evidence and its too frequent absence in studies ignoring it, misrepresenting it, overlooking the need for it, or offering something else in its place. Overall, my book well complements Gavin Alexander’s recent analysis of “the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney,” which focuses on the years 1586–1640 and mainly offers close readings of texts by Sidney’s best friend (Greville); sister (Mary, countess of Pembroke); brother (Robert, first earl of Leicester); and niece (Lady Mary Wroth).30 Both aspects of coverage reflect Alexander’s hypothesis that “a response to Sidney seemed to require some personal relation to animate it, even if at one remove,” and hence “could last only a generation” (337). Subtly reexamining the writing of a coterie capable of engaging with Sidney’s works by forming intimate dialogues with them, Alexander offers a refreshing alternative to so much recent scholarship on chiefly ideological affiliations, but no direct challenge to that wholly different approach. Though he adopts a relatively unorthodox position in even acknowledging the possibility that “Sidney’s literary and biological heirs” differ from and disagree with “his chivalric and political heirs,” and dares express some skepticism as to whether any point of



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by the second half of the seventeenth century, with Mary Wroth dying in around 1653, the strongest Sidney tradition was not literary but political. A continuous vein of political thought can be traced, running from Philip Sidney through the commonplace books of the Robert Sidneys father and son to the writings and career of the extraordinary son of the second Robert Sidney, the republican hero Algernon Sidney. (336)

Here, the standard verities return with a vengeance, and Sidney’s most enduring significance once more proves ideological rather than literary. Given the wide range of material covered, I have needed to follow some principles of usage. Though many Sidneys exist just within Sir Philip’s own family, I usually point to him when writing of Sidney. His sister, Mary, figures as Pembroke (countess of). I have not imposed conformity on authors choosing not to identify Sidney as knighted, spelling his name Sydney, styling him Phillip rather than Philip, or referring to Astrophel rather than Astrophil. Nor have I attempted to bring any uniformity to the different ways in which various writers have invoked his Arcadia—often (perhaps suggestively) as if it were not the title of a book. In particular, I have not sought to define its genre exactly when referring to it indifferently as a work of pastoral or of romance, and have not differentiated its alternate versions except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars whose arguments rest on the distinctions involved. In addition, I have adopted these editorial policies. Firm dates for works establish year of first publication. Approximate dates (ca.) specify period of composition. Unless otherwise noted, dates given for texts echo the edition followed in each case. I have made these silent emendations: reversing italics presented as the norm rather than the exception; re-transposing swapped u and v, i and j; regularizing long s; dropping numbers preceding stanzas in short poems; suppressing indentations marking the beginning of paragraphs in both prose and verse; lowercasing all but the initial capital at the beginnings of poems; and modifying the capitalization of some titles. I only establish the provenance of square-bracketed content and italics in cases with some room for doubt. For their various kinds of help, I thank my editor, Brigitte Shull; her assistant, Lee Norton; and the anonymous reviewers they contacted on my behalf.



contact with Sidney automatically entailed membership “in the network of international militant Protestantism,” these dissents from the mainstream occupy a marginal role in a narrative largely making its own case on its own terms (141, 105). But Alexander also achieves closure for his study and an added rationale for his choice of terminus ad quem with this explanation:

“Yet Verses Are Not Vaine”: Sidney, Spenser, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum

In his “Epitaphe on Sr Philip Sidney” (1587), the future James I savors the dead man’s versatility: Thou mightie Mars the God of souldiours brave And thou Minerve that does in witt excell And thou Apollo that does knowledge have Of everie art that from Parnassus fell With all the Sisters that theron doe dwell Lament for him who dewlie serv’d you all Whome in, you wiselie all your arts did mell.1

By contrast, Thomas Nashe’s epistle dedicatory to his own Anatomie of Absurditie (1589) summarizes a discussion “touching the severall qualities required in Castalions Courtier,” concluding: “every man shotte his bolte, but this was the upshot, that England afforded many mediocrities, but never saw any thing more singuler then worthy Sir Phillip Sidney, of whom it might truely be saide, Arma virumque cano.”2 Though this clinching quotation from the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid would have carried much weight with Nashe’s earliest readers, that epic’s hero embodied fewer than the “severall qualities” (separate, but in context numerous) essential to the realization of Castiglione’s ideal. Like Aeneas, a soldier and an exemplar of piety and patriotism, Sidney also resembled Virgil, as a singer himself. Sir Arthur Gorges produced another lopsided figure in his elegy “Of Syr Phyllypp Sydney” (ca. 1586). Acknowledging that summe . . . whose love surmounts theyr skill and of thy wytt devyne the treasures lacke In prayse of the have cloathed with theyr quyll the papers whyte in lynes of moornynge blacke,



1

2

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, CULTURAL ICON

For doo the ryght thy sworde shoulde be the penn thy noble blood the yncke whearwith to wryte Thy monument the fylde of martyall menn wheare lasting tyme thy glorye should indyte.3

Though it does not offer this clarification for “In prayse of the,” Helen Estabrook Sandison’s commentary to the edition followed notes that “the” in “doo the ryght” means “thee” (222 n.13). Presumptuous, if written before Sidney became a military hero through his fatal wounding at Zutphen, Gorges’s lines nonetheless imply that he had yet to write his own elegy in precisely those terms. Disparaging lesser writers than Sidney, Gorges also rejects literature itself, as inferior to war; he remembers the poet, only to forget him when focusing on the soldier. But Gorges made partial amends by writing, presumably on the same occasion, a sonnet describing how Mars and the Muses weare att mortall stryfe which of them had in Sydney grettest parte the one layde clayme unto his valyaunt harte The other to his mynde in knowledge ryfe This parragon applyinge Bothe to please his spryte and penn gave to Arcadia soyle hys harte and hand in flaunders warrs to toyle Which partage rych dyd eyther parte appease. (1–8)

Now placing poet and soldier on an equal footing, however, Gorges portrays conflict where James found harmony. Moreover, this “mortall stryfe” incorporates itself (the province of “Mars”) as one of its irreconcilable options. Like Gorges, Thomas Campion commemorated Sidney twice in different ways. His Latin epitaph “On the Death of Philip Sidney, Most Noble and Illustrious Knight” (1619) reads in translation: Birds of the mother of feathered Loves, why do you seek Philip in vain through the sweet violets and lovely roses, still calling Philip, Philip, in the thickets? For Orcus has received him entombed while the warlike fame of the youth dares to surpass all; announce the sad death of Philip to Venus that she may weep for the poet of her Loves.4

Though Campion could hardly have praised Sidney’s military prowess any more highly, he reduces this topic’s prominence by treating it in passing,



Gorges protests:

3

as a minor element in relation to the central conflict, no contest: Venus can do nothing about Sidney’s possession by Orcus (not a fellow deity but the underworld, where he lies dead and beyond recovery). Nonetheless, Campion reaffirms Sidney as “the poet of her Loves,” her as “the mother of feathered Loves”: his primary identity remains the same, even when “entombed.” Without reference to “mortall stryfe,” Campion thus keeps his focus on Sidney the poet rather than “the warlike . . . youth,” as befits a writer whose own first published verses appeared with an unauthorized edition (1591) of Astrophil and Stella; noting this literary debut (3), Walter Davis in his commentary to the edition followed remarks how the epitaph’s sparrow imagery recalls the 83rd sonnet from that sequence (425 n.2), and elsewhere styles Campion “Sidney’s Disciple.”5 By contrast, this epitaph in its first version (1595) had featured not only trifling differences in the phrasing of its beginning lines but also a substantially modified conclusion: Mars illum insidiis modo interemit Rivalem metuens, renunciate Flebiles Veneri exitus Philippi, Victus involvit caput tenebris. (504 n.11)

With Mars taking the role later assigned to Orcus, Campion brings out more strongly the theme of Sidney as subject to “mortall stryfe” among the inhabitants of Olympus. Perhaps his revision of these lines reflected his desire to achieve a more original formulation; perhaps he recognized that his first thoughts took a sad turn alleviated by his second, which restore Sidney to Venus in at least some sense, displacing Mars’s victory both through and over him, to throw the emphasis back on “the poet of her Loves.” By contrast, George Peele focuses on “the warlike” Sidney in An Eclogue Gratulatory (1589), twinning him with the earl of Essex as a notable scourge of Spain. Writing in the aftermath not only of the Spanish Armada but also of the counterattack it occasioned, Peele welcomed Essex back to his native shores by reminiscing: “Fellow in Armes he was, in their flowing deies,/With that great Shepherd good Philisides.”6 Peele here expresses the viewpoint of an author who attended or claimed to have witnessed Sidney’s funeral, noting of Essex: “in sad sable did I see him dight./Moning the misse of Pallas peereles Knight” (63–64). These couplets overlook neither Sidney’s pastoral persona as a man of letters nor his civil accomplishments, as suggested by his ties with Athena. Nonetheless, Peele chiefly stresses how Sidney and Essex make a pair because both “watcht and waited fate,/To keepe the grim Wolfe from Elizaes gate” (66–67). Invoking this heroic past makes Peele lament that Sidney “is dead,/For whome the Muses silver teares



“YET VERSES ARE NOT VAINE”


have shed” (71–72), but it also lets him extract consolation from Essex’s alleged role as another such figure: “Yet in this lovelie swaine, source of our glee,/Mun all his Vertues sweet reviven bee” (73–74). In Polyhymnia (1590), written to celebrate the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s accession day, Peele evokes a second time when “in sad sable did I see him dight,” relating the pageantry in which Essex tilted with all his companie in funerall blacke, As if he mourn’d to thinke of him he mist, Sweete Sydney, fairest shepheard of our greene, Well lettred Warriour, whose successor he In love and Armes had ever vowed to be. (1: 110–14)

Whereas Essex undoubtedly marched in black at Sidney’s funeral, Peele’s conjecture about the same man’s mourning in the context commemorated by Polyhymnia has been interpreted as a revealing error. “The sentiments that Peele attributed to Essex are touching but neither true nor appropriate in light of the actual circumstances,” according to Steven May: “The earl was not mourning for Sidney, he was responding to the queen’s intense displeasure over his secret marriage to Philip’s widow, Frances. Essex had become indeed Sidney’s successor in love, but in doing so he elicited a royal tantrum that was hardly a court secret.”7 May stresses this point to make an example of Peele, who “misinterpreted the show because he was not a courtier nor in any demonstrable way a member of the court circle; thus, even a firsthand account of events at court will not necessarily report what actually happened if the witness did not belong to that elite for whose sake the court existed” (9–10). By implication, May also attacks Peele’s conception of Essex from another direction: “there is no evidence that he read or valued Sidney’s writings” (138). Noting the existence of “three Londons, those of the courtier, the chapman, and the cutpurse,” the introduction to the edition of Peele followed classifies him as “a product of the middle London,” even though “his recurrent courtly themes of war and pastoralism show that in his work he aspired to the highest” (127); May suggests that reach exceeded grasp. Moreover, an author more attuned to the internal politics of Elizabeth’s court might have hesitated to pronounce of Sidney and Essex, as Peele did in An Eclogue: “for their Mistresse thoughten these two swains,/They moughten never take too mickle paines” (68–69). The two men only made a pair of this sort insofar as they found their queen so frustrating an employer. In addition, though Sidney’s deathbed bequest of his sword to Essex gave Peele ample warrant for presenting the two men as kindred opponents of “the grim Wolfe,” he had no real basis for supposing that “all” the dead man’s “Vertues” might “reviven bee” in



4

5

a “successor” notably less compendious in the range of his gifts—a “Well lettred Warriour,” but not nearly to the same degree. In another poem on another accession-day anniversary, Anglorum Feriae (1595), Peele acknowledged the limits to his own powers of analysis by describing Essex’s garb more circumspectly, noting how “his mute approache and accion of his mutes/saide that he was sollicited diversly,” with “one way to followe war and war designes,” and “Another way t’apply him to the care/Of common weale affaires” (1: 195–96, 197, 200–01). These lines also acknowledge the limits to Essex’s versatility. Peele himself hinted that he did not find Essex entirely satisfactory as a “successor,” through an otherwise unexplained response to the participation of Thomas Sidney, Sir Philip’s younger brother, in the pageantry described by Polyhymnia: “at which name I sigh,/Because I lacke the Sydney that I love,/And yet I love the Sydneys that survive” (224–26). One possible explanation for this unfilled void appears in Peele’s prologue to The Honour of the Garter (1593); this text (separately lineated in the edition followed) mourns a golden age of literature: other Patrons have poore Poets none, But Muses and the Graces to implore. Augustus long agoe hath left the world: And liberall Sidney, famous for the love He bare to learning and to Chivalrie; And vertuous Walsingham are fled to heaven. (33–38)

These lines obviously relate to Peele himself, as one of the “poore Poets” in question. A. R. Braunmuller gives some sense of Peele’s penury, describing “an autograph letter . . . sent to Lord Burghley . . . in January of 1596. The poet enclosed a poem he had written almost twenty years before and asked for some charity because ‘Longe sicknes havinge so enfeebled me maketh bashfullnes allmost become impudency. ’ ”8 Peele’s testimony contradicts Raphael Falco’s claim that “a significant transformation” occurred in literary commemorations of Sidney as the 1580s gave way to the 1590s, whereby writers initially focusing on him as “almost exclusively . . . a patron and soldier” then evoked him primarily “as a poet.”9 Whereas all three of these roles receive acknowledgment in various poems that Peele wrote between 1589 and 1593, however, the intensity of his focus on Sidney the soldier has no parallel in other poetry of the Elizabethan period and probably reflects his preoccupation with Essex as that figure’s “successor.” The same lack of contemporary evidence undermines the second part of Kevin Sharpe’s claim that Gustavus Adolphus “represented the Protestant cause of the seventeenth century,





as had Sir Philip Sidney that of the sixteenth century.”10 Even if Sidney had been a monarch, like Adolphus, and not Elizabeth’s frustrated servant, he still might have hesitated to unleash his own version of the military tactic Theodore Rabb terms Adolphus’s “swath of destruction,” and in any case proved too contrastingly “Well lettred” a “Warriour” to be made purely synonymous with “the Protestant cause.”11 Insofar as Sidney’s many elegists in the decade or so after his death chose between “the poet” and “the warlike . . . youth,” they either did so on the pattern of Campion’s revised epitaph or subordinated the hero of Zutphen far more extremely, sometimes even to the point of ignoring or regretting his existence. In his Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing (ca. 1594), Sir John Davies groups Sidney among praiseworthy poets by acknowledging his wide range within a purely literary capacity: “Yet Astrophell might one for all suffize,/Whose supple Muse Camelion-like doth change/Into all formes of excellent devise.”12 In his essay “The Excellency of the English Tongue” (?1595–96), Richard Carew likewise stresses Sidney’s compendiousness not as an occupant of multiple roles but as an author: “Will yow reade Virgill? take the Earll of Surrey: Catullus? Shakespheare, and Marlowes fragment: Ovid? Daniell: Lucane? Spencer: Martiall? Sir John Davis and others. Will yow have all in all for prose and verse? take the miracle of our age Sir Philip Sydney.”13 John Buxton does not mislead when he generalizes of the dozens and dozens of elegies in collections gathered at Oxford and Cambridge alone (both 1587): “to these cultivated and civilized men war seemed a detestable and barbarous business, not at all worth the sacrifice of a life such as Sidney’s. They even blame him for wasting his life, and for not leaving to others of less outstanding gifts the degrading tasks of a soldier.”14 Another reason for the relative dearth of praise in the Elizabethan period for “the warlike” Sidney might have been a problem that Peele solved by twinning him with Essex instead: the inherent difficulty of relating him in any convincing way to the illiterate warrior-heroes of ancient Greece and Rome. Buxton conveys the hazards of such a project when summarizing a strange poem entitled The Lamentation of Troy for the Death of Hector [1594] by a poet of little talent who not unnaturally prefers the anonymity of initials I. O. The book is dedicated to Lord Willoughby of Eresby, the brave and dashing soldier in whose rescue Sidney received his mortal wound; but the poet seems never quite to have made up his mind whether he was writing about Hector or about Sidney. The allegory is confused and inconsistent: thus in at least one passage Astrophel and Stella are contrasted with Hector and Helen, but elsewhere Hector is identified with Sidney and Helen with Stella. (218)



6

7

Whereas Nashe appears oblivious of the extent to which linking Sidney with Aeneas diminishes his range instead of evoking it, I. O. might have become at least imperfectly aware of the divergence between Sidney and Hector, even in the very course of attempting to merge them. In an untitled encomium for Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–96), the equally obscure W. L. conflates Sidney’s roles as poet and soldier through an extended analogy, whose character nonetheless preserves the distinctions involved: it depends on Apollodorus’s account of how Odysseus detected the initially reluctant Achilles (for that purpose disguised as a woman) and persuaded him to join the Greek expedition to Troy. The parallels thus drawn make The Faerie Queene’s composition a briefly postponed commitment to the heroic ideal, adopted by its author at Sidney’s encouragement. Spenser thereby becomes the warrior Achilles not because he discards the “womans weedes” of a noncombatant poet but because his first choice of subject, as author of The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), yields under Sidney’s influence to a superior focus on “haughty matter.”15 Spenser now acts in a manner “not fearing future harmes” (16), just like Achilles, except that the poet’s “warlike” dangers must be left to the imagination. But the most strained analogy links Sidney with Odysseus. Though this connection works nicely as a comment on Sidney’s critical acumen, it proposes no equivalent for Odysseus’s prowess as a soldier. On this count, Sidney receives credit neither for his poetry (feasibly a figurative kind of heroism, as in Spenser’s case) nor for his military service (which entirely closes the gap between himself and his Homeric counterpart). If anything, the rejection of Spenser’s first impulse (“To seeme a shepeheard then he made his choice”), though traced to Sidney’s influence, implicitly chastises the Arcadia’s investment in pastoral as no less effeminate, without subsuming it in some other and more favorable overview of its author’s career (11). Though incoherent, W. L.’s encomium conveys the pressures exerted on Spenser. As not only a friend and admirer of Sidney, but also a hugely ambitious poet who lacked significant military experience, Spenser sought to praise him according to his own priorities, without seeming to fault the hero of Zutphen, or otherwise disappointing expectations that the two should forever seem allied. Spenser’s anxiety about poetry’s standing relative to statesmanship and military action emerges from the prefatory sonnet for his Faerie Queene that he dedicated to Sir Charles Hatton, Lord High Chancellor (1593). Here, Spenser notes Hatton’s potential to extend a tradition established by “Those” who not seldom but “Oft from . . . grave affaires were wont abstaine,/With the sweet Lady Muses for to play” (1, 5–6). More specifically, Spenser invokes Scipio Africanus the elder (with respect to Ennius) and Augustus Caesar (with respect to Virgil) as models





for a “great Lord” who “With like delightes sometimes may eke delay,/The rugged brow of carefull Policy” (9, 11–12). Though Spenser aspired to write epic and invoked Roman authors of epic as his equivalents, he also expressed the modest hope that Hatton might “to these ydle rymes lend little space” (13). Whereas Sidney had abandoned literature for warfare in a seemingly stark preference for “rugged” action over mere “play,” he had also produced an ambitious body of writing, even if his Defence similarly disparaged “ydle rymes” when citing the ironic “example of my selfe” as one “who I know not by what mischance in these my not old yeares and idlest times, having slipt into the title of a Poet, am provoked to say somthing . . . in the defence of that my unelected vocation.”16 When Sidney had no military accomplishments to his name save jousting, Spenser could praise him without explicit reference to any “warlike” disposition. Prefacing The Shepheardes Calendar with verses addressed “To His Booke,” he instructs that volume to “present” itself “To him that is the president/Of noblesse and of chevalree.”17 Thomas Cain’s commentary to the edition followed parses these words as invoking “Sidney . . . the ideal courtier, presiding over and also being the model (precedent) of the aristocratic virtues” (12 n.3). Spenser here reconciles his own humbleness as Sidney’s social inferior with an affirmation of the two men’s devotion to literature. Sidney’s high status affords protection for a book now sheltering “Under the shadow of his wing,” and Spenser enjoins his volume: “asked, who thee forth did bring,/A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing” (7, 8–9). After Zutphen, however, he had to weigh the “warlike” Sidney against other versions, while determining what this calculation entailed for his own career as a poet. By contrast with Sidney, Spenser’s “non-aristocratic status and strong commitment to the role of poet gave him a stable vantage point outside the court,” judges Edward Berry, who nonetheless implies that Spenser’s self-esteem took a battering when his “frustration with the court” ultimately led “to a position of permanent alienation.”18 Stressing the planned nature of Spenser’s “systematic career,” however, and rejecting as a denial of its “salvific telos” any notion that he merely became “disillusioned,” Patrick Cheney portrays him as an innovator striving “to accommodate the rota Vergiliana to the Reformation” in a manner drawing at least some inspiration from Sidney’s masterful handling of multiple genres.19 In the sonnet prefacing his Faerie Queene that Spenser dedicated to Pembroke (1596), he chiefly writes of her late brother, commemorated as that most Heroicke spirit, The hevens pride, the glory of our daies, Which now triumpheth through immortall merit



8


9

These lines pay tribute to the soldier’s “Heroicke spirit,” but otherwise remain so general or ambiguous that much of their content could express the poet as well. After all, “baies” reward excellence in both roles, and “brave vertues” do not simply denote courage. That Spenser subsequently recalls Sidney’s encouragement as a patron “Who first my Muse did lift out of the flore” neither promotes nor denies that figure’s own literary activities (6). At the cost of producing a portrait too vague to be of much interest, Spenser implicitly preserves a sense of Sidney’s range while avoiding any notion that his activities must be categorized more rigidly or ranked against each other. In The Ruines of Time (1591), Spenser describes to the dead Sidney how he behaves in the afterlife: now in Elisian fields so free, With Orpheus, and with Linus, and the choice Of all that ever did in rimes rejoyce, Conversest, and doost heare their heavenlie layes, And they heare thine, and thine doo better praise. (332–36)

Though this particular vision of Sidney’s eternity pleases Spenser, he clarifies that not only poets outlast their departure from this world. Observing how “such as neither of themselves can sing,/Nor yet are sung of others for reward,/Die in obscure oblivion,” Spenser assures Sidney: So there thou livest, singing evermore, And here thou livest, being ever song Of us, which living loved thee afore, And now thee worship, mongst that blessed throng Of heavenlie Poets and Heroes strong. (344–47, 337–41)

These lines leave readers to decide whether Sidney belongs in both categories (as an example, too, of “Heroes strong”), and whether the “reward” that makes him “sung of others” reflects military prowess as well as literary accomplishment; but he keeps the company of poets exclusively, not associating as well or instead with the likes of Aeneas, Hector, Achilles, and Odysseus. Before concluding with an envoy to the “Immortall spirite of Philisides” (673), The Ruines presents six pageants variously commemorating him. In their imagery of constellations, they clearly evoke the poet who praised



Of his brave vertues, crownd with lasting baies, Of hevenlie blis and everlasting praies. (1–5)


Stella. Moreover, the first pageant introduces Sidney as “a snowie Swan of heavenly hiew” whose own “mourning melodie” assures his apotheosis as “an heavenly signe,” thus punning on Cygnus, swan, via the constellation Cyncus (590, 596, 601). In a trope still more extravagant than that making Sidney’s nearest companions in Elysium “praise” his poems as “better,” too, Spenser’s second pageant concerns what whilome seemed to have been The harpe, on which Dan Orpheus was seene Wylde beasts and forrests after him to lead, But was th’Harpe of Philisides now dead. (606–09)

Sidney’s military career seems to receive no attention before and except in the fifth of these portrayals, which describes how Still as I gazed, I beheld where stood A Knight all arm’d, upon a winged steed, The same that was bred of Medusaes blood, On which Dan Perseus borne of heavenly seed, The fair Andromeda from perill freed: Full mortally this Knight ywounded was, That streames of blood foorth flowed on the gras. (645–51)

Cheney comments: The knight is Sidney, for whom Perseus is an appropriate image, since the great Christian warrior used military prowess to earn renown. Yet Spenser is representing Sidney also as a famous poet. The reference to Andromeda refers to his championing of wedded love in his writings, especially The New Arcadia. This reading is confirmed by the reference to the “winged steed,” for Pegasus is a sign, not of fame in general, but of poetic fame in particular. (74)

By contrast, W. L. Renwick merely glosses Spenser’s lines so as to imply their martial allusion’s belatedness: “Pegasus is . . . an obvious poetic symbol; to that is added the thought of the soldier-poet mortally wounded.”20 According to Spenser’s Astrophel, a Pastorall Elegie upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney (1595), though “Full many Maydens often did him woo,” this hero “for none of them did care a whit,” because of his exclusive attachment to “Stella the faire,” as courted thus: Ne her with ydle words alone he wowed, And verses vaine (yet verses are not vaine)



10


11

The blunt denial “yet verses are not vaine” resists, immediately after adopting it, the viewpoint that literary accomplishment represents not a sufficient end in itself (“ydle words alone”), and “too hardie alas” reproves excess not just ironically. Elizabeth Mazzola offers this different reading, however: “In Spenser’s retelling of Sidney’s Petrarchan woes, Astrophel courts Stella not ‘with ydle words alone’ or ‘verses vaine (yet verse [sic] are not vaine)’—as Spenser silently corrects the presumptuous lover—‘But with brave deeds to her sole service rowed [sic].’ ”21 Falco suggests that “verses are not vaine” recalls The Faerie Queene, Book 3, so that “Paridell and Astrophel are in a sense linked by the vanity and presumed ephemerality of their verses,” in accordance with an interpretation that goes much further than Mazzola’s in seeing Spenser’s “parenthetical remark” as “a narrative correction of Astrophel’s abuse of poetry” that, far from being incidental, informs its author’s entire approach to Sidney (110, 117). Referring to “Astrophel’s view of poetry as just another gaudy trinket in the courtier’s bag,” Falco hears unambiguous criticism of Sidney by Spenser rather than mixed feelings (118). Though mild, this note of censure continues with the poem’s observation that Such skill matcht with such courage as he had, Did prick him foorth with proud desire of praise: To seek abroad, of daunger nought y’drad, His mistresse name, and his own fame to raise. What needeth perill to be sought abroad, Since round about us, it doth make aboad? (85–90)

The rhyme and similarity in appearance of “abroad” and “aboad” help sharpen the point of Spenser’s question. Astrophel even sounds like the novice Red Cross Knight shown at the beginning of The Faerie Queene: he receives his fatal wound from “A cruell beast of most accursed brood” that “Upon him turnd” because “Eftsoones all heedlesse of his dearest hale,/Full greedily into the heard he thrust” (116–17, 103–04). Robert Shafer long ago suggested that Spenser recalls Bion’s Lament for Adonis (“For why, ah overbold, didst thou follow the chase, and being so fair, why wert thou overhardy to fight with beasts”).22 Such a reminiscence need not exclude, however, the additional relevance



But with brave deeds to her sole service vowed, And bold atchievements her did entertaine. For both in deeds and words he nourtred was, Both wise and hardie (too hardie alas). (37, 49, 55, 67–72)


of a figure dismaying his companion Una through the rashness with which he enters Error’s den to combat its resident monster: “full of fire and greedy hardiment,/The youthfull knight could not for oughte be staide” (1.1.14). “This word describes Arthur when he begins his career,” notes A. C. Hamilton of the “hardiment” attributed to the Red Cross Knight; but that later passage in Book One (9.12) lacks the modifier “greedy.”23 The edition of Astrophel followed glosses “greedily” as no more than “eagerly” (574 n.104). But the introduction to this same text points in a different direction when it backs an essay by Michael O’Connell linking this poem with the accompanying “Dolefull Lay of Clorinda” as the two parts of “a diptych presenting two attitudes toward death and two kinds of consolation” (565). From this perspective, Astrophel voices criticisms of Sidney stronger than “eagerly” suggests, but also ones representing the limited horizons of a pagan narrator whose false assumptions stand corrected by the accompanying text, which Spenser merely attributes to Pembroke as a way of underscoring the contrast. Such an account sounds highly plausible given the juxtaposition of the two poems and the sophistication of Spenser’s work at its best. But it also looks overly tidy in general, and suspiciously pat in more specifically explaining away aspects of Sidney’s characterization in Astrophel that might otherwise seem critical in Spenser’s voice. Thus, “Astrophel’s hunting” becomes “a necessary concomitant of manhood,” and “his death possesses a meaning which would be beyond the pagan narrator’s understanding” (567). Such comments raise the question of why Spenser felt no greater need to secure his very “manhood” by himself going “hunting” and why he did not surpass his “pagan narrator’s understanding” by choosing for himself such an obviously good kind of “death.” Pace W.L., Spenser by starting The Faerie Queene did not become Achilles. Furthermore, Gary Waller in his pioneering edition of Pembroke’s works presents “The Dolefull Lay” as authentically hers, receiving support from her most recent editors: Margaret Hannay et al.24 Waller’s own argument partly rests on the similarities he sees between this poem and Pembroke’s “To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Phillip Sidney” (ca. 1599), one of two dedications prefacing a copy she made for the queen of the Psalter translation begun by her brother and concluded by herself. When “The Dolefull Lay” laments, “Great losse to all that ever him did see,/Great losse to all, but greatest losse to mee” (1: 35–36), Waller claims that “as in ‘To the Angell spirit . . . ’ the Countess brings to the commonplaces of the tradition a note of deeply personal grief ” (59). Regardless of who wrote “The Dolefull Lay,” therefore, “To the Angell Spirit” on this view little resembles other Elizabethan elegies of Sidney in expressing



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“zealous love, Love which hath never done,/Nor can enough in world of words unfold” (27–28). For Waller, such words show how the poem’s “strength . . . arises from its tone of peculiarly sincere and personal grief. Sidney is not just the Phoenix, nor an embodiment of divine Grace, nor is he just the inspirer of the Countess’ verse—his role in the poem appears more personal and disturbing, betraying a peculiar degree of Mary’s affection for her brother” (189 n.97). When she refers to “my thoughts, whence so strange passions flowe” (45), Waller similarly discerns “a peculiarly personal ring, underlined by the strangely worded note of intense intimacy” (52–53). “Without attention to literary genre, it is easy to exaggerate her poetic mourning,” Hannay et al. dissent, judging “To the Angell Spirit” conventional in its rhetoric, no more “extravagant” or “extreme” than that adopted by other elegists of Sidney (11). These scholars also differ from Waller in suggesting that multiple losses colored Pembroke’s translation (ca. 1593) of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte, perhaps “some comfort to a woman who had lost father, mother, daughter, and two brothers in less than a decade” (265). In Waller’s interpretation, Pembroke’s Triumph of Death expresses “her own deeply idealized love for her brother, the impossibility of its sexual consummation and the realization that his inspiration of her own writing could be the only real and lasting fruit of her love” (12–13). Though he notes this “impossibility,” however, Waller also hears Pembroke’s emotions as “intense,” “disturbing,” “strangely worded,” “peculiarly sincere,” present in “a peculiar degree,” and “peculiarly personal.” He therefore had to address a rumor documented by Aubrey, who notes of her home at Wilton House: “Sir Philip Sydney was much here, and there was so great love between him and his faire sister that I have heard old Gentlemen say that they lay together, and it was thought the first Philip Earle of Pembroke was begot by him, but he inherited not the witt of either brother or sister.”25 “Although scandalously unfounded on any public fact,” according to Waller, Aubrey’s gossip may vaguely point to something real, to the degree of intensity of feeling between Philip and Mary, especially on the side of the Countess. Without trying to turn the Countess of Pembroke into an Elizabethan Dorothy Wordsworth, there is no doubt that the deepest emotional commitment of her life was to her brother, both before and especially after his death. All the evidence of her writings suggests that Sidney’s person, example and ideals were at the centre of her life, and while any further speculation about the relationship takes the scholar into the perils of historical psychoanalysis, nevertheless it is important for our understanding of the Countess to realize that the feelings she retained for her brother were, for a sister, remarkable in their strength. (53)




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A Mansion not unvisited of old By Sidney, where, in sight of our Helvellyn, Some snatches he might pen, for aught we know, Of his Arcadia, by fraternal love Inspir’d.26

These lines reflect not Wordsworth’s devotion to the Arcadia but the pleasure he took in contemplating its muse, for he had just mentioned his own “Sister” as “Now, after separation desolate/Restor’d to me” (214, 216–17). Waller also does not explain what he means by “public fact.” He thus scolds Aubrey for failing to locate some sort of incest database as if he invented “gossip” he only recorded, thereby retaining an oral tradition that might otherwise have disappeared. Inverting the whole relationship between his own findings and Aubrey’s testimony, Waller treats straightforward reportage as mystification that “may vaguely point to something real,” which turns out to be an unclassifiable and extraordinary love judged by no means abnormal, though “peculiar” on several dimensions. An irony arises from so confused a response to Aubrey’s “gossip.” According to Gavin Alexander, “Waller reads the ‘strange passions’ with the glasses of John Aubrey”; Mazzola (38) and Hannay et al. (10 n.39) likewise treat the same two authors as identical in their vision.27 By contrast with Waller, who at least deserves credit for his ambivalence about Aubrey’s value as a source, Hannay et al. disparage that pioneering antiquarian by linking his work with “Royalist propaganda” hostile to Philip Herbert, seventh earl of Pembroke, and by portraying him as “writing in the midst of a feud with Mary Sidney’s great-grandson over an election at Sarum,” as a consequence of which he “mixed into his factual accounts . . . sexual innuendoes against the Herberts” (10). When Aubrey writes of “the 2d Earle of Pembroke” instead of the third, he makes an error too inconsequential to serve the ends of malice; such carelessness might sanction his other mistakes about the Herbert clan as innocent too (337). Whereas Hannay et al. seek to guard Pembroke from anything that might sully her name (from their point of view), Aubrey did not therefore seek to dishonor her or her in-laws when treating all of his subjects alike: the Herodotus of seventeenth-century England indiscriminately gathered as much information as he could, neither judging nor censoring. In the most balanced assessment of Aubrey, Anthony Powell stresses his fair-mindedness.28



Though Waller does not explain what “an Elizabethan Dorothy Wordsworth” might be, this entity already existed when he wrote. In The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth refers to

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“There is no reason to believe Aubrey, but it is hard to resist listening to him,” Michael Schmidt proposes: Sidney “today attracts interest, not for what his poetry and fictional prose say, but for what they don’t quite say, what they imply, what they withhold even as they twitch the curtain over it. And for what his too-celebrated life does not disclose.”29 Schmidt here reaches for the same metaphor with which Waller explained “To the Angell Spirit” in introducing his edition of Pembroke’s work: “It is as if a veil is being lifted very briefly, unwillingly, even unconsciously. Her love for her brother passes even her own understanding” (53). Schmidt goes further than Waller, however, in hinting at the possibility of homoerotic elements in Sidney’s work (161–62), though his suggestions in this vein do little more than idly “twitch the curtain.” Moreover, the perspective of “today” as trained on Pembroke chiefly (Waller, Hannay et al.) or both her and Sidney (Mazzola) finds Aubrey essential “to resist” and depends on not “listening to him,” setting a strict but unexplained limit to any peering beneath “the curtain.” By the time Spenser published his elegies of Sidney, he would have known that Pembroke’s devotion to her brother had certainly begun breaking a taboo of vital significance for all subsequent English poets. When sanctioning the initial appearance in print of the Arcadia (1590; new version, 1593), Astrophil and Stella, The Defence of Poesie, Certain Sonnets, and The Lady of May (both 1598, as part of a collected edition), Pembroke ensured Sidney’s literary accomplishments a wider audience and a higher profile than they had attained through prior circulation in manuscript or as scattered piecemeal through sundry anthologies. “Her efforts to stabilize the text of Sidney’s works served to present him primarily as a writer rather than as a soldier or courtier,” note Hannay et al., adding: “An important, although probably unintentional, result of printing his works . . . was to help break down the stigma against print” (7, 21). Similarly, Arthur Marotti hails “the landmark posthumous publication in the early 1590s of . . . Astrophil and Stella” as at least starting “to provide the necessary sociocultural legitimation for printing of lyric verse.”30 Victor Skretkowicz likewise maintains that Sidney composed his own epitaph through his writing.31 Jon Quitslund nonetheless misleads when maintaining that Sidney’s “greatest gift to his fellow poets was, quite literally, a legacy: the availability, with no strings attached, of the poetry that survived his early death.”32 Sidney supplied “strings,” though not insuperable impediments, in presenting his highly artful works as trifles. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Quitslund, Mazzola reads Spenser’s Muiopotmos (1590) as “an allegory of the life and death of Sidney,” esteeming it a better elegy than Astrophel because it alone “seems subversive enough to do his failed model’s memory justice,” as an otherwise exhausted





subject: “What else can be said about a thirty-one-year-old poet who died? Much of the poetry written subsequent to Philip Sidney’s death—what we commonly describe as the English literary tradition—wrestles with this problem” (130 n.2, 96, 93). As S. K. Heninger notes of all attempts to interpret Muiopotmos as a poem presenting “covert allusion to historical persons and events,” however, “no one has proposed an allegorical reading that has gained acceptance”; and establishing Sidney as a “poet” mattered greatly, whether “the English literary tradition” be held at forceps’ length or not.33 In Alexander’s view, based on testimony by Henry Constable from 1595, only “the very breadth of Sidney’s achievements stands in the way of fixing his status as the founding father of late-Elizabethan literary eloquence and lyric poetry” (194). Though the translations of the Psalter that Sidney cowrote with his sister did not appear in print until 1823, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski deems these poems influential in the development of a specifically Protestant poetic.34 In his poem “Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke His Sister” (1635), Donne vouched for his own access to a copy of this manuscript, his awareness of its joint authorship, and his appreciation of its merits as a text to “celebrate” because it can “tell us why, and teach us how to sing.”35 But such testimony does not establish that “us” represented any large circle of similarly privileged, knowledgeable, and discerning readers. The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter had certainly become highly obscure by the beginning of the eighteenth century, judging from the reaction of Sir Richard Steele as probable author of The Guardian 18 (April 1713): Our gallant Countryman, Sir Philip Sidney, was a noble Example of Courage and Devotion. I am particularly pleased to find that he hath translated the whole Book of Psalms into English Verse. A Friend of mine informs me, that he hath the Manuscript by him . . . . They having never been printed, I shall present the Publick with one of them, which my Correspondent assures me he hath faithfully transcribed, and wherein I have taken the Liberty only to alter one Word.36

Of course, Sidney did not translate “the whole Book,” except in collaboration with his sister; moreover, the commentary to the edition followed classifies the psalm at issue (137) as “probably hers” (622 n.4). Though Steele forgets neither the soldier nor the poet, he chiefly values Sidney for his “Devotion,” but only reproduces a single sample from a collection whose lack of availability he himself stresses, and prides himself on his restraint in changing so little of the text. By contrast, Ruskin showed far greater humility as a reader through his willingness to correct himself



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when responding to a different portion of the same Psalter in this diary entry from September 1876: “took up Sir Philip Sidney, opened at the 74th psalm, and got such a lesson. For this, by which I had written ‘very poor, must be his sister’, read every word as precious as pure gold and balm to me; literal truth in every cry and syllable! and interpreted all the original, which is too mystic, otherwise.”37 Thus displaying a capacity for revelation based not only on what he read but also on how he read it, Ruskin nonetheless failed to elaborate whether his revised estimate of a single Sidney-Pembroke psalm therefore entailed a revised estimate of its author or authorship. Though Waller and Hannay et al. have overturned the patronizing expectation (once widespread) that Pembroke’s share of the Psalter “must be” a “very poor” one, to the point where she now qualifies as a canonical author for all her writings, her brother’s reevaluation in similarly recent scholarship has taken a very different turn. Whereas Marotti and Hannay et al. portray much or all of Sidney’s posthumously published work as indirectly giving a voice to his literary successors (as equipped with “sociocultural legitimation” and thus less oppressed by “the stigma against print”), Annabel Patterson reverses this emphasis, tracing his “legacy” in the Arcadia to his own frustration over being substantially gagged: she thus interprets this romance as “a fictionalized account of and stratagem against the restriction on discourse imposed on an Elizabethan courtier.”38 Claiming that “his known advocacy of a militant international Protestantism deprived him of effective address to the queen,” Patterson furthermore notes how Sidney was directly involved in parliamentary debates about political censorship. In 1581 the House of Lords had introduced a harsh bill designed to repress any further public comment on the notorious French marriage controversy: Elizabeth’s hopes, from late 1578 through early 1581, of marrying the duc d’Alençon. This project raised a storm of national and Protestant outrage. (25)

In Sidney’s temporary removal from court after infuriating Elizabeth with a letter opposing her plans to marry Hercule François, duke of Anjou and Alençon, Patterson thus sees a figure frustrated to the point of alienation. But estimates vary widely as to how estranged Sidney felt at this juncture. Leonard Tennenhouse gives an account very different from Patterson’s of the relationship between Sidney’s romance and contemporary politics. He focuses on the tensions introduced by questions of female inheritance pertaining to both Elizabeth and the Arcadia’s point of departure, where a “double bind arises because the king has only daughters to inherit his throne: Pamela and Philoclea thus represent, in the terms of the oracle,





a clear threat to the continuity of blood as well as, by the laws of heredity, the only means of that blood’s perpetuation.”39 “This double bind is a peculiarly English dilemma,” Tennenhouse notes, because “strict patrilineage” had been “modified” to accommodate Mary Tudor and Elizabeth in the royal succession, at the cost of surrounding with ambiguity “the usual hierarchical subordination of female to male,” complicating a queen’s relationship not only to her courtiers but also to any husband from another country, as potentially in Alençon’s case (203, 207). Though Tennenhouse accepts the possibility that “Elizabeth so strongly resented Sidney’s letter that he was forced to absent himself from court and retire to his sister’s estate, where he drafted the first version of the Arcadia,” he also treats it with some skepticism, relating how “the story goes” (205). Moreover, Tennenhouse resists equating Sidney’s romance with “topical allegory” (207); rather, he brings out the richness of the contexts shaping the Arcadia’s composition, as involving not only the Alençon affair but also its author’s anxieties about issues of inheritance within his own family. Whereas Tennenhouse suggests how an “English dilemma” politically relevant to all of Elizabeth’s subjects harmonized with the day-to-day rhythm of Sidney’s personal concerns in the genesis of his romance, May stresses how this same period of composition amounted to business as usual: Sidney’s “final work on the Old Arcadia at Wilton during 1580 was simply another aspect of his career as a courtier, not a product of banishment from the court. He maintained his access to Elizabeth and exchanged New Year’s gifts with her in 1580 and 1581 despite . . . royal uneasiness over the ‘Anjou’ letter” (98). Like texts, however, “gifts” can carry more than one meaning. William Malcolm Wallace quotes a description of the gift Sidney gave Elizabeth at the beginning of 1581 (“a jewel of gold, being a whip, garnished with small diamonds in four rows and cords of small seed pearl”), and explains its significance: “in token of his submission to the will of Her Majesty.”40 “Political conflict with authority, what J. E. Neale calls the ‘art of opposition,’ was extremely difficult for men accustomed to submission,” suggests Richard McCoy, adding: “It was some time before Englishmen could attain the clear-minded, revolutionary assurance of someone like Milton, and the old habits were still never fully lost.”41 But though Elizabeth still got Sidney’s gift, whether or not she also felt it as a barb, Louis Adrian Montrose plausibly maintains that such a present conveyed a more pointed message than “submission” alone.42 Montrose’s shrewd assessment of the whip-gift’s symbolism typifies the frequent subtlety of an argument focusing on the complex vocabulary of Elizabethan courtship, particularly in relation to Sidney’s masque The Lady of May. “Arguments that The Lady of May is a topical allegory about the Alençon affair lack substantiation and fail to convince,” Montrose insists, but with this qualification: “nevertheless, the relationship of the crisis to 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


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Sidney’s personal convictions and aspirations forms part of the context of meanings for The Lady of May” (10). Despite this circumspect formulation of his claims and the insightful textual analysis to which it leads, however, Montrose also assimilates Sidney’s work to this panoramic vision: “The Lady of May can be recognized as a crystallization in cultural form of an incipient social conflict. That conflict grows in intensity and complexity at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and under the Stuarts; within seventy years, it culminates in open warfare and regicide” (20). The caveat establishing Sidney as “no revolutionary” concedes very little: “The sociopolitical transformations of the half-century following Sidney’s death, fed by economic change and the incompetence of the reactionary Stuart monarchs, lead circuitously but surely from Sidney to Milton” (34). Such conclusions both do and do not align Montrose’s interpretation with Patterson’s. “It cannot be assumed that the hermeneutics of censorship depend on any crude opposition between a government and its critics, or on what has been called a Whig view of history,” Patterson maintains (57). One of the “four hermeneutical principles” that Patterson follows in also claiming their implicit acceptance during the period of which she writes is “the importance of an exact chronology in determining what any given text was likely to mean to its audience at the time of its appearance” (47). Drawing partly on Earl Miner’s commentary to his edition of John Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1690), Patterson illustrates the potential richness of her interpretative approach by offering this explanation of why the author dedicated his play to the third earl of Leicester, another Philip Sidney: he identifies Leicester as a second Atticus, implicitly proposing himself as a second Cicero, republican ethos and all. Second, he recalls the first Philip Sidney, and his patronage of Edmund Spenser. Notwithstanding the disclaimer that “there can never be another Spencer to deserve the Favor” of the second Sidney, the effect is to ally himself with writers known as Protestant activists. The reader is therefore utterly confused as to where Dryden has stood, and now stands, ideologically. (236)

Though such bafflement might seem a curious outcome for Dryden to seek or Patterson to value, the fuller context of her discussion establishes the strategic considerations guiding his pen at this juncture. At least some of his contemporaries would have been able to appreciate the subtle and resourceful manner in which he responded to the theologico-political disputes of his day: those readers had learned alongside him as he developed an ever greater nimbleness in the handling of ideologically inflected allusions, and he and they shared an increasingly complex legacy of historical parallels centering on the British Civil Wars of recent memory or 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer




involving topics still viewed primarily through the filter supplied by those conflicts. In the case of an author such as Dryden, Patterson’s emphasis on “exact chronology” works very well to illuminate what his words mean now and what they meant for his contemporaries: he wrote not only for the stage but also on a stage, his workshop open for all to see, his interlocking preoccupations of the moment equally on display. By contrast, Sidney wrote under very different conditions, including interpretative ones; the precision available to a writer for whom “exact chronology” permits contemporary readers to grasp with ease certain dropped hints or veiled comments did not exist for the author of the Arcadia as it circulated in manuscript, reaching different hands in different forms over a notably prolonged “time of appearance.” On the other hand, Patterson not only singles out the Alençon controversy as a defining moment in Sidney’s alienation from Elizabeth and her court, but also subsumes it within a much larger chronological framework: “Fifty years later,” she maintains, “not much had changed” (134–35). So broad a conception seems incompatible with the evidentiary demands of “exact chronology.” Its emphasis on continuity appears little different from Montrose’s explanation of what elapsed “within seventy years” or during “the half-century following Sidney’s death.” Similarly, Waller illustrates the pitfalls of muddling contemporary perceptions with perspectives only available through the benefits of hindsight, explaining how Sidney’s sister established at Wilton what one of her followers was to term a “little Court”, dedicated, both before and after his death, to the renaissance of English courtly culture. We look back to Wilton and its earnest group of poets, theologians and philosophers and see their dedication to the Sidneian ideals, but what we can also see in the “little Court” are the forces which, identifiable in the 1620s and 1630s, would challenge and eventually overwhelm the hegemony of the royal Court. In other words, in the very movement that was attempting to establish and glorify the domination of what were perceived as traditional courtly values lay the elements that were to challenge and shatter it.43

Such cosmic irony would satisfy if it rested on firmer foundations than the presumed rivalry between a literal and a figurative “Court,” and the power invested in “forces” not “identifiable” until a later period that “we can” nonetheless “see” as operative earlier. Aubrey implied a more convincing element of continuity with this comment about Pembroke’s estate: “In her time, Wilton House was like a College, there were so many learned and ingeniouse persons” (220). He thus documented the gradual emergence in England of salon culture when the same comparison struck him regarding



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Great Tew, the Oxfordshire estate of Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland: “his House was like a Colledge, full of Learned men” (154). Sidney’s earliest elegists obviously lacked the hindsight needed to establish not Essex but Milton as his most relevant “successor.” But they also failed to register how “his known advocacy of a militant international Protestantism” accompanied or fueled a vision of domestic politics indirectly challenging Elizabeth’s authority, if not that of monarchs generally. Though allowance must be made for the stifling impact of censorship in curtailing direct criticism of government policy, “militant . . . Protestantism” should also be recognized as a highly labile category. Other epithets besides “militant” likewise impart an engagé character to a creed whose specific commitments and divergence from the mainstream routinely receive no further clarification. As Michael Finlayson cautions, such rhetorical strategies as overworked metaphors and reified abstractions explain away the very phenomena they seek to explain.44 Complex by nature, a theologico-political vision confronting different challenges at home and abroad offered plenty of scope for disagreement among its proponents, as Sidney himself knew from a young age. James Osborn thus illustrates “the weaknesses of the Protestants’ extremism” by quoting a letter from Languet to Sidney (July 1574): “Our party has this failing, that if an excellent man should err even in the smallest matter, they immediately class him among the wickedest of men.”45 Modern scholars stressing solidarity rather than disunity among the coreligionists perceived as closest to Sidney by outlook have sought to “mell” in him not “all . . . arts” but every ideological current feeding “circuitously but surely” into the Civil Wars. The “Well lettred Warriour,” so valued by Peele for standing fast with Essex “To keepe the grim Wolfe from Elizaes gate,” therefore loses his identity as an important but not dominant conception of Sidney entertained during the Elizabethan period. He becomes absorbed and replaced by a “militant” embodiment of “extremism” primarily focused on domestic policies—insofar as his presumed future comrades could only assimilate his agenda by engaging in internecine conflict, “warfare” not yet “open” during his lifetime. The literary figure more prominent than the hero of Zutphen among Elizabethan versions of Sidney, especially for Spenser, thus disappears still more completely, ousted by a figure who “represented the Protestant cause” on an even larger scale than Sharpe supposes: “that of the sixteenth century” and “of the seventeenth century.” This expanded conception of Sidney’s ideological significance most often locates him in a relay-race in which he passes his baton to one or more of three figures: his great-nephew Algernon, his most devoted friend (Greville), and Charles I’s elder brother (Prince Henry).







“Equall Portions”: Sidney, Prince Henry, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity

Had Charles I’s elder brother survived to his 30s, instead of dying at the age of just 18, he would have succeeded James I as Henry IX. Roy Strong stresses this short-lived prince’s significance by reconstructing a vital ideological line of descent into which he should firmly be placed. That line runs as follows: Elizabeth I’s first favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester; secondly his nephew, Sir Philip Sidney; and finally his stepson and the Queen’s last favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex. All three acted as a focus of attempts to introduce the fruits of Renaissance civilization while maintaining an extreme Protestant and anti-Spanish stance.1

By contrast, Henry’s first biographer, Thomas Birch, had mentioned Sidney only as the author of an unfinished translation of a book by Philippe de Mornay: posthumously completed and “addressed . . . to his Highness, in a dedication,” this text demonstrated that Henry “began now to be considered by men of learning, as a proper patron of their works, not only for his high rank, but likewise his relish for them.”2 Moreover, Arthur Nethercot proposed an entirely different “line of descent,” leading not from Sidney et al. to Charles’s brother but from Sidney alone to Charles’s nephew. “Though not so versatile as Sir Philip Sidney,” Nethercot observes of Prince Rupert’s profile in 1635, “he had that idol’s dash and charm and soon became his legitimate successor.”3 But nothing besides Nethercot’s own rhetoric establishes this legitimacy, and his invocation of “dash and charm” equivocates between admitting his own attraction to glittering figures and lightly fulfilling his obligation to indulge such a taste in readers less serious than himself. By contrast, Strong wrote as only one of several modern scholars establishing solidarity of their own by proposing mutually



2


reinforcing lineages of descent and dissent in Britain encompassing the end of the sixteenth century and varying portions of the ensuing epoch. Though Strong himself makes no such claim in comprehensively analyzing visual representations of Sidney, Graham Parry instances a Sir Isaac Oliver miniature of Henry in which “the Prince appears almost as the reincarnation of Sir Philip Sidney.”4 Whereas this likeness depends on the eye of the beholder, John Murdoch can point to a contemporary visual representation commemorating Henry for “the true line of secular and spiritual legitimacy, real heroes rather than plaster saints,” as grouping “Thomas More, Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell after Holbein, Essex and Sidney, Tyndale, Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, Drake and Frobisher.”5 But these highly miscellaneous worthies cannot be anything but “plaster” somethings: any recognition of their flesh-and-blood individuality would doom their shared plinth. The freebooting Drake as twinned with More acquires priorities quite different from those he himself expressed in a poem lauding Sir George Peckham’s True Reporte of the Late Discoveries . . . of the New Found Landes (1583) because “each degree this Treatise dooth unfolde:/The path to Fame, the proofe of Zeale, and way to purchase golde.”6 Tracers of an “ideological line” such as Strong proposes have therefore tended to cultivate more select and discriminating pantheons, though without necessarily going into much detail about the criteria for inclusion. Christopher Hill thus posits this set of overlapping genealogies: Spenser was associated with the radical political wing in government circles, with Leicester, Walsingham, Ralegh. The Spenserian succession—Sidney, Daniel, the Fletchers, John Davies, Drayton, Browne, Wither, Quarles, Milton—was also a political succession. Many of these poets followed Spenser’s example in using the conventions of pastoral poetry to make political criticisms without drawing the attention of the censor. One thinks of Brittania’s Pastorals.7

These claims obviously differ in some respects from Strong’s. Hill identifies a “succession” with no clear parent or founder, and one in which Sidney descends from a near coeval (Spenser) rather than an elder (Leicester). Whereas Strong pinpoints a theologico-political ideology whose components figure in tandem (“Protestant and anti-Spanish”), Hill does not even reduce the role of religious commitments in a focus exclusively “political.” But Hill’s omission of Henry from his version of Strong’s genealogy represents a local feature of the particular passage quoted rather than any failure to appreciate Henry’s possible significance. On the contrary, Hill’s classification of Henry’s funeral as one of the intellectual origins of an English Revolution has helped establish that paradigm as a major



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alternative to internecine conflict as a way of comprehending the history of mid-seventeenth-century Britain. William Hunt acknowledges as much by giving more extensive treatment to “this ‘Henrician moment,’ ” which, “Hill implied, was the real watershed between the Elizabethan and Stuart era, in literature as well as politics.”8 “Like Prince Henry and the Leicester-Sidney circle before him, the leaders of the Long Parliament were committed to the Protestant vocation of imperialism and reform,” Hunt contends, acknowledging continuity as well in the coalition of social interests woven together by this shared vocation. It included Protestant gentlemen hungry for martial glory, predatory capitalists eager to plunder the Spanish empire, colonial entrepreneurs, godly magistrates and parish officers, and the militant preachers whose Anglo-Calvinist theology held the whole constellation together. These were the social groups, supported by the more earnestly Protestant elements among the wider populace, that defeated Charles in the Civil War. They had also been Henry’s most avid admirers. (328)

Hunt does not whitewash these figures as equally animated by noble principles, paying close attention to issues of nomenclature. He explains what he means by “vocation” and why he prefers the term to “identity” (313); he also defines “Anglo-Calvinist theology,” clarifying that he chooses to “describe adherents of this tradition ‘Protestant’, with a capital ‘P’, to distinguish them from other members of the Church of England who rejected some of the main tenets of Anglo-Calvinism, but who deserve to be considered, at the very least, protestants in the lower case” (314). Hunt likewise takes care when establishing these related points: “The men who took up arms against Charles I believed they were resisting a popish conspiracy. They assumed that their liberties would be secure once that conspiracy had been smashed. But they had no ready defence against a Protestant absolutism” (329). “The death of Prince Henry and the ineptitude of Charles spared England that possibility,” Hunt concludes (329). Though certainly a new note as sounded in a Hill-inspired reading of history, Hunt’s parsing of Henry’s potential as both great and not automatically benign resembles G. P. V. Akrigg’s speculation from a quarter of a century earlier: if Henry, instead of the vacillating Charles, had come to the throne there would never have been any conquest of the Crown by Parliament. Far more probably, Henry would have built a strong central monarchy on the French model. With his eager passion for war and arms . . . it seems quite likely that in Henry England lost its Louis XIV, a sun monarch who would have ruined his country through the grandiosity of his ideas.9



“EQUALL PORTIONS”


But whereas Akrigg balances the “vacillating” of the one brother against the other’s “grandiosity,” Hunt damns Charles’s “ineptitude” without assigning some corollary trait to his fellow sponsor of England’s freedom from “Protestant absolutism.” Moreover, though Hunt offers a sophisticated reading of the “potent legitimating myth” that a “Protestant vocation” such as he reconstructs made available to “the Stuarts,” his explanation of how it “was . . . booby-trapped” requires an anachronism: “It imposed a dangerously ambitious policy upon the Crown, and it justified criticism and even, in extreme cases, ‘loyal opposition’ should the Crown fall away from its divine calling” (317, 317–18). Any interpretation of the British Civil Wars must recognize that the antagonists had no concept of “loyal opposition,” establishing at great cost the need to fill such a crucial gap in their political vocabulary. Linking Sidney with Henry via a long-standing program of “reform,” but also linking Henry with a propensity for subsequent “absolutism,” Hunt raises the question of whether he will divide Sidney from that propensity. The answer begins to emerge when Hunt explains how Roger Lockyer “provides a comprehensive and sympathetic account of Buckingham’s policy . . . but fails to recognize the ‘Henrician’ origins of Buckingham’s hybristic designs. This failure weakens his attempt to defend, or indeed render comprehensible, Buckingham’s statesmanship” (331 n.36). Hunt here underscores his own point about one of the disastrous foreign policy ventures of the later 1620s: “The expedition in relief of the Huguenots of La Rochelle was Buckingham’s attempt to play the Protestant hero in the mould of Sidney and Essex. It was a desperate gamble to win fame and popular support by acting as Henry might have done” (322). Condemning Buckingham’s motives as “desperate” and “hybristic” looks like mere labeling in a context in which Henry suffers no such imputed “grandiosity,” confirming the value of Lockyer’s work as a historian sufficiently open-minded to present a “sympathetic” view of a figure almost as much hated now as when alive, the favorite Charles inherited from his father. Hunt also seems overly concerned to protect his equivalent of Strong’s “ideological line” from contamination by Buckingham’s perceived lack of authenticity as a “Protestant hero,” which might seem very obvious in the preferred hindsight of the late twentieth century, but had not been made clear in the aftermath of Henry’s death, by his elegists or through any other form of commemoration. Moreover, the phoniness attributed to Buckingham does not clarify how far an “absolutism” portended by Henry would have broken “the mould of Sidney and Essex” or occupied it to the amplest extent. In that respect, the role of “Protestant hero” retains its pristine character, as ennobled by Sidney (and Essex), despite Hunt’s cautious evaluation of Henry.



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Just as Hunt associates Henry with a “potent legitimating myth” reflecting a “Protestant vocation,” so J. W. Williamson documents a “Puritan myth of Henry”; more explicitly than either Hunt or Akrigg, Williamson also registers this “massive irony” in the hopes pinned on Henry: “it was surely paradoxical that those left-wing religious forces in England, which generally favored the republican inclinations of Parliament against the prerogative of monarchs, should construct an image of a prince who was, by the working of his myth, illimitable.”10 More somber in his view of Henry than Hunt and Akrigg, and far more so than Strong and Hill, Williamson discusses Henry’s “appallingly aggressive persona,” associated with “cruelty and force,” as a figure “from birth wrapped in the robes of a belligerent Protestantism” seeking “to cross boundaries, to burst outward through what the radical Protestants considered the suffocating ring of Catholicism,” and thus preoccupied with “the phallic thrust of sword and lance” (192, 75, 76). Such an assessment reveals the same loose vocabulary characterizing Williamson’s treatment of theologico-political groupings in seventeenth-century Britain: just as he gives “religious forces” a “left-wing” orientation and treats “Parliament” as not only an institution but also one with “republican inclinations,” so his phrase “the . . . ring of Catholicism” conveys very little sense of entrapment on the part of those threatened on all sides by an expansionist Counter-Reformation; it also sounds far less “suffocating” than the swaddling clothes of its intended enemy, “belligerent Protestantism.” Even if more by chance than design, however, Williamson suggests just how stifling the ultramasculine ethos of Sidney’s upbringing might have been, however much valued in retrospect by those keen to stress his ideological affiliation with Henry. In terms as suggestive as Williamson’s, but more circumspect, Malcolm William Wallace acknowledged how Languet’s letters to Sidney “often . . . read like those of a jealous lover to his mistress”; John Buxton likewise heard in some of them “Polonius . . . standing at Languet’s shoulder.”11 But these mere hints differ from Blair Worden’s explanation of how Sidney’s writing could also serve as a refuge from ideological concerns, not only as a vehicle for expressing them: The Arcadia removed Sidney from the life of action. It was written in a language Languet did not know, and belonged to a territory of the imagination which the scholar-statesman had not entered. “Lurking” in the country in 1580, Sidney was free of what has been called Languet’s “oppressive paternalism”. He was free of something more: of that austere, manly philosophy to which not only Languet but England’s forward Protestants subscribed. Sidney is far from rejecting that philosophy. No one can expound it more beautifully or feelingly. Yet so much of what he expounds has been taught




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These reflections more than glance at “Languet’s ‘oppressive paternalism.’ ” Though Worden focuses not directly but indirectly on Sidney’s own “adolescence,” the manner in which he does so takes a richly suggestive form: “the princes” have been interpreted as heroes, fools, and everything in between. Enthusiastic proponents of an “ideological line” encompassing Sidney as well as Henry tend also to endorse it, without sparing much thought for their identification with militaristic and anti-Catholic policies, or their preoccupation with genealogies constructed exclusively by and for men, where women serve to produce offspring when the kinships are literal, but otherwise play no part in the cultivation of an “austere, manly philosophy.” Such considerations nonetheless receive so little attention because the imputed progressivism of this “philosophy” exerts so strong a retrospective appeal, as linked primarily with “reform” and with principled resistance to Stuart “absolutism” by means other than the formation of a countervailing “Protestant absolutism.” Worden himself encapsulates these favorable attributes by styling Sidney’s mentors and associates “forward Protestants.” He does not similarly stress their regressive character, though he acknowledges how far back their “philosophy” dates and how much its character reflects the influence of “old or older men.” Insofar as Hill’s “radical political wing” overlaps with Worden’s “forward” disposition “rooted in . . . the 1550s,” Strong’s “vital ideological line” carries a lot of dead weight and encompasses at its furthest extremes about a century, during which it cannot alter its essential character without becoming meaningless. It must span several generations with continuity not of blood but of thought or feeling. Moreover, a gulf divides how modern scholars typically affiliate Sidney and Henry in the eyes of Henry’s contemporaries and how those same contemporaries themselves regarded the two men in question—as different figures, except when comparing them as types, resembling not only each other but also any number of equivalent exemplars. Insofar as the Jacobean Sidney of contemporary record differs from the Elizabethan version, his poetic laurels had faded somewhat with the passage of time, without any compensatory revival of his significance as a soldier or “Protestant hero,” via Henry’s celebrity or any other phenomenon. Consider Hill’s trump establishing the “Spenserian succession” as “also . . . political.” Whereas Spenser’s influence permeates William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals (second edition 1625), this work’s most



him by old or older men. Like theirs, his political thinking is rooted in that of the 1550s, the time when he was born. How old a head was expected to sit on such young shoulders! Is it an accident that the Arcadia gives the princes the scope for adolescence that Sidney himself has been denied?12


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Th’admired mirrour, glory of our Isle, Thou far-far-more then mortall man, whose stile Strucke more men dumbe to hearken to thy song, Then Orpheus Harpe or Tuilies golden tongue. To him (as right) for wits deepe quintessence, For honour, valour, vertue, excellence, Be all the Garlands, crowne his toombe with Bay, Who spake as much as ere our tongue can say.13

Doubtless Browne’s dedication of the second book of Britannia’s Pastorals to William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, accounts partly for Sidney’s prominent position near the beginning (in the second song) of that volume. As another William in the Herberts’ extensive and powerful clan remarked approvingly (or ominously) in his commendatory verses “To His Worthily-Affected Friend Mr. W. Browne,” “He masters no low soule who hopes to please/The Nephew of the brave Philisides” (1: 157). But Browne himself emphasizes his own “low soule” and also sounds truly appreciative for the extent to which Sidney’s “Arts-Mastry,” even in so far exceeding “my unablenesse,” had nonetheless inspired and perhaps uplifted a lesser poet, who meekly-proudly explains that He sweetly touched, what I harshly hit, Yet thus I glory in what I have writ; Sidney began (and if a wit so meane May taste with him the dewes of Hippocrene) I sung the Past’rall next; his Muse, my mover: And on the Plaines full many a pensive lover Shall sing us to their loves, and praising be My humble lines: the more, for praising thee. Thus we shall live with them, by Rocks, by Springs, As well as Homer by the death of Kings. (2: 9)

Whereas Browne reads predominantly as a Spenserian poet, he thus positions himself in the literary tradition as the loving celebrant of another “Happy Arcadia” (9). Awarding Sidney “all the Garlands” appropriate to so versatile a figure, Browne focuses on his eloquence (akin to Cicero’s), and more especially his poetry, notably in “Past’rall.” Such emphases do not reflect the character of Britannia’s Pastorals as a work in which references to the hero of



explicit statement of literary indebtedness occurs in a lengthy tribute to “Astrophel,” not only for “His shepherds lay, yet equaliz’d of none,” but also as

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And if the earth can shew the like agen, Yet will she faile in her Sea-ruling men. Time never can produce men to ore-take The fames of Greenvil, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more That by their powre made the Devonian shore Mocke the proud Tagus; for whose richest spoyle The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soyle Banckrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost By winning this, though all the rest were lost. (43)

The notes to the edition followed indicate why geographical as well as chronological reasons prompted Browne (born in Tavistock, 1588) to produce an Upper Devonian epoch of his own: “There was no part of England where the threatened invasion of our shores by Spain left a deeper impression than in the West-country, which gave our poet birth” (1: 198). But this comment continues a note (“Philip of Spain seems evidently here to be pointed at”) glossing a reference to “perjur’d Gerion” followed at suggestively close quarters by the inclusion of an adapted version of Browne’s elegy (1612) for Henry (198, 129; the incorporated poem spans 130–34). This figure’s relevance apparently stems from Browne’s commonplace view of him as a potential royal instigator of some military campaign, not necessarily by sea, against “The boasting Spaniard.” In other words, the poet expressed his nostalgia for the glory days of the great Elizabethan pirate-patriots not as parochially wedded to the time and place of his own birth, or only impressed with naval heroics, but because such circumstances as Henry’s death and the peace-first foreign policy that James pursued left him with no more recent successes of any kind to extol. What the dead prince never lived to accomplish left ample scope for speculation about unfulfilled promise, but also seems to have held greater significance in Browne’s mind than Sidney’s death while fighting Spanish forces in the Netherlands. Nothing in the nature of Britannia’s Pastorals precluded its author’s forging a tighter bond between Sidney and Henry than he did. If Browne pursued an oblique strategy by so openly praising his Elizabethan heroes and categorizing Sidney so as to divorce his pastoral writing from political concerns, this indirection involved the apparently costly step of only associating him with “conventions,” not prompting a



Zutphen could only digress or prove incongruous: Browne freely alludes to recent history. In an apostrophe to “my native soile” as “thou blessed plot/Whose equall all the world affordeth not,” Browne reflects that even such a paradise might still be matched after all, only to conclude:

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link between them and ideological values only hidden to the extent that Jacobean idealization of Elizabethans routinely implies dissatisfaction with James. Like Sidney, but at some point in the 1590s, Jonson served as a soldier in the Netherlands; he could have made something of this connection if he had wished, or personally held a strong sense of Sidney’s continuing reputation as a “Protestant hero.” He does not simultaneously invoke and misremember a military figure in the manner of John Earle’s elegy for Francis Beaumont, which explains how wee their Ancient hoary heads can see Whose Wit was never their mortality: Beaumont dies young, so Sidney did before, There was not Poetry he could live to more, He could not grow up higher.14

Writing in ca. 1616 (if his title can be trusted), Earle seems sure that his readers would not immediately reject the parallel proposed, on the basis that Sidney’s “Wit” was not his “mortality” and that his own death when “young” reflected the hazards of war. Nor does Jonson straightforwardly acclaim the literary Sidney in the manner of Michael Drayton’s verseepistle To My Most Dearely-Loved Friend Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets and Poesie (1627), which describes how he “throughly pac’d our language as to show,/The plenteous English hand in hand might goe/With Greeke and Latine.”15 Rather, Jonson treated Sidney much as he did Shakespeare and Donne: with a mixture of praise and censure, often extreme at both ends of the spectrum. The exception to this rule consists of Jonson’s willingness to portray Sidney the man in a warts-and-all mode without counterpart among his various comments about Shakespeare and Donne. In his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), Jonson pronounced Sidney “no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoilled with Pimples & of high blood & Long.”16 “He was not only of an excellent witt, but extremely beautifull,” Aubrey by contrast maintained of Sidney, albeit with these further reflections: “he much resembled his sister, but his Haire was not red, but a little inclining, viz a darke omber colour. If I were to find a fault in it, methinks ’tis not masculine enough; yet he was a person of great courage.”17 Illogical as judging the outcome of a mere genetic lottery, and confessedly self-contradictory in both denying and acknowledging the deceiving nature of appearances, Aubrey’s reading of Sidney’s visage yields no latent Henry, but only discerns “fault” in the most tentative ways. If Jonson more bluntly condemned Sidney as not even moderately “beautifull,” he might have sought to dispel some of the glamour associated with





so idealized a figure, but pursued this approach no further, and otherwise confined his approval or disapproval to matters literary and linguistic. In none of these additional comments did Jonson’s judgment reflect the inhibition posited by Richard Dutton as explaining why the later poet did not find the earlier one more urgently relevant: given Sidney’s profile during the Jacobean era, “it was still not entirely possible to divorce his standing as a writer from that as a national and Protestant martyr.”18 Here, the key to Jonson’s many-sided response becomes the one subject playing no part in it. Raphael Falco’s chapter on Jonson paints him as far more engaged with Sidney than Dutton supposes. When Falco concedes that his “deductions depend, to a degree, on hypertroping,” he downplays the overingenuity of his approach.19 O. B. Hardison makes the strongest case for connecting Sidney’s views about literature with Jonson’s when hearing “two voices” in the Defence: “The first is humanistic in the manner of Boccaccio, Politian, and Tasso; the second, neo-classic in the manner of Scaliger, Castelvetro, and Ben Jonson.”20 But if Jonson himself heard any resemblance here, he gave Sidney no credit for it. Conversely, the harshest verdict on Sidney as a writer that Jonson records (“no poet”) is James’s, and must be regarded as questionable (1: 142). Though James might have been merely following convention when his “Epitaphe” praised Sidney’s excellence in “everie art,” his sonnet beginning “Not orientall Indus cristall streames” pays tribute to “Ladon (wch sweet Sidney dothe extole)/While it, th’ Arcadian Beauties did embrace”—an odd way to invoke “no poet,” though it does admittedly refer to a prose passage from the Arcadia, given in the notes to the edition followed.21 Nonetheless, Jonson’s own assessments of Sidney’s romance sound backhanded: he complained to Drummond that the author of the Arcadia “did not keep a Decor¯um in making every one speak as well as himself ” (1: 132); “for a Heroik poeme he said ther was no such Gro¯und as King Arthurs fiction & yt S. P. Sidney had ane intention to have transform’d all his Arcadia to ye stories of King Arthure” (136). Apparently, Jonson would have preferred this further version (which would presumably have solved the problem of “Decor¯um” by featuring knights as articulate as their creator). The epitome of Medieval chivalry as mediated by his Renaissance equivalent would have made for interesting reading. But the mind also boggles at the interpretative and editorial conundrums posed by a third version of the Arcadia. Significantly, Jonson does not address whether the heroic project of Sidney’s purported Arcadia-Arthuriad would have constituted a better or worse alternative to his actual deeds of arms. As in the case of other writers he discusses, however, much of Jonson’s concern with Sidney involves not particular works but the overall value of an oeuvre as fostering good writing habits. In his commonplace book,



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Timber: or, Discoveries (ca. 1623–35), he thus generalizes that “as it is fit to reade the best Authors to youth first, so let them be of the openest, and clearest. As Livy before Salust, Sydney before Donne” (8: 618). Here, Jonson assigns Sidney a constructive role in a process about which he cared very deeply: the education of taste. “Although Jonson thought of both Sidney and Donne as good models,” Wesley Trimpi nonetheless comments: “his own rhetorical position, his attitudes toward experience, and the subject matter he thought proper for a serious writer, as well as his own style in the vast majority of his poems, all indicate a preference for Donne.”22 But Jonson also did not patronize Sidney as merely Donne-lite or a primer for juveniles, as other comments in Timber confirm. For instance, this source records that “Sir Philip Sidney, and Mr. Hooker (in different matter) grew great Masters of wit, and language; and in whom all vigour of Invention, and strength of judgement met” (8: 591). But on this occasion, Jonson constructs a canon and engages in a historical survey whose acme is Bacon, who hath fill’d up all numbers; and perform’d that in our tongue, which may be compar’d, or preferr’d, either to insolent Greece, or haughty Rome. In short, within his view, and about his times, were all the wits borne, that could honour a language, or helpe study. Now things daily fall: wits grow downe-ward, and Eloquence growes back-ward: So that hee may be nam’d, and stand as the marke, and ακμ ´ η´ of our language. (8: 591–92)

These words assign Bacon essentially the same role Drayton assigns Sidney. Jonson reveals his own sense of the importance of lineages, not only when constructing a canon incorporating Sidney as a major figure, but also when variously connecting him with members of his extended family. The most striking of Jonson’s statements in this kind relate to Sidney’s daughter: they collectively illustrate two key changes of emphasis. Epigrammes LXXIX, “To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland” (1616), begins by claiming, “That Poets are far rarer births then kings,/Your noblest father prov’d,” because of his unprecedented and unsurpassed achievement: “before,/Or then, or since, about our Muses springs,/Came not that soule exhausted so their store” (8: 1–2, 3–5). She alone alters this state of affairs, as one “On whom, if he were living now, to looke,/He should those rare, and absolute numbers view,/As he would burne, or better farre his booke” (10–12). Hugh Maclean helps clarify Jonson’s point here by glossing “numbers,” normally a reference to the counted syllables in a line of metered verse, as referring to Rutland’s physical “proportions.”23 This rather strained extension in the sense of “numbers” allows Rutland to surpass Sidney’s achievements as an author without being one herself. But Jonson could write admiringly of her as if she were a writer (either




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what a sinne ’gainst your great fathers spirit, Were it to thinke, that you should not inherit His love unto the Muses, when his skill Almost you have, or may have, when you will? (8: 31–34)

By further contrast, Conversations simply maintains, “The Countess of R¯utland was nothing inferior to her Father S. P. Sidney in Poesie” (1: 138). Her “numbers” thus turn out to be of the usual kind, after all, and a match for his previously matchless ones. Nothing like so volatile in their judgments, Jonson’s other representations of the Sidneys’ Sidney portray him as not conspicuously a poet (and much less so a soldier or “Protestant hero”), but rather a representative of true nobility, and more especially one who lives up to his ancestry, as each of his descendants also does in following his example. Jonson here does not attempt to deny the facts of Sidney’s life or offer a consciously revisionist interpretation of them; instead, he has his own vision, which chiefly takes the form of comprehending the whole family as a social and ethical ideal.24 The paucity of Jacobean authors directly paralleling Henry with Sidney does not deter Strong from locating those two figures in the same “ideological line,” because he makes this point about Henry’s commemoration: “The flood of literature that attended his departure far exceeded that for Gloriana in quantity, and in theme it matched that which mourned the passing of another quintessential perfect Protestant Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (220). By contrast, Williamson draws a distinction reflecting not “theme” but tone: “In broad terms, the explosion of elegiac literature at Sidney’s death epitomized, without any sense of Hamlet’s irony, the rhetorical sprit of ‘what a piece of work is a man,’ ” whereas “elegies which Henry’s death occasioned . . . seem to have expressed the antithetical ‘man delights not me—nor woman neither’ ” (172–73). These “terms” prove very “broad” indeed, but they capture an overall shift of emphasis possibly linked to the passing of some three decades in which neither domestic nor foreign affairs had remained static. Moreover, Strong attaches far too much importance to a “theme” that unquestionably and unsurprisingly “matched”: two people dying young with unfulfilled promise were always likely to be mourned in much the same way, given the limited range of elegiac verse in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of which now makes for monotonous reading. Such contrasting kinds of dead people as young and old, male and female, active and contemplative



potentially, or on the basis of promising apprentice work), as he does in his unfinished Epistle, To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland (ca. 1600), exclaiming:

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offered room for different kinds of commemoration; but they were still recollected as generic figures. If Henry and Sidney are to share one pantheon solely through their capacity to be assimilated to the same type (rather than directly paralleled), they must also be joined by dozens of other such exemplars, including the figure mourned in Sir William Davenant’s lines “To the Dutchess of Buckingham” (ca. 1628): For gone is now the Pilot of the State, The Courts bright Star, the Clergies Advocate, The Poets highest Theame, the Lovers flame, And Souldiers Glory, mighty Buckingham.25

Underscoring the essentially repetitive character of the period’s elegiac verse, Christopher Brooke’s Funerall Poem (ca. 1625) for Sir Arthur Chichester, Baron of Belfast and Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, at least twice recycles material from his earlier Funerall Elegie on the Prince (ca. 1612). “Not canopies, but tents, tooke his desier;/Not courts, but camps,” Brooke notes of Chichester, having previously commended Henry because “Not canopies, but tents tooke his desire,/Not Courts, but camps.”26 Similarly, the later poem maintains of Chichester that “Armes hardned hym; Love softned not his lyfe;/His musique was the trumpet, drum, and fife” (210); the earlier poem explains how Henry “us’d his eares to trumpet, fife and drumme” (182). Perhaps this element of repetition would have been greater if the two poems had shared the same form: the Henry elegy’s ottava rima ill suited wholesale plundering for the Chichester one’s heroic couplets. But whereas Brooke brought out the likeness between Henry and Chichester on the “theme” of “Not Courts, but camps,” he also brought out a potential link between Henry and Sidney when his Funerall Elegie declares of its subject: “His time by equall portions he divided/Betweene his bookes and th’ exercise of warre” (181). These studies included “bookes” of music, thus justifying Brooke’s concordia discors trope in both tenor and vehicle: His life, and live’s-delight was harmonie, Whose organs and whose instruments were found Upon his parts in contrarietie, To make sweete musique upon Nature’s ground. (180)

Brooke further maintains that, in Henry’s person, “Mars with wit’s Minerva seem’d at jarre,/Which of them both should sway his princely




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Men came to his Court as to bright Academies Of vertue and of valour; all the eies That feasted at his Princely exercise, Thought that by day Mars held his launce, by night Minerva bore a torch to give him light.27

In his biography of Henry, which includes a substantial anthology of extracts from contemporary estimates, Elkin Calhoun Wilson judges that “Joshua Sylvester strikes the dominant elegiac notes when he declares that all who love ‘Religion, Armes, or Art’ grieve for Henry.”28 Though Wilson recognizes how “England’s affection for Henry recalls that felt for Sir Philip Sidney,” he makes this point on the basis of his own perception, and because he sees Sidney as “in character . . . closer to Henry than was Essex,” thus dissenting from E. K. Chambers’s observation, which he quotes: “Prince Henry . . . seems to have had the gift of touching the popular imagination more effectively than anyone else since the fall of Essex” (173–74 n.103). Moreover, the huge hopes pinned on Henry had begun receiving expression when he was still just a child and often betrayed less enthusiasm for his civil accomplishments than for where his “exercise of warre” might lead: Wilson quotes William Alexander’s Parænesis to the Prince (1604), which marvels “To see thee young, yet manage so thine armes,/And have Minervaes mind, Bellonaes hands,” while nonetheless stressing: “Thou like that gallant thunderbolt of warre,/Third Edwards sonne, that was so much renown’d,/Shalt shine in valour as the morning starre” (28). Even Wilson himself expresses “doubts that books and Minerva got a full half of Henry’s time and affection” (139–40). Though likewise subject to great expectations from his earliest days, Sidney at least enjoyed the prospect of a less fully determined future and thus could lean (or be shoved) in various directions on a more truly “equall” basis than the Prince. Falco nonetheless asserts as “fact” that “Sidney and Henry are often compared as patrons and soldiers” in contemporary texts, but then portrays them as “implicitly compared” by “Henry’s elegists,” especially through “the conceit that Henry combined equal parts of wisdom and martial prowess,” and still produces just one example: how Brooke’s “picture of a young knight torn between Mars and Minerva has its roots in the verse tributes for Sidney” (191, 192). The shared allusions to classical mythology constitute the common soil of course; little effort would have been required 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


hart,/Th’one with sterne armes; the other with milde art” (181). In his Monumental Columne, Erected to the Living Memory of the Ever-Glorious Henry (ca. 1612), John Webster likewise explains how “Me thought I saw him in his right hand weild/A Caduceus; in th’other Pallas’ shield,” and how


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despite the extreme claims of Sidney’s prowess in the field, nobody now thinks of him as a great Elizabethan general or warrior. To the contrary, the mythologized defender of a militantly Protestant foreign policy . . . becomes in the decades following his death, not a Scipio or a Cincinnatus, but almost exclusively the exemplar and defender of English poetry. (67)

Falco thus appears to be merely bluffing when he still maintains: “The analogy between Sidney and Henry made by Henry’s elegists draws in part on religious and political connections between the two men with respect to their constituencies” (192). “Attempts were being made to mould him into a new Protestant leader on the model of Leicester, Sidney, and Essex,” David Norbrook similarly maintains of Henry, instancing how “one elegist was to adapt a poem about Sidney to mourn the prince.”29 But such recycling does not always prove meaningful: Phyllis Brooks Bartlett notes of George Chapman’s elegy for Henry that “he went on to double the length of his poem by paraphrasing a Latin elegy by Angelus Politianus written on the death of a fifteen-year-old girl.”30 Moreover, the specific adaptation Norbrook invokes represents only one of several instances in which Gorges reworked on Henry’s behalf poems he had written earlier. Perhaps Gorges hoped to make his pointed parallel between Henry and Sidney less obvious but still visible by camouflaging one significant borrowing with other selfplagiarisms of an entirely innocuous character. But what audience he had in mind to be making the right deductions about his indirection must remain a puzzle: none of the relevant texts were published during his lifetime, and contemporary readers would have required a comprehensive collection of his manuscripts to distinguish the false scents from the true. As established by his modern editor (Helen Estabrook Sandison), Gorges certainly had the right outlook to be linking Henry and Sidney on ideological grounds: she accurately classifies her author’s sonnet beginning “Let Castyls Phillip gratefully confess” as a “deliberately ambiguous compliment to Peacemaker King James,” given the poem’s obvious nostalgia for a “name” that “speals Eightie Eight,” recalling the Armada’s defeat.31 She nonetheless goes too far when claiming that in Gorges’s elegy for Henry, Olympian Catastrophe (ca. 1612), “there is no trace of any gesture in the direction of the bereaved James” (lii): the poem acknowledges that, just as “New Troy her Prince,” so “James wayles his Hector heire” (1039). Moreover, after noting that this elegy features “in combination . . . practically all 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


for (and nothing obviously inhibited) a more direct evocation of Sidney. Unwarranted in itself, Falco’s forced alignment of Sidney and Henry also looks perverse in light of his own point that


the themes of laudation for Henry living and lament for him dead,” she falls victim to her own irony when concluding that “Gorges had all the congratulatory devices at his pen’s end, and might almost have read Professor Wilson’s close-packed chapters, ‘Prince of Wales’ and ‘Elegiac’ ” (lv, lvi): the biographer thus invoked reprints just a single short quotation from the author of Olympian Catastrophe (140). Whereas Gorges made partial amends for his lopsided elegy “Of Syr Phyllypp Sydney” by writing a more balanced one explaining how “Mars and the Muses weare att mortall stryfe/which of them had in Sydney grettest parte,” he subsequently developed this theme at far greater length in Olympian Catastrophe (1–2). In Williamson’s summary, Gorges here “constructed a Spenserian world of knights and jousts, presided over, incongruously, by three goddesses—Bellona, Minerva, and Juno—who quarreled in the fashion of the judgment of Paris over who had bestowed the greatest gifts on valiant Prince Henry” (184). Such repetition offers no surprise in relation to a “strife-motif ” that Sandison accurately classifies as “A commonplace” (222 n.), instancing the same author’s epitaph “Upon the Death of the Young Lord Harrington” (ca. 1614), which begins, “Sorrow and Honor were at strife/To wayle thy death or praise thy lief ” (1–2). Though the “strife-motif ” shared between Gorges’s sonnet and Olympian Catastrophe takes the more particular form of placing “Mars” in contention with other legendary figures, Sandison’s comment serves as a useful reminder of how frequently commonplaces overlap in assuming both the same and variant forms. The sheer extent of Gorges’s recycling nonetheless marks him out as unusually thrifty. Olympian Catastrophe reworks not only its author’s sonnet on Sidney but also his own “Verses To Bee Sett over the Three Crownd Plumes” (1610), which itself adapts that same earlier poem: Bellona vaunts that this brave Prince to her belongd Because hee bare these loftie plumes the badge of Mart But myld Minerva plain’d her right was therein wrongd For that the learned Quills are instruments of Art Nay then quoth Juno, stay, this Crowne hee houlds of mee Therefore shall Arts, and Arms but his attendants bee Now tell mee noble Fraunce what wrong maye well withstand A Crowned head, a prudent heart, a valiaunt hand. (1–8)

In addition, Gorges’s dedicatory “Sonet to His Entombed Bodye,” appended to the conclusion of Olympian Catastrophe, slightly reworks the opening eight lines of his elegy “Of Syr Phyllypp Sydney.” Thus, just 8 of Gorges’s 30 lines commemorating Sidney did not end up commemorating



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Henry in some fashion too, and whereas the theme of “mortall stryfe” supplied a sonnet in Sidney’s case, it generated in Henry’s not only 8 “Verses” but also the nearly 1,200 lines of Olympian Catastrophe. That epic elegy does not merely rob Sidney to pay Henry, however. Another sonnet appended to its conclusion, “The Lamentation of Richmond,” insufficiently adapts what Sandison styles “an amorous compliment . . . that bears signs of having served in the interval to mourn Queen Elizabeth,” a first remodeling (lvi). More obviously pertaining to “Elizabeth’s . . . death at Richmond rather than Henry’s at St. James’s,” as Sandison observes, the concluding couplet explains: “I poore Richmond seene too every eye/Synce my Astreas flyght unto the skye” (238 n., 13–14). Sandison also points out that this same poem “was appropriated by or for Sir Arthur Gorges the younger as his elegy” on behalf of another Henry (Lord Hastings), in the collection Lachrymae Musarum (1649), a third and final remodeling (229 n.). As Michael Gearin-Tosh has established, the 19-year-old smallpox victim Hastings became the extravagantly lauded subject of an entire memorial volume (with contributions by Herrick, Marvell, and Dryden) because he was a member of the royal family; his death furnished an occasion for veiled grief over Charles’s execution.32 At the conclusion of a bewildering journey beginning with some anonymous paramour and reaching Henry by way of Elizabeth, Gorges’s poem as revised by or for his son thus served as propaganda on behalf of Henry’s younger brother. Though Gorges (senior) cannot be held responsible for this final destination, “The Lamentation of Richmond” thus joined ranks with Thomas Pestell’s elegy “On the Untimely Death of Henry Lord Hastings, Onely Son to Ferdinand and Lucy, Earl and Countess of Huntingdon,” which laments: O Sydneian! O Blood-Royal Fate Great Britains curse, whose sinful, shameful State Makes all Heroick Vertue soon decay; Which mad she throws, or just God takes away.33

Here, Charles and Hastings both fuse with the hero of Zutphen; but this linkage constructs no “vital line of ideological descent.” Whereas none of Gorges’s own recycling reveals more than frugality, and though ample warrant exists for his determination to attach the contention between “Mars and the Muses” to Henry, that “stryfe” has a greater applicability to Sidney underscored by Gorges’s own language and conduct. The survival of Olympian Catastrophe in a single transcription not published until 1816 probably reflects Gorges’s lack of favor at the Jacobean court, except through Henry, who could no longer help




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His only encouragement, once again to be defeated—and the central fact for the writings of his later years—lay in his place of trust with Prince Henry, which he won, undoubtedly through his allegiance to the fallen Ralegh, in about 1610, when the heir to the throne was establishing his household. In 1611, perhaps through the prince’s good offices, he was gentleman of the privy chamber . . . but no other signs of preferment appear. (xxii)

In Olympian Catastrophe, therefore, he consoled himself for the final loss of all “court-hopes” by focusing on a figure whose commemoration, even if its informal circulation brought it to sympathetic notice, could not feasibly reopen that shut door. His other miscellaneous original poems likewise survived only in manuscript, probably reflecting an aversion to publishing (typical of the gentlemen authors of his time) that the posthumous printing of Sidney’s work would at least begin modifying. The second autograph title inscribed on a text only recovered in 1940, Sir Arthur Gorges His Vannetyes and Toyes of Yowth, gives some sense of its author’s attitude toward the writings in question (mainly but not exclusively love poems), a few of which appeared during his lifetime in anthologies; he lends the dignity of a title to works dismissed as trivia. This collection includes both of his poems about Sidney, who similarly dismissed his own writing. But Sidney took a more complex view of literature than Gorges attributed to Henry in Olympian Catastrophe: “as for Poetrye,/(Sith the best Poet is but the best lyer)/ . . . fictions I reck not”(278–80). According to Sidney’s Defence, “of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarcely be a lyer,” because “he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.”34 On the one hand, Sidney stressed poetry’s innocence of any capacity for deceit: “the Poet never maketh any Circles about your imaginatiõ, to conjure you to beleeve for true, what he writeth” (29). On the other, he upheld an idealistic conception of poetry’s value as a fictive medium: “Nature never set foorth the earth in so rich Tapistry as diverse Poets have done,” for “her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden”(8).



him once dead. As Sandison explains of this author’s almost extinguished “court-hopes,”

“Intent, and Scope”: Sidney, Greville, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity

One Jacobean text capable of affiliating Sidney with Prince Henry has an appropriate date of composition (ca. 1610–12). If Greville wrote his biography of Sidney about a quarter of a century after its subject’s death, as generally accepted, he would have known of the huge hopes invested in Henry. Greville might even have been aware of how entirely those hopes had been frustrated, if most of his labor occurred during the final months of 1612. In the introduction to his edition of Greville’s biography, however, Nowell Smith proposes as a compositional terminus ad quem another death, occurring half-a-year prior—that of Robert Cecil, first earl of Salisbury.1 Moreover, whereas Greville might not have been able to mention Henry’s end, he also neglects to mention his promise. On the other hand, no such uncertainty surrounds the publication of Greville’s biography (1652), as delayed as its composition, occurring about a quarter of a century after its own author’s death, and Annabel Patterson interprets this timing as evidence of the text’s “potential appeal to a Puritan and republican audience,” based on “the relevance of its message to the monarchy that had just been abolished.”2 In their certain and possible responses to Greville’s biography, however, both Pepys and John Collop shed doubt on the terms of its “appeal” during the Interregnum and post-Restoration period. In the preface to his own collection Poesis Rediviva (1656), Collop assures his dedicatee (Henry, Lord Pierrepont): “Nor is Poesie unworthy of your Patronage, which a Sir Philip Sidney hath prais’d, our seraphick Donne us’d, the learned Scaliger, and he who makes all praises modest, the excellent Hugo Grotius labour’d in.”3 Unlike his “seraphick,” “learned,” and “excellent” peers who “us’d” or “labour’d in” this art, Sidney merely “prais’d” it as “a Sir.” Collop did not know or did not care about the empty nature of Sidney’s knighthood, conferred merely on a point of protocol.



3


“When Sidney was finally knighted in 1583,” as Leonard Tennenhouse notes, “it was only because Count Casimir was unable to attend his own induction into the Order of the Garter and asked Sidney to stand as his proxy. Because a proxy had to be of a rank no lower than knight, Sidney was duly promoted.”4 Collop further establishes the merit of “Poesie” by noting that it “could make an Octavius descend to the Lyricks friendship; and a Lord Brook, as the most permanent Epitaph, desire to be writ Sir Philip Sidneys friend” (35). Here, Collop’s logic depends on his implicit recognition of Sidney as one who “us’d” or “labour’d in” the same art as Donne, Scaliger, and Grotius; in this case, however, he reveals no awareness of Greville’s own credentials as a poet, but stresses his title, “a Lord,” as if this made him another Roman emperor. Determined to sway his patron by linking poetry with generic representatives of superior rank (“a Sir,” “a Lord”), Collop reveals his own crassness, but perhaps exposure to Greville’s recently published biography too. Whereas Collop’s narrow view of Sidney encompasses Greville as well, Pepys’s equally parochial vision takes the opposite direction. His diary entry for the first day of 1668 depicts him making a typical start (“Up, and all the morning in my chamber making up some accounts against the beginning of the new year”), then dining with an acquaintance whose penchant for good conversation proved more stimulating, though no less part of a familiar pattern: Here was a mighty good discourse, as there is alway; and among other things, my Lord Crew did turn to a place in the Life of Sir Ph. Sidny, wrote by Sir Fulke Grevill, which doth foretell the present condition of this nation in relation to the Dutch, to the very degree of a prophecy; and is so remarkable that I am resolved to buy one of them, it being quite through a good discourse.

Whether his estimate of this text reflected prior reading or how much he had gleaned from looking over Crew’s copy, Robert Latham and William Matthews report that “Pepys acquired a copy of the 1652 edition.”5 According to Richard Lanham, “Pepys’ remark . . . that Greville’s treatise shows Sidney forecasting the prosperity of the Netherlands, is often used to cast Sidney as a political prophet.” Rejecting this interpretation, Lanham introduces an inaccuracy of his own when taking Pepys’s words to refer to one nation’s “prosperity” rather than a temporary and mutually beneficial alliance between the English and the Dutch.6 The true value of Pepys’s response to Greville’s biography lies in recording a sensibility still attentive to “prophecy” but as liable to scan it for economic data as for any revelation of the divine, and revealingly myopic too, in finding the past relevant only in such a way as to underscore its actual remoteness. Pepys



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focuses so intently on “the present” that he entirely fails to register the disparity between Sidney’s concerns and his own or the scant value of a “prophecy” remarkably fulfilled after the passage of more than half a century but doomed to ephemeral significance, given the inevitability of further changes in the immediate future. Greville’s own “present” as defined in his biography cannot have reflected the four decades elapsing between its equally delayed composition and publication. When Greville introduced Essex in his biography of Sidney, he did so not to compare the two men, as in Peele’s Eclogue Gratulatory, but to present a monitory example of “sudden descent of such greatnesse” (156), and in a portion of his narrative confessedly disposed “to multiply digression upon digression,” as circuitously serving the “honour of her, to whom I owe my selfe, I meane Queen Elizabeth” (162). Nonetheless, Greville went much further than Peele did by praising Sidney for standing beside Essex “To keepe the grim Wolfe from Elizaes gate.”7 Instead of largely subordinating Sidney as author to the hero of Zutphen, however, Greville most profoundly regretted that his subject’s life had been crowned with that achievement rather than with the completion of the Caribbean expedition projected under the co-command of Drake. This point would be more apparent if Greville’s account were neither so highly conflicted in its priorities nor so selectively remembered in much recent scholarship. The best-known portion of Greville’s biography depicts Sidney’s sublime altruism when fatally wounded at Zutphen: being thirstie with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor Souldier carryed along, who had eaten his last at the same Feast, gastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words, Thy necessity is yet greater than mine. (129–30)

Of this “most famous scene in Sidney’s whole life,” Roger Howell comments: “Greville’s account is the only authority for it, and he was not an eyewitness, but the magnanimity displayed by the wounded knight was so in keeping with his character and what the twentieth century would call his image that it would be rash to reject it outright as a fabrication.”8 Here, matter judged “in keeping” depends on matter judged worth “keeping”; Greville’s own “character” and awareness of “image” cannot be ignored in the case of a self-fashioning not certainly produced by the self in question. “The truly memorable death scenes of the age, on the scaffold, at home, or even on the battlefield—Sir Thomas More, Mary Queen of Scots, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Ralegh, Charles I—were precisely that,” comments



“INTENT, AND SCOPE”


Stephen Greenblatt: “scenes, presided over by actor-playwrights who had brilliantly conceived and mastered their roles.”9 But Sidney’s performance of this kind would not have reached any subsequent audience without Greville’s glowing review as an absent spectator. Far from regarding with skepticism such uncorroborated testimony, however, later generations of absent spectators have invented a detail not included in Greville’s biography. Though the introduction to the edition followed does not originate the claim that Sidney’s altruistic gesture involved “water,” it does perpetuate this myth (vi). Common sense suggests that alcohol would have been a safer “drink” than “water,” as well as more comforting to a figure in pain. Whether further purified in the retelling or not, the “bottle” anecdote can only reduce the abortive Caribbean expedition to even more of a dead duck than it was; but that nothing came of this episode did not deter Greville from attaching the highest importance to it. Greville devotes so many pages to the Caribbean project that he feels bound to explain and justify the relevance of his procedure: “Upon these enterprises of his, I have presumed to stand the longer, because from the ashes of this first propounded voyage to America, that fatall Low Country action sprang up, in which this worthy Gentleman lost his life” (120). But Greville could not thereby dispel the strong impression he had already created of the discrepancy between this purported phoenix and its “ashes”: the latter, from his point of view, had represented a major step toward mounting a global campaign against the Spanish empire, whereas the former merely continued Elizabeth’s cautious policy, a travesty of Sidney’s expansive vision meriting the damningly faint praise that “this moderate course carried her into a defensive war” (80). The contrast emerges clearly when Greville draws an analogy between the Caribbean expedition and the locus classicus of an artist’s masterpiece, for as the Limmes of Venus picture, how perfectly soever began, and left by Apelles, yet after his death proved impossible to finish: so that Heroicall design of invading, and possessing America, how exactly soever projected, and digested in every minute by Sir Philip, did yet prove impossible to be well acted by any other mans spirit than his own; how sufficient soever his associate were in all parts of navigation; whereby the success of this journey fell out to be rather fortunate in wealth, than honor. (77)

Thus, Drake ruined a scheme that could not be “well acted” except as undertaken by Sidney, who could do little to redeem the limitations of Elizabeth’s merely “defensive war,” which became that projected masterpiece’s nearest replacement. Though Greville’s biography classifies the future James I as one “to whom” Sidney’s “service was affectionately devoted, and from whom 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


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he received many pledges of love, and favour,” its nostalgic tribute to Elizabeth’s reign often implies an unflattering estimate of her successor’s (31). Sometimes this invidious comparison takes a fairly direct form, as when Greville unearths the treasure he judges “there be buried” in the Sidney-Languet correspondence: “many delicate images, and differences, between the reall, and large complexions of those active times, and the narrow salves of this effeminate age” (9). Sometimes other points of contrast serve equally well to cast aspersions on James’s capacity to make the right decisions: “God creates those in his certain, and eternall mouldes, out of which he elects for himself; where Kings choose creatures out of Pandoras Tun, and so raise up worth, and no worth; friends or enemies at adventure” (10). Many of James’s favorites caused offense by being Scottish, and recipients of unrealistically lavish gifts; Greville, when writing his biography, was no longer the relatively prominent courtier that he had been under Elizabeth’s rule, though he would enjoy a second wind as a government insider shortly thereafter. This extended even into the earliest years of Charles’s reign, and only ended with Greville’s murder by a disgruntled servant. “In the contest for honor and recognition, the perpetual winners were not Sidney or Ralegh, but the gray, Machiavellian Cecils, who knew what Queen Elizabeth really needed in a statesman,” observes Anthony Low, adding this corollary: “Given the Queen’s aims, of keeping herself in power and securing the Protestant national order—not risking it in foreign adventures—such results were inevitable.”10 Machiavelli bequeathed a complex legacy, of course, as F. J. Levy underscores: “Sidney, who distrusted the Italians and thought them immoral, had no harsh word for Machiavelli. And there is no question that the Sidney ‘circle’—Spenser, Greville, Gabriel Harvey—were all steeped in the Italian’s works.”11 Even so, Greville himself more closely resembled the “gray, Machiavellian” type of courtier than he did his beloved Sidney, however much effort he expended in collapsing this difference, for he knew how to suit his virtu to the times, whereas his friend made a virtue of intransigence. If Greville thus accommodated himself to Elizabeth’s less glorious successors, however, he also did not invariably think of her rule as his theoretical ideal, as shown by his remarks about “a defensive war.” No more roseate than his characterization of James as “that chief, and best of Princes, his most excellent Majesty,” Greville’s summary evaluation of “the blessed Lady which then governed over us” involves placing the best possible construction on her equally temporizing approach to foreign policy: how equall soever she were in her happy creation for peace, or war, and her people (as I have shewed) humble to follow her will in either, yet because she resolved to keep within the Decorum of her sex, she shewed herself more ambitious of ballancing neighbor Princes from invading one another, than




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Nor does Greville deny that Elizabeth had often frustrated him, directly as well as indirectly: her “corrections . . . fell heavy in crossing a young mans ends”—his own (146). Perhaps he would have stressed that no gender-based considerations of “Decorum” excused James’s commitment to much the same “ballancing” act pursued by Elizabeth, but his biography repeatedly wavers between promoting the continuation of what he took to be Sidney’s international vision and admitting the continuity in its utter defeat by monarchs sharing an entirely different agenda. Reraking “ashes” cooled twice over, Greville cannot convincingly reanimate a phoenix stillborn at Sidney’s summons to assume the governorship of Flushing. Greville’s biography too often sounds dark and anguished to warrant its frequent classification as hagiographic, except insofar as that description conveys the extent to which it idealizes at nearly every turn not Elizabeth but Sidney, eschewing the tone and technique of dispassionate reportage. This idealizing impulse does not entirely dominate because it clashes with Greville’s approach in sometimes downplaying and sometimes stressing the profound contrasts between himself and his friend. Greville seems to speak the truth in thus acknowledging that Sidney strongly resembled him in certain respects and differed utterly in others. The net result of this twofold acknowledgment nonetheless remains far from clear-cut because Greville does not always elevate Sidney at his own expense (where the two of them diverge) or show himself as conforming to his friend’s values (where the two of them agree). Greville gives this account of the circumstances surrounding Sidney’s fatal wounding: with what alacrity soever he went to actions of honor, yet remembring that upon just grounds the ancient Sages describe the worthiest persons to be ever best armed, he had compleatly put on his; but meeting the Marshall of the Camp lightly armed (whose honour in that art would not suffer this unenvious Themistocles to sleep) the unspotted emulation of his heart, to venture without any inequalitie, made him cast off his Cuisses; and so, by the secret influence of destinie, to disarm that part, where God (it seems) had resolved to strike him. (128)

As the notes to the edition followed explain, Greville alludes to an anecdote related by Plutarch: “the fame won by Miltiades at Marathon caused such a change in the daily habits of Themistocles that his friends inquired the reason; to whom he replied that ‘the trophy of Miltiades did not let him sleep’ ”



under any pretence of title, or revenge, apt to question or conquer upon forrain Princes possessions. (31, 79, 79-80)

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(254). Though Greville manages to credit Sidney for initially conforming with “the ancient Sages” and then doing the exact opposite, on the basis of an “emulation” first purged of egotism (“unspotted”) and then incorporated into providential design (what “God . . . had resolved”), this approach cannot disguise the belatedness of second thoughts, drawing on mutually exclusive frameworks of judgment. Possibly, too, Greville’s allusion glances at his own standing in relation to Sidney, as one not “unenvious” of that hero’s laurels, and perhaps even of his unambiguously happy condition as a man now dead. Greville’s self-portrait implicitly portrays Sidney as his antithesis: “For my own part, I found my creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black Oxe had not already trod, as the Proverbe is, but to those only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World” (224). Though self-deprecation (“my creeping Genius”) shields Sidney from criticism, Greville cannot sustain this posture of modesty: he presents his preference for “Images of Life” as no quirky choice that his readers might reject in favor of “Images of Wit,” and his further explanation of his aesthetic unites him with his target audience (“those . . . weather-beaten in the Sea of this World”) at the cost of divorcing him from a friend who correspondingly appears naïve, sheltered, and inexperienced. Greville’s rhetoric vents a dichotomy continually threatening to emerge from his biography: the Sidney idealized in its pages condemns its author as severely pragmatic, if not a cynical careerist, but in turn stands condemned as dreamily unrealistic, if not a downright fool. As the contrast between “Images of Life” and “Images of Wit” partly reveals and partly obscures, Greville’s view of literature differed so absolutely from Sidney’s that it entailed far more than just a contrasting aesthetic: it encompassed a gloom about the value of any imaginative writing that seems to have gathered strength with every year and far transcended the utmost of his friend’s misgivings on this point. Ronald Rebholz suggests of the two men’s friendship: “during Sidney’s life Greville may have attached more importance to the relationship than Sidney, who had many good friends.” 12 The strengthening of this plausibly unequal bond might have begun or accelerated after Zutphen. Geoffrey Bullough speculates that “some devastating experience such as the shock of Sidney’s death” proved decisive in Greville’s transformation: “The gay crusading spirit of his youthful Protestantism changed to a sombre brooding over the mysteries of evil in the world and in his own soul.”13 In such a scenario, the grief that drew Greville ever closer to his friend in his own mind also issued from a trauma that drove their approaches to literature further and further apart.




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though my Noble Friend had that dexterity, even with the dashes of his pen to make the Arcadian Antiques beautifie the Margents of his works; yet the honour which (I beare him record) he never affected, I leave unto him, with this addition, that his end in them was not vanishing pleasure alone, but morall Images, and Examples, (as directing threds) to guide every man through the confused Labyrinth of his own desires, and life: So that howsoever I liked them too well (even in that unperfected shape they were) to condescend that such delicate (though inferior) Pictures of himselfe should be suppressed; yet I do wish that work may be the last in this kind, presuming no man that followes can ever reach, much lesse go beyond that excellent intended patterne of his. (223–24).

To some extent, Greville here makes the Arcadia the literary counterpart to the Caribbean expedition, another unfinished work that could not fulfill its promise except as perfected by Sidney alone. By the standards of a much later age, as well, both men were more alike than different in how they ranked literature: Joan Rees rightly points out that “General Wolfe,” because he “would rather have written Gray’s Elegy than have taken Quebec, would have puzzled and perhaps disgusted not only Greville but Sidney too.”14 Nonetheless, Greville characterized as an artistic masterpiece not the Arcadia but the Caribbean project of which Rees herself gives an especially fine account (1–3), and the “confused Labyrinth” of his own ruminations about that romance’s value ends by justifying Charles Larson’s blunt paraphrase: “He concludes the biography hoping that no one will try to imitate Sidney’s sort of literature.”15 Greville even claimed that Sidney’s “end was not writing, even while he wrote” (18). Ideally, he would not have written at all. Larson’s verdict on Greville’s verse applies equally well to his prose, as describing how He can display a tendency toward what might be called a kind of poetic constipation: he often seems to be laboring too hard to express himself, with a resultant loss of clarity. Or, to place a more charitable construction on the matter, perhaps the style can be seen as an artistic corollary of a mind too doubtful and tentative to commit itself clearly to one explicit position. (31–32)

Though these words might seem far from “charitable,” Larson’s frequently more sympathetic assessment of Greville extends to offering what looks like a failed attempt to defend his biography’s accuracy. That Greville



Increasingly regarding verses as vain, Greville could make a case for the Arcadia, but one shot through with ambivalence. As he explains,

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fudged both the affinities and the contrasts between himself and his friend represents one way of construing Larson’s explanation of how he went about reconciling two rather discrepant aesthetics: “Greville’s views on literature diverged rather sharply from Sidney’s, although he chooses . . . to subordinate those differences, principally by distorting somewhat the nature of Sidney’s literary achievement while taking the opportunity to argue for a theory of literature that Sidney would probably not have embraced” (97). The language of subordination implies a modesty on the biographer’s part entirely appropriate in a kind of literary executor but also belied by his concomitant and twofold departure from his friend’s literary values. The strongest admirer of Greville’s writing, Yvor Winters, judges that “in his later work he became a greater poet in every way than any of the associates of his youth”; promoting Greville at Sidney’s expense, such a comment confirms their difference as writers, however ranked in relation to each other.16 On this score, Elizabeth Dipple rather misleadingly states that “a reading of the Arcadias forcibly reminds us of Sidney’s major compositional habit—continuous revision, rethinking, recasting of the work he had done”: she thus presents his whole output in the image of that one set of texts, whose changes also reflected the influence exerted by his sister and his self-styled best friend, both chronic revisers who, unlike him, did very much more rewriting than writing.17 Harold Love suggests that Pembroke’s approach “may well be closer to that of a musician playing variations on a favourite theme”: her lifetime of work on the translation of the psalms begun by her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, while stimulated by a sense of family and religious duty, was also the result of an unwillingness to bring an absorbing activity to too precipitate an end. While the later versions are certainly tauter and more polished than the earlier ones, much variation is of the gratuitous kind that could just as well be unmade or further varied.18

Noting Greville’s “apparently almost compulsive habit of revision,” Larson remarks: “Few authors of his era displayed such a reluctance to consider anything ever to be in its final form. It seems likely that Greville kept his manuscripts in an almost constant state of revision” (21). On the one hand, Love stresses the dangers of imposing “print culture” criteria of evaluation on the writing of an earlier era (54); on the other, Larson points to the scarcity of authors with working habits like Greville’s. Perhaps Sidney’s chief mourners both revised as a way of sustaining contact with him beyond the grave. The connection seems more obvious in Pembroke’s case: she completed a body of translations begun by him—or put off completing





them. But if Greville either wrote his early poetry in dialogue with Sidney, or simply thought of writing poetry as acting in concert with him, then he, too, might have approached revision as extending a discussion of sorts. Notwithstanding the great sympathy as well as sophistication Gavin Alexander brings to his reading of Greville’s entire oeuvre as a complex “dialogue” with Sidney, he still concludes that “a sort of monologue” results.19 But ambivalence repeatedly alleviates the monotony of that one voice: Greville’s biography would be more coherent if wholly self-serving or self-abasing, instead of uniting both dispositions in an unstable combination. Greville characterized his biography in manuscript as A Dedication. It retains this character when Greville acknowledges of Sidney, “I find my self still short of that honour he deserved, and I desired to doe him,” but continues: “I must therefore content my selfe with this poor demonstration of homage; and so proceed to say somewhat of the toyes, or Pamphlets, which I inscribe to his memory, as monuments of true affection between us; whereof (you see) death hath no power” (145). Such “toyes” of Greville’s as appeared in print did so posthumously, beginning with Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633), and without A Dedication, published separately. These “monuments” thus defeated “death,” but not in quite the way that Greville had originally planned. Another memorial did not get even this far—an elaborate mausoleum that he designed to be erected in St. Paul’s as a joint tribute to himself and Sidney. In relating an anecdote about Bacon’s decline, Aubrey insisted that Greville did not merit commemoration in tandem with Sidney: In his Lordship’s prosperity, Sir Fulke Grevil, Lord Brooke, was his great Friend and acquaintance; but when he was in disgrace and want, he was so unworthy as to forbid his Butler to let him have any more small Beer, which he had often sent for, his stomach being nice, and the small beere of Gray’s Inne not liking his pallet. This has donne his memorie more dishonour then Sir Philip Sidney’s friendship engraven on his monument hath donne him Honour.20

Though Aubrey’s casual pronouns might confuse (the “disgrace and want” were Bacon’s, the “unworthy” conduct and “Butler” Greville’s), he informally establishes his own principles as a biographer: he could condone a weakness for “small Beer” at once fastidious and undiscriminating (gentlemen were supposed to prefer sack), and would not dwell on the undeniable corruption responsible for Bacon’s fall, but loathed uncharitable deeds and views, as himself generous to a fault on both scores. Whether true or not, Aubrey’s anecdote reveals a misplaced trust in cosmic justice. As connected with Sidney not only through “friendship” but also as his biographer,



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Greville has enjoyed an opposite fate: the “Honour” he attributes to his subject reflects back on him, and so on his biography, which thus acquires the greater credence, establishing a feedback loop. In addition to the many monuments more lasting than bronze that Sidney’s fellow authors produced for him, he received another accolade of greater substance than the most lavish cenotaph. As William Ringler describes, “the newly formed Bodleian Library was decorated with a series of portraits of the great writers of all ages,” including Sidney’s, whose “pre-eminence” reflected how “for more than a century after his death he continued to be the most admired and the most read writer of his generation.”21 On the one hand, the relatively dim views of Sidney as an author entertained by Jonson and even Greville himself suggest a less secure canonical status for him than such memorialization (and Ringler’s summary) affirm. On the other, any exaggeration of Sidney’s posthumous reputation as an author offers a salutary corrective to modern scholars’ insistent redefinition of him as, above all, an embodiment and focus of ideological commitment, often in the form of a monolithic reconstruction that indeed unites him with Greville. Borrowing a clever phrase from Jennie Kassanoff, Elizabeth Mazzola characterizes Greville’s biography as “a kind of ‘all-purpose ideological epoxy’ ” designed “to seal the cracks in Sidney’s broken image and repair any gaps in Elizabeth’s mercurial reward system”; in addition, it serves as a “magical compound . . . powerful enough . . . to retract Sidney’s deathbed retraction of the Arcadia.”22 Resisting the temptation of glibly contrasting Sidney the dreamer with Greville the consummate survivor, Maurice Evans offers his own summation of why the “image” in question warranted “repair”: It is a commonplace that the Renaissance ideal of man involved versatility and excellence in many different fields, but in the case of Sidney, the diversity is extreme. He was an idealist with more than a dash of romantic heroism in his nature, as his behaviour at Zutphen reveals, yet at the same time he had a ruthless and not always compassionate perception of human weakness. He loved heroism but did not believe in heroes. He was charmed by the glamour of old-time chivalry and yet was an earnest student of realpolitik; he was interested in people as they are, but he wanted to make them different. His imagination kindled at the old tale of Percy, yet his own theory of poetry was uncompromisingly didactic. He wanted to write: he wanted to do: and it is particularly in Poesy, in the Revised Arcadia, that all these incompatibles come most nearly into direct collision.23

By contrast, Arthur Kinney denies any need for a unifying force imparted from within or without Sidney’s oeuvre, stressing that at the time of his





death “his writing, thinking, actions, and politics had become a thing so compact that to mention one of them seems to be to mention them all.”24 This claim nonetheless depends on “magical” assistance owing more to Kinney’s eloquence than to Sidney’s: “Poetry and politics, burned to a luster in the alchemy of a faith that transcended courtly rhetoric and even his death, became, perhaps, Sidney’s greatest legacy” (55). Moreover, most modern scholars seeking to position Sidney’s writing above or beyond “courtly rhetoric” have drawn on Greville’s biography as an “all-purpose ideology epoxy”—and one not falling so far short of the scope Mazzola assigns it as to need substantial gluing before achieving any coherence of its own. In classifying Sidney among “questioners of royal authority,” Patterson chiefly draws on features of his Arcadia first noted by Edwin Greenlaw in 1913; acknowledging her debt to his interpretation, she also identifies his “serious mistakes,” among them choosing “to ignore the fact that Greville’s Life was itself a ‘text,’ with its own motives and strategies, rather than an authoritative account of Sidney’s intentions” (109, 32).25 Her more sophisticated approach involves a crucial distinction: By authorial intention I choose to mean conscious intention, Sidney’s motives in embarking on the work, his changes of intention (for which the many revisions of the Arcadia provide a potent source of evidence), his concept of its function and audience. By reception I choose to mean the Arcadia’s history of publication, adoption (by certain groups of readers), adaptation (for certain ends), any evidence that we can recover of the way it has been understood at different moments after it passed beyond Sidney’s control. (25)

But Patterson’s sense of Sidney’s “conscious intention” in the Arcadia derives not only from his “many revisions”; it also depends heavily on Greville’s assertion that his friend’s “intent, and scope” here “was . . . lively to represent the growth, state, and declination of Princes, change of Government, and lawes: vicissitudes of sedition, faction, succession, confederacies, plantations, with all other errors, or alterations in publique affaires” (15). Rather than treating these words exclusively within a framework of “adoption” and “adaptation,” as her insistence on the biography’s status as “a ‘text’ ” would suggest, Patterson quotes them as a preamble to her remark that “Greville might be supposed to have known something about Sidney’s intentions” (25). This unwarranted assumption oversimplifies the complex relationship between Sidney’s “intentions” and Greville’s, straightforward in neither content nor expression.



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Alan Sinfield furnishes one index of Patterson’s achievement. Though stridently numbering “at least six ways in which the Arcadia manifests, in effect, a critique of absolutist tendencies,” he also takes the more muted position (comparable to Patterson’s emphasis on lines of communication) that “Sidney’s determined exposure of the means by which ideology is promoted is not exactly subversion, but certainly it might contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms of power and how they might be challenged.”26 As Sinfield nonetheless concedes: I should admit that one half of the topic has not been discussed. I have tried to theorize ideological disruption of the Arcadia from the point of view of its inception—of how a person in Sidney’s position might develop a critical analysis. But this shows little of its reception—of what its actual political impact might have been. Hermeneutically, it is convenient and perhaps not unreasonable to assume that those like-minded with Sidney read the Arcadia approximately as he meant it, but others may have read it differently. (408)

Perhaps Patterson’s work on the Arcadia’s “reception” had appeared too recently for Sinfield to be aware of this remedy to his own project’s deficiency, or of the overlap between his work and hers. More solid than an attempt “to theorize” on merely “convenient” and “not unreasonable” assumptions, Patterson’s study nonetheless depends on the circular logic identifying “like-minded” comrades whose viewpoint then confirms their ideological kinship, as her treatment of Greville’s testimony shows. “I dare confidently averr that the wards of this lock are grown so rustie with time,” declared “Philophilippos” (1655) of the Arcadia, “that a modern key will scarce unlock it, seeing in eighty years and upward (such the age of this book from the Nativitie thereof) many criticisms of time, place and person, wherein the life and lustre of this storie did consist, are utterly lost, and unknown in our age.”27 Not claiming that Greville viewed Sidney’s romance as any such roman à clef, Patterson sees him as understanding its ideological significance in the much less rigid way also adopted in an anonymous and unpublished manuscript reprinted by John Buxton, A Draught of Sir Phillip Sidneys Arcadia (ca. 1644). This poem hails Sidney as “soe wise/Hee walks the world in a disguise” because he had located his romance in a tradition extending back to Aesop’s Fables, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the practice of Virgil, who when hee would relate What did concerne persons of State, Least truth too plaine should danger call, Did sport it in a Pastoral.28





A Draught does not address, however, the question of how transparent or opaque that “disguise” had to be in accomplishing the twofold aim of concealing meanings from some readers while revealing them to others. In its own equivalent of Greville’s preoccupation with “the growth, state, and declination of Princes,” this text suggests that anything goes in a game without rules. The anonymous author claims no special credentials as an interpreter in asserting of Sidney that “Unmaske him, and you’ll clerely see/The rise, growth, fall of Monarchie” (68). Moreover, though marginal references indicate which specific passages in the Arcadia encode the messages now rendered explicit, the messages themselves enshrine Renaissance commonplaces rather than hidden lore needing to be quarried from a particular text by special means. Regarding “What ’tis that doth uphold a state,/And what the same doth ruinate,” A Draught judges that Sidney “shewed what danger in a Court/When wholly given up to sport” (68–69). This conventional wisdom only acquires novelty through its pointed application to Charles’s rule—a form of relevance that Sidney could not have foreseen, except insofar as his words identify an approach to government incapable of succeeding under any circumstances. Also critical of that particular king are comments (likewise annotated as found in the Arcadia) about how “Princes doe but tottering stand/Who pull the power out of their hand,” and should not “raise up those about their Throne/In whom desert was never knowne” (69). But if such remarks sound like an unsympathetic evaluation of why Charles’s regime collapsed, other passages apportion blame elsewhere, condemning “pollicie” that “Fills all men’s heads with jealousie” and serves “to distill in people’s hearts/Desire of Change” (69). A Draught thus illustrates how the Arcadia could describe the onset of the British Civil Wars, but not that Sidney’s words were essential to understanding these current events: the same habits of thought equally inform the readings of the text and of the contemporary crisis, accounting for coincidences presented as more significant than that. Where A Draught deviates most from standard ruminations about “The rise, growth, fall of Monarchie,” focusing on such particulars of Charles’s rule as his attempt to bypass parliaments as the traditional vehicle for raising money (“Some raile against the heavie hand/Imposing tribute on the Land”), its author reveals a characteristic tendency to spread the blame in condemning both the burden and the response it received, but also diverges from any equivalent passage in the Arcadia—or at any rate fails to give marginal references from that text (73). Conversely, the poem most actively imports parallels from Sidney’s romance when pursuing its own agenda as a product of royalist infighting: according to Buxton’s introduction, it attacks “members of the House of Palatine” as “foreigners” in response



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cheate Dametas of small know His Miso and his Mopsa too, Befoole Guinecia, and they bring, Such a strange slumber on the King, That he doth sleepe untill hee see A forreigner where hee should bee. (74, 75)

Here, where the relationship of current events to Sidney’s romance proves most truly tangential but receives most emphasis, A Draught launches into a conclusion that again affirms the Arcadia’s character as political analysis “in a disguise,” but so as to undermine this claim by stressing the work’s open-ended and compendious texture. At one extreme, the poem claims that a right reading of the Arcadia might have prevented the Civil Wars: This if men seriously but looke Is the thinge hinted in this booke, By which this nation might have learned And at distance something discerned Threatning a change in church and state, Not forseene, but seene when too late. (75–76)

At the opposite extreme, A Draught includes “the complete generall/The Artist, Atheist, every thing,” not just political matters: “Court follies . . . and/What makes comotions in a Land” (76, 77). Perceiving Sidney’s romance as not only a Machiavellian treatise on affairs of state but also an omnium gatherum, A Draught takes the line that any “key” will do: In this Arcadia men may find Whatever they fancie in mind And weomen too even to the dresse That shadowes ore their nakednes. (77)

Consciously or unconsciously, these lines seem to imply that here “men may find/ . . . /weomen too even to . . . / . . . their nakedness”; but such a discovery has as much validity as any other in the realm of “Whatever . . . fancie.”



to “talk . . . of putting forward Prince Charles Louis as a successor to King Charles” that had embarrassing repercussions for his fellow princes Rupert and Maurice (61, 62). “Some forreigne Agents,” with no stipulated counterparts in the Arcadia, “wind themselves like Serpent slie/I’th bosomes of all companie,” to the extent that they


Whereas Patterson locates in Greville’s biography a flexible but reliable “key” to Sidney’s romance, John Carey discerns the absence of any keyhole in a Gordian Knot: “the Old Arcadia . . . has the same basic structure as the new,” featuring a “constant impulse towards deadlock in the rhetoric, produced by opposites pitted equally against each other,” and resulting in “insoluble questions, where the two possible answers are so balanced that you cannot choose between them.”29 “If one could strip the mask from Sidney’s persona, most likely one would uncover another mask, and another under that,” speculates A. C. Hamilton, suggesting another way in which this author’s work yields no ready solutions, no clear-cut “intentions.”30 But whereas Carey emphasizes that “you cannot choose,” Hamilton characterizes the phenomenon “that there are many Arcadias” as “notorious,” emphasizing how readers have insisted on making choices: “by selective quotation one may make the work appear as one wishes” (159). Aware of this last point, Patterson observes: It is of course possible to argue, both from the dialectical nature of the Arcadia and from the diversity of critical opinion about it, that the work itself remains multivalent. There is a difference, however, between arguing that Sidney was himself responsible for the divisions among his readers, and that he had not himself made up his mind. The debate on the function of poetry is not, I think, left unsettled in the Arcadia. (33)

But in juggling both “Sidney’s intentions” and various forms of “reception,” Patterson preserves a rift apparent from the very first printings of the Arcadia. In her valuable assessment of the different versions of the Arcadia, Rees probably understates her point about how Greville and Pembroke became rivals for control over the transmission of this work: “it is understandable that the devotion of sister and friend might easily lead to jealousy” (56). More than just feelings were involved, too: Martin Garrett clarifies that Greville’s “aim was, as Victor Skretkowicz points out, ‘to safeguard Sidney’s reputation by reducing the complexity of the text into digestible portions, each preceded by a summary of the action,’ ” whereas Pembroke’s “aims . . . are different, and allow a different degree of freedom to the reader (a dangerous degree of freedom, Greville might say).”31 Retaining the “freedom” that Greville opposed, while trusting him rather than Pembroke as a guide to “Sidney’s intentions,” Patterson opens up the text with one hand while closing it down with the other. But this procedure forges no compromise between Pembroke’s and Greville’s rival versions of the Arcadia: his “key” alone unlocks her “freedom” of interpretation. This point emerges most clearly if Susanne Woods’s reading of Sidney’s romance stands as the Pembroke counterpart to Patterson’s Grevillian version, so that the two update not only the old 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


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struggle between Sidney’s sister and his most devoted friend but also the ur-conflict between a message-centered conception of literature and one establishing it as the province of homo ludens. Though Woods politely references Patterson’s work on the Arcadia (in its preliminary, article form) as amounting to “another view,” distinct from her own, they stand at opposite ends of the interpretative spectrum.32 Whereas Woods retains Patterson’s emphasis on the Arcadia’s open texture, she derives Sidney’s “intentions” solely from that, not from any Greville-assisted conception of his friend’s ideology: on issues of freedom and tyranny he knows well that, whatever the theory, some people are more free than others. The solution is the fictive voice and the devices of copia. No one story—or eclogue—defines the author’s stance in relation to current political issues, or even in relation to larger philosophical notions of freedom and tyranny. Yet all combine to invite thought and empower reader choice, and so present a model of freedom to the inquiring reader. As we consider Sidney’s many alternatives, we confront what I will call elective poetics, in which we enact in our hermeneutic activities the knowledgeable choices that are the very substance of freedom. Sidney’s definition of freedom and rejection of tyranny imply agency and choice, and in the abundant and varying analyses of the New Arcadia we encounter not a directive but a set of directions. (174)

Woods conjures up pleasing images of classrooms filled with freshly empowered students recreating the Arcadia’s rich texture in the harmonious polyphony of their own debates. Her version of Sidney’s romance differs from Patterson’s by as wide a margin as Carey’s, but with one crucial modification: in lieu of “deadlock” and “insoluble questions,” she finds a stimulating “copia”; in lieu of his Gordian Knot, she presents a Rorschach test. Other modern scholars sharing Patterson’s investment in Greville’s biography as a “directive” have similarly recognized it as “a ‘text,’ with its own motives and strategies,” only to let this cardinal point slip away. Though he does not falsify the equal odds he invokes, Raphael Falco reveals his order of preference when estimating the accuracy of Greville’s biography: “as likely to be true as to be a fiction.”33 Rebholz forgets his acknowledgment that “predominantly egocentric concerns inclined Greville’s memory to shape the image of Sidney” when also claiming: “generally he stated with accuracy what we know from other sources to have been the positions of his friends in the party, and the fidelity of recollection in middle age shows how deeply he was committed to those attitudes in his youth” (77, 23–24). Greville’s “egocentric concerns” would indeed be worth ignoring if they did not further modify a vision already (and inevitably) colored by the time passing between “middle age” and 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer




“youth,” and if they did not also raise this fundamental question: to whom or to what was he being faithful in his “fidelity of recollection”? Blair Worden nonetheless treats “egocentric concerns” as advantageous: “Greville’s hindsight raises many problems for the student of Sidney’s political beliefs (though it would raise more of them if it were less transparent).”34 So pronounced a bias proves welcome because “Greville, though he may distort, does not invent” (69 n.100). But “transparent” pinpoints what Greville’s writings never are, and distortion can be more deceptive than pure “fiction,” whose innocence Sidney himself defended in arguing that poets never mislead their readers because they always “invent.” Worden’s own investigation of the Arcadia’s political content makes only incidental references to Patterson’s, even though he also takes his point of departure from Greenlaw’s work (11 n.27, 268 n.8, from 267; 3–4). Forming a complementary pair, Worden’s study focuses exclusively on the Arcadia and depends mainly on close readings, whereas Patterson’s analysis of the same work contributes to an entire theory of interpretation. In other respects, however, these two perspectives on Sidney engage in mutual annihilation: they cannot both be right, and each goes some way toward exposing its counterpart’s shortcomings. Whereas Patterson attaches political significance to Sidney’s “many revisions” and his romance’s “history of publication,” Worden takes the opposite approach. “My focus is on the Old Arcadia,” he explains: “A book which centred on the political content of the New Arcadia would have to be a different enterprise from mine. It would also be a harder one, for political events are closer to the front of Sidney’s mind in the first version than in the second” (xxii). Patterson offers not that particular “different enterprise,” but also not one whose argument jettisons any version of the Arcadia as a focus of political interpretation. Conversely, “how to read between the lines of the Arcadia” strikes Worden as no very difficult task (193). Whereas Patterson chiefly seeks to establish Sidney among “questioners of royal authority,” Worden stresses how “the republicans are swept aside” in his reading of the Arcadia, as evidence of how “a republic is no more the answer to England’s problems than to Arcadia’s” (227, 228). In Worden’s view, Sidney, dismayed by the monarchies of his time but unwilling to countenance republicanism, turns to the ideal of limited monarchy. Yet other sides to his mind think differently. Two aspects of his political thinking are in tension with his wish for limited monarchy. They are also in tension with each other. First, Sidney, the critic of courts, is a courtier; and the evolution of Renaissance courtesy belongs to the same process as the erosion of limited



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Worden thus proves willing to consider Sidney possibly ambivalent, rather than always of one mind with “like-minded” companions in the realm of “political thinking.” For every concession of this sort that he makes, however, Worden then takes the opposite tack, installing Sidney beside Greville at the head of a monolithic ideology: The general grounds on which Sidney had opposed Elizabeth’s policies were those on which Greville opposed James’s. A diplomacy of militant or forward Protestantism was the ideal of the two friends and was overruled by both rulers. It was the continuity of that ideal that made Sidney’s memory, late in Elizabeth’s reign, dear to the followers and then to the mourners of the Earl of Essex. The same continuity made that memory, around the time Greville wrote the “Dedication”, dear to the followers and then the mourners of Prince Henry. (357)

“Yet even the most continuous of policies has to adapt to changes of circumstance,” Worden acknowledges: “Greville is rarely interested in such changes. He mainly ignores the alterations to the diplomatic map of Europe that occurred between the composition of the Arcadia and the writing of the ‘Dedication’ ” (357). Still, Worden proves less interested in balancing “continuity” against “changes” than in championing the former at the latter’s expense: “Upon the grief which greeted Sidney’s death there would be built the hagiography that served the political purposes of forward Protestantism in the decades ahead” (68). The best evidence of Worden’s persistent discounting of exceptions to the rule occurs in his treatment of Sidney’s and Greville’s attitudes toward Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to the duke of Anjou and Alençon: It may be . . . that Greville’s emphasis on the threat to parliaments from the use of royal proclamations, an issue of large concern in Jacobean politics and of little if any around 1579, casts Sidney’s anxiety in anachronistic terms. Sidney’s thinking about political consent, as far as we can judge, was altogether less precise about the forms and functions of representative institutions than Greville’s would be in James’s reign. Though he sat in the parliament of 1581, he wrote next to nothing about parliaments. However, while Greville may modernise Sidney in making him a spokesman for parliamentary liberty, his general point, that his friend saw the Anjou crisis as a conflict between limited and unlimited monarchy, between the rule of law and the rule of will, is true to Sidney’s anxieties and to those of his allies. (242)



monarchy. Secondly, unlimited monarchy, which has so much capacity for evil, has an equal capacity for good. (243)


Summarizing Patterson’s discussion of this same “crisis” did not involve explaining her investment in Greville’s biography as a guide to Sidney’s “intentions”: in this case she sought to present evidence compatible with but not dependent on her understanding of that text. For her, the main lessons to be drawn from Sidney’s letter opposing the proposed match were his “serious problems of communication in the Elizabethan court” and his lack “of effective address to the queen” (25). But Worden does not exaggerate the importance of Sidney’s letter for Greville, who devotes a whole chapter of his biography to it (45–60). Moreover, Worden’s characterization of Greville’s “general point” as “true to Sidney’s anxieties” well conveys how both men worried that Alençon might informally colonize subjects acquired through marriage: a French de facto king would prove hostile to “limited . . . monarchy” because his presumed political outlook and his Catholic faith equally disposed him toward absolutism. But such suspicions were also widely shared by British Protestants, for whom Catholic France and the Islamic empire of the Ottomans represented different but equally odious representations of despotic rule. Precisely because of the commonplace nature of such “anxieties,” Patterson contextualizes Sidney’s letter by invoking as its backdrop “a storm of national and Protestant outrage” (25). However less tactfully or thoughtfully articulated, that passion largely coincided with his stated position. Moreover, “national and Protestant” on this point overlap so substantially themselves as to make Sidney’s “allies” a majority of his compatriots, not the select proponents (along with Greville) of a distinctive ideology. The same strictures apply to David Norbrook’s reading of the Arcadia’s “long beast-fable” as “a classic exposition of the radical Protestant fear of the growing power of absolute rulers.”35 However often ascribed to Sidney and his “allies,” militancy, extremism, and radicalism fail to pinpoint any ideology upheld by a minority at some distance from mainstream Protestantism. That Greville himself “may modernise Sidney” proves less of a handicap to Worden’s concept of “forward Protestantism” than it should because all of the late twentieth-century scholarship emphasizing the essential accuracy of Greville’s biography as a guide to Sidney’s ideology serves by various means to modernize both men as virtual participants in the Civil Wars, while claiming not to repatriate them in a future neither lived to see. Sidney and Greville rightly supposed that a French Catholic married to a British monarch would pose problems: the perception that Henrietta Maria exerted an undue influence over her husband helped foster his own notoriety as a suspected crypto-Papist or even would-be-absolute ruler. In itself, this element of “continuity” between Sidney’s day and Milton’s cannot outweigh many “changes” occurring over the same period. Nor does it warrant any assumption that Sidney would have opposed Charles



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because of his steadfast attachment to “limited . . . monarchy” and “the rule of law,” extending from six decades beforehand. Nonetheless, the most pronounced expression of modern scholars’ willingness to modernize Sidney as an ideological forebear of Charles’s enemies affiliates him with his own great-nephew Algernon. Sidney ideologically twinned with his great-nephew represents far more than just a product of modernizing hindsight, for this conception of him dates from the Interregnum and has an ostensibly unimpeachable source in the testimony of Milton. But though recent scholars have not hesitated to embroider the historical record (when affiliating Sidney with Henry) or to take a highly selective view of it (when affiliating the subject of Greville’s biography with its author), they have made no attempt to invoke Milton’s authority when affiliating two men belonging to different generations of the same family. Understanding this apparently curious omission entails examining how conceptions of Sidney produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also linked him with his great-nephew without seeking corroboration from Milton.







“For Freedom’s Sake”: Sidney, Sidney, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association”

When Charles I borrowed Pamela’s prayer in captivity from the Arcadia for his own devotional exercises during the closing stages of his life, this choice did not remain private, shared only between himself and his God. On the contrary, it featured in Eikon Basilike (1649), the vastly successful book published in the immediate aftermath of Charles’s dignified performances at his trial and execution that helped cement his image as a Christ-like martyr. Refuting the King’s book point by point, Milton in his Eikonoklastes (1649) could scarcely refrain from addressing its indebtedness to the Arcadia. But in any case, Milton seems to have been especially disgusted by this particular aspect of Charles’s posthumous self-fashioning, regarding it as an Achilles heel. More or less creative adaptations of the themes and stories in Sidney’s romance had been legion during the decades after it became widely available in print; but Charles’s borrowing from the Arcadia contrasted with its standard treatment as an inexhaustible source of material (comparable to the legends of classical antiquity). Indeed, Pamela’s status as both fictional and pagan formed the main thrust of Milton’s assault on Charles’s piety: Who would have imagin’d so little feare in him of the true all-seeing Deitie, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost, whose office is to dictat and present our Christian Prayers, so little care of truth in his last words, or honour to himself, or to his Friends, or sense of his afflictions, or of that sad howr which was upon him, as immediately before his death to popp into the hand of that grave Bishop who attended him, for a special Relique of his saintly exercises, a Prayer stol’n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; & that in no serious Book, but the vain amatorious Poem of Sr Philip Sidneys Arcadia; a Book in that kind full of worth and witt, but



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Milton avoids crude mockery of Charles’s “sad howr,” accusing him instead of not taking it seriously himself. But this approach entails bruising treatment of Sidney too. Milton makes little attempt not to throw the baby out with the bathwater: strong condemnations sandwich the saving caveat about the Arcadia’s “kind,” the second of which forbids its reading “at any time,” except under otherwise unspecified conditions of “good caution.” Though Merritt Hughes’s commentary to the edition followed describes Milton as having “spotted” Charles’s “source in Sidney’s Arcadia,” the sleuthing might not have been his own (159). “Milton may have steeped himself in chivalrous romance, as he claims in the Apology,” notes James Turner, “but neither in the divorce tracts nor in the political tirades do we hear anything of the gentle sway of beauty, the courtly pretence that the realms of male and female power are absolute and complementary.”2 Moreover, Milton shows no further inclination to soften his criticism of the Arcadia itself in subsequently explaining how Charles “was forc’d to robb Sr. Philip and his Captive Shepherdess of thir Heathen orisons” (366). Though “thir” alone makes a revealing point, Milton adopts an even more striking attitude when speculating: he certainly whose mind could serve him to seek a Christian prayer out of a Pagan Legend, and assume it for his own, might gather up the rest God knows from whence; one perhaps out of the French Astræa, another out of the Spanish Diana; Amadis and Palmerin could hardly scape him. Such a person we may be sure had it not in him to make a prayer of his own, or at least would excuse himself the paines and cost of his invention, so long as such sweet rapsodies of Heathenism and Knighterrantry could yeild him prayers. How dishonourable then, and how unworthy of a Christian King were these ignoble shifts to seem holy and to get a Saintship among the ignorant and wretched people; to draw them by this deception, worse then all his former injuries, to go a whooring after him. (366–67).

These words accuse Charles of laziness and lack of discrimination, but their charge partly depends on esteeming the Arcadia not more “worthy” in its “kind” than the other popular romances listed. The recognition of all such “rapsodies” as “sweet” registers not their excellence but their capacity, directly and indirectly, to tempt readers “to go a whooring” after false idols. So blunt an assessment of the Arcadia disturbs modern scholars expecting more evidence of like-mindedness between Milton and Sidney. Hughes



among religious thoughts, and duties not worthy to be nam’d; nor to be read at any time without good caution; much less in time of trouble and affliction to be a Christians Prayer-Book.1

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perhaps partly due to the fact that Pamela’s prayer in captivity, which stands so strangely at the head of Charles’ prayers on the eve of his execution in the Eikon, ends in the original with a passionate plea for God’s mercy on her lover. Indeed, the substitution of Charles’ closing invocation of Christ for Pamela’s plea for Musidorus is the only important difference between the version of the prayer in the Eikon and that in the Arcadia. In calling Sidney’s romance amatorious Milton was also echoing the opinion of the courtly dramatists who borrowed its characters and parts of its plot. (362 n.38)

But Milton might also be defended as “echoing” in addition Sidney’s own “opinion” of the Arcadia as expressed in the language of its dedication to his sister, where he characterizes “this idle worke of mine” as “but a trifle, and that triflinglie handled,” and warranting this injunction: “Read it then at your idle tymes, and the follyes your good judgement will finde in it, blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuffe, then, as in an Haberdashers shoppe, glasses, or feathers, you will continue to love the writer, who doth excedinglie love you.”3 Milton could choose to take at face value Sidney’s professed disregard for his romance, taking its “idle” characterization as not itself “idle.” On the other hand, Andrew Weiner classifies Sidney’s Defence as a “distinctly Protestant theory of poetry,” therefore assuming it should overlap with Milton’s equivalent.4 The points of divergence Weiner documents prove so numerous, however, as to warrant this conclusion: “That Milton did not follow directly in Sidney’s footsteps should not lead us to undervalue Sidney’s usefulness to him” (199). Such a roundabout justification for overrating paths not taken responds to an additional frustration that Weiner voices: the scant “critical attention” devoted to “Milton’s literary relations with Sidney” (195). “This neglect . . . is largely the result of Milton’s reference . . . to that ‘vain amatorious Poem,’ ” Weiner supposes, emphasizing: “the attack is directed at the King and not at Sidney, and Milton goes on to qualify his description of the Arcadia even at the risk of weakening his argument” (195). But Milton ensured that no such enfeeblement occurred by giving scarcely any credit to Sidney’s romance. Hughes and Weiner fail to take into account the very statement whose indirect influence their disquiet reflects: Milton’s own expression of solidarity with Sidney on ideological grounds. Aptly published in 1652, the centenary of Sidney’s birth, Milton’s Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda



concedes that Milton’s “attack” on Sidney’s romance “now . . . seems bigoted,” but proposes “we . . . remember that to him and to many other Independents all set forms of prayer were genuinely anathema” (159). “This famous literary misjudgment” Hughes further extenuates as


identifies as venerable guardians of “libertatem nostram” (“our liberty”) certain figures “vel amicitiâ vel famâ mihi cognitos” (“known to me either through friendship or by report”), among them “Sidneium (quod ego illustre nomen nostris semper ad hæsisse partibus lætor)” (“Sidney (which glorious name I rejoice has ever been loyal to our side”)) (4.1: 678, 676, 677).5 In his commentary to the edition followed for the English version of these words, Donald Roberts makes the oddly muted suggestion that “Milton’s phrase, ‘glorious name,’ may be a remembrance of Sir Philip Sidney” (4.1: 677 n.524). No other interpretation seems possible, however, for a claim substantially meriting Peter Karsten’s observation: “When John Milton singled out Algernon for praise in his Second Defence of the English People, he seemed to have more to say about the name Sydney . . . than he did of Algernon himself.”6 Strategically vague, Milton does not specify what the earlier Sidney did commensurate with the later one’s service in Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Rather, he gains the immediate rhetorical advantage of harping on their shared “nomen” at a time when Algernon Sidney could equally impart and receive luster as linked with his great-uncle: a recent parliamentarian as yet little known via “famâ” and the far more “illustre” author of a “vain amatorious Poem” had need of a boost that each could supply the other. Such an opportunistic coupling would not have outlived its occasion if Milton’s immense authority had not helped establish the more fundamental pairing of “libertatem nostram” and “nostris . . . partibus” as a leading paradigm in subsequent interpretations of the British Civil Wars, no internecine conflicts but patriotic rejections of alien values such as the Norman Yoke had once imposed. If the mid-seventeenth-century threat to native freedom came from some mixture of Popish tyranny and continental absolutism, then the hero of Zutphen fought the same foe as his great-nephew on a different and earlier front. According to this line of thought, parliamentarians, Protestants, and patriots became readily elided groupings, with predictably confusing results. Milton would seem less guilty of a “misjudgment” in condemning the Arcadia and less perverse in disregarding its author’s “footsteps” if his own conception of “nostris . . . partibus” had not encompassed both men and acquired virtually self-evident validity. Michael Finlayson thus reports as widespread the “assumption that Englishmen have an innate, almost genetic feeling for liberty quite unlike other peoples.’ ”7 Milton died almost a decade prior to Algernon Sidney’s execution for his supposed complicity in the Rye House Plot (1683), an abortive scheme to assassinate Charles II along with his brother, heir to the throne. Condemned not for actions he had contemplated or undertaken but for ideas about government expressed in his unpublished writings, this Sidney won posthumous acclaim as a republican martyr and harbinger of the Glorious



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Revolution—the bloodless deposition of James II (1688). Tied to so “illustre” a legacy, his “nomen” became equal or superior to his great-uncle’s, for either man now qualified as the Sidney. Moreover, whereas the republican martyr had doubled or rendered moot his original credentials as a custodian of “libertatem nostram,” the hero of Zutphen had to ride correspondingly longer coattails to remain his comrade as ideologically significant on much the same terms. James Thomson dramatizes with particular clarity the chronological and other challenges involved here. Having published Summer as a separate poem three years beforehand, Thomson expanded its catalog of English worthies when revising it for his first collected edition of The Seasons (1730). These heroes now included Sir Philip and Algernon Sidney, plus William, Lord Russell (another republican martyr executed for suspected involvement in the Rye House Plot), and John Hampden, who challenged the legitimacy of Ship Money during the 1630s and lost his life on the battlefield in the next decade at the head of a parliamentarian cavalry regiment. This leading opponent of Charles I precedes not only Russell but also both Sidneys in lines addressed to England: A HAMBDEN thine, of unsubmitting soul; Who stem’d the torrent of a downward age, To slavery prone; and bad thee rise again, In all thy native pomp of FREEDOM fierce. Nor can the muse the gallant SIDNEY pass, The plume of war! with every laurel crown’d, The lover’s myrtle, and the poet’s bay. Nor him of later name, firm to the cause Of LIBERTY, her rough determin’d friend, The BRITISH BRUTUS; whose united blood With, RUSSEL, thine, thou patriot wise, and calm, Stain’d the sad annals of a giddy reign; Aiming at lawless power, tho’ meanly sunk In loose inglorious sloth.8

Though such a departure from historical order lets Thomson connect the Sidneys through their one “name,” the doubled “Nor” construction proves merely additive: “later” in itself makes no point other than that they belonged to different generations. Keeping his customary stature as highly versatile figure, Sir Philip therefore gains no further relevance when thus yoked with Algernon Sidney; rather, he disturbs the pattern linking Hampden with two republican martyrs to form a trio of heroes required by their respective times: the “downward age” of Charles I (“To slavery prone”) and the “giddy reign” of his son (“Aiming at lawless power”).




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Nor can the muse the gallant Sidney pass, The plume of war! with early laurels crowned, The lover’s myrtle and the poet’s bay. A Hampden too is thine, illustrious land! Wise, strenuous, firm, of unsubmitting soul, Who stemmed the torrent of a downward age To slavery prone, and bade thee rise again, In all thy native pomp of freedom bold.9

The phrase “early laurels” replaces “every laurel,” conveying Sir Philip Sidney’s youth at his death, without detracting from the variety of his accomplishments, more impressive for occupying so brief a span. Hampden’s personal characteristics now receive greater emphasis, with “unsubmitting” augmented by “Wise,” “strenuous,” and “firm.” The bloodshed of the Civil Wars also undergoes some modification, as justified by a “bold” rather than “fierce” commitment to “freedom.” But with no “name” now available for rapid transition to the “later” Sidney, Thomson required four new lines to get to his next worthy (“Russel” in any case), whose tempered blood, With calmest cheerfulness for thee resigned, Stained the sad annals of a giddy reign Aiming at lawless power, though meanly sunk In loose inglorious luxury. With him His friend, the British Cassius, fearless bled. (1523–28)

No longer at least first among equals, Algernon Sidney dwindles to a virtual afterthought; he also loses the implied moral superiority originally attributed to him as “BRUTUS” rather than “Cassius,” an initial designation that made more sense as well by invoking the nickname he had acquired from performing that role in a production of Julius Caesar. Martin Garrett speculatively identifies Thomson’s treatment of Sir Philip Sidney as “an early instance of radicalism by association with his great-nephew.”10 But Sir Philip at no stage sheds his complex profile as an all-rounder, never comes closer to Algernon than when juxtaposed with him on the basis of “name” alone, and moves further away in the wake of subsequent revisions. Moreover, though Tory readers might have regarded Thomson’s Whig perspective on British history as a species of “radicalism,” his arbitrary handling of Roman archetypes in seeming to invoke and



Re-revising this portion of Summer for his final collected edition of The Seasons (1744–46), Thomson changed some of his wording and reasserted chronological sequence:

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then deny Algernon Sidney’s credentials as “the BRITISH BRUTUS” deviates from the partisan tradition he himself espouses: this change achieves nothing by way of compensation, such as a better integration of the earlier Sidney as some sort of parliamentarian or republican precursor. On the other hand, later and more certain proponents of “radicalism by association” have undeniably exploited the doubly loose parameters of an interpretative tradition potentially as free in both its mode of “association” and definition of “radicalism,” relating Sir Philip Sidney not only with his great-nephew but also with such figures as Prince Henry and Fulke Greville by focusing on an allegedly select group of militant or extreme Protestants deemed exceptionally “strenuous,” “firm,” or “unsubmitting.” Though Thomson’s impressionistic terminology anticipates this more modern tradition, his lines either make no attempt or simply fail to achieve any “radicalism” on Sir Philip Sidney’s behalf. But his “association” of historical figures at least tries to honor that figure’s versatility. By contrast, Thomson’s immediate successors in cataloguing English worthies sometimes invoke a single “nomen” common to both Sidneys without explaining what makes it “illustre.” Replicating the effect of his indifferent assignation of Roman archetypes, they create cases of mistakable identity through an organizational “association” too free to express any coherent vision, much less one imparting “radicalism.” William Mason produced in Isis (1748) an “Elegy,” later a “Monologue,” exhorting readers to “See! the firm leaders of my patriot line,/See! Sidney, Raleigh, Hampden, Somers shine.”11 Responding to this poem the next year, Thomas Warton the younger’s Triumph of Isis included the sentiment “Lo! then the leaders of thy patriot line/Hampden, and Hooker, Hyde, and Sidney shine,” according to the version quoted by Thomas Zouch.12 The edition of Richard Mant nonetheless excludes this Sidney from its equivalent passage (“Lo! these the leaders of thy patriot line,/A Raleigh, Hampden, and a Somers shine”), and furthermore remarks of Mason’s inspiration of this couplet: “I believe that Algernon Sidney, who appears to have been designed in this place, was not a member of the University of Oxford.”13 Mant himself attaches no importance to these alternative readings, dismissing the “several variations in the poem” as “in general too trifling to require any particular notice” (3 n.) Observing that a 1779 visitor to Mason’s home at Aston in Yorkshire “declared it ‘like a bower in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,’ ” John Draper nonetheless minimizes the significance of any link between the Elizabethan man of letters and his eighteenth-century counterpart by similarly stressing the ephemeral character of Isis itself: “For all its notoriety, the poem was merely occasional and so had no lasting interest. Indeed, out of compliment to Warton, Mason regularly omitted it from his Poems.”14 As trivial as such poetic exchanges





might now seem, however, they commemorate a time when the reputations of Sir Philip and Algernon Sidney had become so fluid that either man or both could occupy the same historical niche. To all appearances, Mason’s “patriot line” moves chronologically, from a pair of Elizabethans to Hampden, and then to John Somers, first Baron Somers, identified in Mant’s commentary as a “celebrated Lord Chancellor” and “native of Worcester, 1652” (20 n.198). One version of Warton’s “patriot line” retains this chronological order, presumably excluding Sir Philip rather than Algernon Sidney. But the alternative reading that includes one Sidney drops both Raleigh and Somers, and deviates from historical sequence in passing from Hampden back to the Elizabethan Hooker, then forward again to Hyde (presumably Edward, earl of Clarendon), and then either back again to another Elizabethan (Sir Philip) or forward again to Algernon. Though the introduction to the edition of Mason followed sees Isis as “directed chiefly against the supposed Jacobitism of Oxford,” and thus makes Algernon the more relevant Sidney for both this author and Warton as well, Sir Philip had opposed Roman Catholicism at the head of what might appear a long and unbroken tradition (4). But where the alma mater comes into play, Mant seems to raise a serious objection against Algernon as the Sidney invoked by either Mason or Warton. In a letter he wrote his brother, Thomas (October, 1749), Joseph Warton stressed of The Triumph: “you (must) make these Lines clearer just after you mention Chaucer, with regard to the famous Men of each profession”; the editor reprinting these words adds his own clarification that the postmedieval worthies encompass Hampden, Hooker, and Clarendon (as identified), together with Joseph Addison, John Locke, Henry Hammond, and Sir Philip Sidney.15 In that Sidney’s case, however, his modern biographers have no easy solution to the puzzle that Cambridge as well as Oxford claimed him; but his attendance at Oxford lies beyond dispute. Though Malcolm William Wallace reports that “more uncritical” commentators “accept the tradition” that Sidney attended not only Oxford but also Cambridge, whereas “the more cautious . . . reject it,” he himself weighs in with “contemporary evidence . . . that leaves no reasonable doubt on the question.”16 Like Mason and Warton the younger, Keats could propose a “patriot line” involving a Sidney whose identity remains open to conjecture. His sonnet beginning “O! how I love” (ca. 1816) evokes pleasing sights and thoughts prompted by “a fair summer’s eve,” including ones that “warm my breast with patriotic lore,/Musing on Milton’s fate—on Sidney’s bier—/ Till their stern forms before my mind arise.” But these commanding figures awaken only a melancholy, “often dropping a delicious tear,/When some melodious sorrow spells mine eyes,” and Keats gives no indication which



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Sidney he has in mind.17 The commentary to the edition followed pegs the “reference” as “probably to Algernon Sidney . . . though possibly to Sir Philip Sidney” (543 n.10). Both Sidneys feature alike as admired figures conjoined with Milton in Keats’s correspondence. Writing to George and Georgiana Keats (October 1818), their kinsman judged that Ben Franklin and George Washington “are great Men doubtless but how are they to be compared to those our countrey men Milton and the two Sidneys.” Keats does not explain why these compatriots form a trio, however, because his emphasis falls on the Americans’ defects: “they are not sublime Man—the humanity of the United States can never reach the sublime.”18 Clarence DeWitt Thorpe’s edition of Keats gives for his sonnet the spelling “Sydney’s,” often a preferred nineteenth-century alternative in Sir Philip’s case, and “the two Sidneys” in its version of the letter, which makes sense on the principle that the double-y spelling belongs exclusively to an antiqued Sir Philip.19 But no Sidneys, however spelled, feature in Thorpe’s index. Noting confusions of various Sidneys/Sydneys (72–73), Karsten himself represents a twentieth-century author for whom all Sidneys are Sydneys (255). No such ambiguity surrounds the identity of the central figure among Shelley’s “inheritors of unfulfilled renown” in Adonais (1821), his elegy for Keats: Chatterton Rose pale, his solemn agony had not Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought And as he fell and as he lived and loved Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved.20

In his essay “Sir Philip Sidney” (1886), Edmund Gosse nonetheless wondered whether anyone had entertained this notion: “that the Sidney intended is Algernon Sidney, the republican to whom, from Shelley’s point of view, the words would be almost as applicable.” But Gosse alone (and indirectly) has gone on record as raising any such possibility, and even that response stemmed incoherently from his impatience with a portrayal verging “not only upon the fabulous, but even upon the namby-pamby,” as if such content could be transformed merely by altering “the Sidney intended.”21 Not Algernon but Sir Philip “fell” at a sufficiently young age to resemble the short-lived Chatterton, Lucan, and Keats. A letter Shelley addressed to William Godwin in the summer of 1820 puts to an unusual application Greville’s anecdote about his friend’s death, while misremembering it in the standard way: “Sir Philip Sidney when dying, & consumed





with thirst gave the helmet of water which was brought to him to the wounded soldier who stood beside him. It would not have been generosity but folly had he poured it on the ground, as you would that I should the wrecks of my once prosperous fortune.”22 In his commentary to the edition followed, Anthony Knerr therefore seems justified in similarly misremembering Greville’s words to explain how Shelley recalls the hero of Zutphen, who “chivalrously gave his drink of water to a dying soldier, while desperately wounded himself ” (96 n.401–4). Even so, Gosse raises important questions about the scope of Shelley’s lines: to what extent does their central figure embody ideological significance, and of what sort? Assuming that this content ought to express Shelley’s “point of view” as an attested radical, Gosse dismisses the earlier Sidney as incapable of advancing any such agenda without explaining the better credentials of a mere “republican.” Algernon Sidney “was no radical democrat,” Karsten stresses: “When he wanted to describe the need for selfprotection, he used the analogy of a man protecting his deer park” (19). Commentators certain that Sir Philip must be “the Sidney intended” have nonetheless rated Shelley’s “Spirit without spot” far more favorably than Gosse did because they share his expectation without being disappointed in it: that “radicalism by association” should play some role in this portion of Adonais. “The young, dead poets who greet Keats were chosen with particular appropriateness,” according to Kenneth Neill Cameron: “Sidney, who fought against the conservative critics of his day in his Defence of Poetry; Chatterton, who like Keats died young and in neglect; and Lucan, who was executed at the age of twenty-six for joining a conspiracy against the tyrant Nero.”23 But compared with Lucan, who committed suicide to forestall being thus “executed,” Sidney appears a rather lightweight hero if mere “conservative critics” were his enemies (and not just Keats’s nemeses), and Chatterton’s lack of any ideological significance only underscores how little “appropriateness” of this kind governs a pantheon in which he alone proves “like Keats.” “These poets and others struggled against reaction and corruption in ages past,” Knerr generalizes of Shelley’s “inheritors” (100 n.430): if such a formulation evokes Sidney’s opposition to Spanish rule in the Netherlands, it aligns him more closely with Lucan, but at a level of abstraction still not capable of accommodating Chatterton as an ideologically significant figure. Even if some combination of “reaction,” “corruption,” and “conservative critics” drove Chatterton to suicide, how he “fought” or “struggled” would still need explaining. Seeking to bridge the gulf dividing the apolitical Keats and Chatterton from two poets with some claim to ideological significance, attempts to parse Shelley’s “inheritors” stanza as incorporating some sort of “radicalism by association” obscure the same pairs’ sharply differing credentials



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as representatives of “unfulfilled renown”: neither Lucan nor Sidney “died . . . in neglect.” Not even mentioning the writing of three other prematurely dead poets as grounds for linking them with Keats, Shelley presumably regarded the entire quartet as inherently poetical beings. But whereas Chatterton and Keats qualify as inherently poetical because they died without adequate recognition, Sidney and Lucan do so because their lives were all of a piece. By further contrast, however, Lucan differs from Sidney because only his end certifies his overall integrity—not every act, up to and including that final gesture. Shelley celebrates Sidney’s versatility to stress his uniform purity. Idealized in this way, Sidney displaces the theme of “unfulfilled renown” by fulfilling his own potential so amply as to appear over- rather than underappreciated. Ironically, Gosse rejected such a portrayal as “fabulous” in the same year that Wilde brought out the implications of Shelley’s Sidney by acclaiming Sir Philip as the original fabulist: “the most perfect of all his poems was his own life.”24 At the opposite extreme from Shelley and Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning focuses exclusively on Sidney as an author of texts. She further confines his accomplishments to the literary realm by contrasting his own legacy with that of his great-nephew. In her “Picture Gallery at Penshurst” (1833), she thus relates how There, I beheld the Sidneys: —he, who bled Freely for freedom’s sake, bore gallantly His soul upon his brow; —he, whose lute said Sweet music to the land, meseem’d to be Dreaming with that pale face, of love and Arcadie.25

These lines evaluate the Sidneys by different criteria, praising Sir Philip as a figurative lutanist whose contribution “to the land” must sound inconsequential beside Algernon’s death “for freedom’s sake” —a universal ideal, transcending any single nation. Sir Philip’s role in the poem would be less muted if instead of recalling his “Dreaming . . . pale face” Barrett Browning had more directly evoked his “Sweet music”; but she writes Spenserian stanzas, like those of Adonais. Not condemning the Arcadia as a “vain amatorious Poem,” neither does she remember any of its author’s other credentials as a highly versatile figure, including the soldiering that conceivably established him as a figure “who bled /Freely for freedom’s sake.” She thus avoids the structural problems that Thomson encountered when attempting the very different project of assimilating both Sidneys to a single tradition, but denies the complexity rendering that task so difficult. In Sir Philip’s case, but not in Algernon’s, she could have been responding to separate pictures of the one Sidney. Acknowledging as much, Wordsworth





differentiates the men on a subtler basis that trivializes neither, though again without evaluating them from the same historical perspective. In his Convention of Cintra (1809), Wordsworth writes of “a spiritual community binding together the living and the dead; the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages.”26 Acclaiming heroes “in whom talents, genius, and principle are united,” whose “plans” never prove “subservient to considerations of rewards, estate, or title,” he specifies: “Such men in ancient times were Phocion, Epaminondas, and Philopœmen; and such a man was Sir Philip Sidney, of whom it has been said, that he first taught this country the majesty of honest dealing” (256, 256–57). This last point paraphrases Greville, who reported of Sidney: “his very waies in the world, did generally adde reputation to his Prince, and Country, by restoring amongst us the ancient Majestie of noble, and true dealing.”27 Misremembering Greville’s phrasing and converting a recovery of lost “waies” into an innovatory lesson, Wordsworth does not falsify how “generally” Sidney thus set an example, an emphasis likewise apparent in another pronouncement from the same source: “This was it which, I profess, I loved dearly in him, and still shall be glad to honour in the great men of this time . . . that his heart and tongue went both one way, and so with every one that went with the Truth; as knowing no other kindred, partie, or end” (35). Here, Greville nonetheless concedes that Sidney did not monopolize excellence, commending other “great men” who rose above factionalism or self-interest only insofar as he shared their version of “the Truth.” By contrast, Wordsworth maintained a more purely disinterested perspective in extolling virtuous conduct, for he harbored no nostalgia for any particular “this time,” even when narrowing his focus at least somewhat to catalogue England’s “long train of deliverers and defenders, her Alfred, her Sidneys, and her Milton; whose voice yet speaketh for our reproach; and whose actions survive in memory to confound us, or to redeem!” (288). Such syntax could mean that all of those worthies bequeathed one “voice” and uniform “actions” to posterity or that Milton alone could establish so lasting a legacy. Both alternatives have merit: the perception that such disparate Englishmen could unite in “voice” and “actions” augments Milton’s statement about the role of “nostris . . . partibus” in sustaining “libertatem nostram” by adding Alfred, but in doing so reveals how thoroughly Wordsworth had absorbed the single “voice” whose ego had come most powerfully to define the nature of nos. But Wordsworth differed from Milton in producing two categories of “nostris . . . partibus”: the larger encompasses Milton himself, both Sidneys, and other Englishmen besides, including honorary ones (Phocion et al.); the smaller excludes the earlier Sidney and any compatriots not closely linked with Milton and the later Sidney.



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Cintra gives particular attention to the hero of Zutphen because of his perceived relevance to Wordsworth’s immediate concern, the Peninsular War: “Among the most illustrious of that fraternity, whose encouragement we participate, is an Englishman who sacrificed his life in devotion to a cause bearing a stronger likeness to this than any recorded in history” (339). The affinity thus noted summons an opponent of Spanish rule in the Netherlands to aid guerillas resisting Napoleon’s occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. To that extent, it robs him of the genius loci role he plays in Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps (ca. 1791–92), a poem explaining how “Zutphen’s plain,” as the location “Where bleeding Sidney from the cup retired,” exemplifies “What high resolves exalt the tenderest thought/Of him whom passion rivets to the spot,” in accordance with this logic: who, that walks where men of ancient days Have wrought with godlike arm the deeds of praise, Feels not the spirit of the place control, Or rouse and agitate his labouring soul?28

This contrast between the tract and the poem illustrates Wordsworth’s paradoxical willingness to deracinate Sir Philip Sidney when rooting him as firmly as possible in “principle.” Grouping “The later Sidney” with James Harrington, Andrew Marvell, Sir Henry Vane, “and others who called Milton friend,” Wordsworth’s sonnet “Great men have been among us” (ca. 1602) takes a very different approach, depicting not only a pantheon but also an intimate coterie of like-minded contemporaries occupying a particular time and place (3, 4). As this poem demonstrates, “amicitiâ” involving Milton now certified the merit of some figures not only from his own perspective but also objectively. By contrast, Wordsworth could only be referring to Sir Philip (as surrounding matter corroborates) when he registers this very different “association” in his Essays upon Epitaphs (ca. 1810): “There were many points in which the case of Sidney resembled that of Charles 1st ” (2: 71). As an admirer of those “who called Milton friend,” Wordsworth immediately cautions that Sir Philip “was a Sovereign but of a nobler kind—a Sovereign in the hearts of men” (71); he would not, however, have attempted any such comparison on behalf of Algernon Sidney, a hero equally animated by “principle” but incapable of so far transcending his specific historical niche. Wordsworth’s different categories of heroes probably influenced and therefore clarify Keats’s otherwise vague remarks in his sonnet and letter. The smaller grouping, defined by “association” with Milton, establishes “Sidney’s bier” as Algernon’s, and imparts no “radicalism” because





it views like-minded contemporaries much as they viewed themselves; the larger one encompasses “Milton and the two Sidneys” because such implicitly “sublime” figures represent “a spiritual community” whose “association” only involves “radicalism” in the sense that its otherwise heterogeneous members all share roots in one common soil—the collective high-mindedness authenticating their miscellaneous acts as equally virtuous. On the other hand, Markham Peacock includes “Great men have been among us” in a compilation-entry recording Wordsworth’s opinions not of “The later Sidney” but of Sir Philip, as if his writing about either or both of these men featured no greater precision than Keats’s.29 Enlisting the earlier Sidney among “those who called Milton friend,” Peacock’s error rewrites Wordsworth’s sonnet as an adaptation of Defensio Secunda assigning the one “nomen” to a single master spirit indistinguishably embodied as either Algernon or Sir Philip. But such confusion, however unconsciously revealing, only assumes significance up to a point. This caveat explains the particular value of Charles Lamb’s perverse but dogged attempt to achieve the same result by collapsing Wordsworth’s different pantheons, so that Sir Philip and Algernon Sidney enshrine eternal “principle” at the highest level of abstraction while occupying a specific historical framework as like-minded compatriots and virtual contemporaries. Nonetheless, only the earlier Sidney proves capable in this vision of moving freely through time and space, a significant restriction prompting Lamb to complete the task that Thomson had scarcely begun, if at all: to achieve on Sir Philip’s behalf “radicalism by association with his great-nephew.” In his essay recommending “Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney” (1823), Lamb had no need to promote a form triumphantly revived by the Romantic poets after its prolonged neglect during most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather, he sought to resurrect a sonneteer whose reputation as an author had not benefited much from the Romantics’ generally high regard for Elizabethan literature. Moreover, the sonneteers of the early nineteenth century had drawn their inspiration from Milton’s occasional sonnets on themes both public and personal rather than from the Elizabethans’ Petrarchan sequences. The Romantic poets wrote as many sonnets as any of their Elizabethan forebears, and thus far more than Milton had written; but in doing so, they thus imitated his practice on a much larger scale. Lamb therefore felt obliged to begin his essay by addressing Sidney’s standing in relation to Milton. Though Sidney’s sonnets rank “among the very best of their sort” for Lamb, he cautions, “I speak of the best of them,” and even these “fall below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high yet modest spirit of selfapproval, of Milton, in his compositions of a similar structure.”30 This concession prefaces another: “They are in truth what Milton, censuring



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the Arcadia, says of that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or application), ‘vain and amatorious’ enough, yet the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true of the romance) may be ‘full of worth and wit’ ” (189–90). Though Lamb thus turns to Sidney’s advantage an initially unfavorable point of comparison, this link with Eikonoklastes merely leads to a further disparity: the earlier poet’s sonnets “savour of the Courtier, it must be allowed, and not of the Commonwealthsman” (190). Having backed himself into a seemingly indefensible position, Lamb goes on the offensive: But Milton was a Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed the Arcades. When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him; and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney. (190)

Though “the order of time” primarily signifies chronological sequence and acknowledges that “the national struggle” of the Civil Wars occurred at an earlier period than the constitutional “crisis” leading up to James II’s deposition, Lamb’s phrase also treats history as a moral force in human affairs, issuing summonses heeded by those sufficiently dutiful to recognize when “vanities” must be laid aside. This further dimension of meaning becomes still clearer when Lamb makes the otherwise rather feeble admission that, in Sir Philip Sidney’s case, “The times did not call him to the scaffold” (190). Above all, however, Lamb’s position rests on a logic equally unassailable when entirely reversed, for “reason” as such cannot determine anything significant about how he “should” or “should not have acted” under circumstances in which he only could not “have acted.” Triumphantly reinventing the wheel, Lamb claims that Algernon Sidney’s ideological commitments as a republican martyr establish Sir Philip as a poet on an equal footing with Milton the “Commonwealthsman,” who as a “Commonwealthsman” had established Sir Philip as a political figure on an equal footing with Algernon the parliamentarian. Lamb in his own era also received no “call . . . to the scaffold”: he died from an acute inflammatory skin disease occasioned by a cut to the face he incurred after a fall. This sad end nonetheless furnished oblique grounds for the Reverend Henry Francis Cary to write these “Lines to the Memory of Charles Lamb” (ca. 1834): So should it be, my gentle friend; Thy leaf last closed at Sydney’s end.




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Lamb had borrowed this author’s copy of Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum (1675); unable, when dying, to return it himself, he instructed a friend to take it back to its owner, who found “the leaf folded down at the account of Sir Philip Sidney.” Cary continues with a joke about Lamb’s reputation as a heavy drinker: “Nay, were it wine, filled to the brim,/Thou hadst look’d hard, but given, like him.” Cary concludes by portraying Lamb as enjoying an apotheosis similar to that envisioned by Spenser for Sidney, though in this case poets luxuriating in the afterlife greet as a friend a literary critic rather than a fellow singer: And art thou mingled then among Those famous sons of ancient song? And do they gather round, and praise Thy relish of their nobler lays?

Though Cary combines humor with his sentimental exploitation of the mere coincidence that Lamb died in possession of a book he had earmarked for reasons unknown, the author of “Some Sonnets” took Sidney very seriously, accenting not the hero of Zutphen but the latent hero of a later generation.31 Because he reverses the chronological flow of inheritance, Lamb goes even further than the sort of literary critic mocked in Edward Young’s Satire III (1725): one taking cues from “An author’s principles, or parentage;/Since his great ancestors in Flanders fell,/The poem doubtless must be written well.”32 Zouch made no such attempt to bring aesthetics into the equation, but also assumed that political convictions should run along bloodlines, though from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum and in relation to Algernon’s brother: “Is it not to be deeply lamented, that Philip Sidney, the third Earl of Leicester, of the name of Sidney, and a lineal descendant of this nobleman, should degrade his high birth by engaging in the rebellion against his lawful sovereign?” (175). Because Algernon Sidney himself fought against Charles I in the Civil Wars, he would be equally liable to the same objection. Garrett connects Lamb’s views with those of an “unnamed reviewer” in the Annual Review (1809) who “counters Zouch’s protest at the 3rd Earl of Leicester’s support for regicides” because both that Sidney and Algernon “acted ‘as Sir Philip would himself have done’ ” (299). This dialogue of the deaf illustrates how competing Tory and Whig perspectives on British history each insisted on the ideological significance of Sir Philip Sidney’s bloodline. Either way, an appeal to pedigree ignores how family



Thou, too, like Sydney, wouldst have given The water, thirsting and near heaven.

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members even of the same generation often diverge in their political views, and how changing times necessarily preclude any clan’s adherence to eternal values. But whereas the absurdity of Zouch’s Tory perspective on Sir Philip Sidney’s bloodline became apparent long ago, the Whig perspective enjoys a vogue to this day, as upheld by others writing in the same tradition as Lamb and the “unnamed reviewer.” Resisting “radicalism by association” as best he can, A. N. Wilson still assumes that Algernon Sidney’s ideological choices retrospectively explain his great-uncle’s future conduct: Milton was to join forces with the side that killed King Charles I. So, for instance, was Algernon Sidney; so, had he been alive, if such guesses are worth anything, would Sir Philip Sidney. But we do not, for that reason, suppose Arcadia to be infiltrated from “the radical underground”. Until he went to Italy Milton was training himself, in a rather old-fashioned way, to be a great poet, in much the same way that Sidney had done.33

Wilson not only doubts the significance of “the radical underground” as an influence on the Arcadia but also implies a Zouch-like distaste for the impact it would have exerted: a stealthy incursion presumably serving to “degrade” its pristine host. Moreover, whereas Lamb had rescued Sidney from his own courtliness by invoking Milton’s, Wilson stresses the earlier poet’s distance from “the radical underground” so that the later one might not be stranded there from his very conception. Wilson also shows far greater willingness than other makers of “guesses” to admit that speculative estimates of people’s conduct in periods they never lived to see might not be “worth anything.” Consciously or unconsciously, too, Wilson limits “radicalism by association” when ignoring Algernon Sidney’s conduct during the later seventeenth century: he thus dodges the issue of whether Sir Philip would have become a republican theorist as well. Nonetheless, a science-fiction scenario remains irresistible, albeit in a rather half-hearted form: “had he been alive” during the Civil Wars, Sir Philip Sidney would have been too old to pose much of a threat to anyone. Taking the opposite tack from Wilson, Blair Worden identifies the Arcadia itself as a source of “radical” content transmitted above ground: he classifies “Philip Sidney’s great-nephew, the republican thinker Algernon Sidney,” as one “whose ideas stand in a strong line of descent from his great-uncle’s and often repeat them.”34 Whereas this figurative genealogy pinpoints an intellectual affiliation, the curious emphasis imparted by “strong” hints at a significant weakness: Worden supports his claims by referencing an earlier work of his own, without retracting a single word, though context indicates that he had changed his opinion in the





meantime. Norbrook registers this discrepancy when he draws on that same earlier study of Worden’s “to trace a clear line of succession, both in intellectual and familial kinship, from Sidney and his circle down to the classical republicans of the Commonwealth in the 1650s—down to Sir Philip’s great-nephew Algernon Sidney,” but with this caveat: “Worden has since noted that the Arcadia considers and rejects republican options.”35 Norbrook thus exposes a contradiction undermining Worden’s authority regarding “a strong line of descent,” but still rests his own case on the same foundation: the “intellectual . . . kinship” and the frequent repetition of “ideas” prove “clear” and “strong” features of the historical record, even when only the undeniable link by blood remains. For Norbrook himself, though, blood had power enough to define the ideological choices of prospective in-laws. He thus explains how Edmund Waller aligned himself with the strong political as well as poetic traditions of the Sidney dynasty through a poeticized courtship of Dorothy Sidney (“Sacharissa”), daughter of the earl of Leicester. In political terms, the Sidney circle were associated with “Elizabethan” values in literature and in politics: with support for a vigorous foreign policy and a strongly Protestant ecclesiastical order at home. The Sidneys’ relations with the monarchy had often been strained.36

Even if Waller through marriage could conceivably have related himself to “relations” so “strained,” this last point seems no more than a wild generalization based primarily on a single instance open to question: the degree to which one Sidney offended one monarch for his share in the Alençon controversy. This episode does not strike Norbrook as ancient history from Waller’s point of view because the Sidneys’ “Elizabethan values” prove not only regressive but also progressive, as “political traditions . . . reinforced by the marriage in 1616 of Dorothy’s father to a daughter of Henry Percy, ninth earl of Northumberland,” a patriarch whose “dynasty had a proud tradition of independence from, and if necessary overt resistance to, monarchical power. The brother of ‘Sacharissa’, Algernon Sidney, was to become a leading republican theorist. His father, the tenth earl, if not a republican was at least in favour of a strongly limited monarchy” (73). This favorable conflation of two ideological stances ignores how decisively Hobbes’s contemporaries rejected his hostile presentation of partiality to “limited monarchy” as a slippery slope ending in “republican” views.37 Overlooking Dorothy Sidney’s wealth and beauty (both great) as even additional sources of appeal for Waller, moreover, Norbrook emphasizes “political as well as poetic traditions,” but immediately subsumes



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the second within the first. Such an insistent preoccupation with ideology rather than aesthetics might have led Norbrook to such obvious-seeming evidence as the speeches Waller gave as a member of parliament. Published with his poems as specimens of eloquence, these nonetheless give some idea of his “values . . . in politics.” But Norbrook relies so heavily on evoked “traditions” that he does not even quote from the “poeticized courtship” itself. Though he discusses other poems by Waller (73–78), these include neither direct nor indirect references to any Sidneys. Such an approach doubly distorts the record it claims to represent: not only in his “poeticized courtship” but elsewhere, Waller asserts Sir Philip Sidney’s manifold significance for him. In the process, he establishes an “association” that would endure for about a century and a half and that involved no “radicalism” because it focused on Sacharissa herself and the appeal of a “courtier” aesthetic not yet automatically repugnant, from a biased perspective, as anachronistically linked with royalism during the Civil Wars.







“All We Can”: Sidney, Waller, and the Courtly Love Tradition

Not Sidney’s great-nephew Algernon but a more distant relative proved keen to establish that ancestry as significant, and on poetic rather than ideological grounds. Anne Bradstreet nonetheless tied herself and her subject in knots when writing An Elegie upon That Honourable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney, Who Was Untimely Slaine at the Seige of Zutphon, Anno 1586 (dated 1638), despite this insistence: “Let then, none dis-allow of these my straines,/Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines.”1 As if excusing it, Bradstreet styles the Arcadia “penn’d in . . . youth,” emphasizing: “This was thy shame, O miracle of wit” (149). Addressing him that way, however, she reveals how she partly shares the admiration she rejects as misplaced: “Yet doth thy shame (with all) purchase renown,/What doe thy vertues then? Oh, honours crown!” (149). She herself finds “Divinity within thy Book,” together with “learning, valour, and morality,/Justice, friendship, and kind hospitality,” while insisting on a generalization that she herself undermines as an ambivalent female admirer: severer eyes but scorn thy Story, And modest Maids, and Wives, blush at thy glory; Yet, he’s a beetle head, that cann’t discry A world of treasure, in that rubbish lye. (150)

Bradstreet’s moralizing muddles even her presentation of Sidney’s versatility (“Mars and Minerva did in one agree,/Of Armes, and Arts, thou should’st a patterne be”), for “Mars himself was ta’n by Venus gin” furnishes one answer to her dismayed question: “O Princely Philip, rather Alexander,/Who wert of honours band, the chief Commander./How could that Stella, so confine thy will?” (149, 151). Rosamond Rosenmeier takes a more



5


favorable view of this poem, characterizing it as “enthusiastic,” and thus vitally different from “the significantly revised (and flattened) version . . . as it appeared in Several Poems nearly 40 years later.” “The claims for the poet in 1638 and for her relationship to the famous Sidney are hyperbolic,” Rosenmeier nonetheless acknowledges, but with the further claim that such exaggeration holds interest because “Sidney’s literary reputation by 1638 was in eclipse.”2 But Edmund Waller during the early Caroline period wrote with the conviction that Sidney’s prestige as a poet could not be higher, celebrating the Arcadia as filled with “treasure” unaccompanied by “rubbish.” Justifying his first collection of poems (1645), Waller maintains: “I may defend the attempt I have made upon poetry, by the examples (not to trouble you with history) of many wise and worthy persons of our own times; as Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Fra: Bacon, Cardinal Perron (the ablest of his countrymen), and the former Pope.”3 Mindful that gentlemen, except when young, should not stoop to the frivolity of writing verses, much less having them printed, Waller produces a roll call of literary figures whose social eminence made their precedent irreproachable, however little those other than the first named now command attention for their stature as poets. Peering past his ostensible addressee (Lady Sophia Bertie), Waller thus directs his preface to a broader audience including possibly disapproving men; he writes over her head “to trouble” her “with history,” even when claiming not to do so. Her gender nonetheless proves advantageous, permitting Waller to strike a cavalier pose, disavowing any intention of putting his verses into any wider circulation himself and placing them entirely at her disposal: if you publish them, they become your own; and therefore, as you apprehend the reproach of a wit and a poet, cast them into the fire; or, if they come where green boughs are in the chimney, with the help of your fair friends (for thus bound, it will be too stubborn a task for your hands alone), tear them in pieces, wherein you shall honour me with the fate of Orpheus; for so his poems, whereof we only hear the fame (not his limbs, as the story would have it), I suppose were scattered by the Thracian dames. (1: ix)

Waller here combines a banteringly erotic note with a rationalizing view of the legendary Orpheus’s dismemberment: even in that remote figure, he could discern the familiar-seeming instance of a poet whose carelessly offered verses could be as carelessly “scattered” by the “dames” they address.4 But Waller’s urbane self-deprecation with respect to his writing also invokes another flattering choice of forebear in Sidney, whose Defence presents its author’s ironic “example of my selfe” as one “who I know not by what mischance in these my not old yeares and idlest times, having slipt



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into the title of a Poet, am provoked to say somthing . . . in the defence of that my unelected vocation.”5 Unlike other poets cultivating a cavalier persona, however, Waller seized an opportunity to relate himself to Sidney through his verse-courtship of that figure’s great-niece, under the intermittently adopted guise of Thyrsis wooing Sacharissa. Even though this project foundered when she married the future first earl of Sunderland instead, Waller by then had already conjoined his own name with her great-uncle’s in an initially lasting way. However, a red herring not of Waller’s own devising has largely obscured this accomplishment. The two poems from his verse-courtship that he titled and professed to have written “At Penshurst” (“Had Sacharissa lived” and “While in the park”) have received the most attention in recent scholarship, but as evidence of their perceived indebtedness to Jonson for writing To Penshurst (1616).6 If Waller had most assiduously wooed in verse some woman other than Sacharissa during the years immediately following the death of his first wife (ca. 1634–39), or if Jonson had chosen some estate other than the Sidneys’ to idealize in founding the genre of the country-house poem, the coincidence that both poets wrote “At” and “To” the same location would never have occurred. To be sure, Waller almost certainly knew the earlier poem: “Had Sacharissa lived” refers to “yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark/Of noble Sidney’s birth” (1: 26–27); To Penshurst likewise has a passage about That taller tree, which of a nut was set, At his great birth, where all the Muses met. There, in the writhed barke, are cut the names Of many a SYLVANE, taken with his flames.7

If Jonson invented the numerous swains thus smitten with Sidney’s love poetry, as seems likely, he possibly recollected how Pamela had inscribed verses on a tree in the Arcadia: “Do not disdaine, ô straight up raised Pine,/That wounding thee, my thoughts in thee I grave.”8 Waller extends the same tradition when his poem instructs some conveniently available “boy” to “carve this passion on the bark,” except that he hands off a bigger writing chore than just “names”: he apparently expects inscription of the entire poem, complete with its thereby redundant injunction (25). In addition to a likely but limited indebtedness to Jonson in any case encompassing the earlier poet as well, therefore, Waller expresses determination to write his way into Sidney’s tree, both despite and because of Sacharissa’s reluctance to admit him by other means. By contrast with the plebeian Jonson who trumpeted his own importance and that of his writing by paradoxically including plays among his collected Workes (1616), Sidney



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on both social and aesthetic grounds offered an obvious role model for gentlemen of letters professedly reluctant to let their verses appear in print, and cultivating a style of self-presentation based on sprezzatura or negligent ease, as Waller seems to have grasped more clearly than his contemporaries, if he did not merely make explicit what they took for granted. That Sacharissa did not welcome Waller’s advances proved beneficial, insofar as “While in the park” could then reproach her in these terms: “Love’s foe professed! why dost thou falsely feign/Thyself a Sidney?” (1: 9–10). In Jack Gilbert’s apt paraphrase, Waller here establishes “the poet’s better claim to Sir Philip Sidney as ancestor.”9 Though Sacharissa’s wealth and beauty made her a desirable prospect for marriage in any case, her descent from a figure so eminent both socially and poetically made her irresistible. Because the vogue for sonnet sequences introduced to England by Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella had passed long before Waller began writing, he felt no temptation to imitate that portion of its author’s achievement. Nor did he share Sidney’s appetite for formal experimentation, whether in quantitative meters or demanding rhyme schemes. Moreover, Thomas Zouch exaggerates when he declares that “Waller’s elegant verses on his Sacharissa . . . are unintelligible to the reader who is not acquainted with Sidney’s Arcadia.”10 But as a literary love affair featuring high-profile members of England’s social elite and unfolding before a knowing audience of permitted eavesdroppers, Waller’s verse-courtship of Sacharissa, conducted in full awareness of her great-uncle’s prestige and precedent, necessarily produced an early Caroline equivalent of Sidney’s sonnet sequence. Though Waller echoed Astrophil’s preferred epithet for Stella (“sweet”) with a sugary soubriquet for his own object of desire, Sacharissa’s real identity thus had even more significance. But whereas Astrophil and Stella possibly records the poet-lover’s frustrated courtship of a married woman surnamed Rich, Waller’s poems to Sacharissa, if not similarly rebuffed, would certainly have wedded him to a Sidney with wealth. On the other hand, Waller so highly rated a direct kinship with Sidney himself that his verses “On My Lady Dorothy Sidney’s Picture” exclaim: “This glorious piece transcends what he could think,/So much his blood is nobler than his ink!” (1: 19–20). Van Dyck here receives no credit for his painting, which tops what Sidney could achieve with his writing in any “one pattern,” while reflecting glory on him as ancestor: “Such was Philoclea, such Musidorus’ flame!/The matchless Sidney, that immortal frame/Of perfect beauty on two pillars placed” (4, 1–3). Not only uniting these “extremes of excellence,” Sacharissa also exceeds them as an anthology equivalent to the entire book in which Sidney placed those literary creations: “All the rich flowers through his Arcadia found,/Amazed we see



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Like divers flowers, whose divers beauties serve To decke the earth with his well-colourde weede, Though each of them, his private forme preserve, Yet joining formes one sight of beautie breede. (50.1–4)

Even when ostensibly diverging from the Arcadia, Waller thus harks back to it. Waller’s familiarity with Sidney’s romance likewise emerges from his verses “To the Servant of a Fair Lady,” which compare his own case (when approaching Sacharissa through an intermediary) with how, in those nations which the sun adore, Some modest Persian, or some weak-eyed Moor, No higher dares advance his dazzled sight, Than to some gilded cloud, which near the light Of their ascending god adorns the east, And, gracèd with his beams, outshines the rest. (1: 7–12)

As Alexander Ward Allison points out, this “image of the sun-worshiper recalls a simile in Sidney’s Arcadia in both content and tone-color.”11 According to the passage at issue, even as the Persians were auncyently wonte to Leave no Rysing Sunne unsaluted, (But as his fayre Beames appeared Cleared unto them woulde the more hartely Rejoyse) laying uppon them a greate foretoken of theyre followinge fortunes: So was there no tyme that Cleophila encountered theyre eyes with her beloved presence, but that yt bredd a kynde of burning Devotyon in them. (4: 205)

In other respects, of course, Cleophila does not resemble Sacharissa at all: she is Pyrocles anagrammatically disguised as an Amazon queen in hopes of gaining easier access to Philoclea. Such ill-advised if not ludicrous behavior has prompted Andrew Weiner to oppose traditional readings of Pyrocles and other characters in Sidney’s Arcadia as heroic, bringing out many ways in which their conduct looks foolish.12 Indirectly supporting Weiner’s thesis, both Sidney and Waller depict abject lovers similarly. Whereas Astrophil confesses at one stage that “now like slave-born Muscovite,/I call it praise to suffer Tyrannie” (2.10–11),



in this one garland bound” (5, 11–12). These lines nonetheless recall both the setting of Sidney’s romance and one of its tropes, as sung by Pamela to Musidorus:


Waller’s poem “Of Love” chooses a more typical ne plus ultra of Asiatic despotism in drawing on the perspective of “some brave Turk” to portray England as a twofold dystopia: the obsequies of Petrarchan worship have so promoted “women (born to be controlled)” that they enjoy a necessarily unavailingly monopoly of power in sexual relations, with the ironic consequence that a harem culture illustrates how “Unwisely we the wiser East/Pity, supposing them oppressed/With tyrants’ force” (1: 27, 13, 21–23).13 But Waller’s lines also serve as a useful gloss on Astrophil and Stella’s account of how “Love borne in Greece, of late fled from his native place,/Forc’d by a tedious proofe, that Turkish hardned hart,/Is no fit marke to pierce with his fine pointed dart” (8.1–3). William Ringler in his commentary to the edition followed merely remarks: “The cruelty of the Turks was proverbial” (463 n.2). Nonetheless, “some brave Turk” might well conclude that Cupid’s new residence in England strikes a significant blow on behalf of the Ottoman empire, better equipped to spread its dominion of “cruelty” because this secret weapon will emasculate one possible source of opposition. Sidney himself implies as much when listing all the issues in international affairs that Astrophil scarcely heeds because of his distracting involvement with Stella: pride of place goes to the question of “Whether the Turkish new-moone minded be/To fill his hornes this yeare on Christian coast” (30.1–2). Such concerns were sufficiently real to supply a basis for dating this sonnet to the summer of 1582, as Ringler notes (470–71). The apparent threat to Christendom posed by the Ottoman empire greatly engaged Sidney’s attention when he thought about foreign policy. Waller likewise took this topic seriously, insofar as he often wrote poetry expressing the unrealistic hope that a new crusade might retrieve the biblical holy lands from Ottoman control. About the translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata that Edward Fairfax published in 1600, Dryden wrote: “many besides my self have heard our famous Waller own, that he deriv’d the Harmony of his Numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloign.” Dryden also reports: “Milton was the Poetical Son of Spencer, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax.”14 For Allison, this genealogy makes Waller stylistically, if not a son of Spenser, at least a grandson—and precisely because of his place in “The line of descent from Spenser to Fairfax to Waller” (33). But Fairfax’s rendering of Tasso’s content also proved influential. Elijah Fenton explained how this same translation prompted Waller’s lifelong “desire that the Christian Princes would enter into a religious confederacy to rescue the holy sepulchre from the hands of the Infidels.”15 Dr. Johnson judged from these words that Waller “in reading Tasso . . . had early imbibed a veneration for the heroes of the Holy War, and a zealous enmity to the Turks, which never left him.”16 But whereas Sidney, like Spenser, wrote as a Protestant whose concept of holy warfare entailed treating Roman Catholics as no less an



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enemy than Muslims, Waller expressed the more ecumenical outlook noted by Gilbert: “a pan-Christian bias against the infidel, which broadened his irenic vision of England generously into a Europe harmonized against the ‘Turk’ ” (106–07). In addition to expressing “zealous enmity,” too, Waller could adopt a more nonchalant attitude, as his comment about “some brave Turk” suggests. Fenton perhaps offers further confirmation on this score when he comments that Waller’s choice of sobriquet for Dorothy Sidney “recalls to mind what is related of the Turks, who in their gallantries think Sucar Birpara, i.e. bit of Sugar, to be the most polite and endearing complement they can use to the ladies” (xxxviii). Inasmuch as Waller could strike a persistent note of “zealous enmity,” but also write in envy of “the wiser East,” and even conceivably be aware of turning Turk in courting “Sucar Birpara,” Sidney’s range of tone might have been equally broad. If not pouring savage indignation from a lacerated heart, a letter Sidney wrote to his mentor, Languet (April 1574), perhaps registers the multiple ironies of a professedly modest proposal: The last part of your lamentation concerns the danger with which the Turk seems to threaten Italy; but what event is more to be desired than this? For first this will remove the rotten limb which has so long corrupted the whole body of the Christian commonwealth, and it will destroy, as you say, “the workshop in which the causes of so many misfortunes are being forged.” In addition, this will force Christian princes to arise, as it were, from their deep sleep, and your Frenchmen, who are now fighting tooth and nail among themselves, to join forces and oppose the common enemy, just like quarrelsome dogs if they should see a wolf ravaging the sheepfold. But greater events will follow. I am quite sure that profligate Italy will so contaminate even the Turks themselves and entangle them in its wicked attractions that they will then fall more readily by their very own weight from such a great height; and, unless I am wrong, we shall see this in our own time.17

In his commentary to the edition followed, James Osborn judges this letter “full of leisurely banter,” but only specifies what he means in this instance: “Sidney entered into ironic banter so thoroughly that at times he adopted an avuncular tone towards his sexagenarian friend” (161). Certainly, the points of contact between them suggest that Waller valued Sidney’s humor, even though that trait has sometimes been minimized, as when Weiner deems the Arcadia comic merely because its characters exhibit “the ‘common errors’ of mankind” (54). By contrast, Jack Stillwater stresses: “the prevalent tone of Astrophel and Stella is one of wit, urbanity, sophistication, and plain good humor.”18 “Of Love” recalls Astrophil’s plaint that “I on my horse, and Love on me doth trie/Our horsmanships,



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Who first the generous steed oppressed, Not kneeling did salute the beast; But with high courage, life, and force, Approaching, tamed the unruly horse. (17–20)

Though “Of Love” in its entirety amplifies Astrophil’s rueful comments that “They love indeed, who quake to say they love” (54.14), and “Desire still on the stilts of feare doth go” (66.8), it also illustrates how any Pyrocles must turn Cleophila: in a context where “every passion, but fond love,/Unto its own redress does move,” lover and beloved must always redress (5–6). “The Story of Phœbus and Daphne, Applied,” Waller’s official conclusion to his verse-courtship of Sacharissa, relates how he parlayed erotic failure into literary success: “acquiring unsought praise,/He catched at love, and filled his arm with bays” (1: 19–20). Here, Waller simplifies the tradition of love poetry he inherited through Sidney from Petrarch, whose Rime Sparse spawned innumerable sonnet sequences composed in their image, influentially establishing his beloved Laura as the simultaneous embodiment of l’auro (gold); l’aura (breath of air, hence inspiration); and lauro (laurel, as in the crowning wreath he wore as Europe’s first poet laureate). Whereas Petrarch’s poetry incorporates various legends recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by subjecting them individually and collectively to a welter of further transformations, so that “myths,” as Robert Durling describes, “succeed one another in a brilliant, surrealistic superimposition of images,” Waller creates an “Applied” version of just one “Story.”19 That particular myth plays a brief role in Sidney’s Arcadia: Musidorus was no less astonished with these wordes of his frende, then yf thincking him in healthe hee had sodenly toulde him that hee felt the panges of deathe oppress him. So that amasedly looking upon him, (eeven as Apollo ys paynted when hee sawe Daphnes sodenly turned into a Lawrell), hee was not able to say one worde. (4: 15)

“The suggestion of the Ovidian Daphne is no more than a parenthetical occasion,” Elizabeth Dipple acknowledges, nonetheless stressing that even “brief mention of Apollo’s astonishment . . . is doubly operative as basic simile and evocative analogue. Primarily, it introduces the idea that the transformations of love are to be seen as comparable to Ovid’s



while by strange worke I prove/A horsman to my horse, a horse to Love” (49.1–3), for Waller draws this analogy to expose the inherent folly of men’s attempts to woo from a self-imposed position of inferiority:

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transmutations.”20 By contrast, “The Story” reveals a trend toward unity of aim and focus—a concentration on lauro above all. This difference needs keeping in perspective, however: Waller worked on a smaller canvas than did Petrarch and Sidney (whether in Astrophil and Stella or the Arcadia), and had no option in response to Sacharissa’s rejection of his suit but to redefine his enterprise as capture of the ostensibly “unsought.” Moreover, Waller also retained in some measure the open-endedness characteristic of the Petrarchan tradition, for he apparently flirted with an alternative conclusion to his verse-courtship of Sacharissa that he did not subsequently excise as incompatible with his “Story . . . Applied.” “While in the park” recounts how “just Apollo,” as “president of verse,” intervenes on Waller’s behalf: Highly concernèd that the muse should bring Damage to one whom he had taught to sing, Thus he advised me: “On yon agèd tree Hang up thy lute, and hie thee to the sea, That there with wonders thy diverted mind Some truce, at least, may with this passion find.” (34, 35–40)

If “yon agèd tree” matches “yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark/Of noble Sidney’s birth,” Apollo advises Waller in the starkest of terms to abandon any prospects of achieving kinship with Sidney through poetry written for Sacharissa: his forsaken “lute” will dangle on its branch as the only surviving token of his endeavor. Such counsel Waller nonetheless accepts when he immediately chides Sacharissa: Ah, cruel nymph! from whom her humble swain Flies for relief unto the raging main, And from the winds and tempests does expect A milder fate than from her cold neglect! (41–44)

In his mock-heroic Battle of the Summer Islands, Waller writes as if he had indeed taken a voyage that made him an eyewitness to “wonders,” except that the poem only transports him to the Bermudas when he indulges “these pleasing dreams” about what he would do if located there: “With the sweet sound of Sacharissa’s name/I’ll make the listening savages grow tame” (1: 1.72, 70–71). In such a fantasy, Waller so far fails to drive Sacharissa out of his memory that dwelling on her makes him forget his narrative purpose: “I am diverted from the promised fight” (73). On the other hand, a short and possibly unfinished poem written “When He Was at Sea,” not published until 1789, seems to place Waller on a



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What hand at once can wield a sword and write Or battle paint, engagèd in the fight? Who will describe a storm must not be there: Passion writes well, neither in love nor fear. (1: 5–8)

Here, Waller disallows even the degree of emotional involvement his Battle connects with the dreamy allure of its Bermudan setting: “No passion there in my free breast should move,/None but the sweet and best of passions, love” (1.66–67). According to Aubrey, however, Waller “wrote verses of the Bermudas . . . upon the information of one who had been there; walking in his fine woods the poetique spirit came upon him.”21 On this report, “Who will describe” a scene need “not be there,” provided that location-dependent transport of another kind can be had: Waller’s own estate inspired him to convert mere secondhand data into poetry of his own. Such an account of Waller’s creativity both does and does not correspond with Aubrey’s description of Sidney’s. Recording both his partiality to his native Wiltshire and his fascination with all of his subjects’ working methods, Aubrey posited Sidney’s residence at his sister’s estate as a crucial influence on his writing there, explaining how My great Uncle Mr Thomas Browne remembred him, and sayd that he was wont, as he was hunting on our pleasant plaines, to take his Table booke out of his pocket, and write downe his notions as they came into his head, when he was writing his Arcadia (which was never finished by him): he made it young, and Diying desired his folies might be burnt. These Romancy Plaines, and Boscages did no doubt conduce to the heightening of Sir Philip Sidneys Phansie. (337)

But Aubrey also explained that Pembroke’s “curious seate of Wilton and the adjacent countrey is an Arcadian place and a Paradise” (220). Thus, the same romance generated by a “Romancy” landscape best characterizes that setting in its “Arcadian” dimension. On this report, “Who will describe” a scene need “not be there” insofar as description generates location, but must be insofar as location generates description. Izaak Walton offers no resolution to this chicken-and-egg conundrum when annotating the continuation of his own Compleat Angler that Charles Cotton produced at his request for a fifth edition (1676). Regarding that coauthor’s Beresford estate in Staffordshire, Walton stressed that “the pleasantness of the river, mountains, and meadows about it, cannot be described, unless Sir Philip Sidney, or Mr. Cotton’s father, were again alive to do it.”22 Though either of those past masters might have had to see Beresford before it 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


journey away from anyone or anything impairing his capacity for extreme authorial detachment:

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could be justly “described,” they might only have had to be “alive” to write about another “Romancy” or “Arcadian” place in a suitably “Romancy” or “Arcadian” way. According to Johnson, when Charles II wondered aloud why he and other readers found Waller’s Panegyric to his kinsman Cromwell (1655) so far superior to his verses To the King, upon His Majesty’s Happy Return (1660), the author of both reminded him: “Poets, Sir, succeed better in fiction than in truth” (271). Waller thus produced his own formulation of a Renaissance commonplace now most familiar from Touchstone’s declaration in As You Like It (1600): “the truest poetry is the most feigning.”23 This paradox had nonetheless received its fullest expression in Sidney’s Defence, which maintains that “of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarcely be a lyer,” because “he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth” (28, 29). Stressing poetry’s innocence of any capacity for deceit (“the Poet never maketh any Circles about your imaginatiõ, to conjure you to beleeve for true, what he writeth”), Sidney also upheld an idealistic conception of its value as a fictive medium: “Nature never set foorth the earth in so rich Tapistry as diverse Poets have done,” for “her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden” (29, 8). Waller’s version of the “truest poetry” paradox marks a contrast on this very point, as nothing if not “brasen.” But Sidney sometimes wrote from a highly “brasen” perspective as well. In Certain Sonnets, he records a quarrel between himself and a beloved questioning his commitment as a lover. Giving her perspective first, he explains how My hand doth not beare witnesse with my hart, She saith, because I make no wofull laies, To paint my living death, and endlesse smart: And so for one that felt god Cupid’s dart, She thinks I leade and live too merrie daies. (17.26–30)

He responds by innocently inquiring, Are Poets then the onely lovers true, Whose hearts are set on measuring a verse: Who thinke themselves well blest, if they renew Some good old dumpe, that Chaucer’s mistresse knew, And use but you for matters to rehearse? (30–35)

Here, Sidney secures the immediate advantage of protesting his sincerity as a lover by denying that of love poets—such as himself—on this occasion and others. In his poem “Of English Verse” (1668), Waller offers a 10.1057/9780230106314 - Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon, Richard Hillyer


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his sense can only boast; The glory of his numbers lost! Years have defaced his matchless strain; And yet he did not sing in vain. (2: 17–20)

In terms of the triumphant conclusion of Waller’s “Story . . . Applied,” Chaucer succeeded because “love . . . filled his arm” when “He catched at . . . bays”: The beauties which adorned that age, The shining subjects of his rage, Hoping they should immortal prove, Rewarded with success his love. (21–24)

Chaucer offers a gloomy precedent because he illustrates the mutability of the English language, and thus the impossibility of constructing from it a monument more lasting than bronze; but he also establishes verses as not “vain,” at least in the short term, provided that “beauties” remain in the dark. This innocence Waller’s disclosure renders doubtful, or would do if Sidney beforehand had not also let the cat out of the bag.24 When Astrophil compares himself to a “slave-borne Muscovite,” he can only record this conclusion to his gradual enthrallment by love because he retains sufficient freedom of thought to observe and describe such a process with complete objectivity, yielding a dissonance between personal involvement and dispassionate reportage comparable to that found everywhere in Waller’s love poetry. But Astrophil’s experiences also occur within the framework of a dialectic announced in the opening line of Sidney’s sonnet sequence: “Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show” (1.1). The parallel phrasing of “in truth” and “in verse” simultaneously links and divorces sincerity and artifice, which throughout the remainder of the sonnet sequence dance into and out of alignment. Sidney’s love poems differ from Waller’s not because they ultimately profess any greater sincerity but because their more ample scope includes a many-sided overview of the relationship between “truth” and “verse” and one involving at least the illusion that their author sometimes valued the “Muse” less as a sponsor of artifice than as an improbably self-effacing source of homely advice: “‘looke in thy heart and write’ ” (1.14). Moreover, Astrophil’s anxiety that “Plato I read for nought” supplies a larger context for Sidney’s dialectic between sincerity and artifice that also plays no part in Waller’s love



revised understanding of how the “good old dumpe” functions in relation to Chaucer, who, so long after his death,

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poetry (21.5). Even more strikingly, these poems lack any equivalent of Astrophil’s notion that “far-fet helpes be such,/As do bewray a want of inward tuch,” especially when those amatory aids lie so pertinently and conveniently close to hand in boosting Waller’s own prestige (15.9–10). Indeed, Waller flaunts his borrowed robes: “While in the park” includes the sweeping admission that “all we can of love, or high desire,/Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney’s fire” (13–14). These notably “brasen” lines also diminish Sidney by treating him as just an author, and “of love” alone: “or high desire” must be padding, not some meaningful alternative (pointing to, say, deeds of arms), for it equally stems from “amorous . . . fire.” On the other hand, Waller here pays apt and witty homage: abject poet-lovers resembling Sidney’s cannot even achieve that status except through the further abjection of depending on his prior example. Sidney thus provides the “smoke,” Waller the mirrors. Richard Helgerson nonetheless takes Waller’s admission entirely at face value, as an expression of groveling inferiority, not only on his own behalf but also on that of his peers. “Whether the relation is of smoke to fire, of subject to monarch, or of adopted son to foster father, it never much flatters the latecomer,” Helgerson remarks, tracing an overall trend toward “filial belatedness” among early Caroline authors who “gratefully accepted the literary tradition bequeathed them,” but lacked any “distinguishing role” of their own, aside from a damning tendency to “trivialize their heritage.”25 The sheer presumptuousness of Waller’s “all we can” nonetheless stems from a trademark gesture differentiating him not only from Sidney but also from his fellow poets, for he often submerges his own point of view in that of a collective, as when so immodestly extending the scope of his own selfdeprecation. Though “Of Love” partly typifies its author’s amatory verses in expressing the perspective of a witty worm, these often express as well the aggrieved shop-foreman pleading on behalf of his constituents. But the formulation “all we can” represents so general a community that it could equally well encompass figures courting women other than Sacharissa, and not necessarily by producing verses of their own. On the other hand, the phrase in question might simply illustrate Waller’s fondness for royal first-person plurals. Uncertainty on this score by no means invalidates the argument that he often adopts a corporate viewpoint: the difficulty of determining in such instances where his own person begins and ends underlines the significance of his camouflaged identity when he writes as a poet seldom standing apart from any group. Allison rightly suggests that Waller “favors” both “we” and its cognate forms because he wishes to create “the fact or supposed fact of a flattering consensus” (13). Earl Miner claims that Waller’s collective viewpoint embraces “the social milieu of Cavalier poetry,” as defined by “those who value Sidney as much



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as he does—men and women of quality in a double sense.” Nonetheless, “since we can also find value in Sidney and answer ethical questions when they are posed to us,” Miner adds, “we too are part of the social world of the Cavaliers.”26 Though Miner thus stresses that “quality” has two meanings, only one of them survives in the parallel term “value” as it shifts from verb to noun: in effect, he withdraws mere “quality” of breeding from “us,” allowing it to vanish without further thought. In a related asymmetry, he bridges “the social world of the Cavaliers” with that of his readers via “ethical questions” not secured as common to both settings. This result looks like the failure of an attempt to prove such “questions” no less vital than “‘social” factors in “the . . . milieu of Cavalier poetry.” But whereas “social” preoccupations significantly outweighed “ethical” ones in Waller’s own conception of Sidney’s “value,” the two categories overlap to some extent in the common ground staked out by John Carey’s summary of the Arcadia and Hugh Richmond’s overall evaluation of Waller’s writing at its best. According to Carey, The way Sidney handles scenes of courtship is quite new in English literature, more subtle than anything that had been tried before, and in his delicately complicated syntax he creates a linguistic equivalent of that subtlety, mitigating, by his play of pattern, the crude force of ordinary language: making language sensitized enough for the task.27

Similarly, Richmond concludes an overview of Waller’s strengths by instancing his much anthologized “Song” beginning “Go, lovely rose!” (1: 1): “No poem can be read without false intonation more infallibly than this one. The control is not only metrically impeccable, it is socially speaking, masterly. Henry James could hardly seek more.”28 As Richmond establishes elsewhere, he sees not only Waller’s version of it but also Stuart lyricism in general as benefiting from an “ideal of gentlemanly literacy advocated by authors like Castiglione, Elyot, and Ascham, and epitomized by Sidney,” which “was crucial to the emergence of such a large body of writing, and its intimate connection with the everyday life of the court.”29 Defined not only by distance from “crude force” but also by proximity to Henry James’s standards, “gentlemanly literacy,” and “the . . . life of the court,” these criteria of excellence banish “ordinary language” but embrace “everyday” usage when sufficiently refined. This concept of propriety partly explains the appeal of Sidney’s writing for Waller, but also that of both authors’ work for many readers during the later seventeenth century and throughout most of the eighteenth, until the first generation of Romantics decisively reevaluated the relationship between literature and “ordinary language.” Though this transformation threatened Sidney’s reputation, it



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damaged Waller’s far more substantially: his alone had also been tied to the rise and fall of neoclassical distichs—end-stopped heroic couplets featuring highly symmetrical phrasing. At its zenith (most of the period from 1660 to 1800), Waller’s acclaim had largely rested on his perceived status as a prosodic innovator for first generating neoclassical distichs about a third of the way through the seventeenth century. As such lines came more and more into favor thereafter, they increasingly drove out most forms of love poetry, especially those composed in lyric stanzas. But Waller himself did not sponsor his admirers’ sharply dichotomous tastes: they typically conflated love as an unfit topic with lyricism as an unfit mode, while esteeming neoclassical distichs as the ideal medium for tackling any number of more suitable themes. By contrast, Waller wrote amatory verses not only in lyric stanzas but also in couplets sometimes taking the more specific form of neoclassical distichs, as in the conclusion to his “Story . . . Applied,” now given in full: “Like Phœbus thus, acquiring unsought praise,/He catched at love, and filled his arm with bays.” Though the accomplishments of Waller’s right hand (neoclassical distichs on any subject, including love) thus overlapped with those of his left (amatory verses in lyric stanzas), his ambidexterity as such went largely unrecognized. He “catched at love” in various modes, but “filled his arm with bays” of chiefly one kind. The same phenomena magnifying his legacy’s value thus diminished its range too. Insofar as love poetry retained any prestige at all, he had at least dignified it with some neoclassical distichs; but even these helped cast doubt on the value of the lyric stanzas at which also he excelled. The edition of Waller followed reprints an anonymous preface to the first posthumous reprint of his works (1690) that esteems him “the parent of English verse, and the first that showed our tongue had beauty and numbers in it,” not despite but because of his “surprising” proximity to Spenser, for “not much above twenty years’ distance” divided the later poet’s debut from the earlier poet’s swan song: “the one’s language, like the money of that time, is as current now as ever; whilst the other’s words are like old coins, one must go to an antiquary to understand their true meaning and value” (1: xviii, xix). Aubrey conveys how Sidney partly resembled and partly differed from Spenser in the degree of his language’s currency during the post-Restoration period. On the one hand, Aubrey proclaimed Sidney not only an author “whose Fame will never dye, whilest Poetrie lives,” but also “a reviver of Poetry in those darke times, which was then at a very low ebbe: there is not 3 lines but there is by God, or by God’s wounds” (336). On the other hand, Aubrey recognized that many of his contemporaries did not share his passionate antiquarianism: “Henry, the last Earle of Cumberland, was . . . an ingeniose Gentleman for those times and writt a Poeme



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in English upon the Psalmes, and very well, but the language being now something out of fashion, like Sir Philip Sidney’s, they will not print it” (16). Here, a taste for Sidney also qualifies as outmoded, for even performances done “very well” cannot win an audience among those less tolerant than Aubrey of an idiom not fully current. Contradicting himself about the durability or datedness of Sidney’s writing, Aubrey took both sides in a post-Restoration debate. In his essay Of Poetry (1690), Sir William Temple pronounces Sidney “the greatest poet and the noblest genius of any that have left writings behind them, and published in ours or any other modern language.”30 “Family tradition perhaps had some influence on his valuation of Sidney, unusually high for its time,” notes Martin Garrett, identifying Temple as “the grandson of Sidney’s secretary and friend.”31 No possible bias of this sort explains the “unusually high” status that Sir Thomas Culpeper accords Sidney in one of his Essays (1671), though Trevor Ross still discounts these words when quoting them: I am not so in love with our own times and faces, as that I fancy in our selves a greater excellency, then in our predecessors; who can think that the famous St. [sic] Phillip Sydney; or the incomparable Lord Bacon have been out done in their several kinds, or Shakespear, Beaumont, and Fletcher, or Ben Jonson in theirs, by any of our present writers.

According to Ross, Culpeper “could easily dismiss the modernist’s claim by historicizing it as a perennial ‘affectation’ wherein ‘every age with us will have the greatest esteem for the Speech they use.’ Unfortunately for Culpeper, this relativizing gesture could leave him with little more than emotion on which to form his own canon.”32 Whereas Culpeper probably canonizes Sidney more literally than he intended, he wrote in a context in which Temple’s “valuation” would qualify as “unusually high,” in part, because it enrolls the same figure among not “predecessors” but “present writers”—those working with “modern language.” In combination, Waller’s ambidexterity and Sidney’s “modern” but “out of fashion” standing ensured that the two authors after the Restoration could seem utterly unlike (as for Philip Ayres) or indistinguishable (as for Edward Young); these traits also meant that the later poet could eclipse the earlier one on his own turf (as for Christopher Smart and Charlotte Smith). The aptly named Ayres wrote a preface for his collection Lyric Poems (1687) in which he admitted that, “many of them being Sonnets, Canzons, Madrigals, &c.” (often translated), he could only acknowledge how “none of our great men, either Mr. Waller, Mr. Cowley, or Mr. Dryden, whom it was most proper to have followed, have ever stoop’d to anything of this sort,” and how he had no better defense of his conduct than its being



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In reprinting these words, George Saintsbury classifies their “apology” as “very interesting, because it is evidently meant chiefly for the Sonnet. The ‘Madrigal’ is difficult to define, but hardly any definition of it will exclude many things of Waller and Cowley, and not a few of Dryden’s songs.”33 How completely Ayres’s alienation from his own Lyric Poems blinded him to any relation between Sidney’s writing and Waller’s emerges not only from his false denial that the later poet “ever stoop’d to anything of this sort” but also from the degree to which he reverses the terms of that same author’s self-justifying preface. Whereas Waller expressed no doubts regarding his ability to “defend the attempt I have made upon poetry, by the example . . . of many wise and worthy persons of our own times,” including Sidney, Ayres in the year of Waller’s death could likewise invoke Sidney as one of “many eminent persons” setting a “precedent” for his own endeavors, but to little avail: not consistently high, their social prestige did not redeem a collective literary achievement that he himself reckoned “cannot much be boasted of.” More than four decades later, Young could still twin Sidney and Waller, but only by ignoring a key difference between them. In the second of his Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, Concerning the Authors of the Age (1730), Young recalls how “Sidney and Waller, brightest sons of fame,/Condemn the charm of ages to the flame.”34 These lines read poignantly because they imply that both authors had not only conveyed but also captured “charm” as love poets preserving the beauty of inspirational women: more than just the poems themselves would perish with their condemnation. Young’s couplet also had particular relevance to his own case as a clergyman-poet whose will stipulated the burning of all his remaining papers, other than account books. The resultant hecatomb destroyed his extensive correspondence rather than his poetry, widely available. But the last edition of his poems that he himself oversaw (published posthumously in 1767) included these caveats: “I think the following pieces in four volumes to be the most excusable of all that I have written; and I wish less apology was needful for these. As there is no recalling what is got abroad, the pieces here republished, I have revised and corrected; and rendered them as pardonable, as it was in my power to do.”35 Not locking the stable door until Pegasus had already flown, Young strikes a rather disingenuous note. Similarly, he had adopted an equivocal position in his seemingly earnest remarks about



not without precedent. For many eminent persons have published several things of this nature, and in this method, both translations and poems of their own; as the famous Mr. Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Richard Fanshaw, Mr. Milton, and some few others; the success of all which, in these things, I must needs say, cannot much be boasted of.


“sons of fame.” Though Sidney’s literary works did survive the fire to which he consigned them, this outcome reflected not his own lack of conviction but his executors’ decision to flout his expressed wishes. By contrast, Waller encouraged Bertie to incinerate his verses in the secure knowledge that they and the accompanying gesture would likewise survive, preserving both the work and the self-consciously witty phrasing of a rote renunciation. But whereas “sons of fame” diverged because one took the purging “flame” more seriously than the other would, this contrast became possible only because of the inadvertent survival of Sidney’s work as a poet truly appearing to foster the development of a cavalier persona whenever his gravity and levity faced off by winking at each other. In that sense, too, Waller’s writing sometimes represented “the smoke of amorous Sidney’s fire.” Through a further and more profoundly ironic twist, however, Smart and Smith remembered Waller for his verse-courtship of Sacharissa by disregarding the “ancestor” to whom he thereby laid “better claim.” In his Ode on S. Cecilia’s Day (1746), Smart furnishes this example of how “Musick’s a celestial art”: In Penshurst’s plains when Waller, sick with love, Has found some silent solitary grove, Where the vague moon-beams pour a silver flood Of trem’lous light athwart th’ unshaven wood, Within an hoary moss-grown cell, He lays his careless limbs without reserve, And strikes, impetuous strikes each quer’lous nerve Of his resounding shell.36

These odd lines read as parody but probably represent an unsuccessful experiment in assimilating a new poetic to the authority of recent masters. Equivalent odes by Dryden and by Pope (whose effort in this vein Smart translated into Latin) demonstrated how words could conjure up the patron saint of music through their own version of expressive sound. Admiring this aesthetic, however, Smart also shared his contemporaries’ emerging taste for literary descriptions of melancholy landscapes haunted by brooding loners. Needing a poet “sick with love” to be thus “solitary” in an appropriate setting, Smart chose Waller, as connected with “Penshurst’s plains” through his verse-courtship of Sacharissa. This selection intends no slighting of a love poet from an earlier era who had owned the grounds that Waller could merely occupy as a guest. Rather, it records the tenacity of the later author’s high reputation at a point when various modes of poetry, including the lyric stanzas of Smart’s own Ode, had begun challenging the long monopoly exerted by neoclassical distichs. On the one hand,



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Waller could have recognized himself in Smart’s lines: “He lays his careless limbs without reserve” recalls how the earlier poet in his Battle had yearned “my careless limbs to lay/Under the plantain’s shade” (1: 1.62–63). On the other, “each quer’lous nerve/Of his resounding shell” evokes neither the melodiousness of his specific “lyre” nor any musical instrument mimicked by Dryden and Pope. Though “shell” can indeed refer to “lyre” (OED sb. 10, citing the highly relevant authority of Dryden’s “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687”), and “nerve” has some plausibility as a synonym for string, the combination of these terms recasts the familiar concept of sympathetic resonance to produce not only a combination of strings and heartstrings but also the much stranger image of a human body agitated into sound by the jangling of its own nervous system. Insofar as the player of such music “strikes . . . strikes” the “resounding shell” of himself, he registers Smart’s ambivalence about a figure who invites pity but also indulges his own suffering. Whether or not Smart thereby anticipates Goethe’s perspective on those “sick with love,” he cannot depict the sorrows of young Waller without seeming to travesty that author’s far from “quer’lous” muse. Smith could almost have been responding to Smart’s Ode in her Sonnet XLVI, “Written at Penshurst, in Autumn 1788”: she describes that location’s “walks obscured by matted fern,/Which Waller’s soothing lyre were wont to hear,/But where now clamours the discordant hern!”37 Smith supplies a note glossing the last of these lines, establishing additional detail: “In the park at Penshurst is an heronry. The house is at present uninhabited, and the windows of the galleries and other rooms, in which there are many invaluable pictures, are never opened but when strangers visit it” (102). Sharing Smart’s taste for melancholy landscapes, however, Smith not only mourns but also celebrates Penshurst’s dereliction: “Ye towers sublime! deserted now and drear!/Ye woods! deep sighing to the hollow blast.” She likewise resembles Smart in regarding such a setting as ideal for a meditative loner: “The musing wanderer” who “loves to linger near” these poignant sights, unaccompanied once more after “startling from their haunts the timid deer.” From another perspective, however, Penshurst hosts multitudes, as Smith reminds it: “History points to all your glories past.” Moreover, the place had enough of a future to generate an optimistic sestet: The spoiling hand of Time may overturn These lofty battlements, and quite deface The fading canvas whence we love to learn Sydney’s keen look, and Sacharissa’s grace; But fame and beauty still defy decay, Saved by the historic page—the poet’s tender lay!



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Smith’s note, keyed to her antepenultimate line, only applies to its opening phrase: “Algernon Sidney” (103). The “keen look” she attributes to him must reflect her perception of him as featured in one of the “many . . . pictures” she had seen, but might also echo Marvell’s Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland (ca. 1650), which describes Charles I pondering “with his keener eye/The axe’s edge.”38 But though she classifies all of Penshurst’s paintings as “invaluable,” she also deems them perishable: her optimistic conclusion depends on the survival of Algernon Sidney’s “fame” and his sister’s “beauty” through two other forms of commemoration, “the historic page” and Waller’s “tender lay.” Smith’s otherwise neat parallelism depends on rather glib dichotomies of genre and gender: literature and history each occupy a “page” capable of perpetuating “fame”; the brother’s “keen look” has not less “beauty” than the sister’s “grace,” even without the assistance of sentiment based on his credentials as a republican martyr or the perceived sublimity of his fate. If Smith had not given so much attention to Algernon Sidney, her sonnet would merely resemble Smart’s ode in celebrating Waller’s versecourtship of Sacharissa as focused exclusively on love and involving not at all his “better claim to Sir Philip Sidney as ancestor.” But Smith’s sestet creates divisions that anticipate how Barrett Browning would contrast two other Sidneys as types in “The Picture Gallery at Penshurst”: freedom fighter (Algernon) and poet (Sir Philip). Attentive to this same estate’s “many invaluable paintings,” “all” its “glories past,” and not only historical but also literary exemplars capable of preserving it for the future, Smith’s sonnet finds no room for the great-uncle of Algernon and Dorothy Sidney. Perhaps that Sidney occupied too many niches simultaneously to suit the poem’s rigid categories. But Smith’s lines might also represent the paradoxical culmination of a process Waller himself had begun. Having established his “ancestor” as archetypal love poet to facilitate his verse-courtship of Sacharissa, he himself acquired that mantle instead, having “filled his arm with bays” to the point where his chosen exemplar went empty handed. Modern perceptions of To Penshurst as the sponsor of Waller’s “At Penshurst” pair have obscured this inadvertent theft, as if these poems had more to do with his relationship with Jonson than with their context in a verse-courtship of Sacharissa also linking him to her great-uncle, the original Penshurst poet. Though no contemporary of Waller’s pressed a “claim to Sir Philip Sidney as ancestor” more explicitly or more variously than he did, his own credentials in this area have drawn little comment. “They are urbane, even, and under full control in a cavalier, courtly way,” Robert Kimbrough remarks of Sidney’s sonnets in Astrophil and Stella, implying their general significance for any subsequent poets also characterized as “cavalier.”39



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George Parfitt judges that “the inclination of critics to read seventeenthcentury verse in the light of Donne and Jonson has obscured how strong is the influence of Sidney upon such poets as Thomas Carew.”40 If the category “such poets” overlaps with Pope’s “Wits of either Charles’s days,/The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease,” then Donne and especially Jonson have indeed been the standard influences proposed.41 Most recently, Robert Ray has seconded Carew’s standing as one who “held the work of Sir Philip Sidney in high esteem,” linking him on this score with Richard Lovelace.42 Uncovering “hitherto unnoted allusions to Sidney’s poetry” in lines written by both authors, Ray claims that these “subtle references are clear to someone familiar with . . . Astrophil and Stella” (18, 20). But whereas Lovelace “overtly alludes to Sir Philip Sidney in two poems” as well, Carew’s “allusions” represent only the “hitherto unnoted” kind (18). Much therefore depends, especially in Carew’s case, on whether previously unrecognized echoes “too closely parallel Sidney’s lines to be attributed to mere coincidence” (18). But even if both poets’ “subtle allusions” have probably escaped earlier detection as neither specific nor revealing enough to bear the weight Ray wishes to give them, Lovelace’s explicit references to Sidney cannot be denied (18). These nonetheless look trivial as set beside Lovelace’s true value for an understanding of Sidney’s reputation: the recurrent twinning of these two figures, over a very long time extending to the present, as poet-soldiers. Lovelace’s ties with Sidney thus take an exactly opposite form from Waller’s: they involve claims made for him rather than by him and depend on military experience that, unlike many of their fellow cavalier poets, Sacharissa’s wooer never had.



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“Tam Marti, quam Mercurio”: Sidney, Lovelace, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum

The third stanza of Lovelace’s poem “A Paradox” rues this expression of people’s unquenchable thirst for novelty: “Heav’nly Sydney you/Twice read, had rather view/Some odde Romance, so new.” These words could address readers of either gender. But when he truly wishes to generalize in this poem, Lovelace makes statements such as: from the glorious Sunne, Who to his height hath got, With what delight we runne To some black Cave, or Grot.

Though “you” could cover all readers, clarifying that Lovelace alone remains faithful to the Arcadia, his point about the appeal of the “new” creates an implicitly female counterpart to the sexual inconstancy he acknowledges in his own case by initially confessing: Tis true the beauteous Starre To which I first did bow Burnt quicker, brighter far Then that which leads me now; Which shines with more delight; For gazing on that light So long, neere lost my sight.

Thus, “A Paradox” universalizes novelty’s appeal by invoking the perspectives of “I,” “we,” and “you,” but relates the inconstancy of female readers (abandoning the Arcadia for a more recent romance) to Lovelace’s own conduct in replacing one chaste light with another, while professing loyalty



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to the Lucasta celebrated in the title of the collection in which this poem first appeared (1649).1 Lovelace takes the opposite stance, encouraging reading of a newer romance, in the first version of his “Clitophon and Lucippe Translated, to the Ladies,” printed with and in support of such an effort by Anthony Hodges (1638). Here, he exhorts, Faire ones, breathe: a while lay by Blessed Sidney’s Arcady: Here’s a Story that will make You not repent Him to forsake.

Just as Edmund Waller praised Sacharissa as the perfect blend of feminine traits, so Lovelace observes: Brave Pamela’s majestie, And her sweet Sisters modestie Are fixt in each of you, you are Alone, what these together were. (271)

But whereas Waller demoted Sidney’s artistry to single out one individual’s exceptional merit (and in addition derived Sacharissa’s superior quality from her ancestry), Lovelace directs his hyperbole “to the Ladies” in general, at once the presumed normal audience for the Arcadia and a body of readers who all equally surpass that text’s own best patterns of feminine excellence. Lovelace either revised these lines for publication in Lucasta or had to reconstruct the poem from some unreliable source, such as an imperfect memory. The equivalent passages in the version printed later substitute “Cælestial” for “Blessed” (68) and “Gallant” for “Brave” (69), among other minor changes, affecting scansion but making little difference in sense, suggesting that Lovelace cared as little about his handling of meter as he did about grammatical coherence in the lines first quoted from “A Paradox.” Not despite the frequent badness of his writing, however, but because of it, this author achieved an ultimately enduring association with Sidney first mooted in Francis Lenton’s encomium “To the Honourable, Valiant, and Ingenious Colonel Richard Lovelace, on his Exquisite Poems” (1649): if thy careles draughts are cal’d the best, What would thy lines have beene, had’st thou profest That faculty (infus’d) of Poetry, Which adds such honour unto thy Chivalry?



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Doubtles thy verse had all as far transcended As Sydneyes Prose, who Poets once defended. For when I read thy much renowned Pen, My Fancy there finds out another Ben In thy brave language, judgement, wit, & art, Of every piece of thine, in every part: Where thy seraphique Sydneyan fire is raised high, In Valour, Vertue, Love, and Loyalty. (11–12)

In fewer than 40 lines, Lenton links Lovelace not only with Jonson and Sidney, but also with Apollo, Mars, Minerva, Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Juvenal, Zeuxis, and Apelles. Moreover, the last two names arguably point to the one trait in Lovelace most fully distinguishing him from other men of letters in his generation: his knowledge of painting. Lenton does not simply drop as many names as possible, however, for the link with Sidney predominates sufficiently to motivate the poem’s concluding assertion of Lovelace’s excellence as the like embodiment of a Renaissance ideal: “Wel may each grace, & muse then crown thy praise/With Mars his Banner, and Minerva’s Bayes” (12). Jonson’s rebirth would make most sense in this context if Lenton thereby acknowledged Lovelace’s own tribute to “Father Ben” in his satire On Sanazar’s Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice, for Composing an Elegiack Hexastick of the City (200); prefatory encomiums often read like hastily assembled but representative anthologies of themes and tropes culled from whatever volume they puff. But the satire in question did not appear in print until gathered in Lucasta: Posthume Poems (1659), though portions of it might have circulated earlier.2 Lenton’s inclusion of Jonson stands out because he had already admitted Lovelace’s “careles” approach. Moreover, “judgement” represents a trait upheld by Jonson but scarce in Lovelace’s “draughts.” Appropriately enough, Lenton himself supplies a fine example of “careles” haste or incapacitated “judgement” in the combination “seraphique Sydneyan”: the overlong line in which it appears signifies that one adjective must be redundant. C. H. Wilkinson notes of “clearly alternative epithets” in his commentary to the edition followed that “ ‘seraphique’ was probably the original, ‘Sydneyan’ intended to replace it and echo ‘As Sydneys Prose’ five lines before. On the other hand it is possible that Lenton intended to avoid the echo and that ‘seraphique’ was the revised epithet” (250). If “seraphique” had decisively ousted “Sydneyan,” the impression might remain that Lovelace only resembled Sidney inasmuch as his “Poetry” had shown a potential to outshine others’ to the same extent that his fellow embodiment of “Chivalry” had “as far transcended” all competitors in “Prose.” That “Chivalry” forms part of this equation suggests



“TAM MARTI, QUAM MERCURIO”


“who Poets once defended” need not mean Lenton only knew Sidney as the author of The Defence, for otherwise the trait in question as included in his writing would dwindle to his self-mocking identification with the monomaniacal tutor who instructed him in cavallerice and almost “perswaded me to have wished my selfe a horse.”3 Moreover, the information that Sidney’s “Prose . . . Poets once defended” represents no mere padding in quest of a rhyme: it helps close the gap between himself as peerless artist in one medium and Lovelace as unrealized paragon in another. Either way, however, the transition from parallels between Lovelace and Jonson to the subject of “fire,” understood as “Sydneyan” rather than “seraphique,” creates a particular fusion that would otherwise be missing: “Valour, Vertue, Love, and Loyalty,” as equally distributed between two embodiments of “Chivalry” who also wrote. This second reference to Sidney exposes the material about Jonson as even more digressive; but the same transition as leading instead to “seraphique . . . fire” would not make “Ben” any more plausible as a counterpart to Lovelace, either generally or in that specific context. The reading favored here both points toward and receives support from the combination of “Mars his Banner, and Minerva’s Bayes,” which would suit Lovelace very well as both soldier and poet, but too obviously fits Sidney at least as aptly not to be the completion of a sustained comparison, however awkwardly handled at times. Even so, Lenton only groped toward a pairing not firmly established until much later. If he had opted unambiguously for “seraphique,” he would have led his readers even further away from a trail already obscured by Jonson’s presence. Significantly, the tributes Lovelace won both alive and dead tend in the same direction as Lenton’s praise, without exactly arriving there. Samuel Holland’s elegy for Lovelace (1660) typifies such plaudits when styling Lovelace “excellent in Arms, and Arts,” and thus ”tam Marti, quam Mercurio” (231). “This motto was used by George Gascoigne and Sir Walter Raleigh,” as Wilkinson records (343). Holland’s allusion thus links Lovelace with Sidney’s generation, but not with that figure himself. In his Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, or the Honour of Parnassus (1687), however, William Winstanley made another false start by producing this pair of twins: I can compare no Man so like this Colonel Lovelace as Sir Philip Sidney, of which latter it is said by one in an Epitaph made of him, Nor is it fit that more I should acquaint, Lest Men adore in one A Scholar, Souldier, Lover, and a Saint. As for their parallel, they were both of noble Parentage, Sir Philip’s Father being Lord Deputy of Ireland, and President of Wales; our Colonel



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of a Vicount’s name and Family; Scholars none can deny them both: The one Celebrated his Mistress under the bright name of Stella, the other the Lady Regent of his Affections, under the Banner of Lucasta, both of them endued with transcendent Sparks of Poetick Fire, and both of them exposing their Lives to the extreamest hazard of doubtful War; both of them such Soldiers as is expressed by the Poet. Undaunted Spirits, that encounter those Sad dangers, we to Fancy scarce propose.4

Though he identifies neither of his allusions, Winstanley here recalls an epitaph written for Sidney by Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, together with a verse-epistle by William Habington not concerning either figure in the “parallel” proposed. In his “Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney Lying in St. Paul’s without a Monument, To Be Fastned upon the Church Door” (1665), Herbert advises any “Reader” that Within this Church Sir Philip Sidney lies, Nor is it fit that I should more acquaint, Lest superstition rise, And Men adore, Souldiers, their Martyr; Lovers, their Saint.5

As Winstanley’s phrasing indicates, however, he adapts or garbles the version of this epitaph published in the anthology Wits Recreations (1640), a rendering that the commentary to the edition of Herbert followed characterizes as “a slightly different form,” “Another form,” and “a better form”: Reader, within this ground Sir Philip Sydney lyes Nor is it fit that more I should acquaint; Least superstition rise, And men adore, A Lover, Scholler, souldier and a Saint. (xxv, 155, 132, 155)

Altering these words, Winstanley probably misremembered rather than strove to improve them. Transposing the sequence of Sidney’s multiple roles, Winstanley retains all of them, together with the same clumsy repetition (“A . . . a”), required not for sense but only to eke out the meter. Dropping “superstition” and inserting the phrase “in one,” Winstanley creates an unrhymed line displacing the rhyme of “more” and “adore” (also disguised in the lineation of the 1665 version). This change brings out the





implication that Sidney invited veneration through the sheer number of ways in which he excelled and perhaps softens the otherwise rather subversive point that a “Souldier” who lost his life fighting Catholics had the capacity to excite “superstition,” not only in that role but also in other roles fulfilled as admirably. From a Protestant standpoint, however, “Saint” and “adore” so obviously form a pair evoking Catholic “superstition” that neither the absence of that word nor the presence of “in one” can do much to limit Sidney’s paradoxical appeal as an icon for sundry “Men” encompassing his co-religionists. But Winstanley’s version and the anthology’s likewise agree in classifying Sidney as literally “a Saint” through his religiosity, not figuratively so as a paragon on several other dimensions: they combine a straightforward and familiar estimate of him as “tam Marti, quam Mercurio” with an emphasis on his Protestant piety so extreme and unusual as to canonize him after the Catholic pattern. On all these counts, the 1665 version of Herbert’s epitaph proves far superior to both the anthology’s rendering and Winstanley’s paraphrase of it. Though Sidney loses his credentials as “Scholler” in the juxtaposition “Souldiers, their Martyr; Lovers their Saint,” the matching trochaic inversions of “Souldiers” and “Lovers” create a pair enforcing the symmetry of a pithier meaning and not resulting in a wooden iambic-pentameter line sustained by padding alone. This formulation loses much of its wit with Sidney literally “a Saint” rather than a plausibly tempting icon of a figurative kind who appeals equally to rival groups of potential idolaters, each with a marked preference for one of his roles. At the same time, such phrasing does not shy away from the subversive implications of hailing a Protestant hero in the language of Catholic veneration, which would have had most point if Herbert wrote these words during the 1630s, when Charles I’s projected renovation of the then much dilapidated St. Paul’s assumed a symbolic importance not only in his own eyes but also in those of critical onlookers, for whom its highly visible expression of advancing church policies represented an unwelcome return to Rome. In focusing not on “a Saint” for all “men” but that created by “Lovers,” too, Herbert possibly responds to his younger brother George’s project in The Temple (1633), which transposes into sacred terms much of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, as well as creating devotional parodies of specific love poems produced by others—Lord Herbert among them.6 Moreover, though all of the epitaph versions under consideration employ the same spelling in “Souldiers,” “souldier,” and “Souldier,” and though this cannot be ascertained as a deliberate preference on Lord Herbert’s part, the 1665 version goes furthest in conveying at least the appearance of a dubious pun in juxtaposing “Soul-” not only with “Saint” but also with “Martyrs,” and without the distraction of “Scholler” or “Scholar” (however spelled). In limiting its attention to



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just two roles, this version sacrifices some of Sidney’s range but does more with what remains, achieving a double-barreled mockery. In their difference, “Souldiers, their Martyr” and “Lovers, their Saint” shed an ironic light on each other; in their similarity, they equally discredit one cynosure: idolaters, their idol. But the skepticism thus playing over two conjoined icons proves most heretical with respect to the first: Petrarchan love poetry makes no secret of appropriating sacred veneration for secular ends. Thus, Astrophil and Stella includes a sonnet acknowledging: It is most true, what we call Cupid’s dart, An image is, which for our selves we carve; And, fooles, adore in temple of our hart, Till that good God make Church and Churchmen starve.7

By contrast, worshippers of military heroes have never shown the same capacity to acknowledge their own cult of devotion as likewise a redirected form of religious faith. Though Habington as author of Castara (1634) offered an obvious precedent for Lovelace’s Lucasta, Winstanley draws on the older poet’s “Militia Est Vita Hominis, to Sir Hen. Per.” (1640) in proposing not that “parallel” but another, accomplished by adapting the original wording: “Undaunted spirit, which encounters those/Sad dangers, we to fancie scarce propose.”8 If Winstanley’s readers could have recognized this couplet unaided, they would have known that the pietistic Habington had characteristically added this caveat: “Yet tis the true and highest fortitude/To keepe our inward enemies subdued” (51–52). Whether they would also have been able to identify the poem’s subject and context lies open to question. In his commentary to the edition followed, Kenneth Allott identifies the figure thus lauded by Habington as possibly Castara’s cousin, Henry Percy (1605–1659), second son of Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland. In 1639 he joined the king’s army in the north; in 1640 he was made Captain and Governor of Jersey; in 1641 he was concerned in the first Army Plot; and in 1643 he was made general of the ordnance of the king’s army. Name, dates and profession approve this identification, but Habington writes of him as married, and Collins and de Fonblanque (Annals of the House of Percy) agree that this Henry Percy . . . died unmarried in 1659. (201)

But Percy’s “profession” as clarified by his activities after the poem’s date of publication has no bearing here. Moreover, his “unmarried” status only poses a problem on the assumption that Habington’s poem classifies him as no bachelor in commenting, “you unforc’d part from your Ladies bed” (7).





In relation to almost any other poet of the time, such thinking would be naïve. Habington nonetheless made much of how his prim courtship of Castara, his chaste altar and future wife, Lucy Herbert, accorded with his perception of her, and even when writing on the theme of “Militia Est Vita Hominis,” he found occasion to specify the traits of “the highest fortitude” as “Not to permit our passions over sway/Our actions, nor our wanton flesh betray/The soules chaste Empire” (53–55). Given these lines in particular and their author’s disposition in general, Percy’s “unmarried” status precludes an otherwise obvious identification. If not Percy, however, some other soldier who also “joined the king’s army in the north” for the Bishops’ Wars of 1639–40 seems to have furnished Habington with the occasion of his poem. When he praises his subject’s motivation as “Onely a pure devotion to the King/In whose just cause whoever fights, must be/Triumphant,” he thus stresses that no “appetite of glory” detracts from this soldier’s disinterested support of Charles’s attempt to extend his policy of religious uniformity by imposing it on his Scottish as well as his English subjects (28–30, 1). Whatever ran though the mind of “Hen. Per.” when participating in these unsuccessful campaigns, modern historians have generally suspected that, even among those backing Charles against the rebellious Scots, a substantially coerced “pure devotion to the King” proved more decisive than any particular enthusiasm for the “just cause” at stake. “In his role as feudal lord he . . . called upon his tenants-in-chief to aid him by their personal attendance, each with a suitable retinue of horsemen,” J. P. Kenyon notes of Charles: “This extraordinary medieval revival was technically legal, and even the Puritan lords felt obliged to comply.”9 That Habington as a Catholic endorsed the conduct of a soldier serving in the Bishops’ Wars on these or more zealous grounds might have struck the earliest readers of his poem as damning evidence that Charles’s religious policy, now entering a newly militant phase, did entail a slide toward Rome, as his critics angrily alleged; in the aftermath of the Popish plot of 1678 and ensuing Exclusion Crisis, Winstanley’s own earliest readers would not have considered such topics ancient history, if they had any sense of “the Poet” invoked. They would have recognized that Winstanley’s paraphrase of Habington links the hero of Zutphen with a soldier praised by a Catholic poet for supporting the religious policies of a monarch then campaigning against his own compatriots and widely perceived as crypto-Papist. However perplexing in themselves, these overtones would only have reinforced the bizarre notion that Sidney constituted “a Saint,” not just for readily idolatrous “Lovers,” but for any “Men” prone to “adore” so great a paragon. But Habington’s lines prove no less incongruous as applied to Lovelace as well, for the simple reason that he served in the Bishops’ Wars with



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“Hen. Per.” Presented as remarkable, his enrolment among “such Soldiers” thus amounts in part to a simple statement of fact. Moreover, whereas Winstanley’s “parallel” depends on making Habington’s singular phrasing plural and creating a generalization not limited by any particular “cause,” “just” or otherwise, it retains the original logic of a noncombatant’s admiring perception of all soldiers as courageous for “exposing their Lives to the extreamest hazard of doubtful War.” Though Habington himself proclaimed “pure devotion to the King” as the honorable motive of an alleged volunteer, the degree to which “Hen. Per” did or did not embrace Charles’s “cause” as “just” makes no difference to the larger point that any soldier shows courage when undergoing “Sad dangers, we to fancie scarce propose.” Erring on the side of calculated generosity, this estimate of military service ignores whether a given campaigner makes an entirely free choice: however motivated or contextualized, subjection to “extreamest hazard” automatically commands respect from noncombatants willing to honor as heroes risk takers and risk sufferers alike, if they in return escape classification as cowards. Though Winstanley presents his “parallel” as if Lovelace and Sidney both qualify as rare cases incomparable except with each other, his perspective on them as soldiers overlaps precisely with Habington’s in marveling not at the prodigious versatility of figures “tam Marti, quam Mercurio” but at the normal bravery of anyone either courting “Sad dangers” or simply enduring them. Though such a perspective might not extend to Falstaff ’s conscripts, it otherwise encompasses a notably wide range of soldiers. Whereas Lives proved accurate about neither the present nor the immediate future when declaring that “Mr. Lovelace’s Poems, did, do, and still will live in good Esteem with all knowing true Lovers of Ingenuity” (170), William Carew Hazlitt could nonetheless announce almost two centuries later in his edition of this previously much neglected author (1864): “Winstanley was so far right in instituting a comparison between Lovelace and Sydney, that it is hard to name any one in the entire circle of early English literature except Sydney and Wither, who could have attempted, with any chance of success, the Song to Althea from Prison” (1649).10 On the other hand, Carew Hazlitt cautions that Winstanley “must be understood to signify a resemblance between Lovelace and Sidney as men, rather than as writers” (xxiii n.1). Such a partial divorce proves necessary on two related points: “The versification of Lovelace is . . . more rugged and unmusical than that of any other writer of the period”; “It would be difficult to point out a writer so unpardonably slovenly in his style or phraseology as Lovelace” (xxxiv, 111–12 n.3). Thus, the matchlessly slapdash writer could prove man enough in the Sidney mold to produce one poem impossible of attainment by any less noble a sensibility. Though





Lenton had been responsible for “instituting” the “comparison” in question, and had found a less convoluted way in which to acknowledge the “careles” quality of Lovelace’s writing while linking his “Chivalry” with Sidney’s, neither his nor Winstanley’s “parallel” became fully established until Carew Hazlitt himself had established a third twinning of this kind. World War I played a key part in cementing such connections. “This account . . . was completed before the outbreak of war in August last,” remarks Malcolm William Wallace in concluding the preface to his biography of Sidney; he continues: When we are able once more to turn to books that deal with themes not directly related to the one all-encompassing subject, the life of Sidney may possess a new interest for us, for he, too, died in the Netherlands in defence of ideals strangely similar to those for which the British nation is to-day engaged in a life-and-death struggle.11

Wallace’s verdict on the Great War resembles that of Wordsworth’s Cintra on the Peninsular War, when characterizing Sidney as “an Englishman who sacrificed his life in devotion to a cause bearing a stronger likeness to this than any recorded in history.”12 Registering less bold of a claim than “stronger likeness,” Wallace’s phrase “strangely similar” still has a paradoxical ring, but did not discourage the hero of Zutphen’s installation as an “armoured figure” atop “the pedestal of a First World War monument,” as Alan Hager describes.13 According to William Lyon Phelps in his edition of Lucasta, “a thousand newspaper leading articles during the years 1914–18” referenced the concluding couplet from Lovelace’s song “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres” (1649): “I could not love thee (Deare) so much,/Lov’d I not Honour more” (18).14 Robert Ray considers these lines reminiscent of how Sidney ends one of his sonnets in Astrophil and Stella: “Dear, love me not, that you may love me more” (62.14).15 For Ray, the proposed “echo” proves “ironic in that it delineates the difference between the honorable, mature man speaking to Lucasta and the sensually-inclined, immature Astrophil who is trying to seduce Stella” (19). If valid, however, this contrast does not shame Sidney himself, who could seem feasibly part of a Great War memorial because of his perceived similarity to the Lovelace whose devotion to “Honour” served as a means of prodding Englishmen to enlist before receiving a white feather. But though World War I as so extreme “a life-and-death struggle” brought a particular intensity to the idealization in tandem of Sidney and Lovelace, their shared status as paragons ultimately rested on their capacity to transcend any specific conflicts or historical niches, even in formulations claiming to fix and particularize them. Any jumble of “Valour, Vertue,



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Love, and Loyalty” would serve as well as another for readers assessing the two figures as both fundamentally different and essentially the same. “As Marvell was a lesser Milton, Lovelace was a lesser Sidney,” Phelps maintains: “The spacious times of Queen Elizabeth had their incarnation in Sidney; he was the climax of triumphant chivalry. Seventy years later, against the sunset of royalty, stands the romantic figure of Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier” (ix). “Sir Philip Sidney . . . was as typical an Elizabethan as Lovelace was a Cavalier,” explains Cyril Hughes Hartmann: “Sidney is Chivalry, Lovelace is Loyalty.”16 According to Douglas Bush, “to think of the cavalier spirit is to think first of Richard Lovelace . . .. As soldier, courtier, lover, poet, scholar, musician, and connoisseur of painting, the ‘extraordinary handsome’ Lovelace exemplified the tradition of Sidney and Castiglione.”17 “The chivalry of the Cavaliers embodied itself in Lovelace,” from the perspective of R. G. Howarth, and “so much so that a contemporary writer was led to compare him with the ever-memorable Sir Philip Sidney. In the spirit of his poetry, too, he approaches Sidney, whose Arcadia must have been one of his favourite books.”18 Even dissent from these sorts of pronouncements cannot avoid their “spacious” rhetoric: complaining that Hartmann adopted “a faded nineteenth-century approach” and did not “have much new to say about the ‘Cavalier spirit,’ ” Manfred Wiedhorn himself reports of Lovelace that “what he did or wrote is not so striking as what he was and stood for.19 Moreover, that “faded . . . approach” remained so vivid for Michael Schmidt near the beginning of the current century that he drew on it for several of his brief biographies, starting with Wyatt as “the first of a type—the noblest type—of poet in English literature: a man of action, servant of his king, his God and of his Muse, like Surrey, Ralegh, Sidney, Fulke Greville, Lovelace and others.”20 In his “pellmell life,” Lovelace for Schmidt “epitomizes the heroic and tragic careering of a young Cavalier, final heir of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney, exemplary, anachronistic” (246). Schmidt’s verdict that Lovelace’s “accomplishments seem a shadow of Sidney’s” apparently conveys not the later poet’s relative insubstantiality but rather his close proximity (248). Schmidt thus proceeds to explain how “Lovelace embodies older virtues” as “an uomo universale: courtier, scholar, soldier, lover, musician, connoisseur of painting, latter-day Sidney, devoted to king, mistress and art” (250). “He was the last of the knight-poets,” Schmidt concludes: “his death in poverty rather than service proved that the age of Wyatt, Surrey, Ralegh, Sidney and others of their stamp was over” (250). Whereas modern scholars claiming Sidney as an embryonic parliamentarian or republican see far more continuity than change in the “Seventy years” or so elapsing between his own death and the regicide, Carew Hazlitt’s followers affirm or imply that Lovelace as a reincarnation of





Sidney could not update him as a royalist instead because his “type” had become so outmoded over the course of that same biblical span. Moreover, though Hastings’s “Sydneian” and “Blood-Royal Fate” as lamented in Pestell’s Lachrymae Musarum elegy linked him not only with a late monarch who had appropriated Pamela’s prayer for a Sidneyan passage in Eikon Basilike but also with Lovelace as celebrated for his “Sidneyan fire,” and in the same year, this common element delineates no specifically royalist tradition upheld either independently or in opposition to any competing ideological perspective.21 Whereas Lenton established the “Chivalry” of his broadly “Sidneyan” Lovelace as encompassing “Loyalty,” Winstanley in more directly twinning that same figure with Sidney enrolled both soldiers more neutrally among those “exposing their Lives to the extreamest hazard of doubtful War.” This difference of emphasis corresponds with an inconvenient fact about Lovelace’s profile: though he wrote poetry from a royalist perspective, participated in the Bishops’ Wars, possibly endured deep poverty after Charles’s defeat and execution, and underwent two periods of imprisonment (1642, 1648–49), the first certainly on ideological grounds, he also spent most of the period between these incarcerations campaigning in France and the Netherlands. Albeit roughly speaking a victim of the Civil Wars, he apparently fought in none of the battles spanning from Edgehill (October 1642) to Naseby (June 1645) and played no identified role in the skirmishes ensuing that comprehensive parliamentarian victory: much of the strategic vagueness surrounding his “romantic” relation to “the sunset of royalty” reflects this gap in his résumé. Whereas the noncombatant Waller and the soldier Lovelace both wrote poetry directly or indirectly endorsing Sidney as “Lovers, their Saint,” moreover, only Sir William Davenant among those poets’ contemporaries devoted significant attention to the same figure as “Souldiers, their Martyr,” and even then did so with mixed feelings tantamount to Lord Herbert’s skepticism about such an icon. In the title-poem of his debut collection “Madagascar,” with Other Poems (1638), Davenant narrates an imaginary duel between Endymion Porter (Endimion) and Henry Jermyn (Arigo), commenting: “Of these, the God-like Sidney was a Type,/Whose fame still growes, and yet is ever ripe.”22 These lines do not foreshadow Schmidt’s presentation of Wyatt as “the first of a type—the noblest type.” Rather than invoking essentially the same category of person as that celebrated in the ideal “tam Marti, quam Mercurio,” Davenant’s words draw on the language of typology, a mode of biblical interpretation recognizing Old Testament persons, things, and events as precursors of New Testament ones. Implicitly heroic rather than poetic, Davenant’s “Type” nonetheless receives a more expansive definition in the further elaboration that “Our Sidney’s full-growne Fame will still



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endure:/Sidney, like whom these Champions strive to grace/The silenc’d remnant of poore Orpheus race” (168–70). Whereas Sidney’s credentials as a descendant of “poore Orpheus” require no proof, Davenant can only reconcile soldier and singer in the cases of Porter and Jermyn by digressing about “mighty Numbers,” as he himself concedes in a self-mocking formulation: “But whither am I fled? A Poets Song,/When love directs his praise, is ever long” (171, 181–82). Whereas this strained evocation of heroic poetry as an ideal ensures that “Souldiers, their Martyr” prevails over “Lovers, their Saint,” Davenant’s verse-epistle beginning “Would thou wert dead,” addressed exclusively “To Endimion Porter” (1638), puts both icons on the same plane, classifying not only “the bold Sonnes of Honour” but also “the milde/Race of Lovers” as “both thy disciples stil’d” (5–6). The continuity in religious language between “Type” and “disciples” only underscores the extent to which Davenant lacks any consistent framework within which to evaluate Sidney as a figure applicable to Jermyn and Porter. Though he concedes as much by reducing both of those figures to the role of choric bystanders in a fuller attempt from the same period to invoke Sidney as a “Type,” this project further dramatizes the extreme disparity between his highly unstable conception of heroic virtue and the fixed patterns of meaning on which typological visions normally depend. In an elegiac dialogue not pastoral but aquatic (“Scene, the Sea”), Written, When Collonell Goring Was Beleev’d To Be Slaine, at the Siege of Breda, His Death Lamented by Endimion, Arigo (ca. 1637), Davenant alludes to Achilles, Hector, Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and other worthies, before having Porter declare to Jermyn: If thou, by the wise Poets Card, or Starre, Canst bring us where these faded Heroes are, Shift all thy Sayles, to husband ev’ry Winde, ’Till by a short, swift passage we may finde Where Sidney’s ever-blooming Throne is spred; For now, since one renown’d as he is dead (Goring, the still lamented, and belov’d!) He hath enlarg’d his Bow’r, and farre remov’d His less heroique Neighbours, that gave place To him; the last of that soone number’d Race. (65–74)

Davenant’s brusque treatment of “faded Heroes” elevates not only Sidney but also George, Lord Goring. A. M. Gibbs’s notes to the edition followed record Sir Richard Bulstrode’s judgment of Goring, whom he knew as a commanding officer in the Civil Wars: that this leader’s “extraordinary Abilities” were substantially offset by how “he strangely loved the





Bottle, was much given to his Pleasures, and a great Debauchee” (387, 388). Though Goring’s faults might have been less apparent when Davenant wrote, the DNB reports that he “early became famous as the most brilliant and prodigal of the younger courtiers.” But “love” once again “directs” Davenant’s “praise,” as in the cases of Porter and Jermyn themselves, and “extraordinary Abilities,” at least, lend substance to Goring’s affinity with Sidney. On the other hand, though the Colonel received his hurt in both the right places (Netherlands, leg), a wound not fatal fatally wounds the extravagance of Davenant’s conceits about a figure only “Beleev’d . . . Slaine.” “Severely wounded” and “semi-disabled” as he was, according to Kenyon, Goring still resumed his military career by serving in the Bishops’ Wars (256). The mere fact of Goring’s survival after his limited participation in the Thirty Years’ War imparts a predominantly anticlimactic effect to Davenant’s poem, especially given Jermyn’s insistence that Thus he forsooke his glories being young: The Warriour is unlucky who lives long; And brings his courage in suspect; for he That aymes at honour, i’th supreme degree, Permits his Valour to be over-bold, Which then ne’re keepes him safe ’till he be old. (89–94)

In their celebration of the heroic ideal, these lines have “unlucky” consequences for Goring, as not only underscoring his actual difference from Sidney but also making “his courage . . . suspect.” Nonetheless, the twinning continues, with Jermyn endorsing the suggestion that Sidney would welcome to “his Bow’r” his new companion, Whom he must needs delight to celebrate, Because himselfe, in manners, and in Fate, Was his undoubted Type: Goring, whose name Though early up, will stay the last with Fame. (75–78)

Porter concurs, after registering a caveat, because Goring, Though Sidney was his Type, fulfill’d above What he foretaught, of Valour, Bounty, Love; Who dy’d like him, even there, where he mistooke The People, and the Cause he undertooke; Betray’d by Pitty then to their defence, Whose povertie was all their innocence: And sure, if to their helpe a Third could come, Beguil’d by Honour, to such Martyrdome,



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Porter begins these clogged lines with a mild demurral, on the grounds that Goring surpassed his supposed forerunner—a hyperbole consistent with the general tendency of the poem as a whole. But Porter does not mean thereby to diminish either Sidney or his applicability to Goring, and thus proceeds to soften any such impression by emphasizing their many points of similarity. Though “dy’d like him, even there” could encompass both figures and “he mistooke” refer to Goring alone, the concluding lines strongly suggest that Sidney, too, fought as “Beguil’d by Honour.” Porter dwells at such length on the worthless contexts in which Sidney died and Goring was “Beleev’d . . . Slaine” that he seems to comment cynically about what “The World in time” chooses to “thinke,” even as he sets up Jermyn’s glowing words about the heroic ideal: “he/That aymes at honour, i’th supreme degree.” Whatever limited value they might have possessed as equally embodying “Souldiers, their Martyr,” neither Sidney nor Goring could have borne witness to any set of beliefs through a “Martyrdome” classified as delusional or illusory: both represent heroes, their question mark. A comparable disenchantment with soldiering informs Davenant’s play Love and Honour (licensed 1634, published 1649), in which Leonell, Prince of Parma, judges as “a mystery/Too sad to be remembred by the wise” how “half mankind consume their noble blood,/In causes not belov’d, or understood.”23 Davenant here expresses not his own perspective but a stage-character’s, just as he divides between Jermyn and Porter the debate as to whether “he/That aymes at honour” proves merely “Beguil’d.” Moreover, if Davenant himself always, often, or sometimes questioned the worth of any commitment to “causes not belov’d, or understood” such detachment in no way impeded his effectiveness as a royalist soldier, first as Lieutenant-General of Ordnance under the command of William Cavendish, future duke of Newcastle (November 1642 to August 1643), then as a gunrunner at sea supplying Charles’s supporters in the West of England with munitions acquired through Henrietta Maria’s connections on the Continent; in this capacity, he revealed his naval prowess as “the great pirott” identified by an adversary conceding that “No one man hath don . . . more hurt, and . . . been a greater enemy to the parliament.”24 But if he personally entertained even some of the doubts aired in his work as to the validity of the heroic ideal, this inner conflict might have hindered completion of his projected magnum opus Gondibert: A Heroic Poem, little more than half-finished at its publication (1651).



Sufficient like these Two, in braine, as blood, The World in time would thinke their cause is good. (79–88)

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thus fame Did honour Sidney; on your name Two Laurels grew, and they That speak them both, may say, Thus the fluent Ovid wrote, And thus too, wise Cæsar fought.25

In his commentary to the edition followed, Ray Livingstone Armstrong makes two points about the chronology of Shirley’s lines: “Since Newcastle was created Marquess 27 October 1643, the poem must date about that time. It would not have been written after Marston Moor the following year” (64). But Newcastle little merited the great disgrace accompanying his retirement from the Civil Wars in the aftermath of this crushing royalist defeat (July 1644), so Shirley might then have been attempting to redeem a tarnished reputation. No fair-weather friend, Shirley also published his lines instead of disowning them. Whenever he wrote, however, he must have done so too hastily, given his gross misrepresentation of Julius Caesar as only a military genius, not also a great writer with additional credentials as “tam Marti, quam Mercurio.”26 But though Newcastle’s versatility could not rival that of Sidney or Caesar, he was a discerning patron, a man of letters, a soldier, and an exponent of cavallerice. Both his competence and his limitations as a literary figure well emerge from Dale Randall’s characterization of him as “the most Jonsonized of the Sons of Ben.”27 If Shirley’s lines usefully correct the perspective of posterity by crowning with double “Laurels” a figure too often diminished as a mere dilettante whose doubtful accomplishments would have been still less impressive without the backing of a stupendous personal fortune, however, they also represent a notable exception to the rule that authors writing both during the Civil Wars and about them most often found Sidney relevant because his legacy in some manner transcended those conflicts. Among his Wishes, to His (Supposed) Mistresse (1646), Richard Crashaw includes Sydnæan showers Of sweet discourse, whose powers Can Crowne old Winters head with flowers,



No such ambivalence colors the praise of Newcastle as a Sidneyan “Type” tendered by another soldier who served under his command (November 1642 to July 1644). In his verses “To W.[illiam] M.[arquess] of N.[ewcastle]” (1646), James Shirley extols this General as “Great both in Peace and War,” elaborating:


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“As Crashaw declares that the physical delights of his mistress are chaste, without depriving them of their pleasurability,” Anthony Low maintains, “so he makes her intellectual virtues seem equally pleasurable by setting them forth in imagery that is insistently, almost physically, sensuous.”29 Though Crashaw’s ambiguous syntax permits this pleasing attribution of “intellectual virtues” to a seventeenth-century female, he probably writes of “showers” not as emanating from such a figure but as ideally bestowed on her. Crashaw might only have been thinking of the point that Sidney’s Arcadia, much loved and widely read in general, proved especially popular with female readers; but “sweet discourse” possibly implies an even larger realm of civilized values than those encompassed by Sidney’s compendious romance alone. Certainly that readily available book did not obviously excite wishful thinking, and John Buxton sees Crashaw as evoking “in the midst of civil war” not any one text but rather everything epitomized by “the patronage of Philip Sidney and his sister Mary” as cosponsors of the entire English Renaissance.30 Such an interpretation counters Austin Warren’s objection that Crashaw fails to specify “whether he is recollecting the Euphuistic prose of the Arcadia or the poems”; but Warren also deems the “sweet discourse” passage from Wishes “so unparalleled as to make one attach a perhaps undue importance to it,” on the grounds that Crashaw directly refers to no other English poets besides Sidney and John Ford.31 Whereas Crashaw does not cite these authors in quite the same way that he names Sidney and Ford, however, he did not shy away from printing secular verses recording his acquaintance with Abraham Cowley, and in his religious collection Steps to the Temple (1646) pays obvious tribute to George Herbert, whose verses he might well have read as suffused with “Sydnæan showers.” George Walton Williams argues that the “truncated” Wishes printed in the second edition of the anthology Wits Recreations (1641) “exhibits such errors . . . as suggest that it is a subsequent and not an early form of the 1646 version,” which would therefore have been complete at least five years earlier, and possibly “before 1634.”32 But these “errors” could have arisen from many different causes. Understood as an addition made to an already extant poem at some point during the first half of the 1640s, the passage about Sidney has a rationale that it otherwise lacks: then the Civil Wars supply a tempest confirming the tragic distance dividing the present from a past whose heritage nonetheless remains available, at least as an ideal. Conversely, Crashaw’s celebration of “sweet discourse” involves no paradox



Soft silken Houres, Open sunnes; shady Bowers, Bove all; Nothing within that lowres.28


as the published tribute of a recent Catholic convert (ca. 1645): “Nothing . . . that lowres” banishes all conflict, including the religious one for which Sidney lost his life. From this perspective, Crashaw not only ignores “Souldiers, their Martyr” but also looks beyond “Lovers, their Saint” to a more expansive emblem: hermits and turtledoves, their halcyon. This point holds true even if Wishes in its imagery anticipates royalist poems such as Robert Herrick’s “Bad Season” (1648) and Lovelace’s “Grasse-Hopper” (1649): elegiac rather than satirical in emphasis, these undeniably partisan statements mourn the loss of “Open sunnes” more than they identify and condemn the agents responsible for making permanent “old Winters head”; they lament internecine conflict as cultural suicide more than they withhold applause because the wrong soldiers triumphed. Whereas Crashaw’s “Wishes” would prove equally idle in Sidney’s case if they focused on an impossible dream or failed to acknowledge that his legacy had been interrupted, George Daniel produced A Vindication of Poesie during the Civil Wars that takes a more optimistic view of “sweet discourse” as still within reach. “The Sweet Arcadian Singer, first did raise/Our Language Current, and deserved his Baies,” Daniel observes, though forced to lament That Lord of Pen’herst; Pen’herst whose sad walls Yet mourne their Master, in the Belgicke fray Untimelie lost; to whose deare Funeralls The Medwaie doth its constant Tribute paye.33

Not denying Sidney’s involvement in warfare, Daniel also makes little of it: he focuses on that figure’s literary impact, as one “of our witts at home” (42). But he does not thereby promote the Elizabethan period at the expense of a later one: “Our Language Current” encompasses achievements by a range of Jacobean and Caroline contemporaries, of whom “the glorious Muse of Denham” represents the most recent (137), placing A Vindication as no earlier than that author’s Coopers Hill (1642). Daniel here does not refer to the Civil Wars themselves, though other portions of his oeuvre address “the evils of Parliament and the Commonwealth, and the heroic decline and fall of Charles I,” according to Thomas Stroup’s introduction to the edition followed (xxiv). Rather, A Vindication appears to confirm Stroup’s assessment of Daniel as “no soldier, but a retiring gentleman of cultivated and scholarly tastes, a would-be seventeenth-century Horace, loving chiefly his reading and painting, his fields and his pastures” (xix). Whereas Daniel’s elegiac invocation of Penshurst’s “sad walls” might indirectly mourn other estates lost in a more recent “fray” than the “Belgicke” one, his focus on Sidney’s “Language” as “Current” points in



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the opposite direction: he celebrates a legacy outlasting internecine conflict. Though the “retiring” vein of poetry composed in Britain during the mid-seventeenth century has often been interpreted as implicitly royalist, James Loxley’s emphasis on “The Drawn Sword” probably goes too far in dissenting from the once standard perception of such verse as withdrawing to at least some extent from partisan engagement.34 According to Henry Vaughan’s poem “To His Retired Friend, an Invitation to Brecknock” (1651), I have reserved ’gainst thy approach a cup That were thy Muse stark dead, shall raise her up, And teach her yet more charming words and skill Than ever Celia, Chloris, Astrophil, Or any of the threadbare names inspired Poor rhyming lovers with a mistress fired.35

Without hostility to Sidney, these lines promote alcohol as a source of inspiration superior to any Stella not Artois; they occur in a context in which the more fundamental opposition divides those following some sort of muse in retirement from those active in the turmoil of public affairs during a “Bad Season”: Come then! and while the slow icicle hangs At the stiff thatch, and winter’s frosty pangs Benumb the year, blithe (as of old) let us ’Midst noise and war, of peace, and mirth discuss. This portion thou wert born for: why should we Vex at the time’s ridiculous misery? An age that thus hath fooled it self, and will (Spite of thy teeth and mine) persist so still. (73–80)

Similarly, Vaughan’s poem “To the River Isca” (1651) instances how “the Thames/Doth murmur SIDNEY’S Stella to her streams” as one example of the purported phenomenon that “Poets (like Angels) where they once appear/Hallow the place, and each succeeding year/Adds reverence to’t”; he hopes that his own ties with a particular region will establish its “borders” as “The land redeemed from all disorders!” (7–8, 15–17, 85–86). Here, Vaughan not only finds another poetic genius loci in how “Severn swoln with joy and sorrow, wears/Castara’s smiles mixed with fair Sabrin’s tears” (9–10), but also echoes the author thus associated with the goddess of the river: Habington had included in Castara a poem entitled “His Muse Speakes to Him” claiming: “our famous Thames/Doth murmur Sydneyes Stella to her streames” (7–8). Ray (19) indirectly establishes a possible





source for both sets of lines by maintaining that the opening of Lovelace’s “Lucasta, Taking the Waters at Tunbridge” (1649)—“Yee happy floods! that now must passe/The sacred conduicts of her Wombe” (53)—consciously recalls a sonnet in Astrophil and Stella beginning with this exclamation: “O happie Tems, that didst my Stella beare,/I saw thy selfe with many a smiling line” (103.1–2). Whatever the relationship among the phrases “famous Thames,” “happy floods,” and “happie Tems,” however, Vaughan borrows without modification an entire line of Habington’s, illustrating the highly imitative approach characterizing his whole oeuvre; but these “Sydnæan showers/Of sweet discourse” aptly remain unchanged both despite and because of their translation from an era of peace to one of war. By contrast, Cowley could not distance himself from “the time’s ridiculous misery,” “all disorders,” or anything “that lowres” when attempting a projected short epic, The Civil War (ca. 1643), based on events still unfolding as he wrote. Instead of transcending contemporary “noise and war” as a salutary reminder of happier days, Sidney here functions as a yardstick of how far reality had defeated Cowley’s expectations that the Civil Wars and The Civil War could alike conclude with a swift royalist victory. Instead, though the conflicts persisted to the point of comprehensive royalist defeat, the projected epic ended prematurely at three books, with Falkland’s death at the first battle of Newbury (September 1643), as one “More civill, then Romance ere fancied yet;/Above the noblest draughts of Sidney’s Wit.”36 Whereas Lovelace and Waller both portrayed epitomes of feminine excellence as allegedly real-life combinations of the merits distributed between the fictional Pamela and Philoclea, Cowley praises a man who actually existed as surpassing all heroes “fancied” in the Arcadia or any other “Romance.” Cowley thus goes even further here than he did in his scene-setting exhortation earlier in The Civil War, addressed to the royalists alone and not to their rebellious compatriots: Yee noble Brittaines who so oft with blood Of Pagan Hosts have dyed old Tamars Flood. If any drop of mighty Uther still, And Uthers mightier Sonne, your veines does fill, Show now that Spirit, till all men thinke by you, The doubtfull tales of your great Arthur true. (1.401–06)

At this juncture, Cowley’s perspective coincides with Shirley’s on Newcastle, idealized as a figure who guarantees plausibility for “each Patriot” who “must rise/To court you with a sacrifice,” for “boldest Writers telling ages, why/Need fear no fiction in their Poetry” (13–14, 15–16). In Falkland’s case, however, Cowley does not maintain that a true hero



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validates “Romance” by lending credence to its “doubtfull tales.” Rather, he presents this dead man as both more wonderful and more real: civilians, their acme. Such hyperbole offers hollow comfort, however. Cowley himself had not attempted to outgo Sidney’s achievement in “Romance” or to imitate the hybrid texture encompassed by the old and new Arcadia; when he did revamp The Civil War, it took on the radically new guise of biblical epic. Though his first effort produced another unfinished “Heroic Poem,” like Gondibert, its unique ambition had been to channel history in the making. Foundering at Falkland’s death, this project merely confirmed the argument of Sidney’s Defence that fiction yields better heroes than history can afford in “beeing captived to the trueth of a foolish world,” whence it “is many times a terror from well-dooing, and an encouragement to unbrideled wickednes” (3: 18). Cowley’s perspective likewise diverges from Shirley’s in that his projected epic depicts many royalist heroes (Newcastle included) as somehow “Great both in Peace and War,” crowned with “Two Laurels,” or “tam Marti, quam Mercurio,” but without twinning any of them with Sidney himself. Prince Rupert personifies a “Comely young man! and yet his dreadfull sight,/The Rebells blood to their faint hearts does fright” (1.195–96). Charles Cavendish shows “Hector in his Hands, and Paris in his Face” (2.140). In Jermyn (Davenant’s Arigo), “Wit, Judgment, Valour, Goodnesse joyne,/And all theise through a comely Body shine,” together with “A Soule compos’d of th’Eagle and the Dove” (3.219–21). On George, Lord Digby, free Pallas did bestow, All that her Armes can dare, and Wit can know; In both has gain’d her Gorgons pow’er ore men, By’s Sword struck dead, astonisht by his Pen. (3.229–32).

Newcastle stands out as one whom every grace and every Muse, Kist at his birth, and for their owne did choose. Soe good a Wit they meant not should excell In Armes; but now they see’t, and like it well. (1.513–16)

These last two portraits hold particular interest: Digby not only reconciles accomplishments of “Sword” and “Pen” in a single person but also harnesses them to the same cause; in Newcastle’s case, Cowley permits “every Muse” to embrace and not merely become resigned to the emergence of a military hero originally “meant” to “excell” in “civill” activities instead. Taken together, however, all these paragons confirm how Falkland





for Cowley remained an exceptional figure, not even primus inter pares. Whereas any one of the royalist heroes listed could conceivably have been classified as a reincarnated Sidney (given the largely interchangeable terms on which Cowley idealizes them), only the victim of first Newbury proves subject to any such comparison, and then only on the basis of divorcing arms from arts, and of invoking the Arcadia as a “Romance” surpassed not by its own author’s life but by Falkland’s. Significantly, Cowley’s vision of Falkland remained unchanged from some three or four years prior to the commencement of his Civil War. In his verses “To the Lord Falkland, for His Safe Return from the Northern Expedition against the Scots” (ca. 1639), Cowley ignores how this figure had sought a military career before turning to poetry, scholarship, and theological debate: He is too good for War, and ought to be As far from Danger, as from Fear he’s free. Those Men alone (and those are useful too) Whose Valour is the onely Art they know, Were for sad War and bloody Battels born; Let Them the State Defend, and He Adorn.37

Other men of letters served in the Bishops’ Wars: Lovelace, Lord Herbert, Davenant, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Shakerley Marmion. But Cowley either knew these men less well than he did Falkland or cared less deeply about them. His focus in this regard would prove traumatic when a paragon “too good for War” lost his life in battle, as recounted in a narrative transcending “Romance” but utterly incapable of dictating what “ought to be.” Acceptable in Newcastle’s case, the deviation from a “meant” destiny could not be tolerated in Falkland’s. Cowley reacted to the death of his friend in terms explaining very well why he could not keep writing: “What unjust weights into this Scale were hurl’d?/Wee gain’d a Feild, and lost in him a World” (3.567–68). As this exaggerated claim of victory reveals, “Wee” encompasses royalists alone. By contrast, Cowley had initially framed his narrative from the neutral perspective of one appalled by the outbreak of hostilities: “How can we wish that Conquest, which bestowes/Cypresse, not Bayes uppon the conqu’ering browes!” (1.11–12). But he soon switched to crude propaganda. Even where his rhetoric extends to portraying Falkland’s death as a universal calamity, Cowley still retains his partisan perspective: “They killd a Man, whose Knowledge did containe,/All that the Apple promis’d us in vaine,” (3.563–64). The final pronoun must encompass all humanity to make sense as an echo of Genesis; but the first reproaches a parliamentarian army of Cains. Cowley



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unwittingly fingers the true culprit in this tragedy when he remarks of Falkland, “The farthest lands of Art did hee invade,/And widestretcht Nature was his Triumph made” (3.565–66): this figurative soldier should never have become a literal one, though he himself made the choice. Bloodthirsty enough to embrace the uncompromising royalism that Robert Ashton dubs “Cavalierism red in tooth and claw,” Cowley did no fighting himself and could not stand that Falkland ultimately proved “too good for War” by dying in battle.38 In his insistence that Falkland deserved a better fate, Cowley recalls Sidney’s numerous Elizabethan elegists at Oxford and Cambridge, as summarized by Buxton: “to these cultivated and civilized men war seemed a detestable and barbarous business, not at all worth the sacrifice of a life such as Sidney’s. They even blame him for wasting his life, and for not leaving to others of less outstanding gifts the degrading tasks of a soldier” (177). Perhaps when writing “To the Lord Falkland,” Cowley encountered Habington’s “Militia Est Vita Hominis,” and then remembered both its and his response to the Bishops’ Wars when writing his projected epic: whereas the older poet celebrated the heroism of “Hen. Per.” in confronting “Sad dangers, we to fancie scarce propose,” the younger poet had been unable to prevent his hero’s exposure to “sad War,” mourning that victim in a later conflict as “More civill, then Romance ere fancied yet.” Though two pairs emerge here in “Sad,” “sad,” “fancie,” and “fancied,” however, this resemblance might be no more than coincidental: in assigning Leonell his remarks about “a mystery/Too sad to be remembred by the wise,” Davenant possibly reveals how far melancholy had become a staple face of warfare in early seventeenth-century Britain, even as he acknowledges an enigma so multifaceted that it transcends not only prospects entertained by “fancie” but also the perspective generated by a conscious attempt to exceed the limits of the hitherto “fancied.” Habington’s view of “Hen. Per.” and Cowley’s of Falkland nonetheless prove complementary by diverging in opposite ways from the ideal “tam Marti, quam Mercurio.” Though Habington does not enroll his hero among “Those Men . . . /Whose Valour is the onely Art they know,” he also does not disparage them as merely “useful.” His opinion of “Sad dangers” does more than just offer cold comfort to reluctant, low-ranking, or otherwise undistinguished soldiers: cannon fodder, their crumb. Whereas Cowley makes “born” soldiers “useful too” because they can “Defend” the same “State” that Falkland can just as productively “Adorn,” this emphasis on the shared utility of two different categories of being leaves no doubt as to which he values the more highly—the “civill” paragon rather than the undifferentiated mass of competent butchers. The twofold advantage of any versatile figure equally adept in “Art” and “bloody Battels” would otherwise be apparent in Falkland’s case, as in that of sundry





royalist heroes admired with damningly faint praise for being no better than him when somehow proving “tam Marti, quam Mercurio.” Defining the middle ground between Habington and Cowley, Lovelace’s younger brother Dudley illustrates through circular logic how a “born” soldier could take pride in his repeated exposure to “Sad dangers”: he wrote badly because he fought well and fought well because he wrote badly. In the prefatory encomium he wrote for Lucasta, “To My Deare Brother, Colonel Richard Lovelace” (1649), Dudley disparages himself for even offering such an attempt, announcing, Ile doe my nothing too; and try To dabble to thy memory: Not that I offer to thy Name, Encomiums, of thy lasting Fame. Those, by the Landed have been writ, Mine’s but a Yonger-Brother-Wit; A Wit thats hudled up in scarres, Borne like my rough selfe in the Warres; And as a Squire in the fight, Serves only to attend the Knight: So ’tis my glory in this Field, Where others act, to beare thy Shield. (13)

This Lovelace echoes his brother’s “Going to the Warres,” which prospectively equipped its author with “A Sword, a Horse, a Shield” (18). The last detail plays a crucial role in George Fenwick Jones’s argument that the elder Lovelace here embraced a concept of “Honour” dating from the medieval period if not earlier, rather than one expressing support for Charles in terms of the utmost high-mindedness.39 Dudley’s equivalent anachronism expresses figuratively his unworthiness as an encomiast to occupy any role less humble than that of an accompanying “Squire.” Before thus dismissing himself as a mere dud, however, he had established himself as active in contemporary warfare, carrying neither his own “Shield” nor anyone else’s. As the repetition in “Borne” and “beare” conveys, the same “YongerBrother” status that in his own eyes disqualifies him as an encomiast also authenticates him as a veteran whose “rough selfe” had been much “in the Warres.” By implication, not only “Landed” encomiasts generally but also his elder brother held a less valid claim to the “scarres” of extensive military experience. Dudley confirms this impression in a dedicatory poem he wrote for Richard’s Posthume Poems, which he had organized for publication, when hoping that this volume’s “welcome” might not “be the less” merely



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“’Cause a rough hand makes her Addresse,/One (to whom Foes the Muses are)/Born and bred up in Rugged War” (121). Dudley’s focus on his “rough selfe” and “rough hand” as legacies of “Rugged War” make poignant reading when set beside Richard’s tribute “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly, on That Excellent Picture of His Majesty, and the Duke of Yorke, Drawne by Him at Hampton-Court” (1649), which praises Lely’s accomplishment in advancing portraiture by leaving behind the crude “Hieroglyphicks” typifying the tradition “of old, when a rough hand did speake/A strong Aspect, and a faire face, a weake;/When only a black beard cried Villaine” (58). As translated into a literary context, “a rough hand” proves no less of a cliché, and Dudley cannot have meant to boost his own prestige by conferring on Richard an “Aspect . . . weake” by comparison with his own “strong” attributes. Even so, the same logic establishing a “Yonger-brother” condemned at birth to a military career as encountering “Muses” only in the shape of “Foes” also inflicts collateral damage: an elder brother free to pursue the more varied profile of an all-rounder proved not only more than a mere soldier on that account, but also less of one. In addition, Dudley reveals an important continuity between his own era and that of Spenser, whose sonnet to Sir Charles Hatton had expressed the muted hope that such “delightes” as his Faerie Queene potentially offered might briefly alleviate in this Lord High Chancellor “The rugged brow of carefull Policy.”40 Though Dudley abases himself with respect to poets as a mere participant “in Rugged War” and Spenser abases himself as a mere poet with respect to statesmen whose “rugged brow” evinces the greater importance of their concerns, the underlying dichotomy remains the same: for better or for worse, literature fundamentally differs from governing or fighting as less hard work. Whereas Dudley does not dispute anyone’s entitlement to acclaim as “tam Marti, quam Mercurio,” the very frankness with which he accepts and even celebrates his inferior status in a rigidly hierarchical social system based on primogeniture introduces a note of realism inimical to an ideal conceived in terms of superabundant “Muses” rather than unequally distributed opportunities and resources. In his capacity as younger brothers, their Hercules, Dudley throws an inadvertently skeptical light not only on his own elder brother but also on Sidney, as lauded singly or in tandem by Wordsworth, Carew Hazlitt, Wallace, Great War newspaper editorials, Phelps, Hartmann, Bush, Howarth, Weidhorn, and Schmidt: sentimentalists, their special one(s). Idolaters, their idol; heroes, their question mark; hermits and turtledoves, their halcyon; civilians, their acme; cannon fodder, their crumb; younger brothers, their Hercules; sentimentalists, their special one(s)— these phrases convey both the wide range of issues covered in the preceding pages and the recurrent relevance of Lord Herbert’s twofold





icon: “Souldiers, their Martyr; Lovers, their Saint.” Not because of his formulation’s iconoclastic reverberations but rather despite them, this Herbert played a key role in the first concerted effort to demolish Sidney’s huge reputation as no more than a myth perpetuated by undiscriminating hero worshippers: idolaters, their idol. Reading Lord Herbert’s autobiography as a monument erected in praise of his own ego, Walpole sought to twin him with Sidney, denigrated as a comparable case of absurdly inflated accomplishment, but with this difference: the later figure overrated himself, whereas the earlier had merely been overrated by credulous others.



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“Beyond Comparison”: Sidney, Lord Herbert, and the Problem of Scale

Aubrey reveals the extent to which Sidney “loved very well” his wife: “having received some shott or wound in the Warres in the Lowecountreys . . . he would not (contrary to the injunction of his Physitians and chirurgions) forebeare his carnall knowledge of her, which cost him his life; upon which occasion there were some roguish verses made.”1 According to Oliver Lawson Dick’s introduction to the edition followed, “bawdy verses written on Philip Sidney’s famous death” possess value because at such moments “heroic figures lose their formal pose, and we see them once again as living men,” underscoring this general principle: “Unless we look at the past through its own eyes, we can be hopelessly misled by the differences in emphasis. For the law of perspective seems to work contrariwise down the centuries: the figures grow larger as they walk away” (108). Not the condemned “verses” themselves, however, but the actions occasioning them, as reported in a nonjudgmental way, have this quality of keeping one such hero in proportion. Moreover, Dick partly deserves credit here: he could not have generated his “law of perspective” from the same testimony by Aubrey as edited by Andrew Clark, whose version explains how Sidney “ contrary to the injunction of his physitians and chirurgions, which cost him his life: upon which occasion there were some roguish verses made.”2 Referring to Anthony Powell’s editing rather than Clark’s and reversing Dick’s point about how “heroic figures” can return to “living men,” Alan Hager notes that “a modern edition of Aubrey, which in general shows little sign of bowdlerization has ‘[acted]’ for ‘would not . . . forbeare his carnall knowledge of her’, obfuscating Aubrey’s sense,” and prompting this conclusion: “If the positive tradition were not so strong, it could not have contained the anti-tradition so easily.”3 But the outrage occasioned by Aubrey’s remarks about the possibly incestuous relations between Sidney



7


and Pembroke (another rumor thereby recorded rather than invented) illustrates how “the positive tradition” sometimes struggled to keep its “anti-” counterpart at bay. Even so, this notable exception to Hager’s rule does not validate Anthony Low’s claim that Sidney’s “legend endured” only with these caveats: “Don Quixote (1605) was published within a generation of his death. Loyalty in a losing cause, dying bravely, would continue to be admired, but usually with mixed emotions and with increasing wonderment.”4 The modern reappraisal of Richard Lovelace as a Sidneyan figure confirms how late in the day “wonderment” might still take a sentimental rather than incredulous turn, and William Habington’s respect for the paradoxically exceptional valor of any soldier expresses an outlook not “mixed” by recent exposure to Cervantes’s influence. Whereas Low grasps that literature might have a significant impact on perceptions of “heroic figures,” he overlooks the crucial point that Sidney’s own writing played a leading role in the historical development of his “legend.” “Even Fielding, that progenitor of the novel as parodic slice-of-life, harks back to the definition of poem propounded in the Defence and exemplified by the Arcadia,” notes S. K. Heninger, recording one way in which Sidney’s “legend endured” not despite his writing but because of it.5 Sidney’s romance over the course of the eighteenth century also became the victim of its own success, however, as outmoded by the very works it influenced. The high esteem in which the author of Pamela held Sidney thus yielded equivocal results. Recognizing the Arcadia as “the source for his Pamela’s name and predicament and for a number of her remarks,” Martin Garrett nonetheless observes: “Richardson printed the 1739 edition, which, partly as a result of his subsequent role as author of several of the novels which supplanted the romance in popular affection and esteem, was the last collected Sidney until Feuillerat’s.”6 The reputation of Sidney’s romance proved far more volatile than that of his other works, not only because the Arcadia spawned novels that then eclipsed it, but also because its genre highlighted issues of scale and “perspective” relevant to his own standing as a larger-than-life figure. A quarter of a century after mourning the death of Falkland as one “More civill, then Romance ere fancied yet,/Above the noblest draughts of Sidneys Wit,” Abraham Cowley published an essay, “The Dangers of an Honest Man in Much Company” (1668), in which he explains, I thought when I went first to dwell in the Country, that without doubt I should have met there with the simplicity of the old Poetical Golden Age: I thought to have found no Inhabitants there, but such as the Shepherds of Sir Phil. Sydney in Arcadia, or of Monsieur d’Urfe upon the Banks of



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Cowley’s divergent responses to the Arcadia represent two sides of the same coin: panegyric and satire. In both cases, reality triumphs: Falkland lost his life and the Arcadia proved chimerical. The earlier statement nonetheless shows Cowley attempting to remain in denial: invoking a conceptual realm beyond “Romance,” he creates an ideal at once less “fancied” and more (theoretically) imperishable. By contrast, his essay explores the comprehensive defeat of his own expectations. He initially moderates his skepticism about the scope of “Romance”: though he sets limits to “the noblest draughts of Sidneys Wit,” his chosen benchmark of excellence pays tribute, and he discreetly shrouds in mystery the precise mechanism of that gold standard’s transcendence by a still higher (albeit not “fancied”) exemplar. In his essay, however, Cowley writes as if he were a scientist reporting to the Royal Society, which he had joined at its founding: his “infallible demonstrations” document his bitter disappointment with “the truth” that the pastoral writing of Sidney and Honoré d’Urfé had obscured by pulling the wool over his eyes. Encountering his neighbors at Chertsey in the flesh produces two related shocks: their actual nature and the absolute irrelevance of pastoral as a guide to rural life. Accordingly, Cowley concludes that he cannot produce any such writing of his own because “the truth” leaves him nothing to “recommend . . . to Posterity,” other than his own disenchantment. But he had been the one living the dream. “No other genre insists so absolutely on a basic contradiction,” James Turner remarks: “people who believe the pastoral to be literally true are forever excluded from seeing its point.”8 Though not a believer himself, Cowley has no “point” of his own without adopting so naïve a response to pastoral as his foil: he mocks his own credulity, as well as his fellow country dwellers. Having sought “the old Poetical Golden Age” only to stumble across “Old England,” he allegedly encountered “the truth” for the first time, even as he acknowledged the “fancied” component of the superior antiquity he had hoped to find. The language of empirical observation adopted to enhance his irony kills it instead: he expresses a modern outlook and denies the common knowledge of his own era not by discovering that pastures and pastorals fundamentally diverge but by writing as if this incongruity were noteworthy. Though he had not expected his readers to reject as absurd a figure “More civill, then Romance ere fancied yet,” he professed amazement that “the Men of Chertsea” should prove more rustic than any agricultural laborers depicted in such works as the Arcadia.



Lignon; and began to consider with my self, which way I might recommend no less to Posterity the Happiness and Innocence of the Men of Chertsea: but to confess the truth, I perceived quickly, by infallible demonstrations, that I was still in Old England, and not in Arcadia, or La Forrest.7


Others besides Cowley have reacted to pastoral as if its “point” were to tease and ultimately frustrate readers by conjuring up an immensely satisfying mirage. In Book Four of The Task (1784), William Cowper initially hymns the innocence of an entire civilization’s youth in a manner that only appears deceived as to the true character of such works as Sidney’s romance: Would I had fall’n upon those happier days That poets celebrate. Those golden times And those Arcadian scenes that Maro sings, And Sydney, warbler of poetic prose. Nymphs were Dianas then, and swains had hearts That felt their virtues. Innocence it seems, From courts dismiss’d, found shelter in the groves. The footsteps of simplicity impress’d Upon the yielding herbage (so they sing) Then were not all effaced. Then, speech profane And manners profligate were rarely found, Observed as prodigies, and soon reclaim’d.

Cowper no sooner indulges this fantasy than he acknowledges it as one: Vain wish! those days were never. Airy dreams Sat for the picture. And the poet’s hand, Imparting substance to an empty shade Imposed a gay delirium for a truth.

When Cowper does succumb to wish fulfillment, it takes a significantly different form: Grant it—I still must envy them an age That favor’d such a dream, in days like these Impossible, when virtue is so scarce That to suppose a scene where she presides, Is tramontane, and stumbles all belief.

The OED cites this use of “tramontane” to illustrate the word’s “now rare” sense of “uncouth, unpolished, barbarous” (adj. 1b). With fine irony, Cowper thus condemns as lacking in sophistication not actual or imaginary “swains” from the less civilized side of the mountain but contemporaries of his so naïve as to see “virtue” predominating anywhere in an entirely fallen present. This level of disenchantment also qualifies as an illusion,



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No. We are polish’d now. The rural lass, Whom once her virgin modesty and grace, Her artless manners and her neat attire So dignified, that she was hardly less Than the fair shepherdess of old romance, Is seen no more. The character is lost.

Though “hardly less” maintains a distinction between “truth” and “gay delirium,” this dividing line has now grown perilously thin. Cowper mourns as “lost” and “Impossible” (even as “a dream”) an “Innocence” he refuses to surrender. His satirical perspective on “now” veers inescapably toward panegyric on behalf of some “then.”9 Raymond Williams notes one way in which “hardly less” both does and does not chart the historical, conceptual, and physical distance dividing “swains” from “old romance”: Poets have often lent their tongues to princes, who are in a position to pay or to reply. What has been lent to shepherds, and at what rates of interest, is much more in question. It is not easy to forget that Sidney’s Arcadia, which gives a continuing title to English neo-pastoral, was written in a park which had been made by enclosing a whole village and evicting the tenants. The elegant game was then only at arm’s length—a rough arm’s length—from a visible reality of country life.10

Whereas Cowley’s essay implicitly rebukes Sidney for false advertising on the subject of “Shepherds” and Cowper ambivalently recognizes “Arcadian scenes” as an intoxicating “dream” substituting “gay delirium for a truth,” Williams stresses how the pioneer in “English neo-pastoral” had accomplished that innovation in which the “reality of country life” had been supplanted, permitting the production of a certain kind of fiction not only in place of it but also in its place. But the phenomenon characterized as “not easy to forget” had seldom if ever been remembered beforehand and has received little emphasis since. Neither the “rough” impact of enclosure nor the “reality of country life” has significantly influenced perceptions of the Arcadia, especially as compared with the resiliency of that work’s “continuing title”; the disruption that Williams records as difficult to ignore has not upset Sidney’s own “continuing title” as a highly reputed author. Though Williams comes much closer than either Cowley or Cowper to handling Sidney without kid gloves, he claims no special authority when rather disingenuously appealing to common knowledge



however, and in its grip, Cowper very nearly talks himself back into his original fantasy of a bygone Eden:


and common acknowledgments, and equivocates as to whether the author of the Arcadia had wielded a “rough arm” of his own when writing at his sister’s estate. By contrast, Walpole mounted a sustained assault on Sidney as comprehensively overrated in part because of his high social status, as well as more entirely and more disreputably a product of fantasy than anything found in his works. In a thumbnail sketch of Greville (1758), Walpole not only damned the Arcadia as unreadable but also tarred it with the same brush as its author’s experiments with quantitative measures in English (generally dismissed as a failure, though usually with greater tact). “No man seems to me so astonishing an object of temporary admiration as the celebrated friend of the Lord Brooke, the famous Sir Philip Sidney,” Walpole comments, noting these meager credentials: “In full of all other talents we have a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through; and some absurd attempts to fetter English verse in Roman chains; a proof that this applauded author understood little of the genius of his own language.”11 Obviously iconoclastic in his contempt for the Arcadia, Walpole indirectly diminishes its author as well by making him “the celebrated friend of the Lord Brooke.” This gesture partly recalls Collop’s attempt to establish “Poesie” as not “unworthy” because “prais’d” by “a Sir Philip Sidney” and able to “make . . . a Lord Brook, as the most permanent Epitaph, desire to be writ Sir Philip Sidneys friend.”12 Ignoring the honor conferrable by “a Sir,” Walpole respects that conferred by “a Lord,” while reversing the emphasis imparted by “the Lord” in question through his own choice of “Epitaph.” As Greville hoped, he has indeed been remembered most often as connected with “the [more] famous . . . Sidney.” Walpole also attempts to rewrite history by classifying the enduring “admiration” of Sidney as a “temporary” phenomenon: he thus treats as settled the very matter he disputes. Insisting that Sidney had been overrated in his own day, Walpole challenges this quirk of the past as a persistent misjudgment still in need of correction. In this way, he both counters and ignores such contemporary evidence as Johnson’s English Dictionary (first published in 1755 but here quoted from the fourth edition, 1773), whose preface starkly denies Sidney’s ineptitude with respect to “the genius of his own language” by establishing his “work” as a “boundary” in this enterprise: “I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction.”13 Walpole knew that his low opinion of Sidney contradicted not only the testimony of the Elizabethan era but also that of his own day: even his friends objected. In a letter to Hume (July 1758), Walpole thus felt obliged



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to expostulate: “compare his talents with the admiration they occasioned, and that in no unlettered, no unpolished age, and can we at this distance help wondering at the vastness of his character?”14 Consciously or unconsciously, Walpole here counterpoints two terms formerly synonymous, as reflecting the influence of the Latin admiror, to wonder. He thus dramatizes his redefinition of Sidney as prodigious not because of his accomplishments but because of the huge disparity between those accomplishments and the reputation fueled by them. Invoking “distance” as a factor that could or should put Sidney’s legacy in perspective, Walpole nonetheless conceded that he sought to correct the vision of his own contemporaries, for his letter continues by lamenting a still current bias in the judgment of posterity: Allowing as much sense to Sir Philip as his warmest admirers can demand for him, surely this country has produced many men of far greater abilities who have by no means met with a proportionate share of applause. It were a vain parade to name them—take Lord Bacon alone, who I believe of all our writers except Newton is most known to foreigners, and to whom Sir Philip was a puny child in genius, how far was he from attaining an equal degree of fame and honour? To say the truth, I attribute the great admiration of Sir Philip Sidney to his having so much merit and learning for a man of his rank. (40: 136)

Though “puny” expresses a withering contempt based on the language of status (puis ne), Walpole’s concluding point about Sidney’s “rank” belittles him in a subtler but far more damaging way. Puncturing an inflated reputation by establishing a plausible cause for it, Walpole banishes an otherwise inexplicable mystery. Once more, however, he fails to explain why Sidney’s “warmest admirers” included eighteenth-century idolaters as well, unless he insinuates that they retained an earlier period’s automatic veneration of high social status—a touchy point for Walpole himself, perhaps, as one “having so much merit and learning for a man of his rank.” Jonson had likewise evaluated Sidney as inferior to Bacon, but only by one degree of excellence. Necessarily unique as the acme “of our language,” Bacon had not hindered Sidney’s inclusion with Hooker among “great Masters of wit, and language,” those “in whom all vigour of Invention, and strength of judgement met.”15 For Jonson’s namesake, those three authors (together with others) had served equally well for his English Dictionary in illustrating how the Elizabethan period had generated “a speech . . . adequate to all the purposes of use and eloquence,” the only difference being varying provinces of expression: Hooker’s “language of theology,” Bacon’s “terms of natural knowledge,” and Sidney’s “dialect of poetry and fiction” (314). At the furthest remove from Walpole, Aubrey treated Bacon as a figure





exposing not Sidney’s limitations but those of Greville, whose “unworthy” conduct toward Bacon “has donne his memorie more dishonour then Sir Philip Sidney’s friendship engraven on his monument hath donne him Honour” (117). Whereas Walpole reduces Sidney to “a man of his rank,” Aubrey had stressed this same figure’s credentials as “the most accomplished Cavalier of his time” (336). Perhaps Walpole’s experience of publishing Lord Herbert’s autobiography brought home to him how much he had slighted Sidney’s full range as a comparably versatile figure. At any rate, this degree of resemblance certainly struck him as grounds for a fresh line of attack, based on twinning the two men as if the designation “most accomplished Cavalier” in both cases rendered them fabulous. As Walpole explained in a letter to George Montagu (December 1764), The thing most in fashion is my edition of Lord Herbert’s Life; people are mad after it—I believe, because only two hundred were printed—and by the numbers that admire it, I am convinced that if I had kept his Lordship’s Council, very few would have found out the absurdity of it. The caution with which I hinted at its extravagance has passed with several for approbation, and drawn on theirs. This is nothing new to me; it is when one laughs out at their idols, that one angers people. I do not wonder now that Sir Philip Sidney was the darling hero, when Lord Herbert, who followed him so close and trod in his steps, is at this time of day within an ace of rivalling him. I wish I had let him; it was contradicting one of my own maxims, which I hold to be very just; that it is idle to endeavour to cure the world of any folly, unless one could cure it of being foolish. (10: 139–40)

Walpole so much enjoyed going over his readers’ heads that he did not mind becoming the victim of his own irony—as the editor of a surprise success. But he still resorted to “caution,” even when showing his hand to a confidant. His supposedly straight talk thus requires no fewer than three elucidations in the notes to the edition followed. “Lord Herbert’s secret” glosses “his Lordship’s Council,” yielding this translation: “if HW had not exposed Lord Herbert’s follies in his introduction, few would have detected them; as it was, his guarded expression deceived several” (140 n.15). The phrase “let him” expresses an ambivalence spelled out thus: “HW regrets that he introduced Lord Herbert lightly and so prevented his rivaling Sidney as a national hero” (n.17). But another annotation muffles the full significance of this point: “Of his age” misleadingly contextualizes Sidney “the darling hero” (n.16). Though Walpole assigns this status to the past by referring to what Sidney “was,” he cannot have meant that a once overrated “darling hero” had become more sensibly evaluated in a later age as merely “a national hero”: this figure only proves relevant as Herbert’s forerunner



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among “idols” fueling or fueled by “extravagance.” Insofar as Walpole had learned how “one angers people,” this education partly rested on contemporary reactions to his iconoclastic disparagement of Sidney. Here compounded by his compulsive obliquity, Walpole’s equivocation as to the nature of Sidney’s eighteenth-century reputation typifies his approach to this “darling hero,” but does not entirely disguise his claims: among other historical accidents, the inaccessibility of Herbert’s autobiography had long obscured the extent to which he resembled Sidney as one “who followed him so close and trod in his steps”; Walpole’s printing of the text had closed this gap to the point where Herbert had come “within an ace of rivalling” Sidney, and would have gone further in the same direction if the editorial apparatus had offered less mockery. His intervention thus did and did not prove decisive: if Herbert and Sidney could still seem utterly unlike, they could now seem highly similar, but in different ways—as “darling hero” or “national hero.” “The misreading of Sidney involved here has long ago been corrected,” according to Eugene Hill, whereas “that of Herbert has survived to haunt his reputation.”16 Though Walpole’s heretically low opinion of Sidney (albeit no “misreading” as such) could scarcely avoid being “corrected” by the overwhelming weight of opposite testimony on either side of it, it has exerted some influence too—perhaps also of a spectral kind. Low’s formulation of the terms on which Sidney’s “legend endured” attributes to Cervantes alone an upsurge of the very “wonderment” that Walpole sought to promote. As he explains in the “Advertisement” prefacing his edition of Herbert’s autobiography, “This Life of a Philosopher is neither a deduction of his opinions nor a table of philosophy—I will anticipate the reader’s surprise, tho’ it shall be but in a word: to his astonishment he will find, that the History of Don Quixote was the Life of Plato.”17 Not trusting the members of his audience to discover for themselves or even to discern with the assistance of just “a word” this perceived incongruity between Herbert’s preferred self-representation as a soldier and his chief claim to fame on any more objective account (as the pioneer of English Deism), Walpole obscures the point that these sharply contrasting profiles equally distort his credentials as an all-rounder accomplished in other ways too: historian, diplomat, poet, and lutanist. So versatile a figure certainly paralleled Sidney and merited the tribute paid in Jonson’s epigram “To Sir Edward Herbert” (1616): “If men get name, for some one vertue: Then,/What man art thou, that art so many men,/All-vertuous HERBERT!” (8: 1–3). A miniature by Sir Isaac Oliver dating from the same period (1617) nonetheless brings stark contradictions back into play when presenting Herbert as the quintessential love melancholic: reclining in the foreground, stretched out on a forest floor, he faces the viewer but appears





lost in thought; far behind him, his squire patiently waits with his fully caparisoned horse, ready to go. Though Herbert has his shield with him, this anachronistic emblem of his identity as a soldier now serves as a blanket further cocooning him in moonstruck isolation rather than protecting him on the battlefield. Whereas other portrayals of love melancholics often show young men whose introspection alone suffices to condemn them as unduly self-involved, Oliver’s miniature of Herbert incorporates specific evidence of duty neglected: squire, horse, and shield remain idle or misused.18 Such a figure represents the antithesis of the speaker in Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres,” who takes up “A Sword, a Horse, a Shield,” assuring his beloved: “I could not love thee (Deare) so much,/Lov’d I not Honour more.”19 But the love melancholic of Oliver’s miniature also bears no relation to the same man as depicted in his own autobiography, except insofar as implied criticism of military inaction reveals his usual priority. Suspended in or at 1624, when he had just entered his forties, Herbert’s life story depicts a highly successful ladies’ man, not because he devoted much time to thinking about or pursuing them, but because they forced themselves on him (and he, with some perplexity, yielded). For the most part, however, this narrative concerns his feats as a duelist and man at arms, locating him in a family tradition epitomized by his “Great Great Grandfather Sir Richard Herbert of Colebrook,” an “incomparable Heroe” only intelligible through comparison, as having achieved “more than is famed of Amadis de Gall, or the Knight of the Sun.”20 Rather than dwelling on his “All-vertuous” range, Herbert portrays himself as no less extremely one-dimensional than the love melancholic of Oliver’s miniature, except that he now embodies aggrandizement rather than directed or permitted diminishment. Unless he mocks his own vanity as the true descendant of an “incomparable Heroe” far surpassing any that “Romance ere fancied yet,” however, he more than justifies Walpole’s twofold amazement: that such “extravagance” could be voiced by a narcissist and still go undetected, even as “hinted” at its first publication. In their extremity, Herbert the love melancholic and Herbert the “incomparable Heroe” nonetheless meet in the last line of his own epitaph on the all-rounder he also resembled: “Souldiers, their Martyr; Lovers, their Saint.”21 So skeptical an estimate of Sidney as doubly iconic reveals either Herbert’s competitive determination to undermine a paragon he could come “within an ace of rivalling” or his wry recognition of the inherent “extravagance” characterizing all forms of adulation. Walpole’s unstable layering of multiple ironies would indeed receive a suitably crowning touch if Herbert in his epitaph on Sidney had found his own solution to this problem of tact: “it is when one laughs out at their idols,



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that one angers people.” Regardless of whether Walpole reinvented the wheel when ironically deflating Herbert’s autobiography as an expression of monumental vanity not comically inflated in the first place, however, four authors writing in the decades immediately preceding his attack on Sidney suggest that he underestimated his contemporaries’ willingness to abandon their sometimes merely stubborn attachment to a “darling hero” who both fostered and alleviated their own unease about indulging “extravagance.” Conversely, Thomas Zouch attested the long shadow cast by Walpole’s disparagement of Sidney by responding to it in the same year that Wordsworth published Cintra, belatedly answering a critic who had been dead for almost a decade with a biography restoring the “darling hero” to his former eminence, in part by incorporating an anthology of memorial tributes paid to him over the ages. “All his deeds of bravery, his politeness, his learning, and courtly accomplishments, do not reflect so much honour upon him, as this one disinterested, truly heroic action,” mused Theophilus Cibber (1753), as hugely impressed with Greville’s account of Sidney’s altruistic conduct at Zutphen; but he immediately added: “none I hope will think me ext[r]avagant in thus endeavouring to extol it.”22 “This great ornament to human nature, to literature, and to Britain” thus contracts to a single gesture, at once supreme and subject to inhibited enthusiasm (76). Anxious not to seem intemperate but also reluctant to abandon “the darling hero,” Cibber inadvertently supports Walpole’s iconoclastic assault on Sidney’s “vastness” when attempting to praise a highly versatile figure in the safest and most conventional terms: “He united the statesman, the scholar and the soldier; and as by the one, he purchased fame and honour in his life, so by the other, he has acquired immortality after death” (78). These words offer no way of determining which of three traits counts as “the one” and which as “the other,” or which gets lost in the shuffle. Grist to Walpole’s mill, such slack writing implies that mindless repetition played some part in perpetuating Sidney’s fame. Insofar as he even flirted with “extravagance,” however, Cibber also revealed the potential allure of forbidden fruit. James Thomson attempted to honor Sidney’s range while also assimilating him to a Whig pantheon. Construed by Garrett as perhaps “an early instance of radicalism by association” (48), this gesture more likely creates incongruity by being merely of its time rather than considerably ahead of it. Diluting as much as disrupting the mild “radicalism” of Whig historiography, Sidney’s inclusion in The Seasons makes little sense chronologically or thematically: an Elizabethan variously embodying “The plume of war! with early laurels crowned,/The lover’s myrtle and the poet’s bay,” he remains in this context a “darling hero” of a fundamentally different sort from his alleged peers, more “ornament” than indispensible link, and thus




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Oh! cou’d I emulate Dan Sydney’s muse, Thy Sydney, Cantium—He from court retir’d In Penshurst’s sweet elysium sung delight, Sung transport to the soft-responding streams Of Medway, and enliven’d all her groves: While ever near him, goddess of the green, Fair Pembroke sat, and smil’d immense applause.24

If “emulate” in this context encompassed a desire to produce rural meditations typical of his own age, then Smart had fundamentally misconceived the Arcadia; but the conclusion to the passage just quoted suggests otherwise, for it acknowledges that romance’s character as a performance. Inspiring a work that in turn elevates her as privileged sole audience, Pembroke, thereby crowned “goddess of the green,” responds with “immense applause” not clapped but “smil’d”: she thus gives the Arcadia the rapturous acclaim it deserves, but in a setting so intimate that she audibly beams with pleasure. Though Smart might be mistaken in linking with Penshurst a romance composed primarily or wholly at Wilton, he does not mistake its location “from court retir’d” as a departure from the pastoral genre or anticipate the naïve pseudo-history propounded by Cowper: “Innocence it seems,/From courts dismiss’d, found shelter in the groves.” “Once courtier status had been achieved, the distinction was recognized despite relatively long absences from court,” remarks Steven May, explaining the rationale behind grouping Sidney’s romance among “products of court culture.”25 Esteeming Penshurst itself as an “elysium,” Smart does not conflate all of rural England with Arcadia; rather, he indicates why his own poetry can only wish to “emulate” Sidney’s romance, to which he attributes these more potent themes and effects: With vocal fascination charm’d the Hours Unguarded left Heav’ns adamantine gate, And to his lyre, swift as the winged sounds That skim the air, danc’d unperceived away. Had I such pow’r, no peasants toil, no hops Should e’er debase my lay: far nobler themes, The high atchievements of thy warrior kings Shou’d raise my thoughts, and dignify my song.



an indulged bout of “extravagance” that wanders beyond even the loosely established boundaries of Thomson’s persistently free “association.”23 Identifying with Sidney as his fellow Kentishman, Christopher Smart both could and could not identify with him as an author, exclaiming in The Hop-Garden, a Georgic (1752),


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Here, Smart simultaneously disparages “peasants toil” and includes himself in their community (as a fellow “rustic”). He also shifts so far away from Pembroke as an audience approving Sidney’s romance (and presumably in that capacity influencing its character), that he turns the Arcadia into the Iliad. The “charm’d . . . Hours” hardly prepare for this transition as a secondary audience, because they “danc’d away” in a response underscoring the romance’s status as light entertainment. Karina Williamson’s introduction to the edition followed struggles to meet the second of these difficulties: “The choice of Sidney’s Arcadia . . . as a model for the epic poet is unexpected. Sidney is clearly appropriate because of his Kentish origins, but Smart also has some justification for thinking of the Arcadia as an heroic poem” (xxiv). Nonetheless, her commentary on The Hop-Garden probably hits the mark in maintaining that “Smart’s command of register does not always appear certain or felicitous” (416). Such control seems less open to question in the case of another Arcadiarelated poem by Smart, “A Noon-Piece; or, the Mowers at Dinner” (1748), whose swains imagine these amusements for themselves: On a bank of fragrant thyme, Beneath yon stately, shadowy pine, We’ll with the well-disguised hook Cheat the tenants of the brook; Or where coy Daphne’s thickest shade Drive amorous Phœbus from the glade, There read Sydney’s high-wrought stories Of ladies charms, and heroes glories; Thence fir’d, the sweet narration act, And kiss the fiction into fact. (30–39)

In their view of fish as “tenants,” the mowers tacitly acknowledge and console themselves for their inferior position by making themselves landlords in relation to creatures occupying a still less exalted rank than their own. On the other hand, they express a landlord’s view of the world, as compatible with their knowledge of classical mythology, their literacy, and more particularly their sophisticated attitude toward the Arcadia, which seems another way of conveying Pembroke’s purported “immense applause,” and suggests that Smart made no attempt to pass off his rustics as authentic figures from country life, but wrote of persons “from court retir’d” only insofar as they wear the garb of pastoral.



But I, young rustic, dare not leave my cot, For so enlarg’d a sphere. (18–27)


Margaret Ann Doody nonetheless judges that Smart’s lines feature a “patronizing tone about the Arcadia.”26 This verdict might reflect her failure to quote the last two of the lines given above, except that Dennis Kay quotes these also and goes further than Doody in drawing this resemblance: “A comparably patronizing attitude is a feature of Walpole’s writings.”27 As with “goddess of the green” and “smil’d immense applause,” Smart reveals his gifts as a phrase maker, linking “fiction” with “fact” through alliteration and consonance, and “fiction” with “kiss” and “into” through assonance as well: the melodious cadence resulting hints at the ease with which the imagined transformation might occur and evokes Euphuism without therefore mocking it. Rather than anticipating Walpole’s contempt for a work so “tedious” as to exhaust even “the patience of a young virgin in love,” moreover, the metamorphosis Smart envisages recalls the libertine perspective of Charles Cotton’s “Surprise” (1689), whose speaker locates “my glorious Nymph” in a pastoral setting where The happy object of her eye Was Sidney’s living Arcady; Whose amorous tale had so betray’d Desire in this all-lovely Maid; That, whilst her cheek a blush did warm, I read Love’s story in her form: And of the Sisters the united grace, Pamela’s vigour in Philoclea’s face.28

Though the conceit about “united grace” covers the same ground as equivalent sentiments expressed by Lovelace and Waller, Cotton introduces much of his own here, including the “Surprise” that nothing ensues from this voyeuristic scenario, even though the male observer sees his “glorious Nymph” setting aside the very text he suspects of playing some part in bringing her to an apparent boil: She read not long, but clos’d the book, And up her silent lute she took, Perchance to charm each wanton thought, Youth, or her reading had begot. (170)

Reporting “I could/No more resist my factious blood,” Cotton’s onlooker nonetheless recounts how “The Nymph was kind but would not do,” whence “at last I parted wounded more/With her soft pity, than her eyes before” (170, 171). Though Smart develops to no comparable extent his equivalent of this erotic scenario, his point about the capacity of



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“sweet narration” to translate into “act” similarly preserves “Sidney’s living Arcady” as a still vital text, even if its own recourse to the libertinism of an earlier era has seemed so incompetent as to resemble the “patronizing” tone of an author condemning that same romance as merely “pedantic.” Whereas Smart’s “tone” leaves ample room for disagreement, Moira Dearnley makes good sense of it when she observes that his Hop-Garden “veers from modesty to self-confidence” but relates this inconsistency to a more predominant “sense of inferiority” that issues in a “recurring note of sycophantic adulation.”29 “Although Smart’s admiration for Sidney and Spenser had only a sporadic influence on his literary style, it may well be that the Arcadia and The Faerie Queen had a lasting effect on his imagination,” Dearnley adds, suggesting that “the chivalric ideals expressed in Jubilate Agno were in fact psychotic variations on his early enthusiasm for the sixteenth-century poets” (65). But insofar as this poem of Smart’s (not published until 1939) has recently acquired canonical status as his masterpiece, esteemed more proto-modernist than product-of-madness, his “tone” remains highly contested. Though his evident admiration for Sidney confirms that no hostility motivated that figure’s replacement by Edmund Waller in the Penshurst setting of Smart’s Ode on S. Cecilia’s Day, this poem confirms both that his “enthusiasm” extended beyond “sixteenth-century poets” to models from a later age and that “veers” best describes his overall “command of register.” Guilty not of Walpole’s “patronizing attitude” but of the “extravagance” that he deplored, Smart equivocally brought this trait not only to his “adulation” of Sidney (and others) but also to his self-abasement. At least intermittently aware of the Arcadia as sophisticated “fiction” meriting Pembroke’s “immense applause,” Smart hobbled his sense of decorum by confusing that “sweet narration” with rueful reflections on his own status as a “young rustic” whose hopes “dare not” extend beyond his “hops.” Whereas Smart belittles himself with respect to Sidney as no fit celebrant of “warrior kings” but merely a “young rustic” confined both to and by his “cot,” Thomas Warton the elder humbles “Astrophil” by adopting and domesticating that persona to voice the thoughts of a doting father contemplating the infant occupying another kind of “cot.” No Hector scaring Astyanax with his “plume of war,” this parent meditates in “Astrophil to His Son, Aged Seven Months” (1748): O thou! with whom I fondly share My faithful Stella’s Love, and Care, To thee ’tis giv’n to tumble o’er Thy absent Sire’s poëtic Store, (With eager Hands these Lines to seize




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What tho’ thy Age no Skill can boast, In one small Round of Follies lost, Yet ev’n thy Toys, and Tears, and Strife, Act all the World in little Life. Alike Man aims at all he can, And Imitation teaches Man: —But then has Man his Play-things too?— —Yes sure. —Amusements all allow, And are more serious Fools—than thou. We differ, only in th’ Intent As idle—but less innocent.30

These words recall Sidney’s professed misgivings about the merit of his literary trifles, in part by fusing the Renaissance tropes of multum in parvo and world-as-theater: “Act all the World in little Life.” Whereas Waller developed a cavalier persona by invoking Sidney’s precedent to justify his own activities as a gentleman of letters and then placing his verses entirely at the disposal of ladies encouraged to “tear them in pieces, wherein you shall honour me with the fate of Orpheus,” Warton more directly adopts a Sidneyan persona to avow a similarly cavalier disregard about the ultimate fate of his “poëtic Store” by conjuring up a scenario familial rather than erotic, subjecting “these Lines” to the “eager Hands” of his own child, permitted “to seize/And tear, or lose ’em.”31 Thus steeped in a past that it also updates, “Astrophil to His Son” even anticipates the Romantic era in making a mere “innocent” the audience and inspiration for its ruminations. This apparently forward-looking character extends to the poem’s style as well, for its octosyllabic couplets depart from the norms of their period in the relative irregularity of their movement through two strophes whose unequal length Warton further compounds by introducing a triplet. Clearly, he could have recast his 19 lines to impart more symmetry and epigrammatic pith (Swift’s poems to Stella would have furnished an ideal model), but sought a different kind of music, one anticipating the Romantics in its relaxed grammar of dashes and seemingly spontaneous cadence of thought. Given that Sidney fathered only a daughter (Elizabeth, in 1582) whose mother was not “Stella,” Warton’s “Astrophil” must be the self-projection of a poet whose sons Joseph and Thomas the younger were born in 1722 and 1728; the lines in question would therefore date from ca. 1729 at the latest. Indirectly arguing for the earliest possible date of composition and classifying “Astrophil to His Son” as a swan song, David Fairer



And tear, or lose ’em, as you please,) Thou too from Pedantry art free, And I can safely sing to thee.

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concludes from his review of manuscript sources that Warton the elder’s “poetic output was confined to the period before his 1723 departure for Basingstoke”—not just a muse-fatal environment but one in which his triple responsibilities as father, vicar, and headmaster of a grammar school perhaps hindered or seemed incompatible with writing verses.32 Nonetheless, this same study also reports the existence of a letter by Warton the elder signed “Astrophil” and including a poem with the first line “O where is Stella Now to sooth my Care”; this Fairer does not reprint in full but characterizes as “a moving vers d’occasion in the ‘Tom of Maudlin’ strain” and associates with its author’s “final illness” (403). Such evidence points to the persistence (up to 1745) not only of Warton the elder’s muse but also of his identification with “Astrophil.” Moreover, that borrowed persona also recurs in lost poems by the same author that Fairer can list because at least their titles survive: these include “The First Billett Sign’d Astrophil, Being in Return for a How’d’ye,” “Astrophil’s 2d Arrival at Maudling 7.1.1721,” “How Stella Is Astrophil’s Honour; The Joy He Takes in Coming To See Her &c,” and “Astrophil’s Fright on Stella’s Illness” (402). Fairer only presents such material, however, to strengthen his case that that the elder Warton was not “a ‘pre-romantic’ innovator in eighteenth-century poetry (as all literary historians have seen him)” but rather a “mediocre littérateur with some talent for satire and occasional verse”: he primarily emphasizes how many of the poems published as the father’s were written from scratch or transformed through revision by his sons.33 The authenticity of “Astrophil to His Son” remains beyond dispute, though, and the elder Warton’s reputation would be easier to assess if his other poems voiced from the same persona had not disappeared or been suppressed. As the editor arranging Warton the elder’s poems for their first publication, Joseph had the most influence over his father’s artistic legacy. He not only retained “Astrophil to His Son” but also endorsed it with this stanza from his own “Ode on the Death of His Father” (1748): For ever sacred, ever dear, O much-lov’d shade, accept this tear; Each night indulging pious woe, Fresh roses on thy tomb I strew, And wish for tender Spenser’s moving verse, Warbled in broken sobs o’er Sydney’s herse.34

These lines capture how Spenser then enjoyed higher prestige as a poet than Sidney did; but the full context of Joseph’s “wish” concerning the one Elizabethan seems to require a link between his father and the other Elizabethan that would make far less sense if the dead man had not portrayed himself as





“Astrophil,” and possibly at least once in connection with this very “Son.” In addition, John Vance points out that Joseph “decided in 1784 to publish a volume” combining Sidney’s Defence with extracts from Jonson’s Discoveries, though the completed project amounted to no more than “a few copies . . . printed and sold,” and “erred in using eighteenth-century rather than the original editions as copy-texts.”35 But if Joseph gave such tokens of his respect both for Sidney himself and for his father’s appropriation of “Astrophil” as a persona, he also deleted two references to “Stella” in the elder Warton’s poem “Written in a Lady’s Watch-Case” (1748), substituting “Aurelia” and “the Nymph”; recording these changes, Fairer judges them “only minor,” though they compound the loss or destruction of other such material.36 Unquestionably in charge of his “absent Sire’s poëtic Store,” Joseph might have felt emboldened to revise or even purge it if he had been the “Son” instructed in “these Lines” to treat them “as you please,” either vindicating or belying the claims “Thou too from Pedantry are free,/And I can safely sing to thee”; but even on that scenario, the motives informing any changes wrought by “eager Hands” remain obscure. Neither preserved intact nor obliterated, Warton the elder’s persistent identification with “Astrophil” thus survives in a single poem that gives no grounds for supposing that lost context would have complemented it in such a way as to yield a body of work equivalent in scope or form to Sidney’s own sonnet sequence. Moreover, “Astrophil” as a borrowed persona neither acquires additional resonance through its adoption nor retains the “ironic complexity” that Edward Berry attributes to Sidney’s original use of it as characteristic of his best “self-representations,” which “always involve not only the testing of the self-image against a conventional ideal but the testing of the ideal itself against the conflicting demands of experiential reality. Not only is Astrophil found wanting by Petrarchan standards, but Petrarchan standards are found wanting by Astrophil’s.”37 But whereas “Astrophil to His Son” thus bears no more than a tenuous relationship with Astrophil and Stella, taking this work of Sidney’s rather than the Arcadia as a reference point might have helped Warton both find and locate “Innocence” in a wry way that Cowper later could not, as part of an eternal present defined by paradox (“serious Fools”) rather than by such glib dichotomies as “then” and “now,” “courts” and “groves,” “delirium” and “truth,” “artless” and “polish’d.” Instead of relegating Sidney himself as a “puny child” compared with Bacon, Warton thus sets “Astrophil” before a cradle supplying a different perspective: mundus et infans. Whereas Walpole rejected the Arcadia as (inter alia) “pedantic,” Warton implicitly assigns “Pedantry” to himself as “Astrophil” only when expressing the contrast between adults’ self-conscious artistry and the more spontaneous “Amusements” of a “child” not “puny” but “innocent.” Sentimental



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without being saccharine, Warton’s poem embodies “extravagance” only insofar as it elevates its author’s own standing as a literary figure, a point that might or might not have led to the eventual isolation of “Astrophil to His Son” as an apparently unique effort in this vein. Though Zouch might have known and disapproved of “Astrophil to His Son,” he more likely omitted the poem from his compendium of tributes to Sidney because he had not encountered it: he sometimes includes with little or no justification material of doubtful merit or significance. The only lines quoted from any Warton (Thomas the younger) fall into this category, as possibly pertaining to the great-nephew rather than to his ancestor: “Lo! then the leaders of thy patriot line/Hampden, and Hooker, Hyde, and Sidney shine.”38 Zouch explains everything and nothing when he rationalizes “those beautiful verses of Thomson . . . wherein he celebrates the sons of glory” because “it would have been unpardonable in him to have omitted Sir Philip Sidney”: the passage in question loses much of its coherence by virtue of that belated inclusion (295). Though Zouch needed no excuse to reprint the first passage quoted above from The Hop-Garden, he mistakenly treats the lines as consequential for the wrong reasons: evidence not of one Kentishman’s misleading partiality for another (in probably overstating the importance of Penshurst as a setting beneficial to Sidney’s writing) but of the likelihood that Spenser “spent several weeks” there to the same effect: “In this place of rural elegance they tuned their lyres together” (322). Conversely, Zouch offers no clue as to the tributary relevance of these lines he quotes (306), attributed to Spenser’s ghost in John Oldham’s Satyr (1683): Would’st thou to raise thine, and thy Countries Fame, Chuse some old English Hero for thy Theme, Bold Arthur, or great Edward’s greater Son, Or our fifth Harry, matchless in Renown, Make Agincourt and Cressy Fields outvie The famed Lavinian Shores, and Walls of Troy; What Scipio, what Mæcenas would’st thou find, What Sidney now to thy great Project kind?39

The commentary to the edition followed notes that Oldham’s Satyr “might be considered a distant ‘allusion’ to a part . . . of Juvenal VII” (477). This provenance does not explain why a passage focusing on Sidney’s patronage of Spenser ignores his own credentials as a soldier “matchless in Renown” and fails to identify him as a fellow poet. Oldham’s lines only qualify as a tribute to Sidney inasmuch as they damn him with relatively faint praise and without the brutally reductive outlook conspicuous in another poem drawing on the same point of inspiration, Matthew Prior’s Satyr on the





Poets, in Imitation of the Seventh Satyr of Juvenal (ca. 1687): “now no Sidney will three hundred give,/That needy Spencer, and his Fame may live.”40 Avoiding the crassness of a round and very large sum, Oldham deploys the discreet euphemism “kind”; but if his lofty rhetoric partly substantiates his priority as the value of a “great Project,” it cannot entirely disguise the extent to which he paints Sidney the color of money. Though Zouch does not include Prior’s lines along with Oldham’s, either as supplying context or for any other reason, they would not have looked out of place in a group of quotations assembled on no firmer principle that they shed a flattering light on Sidney, however trivially. This rationale explains Zouch’s classification of “Waller’s elegant verses on his Sacharissa” as “unintelligible to the reader who is not acquainted with Sidney’s Arcadia”: rather than assessing the relationship between the two poets with greater care, he presents an overstatement because this most forcefully boosts the earlier one’s prestige (147 n.8). The sheer lack of discrimination governing Zouch’s compendium of tributes to Sidney would be insignificant if these did not qualify in his eyes as augmenting his own biography of that same figure in countering Walpole’s attack. “Some severe animadversions on the character of Sir Philip Sidney gave rise to the following work,” Zouch relates, signaling his dissent from Walpole—here identified as Lord Orford (vii). On the back foot from first to last, Zouch believed that he had this huge advantage on his side: “The shafts of ridicule, when aimed against a virtuous man, lose their edge, and fall upon him blunted and despoiled of their force” (vii). But the opposite phenomenon occurs: insofar as Zouch misconceives Walpole’s attack and refutes it at every turn, he answers perceived satire with a panegyric of his own. Though Walpole had questioned not Sidney’s “character” as such but rather “the vastness of his character” relative to his literary achievements, Zouch produces as his trump card “a virtuous man” immune to all criticism. He thus lends “force” over and over again to Walpole’s claim that Sidney little deserved his elevation to “darling hero” status, for a “darling hero” he remains, superior to St. Sebastian in his invincibility when assailed with “shafts.” Instead of making a case for Sidney’s merits as an author, Zouch finds revealingly little to say on this point. By the time he quotes Walpole’s verdict on the Arcadia (155), he himself had already admitted that this work “now lies neglected on the shelf, and has almost sunk into oblivion” (146). In Hager’s terms (but further contradicting his claim), Zouch reaffirmed a “positive tradition” not accommodating but being eaten by the “anti-tradition” it resists, as an equal and opposite reaction. Precisely because he answers Walpole in every way possible, however, Zouch also creates at least the illusion that he challenges any testimony not directly and obviously to Sidney’s credit. Apparently unaware of or



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unconcerned with Aubrey’s brief life of Sidney, Zouch nonetheless gives the impression of going out of his way to smother rumors of “carnal knowledge” and the “roguish verses” that these had inspired: “Lady Sidney, who had accompanied her husband into Zealand, attended him in his last illness, and administered all that assistance and soothing consolation, which the tenderest, and most affectionately sympathizing indulgence could bestow” (258). Zouch cannot possibly have known this for a fact: he either invented material heightening a death already too good to be true or sought to whitewash a perceived “anti-tradition” that he did not wish to advertize any further by acknowledging its existence. Whereas he quotes Jonson’s verses To Penshurst (11), he reveals no awareness that the same author’s Conversations had classified Sidney’s visage as “spoilled with Pimples” (1: 139). Insisting that those with whom Sidney mingled evinced his own pristine and exceptional merit, Zouch offers poor logic but an excellent makeover: “The complexion of Sir Philip Sidney’s conduct through life, was without a stain or a blemish. He admitted none into his friendship but good and wise men. His habits of intimacy with them, prove, beyond the possibility of a doubt, the congeniality of their minds” (vii). Routinely protesting too much as a matter of principle, Zouch on one occasion introduces a phantom “blemish” in the act of dispelling it: “If Languet may be justly compared to Socrates on account of his wisdom, and the innocence and integrity of his life, the character of Sidney is infinitely superior to that of Alcibiades” (57). The pairing of Socrates and Alcibiades was not so indelibly established that linking Languet with the one required divorcing Sidney from the other; Zouch here seems to forestall the snickering of Walpole’s shade. Too honest to deny Sidney’s flaws, Zouch refused to let them modify his overall estimate. He twice excused the intemperate rhetoric of letters Sidney had written (112–13, 221), and mentions plausibly extenuating circumstances; but these outbursts do not in the least disturb the serene “complexion” of “conduct . . . without a stain or a blemish.” This curious state of denial becomes most apparent, however, when it extends to graver imperfections. For instance, Zouch explains away Sidney’s hotheadedness by making these points: In the annals of our country are eternized the names of great naval heroes, of Drake, Raleigh, Frobisher, Cavendish, Davis, and Hawkins. May we not therefore be inclined to excuse, at least not to blame with rigid severity, that ardour with which Sir Philip Sidney was inflamed to seek renown? He was not yet ennobled by any singular mark of royal favour: the Queen had delayed to promote him to any place of honour or trust in the state. High in rank, in the midst of prosperity and ease, he listened to the calls of Ambition. (225)




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Nothing but inevitable necessity compelled him to lay waste a rich and fertile country, by breaking a sluice and cutting out a bank to give a free passage to the sea, and thus to overspread with water a very large extent of the enemy’s territory. Such is the cruel operation of war, delighting itself in scenes of disaster and havoc, and extinguishing for a time all the feelings of humanity! (249)

Having converted Sidney into another Cromwell, warts and all, Zouch exhibits a different kind of incompetence when he turns to the one episode that should most easily lend itself to the re-ennoblement of “the darling hero”: The concluding period of life not seldom presents us with the most prominent features of genuine goodness; and it may be truly asserted, that the pages of ancient and modern biography are not illuminated with a brighter pattern of benevolence, fortitude, and invincible patience, than that . . . exhibited by Sir Philip Sidney at this most awful season. (256)

Though no “pattern” could be “brighter,” Sidney on this dimension still exemplifies a trend “not seldom” encountered, which takes away some of his luster. Zouch probably wished to normalize a figure who might otherwise seem too redolent of “extravagance,” and therefore subject to Walpolean “shafts.” Zouch again portrays Sidney as a paradoxically mundane figure when certifying his perfection not only through his (choice of) friends but also through the entire age in which they all lived: “No period of the English history is more richly adorned with examples of genuine worth, than the golden reign of Queen Elizabeth” (9). Both that monarch and her relations with Sidney appear in the most glowing of lights: “The Queen treated him with peculiar kindness, calling him ‘her Philip,’ in opposition, it is said, to Philip of Spain, her sister’s husband. To obtain the approbation of a wise prince, even in lesser matters, is an honour which no prudent man will under-value” (83). But not even the toadyism of this last comment can blind Zouch to an awkward fact about Sidney’s first diplomatic employment: “When it is known with what diligence, attention, and wisdom, he discharged the functions of this embassy, it is difficult to explain the causes, which prevented his advancement in the court of Elizabeth” (102). More than a hundred pages later, Zouch admits: “Though favoured with the personal esteem of the Queen, Mr. Sidney was not yet promoted to any honourable employment under Government” (206).



Whereas this passage encourages readers to suspend or soften “rigid severity,” another endorses Sidney’s own harsh measures:

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Zouch does his best with Sidney’s ultimate “employment,” however: “The cause in which he fought and bravely fell, was just and honourable, the cause of freedom and religion against Spanish tyranny and Spanish superstition. Thus was he immaturely cut off, like another Marcellus” (263–64). But the corollary endeavor of converting the notoriously unenthusiastic Queen into another Augustus requires twisting the evidence, and in any case drifts into unintended comedy: However commendable the zeal of Elizabeth might be in liberally affording aid to the oppressed Protestants, who, to use the metaphorical language of the Prince of Orange, were “protected under the shadow of her wings,” that fatal change, which the moral character of the English sustained by this their intercourse with foreign countries, cannot be sufficiently lamented. Alas! their habits of society and temperance no longer existed. “Yet this is not to be omitted,” saith Mr. Camden, “that the English, which of all the northern nations had been least drinkers, and most commended for their sobriety, learned by these Netherland wars to drown themselves with immoderate drinking, and by drinking to others’ healths, to impair their own. And, ever since, the vice of drunkenness hath so spread itself over the whole nation, that in our days came forth the first restraint thereof by severity of laws.” (241–42)

Thus, Sidney died that Dutch courage might prevail. Though unvoiced, the issue of “foreign” contamination also arises when Zouch presents contrasting portraits of Sidney and his father, who merits this paean: a more exalted character, than that of Sir Henry Sidney, can scarcely be found in the volume of history. It deserves to be better known. In him we behold the brave soldier, the consummate general, the able counsellor, the wise legislator; while in the recesses of private life, he was no less estimable as a husband, a father, and a friend: firmly attached to the church of England, and adorning his Christian profession by his temperance and exemplary piety. (14–15)

The son personifies excellence to the same degree but in an altogether different kind: During his stay at Vienna he acquired all those accomplishments, with which the Conte Baldassar Castiglione has adorned his courtier. He excelled at tilt or tournament, in managing all sorts of weapons, in playing at tennis, in diversions of trial and skill, in music, in all the exercises that suited a noble cavalier. His person, his aspect, his discourse, his every gesture were embellished with dignity and grace. (61)





In extolling Sir Henry, Zouch sought to heighten the merit of his primary subject: “Such was the father of Mr. Philip Sidney. Nor was his mother less illustrious or less amiable” (17). But this procedure only draws attention to the sharp divergence between Sir Philip and his native stock, a gulf attributed to acculturation “at Vienna” after the fashion recommended by an Italian writer. The one common element between the character sketches, the theme of adornment, still further accentuates the difference between two men who scarcely seem to share the same planet, let alone the same blood. Whereas the decorative side of Sir Henry augments “his Christian profession,” that of Sir Philip predominantly expresses itself in the sphere of “gesture,” amid “playing,” “diversions,” and “exercises.” Inescapably, one wonders why Sir Henry, who “deserves to be better known,” only emerges from the wings to amplify the brilliance of a figure already in the limelight, who apparently does not merit evaluation as the even “more exalted character” otherwise rare “in the volume of history.” Though Zouch himself seems entirely unconscious of any such tension in his narrative, any talk between Sir Henry and Sir Philip as conceived in these terms would swiftly end, with the son condemning the father as a Philistine and standing accused of being a popinjay. Both sorts of figure have their merits, as Zouch conveys; but they also have a long tradition of such mutual exclusivity that the one cannot exist in relation to the other without creating satire or parody. Thus, Zouch not only produces an early version of the dandyhearty split so masterfully analyzed by Martin Green, but also projects it more deeply into the past.41 Noting that “it has become usual to distinguish between the Elizabethan fathers and their sons by identifying one group with mid-century humanism and the other with Italianate and romantic courtliness,” Richard Helgerson points out the risks attending any such departure from paternal values: “In an age of inherited property and personal patronage, young men were particularly dependent on the good will of their fathers and others who stood above them in the hierarchy of rank, wealth, and authority.”42 In the parable of the prodigal son, Helgerson finds an apt paradigm for the complex dynamic that he sees as emerging from this disparity in generational power and tastes. “Though it is not what we we [sic] expect from the mirror of English chivalry in an age of courtly poets, Sidney . . . repented,” Helgerson acknowledges, as if forced to stutter by this outwardly shocking turn of events (154). But as he explains, the promise of such ultimate conformity had played an indispensable part in making prior nonconformity even conceivable: “Sidney and many of the other gentlemen-writers of his generation found it natural to represent themselves as prodigals. The pattern of prodigality supplied a mask for rebellion, a role that could be



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if they could not make an important contribution to the commonweal, they could nevertheless still satisfy negative expectation, the expectation that prodigality leads to repentance. They could rebel, suffer guilt, and repent, and thus acquire an identity supported by the governing ethos of their age. The pattern of rebellion, guilt, and repentance was a guarantee of achieved selfhood for so many of these writers—a mirror in which they found a reflection of their works and lives. (155)

At least in Sidney’s case, such an analysis helps account for the otherwise rather baffling extremes of his heavy investment in “Italianate and romantic courtliness” and his insistent disparagement of his literary works as trifles, which thus becomes the master dialectic of an oeuvre characterized by the multiplicity of its dialectics. On the other hand, the sheer extent to which the dynamic identified by Helgerson figured in Sidney’s mind and work, without involving any discernible friction with his father, either subtly supports or strongly undermines this paradigm of prodigal rebellion. If he was quarreling with his inner sire, he had no need to take issue with his biological one. But then again, Malcolm William Wallace drew opposite conclusions from Helgerson’s in addressing essentially the same issues of generational tension: It has been suggested that the disingenuousness which characterized so many of even the best men of Elizabeth’s day traced its origin in no slight degree to the prevailingly harsh discipline to which children were subjected. From such an unhappy experience Philip Sidney was spared. It is a thousand pities that we know so little of his relations to his mother; to his father, however, we know that from his youth up he was an intimate companion and friend.43

Here “disingenuousness” serves as another way of describing what could also be construed as prodigal rebellion. “He was a type of the best manhood of England in the sixteenth century,” Wallace also judges of Sidney senior (361). As in Zouch’s account, Sir Henry very nearly upstages his more famous son. Though Zouch’s fuller tribute to Sidney senior goes further in this direction, and by extolling him as in effect the opposite of his son most clearly both endorses and calls into question Helgerson’s attempt to portray rebellion where neither open conflict nor unambiguous connection occurs between representatives of the two generations at issue, Wallace’s comment about Sir Henry’s “type” acknowledges tensions even in the very act of ignoring them. After all, “the best manhood” and “of



played all the more exuberantly because it was destined to end in defeat” (155). Thus,


England” introduce categories not needed in presenting Sidney senior as an exceptionally good person, and ones to which his son would have been keenly attuned as an embodiment of “Italianate and romantic courtliness” who both condemned and flirted with postures regarded as effeminate. Zouch so far ignores Walpole’s heretical twinning of Sidney and Herbert as “idols” that he disputes the far more neutral pairing of these two by another author. After rejecting (because the French worthy produced no writing) William Robertson’s comparison of Sidney and Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard, famous as “le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche,” Zouch comments: The same noble historian hath observed, that a parallel may be drawn between Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir Philip Sidney—that they were both of them possessed of the high spirit of chivalry, and were men of parts and learning—but that Lord Herbert had defects and weaknesses in his character arising chiefly from vanity, which are not to be found in Sidney; none of whose actions were improper, much less were they ridiculous. “Yet,” he adds, “it must be owned that if these gentlemen are compared as writers, the History of Henry VIII is superior on the whole to any work of Sir Philip Sidney.”—But surely it cannot escape our observation, that one of them died at the age of sixty seven years, while the life of the other did not measure half that time. If the days of the latter had been extended to a longer period, there is little doubt but that he would have been one of our most correct and approved authors. (299–300)

Zouch ignores how the works of Sidney’s short life encompassed his Defence, which stresses the inherent limitations of any historical writing and argues the “superior” value of poetry, but within a sophisticated perspective acknowledging that “selfelove is better then any guilding, to make that seem gorgious wherein our selves be parties.”44 Nor does Zouch betray any awareness that Herbert’s “vanity” could only be held against him because Walpole had both published that figure’s autobiography and presented its “extravagance” as its most salient feature. Moreover, Robertson’s agreement with Walpole’s reading of that same work complements his agreement with Zouch’s view of Sidney as never “improper” or “ridiculous,” and Zouch in turn so far agrees with Robertson’s estimate of Herbert’s historical writing that his only counterargument takes the desperate form of pointless speculation about what Sidney “would have been” if he had not died so young. In making such a meal of Robertson’s scarcely contentious position on the relative standing of Sidney and Herbert, Zouch displaces not only his usual antagonist but also Walpole’s own treatment of the self-same pair. As with his apparent rejection of testimony by Aubrey and Jonson incompatible with his own idealization of Sidney as “without



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a stain,” Zouch again seems to discredit a perspective that he also fails even to acknowledge. Though he might genuinely have forgotten or overlooked Walpole’s heretical twinning of Sidney and Herbert as “idols,” he also makes it disappear when countering an entirely different and far less challenging assessment. Herbert’s reputed “extravagance” haunts Zouch’s narrative in another way too, when he admires “that incomparable hero Sir Philip Sidney, equally illustrious in the arts of peace and war” (255). To the delight of Walpole’s shade, Zouch here matches Herbert’s “incomparable Heroe” with one of his own. This resemblance extends to a peerless stature established through comparison, though not with romance heroes. “The Alexanders, the Ptolemies, the Pompeys, the Cæsars of ancient times appear with diminished lustre, when brought into competition with our English prince,” Zouch claims, adding: “nor can modern history present to us a portrait sufficiently resembling him” (299). But Zouch ventured furthest into his own kind of “extravagance” when taking “incomparable” most literally, producing the highest praise of Sidney that ever has been uttered or that ever could be: “The power of language is unable to equal his merits. They are indeed beyond comparison. His character must be contemplated with awe; nay, almost with veneration” (301). Though “almost” pays lip service to moderation, a “Heroe” so “incomparable” represents a “darling hero” tenaciously retained in the teeth of Walpole’s complaint about Sidney’s “vastness of character,” which here proves not disproportionate in relation to his own writing but incommensurate with “language” itself—an odd conclusion for a work combining Zouch’s own words with the more or less glowing tributes of so many others. By the time of its belated publication, Zouch’s titanic struggle with Walpole held so little relevance that neither author much influenced the development of Sidney’s reputation during the Romantic and Victorian periods. Whereas Yvor Winters sees Browning as “apparently modeling his best poem—Serenade at the Villa—upon Sidney’s lyric Who is it that this dark night,” most nineteenth-century writers had so little sympathy for great versatility as an ideal that it impeded their appreciation of Sidney’s writing.45 “We accept him as the type of what an English gentleman should be,” Hains Friswell declared of Sidney in introducing his own edition of the Arcadia (1867); quoting not only these words but also the preceding waffle, John Gouws concludes that “Sidney is valued not as an author, but as a gratifyingly English exemplar of the chivalric gentlemanly ideal.”46 Katherine Duncan-Jones plausibly reads Dickens’s Mr. Jingle as a parody of the poet-soldier Sidney.47 In Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney (first published 1824, revised through 1876), Walter Savage Landor assigns the second speaker an outlook entirely redolent of the nineteenth century: “I attempt





no composition which I foresee will occupy more than an hour or two, so that I can hardly claim any rank among the poets.”48 In 1821, Leigh Hunt judged that “the spirit of chivalry helped to fetch out the genius of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney, and Lord Herbert; but even they were all more or less hurt by their situation, and expected the Muses to visit them like gentlemen.”49 That Sidney should thus seem “hurt” with Herbert through their mutual “situation” rather than through affiliation with his “extravagance” spells out the obsolescence of both Walpole’s attack on Sidney and Zouch’s rejoinder, which had shared in this nineteenth-century trend toward valuing Sidney the man over Sidney that author, but without any corresponding sense that his status as a “gentleman” also limited his greatness. Only Wordsworth came anywhere close to echoing Zouch’s valuation of Sidney, and even on this dimension, Cintra reveals the outmoded nature of a rejoinder to Walpole by instead linking Sidney with the Peninsular War. Still more notably, Hazlitt assailed Sidney repeatedly, provoking a reaction by Lamb, thus recreating the conflict between Walpole and Zouch but as if those antagonists had never existed. In this repeated struggle between “positive” and “anti-tradition,” Lamb prevailed, not only by establishing Sidney as the virtual twin of his own great-nephew but also by inspiring the development of another match for him in Giordano Bruno.



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“The Revolution Then Effected”: Sidney, Bruno, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association”

Consciously or unconsciously weaving an elegant variation on Walpole’s disgust with “a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through,” Hazlitt some six decades later judged of the Arcadia: “the effeminacy of modern taste would, I am afraid, shrink back affrighted at the formidable sight of this once popular work, which is about as long (horresco referens!) as all Walter Scott’s novels put together.”1 Perhaps Hazlitt rather pointlessly replaced Walpole’s gender-based stereotype with another, matching but not beating him at his own game; perhaps even the height of ingenuity could achieve no greater variety when delineating a ne plus ultra of indigestible prolixity. But Hazlitt attacked Sidney with a vigor and persistency suggesting he was unaware of Walpole’s less forceful precedent, and thus regarded such iconoclasm as all the more overdue. Hazlitt also produced his own, subtler version of Walpole’s litany (“tedious, lamentable, pedantic”), styling the Arcadia “the most involved, irksome, improgressive, and heteroclite subject that ever was chosen to exercise the pen or patience of man” (6: 325). Moreover, whereas Walpole could probably have made his gibe about “the patience of a young virgin in love” without having bothered himself to “wade through” the Arcadia (an unreadable book should remain unread), Hazlitt’s rueful comment about “the . . . patience of man” reflects at least sufficient familiarity with that text to generate a note of authentic exasperation in no way minimized by its accompanying humor at the expense of “a riddle, a rebus, an acrostic in folio” encompassing “about 4000 far-fetched similes, and 6000 impracticable dilemmas, about 10,000 reasons for doing nothing at all, and as many more against it” (6: 325).



8


Hazlitt did not restrict his condemnation of Sidney to the Arcadia and sometimes made gratuitous slurs. In 1830, he idly speculated that this author “might have written a play at his leisure, and locked it up in some private drawer at Penshurst, where it might have been found two hundred years after,” whereas Shakespeare “had no opportunity to leave such precious hoards behind him, nor place to deposit them in” (11: 208). Here, Sidney so perfectly epitomizes a cavalier poet that he neglects to publish even conjectural works. On this score, Hazlitt has his cake and eats it too: he had earlier demoted Sidney from his customary status as England’s quintessential all-rounder by offering him a backhanded tribute as “one of the ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth” (6: 325). Such praise amounted to more than just an insincere setup prefacing a definitive put-down, however, for Hazlitt promoted that “age” more ardently than any other Romantic author: “Jousts and tournaments were still common with the nobility,” he enthused, of whom “Sir Philip Sidney was particularly distinguished for his proficiency in these exercises (and indeed fell a martyr to his ambition as a soldier).” Even so, a discernible impulse to belittle Sidney colors Hazlitt’s immediately ensuing remark: “the gentle Surrey was still more famous, on the same account, just before him” (6: 189). In his edition of Richard Lovelace, Hazlitt’s grandson made partial amends when looking beyond “the age of Elizabeth” and Surrey’s precedent to rehabilitate Sidney by reconfiguring his standing in relation to the categories “ablest men and worst writers.” He echoed the comparison ventured by William Winstanley, with the important caveat that it “be understood to signify a resemblance between Lovelace and Sidney as men, rather than as writers”: though this Hazlitt primarily sought to upgrade the neglected Caroline author by pairing him with the still respected Elizabethan author through their perceived nobility of character, he also helped secure the earlier figure’s literary achievement through the related contrast between his writing and the later one’s “rugged,” “unmusical,” and “unpardonably slovenly” efforts.2 Though Hazlitt senior found little to pardon in Sidney, none of his strictures justify Lamb’s claim to have written his essay “Some Sonnets” in reaction against “the wantonness . . . with which W. H. takes every occasion of insulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney,” as motivated by “an accidental prejudice” arising from this calculation: “Milton wrote sonnets, and was a king-hater; and it was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a patriot.”3 As he explained in 1822, Hazlitt did favor Milton’s sonnets (“truly his own in allusion, thought, and versification”) over William Drummond’s (less original, as too Petrarchan), and even more so over Sidney’s: “elaborately quaint and intricate, and more like riddles than sonnets” (8: 175). Whereas Lamb had begun his essay by appearing to wrestle with



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himself, his true antagonist thus emerges in the Walpole to his Thomas Zouch. Just as that author invented the opponent against whose testimony he launched a sustained reaction when generating “severe animadversions on the character of Sir Philip Sidney” from Walpole’s persistent skepticism about “the vastness of his character,” so Lamb countered at length a bête noire whose remarks had not stemmed even indirectly from any political bias and whose perspective chiefly reflected not his undeniably high estimate of Milton’s sonnets but his distaste for writing deemed excessively “involved.”4 Lamb thus denied his own originality in answering a nonexistent “sacrifice” with an act of redemption transforming “a courtier to a patriot,” for on this point he lacked even Hazlitt’s negative stimulus: “if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon the crisis which preceded the revolution, there is no reason why he should not have acted the same part in that emergency, which has glorified the name of a later Sydney” (190). According to this logic of “name” consistency, William Carew Hazlitt should have inherited his grandfather’s pronounced hostility toward “the memory of Sir Philip Sydney.” Though their actual difference of opinion demonstrates the folly of supposing that kinship fosters ideological lockstep, Lamb not only anticipated the late twentieth-century trend toward twinning the earlier Sidney with his own great-nephew but also played some part in inspiring Swinburne to develop another such ultimately canonical pair. In a letter (September 1892), Swinburne records the origins of his paean Astrophel, after Reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in the Garden of an Old English Manor House (1896): I have now read every line of Sir Philip Sidney’s works in prose and verse with a devout thoroughness of study which would have satisfied Lamb himself; and the names, adventures, and characters of Pyrocles and Musidorus, Pamela and Philoclea, will I think always be associated in my mind with the terraces, flower-beds, bowling green and artificial waters of this little garden and pleasure-ground.5

Elsewhere in his correspondence, Swinburne quotes from Sidney’s Defence (April 1875), includes among a hundred great books “26 . . . (Astrophel and Stella)” (January 1886), and frets that “an unlucky ambiguous turn of phrase” might expose Edmund Gosse as enough of a dunce to suppose the Arcadia a poem (October 1896)—proof that the catty friend knew better (3: 27, 5: 133, 163). But Astrophel itself distills “devout thoroughness of study” as polyvalent synesthesia: “Music bright as the soul of light, for wings an eagle, for notes a dove,/Leaps and shines from the lustrous lines where-through thy soul from afar above/Shone and sang till the darkness



“THE REVOLUTION THEN EFFECTED”


rang with light whose fire is the fount of love.”6 “As late as the nineteenth century, we find Swinburne trying to imitate Sidney’s methods of riming,” declares Yvor Winters, who seems to mean nothing more specific than a comparison of the two poets’ shared delight in virtuoso metrics.7 Moreover, the one Sidney of any ideological significance emerging from Swinburne’s poem takes a form apparently too vague for Lamb’s approval: “lord of the stainless sword” (123). This Sidney does not fight the same battles as his great-nephew and Milton would: his purity transcends history instead of responding to its dictates. Through other comments he made about Sidney both before and after concluding his “devout . . . study,” however, Swinburne had already gone or would go further than Lamb along the same path, transforming “a courtier to a patriot” in additional ways that might have baffled Lamb, though they ought to “have satisfied” at least the part of him so blithely securing not only the later but also the earlier Sidney’s participation in “the crisis which preceded the revolution.” In his essay “Charles Lamb and George Wither” (1885), Swinburne himself offered one explanation as to why the first of these authors precluded any less elliptical homage: No good criticism of Lamb, strictly speaking, can ever be written; because nobody can do justice to his work who does not love it too well to feel himself capable of giving judgment on it. And if such a reader as this should undertake to enter the lists against any of Lamb’s detractors, or to engage in debate with any of his half-hearted and semi-supercilious partisans, he would doubtless find himself driven or tempted to break all bounds of critical reason in his panegyric of a genius so beloved.8

But this same essay also records Swinburne’s keen awareness of “the attraction which his lovers find in the lightest word, the slightest record, the smallest relics of Charles Lamb” (268). Though Swinburne felt incapacitated as a judge of Lamb’s “work” because of his “too” great “love” for it, the sheer extent of his veneration made him sensitive to and able to extrapolate from apparently minor but arguably essential features of this critic’s writing undervalued by “half-hearted” readers and ignored by “detractors.” Not at all reluctant himself “to enter the lists” on behalf of one whom he enrolled in a letter (October 1879) among “my dearest and earliest friends in all the world of books,” Swinburne evolved from this enthusiasm a constant testing of “all bounds of critical reason” expressing his penchant not only for hyperbole but also for a rhetorical duplicity in itself paying tribute to Lamb (4: 104). “The writer of ‘Songs before Sunrise,’ from the first line to the last,” according to the dedicatory epistle introducing the earliest collected



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edition of Swinburne’s works (1905), “wrote simply in submissive obedience to Sir Philip Sidney’s precept—‘Look in thine heart, and write’ ” (1: viii). Though the habitual floggee Swinburne remains peerless as an authority on “submissive obedience,” he misrepresents the concluding line from the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, obscuring its context by quoting only the second half: “ ‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart and write.’ ”9 In his commentary to the edition followed, William Ringler explicates this “most quoted and least understood line of all Sidney’s poetry” as follows: “ ‘Heart’ refers to the mind in general, the seat of all the faculties. What the poet will see when he looks in his heart is the image of Stella . . . which will give him all the material he needs for invention” (459 n.14). But the exact location of this key matters little so long as Astrophil has access to it, and Sidney could have written “mind” if he had meant that instead of “heart.” Misread by Theodore Spencer and many others as “an eloquent rejection of anything but the strictest devotion to honest feeling,” as if spoken not only of the “heart” but also by it, the words actually uttered by Astrophil’s “Muse” illustrate Anthony Low’s point that Sidney’s “protests of sincerity and of naturalness are a nice instance of courtly sprezzatura, of art concealing art yet allowing itself to be seen and to be admired for its skill,” occasioning “only a superficial or pretended resistance to convention.”10 Albeit strongly conscious in other respects of how “the Romantic revolution” entailed “a new conception of poetry and its purpose” transforming how Sidney would be “remembered,” John Buxton claims of this same figure that “when study of other men’s verses but clogged his own invention, he found the remedy in the Romantic recipe.”11 These words capture how the advice of Astrophil’s “Muse” became trivialized in England during the nineteenth century and after, but also endorse such a caricature of Romanticism while supposing it somehow commonplace during a much earlier period. By professing to have written Songs before Sunrise “simply in submissive obedience to . . . Sidney’s precept,” however, Swinburne both does and does not evince “the strictest devotion to honest feeling” craved by all diluters of Romanticism: this volume (1871) encompasses some of his loudest tub thumping on political themes, including a cri du coeur entitled The Eve of Revolution. Whereas Lamb supposed that only “the order of time” had prevented Sidney from performing “the same part” as his own great-nephew by himself becoming a late seventeenth-century republican martyr, Swinburne claimed Sidney’s imprimatur for poetry championing reform movements at the expense of Europe’s anciennes régimes, especially in Il Risorgimento. Of course, Swinburne does not exclude other kinds of subject matter warranted by “Sidney’s precept,” as likewise drawn directly from the “heart”; but he expands the domain of





“honest feeling” to include political content that his contemporaries often deemed antithetical to poetry, as inherently impure. Lamb in an earlier period had recognized the blame he might incur by tarnishing poetry with politics: he advanced his ideological agenda under the guise of reacting against an opposite and prior bias attributed to Hazlitt, who proves the offending party as the original provocateur, thus justifying a riposte in the same vein. Incongruous in a Lamb, the resultant mixture of mock innocence and declamatory bravado became for Swinburne a habitual camouflage. Though his treatment of Gosse exemplifies his double dealing, his ambitions also extended beyond such trivial one-upmanship. Embracing “Sidney’s precept” as a modus operandi, Swinburne proved utterly unexceptionable by the aesthetic standards of the Pre-Raphaelite era in which he began publishing; at the same time, his outward conformity proved an ideal Trojan Horse, allowing him to exploit a widespread distortion of Astrophil and Stella that still enjoys currency. His cleverness on this score nonetheless backfired if it played any part in fostering his false reputation as one of the purest of aesthetes, rather than as the essayist who in writing of Victor Hugo (1872) maintained these crucial distinctions: “the doctrine of art for art is true in the positive sense, false in the negative; sound as an affirmation, unsound as a prohibition” (148). On its own terms, however, his misrepresentation of Astrophil’s “Muse” straddles the middle ground dividing two further such misrepresentations otherwise comparable not only with each other but also with his: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s and Christopher Hill’s. In her Book of the Poets (1842), Barrett Browning classified Sidney as “true knight and fantastic poet, whose soul did too curiously inquire the fashion of the beautiful—the fashion rather than the secret,—but left us in one line the completest ‘Ars Poetica’ extant.”12 Though she did not err by supposing “looke in thy heart” recommends sincerity rather than artifice as a point of departure, she overlooked the paradoxical origin of such self-effacingly homely advice in the words of Astrophil’s “Muse,” thus missing altogether the sophisticated wit of Sidney’s aesthetic. She likewise diluted Romanticism itself, for she limited poetry not only to purity of feeling but also to a concept of “the beautiful” implicitly excluding such impure matter as Swinburne’s republicanism. Her position thus accords with her poem from almost a decade beforehand, “The Picture Gallery at Penshurst,” in which Sidney (“he, whose lute said/Sweet music to the land”) and his great-nephew (“he, who bled/Freely for freedom’s sake”) occupy distinct niches (1: 16-17, 14-15). In that regard, Barrett Browning also opposed Lamb’s redemption of Sidney through his hypothetically “acted . . . part.” At the opposite extreme from Barrett Browning, Hill drew from Sidney’s “most quoted . . . line” not an “Ars Poetica” but an ideological



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program: “Protestantism had taught men and women to look inwards to ascertain God’s will, not outwards to the hierarchy of the Church.”13 For Hill, shedding the rhetorical context of a Petrarchan sonnet sequence fixated on Stella’s “image” to reveal the theologico-political implications of Sidney’s words justified bracketing him with Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the True Levellers, a sect of Christian communists active during the British Civil Wars and antagonistic to social as well as religious “hierarchy” (30 n.102). Though Hill thus agreed with Barrett Browning in so entirely discounting the role of Astrophil’s “Muse,” he took the opposite step of achieving on Sidney’s behalf the “radicalism by association” that Martin Garrett perceived in James Thomson’s anticipation of Lamb when pairing Sidney with his own great-nephew.14 Like Barrett Browning, Swinburne found in Sidney’s “most quoted . . . line” an “Ars Poetica”; like Hill, he found in that same “precept” justification for opposing various kinds of status quo. But Swinburne also promoted Sidney’s “radicalism” more directly, through “association” alone, in his poems “The Monument of Giordano Bruno” (1889) and “For the Feast of Giordano Bruno, Philosopher and Martyr” (1878). The earlier of these tributes salutes “Our friend that art, our Sidney’s friend that wast” (3: 48); the later hails one “Whom Sidney, flower of England, lordliest head/Of all we love, loved” (6: 243). Zouch had felt obliged to defend Sidney from the “obloquy” of his rumored ties with Bruno, protesting his subject’s inability to “delight in a dark and clandestine association,” though also doubting whether the heretic “burnt at Rome in 1600, by a sentence of the Inquisition, as an atheist and a teacher of impiety,” had been condemned by “a just and impartial tribunal” (337, 339, 340). Swinburne reverses these terms of discussion, presenting Bruno as a “Martyr” rather than a mere victim of prejudice, trumpeting an “association” whose “clandestine” character he thereby denies, making it a source of glory rather than of “obloquy,” and eliminating its “dark” aspect by reinforcing Sidney’s reputation as a “flower” among Englishmen. Whereas Lamb had conjured from their shared “name” an ideological consistency uniting Sidney with his great-nephew, Swinburne ranges further afield in pursuit of a fit comrade for the hero of Zutphen and invokes a more spacious connector than genealogical ties: through the operation of his own affection, the “lordliest head/Of all we love” makes Bruno as unexceptionable a feature of “this little garden and pleasure-ground” as the “bowling green” he and Sidney thus seem to share. This new Damon-and-Pythias combination at once echoes and displaces not only more traditional pairings but also prior categories likewise based on ostensible consensus: Edmund Waller’s statement that “all we can of love, or high desire,/Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney’s fire”; Milton’s insistence on the centrality of the Sidney “nomen” to





“nostris . . . partibus.”15 The pristine Sidney thus let Swinburne maintain a blameless posture while cultivating “clandestine” tastes of his own: he put the onus on his Victorian contemporaries to explain their misgivings about an ambiguous figure sanctioned by “association” to so irreproachable a hero. The outward conformity maintaining Swinburne’s privileged position in the literary establishment of his day seldom meshed so smoothly with his unorthodox tendencies as atheist, republican, and admirer not only of Bruno but also of Whitman, Baudelaire, and de Sade. But therein lies a problem greater than the potential for his retrospective classification of Songs before Sunrise as cris du coeur to obscure as well as clarify his attitude toward “art for art.” Ian Fletcher suggests that Swinburne resembled Yeats in having “located . . . some of his most deeply felt values under the aristocratic notions of courage, honour and chivalry.”16 Intended or not in either man’s case, the implication that “under” might entail subterfuge certainly held true at times for Swinburne. Noting that Ruskin had advised him against publishing any poems that “ ‘would win him a dark reputation,’ ” Jean Overton Fuller records Swinburne’s frequent recourse to hypocrisy, as well as acknowledging his overall “trend towards retrenchment from earlier and liberal loyalties” as he aged.17 Though Swinburne’s twinning of Sidney and Bruno marks no such “retrenchment,” neither does it post any advance: his Trojan horse enters the city, but not to sack it. Insofar as he chiefly sought to mobilize Sidney’s “courage, honour and chivalry” on Bruno’s behalf, Swinburne secured “radicalism” for the one by “association with the other. But he also did not mind or welcomed how both might fall together, rather than stand so. Whereas he would later describe how “darkness rang with light” on the basis of Sidney’s “lustrous lines” alone, he produced a quite different effect by fusing two figures hitherto deemed quintessential embodiments of “darkness” and “light.” The shock value of this formulation nonetheless depends on its oxymoronic appearance: in lieu of “deeply held values,” Swinburne offers the equivalent of an adolescent’s testing of boundaries: he can only achieve incidental outrage, not profound or enduring change in readers’ perceptions, when manipulating Sidney and Bruno as tokens based on their previously established and dramatically contrasting profiles. Up to a point, but no further, Swinburne would court “a dark reputation,” both for himself and for Sidney, by celebrating rather than regretting “a dark and clandestine association” otherwise left undisturbed, as subject to no substantial revision based on “devout thoroughness of study” or some alternative source of evidence. In that respect, Swinburne neither anticipated nor fostered the current orthodoxy governing Sidney-Bruno relations, in which “dark” qualifies as the new “light.”



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“The actual extent of Sidney’s acquaintance with Bruno remains uncertain with the camps divided,” according to Tom Parker, “one arguing for close friendship between the two with the obvious likelihood of discussion and manuscript exchange, the other claiming that the available evidence can justify no more than a passing acquaintance.”18 This ostensibly evenhanded formulation nonetheless deceives: “obvious likelihood” might be a reasonable assumption if it stemmed from a known “close friendship” rather than pure speculation based on some degree of “acquaintance”; the opposing position involves not “claiming” of any kind but a circumspect reluctance to exceed “available evidence.” Though not consciously indebted to Swinburne’s claims, the first of Parker’s “camps” has also made no progress beyond exaggerating Sidney’s affection for Bruno in the context of “all we love,” except insofar as that category now depends less on the one’s “courage, honour and chivalry” and more on the other’s “impiety,” reconceived with suspicious assurance as heterodox innovation. Low characterizes Bruno’s Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante (1584) as “one of the originary texts for the whole movement toward scientific, economic, and cultural reform in the seventeenth century” (154). Because this text bore a dedication to Sidney, he would have seemed all the more benighted not to have appreciated its merits. But where Low finds such a rich abundance of forward-looking meaning, others have found merely a lack of focus or coherence. Reviewing Ingrid Rowland’s “first full-scale biography of Bruno in English,” Joan Acocella pinpoints “the question” about his collected writings that this study seeks, “with difficulty, to answer”: when the Catholic Church “made Bruno a martyr,” he thereby bore witness “ ‘to what?’ ”19 “Rowland does the best she can with this material,” in Acocella’s view, “but . . . has” another “big problem” insofar as “very little is known about Bruno’s life” (79). The highly elusive nature of this figure has not deterred attempts to augment his “scientific, economic, and cultural” significance with meaningful political credentials as well. Annabel Patterson classifies Thomas Carew’s “choice of model” for his masque Coelum Brittanicum (1634) as “suggestive” because Spaccio and its dedication “presumably” evoked “the reputations of both Bruno and Sidney as questioners of royal authority.”20 Though Bruno’s dedication does not itself lie open to dispute, a masque such as Carew’s, with its generic predisposition to favor music, dancing, and spectacle over words, seems ill qualified to convey such a meaning as Patterson assigns it. With so little known about how well Sidney knew Bruno or his work, and what if anything he made of either, the level of modern investment in their mere “acquaintance” only seems not absurd on the assumption, itself highly questionable, that in this affiliation the hero of Zutphen found another soul mate of much the same ideological orientation as Spenser, Prince Henry,





Greville, Winstanley, and his own great-nephew. The “dark and clandestine association” that so worried Zouch as potentially tarnishing Sidney’s reputation Swinburne viewed as conceivably polished by that same reputation instead. Whereas Zouch questioned whether Bruno received “a just and impartial tribunal,” the opposite line of argument now prevails: insofar as an enemy’s enemy constitutes a friend, Sidney must have “loved” a figure so persecuted. With Bruno currently qualifying in many corners as both “Philosopher” and “Martyr,” this verdict stresses not the justice of his cruel execution on the latter count but the luster he imparts to Sidney by “association” as a figure so deeply involved in “radicalism” that he merited such a fate, proof by default of his multipronged agenda for “reform.” The fact remains that no evidence establishes whether Sidney did or did not perceive Bruno’s conversation and writing in much the same way that his Defence recalled Jon Pietro Pugliano’s narcissistic enthusiasm for all things equestrian: as symptomatic of “the fertilnes of the Italian wit.”21 In this connection, Aubrey’s anecdote about Sidney’s patronage acquires indirect significance: Among others, Mr Edmund Spencer made his addresse to him, and brought his Faery Queen. Sir Philip was busy at his Study, and his servant delivered Mr Spencer’s booke to his master, who layd it by, thinking it might be such kind of Stuffe as he was frequently troubled with. Mr Spencer stayed so long that his patience was wearied, and went his way discontented, and never intended to come again. When Sir Philip perused it, he was so exceedingly delighted with it that he was extremely sorry he was gonne, and where to send for him he knew not. After much enquiry he learned his lodgeing, and sent for him, mightily caressed him, and ordered his servant to give him so many pounds in gold. His servant sayd that that was too much. No, sayd Sir Philip, and ordered an addition. From this time there was a great friendship between them, to his dying day.22

A narrative so satisfying on so many dimensions most likely disqualifies itself as fiction on that account alone. Primarily, perhaps, it corroborates the testimony of John Collop, John Oldham, and Matthew Prior as evincing a trend in England during the second half of the seventeenth century toward focusing on Sidney not as poet, soldier, or general all-rounder, but as source or recipient of patronage, with increasing attention to the allegedly large sums of money involved. Pepys in his diary only deviated from this pattern insofar as he responded to Greville’s biography of Sidney by ignoring its subject to ponder national rather than individual prosperity. Taken together, these verdicts suggest that a decline in patronage had heightened interest in and sometimes prompted exaggeration about the



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generosity of this kind on display in an earlier and seemingly fabled era, and that cash-strapped poets were not alone in voicing a coarser or more realistic appreciation of money’s importance. But Aubrey’s anecdote also offers an ironic upshot to his point about the burdens sometimes accompanying Sidney’s magnanimity as one “of a very munificent spirit, and liberall to all Lovers of Learning, and to those that pretended to any acquaintance with Parnassus: in so much that he was cloyed and surfeited with the Poetasters of those dayes” (337). Insofar as Aubrey’s story appeals to our sentimental conviction that all great artists should recognize and support each other by word or deed, it ought to remind us as well that such wishful thinking often proves vain. We think we know more about SidneySpenser relations than we do, because we cannot easily imagine them not linked by “a great friendship” founded on mutually high esteem. To question this scenario would be to echo the niggardly “servant” who cried, “too much.” But whereas bad luck or timing rather than any defect of judgment on Sidney’s part might have relegated Spenser to the ranks of sundry “Poetasters” in Aubrey’s report, this in itself confirms the important role played by chance in such transactions. Sidney could have been too busy to lend more than half an ear to Bruno’s writing and conversation, and might or might not have concluded on that basis, rightly or wrongly, that he was again being “troubled.” However embellished, Aubrey’s claim that Spenser experienced the greatest near miss in English literary history because of “the Poetasters” his prospective patron “was frequently troubled with” underscores other testimony, less open to doubt, as to the sheer number and variety of people vying for Sidney’s undivided attention, almost from the moment of his birth. Seen at the time, as in retrospect, as possessing enormous potential, he could only realize his gifts in a variety of contexts partly defined by those around him—a motley crew encompassing great talents, “Poetasters,” Machiavels, ideologues of various stripes, enigmas like Bruno, and a monarch often frustrating not only to himself but also to other members of her court. On this score, nineteenth- and twentieth-century appraisals of the Elizabethan era swing between two extremes: an idealistic if not sentimental appraisal of a golden age epitomized by such glittering figures as Sidney and a more realistic if not jaundiced appraisal of a leaden age displaying those same figures to equal advantage in the manner of a foil but otherwise mocking their abilities as futile. “There are great writers, poets especially, of whom we can think without any strong consciousness of the time in which they lived,” proposes Dorothy Macardle, with this caveat: “but Sidney is not one of them. When he enters upon the stage of our imagination there troops about him the whole pageant, with all its music and bravery, of Elizabethan England.”23




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an amazing development of power, but all connected with prudential purposes—an attempt to reconcile the moral feeling with the full exercise of the powers of the mind, and the accomplishment of certain practical ends. Then lived Bacon, Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, and a galaxy of great men, statesmen, lawyers, politicians, philosophers, and poets; and it is lamentable that they should have degraded their mighty powers to such base designs and purposes, dissolving the rich pearls of their great faculties in a worthless acid, to be drunken by a harlot. What was seeking the favour of the Queen, to a man like Bacon, but the mere courtship of harlotry?24

Arrestingly, the longhand transcript from which John Payne Collier reconstructed this lecture for a volume not published until 1856 omits Sidney altogether (5.1: 288). Even if the transcriber did not consciously or unconsciously falsify Coleridge’s actual words by including Sidney, that star remains just one among an entire “galaxy” of other luminaries, of whom Bacon shines brightest, as the most palpably “degraded.” As to the respective merits of Sidney and Bacon, however, Coleridge concurs with Jonson rather than Walpole. Moreover, the overall thrust of the passage at issue holds constant: to expose the corrupt environment in which all Elizabethans were obliged to move. From this perspective, the critical question became whether the hero of Zutphen had salvaged his own “pearls” through heroic self-sacrifice in a cause meriting such altruism or had merely thrown them away in an unworthy context in which they were already “dissolving” because of Elizabeth’s indifference. Addressing whether “the Dutch Revolt against Philip II was in religionis causa or in libertatis causa,” Simon Groenveld concludes that it encompassed elements of both, but also much else, as a faction-ridden morass.25 By contrast with this assessment and his own gloom about necessarily “degraded . . . powers” in an environment generally characterized by “harlotry,” Coleridge produced a vastly more exalted estimate of Sidney’s stature and capacity to shield his ideals from “acid” when responding enthusiastically to an optimistic letter of his about the Dutch uprising that Wordsworth and Zouch also quoted and deemed crucial. Wordsworth’s Cintra praises “the elder Sidney” as not only “a deliverer and defender” but also one who, treating of the war in the Netherlands against Philip the Second, thus writes: “If her Majesty,” says he, “were the fountain; I wold fear, considering what I daily find, that we shold wax dry. But she is but a means whom God



At the opposite extreme, Coleridge explained in a lecture (December 1811) how “the reign of Elizabeth” witnessed


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Pointing out that Wordsworth’s text for Sidney’s letter to his father-inlaw, Walsingham (March 1586), differs scarcely from that given by Albert Feuillerat (“fully” replaces “faithfully”), the commentary to the edition followed observes that the same quotation figures again in a context of uncertainty: “whether Coleridge is adapting Cintra, or Wordsworth adapting Coleridge, or whether both have a common source in Sidney, which we have not found” (405 n.4822–9, 393 n.2772–3, from 392). This puzzle arises because of a claim that Wordsworth made many pages before he quoted Sidney’s letter: “when the people speaks loudly, it is from being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon” (290). In an issue of his periodical The Friend (first published in September 1809), Coleridge self-deprecatingly characterized Wordsworth as “a fellowlabourer in the same vineyard, actuated by the same motives and teaching the same principles, but with far greater powers of mind, and an eloquence more adequate to the importance and majesty of the cause”; but he also quoted Sidney’s letter in such a way as to bring out the distinguishing features of his own approach: the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, the paramount gentleman of Europe, the nephew, and (as far as a good man could be) the confidante [sic] of the intriguing and dark-minded Earl of Leicester, was so deeply convinced that the principles diffused through the majority of a nation are the true oracles from whence statesmen are to learn wisdom, and that “when the people speak loudly it is from their being strongly possessed either by the godhead or the dæmon,” that in the revolution of the Netherlands he considered the universal adoption of one set of principles, as a proof of the divine presence. “If her majesty,” says he “were the fountain; I would fear, considering what I daily find, that we should wax dry. But she is but a means which God useth.” (4.1: 183, 182; square brackets added)

As the commentary to the edition followed records, Coleridge had a convenient source for Sidney’s letter in Zouch’s work (as had Wordsworth), but also quoted beforehand a passage “untraced” unless he adapted “Alcuin’s famous letter to Charlemagne,” which includes the phrase “Vox populi, vox Dei” (4.1: 182 n.2). However established, the resultant connection protected “pearls” from “acid”: Coleridge could feel optimistic about any



useth. And I know not whether I am deceaved; but I am fully persuaded, that, if she shold withdraw herself, other springs wold rise to help this action. For, methinks, I see the great work indeed in hand against the abusers of the world; wherein it is no greater fault to have confidence in man’s power, than it is too hastily to despair of God’s work.”26


offspring produced by bedfellows so strange as the “good man” Sidney and the “dark-minded” Leicester. “Sir Philip was prepared to sacrifice his fortune and his life for his religion and country,” observed Zouch, introducing the “fountain” letter as “so strong a proof that he considered the cause of the persecuted inhabitants of the Netherlands as the cause of God, that it would be improper to deny the Protestant reader the pleasure of perusing it” (239). In his formulation “deliverer and defender,” Wordsworth evaded the issues raised by Zouch’s awkward clash of perspectives: though Sidney fought not only “for his religion” but also “for his . . . country,” none but “the Protestant reader” can take “pleasure” as a result. Though Wordsworth classified Sidney as “an Englishman who sacrificed his life in devotion to a cause bearing a stronger likeness to this than any recorded in history,” he did not explain this especially close relationship between the Peninsular War and the revolt against Spanish rule in Netherlands (339). By implication, however, Wordsworth must have regarded the earlier conflict as at least partly “in libertatis causa” to bear any relation to the later. From one perspective, Coleridge deferred to the authority of Wordsworth’s more laborious exposition, directing his own “Readers” to Cintra for further assurance, as if he himself had impatiently relied on shorthand (4.1: 182). From another, Coleridge restated with greater vigor what he took to be Wordsworth’s key points, as if Wordsworth himself had muffled them by going on at such length and in less direct terms. Thus, Wordsworth showed the utmost concern with “principles” in general as a guide to virtuous action, but not Coleridge’s eagerness to locate “one set” as “universal” on any terms less abstract than that of “a spiritual community” defined by Cintra as encompassing “the good, the brave, and the wise, of all ages” (339). Likewise, Wordsworth included the voice of “the people” and “the war in the Netherlands” as part of the same meditation on history, but without relating them in the insistent manner of Coleridge’s juxtaposition. Above all, Wordsworth offered no equivalent for the strongly secular cast that Coleridge imparted to his reading of Sidney’s “fountain” letter by categorizing the Dutch uprising as a “revolution”—as if it resembled one of the reform movements hailed by Swinburne’s Songs before Sunrise. Even more strikingly, Coleridge also wrote as if the French Revolution had not vitiated the concept of “revolution” by degenerating from a quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity within one nation to the point where, some 20 years later, the Peninsular War represented a rare challenge to Napoleon’s stranglehold over most of Europe. Wordsworth had both hit the mark and missed it entirely when invoking “a cause bearing a stronger likeness to this than any recorded in history.”



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England may said to have then overflowed from the fullness of grand principle—from the greatness which men felt in themselves, abstracted from the prudence with which they ought to have considered, whether their principles were, or were not, adapted to the condition of mankind at large. Compare the revolution then effected with that of a day not long past, when the bubbling-up and overflowing was occasioned by the elevation of the dregs—when there was a total absence of all principle, when the dregs had risen from the bottom to the top, and thus converted into scum, founded a monarchy to be the poisonous bane and misery of the rest of mankind. (5.2: 479)

Though Coleridge could point to a prior upheaval not characterized in his view by “a total absence of all principle,” he still voiced the disillusioned realization that whether “principle” animates regime change makes little difference, except in the unlikely event that a majority of citizens share in that idealism. He nonetheless made a significant break with the usage of his contemporaries and compatriots, for “the revolution then effected” invokes not Lamb’s Glorious one of 1688 but the regicide and its republican aftermath. “It was not until the great Victorian historian of early seventeenth-century England, S. R. Gardiner, had completed the majority of his sixteen volumes that it became at least an acceptable proposition that events in England between 1640 and 1660 provided an example of a general phenomenon called a revolution,” notes Michael Finlayson, identifying François Guizot as the author (1826) “who first used the expression in his History of the English Revolution,” not published in England or translated into English until after Coleridge’s death; R. C. Richardson likewise stresses the French historian’s primacy.27 Moreover, Collier in this matter does not appear guilty of importing a thought difficult for himself and even less possible for Coleridge to entertain: “Compare the revolution thus effected” closely matches the longhand transcript’s “Compare this Revolution with that of a later age” (5.1: 288). Though the tardily emerging paradigm of an English Revolution other than the Glorious has enjoyed a long ascendancy, historians of the Stuart era have not ceased debating whether its denizens could conceive of themselves as engaging in revolutionary acts or only as being caught up in revolving events. Writing as a contemporary witness in Behemoth (1679), his history of the Civil Wars, Hobbes recorded a protracted but secure return to square one at the Restoration,



But Coleridge (at least in retrospect) portrayed the French Revolution as corrupt from its very inception: in the same lecture quoted earlier, he turned from the Elizabethan period to that of the Interregnum, during which


claiming to “have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power through two usurpers” (Richard Cromwell and his father Oliver), “from the late King to this his son” (Charles II); at the opposite extreme, Crane Brinton on the eve of World War II paralleled world-transforming revolutions in Russia, France, America, and England.28 Though Coleridge did not claim that revolutions in France, England, and the Netherlands should all be regarded as alike (much less equally treasured as midwives to modernity), and though he made no special claims for Sidney’s stature against this historical backdrop (or in relation to any other context), he formulated the key terms on which late twentieth-century scholars would evaluate Sidney as a figure of vital ideological significance. Whereas he himself did not establish or endorse any such connection, his vocabulary permitted the view that the Dutch revolution in which Sidney lost his life shared some common ground with the English revolution to which his great-nephew contributed as a parliamentarian trooper, as well as with the subsequent English revolution in whose formative stages that later Sidney also became a republican martyr. According to Barry Coward, the paradigm of conflict in mid-seventeenth-century Britain as revolution “need not be a bar to well-rounded and objective historical reappraisals”: it does not automatically entail “waving an ideological banner.”29 Quoting these words as justification for “the most commonly applied label for England’s crisis years,” Richardson adds the further assurance that “like any term, its significance has varied according to its users,” generating “no fixed and finite meaning” (187). Such flexibility holds dangers, however: the “label” in question invariably confers a seal of approval without committing “its users” to explaining which phenomena warrant such approbation and why. Especially when categorized as revolutionary, moreover, the conflicts of mid-seventeenth-century Britain exert so strong a magnetic attraction that miscellaneous people, issues, and events of an earlier era seem to realign inevitably as any number of iron filings pointing in the only possible direction. Attempting to strip away the many legends surrounding Sidney, F. J. Levy nonetheless concludes by offering this perspective: denied employment, Sidney and his associates forced themselves to examine critically the monarchy which had abandoned them; they turned for inspiration to Tacitus and to Machiavelli, and thus initiated that realistic appraisal of government which led to the “politic history” of the early seventeenth century and, ultimately, to the revolution.30

Whereas Gary Waller explains how Pembroke’s “ ‘little Court’ ” preserved “Sidneian ideals” until such time as they “would challenge and eventually



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overwhelm the hegemony of the royal Court” during the Civil Wars, Levy identifies a process of cultural transmission centering on no such coterie but sufficiently uniform to affiliate different thinkers at different times as members of a coherent ideological grouping.31 Whereas Louis Adrian Montrose can trace “sociopolitical transformations” that “lead . . . surely” and not just “circuitously . . . from Sidney to Milton” because he regards the earlier author’s Lady of May as “a crystallization in cultural form of an incipient social conflict,” Levy presents no such distillation but an extended chain reaction retaining its original impetus over several decades and multiple metamorphoses or displacements.32 Illustrating the widespread appeal rather than the plausibility of a historical vision indistinguishable from post hoc ergo propter hoc, these heavy but essentially trivial investments in an early modern Sidney make no attempt to align his life and work with, say, Lawrence Stone’s model of the Civil Wars as the revolutionary outcome of multiple interlocking factors, including long-term ones dating all the way back to 1529.33 Though Levy dispels myth only to reintroduce it at the last possible moment, his dispelling at least takes a less crude form than that of Richard Lanham’s Philippic, which he rightly condemns as “debunking . . . too far” (11 n.1). Just as Zouch’s rejoinder to Walpole’s attack on Sidney misrepresented it and thereby produced no mirror image, so Lanham does not merely repeat Walpole’s strictures when himself adopting a stance directly antithetical to Zouch’s, discarding as irrelevant or reading in the opposite direction any evidence previously interpreted to Sidney’s credit. Though written with a robust insistence on sticking to the facts, an eye toward recuperating the artist by liberating him from the layers of legend that have accumulated around him, and with a wise recognition that “to know a man truly cannot be the office of an enemy,” Lanham’s flat reversal of the sentimentality he rejects yields rote vilification.34 His condemnation nonetheless succumbs to myth when it retains as fact the water content of the drinking vessel handed by the hero of Zutphen to another wounded soldier, even as it reclassifies that alleged act of altruism in light of “habits of mind . . . calculated to increase the opportunities for such condescending kindness” (325). Such a comment makes insufficient allowance for the alteration in meaning that “condescending” has undergone since Sidney’s time. His “kindness” did not merely patronize if it involved a “condescending” manner illustrating Sidney’s ability “To depart from the privileges of superiority by a voluntary submission; to sink willingly to equal terms with inferiours” (OED, “condescend,” v.3, quoting Dr. Johnson). Of course, no one will ever be able to say whether Sidney on this occasion exhibited a virtue once attributed to the aristocracy or acted with a disdainful hauteur explaining very well




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Nineteenth-century heroic idealism and the enabling myth of the gentleman did not cease functioning sometime between 1914 and 1918. Frequently, they were sublimated into less obvious forms. The popular Sidney myth that followed in their wake could therefore continue to exercise a significant influence on perceptions of Sidney. Indeed, the Sidney legend could even be regarded as one of the sustainers of nineteenth-century myth. It seems to me that, for a great many people, Sidney is still perceived in terms of those nineteenth-century values which are only too easily resuscitated by means of an exclusive and unqualified reliance on the Greville anecdote. Even those of us who are alert critically are subject to modes of perception that we have inherited from the last century. The extent to which we are subject to the romantic image of Sidney is revealed by the ease with which we refer to the Greville story as the “anecdote of the water bottle”—after all, Greville never specified the contents of the bottle.35

But Lanham proves “subject to the romantic image of Sidney” even when attempting to demolish “heroic idealism and the enabling myth of the gentleman.” Conversely, Gosse before the end of the Victorian era had been unable to resist invoking “the draught of water,” though he also had already demanded: “Is it possible to strip off the fable, and see the actual Philip Sidney as he breathed and talked?”36 Malcolm William Wallace updated Wordsworth’s parallel between the Dutch revolt and the Peninsular War by linking the earlier of these conflicts with World War I, thus confirming that the hero of Zutphen’s perceived relevance extended to a period as late as “between 1914 and 1918.” But Wallace agreed with Wordsworth, too, in moderating not only “the enabling myth of the gentleman” but also “heroic idealism,” to the point where Sidney could serve as a representative figure rather than one so exceptional as to have little bearing on other soldiers involved in later campaigns. Thus, Wordsworth’s “Englishman who sacrificed his life” became for Wallace an exemplary figure who also “died in the Netherlands in defence of ideals strangely similar to those for which the British nation is to-day engaged in a life-and-death struggle”: in both cases, Sidney illustrates what his compatriots could accomplish by following in footsteps not so far enlarged as to defeat meaningful imitation.37 In addition, Swinburne stressed Sidney’s “lordliest” aspect because elevating him as highly as possible on every dimension helped promote Bruno as one “loved” by this embodiment of “all we love,” and thus had a particular reason for activating on both figures’ behalves “the enabling myth



why “condescending” behavior has ultimately acquired wholly unfavorable connotations. Lanham partly validates John Gouws’s explanation for the continuity in representations of Sidney over the last 200 years:

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of the gentleman,” whereas more recent commentators likewise emphasizing the significance of this same bond had the reverse priority of securing Sidney’s “radicalism” as attested by his “association” with Bruno—a very different kind of “enabling.” “What we are no longer willing to accept as religious zeal we may still find palatable if we transform it into a more purely political zeal,” reflects Low, explaining “a typically Postmodernist attitude toward Milton” with roots much older than he realizes (176). Even if Gouws’s point about “sublimated . . . forms” holds true for some of the transformations apparent in versions of Sidney produced during the last 200 years, he palliates as lingering sentimentality focusing on a “romantic image” a willful rewriting of history whose “nineteenth-century values” reveal the stubborn persistence of a Romantic vision. Noting that Shelley read Sidney’s Defence before producing his own (ca. 1821), Newman Ivey White summarizes points of contact and contrast between two texts whose perceived proximity or divergence more obviously affects assessments of the earlier poet-critic’s standing.38 Explaining the development not of Shelley’s poetic specifically but of Romantic literary values generally, M. H. Abrams draws this distinction: “Sidney holds in suspension many of the ideas of which we are in pursuit, but these occupy a marginal, and not a determinative position in Sidney’s essay.”39 Likewise, Clarence DeWitt Thorpe declares that “Sidney probably had little idea of the importance of what he was saying,” even when writing a Defence sometimes “all but prophetic of an order in criticism of which England knew little before the Romantic period.”40 By contrast, Raymond Williams incorporates Sidney in a “long revolution” by explaining how “poetry can be supernatural” for that author: “because it is an energy of the soul which in discovering God is able to create beyond natural limits. But another way of making the same claim is to assert a purely human creativity, the powers of the emergent mind.”41 David Norbrook goes still further: “The detached and critical cast of mind that enabled Sidney to conceive of the work of art as a ‘world’ was the same kind of capacity that produced the concept of the ‘commonwealth’ as a complex entity independent of the person of the ruler.”42 Though the phrases “in suspension,” “all but prophetic,” “another way,” and “same kind” all concern degrees of approximation, Williams and Norbrook tip the balance to make Sidney himself a Romantic when they embrace the version of Romanticism articulated not in his Defence but in Shelley’s: “Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.”43 Recognizing a contrast sufficient to necessitate translation, Williams nonetheless generates a “same claim” converting sacred to secular in the leap from “God” to “purely human.” Not even resorting to this degree of paraphrase, Norbrook treats Sidney’s “capacity” as indistinguishable from that manifested in his great-nephew’s republican theorizing, to





the point where he appears to substantiate Shelley’s classification of “Poets” as “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” except for having become apparent on this dimension at some point, rather than remaining neglected or overlooked (297). Though Norbrook does not specify when Sidney’s Defence became conceivable in such terms, he seems to present it as an ideologically significant “Ars Poetica” compatible with that Hill extracts from the same author’s Astrophil and Stella, a stimulus to political activists such as Winstanley. By contrast with Williams and Norbrook, S. K. Heninger updates Sidney more extremely, but also with far greater circumspection. Not restricting his case for Sidney as a proto-postmodern to The Defence alone, Heninger attributes “renewed interest in . . . the Arcadia” to its evincing how “Sidney was aware of the problems inherent in any theory of meaning or of signifying or of reading, and . . . makes rudimentary efforts to deal with these problems and formulate his own solutions.”44 The caveat as to the limited extent of Sidney’s attempts in this vein typifies Heninger’s balance: “Plato, not Saussure, was his point of reference in theorizing about language”; therefore “we must remember that while Sidney would have understood the positions taken by Derrida and Barthes, and while in a very real way he prepared for the anti-authoritative arguments of these theorists, he himself would not have gone so far” (xii). At the same time, however, Heninger avoids the opposite mistake of qualifying his bold claims out of existence: Sidney not only “preempted the deconstructionists by making both philosophy and history subspecies of an archi-literature which he calls ‘poetry,’ ” but also “promoted the principle of self-reflexivity in poetry, that ‘literature is a mode of writing distinguished by its quest for its own identity’—for example, by characterizing Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and More’s Utopia as ‘absolute’ poems” (xii). As these words indicate, Heninger’s claims about Sidney’s Defence differ from Norbrook’s not only in force but also in nature, broadly paralleling the extremes of recent scholarship subsuming “history” within “archiliterature” or “literature” within “history.” But proponents of the second approach have typically shown far greater concern with Sidney than have proponents of the first, and to paradoxical effect. Though Sidney’s extraliterary achievements have never seemed trivial to any retrospective observer, they assumed a particular importance during the nineteenth century for readers only dissenting from Hazlitt’s estimate of him by expressing its second element less bluntly: “one of the ablest men and worst writers of the age of Elizabeth.” Lamb both embraced and resisted the critical orthodoxy of his era when he sought to redeem Sidney’s artistry by converting him from “courtier to . . . patriot.” This gesture proved so far ahead of its time, however, that Swinburne during the last decade of the nineteenth century



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could still treat Lamb as the quintessential Sidney enthusiast. Even allowing for the hyperbole involved, such a classification still conveys Lamb’s importance as a pioneer in reevaluating Sidney. When following Lamb in his own manner, Swinburne likewise generated a version of Sidney ahead of its time: a comrade of Bruno whose “Ars Poetica” sanctioned paeans to an “Eve of Revolution.” Virginia Woolf thus had a valuable contribution to make when she more directly aided Sidney’s return to prominence in the canon of English literature by excluding all historical concerns save literary ones: in her essay “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia” (1932), she grouped this romance among “great volumes that have sunk . . . as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf,” but also appraised it as a “luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.”45 Though studies focusing on Sidney’s fecundity as the creator of more than one such “luminous globe” have been and will continue to be written, the reaction against formalist interpretations of literature as little better than an “art for art” approach has resulted in a predominant emphasis on how his life and work together reaped their harvest in the Civil Wars and after: all the seeds of British friction, in hazes of po[e/l]itics. On such terms no longer at risk of ranking among his era’s “worst writers,” he nonetheless stands secure only insofar as his work seems commensurate with his “ablest” status as a participant in theologico-political conflict; his writing has little validity save as an extension of the presumed ideological commitments now rendering him still admirable as a man. Despite this primary focus on turmoil in midand late seventeenth-century Britain, however, Sidney’s perceived status as “patriot” rather than “courtier” has not eclipsed his alleged ties with Bruno or outweighed any other species of “radicalism by association” conveying his ideological significance during his own lifetime and subsequently. The sheer number and variety of particular affiliations claimed for Sidney has promoted little rivalry among their respective sponsors because such links have so consistently agreed in siding him with the angels in a Manichean conflict between progressives and reactionaries. Not largely or wholly legendary, however, Sidney has consequently failed to inspire the excesses of mystical cultism and amateur sleuthing devoted to Arthur. Nor has Sidney’s profile even at its most complex yielded the dizzying paradoxes embodied in an English icon who became so through his prominence in French literature and putative historical role as the Romanized Celtic leader of a heroic rearguard action against AngloSaxon invaders. Conversely, Sidney’s reputation has never reached so low a “nadir” as Derek Pearsall identifies in Arthur’s case by pointing to the publication of Fielding’s burlesque Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1730).46 To his frustration, Walpole discovered that his contemporaries





refused to live up to their retrospective billing as denizens of a boring Age of Reason—at least insofar as they failed to consider both Sidney and Lord Herbert along with Arthur as merely fabulous figures unsuitable for any treatment not more or less heavily ironic. Though Sidney thus had a far shorter distance to traverse when subject to his own equivalent of “the Romantic Revival” that Pearsall traces among Arthur’s changing fortunes (116-38), both heroes in nineteenth-century Britain came to fill essentially the same niche, as Victorian projections of the perfect chivalric gentlemen. Paraphrasing Mark Girouard, Pearsall notes the tragic “consequence” of such an outlook as focused on Arthur: “the ideals of chivalry worked to glorify war . . . and to encourage 2.5 million men to volunteer for the army in 1914” (137). Sidney played a part in this process too, though now with Richard Lovelace rather than Lord Herbert as his companion. All the mud and bloodshed of attritional trench warfare had nonetheless seemed as far removed from Swinburne’s Sidney (“lord of the stainless sword”) as from Tennyson’s Arthur (a “stainless gentleman”).47 But Swinburne had already harnessed Sidney’s purity to the relatively heretical task of promoting Bruno as another hero meriting worship in the same breath, and Tennyson had at least made Arthur’s spotlessness a matter for debate between an idolatrous Merlin and an iconoclastic Vivien, even if he left no doubt as to which speaker he himself favored. On the other hand, late twentiethcentury appraisals of Sidney diverge so little from the Victorian model that they present his reputed ties with Bruno as evidence of his own respectability, albeit now for his “radicalism” as certified by “association” with so impeccable a Merlin, and even when attempting Vivien-like character assassination, Lanham could not imagine the hero of Zutphen without his water vessel, as definitive a prop as Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone. Merely resembling that vessel in approximate appearance, the holy grail featuring in Arthurian romance only found a counterpart in Sidney’s biography with recent attempts to establish his ideological significance by focusing on the Civil Wars, of which he apparently could not fail to partake without losing an essential part of his continuing luster. This updating of a figure dead before the launching of the Armada differs entirely from the fictional experiments attempted by Twain throughout A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1890) and by T. H. White in those portions of his novel cycle The Once and Future King (1958) that allude to such twentieth-century phenomena as the advent of totalitarian communist rule. In establishing Sidney as so ideologically unswerving that his future acts can be predicted with quasi-scientific exactitude, recent scholars nonetheless engage in a fantasy merely revising the terms of Lamb’s wishful thinking. Pearsall himself lends indirect support to this way of thinking about Sidney by tracing the “decline” of Arthurian literature



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to a historical process in which “the idealized knight of the feudal retinue” became replaced by “more politically self-conscious figures such as the idealized Tudor governor and Renaissance gentleman” (110). Sidney proved neither so perfect a “gentleman” of this kind nor so “politically self-conscious,” however, that he could in effect reverse the fundamental “transition from national epic to courtly romance” that Pearsall also analyzes in the development of Arthurian literature (20). As Pearsall notes, this change “relegated” Arthur himself, because it led to a focus on miscellaneous knights whose adventures led them ever further away from Camelot, whose king only remained relevant insofar as the resultant good deeds still bore his imprimatur (20). The round table bestowed on Sidney by modern scholars reconstructing his ideologically like-minded comrades possesses much the same character, in that his few political actions of any note matter little compared with his overall importance in setting a tone: his own idealism or an idealized view of him thus underwrites the value of goals he could nor or did not attain. Whereas Greville identified as Sidney’s greatest achievement an enterprise in which he did not participate and that had no value without his involvement (the Caribbean expedition projected under the co-command of Drake), in contrast with which even the heroism of Zutphen seemed anticlimactic, much late twentieth-century scholarship has interpreted Sidney’s death in a more favorable light, without explaining how this fulfilled quest involved him in subsequent developments likewise establishing him as the hero of “national epic,” though repeatedly claiming on the basis of little or no evidence that Elizabethan contemporaries and Jacobean and early Caroline successors saw him in exactly this way. Here, another result of the “transition” Pearsall describes becomes directly relevant: “The knight is not impelled by dynastic or territorial ambitions, but chooses to go out on adventures because that is how he proves the values by which he lives—proves his reality, his identity, in fact” (22). Judging that “his most consistent goal, it seems fair to say, was that of military action,” Edward Berry regards Sidney as so committed to soldiering that even his Defence turned “a treatise on poetry into a call for arms.”48 To bolster his argument, Berry quotes Robert Sidney, in a letter of 1580, recalling his brother’s advice: “if there were any good warrs, I should go to them” (145). As these words establish, Sidney did not think all opportunities for military action equally valid: though he did not define “good warrs” with any precision, he did give some sense of his criteria when he explained in his correspondence with Languet (April 1576) that he would welcome joining battle with “the Turks” because “I would prefer to fight my first campaign in that kind of conflict, rather than involve myself in a civil war.”49 Whether or not he implies his willingness to be





less selective after the satisfaction of an appropriate “first campaign,” he could not afford to be too choosy at any stage in affirming his soldierly “identity,” if that constituted a priority. Though viable adventures throng to greet any questing knight the moment he departs from Camelot, “good warrs” prove more elusive. For Sidney, the Dutch revolt appears to have been “good” enough. Despite the claims of many modern scholars, however, Sidney’s earliest mourners did not generally celebrate him as a hero of “national epic” because Protestantism or some other ideological factor sanctioned that conflict as sufficiently worthy to compensate for the loss of his life, with all of its promise. The still greater distortion of the historical record nonetheless represents him as a hero of “national epic” for the part he would have played in the Civil Wars: conflicts entirely inappropriate from his own standpoint, as of the “civil” kind and erupting in his own homeland, but the mother of all “good warrs” as validating the once and future Sidney.



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Preface 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 34. Howell, Sir Philip Sidney, 250. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 516. Kimbrough, Sir Philip Sidney, unpaginated preface. Hager, “The Exemplary Mirage,” 52, 53, 54. Bindoff, Tudor England, 298. Achebe, Things Fall Apart, 215. Dutton, Ben Jonson, 59. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney, 9. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle, 6. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 337. Introduction to Colaianne and Godshalk, eds., Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney (1587), viii. The images at issue appear immediately after this introduction. According to the preface in Buchanan-Brown, ed., John Aubrey: Brief Lives, the rival editions by Clark (xxiii) and Dick (xxxiii) fostered a conventional but false view of Aubrey as highly disorganized in his research and writing. Carrithers and Hardy, Age of Iron, xiii. Ashton, The English Civil War. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, 30.12, 9–10. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 192, 193. Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 55. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 150. Foster, W. B. Yeats, 2: 118; Bornstein, “Yeats and the Greater Romantic Lyric,” 199. Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 172. Tuohy, Yeats, 176. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, 189 (poem), 293 (note). Gouws, “The Nineteenth-Century Development of the Sidney Legend.” Garrett, ed., Sidney, 48. Kay, ed., Sir Philip Sidney, and “Introduction.” Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 212. Kishlansky, “Mighty Causes,” 31; The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 18. Kishlansky makes his case as part of a hostile review of the



Notes

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NOTES

Chapter 1 1. New Poems by James I of England, ed. Westcott, 1–7. 2. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, 1: 7. For more of Nashe’s views about Sidney, see Martin Garrett, ed., Sidney, 119–26. For Dennis Kay, “Nashe ranks with Harington as Sidney’s most notable early critic” (“Introduction,” 11). 3. The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. Sandison, 5–8, 13–16. 4. The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Davis, 425. 5. Davis, Thomas Campion, 42. 6. The Life and Works of George Peele, ed. Prouty et al., 1: 61–62. 7. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 9. 8. Braunmuller, George Peele, 1. 9. Falco, Conceived Presences, 52. 10. Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I, 79. 11. Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe, 76. 12. The Poems of Sir John Davies, ed. Krueger, stanza 130. 13. Carew, “The Excellency of the English Tongue,” 293. 14. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 177. 15. As reprinted in the prefatory matter to The Faerie Queene, ed. Roche, 4, 10. I also follow this edition when quoting from Spenser’s epic and its dedicatory sonnets. 16. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 3. 17. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. Oram et al., 1, 3–4. 18. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 99, 191. 19. Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight, 46, 61. Cheney sees both similarities (164) and differences (152) between Sidney and Spenser. 20. Renwick, quoted in the notes to Greenlaw et al., eds., The Works of Edmund Spenser, 7.2: 309, from an essay-review published in 1935. 21. Mazzola, Favorite Sons, 95. 22. Shafer, quoted in the notes to the Greenlaw et al. edition of Spenser, 7.1: 495, from a paper published in 1913. 23. Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, 34 n.1. 24. Introduction to Waller, ed., “The Triumph of Death,” 53–61; The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, ed. Hannay et al., includes the “Dolefull Lay,” and is the text I follow for quotations from this author’s verses, attributed and certain alike. But see also this edition’s “Literary Context” (1: 119–32) for an extensive review of the evidence pertaining to the authorship of the poem in question.



latest book by Worden, who therefore no longer qualifies as even ambivalently drawn to new historicism. 30. Alexander, Writing after Sidney.

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25. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 220. Aubrey writes of the fourth earl of Pembroke as the first named Philip. 26. Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” ed. Selincourt and Derbyshire, 6.222–26. 27. Alexander, Writing after Sidney, 125. 28. Introduction to Powell, ed., Brief Lives and Other Selected Writings by John Aubrey, especially xxi–xxii. 29. Schmidt, Lives of the English Poets, 160, 159. 30. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 228–29. 31. Skretkowicz, “ ‘A More Lively Monument.’ ” 32. Quitslund, “Sidney’s Presence in Lyric Verse of the Later English Renaissance,” 111. 33. Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, 362. 34. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, 244–45, 275–76. 35. Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. Smith, 50, 22. 36. The Guardian, ed. Stephens, 95. On Steele’s authorship, see this text’s commentary, 621 n. 37. The Diaries of John Ruskin, ed. Evans and Whitehouse, 3: 904. Ruskin had apparently begun reading the Sidney-Pembroke Psalms three years earlier (2: 760). 38. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 134. 39. Tennenhouse, “Arcadian Rhetoric,” 203. 40. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 260. 41. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 50. 42. Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation,” 28. 43. Waller, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, 139. 44. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution, especially 40–41. 45. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 228.

Chapter 2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance, 223. Birch, The Life of Henry Prince of Wales, 44. Nethercot, Sir William D’avenant, 133. Strong, “Sidney’s Appearance Reconsidered”; Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d, 80. Murdoch, “Painting: From Astraea to Augustus,” 238. Reprinted in Steven May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 287. The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 1: 134. Hunt, “Spectral Origins of the English Revolution,” 306. (This title intends no irony.) Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant, 139–40. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror, 78–79. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 133; Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 51.



NOTES

NOTES

12. Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 314–15. 13. Browne, The Whole Works, ed. Hazlitt, 2: 8–9. 14. Earle, “On Mr . Beaumont (Written Thirty Years Since, Presently after His Death),” xxxiii. These lines first appeared in the Beaumont and Fletcher folio (1647). 15. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel, 3: 87–89. 16. Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 1: 138–39. 17. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 336. 18. Dutton, Ben Jonson, 64–65. 19. Falco, Conceived Presences, 150. Such overingenuity also undermines Don Wayne’s “Jonson’s Sidney.” Though their kinds of overingenuity differ, Falco and Wayne both work very hard in advancing similar claims about Sidney’s significance for Jonson. 20. Hardison, “The Two Voices of Sidney’s Apology for Poetry,” 88. 21. New Poems by James I of England, ed. Westcott, 4; 1, 5–6; 98 n.5. 22. Trimpi, Ben Jonson’s Poems, 30. 23. Maclean, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, 10 n.5. 24. Isabel Rivers, The Poetry of Conservatism, offers an excellent overview of the general outlines of Jonson’s presentation of the Sidneys in his verse and its relation to his social and ethical ideals; see especially 37–40, 51–52. 25. Davenant, The Shorter Poems, ed. Gibbs, 13–16. 26. The Complete Poems of Christopher Brooke, ed. Grosart, 209, 183. 27. The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. Lucas, 3: 31–32, 53–57. 28. Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature, 134. 29. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 181. 30. Introduction to Bartlett, ed., The Poems of George Chapman, 7. 31. The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. Sandison, 231n., 14. 32. Gearin-Tosh, “Marvell’s ‘Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings.’ ” 33. The Poems of Thomas Pestell, ed. Buchan, 39–42. 34. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 28, 29.

Chapter 3 1. Introduction to Sir Fulke Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Smith, x. I follow this edition for the biography itself. 2. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 25. 3. The Poems of John Collop, ed. Hilberry, 34. 4. Tennenhouse, “Arcadian Rhetoric,” 210. 5. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Latham and Matthews, 9: 1 and 1 n.2. 6. Lanham, “Sidney: The Ornament of His Age,” 325. 7. The Life and Works of George Peele, ed. Prouty et al., 1: 67. 8. Howell, Sir Philip Sidney, 256. 9. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, 15. 10. Low, The Reinvention of Love, 27.



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11. Levy, “Philip Sidney Reconsidered,” 6. For Greville’s knowledge of and indebtedness to Machiavelli, see the introduction to Bullough, ed., Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, 1: 14–18. 12. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, 30. 13. Introduction to Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, 1: 49, 50. 14. Rees, Fulke Greville, 51. 15. Larson, Fulke Greville, 107. 16. Winters, Forms of Discovery, 44. 17. Dipple, “Metamorphosis in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 328. 18. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England, 54, 53–54. 19. Alexander, Writing after Sidney, 243. 20. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 117. 21. Introduction to The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, xv. 22. Mazzola, Favorite Sons, 94. 23. Evans, “Divided Aims in the Revised Arcadia,” 34. 24. Kinney, “Puritans versus Royalists,” 54. 25. Patterson cites Greenlaw, “Sidney’s Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory.” 26. Sinfield, “Power and Ideology,” 398, 407. 27. Reprinted in Garrett, ed., Sidney, 257–59; I quote 258–59. 28. Buxton, “A Draught of Sir Phillip Sidneys Arcadia,” 68. 29. Carey, “Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 246, 247. 30. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney, 12. 31. Garrett, ed., Sidney, 11. 32. Woods, “Freedom and Tyranny in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 175 n.11; Patterson, “ ‘Under . . . Pretty Tales.” ’ 33. Falco, Conceived Presences, 57. 34. Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 357. 35. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 87.

Chapter 4 1. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Bush et al., 3: 362–63. 2. Turner, One Flesh, 224. Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, offers an excellent discussion of Eikon Basilike itself (277–86). 3. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 1: 3, 4. 4. Weiner, “Sir Philip Sidney,” 196. 5. For the Latin text only, I follow The Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson et al., 8: 234. 6. Karsten, Patriot-Heroes in England and America, 24–25. 7. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution, 16. For a fascinating discussion of other aspects of Milton that have been so thoroughly internalized by his later readers as to disappear from conscious awareness, see Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan. 8. Thomson, The Seasons: Summer, 591–604.



NOTES

NOTES

9. The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. Robertson, The Seasons: Summer, 1511–18. 10. Garrett, ed., Sidney, 48. 11. Poems of William Mason, 326. 12. Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, 305 n.8. 13. The Poetical Works of the Late Thomas Warton, ed. Mant, 1: 197–98 and 19 n.197. 14. Draper, William Mason, 127, 29–30. 15. The Correspondence of Thomas Warton, ed. Fairer, 17, 18 n.4. 16. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 105; see 105–07. 17. Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. Barnard, 1, 9–11, 13–14. 18. The Letters of John Keats, ed. Rollins, 1: 397. 19. Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Thorpe, 35 (poem), 585 (letter). 20. Shelley’s “Adonais,” ed. Knerr, 397, 399–404. 21. Gosse, “Sir Philip Sidney,” 638 n. and 638. 22. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Jones, 2: 226. 23. Cameron, Shelley, 440. 24. Wilde, The Artist as Critic, ed. Ellmann, 42. 25. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter and Clarke, 1: 14–18. 26. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1: 339. 27. Sir Fulke Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Smith, 35. 28. Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Hutchinson and Selincourt, 295, 301, 297–98, 289–92. 29. Peacock, The Critical Opinions of William Wordsworth, 350. 30. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Cerf and Klopfer, 189. 31. Cary’s poem and the circumstances of its composition are given by Cerf and Klopfer (1099–1100). 32. Poems of Edward Young, 387. 33. Wilson, The Life of John Milton, 77. 34. Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 278 n.65. 35. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 88, 88 n.21. 36. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 72. 37. See my Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries, 10–12.

Chapter 5 1. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. McElrath and Robb, 149. 2. Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited, 95. 3. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. Drury, 1: vii–viii. In quoting verse from this edition, I have added clarifying accents wherever Waller’s scansion seems to call for optional pronunciation of an –ed ending as a separate syllable. Unless otherwise stated, all of the material by Waller I quote comes from his first collection.



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4. For more on Waller’s rationalistic treatment of myth, see my Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries, 69–75. 5. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 3. 6. For Jonson’s alleged influence on Waller, see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d, 209, Hugh Maclean, ed., Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets, 21 first n.7, and Julia Griffin, ed., Selected Poems of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller and John Oldham, 157. 7. Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 8: 13–16. 8. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, 47.1–2. 9. Gilbert, Edmund Waller, 41–42. 10. Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, 147 n.8. 11. Allison, Toward an Augustan Poetic, 51. 12. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, especially 51–100. 13. As observed in the notes to William Dighton, ed., The Poems of Sidney Godolphin, this poet answered “Of Love” with a “Replye” that, like its point of inspiration, must have been written prior to his death in 1643 (74). 14. Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), in The Poems and Fables of John Dryden, ed. Kinsley, 521. Despite his genealogical concerns and predominant focus on Sidney, Raphael Falco only mentions Waller in quoting Dryden’s observations about poetic sons (Conceived Presences, 9 n.11). 15. Introduction to Fenton, ed., The Works of Edmond Waller Esq., xviii. 16. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. Hill, 1: 275. 17. Sidney’s correspondence with Languet, as quoted and translated from the original Latin by James Osborn in Young Philip Sidney, 162–63. 18. Stillinger, “The Biographical Problem of Astrophel and Stella,” 181. J. G. Nichols, The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, represents the best treatment of this poet’s humor that I have encountered; it has other merits too. 19. Introduction to Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 27. My remarks about Laura’s multiple significance also follow this valuable discussion. 20. Dipple, “Metamorphosis in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 330, 329. 21. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 360. 22. Walton and Cotton, The Compleat Angler, 291 n. 23. As You Like It, III.iii, 19–20, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Evans et al. 24. For a fuller account of this poem, see my “Better Read than Dead.” 25. Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates, 191, 197, 200, 263. 26. Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton, 22. 27. Carey, “Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 261. See also Colin Williamson, “Structure and Syntax in Astrophil and Stella.” 28. Richmond, “The Fate of Edmund Waller,” 555. 29. Richmond, The School of Love, 297. 30. Five Miscellaneous Essays by Sir William Temple, ed. Monk, 188. 31. Garrett, ed., Sidney, 267. 32. Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon, 154. (I reproduce Ross’s “[sic].”) 33. Ayres, “Preface,” 269 and 269 n.3. 34. Poems of Edward Young, 515.



NOTES

NOTES

35. The “advertisement of the author,” quoted in Isabel St. John Bliss, Edward Young, 150. 36. The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Williamson and Walsh, 4: 39, 45–52. 37. Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, 46. All of her lines occupy this one page. 38. Andrew Marvell, ed. Kermode and Walker, 59–60. 39. Kimbrough, Sir Philip Sidney, 117. 40. Parfitt, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, 18. 41. Pope, The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated (ca. 1736), 107–08, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt. 42. Ray, “The Admiration of Sir Philip Sidney by Lovelace and Carew,” 18.

Chapter 6 1. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. Wilkinson, 19. I also follow this text for poems to or about Lovelace. 2. On Lovelace’s satire and the complexities of its dating, see chapter 5 of my “Royalist Verse of the English Civil War.” 3. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 3. A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney, sees the author in this portion of The Defence as “wittily alluding to his own name, Philip, philippos, one fond of horses” (109). 4. “The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets” (1687) by William Winstanley, 170. The introduction to this edition (viii) classifies Winstanley’s biographies of Sidney and Lovelace with “those that add more than they borrow” from various sources, most notably Edward Phillips’s Theatrum Poetarum (1675). 5. The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Smith, 1–6. 6. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, first proposed The Temple’s indebtedness to Astrophil and Stella, among other secular texts (259–82). For “Some Secular Poems Parodied,” see “appendix III” in Patrides, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert, 209–13. 7. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, 5.5–8. 8. The Poems of William Habington, ed. Allott, 49–50. 9. Kenyon, The Civil Wars of England, 16. 10. Carew Hazlitt, ed., Lucasta, xxxiii-iv. On Lovelace’s posthumous reputation, see Wilkinson’s commentary, lxiv-lxvi. 11. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, vii. 12. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1: 339. 13. Hager, “The Exemplary Mirage,” 48 n.11. 14. Introduction to Phelps, ed., Lucasta, 1: xiii. 15. Ray, “The Admiration of Sir Philip Sidney by Lovelace and Carew,” 18–19. 16. Hartmann, The Cavalier Spirit, 131. 17. Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 118–19. Bush quotes Aubrey’s verdict on Lovelace (“He was an extraordinary handsome



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18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

Man”), without its corollary (“but prowd”): Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 265. Introduction to Howarth, ed., Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century, xvi. Weidhorn, Richard Lovelace, 163, 25. Schmidt, Lives of the English Poets, 125. The Poems of Thomas Pestell, ed. Buchan, 39. Davenant, The Shorter Poems, ed. Gibbs, 161–62. Davenant, Love and Honour, I.i, 113. See also Davenant’s song “The Souldier going to the Field.” Quoted in Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant, 96. “No details . . . survive,” Edmond notes of Davenant’s “service” under Newcastle’s command, interpreting this to mean “it was satisfactory, since critics of ‘Davenant the poet’ would not have been slow to pick on shortcomings” (91); “Contemporaries were in no doubt” she adds of his later efforts as “a contribution to the royalist cause which has been much under-valued” (96). The Poems of James Shirley, ed. Armstrong, 17–22; on the dates of Shirley’s campaigning with Newcastle, I follow Sandra Burner, James Shirley, 145. William Durant, Heroes of History, styles Julius Caesar “the most complete man that antiquity produced” (140). Randall, Winter Fruit, 314. For a balanced appraisal of Newcastle’s soldiering, see Ronald Hutton, The Royalist War Effort, 18, 83. The Poems English, Latin, and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. Martin, 88–93. Low, The Reinvention of Love, 110. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 2. Warren, Richard Crashaw, 94. Notes to Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, 479. The Selected Poems of George Daniel, ed. Stroup, 47–52. Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars, 192–241. Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Rudrum, 67–72. Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Pritchard, 3.597–98. My account of Cowley’s plans for his unfinished epic draws on Pritchard’s introduction and notes. For additional context, see my Hobbes and His Poetic Contemporaries, 61–63. Cowley, Poems, ed. Waller, 20. Ashton, The English Civil War, 160. Jones, “Lov’d I Not Honour More,” 142. Spenser, in The Faerie Queene, ed. Roche, 11, 12.

Chapter 7 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 338. Clark, ed., “Brief Lives,” 2: 249. Hager, “The Exemplary Mirage,” 57. Low, The Reinvention of Love, 29. Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, 227–28. Garrett, ed., Sidney, 47.



NOTES

NOTES

7. Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Pritchard, 3.597–98; Cowley, Essays, Plays, and Sundry Verses, ed. Waller, 446–47. 8. Turner, The Politics of Landscape, 173. 9. Cowper, ed. Spiller, 479–80. 10. Williams, The Country and the City, 22. 11. Walpole, A Catalogue, 1: 163, 164. 12. The Poems of John Collop, ed. Hilberry, 34, 35. 13. Johnson, ed. Wilson, 314. As a reader reviewing my book in manuscript pointed out to me, Johnson’s phrasing recalls Spenser’s praise of Chaucer. 14. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Lewis, 40: 136. 15. Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, 8: 592, 591. 16. Hill, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 105. 17. Walpole, ed., The Life of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, unpaginated preface. 18. The Wikipedia biography of Lord Herbert includes a color reproduction of Oliver’s portrait. 19. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. Wilkinson, 18. 20. The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Shuttleworth, 5. 21. The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. Smith, 6. 22. Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, 1: 79. 23. The Complete Poetical Works of James Thomson, ed. Robertson, The Seasons: Summer, 1512–13. 24. The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Williamson and Walsh, 4: 1.11–17. 25. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets, 31. 26. Doody, The Daring Muse, 171. 27. Kay, “Introduction,” 34. 28. Poems of Charles Cotton, ed. Beresford, 169–70. 29. Dearnley, The Poetry of Christopher Smart, 15, 27, 29. 30. Warton the elder, Poems on Several Occasions, 60–61. 31. The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. Drury, 1: ix. 32. Fairer, “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder? Part II,” 402. 33. Fairer, “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder?—a Postscript,” 62. 34. Poems of Dr. Joseph Warton, 172. 35. Vance, Joseph and Thomas Warton, 85. 36. Fairer, “The Poems of Thomas Warton the Elder? Part I,” 291. 37. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 47. 38. Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, 305 n.8. 39. The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Brooks, 121–28. 40. The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. Wright and Spears, 1: 184–85. 41. Green, Children of the Sun. 42. Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, 41, 22. 43. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 70–71. 44. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 3. 45. Winters, Forms of Discovery, 39. 46. Gouws, “The Nineteenth-Century Development of the Sidney Legend,” 252. 47. Duncan-Jones, “Philip Sidney’s Toys,” 64.



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48. The Complete Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. Welby, 4: 53. 49. Leigh Hunt’s Literary Criticism, ed. Houtchens and Houtchens, 154.

1. Walpole, A Catalogue, 164; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, 6: 319–20. Unless otherwise indicated, Hazlitt’s verdicts on Sidney date from 1820. 2. Carew Hazlitt, ed., Lucasta, xxiii n.1, xxxiv, 111–12 n.3. 3. The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, ed. Cerf and Klopfer, 195. 4. Zouch, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir Philip Sidney, vii; The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Lewis, 40: 136. 5. The Swinburne Letters, ed. Lang, 6: 33. 6. The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6: 124. 7. Winters, Forms of Discovery, 39. 8. Swinburne as Critic, ed. Hyder, 269. 9. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Ringler, 1.14. 10. Spencer, “The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney,” 48; Low, The Reinvention of Love, 13–14. 11. Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 2, 182–23. 12. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Porter and Clarke, 6: 266. 13. The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 1: 22. 14. Garrett, ed., Sidney, 48. 15. “At Penshurst” (“While in the park”), The Poems of Edmund Waller, ed. Drury, 1: 13–14; Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, The Works of John Milton, ed. Patterson et al., 8: 234. 16. Fletcher, Swinburne, 9. 17. Fuller, Swinburne, 92, 266; see also 264. 18. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle, 22. 19. Acocella, “The Forbidden World,” 76. 20. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, 108–09. 21. The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, 3: 3. For a concise overview of Sidney’s relations with Bruno, see Malcolm William Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 298–302. Frederick Boas, Sir Philip Sidney, stresses how little evidence survives that Bruno influenced Sidney in any way (170). 22. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 337. 23. Introduction to Macardle ed., Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defense of Poesy,” ix. 24. The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Coburn et al., 5.2: 479. 25. Groenveld, “ ‘In the Course of His God and True Religion,’ ” 58. 26. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser, 1: 339. 27. Finlayson, Historians, Puritanism, and the English Revolution, 24, 166 n.16; Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited, 187. 28. Hobbes, Behemoth or the Long Parliament, ed. Tönnies, 204; Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution.



Chapter 8

NOTES

29. Coward, “Was There an English Revolution in the Middle of the Seventeenth Century?,” 10. 30. Levy, “Philip Sidney Reconsidered,” 11. 31. Waller, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, 139. 32. Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation,” 34, 20. 33. Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642. 34. Lanham, “Sidney: The Ornament of His Age,” 320. 35. Gouws, “The Nineteenth-Century Development of the Sidney Legend,” 259. 36. Gosse, “Sir Philip Sidney,” 632, 638. 37. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, vii. 38. White, Shelley, 2: 271–73. 39. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 274. 40. Thorpe, The Aesthetic Theory of Thomas Hobbes, 68, 66. 41. Williams, The Long Revolution, 8. 42. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 85. 43. Shelley’s Prose, ed. Clark, 277. 44. Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, xi. 45. Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Woolf, 1: 19, 27. 46. Pearsall, Arthurian Romance, 115. 47. Tennyson, “Merlin and Vivien” (first published 1859, revised through 1875), 790, Idylls of the King, ed. Gray. 48. Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 144, 159. 49. James Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 420.



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Note: the letter ‘n’ followed by locators denotes note numbers. Abrams, M. H., 177 absolutism, 25, 26, 27, 28, 53, 59, 60, 66, 87–8, 180 Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, viii, xv Achilles, viii, 7, 9, 12, 63, 117 Acocella, Joan, 167 Addison, Joseph, 70 Adolphus, Gustavus, 5–6 Adonis, 11 Aeneas, 1, 7, 9 Aesop, 53 Africanus, Scipio, 7–8, 37, 149 Agincourt (battle), 149 Akrigg, G. P. V., 25, 26, 27 Alcibiades, 151 Alcuin, 171 Alexander, Gavin, xvii–xviii, 14, 16, 50 Alexander the Great, 83, 117, 157 Alexander, William, tribute to Prince Henry, 36 Alfred the Great, 74 Allison, Alexander Ward, 87, 88, 95 Allott, Kenneth, 111, 112 American Revolution, 174 Andromeda, 10 Anjou and Alençon, duke of (Hercule François), 17, 18, 20, 59, 60, 80 anonymous, authorship disputed Amadis de Gaul, 64, 140 Ballad of Chevy Chase, 51 contribution to the Annual Review, 78–9

A Draught of Sir Phillip Sidneys Arcadia, 53–5 El Cavallero Febo (The Knight of the Sun), 140 preface to Edmund Waller’s works (1690), 97 Tom of Bedlam, 147 Antaeus, xi Apelles, 44, 107 Aphrodite (Venus), 2–3, 44, 83 Apollodorus, 7 Apollo, Phoebus, 1, 90, 91, 97, 107, 143 Ares (Mars), 1, 2, 3, 35, 36, 38, 83, 107, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120, 125, 127, 128, 129 Armada, 3, 30, 37, 180 Armstrong, Nancy, 187 n.7 Armstrong, Ray Livingstone, 120 Army Plot, 111 art for art, 164, 166, 179 Artemis (Diana), 134 Arthur, 12, 32, 124, 149, 179–81 Ascham, Roger, 96 Ashton, Robert, xii, 127 Astraea, 39, 64 Astyanax, 145 Athena, Pallas (Minerva), 1, 3, 35, 36, 38, 83, 107, 108, 125 Atticus, 19 Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, x–xi, 13, 14, 15, 20–1, 31, 50, 51, 92, 97–8, 131–2, 137–8, 151, 156, 168, 169, 183 n.12, 183 n.13, 185 n.25, 190–1 n.17



Index

INDEX

Aubrey, Richard, xi Axel (battle), vii Ayres, Philip, preface to Lyric Poems, 98–9 Bacon, Sir Francis, 33, 50, 84, 98, 137–8, 148, 170 Barnard, John, 71 Barthes, Roland, 178 Bartlett, Phyllis Brooks, 37 Baudelaire, Charles, 166 Bayard, seigneur de (Pierre Terrail), 156 Beaumont, Francis, 30, 98, 186 n.14 Bellona, 36, 38 Berry, Edward, xvii, 8, 148, 181 Bertie, Lady Sophia, 84, 100 Bertie, Peregrine, see Eresby, thirteenth Baron Willoughby de Bindoff, S. T., viii Bion, The Lament for Adonis, 11 Birch, Thomas, 23 Bishops’ Wars, 111, 112–13, 116, 118, 126, 127 Black Prince, see Prince, Black (Prince of Wales) Boas, Frederick, 193 n.21 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 32 Bornstein, George, xiv Bradstreet, Anne elegy for Sir Philip Sidney, 83–4 Several Poems, 84 Braunmuller, A. R., 5 Breda, siege of, 117 Brinton, Crane, 174 British Civil Wars, xi–xii, xv, xvi, xvii, 19–20, 21, 24–5, 26, 54, 55, 60, 66, 67, 68, 78, 79, 81, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–8, 165, 173, 174, 175, 179, 180, 182 British empire, viii, xiv Brooke, Christopher elegy for Prince Henry, 35 elegy for Sir Arthur Chichester, 35 Brooks, Harold F., 149

Browne, Mr. Thomas, 92 Browne, William, 24, 28–30 Britannia’s Pastorals, 24, 28–30 elegy for Prince Henry, 30 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett The Book of the Poets, 164, 165, 178, 179 “The Picture Gallery at Penshurst,” 73, 102, 164 Browning, Robert, “A Serenade at the Villa,” 157 Bruno, Giordano, xv, xvi, 158, 165–9, 176–7, 179, 180, 193 n.21 Spaccio de la Bestia Trionfante, 167 Brutus, 67, 68, 69 Buchanan-Brown, John, 183 n.13 Buckingham, duchess of (Lady Katherine Manners), 35 Buckingham, first duke of (George Villiers), 26, 35 Bullough, Geoffrey, 47, 187 n.11 Bulstrode, Sir Richard, 117–18 Burghley, first Baron (William Cecil), 5, 45, 170 Burner, Sandra A., 191 n.25 Bush, Douglas, 115, 129, 190–1 n.17 Buxton, John, vii, 6, 27, 53, 54–5, 121, 127, 163 Byron, Lord (George Gordon), vii, xv Caesar, Augustus (Octavius), 5, 7–8, 42, 153 Caesar, Julius, 68, 120, 157, 191 n.26 Cain, Thomas, 8 Camden, William, 153 Cameron, Kenneth Neill, 72 Campion, Thomas, 2–3, 6 Latin epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney (two versions), 2–3, 6, 7, 8 Carew, Richard, “The Excellency of the English Tongue,” 6 Carew, Thomas, 103, 126 Coelum Britannicum, 167 Carey, John, 56, 57, 96 Carrithers, Gale H., Jr., xi



210

Cary, Lucius, see Falkland, second Viscount Cary, Reverend Henry Francis, “Lines to the Memory of Charles Lamb,” 77–8 Casimir, John (Count Palatine of the Rhine), 42 Cassius, 68 Castelvetro, Lodovico, 32 Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, 1, 96, 115, 153, 154 Catholicism, Catholics, xii, 25, 27, 60, 66, 70, 88–9, 110, 112, 122, 167 Catullus, 6 cavalier poets, personae, xvi, 84, 85, 95–6, 100, 102, 103, 115, 146, 160 cavallerice, vii, xiv, 108, 120, 138 Cavendish, Charles, 125 Cavendish, Sir Thomas, 151 Cavendish, William, see Newcastle, duke of Cecil, Robert, see Salisbury, first earl of Cecil, William, see Burghley, first Baron Cerf, Bennett A., 78 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 132, 139 Chambers, E. K., 36 Chapman, George, elegy for Prince Henry, 37 Charlemagne, 171 Charles I, 23, 25, 26, 39, 43, 45, 54, 60, 61, 63–5, 67, 75, 78, 79, 102, 103, 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 122, 128, 174, 187 n.2 Eikon Basilike, 63–5, 116, 187 n.2 Charles II, x, 66, 67, 93, 103, 174 Chatterton, Thomas, 71, 72–3 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70, 93–4, 192 n.13 Cheney, Patrick, 8, 10, 184 n.19 Chichester, Sir Arthur (baron of Belfast), 35 chivalry, 5, 8, 32, 51, 72, 106, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 145, 154, 157, 158, 166, 167, 180

211

Churchill, John, see Marlborough, first duke of Churchill, Sir Winston, vii, xv Cibber, Theophilus, 141 Cicero, 19, 29 Cincinnatus, 37 Clarendon, earl of (Edward Hyde), 69, 70, 149 Clark, Andrew, 131, 183 n.13 Clifford, Henry, see Cumberland, fifth earl of Coburn, Kathleen, 171 Colaianne, A. J., xi, 183 n.12 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 170–3, 174 journalism, 171, 172 lectures, 170, 171, 173 Collier, John Payne, 170, 173 Collins, Arthur, 111 Collop, John, Poesis Rediviva, preface, 41, 42, 136, 168 commonplaces, 12–13, 30, 32–3, 34–5, 36, 38, 51, 54, 60, 93, 163 concordia discors, 35 Constable, Henry, 16 Cotton, Charles, the elder, 92–3 Cotton, Charles, the younger The Compleat Angler (continuation), 92 “The Surprise,” 144–5 Counter-Reformation, xv, 27 Coward, Barry, 174 Cowley, Abraham, 98, 99, 121, 124–8, 132–5, 140, 191 n.36 The Civil War, 124–8, 132, 133, 140, 191 n.36 “The Dangers of an Honest Man in Much Company,” 132–4, 135 “To the Lord Falkland,” 126, 127 Cowper, William, The Task, 134–5, 142, 148 Cranmer, Thomas (archbishop of Canterbury), 24



INDEX

INDEX

Crashaw, Richard, 120–2, 124 Steps to the Temple, 121 Wishes, to His (Supposed) Mistresse, 120–2, 124 Crécy (battle), 149 Crew, John (Baron Crew of Stene), 42 Cromwell, Oliver, 66, 93, 102, 152, 174 Cromwell, Richard, 174 Cromwell, Thomas, 24 Culpeper, Sir Thomas, 98 Cumberland, fifth earl of (Henry Clifford), 97–8 Cupid, see Eros Cyncus, 10 Damon and Pythias, 165 Daniel, George, A Vindication of Poesie, 122–3 Daniel, Samuel, 6, 24 Daphne, 90, 143 Davenant, Sir William, 35, 116–20, 125, 126, 127, 191 n.23, 191 n.24 “To the Dutchess of Buckingham,” 35 “To Endimion Porter” (“Would thou wert dead”), 117 Gondibert, 119, 125 Love and Honour, 119, 127 Madagascar, 18, 116–17, 120, 125 “Madagascar,” with Other Poems, 116 “The Souldier going to the Field,” 191 n.23 Written, When Collonell Goring Was Beleev’d To Be Slaine, at the Siege of Breda, His Death Lamented by Endimion, Arigo, 117–19 Davies, John, of Hereford, 24 Davies, Sir John, 6 Orchestra or a Poeme of Dauncing, 6 Davis, John, 30, 151 Davis, Walter R., 3 Dearnley, Moira, 145 deconstructionists, 178 Deism, 139 Denham, Sir John, Coopers Hill, 122 Derrida, Jacques, 178

Devereux, Lady Dorothy, 80 Devereux, Penelope, see Rich, Lady Devereux, Robert, see Essex, second earl of Diana, see Artemis Dickens, Charles, Pickwick Papers, 157 Dick, Oliver Lawson, 131, 183 n.13 Digby, Lord George, 125 Dighton, William, 189 n.13 Dipple, Elizabeth, 49, 90–1 Donne, John, 16, 31, 33, 41, 42, 43, 103 “Upon the Translation of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countess of Pembroke, His Sister,” 16 Doody, Margaret Ann, 144 Drake, Sir Francis, vii, 24, 30, 43, 44, 151, 181 tribute to Sir George Peckham, 24 Draper, John W., 69 Drayton, Michael, 24, 31, 33 verse-epistle to Henry Reynolds, 31, 33 Drummond of Hawthornden, William, 31, 32, 160 Dryden, John, 19, 39, 88, 98, 99, 100, 101, 189 n.14 dedication of Don Sebastian, 19 elegy in Lachrymae Musarum, 39 preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, 88, 189 n.14 “Song for St. Cecilia’s Day,” 100, 101 songs, 99 Dudley, Robert, see Leicester, first earl of Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 157 Durant, William, 191 n.26 Durling, Robert M., 90, 189 n.19 Dutch revolt, vii, xii, 44, 122, 131, 153, 170, 172, 176, 182 as revolution, 171, 172, 174 Dutton, Richard, viii, 32 Dyer, Sir Edward, ix



212

Earle, John, elegy for Francis Beaumont, 31, 186 n.14 Easter Uprising, xiv Edgehill (battle), 116 Edmond, Mary, 191 n.24 Edward III, 36, 149 elegy as genre, 12–13, 34–5 Elizabeth I, vii, viii, xii, 3, 4, 6, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 34, 39, 43, 44, 45–6, 51, 59, 60, 80, 115, 151, 152, 153, 155, 160, 169, 170, 171, 178 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 96 Elysium, 9, 10, 142 enclosure, 135–6 English Revolution, 24, 173, 174, 185 n.8 Ennius, 7–8 Epaminondas, 74 Eresby, thirteenth Baron Willoughby de (Peregrine Bertie), 6 Eros (Cupid), 88, 93, 111 Essex, second earl of (Robert Devereux), viii, 3–5, 21, 23, 24, 26, 36, 37, 43, 59 Euphuism, 121, 144 Evans, Maurice, 51 Exclusion Crisis, 77, 112, 161, 162 Fairer, David, 70, 146–7, 148 Fairfax, Edward, 88 Falco, Raphael, 5, 11, 32, 36, 37, 57, 186 n.19, 189 n.14 Falkland, second Viscount (Lucius Cary), 21, 124–8, 132, 133 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 99 Fenton, Elijah, 88, 89 Feuillerat, Albert, 132, 171 Fielding, Henry, 132 The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, 179 Finlayson, Michael G., 21, 66, 173 Fire of London, x, xi Fletcher, Giles, 24 Fletcher, Ian, 166, 167 Fletcher, Phineas, 24

213

Fletcher, Sir John, 98, 186 n.14 Fonblanque, Edward Barrington de, 111 Ford, John, 121 Foster, R. F., xiv Franklin, Ben, 71 French Revolution, 172, 173, 174 Friswell, Hains, 157 Frobisher, Martin, 24, 151 Fuller, Jean Overton, 166 Gardiner, S. R., 173 Garrett, Martin, xvi, 56, 68, 69, 72, 75–6, 78, 79, 81, 98, 132, 141, 142, 165, 166, 168, 177, 179, 180, 184 n.2 Gascoigne, George, 108 Gearin-Tosh, Michael, 39 genius loci, 75, 123 Geryon, 30 Gibbs, A. M., 117–18 Gilbert, Jack G., 86, 89, 100, 102 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 30 Girouard, Mark, 180 Glorious Revolution, 66–7, 77, 161, 162, 173, 174 Godolphin, Sidney, “A Replye,” 189 n.13 Godshalk, W. L., xi, 183 n.12 Godwin, William, 71 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 101 Gordian Knot, 56, 57 Gorges, Sir Arthur, the elder, 1–2, 3, 37–40 elegy for Prince Henry (Olympian Catastrophe), 37–8, 39, 40 “The Lamentation of Richmond,” 39 “Let Castyls Phillip gratefully confess,” 37 “Mars and the Muses weare att mortall stryfe,” 2, 3, 38, 39 Sir Arthur Gorges His Vannetyes and Toyes of Yowth, 40 “Sonet to His Entombed Bodye,” 38 “Of Syr Phllypp Sidney,” 1–2, 38



INDEX

INDEX

Gorges, Sir Arthur, the elder (Continued) “Verses To Bee Sett over the Three Crowned Plumes,” 38 “Upon the Death of the Young Lord Harrington,” 38 Gorges, Sir Arthur, the younger, elegy in Lachrymae Musarum, 39 Goring, George, Lord Goring, 117–19 Gosse, Edmund, 71, 72, 73, 161, 164, 176 “Sir Philip Sidney,” 71, 72, 73, 176 Gouws, John, xvi, 157, 176–7 Gray, Thomas, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 48 Great Tew, 21 Greenblatt, Stephen J., 43–4 Greenlaw, Edwin A., 52, 58 Green, Martin, 154 Gregory, Major Robert, xiii–xiv Grenville, Sir Richard, 30 Greville, Sir Fulke (first Lord Brooke, Sir Philip Sidney’s best friend), xv, xvi, xvii, 21, 41–53, 54, 56–60, 69, 71, 72, 74, 115, 136, 138, 157–8, 168, 176, 181, 187 n.11 biography of Sir Philip Sidney, 41, 42, 43–9, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56–8, 59, 60, 61, 71, 72, 74, 141, 168, 176, 181 Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes, 50 poetry, 42, 48, 49, 50 Griffin, Julia, 189 n.6 Groenveld, Simon, 170, 172 Grotius, Hugo, 41, 42 Guizot, François, History of the English Revolution, 173 Habington, William, 109, 111–13, 123, 124, 127, 128, 132 Castara, 111, 112, 123 “His Muse Speakes to Him,” 123, 124 “Militia Est Vita Hominis, to Sir Hen. Per.,” 109, 111–13, 127, 128, 132

Hager, Alan, viii, 114, 131–2, 150, 151, 158 Hamilton, A. C., ix, 12, 56, 190 n.3 Hammond, Henry, 70 Hampden, John, 67, 68, 69, 70, 149 Hannay, Margaret P., 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 184 n.24 Hannibal, 117 Hardison, O. B., Jr., 32 Hardy, James D., Jr., xi Harington, Sir John, 184 n.2 Harrington, James, 75 Harrington, Lord, second baron of Exton, 38 Hartmann, Cyril Hughes, 115, 129 Harvey, Gabriel, 45 Hastings, Fernando, sixth earl of Huntingdon, 39 Hastings, Lord Henry, 39, 116 Hastings, Lucy, countess of Huntingdon, 39 Hatton, Sir Charles, 7–8, 129 Hawkins, Sir John, 30, 151 Hazlitt, William, xvi, 158, 159–60, 161, 164, 178, 179, 193 n.1 Hazlitt, William Carew, 30, 113–14, 115, 129, 160, 161 Hector, 6–7, 9, 37, 117, 125, 145 Helen, 6 Helgerson, Richard, 95, 154–5 Heninger, S. K., Jr., 16, 132, 178 Henry V, 149 Henry VIII, 156 Hera (Juno), 38 Herbert, Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury, xv, xvi, 109–11, 126, 130, 138–41, 156–7, 158, 180, 190 n.6, 192 n.18 autobiography, 130, 138–9, 140, 141, 157 epitaph for Sir Philip Sidney, 109–11, 112, 116, 117, 119, 122, 129–30, 140 history of Henry VIII, 156



214

INDEX

Hunt, Leigh, 158 Hunt, William, 25, 26, 27, 28, 185 n.8 Hutton, Ronald, 191 n.27 Hyde, Edward, see Clarendon, earl of icons, iconoclasm, 23, 63–5, 110, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129–30, 132, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 150, 156, 157, 159, 166, 174, 175, 176, 179, 180 Interregnum, 41, 61, 168, 173 Islamic empire, 60, 88–9, 181 Jacobitism, 70 James I, 1, 2, 21, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37, 44–5, 46, 59 epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney, 1, 2, 21, 32 “Not orientall Indus cristall streames,” 32 James II, 66, 67, 77 James, Henry, 96 Jeffares, A. Norman, xiv Jermyn, Henry (first earl of St. Albans), 116–19, 125 Johnson, Dr. (Samuel) English Dictionary, 136, 137, 175, 192 n.13 Lives of the Poets, 88, 89, 93 Jones, George Fenwick, 128 Jonson, Ben, 31–4, 51, 85, 98, 102, 103, 107, 108, 120, 137, 139, 140, 148, 151, 156, 170, 186 n.19, 186 n.24, 189 n.6 Conversations, 31, 32, 34, 151, 156 “To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland,” 33, 34 Epistle, To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland, 34 To Penshurst, 85, 102, 151, 189 n.6 “To Sir Edward Herbert,” 139, 140 Timber, 33, 137, 148, 170 Workes, 85 jousting, related pageantry, vii, x, 4, 5, 8, 153, 160 Juno, see Hera



Herbert, George, The Temple, 110, 121, 190 n.6 Herbert, Henry, see Pembroke, second earl of Herbert, Lucy (William Habington’s “Castara”), 111, 112 Herbert, Philip, see Pembroke, fourth earl of Herbert, Philip, see Pembroke, seventh earl of Herbert, Sir Richard, of Colebrook, 140 Herbert William, see Pembroke, third earl of Herbert, William, author of poem to William Browne, 29 Hercules, 129 Hermes (Mercury), 36, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120, 125, 127, 128, 129 Herodotus, 14 heroic poetry, poems, 117, 119, 125 Herrick, Robert “The Bad Season,” 122, 123 elegy in Lachrymae Musarum, 39 Hill, Christopher, 24, 25, 27, 28, 164–5, 178 Hill, Eugene D., 139 Hippocrene, 29 Hobbes, Thomas, 80, 173–4, 189 n.4, 191 n.36 Behemoth, 173–4 Hodges, Anthony, 106 Holbein, Hans, 24 Holland, Samuel, elegy for Richard Lovelace, 108, 110, 113, 116, 120, 125, 127, 128, 129 Homer, viii, 6–7, 29 Iliad, viii, 6–7, 143, 145, 149 Hooker, Richard, 33, 69, 70, 137, 149 Horace, 94, 103, 122 Howard, Henry, see Surrey, third earl of Howarth, R. G., 115, 129 Howell, Roger, vii, viii, ix, 43 Hughes, Merritt, 64–5, 66 Hugo, Victor, 164 Hume, David, 136–7

215

INDEX

Juvenal, 107 seventh satire, 149 Juxon, William (archbishop of Canterbury), 63 Karsten, Peter, 66, 71, 72 Kassanoff, Jennie, 51, 52 Kay, Dennis, xvi, 144, 145, 184 n.2 Keats, George, 71 Keats, Georgiana, 71 Keats, John, 70–6 correspondence, 71, 75–6 “O! how I love,” 70–1, 75–6 Kennedy, John F., viii, xv Kenyon, J. P., 112, 118 Kimbrough, Robert, vii–viii, 102 Kinney, Arthur F., 51–2 Kishlansky, Mark, xvii, 183–4 n.29 Klopfer, Donald S., 78 Knerr, Anthony D., 72 Labyrinth, 48 Lachrymae Musarum, 39, 116 Lamb, Charles, 76–9, 81, 158, 160–2, 163–4, 165, 173, 178–9, 180 “Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney,” 76–7, 78, 81, 158, 160–1, 162, 163, 164, 165, 173, 178–9, 180 Landor, Walter Savage, Lord Brooke and Sir Philip Sidney, 157–8 Languet, Hubert (Sir Philip Sidney’s mentor), vii, 21, 27, 45, 89, 151, 181 Lanham, Richard, 42, 175–6, 180 Lant, Thomas, xi, 183 n.12 Larson, Charles, 48, 49 Latham, Robert, 42 Latimer, Hugh, 24 Leicester, first earl of, see Sidney, Robert Leicester, first earl of (Robert Dudley, Sir Philip Sidney’s uncle), viii, 23, 24, 25, 37, 171, 172 Leicester, second earl of, see Sidney, Robert Leicester, third earl of, see Sidney, Philip

Lely, Sir Peter, 129 Lenton, Francis, tribute to Richard Lovelace, 106–8, 114–15, 116 Levy, F. J., 45, 174 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 16 Lewis, W. S., 138 libertinism, 144, 145 liberty, freedom, 66, 67, 68, 73, 74, 94, 102, 164, 170, 172 limited monarchy, 58, 59, 60, 61, 80 Linus, 9, 10 Livy, 33 Locke, John, 70 Lockyer, Roger, 26 Louis XIV, 25 Love, Harold, 49 Lovelace, Dudley dedication to Lucasta: Posthume Poems, 128–9 tribute to Richard Lovelace, 128 Lovelace, Richard, xv, xvi, 103, 105–9, 111, 112–16, 122, 124, 126, 128–9, 132, 140, 144, 160, 180, 190 n.2, 190 n.10, 190–1 n.17 “To Althea, from Prison,” 113 “Clitophon and Lucippe Translated, to the Ladies,” 106, 124, 144 “The Grasse-Hopper,” 122 Lucasta, 106, 109, 111, 128 “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres,” 114, 128, 140 Lucasta: Posthume Poems, 107, 128–9 “Lucasta, Taking the Waters at Tunbridge,” 124 “To My Worthy Friend Mr. Peter Lilly, on That Excellent Picture of His Majesty, and the Duke of Yorke, Drawne by Him at Hampton-Court,” 129 “A Paradox,” 105–6, 106 On Sanazar’s Being Honoured with Six Hundred Duckets by the Clarissimi of Venice for Composing an Elegiack Hexastick of the City, 107, 190 n.2



216

Low, Anthony, 45, 121, 132, 139, 163, 167, 168, 177 Loxley, James, 123 loyal opposition, 26 Lucan, 6, 71, 72–3 L., W., encomium for The Faerie Queene, 7, 12 Macardle, Dorothy M., 169 Machiavelli, Niccolo, Machiavellianism, viii, 45, 55, 169, 174, 187 n.11 Maclean, Hugh, 33, 189 n.6 Maecenas, 149 Mant, Richard, 69, 70 Marathon (battle), 46 Marcellus, 153 Maria, Henrietta (queen consort of Charles I), 60, 119 Marlborough, first duke of (John Churchill), vii, xv Marlowe, Christopher, 6 Marmion, Shakerley, 126 Marotti, Arthur F., 15, 17 Mars, see Ares Marston Moor (battle), 120 Martial, 6, 107 martyrdom, martyrs, 32, 63, 66, 67, 77, 102, 109, 110, 111, 118, 119, 160, 163, 165, 167, 168, 174 Martz, Louis L., 190 n.6 Marvell, Andrew, 75, 115 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, 102 elegy in Lachrymae Musarum, 39 Mary I, 18, 152 Mary, Queen of Scots, viii, 43 Mason, William Isis, 69–70 Poems, 69 Matthews, William, 42 May, Steven W., 4, 18, 142 Mazzola, Elizabeth, 11, 14, 15–16, 51, 52 McCoy, Richard C., 18

217

Medusa, 10, 125 Mercury, see Hermes Miltiades, 46 Milton, John, xvi, 18, 19, 21, 24, 60, 61, 63–7, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76–7, 79, 88, 99, 115, 160–1, 162, 165–6, 175, 177, 187 n.7 An Apology for Smectymnuus, 64 “Arcades,” 77 divorce tracts, 64 Eikonoklastes, 63–4, 65, 66, 73, 77 A Mask, 77 political tirades, 64 Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda, 65–7, 69, 74, 75, 76, 165–6 sonnets, 76, 99, 160–1 Miner, Earl, 19, 95–6 Minerva, see Athena Montagu, George, 138 Montemayor, Jorge, Diana, 64 Montrose, Louis Adrian, 18–19, 20, 175 Moore, Marianne, “No Better than a ‘Withered Daffodil’,” xiv Moraes, Francesco, Palmerin of England, 64 More, Sir Thomas, 24, 43 Utopia, 178 Mornay, Philippe de, 23 multum in parvo, 146 mundus et infans, 148 Murdoch, John, 24 muse, muses, xv, 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 14, 29, 33, 38, 85, 91, 94, 115, 122, 123, 125, 129, 142, 147, 158, 163, 164, 165 Napoleon, 75, 172 Naseby (battle), 116 Nashe, Thomas, 1, 7, 184 n.2 The Anatomie of Absurditie, epistle dedicatory, 1, 7 Neale, J. E., 18 neoclassical distichs, 97, 100 Nero, 72 Nethercot, Arthur H., 23



INDEX

INDEX

Newbury, first (battle), 124, 126 Newcastle, duke of (William Cavendish), 119, 120, 124, 125, 126, 191 n.24, 191 n.25, 191 n.27 new historicism, new historicists, xi, xiii, 183–4 n.29 New Model Army, 66 Newton, Sir Isaac, 137 Nichols, J. G., 189 n.18 Norbrook, David, 37, 60, 80–1, 177–8 normal bravery of soldiers, 113, 127, 132 Norman Yoke, 66 Northumberland, ninth earl of (Henry Percy), 80, 111 Northumberland, tenth earl of (Algernon Percy), 80 O’Connell, Michael, 12 Odysseus, 7, 9 O., I., The Lamentation of Troy for the Death of Hector, 6–7 Oldham, John, A Satyr, 149–50, 168 Oliver, Sir Isaac, xiv, 24, 139–40, 192 n.18 Olympus, 3, 37 Oram, William A., 12 Orcus, 2–3 Orpheus, 9, 10, 29, 84, 117, 146 Osborn, James M., vii, 21, 89 Ovid, 6, 107, 120 Metamorphoses, 53, 90–1 Owen, W. J. B., 171 Oxbridge elegists of Sir Philip Sidney, 6, 127 Pandora, 45 Parfitt, George, 103 Paris of Troy, 38, 125 Parker, Tom W. N., ix, 167 parliamentarianism, parliamentarians, xv, 25, 27, 54, 66, 67, 69, 77, 79, 115, 116, 119, 122, 124, 125, 126, 174 Parnassus, 1, 108, 169 Parry, Graham, 24, 189 n.6

pastoral as genre, xviii, 7, 24, 29–30, 30–31, 53–4, 133, 134, 135, 142, 143 Patrides, C. A., 190 n.6 patriotism, patriots, xv, 1, 30, 32, 66, 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 149, 160–1, 162, 172, 178, 179 Patterson, Annabel M., 17, 19, 41, 52–3, 56–8, 60, 167 Peacock, Markham L., Jr., 76 Pearsall, Derek, 179, 180–1, 182 Peckham, Sir George, 24 Peele, George, 3–6, 21, 43 Anglorum Feriae, 5 Eclogue Gratulatory, 3–4, 21, 43 The Honour of the Garter, prologue, 5 Polyhymnia, 4, 5, 6, 21 Pegasus, 10, 99 Pembroke, countess of (née Sidney, Sir Philip’s sister), ix, xvii, xviii, 8, 12, 13–15, 16, 17, 20, 31, 49, 56–7, 65, 92, 121, 132, 136, 142, 143, 144, 174–5, 179, 184 n.24, 185 n.37 “To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” 12–13, 15 “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda,” 12, 184 n.24 Psalter-translation, 12, 16–17, 49, 185 n.37 The Triumph of Death, 13 Pembroke, second earl of (Henry Herbert, husband of Sir Philip Sidney’s sister), x, 14 Pembroke, third earl of (William Herbert, one of Sir Philip Sidney’s nephews), x, 14, 29 Pembroke, fourth earl of (Philip Herbert, one of Sir Philip Sidney’s nephews), 13, 185 n.25 Pembroke, seventh earl of (Philip Herbert), 14 Peninsular War, 75, 114, 158, 172, 176 Penshurst, 73, 85, 86, 91, 95, 100, 101, 102, 122, 142, 145, 149, 151, 160, 164, 165, 189 n.6



218

Pepys, Samuel, diary, 41, 42–3, 168 Percy, Algernon, see Northumberland, tenth earl of Percy, Henry, see Northumberland, ninth earl of Percy, Henry (second son of ninth earl of Northumberland), 111–13, 127 Perron, Cardinal, 84 Perseus, 10 Pestell, Thomas, elegy in Lachrymae Musarum, 39, 116 Petrarch, Petrarchanism, 11, 13, 76, 88, 90, 91, 111, 148, 160, 165, 189 n.19 Rime Sparse, 90, 189 n.19 Trionfo della Morte, 13 Phelps, William Lyon, 114, 115, 116, 129 Philip II (Sir Philip Sidney’s godfather), vii, 30, 152, 170 Phillips, Edward, Theatrum Poetarum, 78, 190 n.4 “Philophilippos,” 53, 55, 57 Philopœmen, 74 Phocion, 74 Phoenix, 13, 44, 46 Pierrepont, Lord Henry, 41, 42 Plato, 94, 139, 178 Plutarch, 46 Politian (Angelus Politianus), 32 Latin elegy, 37 Pompey the Great, 157 Pope, Alexander, 99 The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 103 ode for Saint Cecilia, 100, 101 Popish Plot, 112 Porter, Endymion, 116–19 Powell, Antony, 14, 131 Prince, Black (Prince of Wales), 36, 149 Prince Charles Louis, 54–5 Prince Henry (Prince of Wales), xv, xvi, 21, 23–7, 28, 30, 31, 34–40, 41, 59, 61, 69, 167 Prince Morris, 54–5

219

Prince of Orange (William the Silent), 153 Prince Rupert, 23, 54–5 Prior, Matthew, Satyr on the Poets, in Imitation of the Seventh Satyr of Juvenal, 149–50, 168 Pritchard, Allen, 191 n.36 pronouns, revealing, ix, xiii, xiv, xvi, 16, 64, 66, 74, 95, 96, 126, 165–6 Protestantism, Protestants, xii, xv, xviii, xviii, 5–6, 16, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 34, 37, 45, 47, 59, 60, 65, 66, 69, 80, 88–9, 110, 153, 165, 172, 182 Ptolemy, 157 Pugliano, Jon Pietro (Sir Philip Sidney’s equestrian instructor), 108, 168 Puritanism, Puritans, xv, 27, 41, 65, 112, 187 n.7 Quarles, Francis, 24 Quebec (battle), 48 Quitslund, Jon A., 15 Rabb, Theodore K., 6 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 24, 40, 43, 69, 70, 108, 115, 151, 170 Randall, Dale B. J., 120 Ray, Robert H., 103, 114, 123–4 Rebholz, Ronald A., 47, 57–8 Rees, Joan, 48, 56 Reformation, 8 Renaissance man, ix, xv, xvi, 51, 107, 115, 116 Renwick, W. L., 10 republicanism, republicans, xii, xiii, xviii, 19, 27, 41, 58, 66–7, 69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 80, 102, 115, 160, 163, 164, 166, 173, 174, 177 Restoration, post-Restoration period, x, 41, 93, 97, 98, 168, 173–4 Reynolds, Henry, 31 Richardson, R. C., 173, 174 Richardson, Samuel, edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s work, 132 Pamela, 132



INDEX

INDEX

Rich, Lady (Penelope Devereux, possibly Sidney’s “Stella”), 86 Richmond, Hugh M., 96 Ridley, Nicholas, 24 Ringler, William A., Jr., 51, 88, 163, 164, 165 Risorgimento, 163 Rivers, Isabel, 186 n.24 Roberts, Donald, 66 Robertson, William, 156 romance as genre, xviii, 63, 64, 92–3, 124–5, 126, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 143, 145 Romanticism, 96, 146, 147, 157, 160, 163, 164, 177, 180 Rosenmeier, Rosamond, 83–4 Ross, Trevor, 98 Rowland, Ingrid, 167 royalism, royalists, 14, 54, 81, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 187 n.2, 191 n.24, 191 n.27 Royal Society, x, 133 Ruskin, John, 17, 166, 185 n.37 Russell, Lord William, 67, 68 Russian Revolution, 174 Rye House Plot, 66, 67 Sabrina, 123 Sade, Marquis de, 166 sages, 46, 47 Saint Cecilia, 100, 101 Saint Paul’s Cathedral, x, 50, 109, 110 Saintsbury, George, 99 Saint Sebastian, 150 Salisbury, first earl of (Robert Cecil), 41, 45 Sallust, 33 Sandison, Helen Estabrook, 2, 37–8, 39, 40 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 178 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 32, 41, 42 Schmidt, Michael, 15, 115, 129 Scott, Sir Walter, 159 Shafer, Robert, 11

Shakespeare, William, 6, 31, 98, 160 Hamlet, 27, 34 1 Henry IV, 113 Julius Caesar, 68 As You Like It, 93 Sharpe, Kevin, 5–6, 21 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Adonais, 71–3 correspondence, 71–2 A Defence of Poetry, 177–8 Ship Money, 67 Shirley, James, 120, 124, 125, 191 n.25 tribute to duke of Newcastle, 120, 124, 125 Shrewsbury, seventh earl of (Gilbert Talbot), x Sidney, Algernon (one of Sir Philip’s great-nephews), xiii, xv, xvi, xviii, 21, 61, 66–80, 101, 102, 149, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 168, 174, 177 Sidney, Dorothy (one of Sir Philip’s great-nieces, Edmund Waller’s “Sacharissa”), 80–1, 85–7, 89, 90, 91, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 124, 144, 150, 165 Sidney, Elizabeth (countess of Rutland, Sir Philip’s daughter), 33–4, 146 Sidney, Frances (née Walsingham, Sir Philip’s wife), 4, 131, 146, 151 Sidney, Lady Mary (née Dudley, Sir Philip’s mother), 13, 154, 155 Sidney, Mary, see Pembroke, countess of Sidney, Philip (third earl of Leicester), 19, 78 Sidney, Robert (first earl of Leicester, one of Sir Philip’s brothers), xvii, xviii correspondence, 181, 182 Sidney, Robert (second earl of Leicester, one of Sir Philip’s nephews), xviii, 80



220

Sidney, Sir Henry (Sir Philip’s father), xii–xiii, xiv, xv, 13, 108, 153, 154, 155–6 Sidney, Sir Philip altruism of (bottle anecdote, spotlessness), 43–4, 46, 47, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 113, 141, 151, 156–7, 162, 170, 175, 176, 180 appearance of, xiv, 24, 151 autonomy of, xiv, 57, 151, 169 birth of, 28, 65, 85, 91, 169 brief life of, vii, 31, 39, 68, 71, 73, 83, 122, 153, 156 Caribbean expedition of (projected, in concert with Drake), vii, 43, 44, 48, 181 education of, 27–8, 36, 70 European travels of, vii, 153, 154 funeral of, vii, viii, x, xi, 3, 4, 183 n.12 heroism of, vii, xvii, 2, 6, 7, 8–9, 21, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 43, 47, 51, 66, 67, 72, 75, 110, 112, 113, 114, 119, 131, 138–9, 141, 150, 157, 158, 165, 167, 170, 175, 176, 180, 181, 182 humor of, 89, 189 n.18, 190 n.3 knighthood of, xviii, 41–2 legacy of, disputed by Greville and the countess of Pembroke, 56–7 personae of, xvii, 3, 56, 57, 84–6, 100, 114, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154–5, 163 reputation of, vii, viii, ix, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 28, 32, 34, 37, 51, 61, 70, 76, 84, 96, 97–8, 103, 130, 135, 136–7, 138–9, 141, 147, 157, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184 n.2, 186 n.19, 186 n.24 roles of as; aristocrat, viii, 8, 34, 84, 85–6, 108, 135, 136, 137, 138, 157, 158, 160, 171, 175, 176, 181; author, vii, viii, ix, xv, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30–1, 32, 33, 34,

221

37, 40, 43, 49, 51, 52–8, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 72, 73, 76–7, 79, 80–1, 83, 85–6, 92–3, 95, 96, 100, 102, 103, 109, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 132, 135, 136, 141, 142, 149, 150, 157, 158, 160, 168, 175, 178, 179, 189 n.27; cavalier, 108, 138, 153, 160; courtier, vii, viii, ix, xii, 8, 11, 15, 17, 18, 58, 60, 77, 79, 81, 96, 142, 153, 160–1, 162, 178, 179; diplomat, vii, 152; early modern, ix, 61, 175, 177, 178, 180; emblem or device maker, x; Governor of Flushing, vii, 46; ideologue, ix, xi, xii, xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, 17, 19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30–1, 34, 37, 42, 46, 52, 53–5, 57, 58–61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80–1, 115–16, 149, 161, 162, 163, 164–5, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174–5, 176–7, 179, 180, 181, 182, 193 n.21; jouster, vii, 8, 153, 160; Kentishman, 142, 143, 149; lover, 67, 68, 108, 109, 110, 111, 122, 130, 140, 141; martyr, 32, 109, 110, 111, 116, 119, 122, 130, 140, 160; member of parliament, vii, 17, 59; musician, 153; patron, vii, 5, 7, 19, 36, 41, 121, 149, 150, 168, 169; prodigal, 154–5; saint, 98, 108, 109, 110, 112, 122, 130, 140; scholar, vii, 35, 108, 109, 110, 137, 141; soldier, vii, xiii, xv, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 37, 43, 67, 68, 72, 73, 75, 83, 95, 103, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 130, 140, 141, 149, 152, 157, 160, 168, 181; statesman, vii, viii, ix, 6, 45, 46, 141, 151, 152, 174, 181; tennis-player, 153; translator, vii, 12, 16–17, 23, 49, 185 n.37; typological type, 116–17, 118



INDEX

INDEX

Sidney, Sir Philip (Continued) sword of, bequeathed on deathbed, 4 unusual relations of, with sister, perceived or rumored, 13–15, 131–2 unusual relations of, with wife, rumored, 131, 151 versatility of, ix, xv, xvi, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 16, 23, 29, 35, 51, 67, 68, 69, 73, 83, 102, 108–11, 113, 115, 120, 138, 139, 140, 141, 153, 157, 160, 168 views of, about; his own work, viii–ix, 8, 11, 15, 40, 47, 48, 49, 51, 56, 65, 92, 100, 146, 155; Ireland, xii–xiii, xiv; Italians, 45, 89, 155, 156, 168; Machiavelli, 45; wars, civil, good, 181–2 works of; Arcadia, ix, xviii, 2, 7, 10, 14, 15, 17–18, 20, 27–8, 29, 32, 48, 49, 51, 52–60, 63–5, 66, 69, 73, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 89, 90, 91, 92, 96, 105, 106, 115, 116, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143, 144, 145, 148, 150, 157, 159, 160, 161, 178, 179; Astrophil and Stella, xii, 3, 6, 10, 11, 15, 83, 86, 87–8, 89–90, 91, 94–5, 102, 103, 109, 110, 111, 114, 123, 124, 148, 157, 161, 163, 164–5, 178, 179, 189 n.27, 190 n.6; Certain Sonnets, 15, 93; correspondence, 17, 18, 45, 60, 80, 89, 151, 170–2, 181–2; The Defense of Poesie, xvii, 8, 15, 32, 40, 51, 65, 72, 84–5, 93, 107, 108, 125, 132, 148, 156, 161, 168, 177, 178, 181, 190 n.3; A Discourse on Irish Affairs, xii; The Lady of May, 15, 18–19, 175; Psalter-translation, 12, 16–17, 49, 185 n.37; quantitative verses, 86, 136; sonnets generally, 76–7, 99, 160

compared with miscellaneous figures, vii, viii, xiii, xv–xvi, 1, 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 43–4, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 53, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72–3, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 83–4, 85–6, 88–9, 90–1, 92–95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106–9, 112, 113–14, 115, 116–19, 120, 124, 126, 129, 130, 132, 136–7, 138, 139, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153–4, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 168, 174–5, 177–8, 179, 180, 184 n.19, 186 n.24, 189 n.14, 193 n.21 Sidney, Thomas (one of Sir Philip’s brothers), 5, 13 Sinfield, Alan, 53, 59 Singleton, Mr., xi Skretkowicz, Victor, 15, 56 Smart, Christopher, 98, 100–1, 142–5, 149 The Hop-Garden, a Georgic, 142–3, 144, 145, 149 Jubilate Agno, 145 Latin translation of ode by Pope, 100 “A Noon-Piece; or, the Mowers at Dinner,” 143–4, 145 Ode on S. Cecilia’s Day, 100, 101, 145 Smith, Charlotte, 98, 100 Sonnet XLVI, “Written at Penshurst,” 101 Smith, G. C. Moore, 109 Smith, Nowell, 41, 44, 46 Smyser, Jane Worthington, 171 Socrates, 151 Somers, John (first Baron Somers), 69, 70 Spanish empire, 25, 30, 44, 72, 75, 153, 172 Spencer, Henry, see Sunderland, first earl of



222

Spencer, Theodore, 163, 164 Spenser, Edmund, ix, xiv, xv, 6–12, 15, 19, 21, 24, 28, 29, 38, 45, 73, 78, 88, 97, 99, 129, 145, 147, 149, 150, 167, 168, 169, 184 n.19, 184 n.24, 192 n.13 Astrophel, 10–11, 12, 15 “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda,” 12, 184 n.24 The Faerie Queene, 7, 11, 12, 129, 145, 168 “To His Booke,” 8 Muiopotmos, 15, 16 The Ruines of Time, 9–10, 15, 78 The Shepheardes Calendar, 7, 8 sonnet to Hatton, 7–8, 129 sonnet to Pembroke, 8–9 sonnets, 99 Steele, Sir Richard, 16, 185 n.36 Stillwater, Jack, 89 Stone, Lawrence, 175 Strong, Roy, 23, 24, 27, 34, 39 Stroup, Thomas B., 122 Suckling, Sir John, 126 Sunderland, first earl of (Henry Spencer, Dorothy Sidney’s husband), 85 Surrey, third earl of (Henry Howard), 6, 115, 158, 160 Swift, Jonathan, 89 poems to Stella, 146 Swinburne, A. C., xvi, 161–8, 172, 176–7, 178–9, 180 Astrophel, after Reading Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in the Garden of an Old English Manor House, 161–2, 166, 180 “Charles Lamb and George Wither,” 162 correspondence, 161, 162, 165, 166, 178–9 dedicatory epistle, 162–3, 164, 165, 166 essay on Victor Hugo, 164, 179 The Eve of Revolution, 163, 179

223

“For the Feast of Giordano Bruno, Philosopher and Martyr,” 165, 168, 180 “The Monument of Giordano Bruno,” 165, 167, 168, 176–7, 180 Songs before Sunrise, 162–3, 166, 172 Sylvester, Joshua, elegy for Prince Henry, 36 Tacitus, 174 Tasso, Torquato, 32 Gerusalemme Liberata, 88 Tatius, Achilles, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, 106 Temple, Sir William (grandson of Sir Philip Sidney’s secretary), Of Poetry, 98 Temple, Sir William (Sir Philip Sidney’s secretary), 98 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 17–18, 42, 187 n.7 Tennyson, Arthur, Lord, “Merlin and Vivien,” 180, 194 n.47 Themistocles, 46 theologico-political conflicts, 19, 21, 27, 177, 179 Thirty Years’ War, 118 Thomson, James The Seasons, 67, 68, 141 Summer, 67–9, 73, 76, 141–2, 145, 149, 165 Thorpe, Clarence DeWitt, 71, 177 Toryism, Tories, 68, 78–9 Trimpi, Wesley, 33 Trojan Horse, 164, 166 Tuohy, Frank, xiv Turner, James G., 64, 133, 134 Twain, Mark, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, 180 Tyndale, William, 24 Urban VIII, Pope (Maffeo Barberini), 84 Urfé, Honoré d’, Astrée, 64, 132–3 Uther, 124



INDEX

INDEX

Vance, John A., 148 Van Dyck, Sir Anthony, 86 Vane, Sir Henry, 75 Vaughan, Henry, 123–4 “To His Retired Friend,” 123, 124 “To the River Isca,” 123, 124 Venus, see Aphrodite Villiers, George, see Buckingham, first duke of Virgil, 6, 7–8, 53, 107, 134 Aeneid, 1, 7, 9, 149 rota Vergiliana, 8 Wallace, Malcolm William, xii–xiii, 18, 27, 70, 114, 129, 155, 176, 193 n.21 Waller, Edmund, xv, xvi, 80–1, 84–103, 106, 116, 124, 145, 146, 150, 165, 188 n.3, 189 n.4, 189 n.6, 189 n.13, 189 n.14, 189 n.24 The Battle of the Summer Islands, 91, 92, 101 “Of English Verse,” 93–4, 189 n.24 To the King, upon His Majesty’s Happy Return, 93 “Of Love,” 88, 89–90, 95, 189 n.13 “On My Lady Dorothy Sidney’s Picture,” 86, 106, 124, 144 A Panegyric, 93 “At Penshurst” (“Had Sacharissa lived”), 85, 91, 102, 189 n.6 “At Penshurst” (“While in the park”), 85, 86, 91, 95, 100, 102, 165, 189 n.6 preface to Poems (1645), 84, 99, 100, 146 “To the Servant of a Fair Lady,” 87 “Song” (“Go lovely rose!”), 96 speeches in parliament, 81 “The Story of Phœbus and Daphne, Applied,” 90, 91, 94, 97 verse courtship of “Sacharissa” (Dorothy Sidney), 80–1, 85–7, 89, 90–2, 95, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 124, 144, 150, 165 “When He Was at Sea,” 91–2

Waller, Gary F., 12–14, 15, 17, 20, 174–5 Walpole, Horace, xvi, 130, 136–41, 142, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 170, 175, 179–80 A Catalogue, 136, 144, 145, 148, 159 correspondence, 136–7, 138–9, 140, 141, 142, 145, 148, 149, 150, 152, 156, 157, 158, 161, 170 edition of Lord Herbert’s autobiography, 138–9, 141, 156 Walsingham, Sir Francis (Sir Philip Sidney’s father-in-law), viii, 5, 24, 172 Walton, Izaak, The Compleat Angler, 92 War of Spanish Succession, vii Warren, Austin, 121 Warton, Joseph, 146, 147 correspondence, 70 edition of literary criticism by Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Jonson, 148 “Ode on the Death of His Father,” 147 Warton, Thomas, the elder, 145–9 “Astrophil to His Son, Aged Seven Months,” 145–9 “Astrophil’s 2d Arrival at Maudling 7. 1.1721” (lost), 147 “Astrophil’s Fright on Stella’s Illness” (lost), 147 “The First Billett Sign’d Astrophil, Being in Return for a How’d’ye” (lost), 147 “How Stella Is Astrophil’s Honour; The Joy He Takes in Coming To See Her &c,” (lost), 147 “O where is Stella Now to sooth my Care,” 147 “Written in a Lady’s Watch-Case,” 148 Warton, Thomas, the younger, 146, 147 The Triumph of Isis, 69, 70, 149 Washington, George, 71



224

Wayne, Don E., 186 n.19 Webster, John, elegy for Prince Henry, 36 Weiner, Andrew D., 65, 66, 87, 89 Westcott, Allan F., 32 Whetstone, George, xiii Whiggism, Whigs, 19, 68–9, 78–9, 141 White, Newman Ivey, 177 White, T. H., The Once and Future King, 180 Whitman, Walt, 166 Wiedhorn, Manfred, 115, 129 Wilcher, Robert, 187 n.2 Wilde, Oscar, 73 Wilkinson, C. H., 107, 108, 190 n.10 Williams, George Walton, 121 Williamson, Colin, 189 n.27 Williamson, J. W., 27, 34, 38 Williamson, Karina, 143, 145 Williams, Raymond, 135–6, 177, 178 Wilson, A. N., 79 Wilson, Elkin Calhoun, 36, 38 Wilton House, x, 13, 18, 20, 92, 135–6, 142, 174–5 Winstanley, Gerrard, 165, 168, 178 Winstanley, William, Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, 108–10, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 160, 190 n.4 Winters, Yvor, 49, 157, 162 Wither, George, 24, 113, 162 Wits Recreations, 109, 110, 121 Wolfe, James, General, 48 Wolsey, Thomas, Cardinal, 24 Woods, Susanne, 56–7 Woolf, Virginia, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” 179 Worden, Blair, xiii, 27–8, 58–61, 79–80, 183–4 n.29 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 13, 14 Wordsworth, William, 14, 73–6, 114, 129, 141, 158, 170–2, 176 The Convention of Cintra, 73–5, 76, 114, 141, 158, 170–1, 171, 172, 176

225

Descriptive Sketches Taken during a Pedestrian Tour among the Alps, 75 Essays upon Epitaphs, 75 “Great men have been among us,” 75, 76 The Prelude, 14 world-as-theater, 146 World War I, xiii, xiv, 114, 129, 176, 180 World War II, 174 Wroth, Lady Mary (née Sidney, one of Sir Philip’s nieces), xvii, xviii Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 115 Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 178 Yeats, W. B., xiii–xiv, 166 “An Irishman Foresees His Death,” xiv “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” xiii–xiv “Reprisals,” xiv “Shepherd and Goatherd,” xiv Young, Edward, 78, 98, 99–100 advertisement for posthumous collected poems, 99 correspondence, 99 Satire III, 78 second of Two Epistles to Mr. Pope, 99, 100 younger brothers, 128–9 Zeuxis, 107 Zouch, Thomas, biography of Sir Philip Sidney, xvi, 69, 78–9, 86, 141, 149–58, 161, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 175 Zutphen (battle), vii, viii, 2, 6, 7, 8, 21, 30, 39, 43, 47, 51, 66, 67, 72, 75, 83, 112, 114, 141, 165, 167, 170, 175, 176, 180, 181



INDEX

Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

Sir Philip Ashton's Eyes

Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586-1640

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

To Sir Philip With Love (Epilogue)

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

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Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

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Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

Icon

Icon

Icon

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Introducing Cultural Studies, Third Edition (Introducing (Icon))

The Icon

Sidney Sheldon

The Icon

Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

Sir Philip Ashton's Eyes

Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586-1640

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

To Sir Philip With Love (Epilogue)

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

Icon

Icon

Icon

Icon

Introducing Cultural Studies, Third Edition (Introducing (Icon))

The Icon

Sidney Sheldon

The Icon

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