The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature

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Author: Joel B. Davis

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The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature

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The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature

Joel B. Davis

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THE COUNTESSE OF PEMBROKES ARCADIA AND THE INVENTION OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Copyright © Joel B. Davis, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 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: 978–0–230–11252–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davis, Joel B. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the invention of English literature / Joel B. Davis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11252–0 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586. Arcadia. 2. Arcadia in literature. I. Title. PR2342.A6D33 2011 823⬘.3—dc22

2011010790

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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To my wife, Stacy, for those thousand decencies that daily flow from all her words and actions, and to my parents, Marge and Todd Davis, for always believing in me.

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Contents

List of Figures

xi

Preface: A Book about Books

xiii

Acknowledgments

xix

Introduction: The Literary System and its Symptoms: A Disciplinary Glance at the Invention of English Literature

1

1

The Arcadia in Print in the Twentieth Century The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as a Symptom Sidney and the Literary System The New Criticism, the New Bibliography, and the Invention of English Literature

13

Feigning History in the 1590 Arcadia

23

How the 1590 Arcadia Advanced Textual Criticism Social and Political Pressures Working on the 1590 Text Staging the Page of Poesie Historicall Grevillean Skepticism, Arcadian Exempla, and “Glowe-Worme Lights” to Govern Princes Two Grounds of All this Storie in the 1590 Arcadia The Modes of the 1590 Quarto Time, Decay, and the Immanent Book One: The Disruptions of Eros and Corruptions of Chivalry The Symmetries of the First Eclogues Book Two: The Heroic Immanent in the Pastoral The Eruption of Bathos in the Second Eclogues The Historiographical Mode and the Immanence of Passions in Book Three

23 27 30

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1 5 7

39 43 46 48 52 55 57 66 68

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2 The Performance of Astrophel and Stella in the 1591 Quartos Why Study the 1591 Quartos? Who Leaked Astrophel and Stella? Interlude: Shuffling Astrophel and Stella Astrophil’s Stolen Kiss in Q1 The Poetic Argument of the Songs in the 1591 Quartos: The Matter The Poetic Argument of the Songs in the 1591 Quartos: The Manner Succeeding Astrophel and Stella: Daniel’s Delia, Lodge’s Phillis, and Fletcher’s Licia Delia and the Broken Crown: A Fable of Succession and Decay Echoes of Fame in Phillis Giles Fletcher, Sidney’s Other Heir

3 The One and the Many: The Sidney Name in Print, 1590−93 Nationalistic or Opportunistic? Essex, Spenser, and the Sidney Name Before 1593 William Ponsonby, Abraham Fraunce, and the Construction of the Insider Ethos Spenser, Harvey, and Nashe: The Art of Deflation Nicholas Breton, Thomas Nashe, and the Countess of Pembroke’s Love Fraunce Redux: Satirizing the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel Sir John Harington and the Case for Insider Truthiness The Need to Reclaim Arcadia

4

79 79 81 85 87 91 93 99 102 108 112

119 120 125 127 134 137 140 144

Mary Sidney Herbert and the Reinvention of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

145

The Fabrication of the Sidney Family Discourse The Discourse of Life and Death The Tragedie of Antonie The 1593 Edition of the Arcadia Aristocratic Friendship and the Virtue of the Heroic Romance The Political Analysis of Faction The Prudence of Euarchus Humanity and Judgment, Pity and Monstrosity in the Trial Scene

146 149 153 160 162 170 172 174

5 Organic and Artificial Wholes in the Invention of English Literature: Or, the Ontological Status of the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia The Lady of May as Emblem for Sir Philip Sidney The Certain in the Certaine Sonets The Authentication Effect of Astrophel and Stella in the 1598 Folio Publishing An Apologie for Poetrie: 1595

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179 181 182 185 186

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Contents The Prominence of The Defence of Poesie: A Little Critical Genealogy The Place and Function of the Defence in the 1598 Folio The Modernist Myth of Organic Elizabethan Culture

●

ix 188 191 193

Notes

201

Selected Bibliography

229

Index

245

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Figures

1 2 3

4

5

6 7 8

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London, 1590 (Sig 6r) Huntington Library Board

32

An abridgemente of the notable worke of Polidore Virgile. London, 1560 (Sigs a3v, a4) Huntington Library Board

34

Fenton, Geoffrey (trans). The historie of Guicciardin conteining the vvarres of Italie and other partes. London, 1579 (Sigs F6r, G1) Huntington Library Board

36

Sansovino, Francesco. The quintesence of wit being a corrant comfort of conceites, maximies, and poleticke deuises. London, 1590 (SigB2v) Huntington Library Board

38

Puttenham, George. The arte of English poesie Contriued into three bookes. London, 1589 (Sigs M2, M2v) Huntington Library Board

50

1590 Arcadia Book 1: Modes of Narration and Arrangement of Narrative Modes

53


58


70

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Preface: A Book about Books

I

n November 1586, hardly a month after Sir Philip Sidney died from wounds taken in an attack on a Spanish supply route outside Zutphen, in the Low Countries, the competing claims to represent Sidney and his writings began: Sidney’s friend, Fulke Greville, wrote to warn Sidney’s father-in-law Francis Walsingham that someone had approached the London stationer William Ponsonby with a plan to publish an unauthorized edition of Sidney’s prose romance, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Greville claimed that Sidney left the latest copy of the Arcadia in his care, which was “a correction of that old one don 4 or 5 years since wch he left in trust wth me wherof ther is no more copies, & fitter to be printed than that first which is so common.” Scholarly consensus is that the “old” Arcadia is the essentially complete pastoral romance that circulated in manuscript but was never published until Bertrand Dobbell recognized a copy in 1907, whereas the “correction” to which Greville refers is the unfinished “New” Arcadia first printed in 1590. In effect, Greville claimed to represent the Arcadia and its author by suppressing the “old” Arcadia. He could not have known it would disappear for over three centuries. Prior to writing Walsingham, Greville had sent his own copy of the Arcadia to Sidney’s widow, the Lady Frances (Walsingham’s daughter), a gesture that gave control of the manuscript to Sidney’s powerful in-laws instead of the Sidney family proper. Furthermore, he wrote that this copy was “to be amended by a direction sett down undre [Sidney’s] own hand how & why.”1 The direction has never been identified and is not mentioned in any of the early printed editions of the Arcadia. The invocation of this direction lends the imprimatur of Sidney’s authority to Greville’s actions, however, and stands out as the beginning of a more than decade-long struggle to control the printing of Sidney’s writings and, even more important, to shape their interpretation.

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The competition to represent Sidney almost immediately spread beyond the rarefied circle of Sidney’s family, his in-laws, and his friend Greville, and it has come to be interpreted as evidence of incipient nationalism or imperialism in the newly emerging English literary system. In the Elizabethan age, Sidney and fellow poet Edmund Spenser achieved the “kingdom of their own language” in Richard Helgerson’s memorable phrase.2 Helgerson effectively collapses cultural identity, of which language is a significant component, and national identity (which frequently yokes disparate languages together and pits them in often violent competition) in a “kingdom.” More recently, William J. Kennedy has argued that Sidney and poets near to him sought “to develop a specifically English literary style with a specifically English cultural identity,” and, further, that Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella “encodes for its elite readership a conflict between Protestant individualism valued as a moral imperative and the corporate allegiance required by the emerging nation-state.”3 In accounts like these, the Sidney name is all but a synecdoche for the rise of a self-consciously English literature. This book aims to unravel how Sidney came to stand in for English literature (as opposed to literature written in English) by focusing at once on the late Elizabethan environment in which Sidney’s writings first saw print, and on the twentieth-century affinities between modernism and structuralism in the profession of literary studies construed broadly.4 The ways that early modern writers and modern critics have constructed accounts of literary authority link these two foci. Authority and authenticity have always been the stakes central to controversies surrounding the earliest print editions of Sidney’s works, and those publications are central to the most influential accounts of what we now rather uncritically designate the “literary system” of the late Elizabethan period. Studies of the English literary system seem largely to remain in a synchronic and semiotic mode, but other forays into cultural studies of the period have reasserted the importance of reading diachronically, as we see in histories of the book and histories of reading that have arisen in the last two decades.5 “The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature” challenges the largely dominant, semiotic account of the rise of the English literary system in three ways: it offers a microhistory of the publication of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia from the quarto edition of 1590 to the 1598 folio that effectively constituted Sidney’s collected works; it reads each early edition of Sidney as a literary work in its own right; and it sets this hybrid of literary history and history of the book in the context of the publication of many works cited as constitutive of the late Elizabethan English literary system. By reading diachronically against the largely synchronic accounts of the literary system, I hope to suggest productive dialogues between the microhistory approaches to literary history

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and the powerful, “total-system” accounts of early modern English literature enabled by the semiotic turn in literary history. At the same time, this project opens up a surprisingly lightly tread line of inquiry in Sidney studies: the ways that the earliest editions of Sidney interpreted his writing and, in fact, appropriated his reputation. The shifting image of Sidney in the poetry of his contemporaries has been well-studied and, of course, Sidney’s efforts at self-fashioning have been a favorite topos since about 1980, but in spite of the excellent textual scholarship and the many documents to which we have access, Sidneians have not produced a monograph focused on interpreting Sidney’s writings in light of their publication history.6 Fortunately, in H. R. Woudhuysen’s Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640, we do have a careful tracing of social networks involved in circulating manuscripts that provides a jumping-off point for the present study: a reading of the early editions of the works eventually comprising the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia; namely, the romance itself, Astrophel and Stella, The Defence of Poesie, Certaine Sonets, and the pastoral we now call The Lady of May.7 Sir Philip Sidney and The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia stand at the center of the most influential accounts of the early modern literary system, which assert that incipient English nationalism conditioned the literary system from the beginning. Both the argument advanced in Richard Helgerson’ Self- Crowned Laureates (1983)—that a tension between “amateur” and “professional” categories of writing dialectically gave rise to a third, “laureate” category— and Helgerson’s structuralist way of seeing complicated patronage networks and relations among printers and poets designated by the term “literary system” use Sir Philip Sidney as the figure for “that most laureate of amateur poets” against which laureate poetics is to be understood. Helgerson explains his attempt to step outside of (though not to abandon) literary history in unambiguously structuralist terms: “the axis of my interest rotated from the diachronic to the synchronic” (17−18). Self- Crowned Laureates is committed to the structuralist principles that the individual elements of a system “take their meaning from their relationship to the whole,” and that such structures preexist, both psychologically and ontologically, the verbally and logically articulated rules by which societies are organized. Indeed, Helgerson posits that the intelligibility of such statements of ambition as those framed by Spenser, Jonson, and later Milton “depended . . . on a system of authorial roles in which that ambition might make sense” (2).8 Helgerson’s semiotic account of the early modern English literary system has been a powerful tool, and its influence has spread a particular version of Sir Philip Sidney throughout early modern cultural studies. But I argue that some aspects of what we now consider the literary system, like

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the opposition between the active and contemplative life that seems to have defined Sidney and so many other ambitious Elizabethan writers, are in significant respects artifacts of the competition to represent Sidney as it played out between 1590 and 1598, in the earliest print editions of his writings. The opposition between these two modes of life certainly preceded Sidney in the mental landscape of Europe and continued long after the Arcadia’s reputation declined; nevertheless, Sidney remains an exemplar of that opposition. Our accounts of the English renaissance generally find the opposition and the figure of Sidney unavoidable. For example, Arcadian otium (leisure, a prerequisite for contemplation) serves as the foil against which the negotium (work) of Elizabethan bookstalls defines itself, and yet, paradoxically, the idleness of common maids is associated with popular romance, while masculine activity is associated with aristocratic romances in Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (2002). Likewise, in both Arthur Marotti’s and Wendy Wall’s accounts of Elizabethan lyric poetry, the semblance of aristocratic leisure is assiduously represented in printed poetry— all the more so among common poets.9 In these and other, similar studies of early modern literary culture, Sidney’s writings tend to be read monolithically and to serve as a kind of immovable mover around which interesting versions of the literary system are to be understood. The synchronic and structural nature of the idea of a literary system, and the fact that the power of the concept of a literary system is achieved at the cost of abandoning not only diachrony but also the capacity to make valid inferences about causation, tend not to receive much attention. On the other hand, as literary scholars recover the material history of books, the value of linking material history to literary interpretation becomes more apparent. While new historicist ideas about the circulation of power remain necessarily unspecific and incorporeal because of their structuralist underpinnings, the textual sites on which power leaves its traces take on very specific form in newer microhistories: such studies apply the semiotic turn in criticism to the space of reading, analyzing the “miseen-page” as a physical manifestation of structure—indeed, as a structure in itself—wherein the circulation of manuscripts and readers’ inscriptions in printed books are traced.10 In this book I apply methods developing in the fields of the history of reading and the history of the book in order to set interpretations of the early editions of Sidney’s printed writings in the context of their publication history, the publication of other significant works in the same period, and the politics of many of the principals invested in influencing the publication of Sidney’s and other writers’ works in the 1590s. Thus in the chapters that follow, I place the early editions of

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Sidney’s writings in dialogue with each other and with the cultural milieux on which they exerted the greatest influence. The introduction clears ground for the project by tracing the editorial and critical practices that have led us to rely on critical editions of literary works unmoored from their social and material contexts: the nearly coterminous rise of the New Bibliography in textual scholarship and formalism in literary criticism, which in turn reconfigures our notion of an author into something closely resembling the Foucauldian author-function. Our disciplinary accounts of the history of English literature and of the English “literary system” reproduce, with certain distortions, the process in the 1590s through which Philip Sidney and the Arcadia become analogous to transcendental signifiers that retroactively confer coherence on Elizabethan literature as a distinct field of study. In our disciplinary conversations and in the writings of the 1590s, Sidney and the Arcadia stand above and outside the relations among other Elizabethan writers, authorizing their activity paradoxically by being inimitable, different not in degree but in kind. The introduction, therefore, interprets some of our most influential accounts of the Elizabethan period as symptoms of our disciplinary turn toward semiotics and structuralism. That turn, like many disciplinary shifts, carried with it unexamined baggage from the “old” paradigm, namely the New Bibliography; the result for our discourse has been that, as Gavin Alexander puts it neatly, “Sidney is his works and his works are Sidney.”11 In order to deconstruct the Sidney-as-sign-of-English-literature that we have created by synchronically distorting the references that appear in many Elizabethan texts, the rest of this book investigates The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as a series of discrete textual moments in a vein suggested by Jerome J. McGann’s revisionist methodology—itself a significant influence on scholarship on the history of the book. McGann’s understanding of a literary work foregrounds its heterogeneity in order to correct the tendency of traditional textual scholarship to produce the illusion of textual unity. In particular, McGann’s methods are designed to produce detailed diachronic accounts of the production of literary works.12 Accordingly, the present study might fairly be described as a revisionist account of the literary work we know as the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia —the one that comprises most of the Sidney canon. Therefore, following chapters treat the 1590 quarto Arcadia, the two 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, and the 1593 folio Arcadia; finally, the 1595 quartos of An Apologie for Poetrie are treated together with the 1598 folio. This structure helps bring to the surface dialogic exchanges among significant agents in the production of these books (among them Fulke Greville, the Countess of Pembroke, Thomas Newman, Thomas Nashe, Hugh Sanford) and in the letters, prefaces, and

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other works currently supposed to indicate an incipient system of English literature (Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, George Puttenham, and others). Because it is organized chronologically, this study facilitates a diachronic account of change over a relatively short but crucial period of time, in order to provide an account of some significant causal relationships that current synchronic accounts of the Elizabethan literary system cannot offer.

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Acknowledgments

W

hoever said the model of scholarship in the humanities centers on the solitary researcher may have overstated the case. I would like to thank my colleagues at Stetson University for their support during the writing of this book, especially Jamil Khader, Terri Witek, and Tom Farrell for responding with critical eyes but kind words, and Eric Kurlander in the Department of History for great comments on several chapters and stimulating intellectual debates. To Stephanie Brown I owe a particular debt: working with her introduced me to the Harvey-Nashe flyting properly. Stetson is a small university with no research assistants, and so I have depended heavily on the good offices of many staff, including Maribel Velázquez, Alyssa Pickles, Elizabeth Bogart, Leah Knapp, Laura Vercolen, and Courtney Renfro. Sue Ryan in DuPont-Ball Library, as well as Susan Connell Derryberry and Cathy Ervin in the Interlibrary Loan Department cheerfully answered my every request and nudged me only when books were long overdue. The College of Arts and Sciences has generously defrayed some of he expenses associated with reproducing images and securing permissions to do so. I would like also to acknowledge the financial support given my research by Stetson University Summer Research Grants. Beyond my university, I am deeply indebted to a marvelous group of friends and mentors. Staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library have all been more than accommodating and helpful. George E. Rowe focused my attention early on the textual difficulties presented by the Arcadia, and the questions of Lisa Freinkel and Roland Greene have likewise prodded me over the years. John T. Gage provided invaluable encouragement that helped me past many crises of self-doubt. Michael J. Ward, Robert McGovern, and Jason Powell taught me more about scholarly writing than anyone could hope for from peers, Rick Reverand taught me how to read a poem, and Susan Frye,

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who introduced me to the Arcadia, has always been an inspiration and a role model. Edward Jones, Jeff Ritchie, and Denise Tillery were great friends and guides early in my research, and Georgiana Ziegler helped me ask far more intelligent questions than I would have asked on my own. For the past twelve years the community of scholars that gather each year at Kalamazoo has fed my thoughts, brightened my spirits, and saved me from many a critical blunder. I cannot name everyone from Kalamazoo to whom I owe a debt of gratitude and a most sincere toast, so these few must stand in for all: Helen Vincent, Matthew Woodcock, Matthew Steggle, Matthew Hansen, Andrew King, Cindy Bowers, Craig Berry, Anne Lake Prescott, Tom Roche, Mary Ellen Lamb, Tom Herron, Margaret Hannay, Wayne Erickson, Beth Quitslund, Andrew Escobedo, Roger Kuin, Jean Goodrich, Gavin Alexander, John Watkins, Bill Oram, David Wilson-Okamura, Marianne Micros, Ted Steinberg, Arthur Kinney, Clare Kinney, Donald Stump, Robert Shepard, Germaine Warkentin, Henry Woudhuysen, Teemu Manninen, and Timothy Duffy. To two men in particular are due greater thanks than I can give. One is Victor Skretkowicz, for whose unquenchable inquisitiveness, kindness, and patience I shall always be grateful. The other is Jerry Rubio, the very spirit of Sidney and Spenser at Kalamazoo, whose generosity, unfailing good humor, and boundless energy will not be forgotten. Whatever virtues are in this book I owe to these people and friendships; errors of fact and judgment that remain are my own. A note on quotations of early modern texts: With some exceptions, I have quoted wherever possible from early modern printed editions, and I have kept original spelling intact, except for silently modernizing i/j, u/v, and vv/w, and using italics to indicate having expanded elisions indicated by macrons in the original printed text.

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Introduction: The Literary System and its Symptoms: A Disciplinary Glance at the Invention of English Literature

The Arcadia in Print in the Twentieth Century Talking and writing about The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia constantly negotiates the problem of which “Arcadia” is under discussion. For most of us, the Arcadia refers to Philip Sidney’s prose romance, which exists in two versions: the Old Arcadia , which circulated in manuscript but was not published until it was rediscovered in the early twentieth century; and the revised and printed New Arcadia —which itself exists in two versions, the quarto printed in 1590 that ends mid-sentence and the folio printed in 1593 that grafts the ending of the Old Arcadia onto the matter printed in the 1590 quarto. But by 1598, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia also included Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophel and Stella; his Defence of Poesie, another collection of sonnets; and a pastoral entertainment now known as The Lady of May. Setting aside these parts of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia for the moment, another difference between the prose romances designated under the title of the New Arcadia is that the 1590 quarto excised many of the pastoral eclogues that had graced the Old Arcadia , whereas the 1593 folio Arcadia restores many eclogues and even adds three poems not found in either earlier version of the romance.1 Finally, beyond the additions to the 1598 folio, the Arcadia invited many seventeenth-century writers to write supplements, continuations, and literary spinoffs.2

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2

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The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

Readers interested in literary history or even in Philip Sidney’s influence as a writer do not always draw sharp distinctions among the various Arcadia s, in part because of the editions that are readily available and in part because the practice of literary criticism often assumes a single, stable text of the literary work under question. A glance at the editions of the Arcadia currently available is instructive: If we want to teach the Arcadia we often rely on the Oxford World Classics paperback (Old Arcadia) or the Penguin paperback (New Arcadia, more or less the 1593), or an anthologized selection. When we write about the Arcadia, we usually pick one version but fairly often find ourselves having to refer to other versions at least in passing. More often than not, at least beyond the sphere of Sidney studies proper, as instructors and critics alike, we seek a single, stable text of the Arcadia for our courses and our literary-historical and critical arguments. But the goal of a single, stable text of the New Arcadia —or even of one of its versions—is not easily realized. The 1987 Clarendon Press edition of the New Arcadia, which suppresses some of the editorial apparatus of the 1590 Arcadia and removes all the eclogues to an appendix, is out of print, and moreover, is rather rare, if the nearly $1,000 ABE books wanted for a copy in 2006 is a fair indication. The 1977 Penguin paperback Arcadia is not based on a critical edition; it represents the 1593 folio Arcadia, but it introduces chapter divisions lacking in the folio, and it lacks a sophisticated textual apparatus. An out-of-print Kent State University Press reprint of a turn-of-the-century facsimile reprint of the 1590 quarto can be found more readily, but it too lacks a critical apparatus. By comparison, relatively reliable annotated editions of Spenser are available in plenty. To be sure, textual criticism of Spenser’s oeuvre has its own difficulties, such as the question of who wrote “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda” and the various copy-states of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Nevertheless, the instructor on the lookout for editions of Spenser is rewarded with the Longman annotated Faerie Queene and the briefer Penguin edition; many excellent editions of single books or pairs thereof from the Faerie Queene; and most of the rest of Spenser’s shorter works in reliable paperback editions. The difference is certainly not the quality of the textual scholarship in the respective fields: William Ringler’s edition of Sidney’s poems is still regarded as exemplary, and the Robertson and Skretkowicz editions of the Old and New Arcadia s are of similar quality. Still, Spenserians do not face the problem of which Faerie Queene to teach, only which parts thereof. The question, “What is The Faerie Queene ?” is a question into which literary critics are well-equipped to lead students. But the question, “What is The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia?” immediately confronts us with the fundamental textual problem of which Arcadia,

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Introduction

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compounded by the lack of a reliable paperback edition of either the 1590 or the 1593 New Arcadia. All of these difficulties led Victor Skretkowicz, the editor of the Clarendon New Arcadia, to assert that with a few reasonable qualifications, the 1593 Arcadia ought to be reprinted “without hypothetical emendation”; such a critical edition could serve as a basis for a paperback edition.3 Unfortunately, his critical edition of the New Arcadia makes reconstructing the experience of reading the 1593 Arcadia very difficult, because it excludes the revised material from books 4 and 5 of the Old Arcadia that was included in the 1593 Arcadia, and it excludes the pastoral eclogues as they appeared in the 1593 Arcadia. Albert Feuillerat’s 1912 edition of Sidney’s works is the only critical edition that attempts to represent the 1593 Arcadia, and it is outdated. More important, the difficulties of writing about or teaching the New Arcadia would not be solved by a new critical edition or even new critical editions of both the 1590 quarto and the 1593 folio Arcadia s. In the first place, we lack a consensus as to whether the authoritative Arcadia is the 1590 quarto or the 1593 folio, or perhaps the critical edition of the Old Arcadia. Typically such questions are resolved by textual evidence of the author’s final intentions, but in the case of the Arcadia s, the attempt to ascertain Philip Sidney’s final intentions founders on two rocks: we have too many texts from which to work, and the authorial figure of Philip Sidney himself overshadows work on the texts he wrote. In essence, we are back to the problems of authority and authenticity of which I spoke earlier. Rather than attempt to solve those problems in the way most critical editions do (eliminating inauthentic variants), or declaring them irrelevant as structuralist and poststructuralist inquiries do (after the death of the author, the text remains), I instead widen the scope of authority and authors to include many different kinds of agents whose work affected the earliest print editions of Philip Sidney’s works. Therefore, this book identifies what we usually call early editions of Sidney’s works as separate works in dialogue with one another and, inevitably, with their literary environment: the 1590 quarto of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia , the 1591 quartos of Syr P.S. his Astrophel and Stella , the 1593 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia , and, finally, the 1598 folio titled The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia that comprised the romance, the famous sonnet sequence, Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (retitled The Defence of Poesie), Sidney’s occasional Certaine Sonets, and a pastoral entertainment now known as The Lady of May —all of which has come to be regarded as the central part of the Sidney canon today (with the significant exception of Sidney’s metaphrases of the psalms, which circulated in manuscript and were completed by his sister).

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Reading the early editions of Sidney’s works separately helps us to understand more clearly how their printing influenced contemporaries during the 1590s. When we consider, for example, that most of the sonnet vogue of the 1590s had already passed by the time Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella had been printed in the form in which we are accustomed to reading it, a closer study of how the 1591 quartos presented the sequence is merited. And when we consider that readers of Sidney’s prose romance often marked and annotated it, even in the case of one 1613 edition reproducing by hand the editorial apparatus of the 1590 quarto, a closer study of how the 1590 quarto Arcadia presents itself is likewise merited.4 For these reasons, this is a book about books, as opposed to a study of literary works and authors. To read early editions of Sidney’s works as separate books follows Jerome J. McGann’s suggestion that we imagine a literary work as a “related series of concretely determinable semiotic events that embody and represent processes of social and historical experience.”5 Unlike McGann, however, I frequently call attention to the heterogeneous agents involved in the creation of early editions of Sidney’s writings, and treat these editions largely as “works” in themselves. In this sense, I read the 1598 folio Arcadia as something of a culmination of a series of previous works, each of which might be considered a semiotic event,6 that functions very much like a dialogue, the evidence of which we have in copies of early editions of Sidney’s works. The subtext in this dialogic series is a struggle to shape the ethos of Sir Philip Sidney during the 1590s, which can be read in the early editions of his works. Thus I seek first to recover the works themselves and then to investigate how the figure of Sidney was appropriated in both early modern and postmodern discourses—especially the claim that English literary nationalism began to accrete around Sidney and his writings. One consequence of reading The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as a series of semiotic events in dialogue is that the materiality of the texts comes to the forefront of the analysis, and therefore we can seek what Warren Boutcher has usefully designated “applied texts”: “[t]he historically conditioned pattern of habitual perception and purposive reaction that can be inferred from copies of books when combined with other evidence.” 7 One way to represent an “applied text” is to write a microhistory of the reading of a given work. For example, Heidi Brayman Hackel’s microhistory of the reading of Sidney’s Arcadia traces early modern readers’ marginalia to produce a compelling account of their habits.8 Another field of data crucial to reconstituting an “applied text” is what Gérard Genette calls a book’s “paratext” (in particular the “peritextual” elements of the editorial apparatus and prefatorial materials), the “factual paratext” (“not . . . an explicit message [verbal or other] but . . . a fact whose existence alone, if known to the public, provides

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some commentary on the text and influences how the text is received,” for example, the fact that Sidney’s writings circulated in manuscript among some members of England’s cultural elite before they were printed), and what I would call, extending Genette’s scheme, an “inferred paratext,” to designate inferences that readers draw about books based on what they think they know about them (e.g., the proposition that Stella represents a woman once beloved of Philip Sidney).9 Such paratexts and applied texts abut the critically fertile fields of cultural capital, in the sense explored by Pierre Bourdieu, that have produced many a widely marketable book, but I restrict the scope of this study to the interpretations created by the paratexts of Sidney’s writings between 1590 and 1598, their significance for what has come to be known as the literary system, and their significance for the discipline of literary history.10 My hope is to make the grounds for wider cultural studies and literary histories more legible than they currently are. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as a Symptom We need the kind of account I have suggested above because The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia is a symptom of the professional interests that shape our discipline in the broad sense of “professing literature” traced by Gerald Graff.11 It designates multiple and sometimes contradictory works of literature, and what it designates has never really been contained by The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia —not in the initial editions of the work produced in the 1590s, nor in the exemplary critical editions of Sidney’s oeuvre produced in the twentieth century, nor in accounts of reading and literary production in renaissance England currently dominant in our discipline. Likewise, the name of Sir Philip Sidney is a symptom of our professional interests. What Sidney’s name means is overdetermined and even contradictory, which in turn reveals a deeper structure in both the nature of authorship as Elizabethans and Jacobeans understood it, and the nature of the descriptions of the literary system proffered by our contemporaries in the field of literary history. In many late sixteenth- and early seventeenth- century texts, Sidney’s name and writings elicit significant praise and comparisons with continental writers—a point seldom underappreciated by critics of our own generation concerned with the rise of an English literary and political identity. Like our predecessors in the English renaissance, we too find ourselves compelled to account for literary origins; unlike them, we are obsessed with the origins of a national literature in sixteenth-century England, however anachronistic such a chimera may be. This compulsion is similar to the “desire for origins” that Allen Frantzen has traced in the study of Anglo-Saxon literature.

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Indeed, seeking origins is for us, as for many humanist-trained sixteenth-century writers, “a powerful means, sometimes spiritual, always scholarly, to a material, worldly end.”12 Our ends are defined largely in terms of our profession, which explains why Sidney is sometimes a well-connected insider who moved with ease through the Elizabethan court; at others a courtly outsider banished for an unruly streak of egalitarianism or for hot Protestantism; a Catholic sympathizer; a protofeminist; an aristocrat who elegantly papers over the misogyny inherent in his writings, and so on.13 The ends of early modern English writers were defined by a confluence of forces like the exigencies of patronage and emerging markets for printed books, which had not yet defined writing as a profession; those of Sidney’s mostly aristocratic first editors by desires to shape the ethos of Sidney for social and political purposes. Likewise, English renaissance writers understood the significance of Sidney and his writings in terms of their own desire for origins: “Sidney’s utility to Elizabethan poets,” as Raphael Falco explains, “is the empty slot he leaves behind.”14 While Falco and others imagine early modern discussions of poetry as structures in the postmodern sense of the term, they produce and reify a structure in current critical discourse. We constantly negotiate our entry into that structure, in which Sidney’s name and his writings figure prominently. I designate modern criticism as a structure for the following reasons: (1) It attempts to represent a certain kind of reality, namely, how English literature came to be what it is and what its salient traits are; (2) It presents itself as a self-authorizing system: in order to check the veracity of a constituent statement, one examines other statements in the system; and (3) Individual subjects negotiate entry into the system via language; their statements concerning English literature must be consistent with or at least legible in terms of other statements that constitute the system; and the authority to speak is conferred by other participants in the system. In currently dominant critical discourses on English literary history, Philip Sidney and his writings function as a “pure” signifier that stands outside the structure and guarantees its coherence. As Slavoj Žižek writes, “[T]he only way a given historic reality can achieve its unity is through the agency of a signifier, through reference to a ‘pure’ signifier. It is not the real object which guarantees as the point of reference the unity and identity of a certain ideological experience—on the contrary, it is the reference to a ‘pure’ signifier which gives unity and identity to our experience of historical reality itself.”15 That is, through discourse, the events of the past become reified as literary history, and only through an empty signifier does literary history come to be a particular literary history—the history of English literature.16 The discourse of the history of English literature is unified at several significant points around the signifiers “Sir Philip Sidney” and “Arcadia,” which have been emptied of

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their meaning paradoxically by being overfilled with it (that is, because our accounts of Sidney and the Arcadia are overdetermined). Noting that many an early modern English writer justified his work by referencing Sidney in some way, our accounts of the early modern English literary system came to be constituted around Sidney and his writings, but they could not contain them: neither Sidney nor his writings could participate fully in the system they seemed to authorize. They were the absent signifiers—the reference points—that gave the system its coherence. In our own accounts, the name Sidney signifies something more than the man himself, or his writings, or his qualities (virtue, Protestantism), so that C. S. Lewis could comment “even at this distance Sidney is dazzling” in his magisterial survey of Sixteenth Century Literature, Excluding Drama.17 For Lewis, Sidney is more dazzling than his writings because of his overdetermined place in the narrative of English literary history. *

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In spite of all the ways that Sir Philip Sidney and his writings have been connected to the rise of literature in England, neither Sidney himself nor many of those who first saw his writings into print demonstrated much interest in English literature as distinct from the literature of other realms. The disjunction between the nationalistic frenzy that surrounds Sidneian texts and the striking lack thereof both in Sidney’s writings and in the earliest printed editions of his works indicate the ways which in our ideas of Sidney, and the English renaissance notions of Sidney, are cultural symptoms. To argue that our notions of Sidney are symptoms of institutional desires also requires that we examine the profession of English as it arose in the twentieth century. Therefore, this introduction examines Sidney’s place in the dominant critical discourse on the early modern English “literary system,” which examines the literary system through the lens of semiotics. Next, in order to understand how semiotics came to be the dominant paradigm within which to frame our accounts of the early modern literary system, I turn to the protocols of the sophisticated textual criticism that produced modern editions of early modern literary works, and how the logic of textual criticism affects our interpretation of Sidney’s writings. Sidney and the Literary System Philip Sidney’s writing was fairly widely known during his lifetime, but before the first edition of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia was printed in 1590, the only literary references to Sidney that said anything about him in

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relation to the rise of a specifically English literature were those of George Puttenham, Gabriel Harvey, and Edmund Spenser. Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) praises Sidney’s pastorals in a passage that demonstrates familiarity with some of Queen Elizabeth’s favorites and praises Elizabeth’s poetry above all others. The passage is more a work of courtiership than poetics. But Harvey and Spenser, if we are to judge from The Shepheardes Calendar, had set out specifically to reform English verse. Around 1580, Harvey complains that both Sidney and Spenser wrench English unjustifiably by treating words like “heaven, evil, divel, & the like [as] dysyllables, contrarie to their natural pronunciation,” and in his “Gallant familiar Letter, containing . . . some precepts of our Englishe reformed Versifying,” he pursues the case for a standardized English orthography while praising Sidney and his friend Edward Dyer as two “diamonds” of Elizabeth’s court for their attempts to replace “our Barbarous . . . Rymes with Artificial Verses.”18 Harvey is referring to attempts to produce quantitative verse in English in this passage, but the wider implications of his criticism can be seen in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), which likewise appears to set out program to reform English verse, which is wrapped in its own layers of correspondence between E. K., Harvey, and Immerito, and which is dedicated to Sidney. While Harvey and Spenser’s early references to Sidney might be interpreted as precocious attempts to refine and define English literature, we are on firmer ground asserting that they are part of a strategy to justify Spenser’s poetry that works in part by suggesting that some group of illuminati has indeed thought out a complete program of literary reform, of which The Shepheardes Calendar is one initial piece. In fact, Spenser and Harvey cast The Shepheardes Calendar as the fruit of a wider program of verse “reformation” in England, initiated by Sidney and an “areopagus” to which Spenser has privileged access. The twentieth-century scholarly literature devoted to the English “areopagus” testifies to the success of Spenser’s strategy.19 Spenser and Harvey are among the first writers to realize the social and commercial benefits of dropping Sidney’s name in a discourse on English poetry—a move much more sophisticated than merely dedicating a book to him. Other than Puttenham, Harvey, and Spenser, those who mentioned Sidney before 1590 tended to place him above other English writers, if they drew a comparison, and they had nothing to say about a developing national literature. In September 1577, writing to Philip’s father, Sir Henry Sidney, Edward Waterhouse had praised Sidney’s Discourse on Irish Affairs, a defense of Sir Henry Sidney’s conduct as Lord Deputy of Ireland, as “the most excellent . . . that ever I red in my Lief” and gushed “let no man compare with Mr. Philips pen.”20 Thomas Howell’s praise of Sidney’s pastoral, presumably a version of the Old Arcadia or The Lady of May, in Howell his

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devises (1581), lauds the work’s “rare invention” and the depth of its mysteries but says nothing about other English writers.21 Abraham Fraunce’s 1588 Arcadian Rhetorike, dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, sets Sidney in the company of Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Salluste du Bartas, among others. But the Arcadian Rhetorike is not an attempt to justify English literature: its goal is to explicate rhetoric through Ramism and, in conjunction with the Lawiers Logicke of the same year, to demonstrate Fraunce’s fitness for public service. While it demonstrates rhetorical figures admirably and it effectively sets out an excellent commonplace book, nowhere does it mention the state of English literature or Sidney’s place within it. Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586) focuses on Sidney’s aristocratic status: it compares Sidney to Surrey, imagines that Sidney’s pen was given him by Mercury, and claims that Sidney “famous lives, at home, and farre, and neare; / For those that live in other landes, of SIDNEYS giftes doe heare.”22 That is, Sidney’s greatness derives from his fame abroad rather than his notoriety in England. Angel Day’s elegy, like many of the better-known elegies for Sidney in the Oxford and Cambridge collections (1587), works primarily in the courtly/aristocratic register rather like Howell and Whitney. In Holinshed (1587), Edmund Molyneux, who had been Sidney’s secretary, emphasizes the same aristocratic frame of reference and provides a glimpse at what Sidney may have wanted to achieve in writing the Arcadia. Molyneux writes that “nothing could have been taken out to amend [the Arcadia], or added to it that would not impaire it”; that “a speciall deere freend he should be that could have a sight, but much more deere that could once obteine a copie”; and that the Arcadia “so amplie set out both [Philip Sidney’s] sufficiencie for the publicke, and what he can doo in exercise privat,” that many had great expectations for Sidney.23 Molyneux’s reflections reveal why writers would go out of their way to discuss Sidney’s works before The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia was published in 1590: one had to be somebody simply to have seen Sidney’s writing. Demonstrating some knowledge of Sidney’s writing was largely a form of name-dropping, of advertising status, in which proximity to court conferred value. Above all else, the Arcadian Rhetorike announced Abraham Fraunce’s special access to the Sidney family. Less privileged writers had to content themselves with praising Sidney’s writing by reputation. Only as something of a celebrity, and not as a figure presiding over a nascent national literature, did the figure of Sidney authorize English writing before his works were printed. The kinds of references dropped by Fraunce, Whitney, Howell, and others were for the most part attempts at self-promotion, and even Spenser and Harvey’s ambitions in the front matter of The Shepheardes Calendar served foremost as an advertisement for their book.

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In fact, after Sidney’s writings had been published, the name-dropping game became a target in itself. Two of the butts of Ben Jonson’s jokes in Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), Fastidious Brisk and Fungoso, underscore their fashionable superficiality in their praise of the Arcadia. Francis Davison’s preface to the miscellany A Poetical Rapsody (1602) distanced Davison from his printer’s use of well-known poets’ names—and sometimes their poems—to attract buyers to books stuffed otherwise with wretched verse. Davison says, “I utterly disclaime it, as being done by the Printer, either to grace the forefront with Sir Ph. Sidneys, and other names, or to make the booke grow to a competent volume.”24 In the seventeen or so years between the elegies for Sidney’s death and Davison’s exposure of a cynical marketing ploy, the discourse of the English literary landscape and printing trade had undergone a significant transformation. Considered collectively and synchronically, the various claims of Harvey, Puttenham, Whitney, Davison, and even Fungoso appear to be a fully formed “literary system” into which Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s Faerie Queene fit. Although the notion of an English literary system has proved itself useful, its genesis should be examined carefully. The innovation of Richard Helgerson’s 1983 Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System was, from a semiotic perspective, to describe references to English writing in the early modern period as a kind of code that allows us to understand the meaning of individual renaissance poets’ statements about literature and their relation to other poets. Self-Crowned Laureates set out to understand the conditions in which a “laureate” poetic career—that is, the kind of career with legitimate pretensions to represent the poetry of a nation or a people—could be legible, on the assumption that poetry, literary discourse, and a broader circle of activities including circulating, printing, and selling books of poetry “could be the manifestations of a laureate career only if certain possibilities existed within the literary system that the writer shared with his audience.”25 One could become a really important poet only if, in the code for measuring such matters, there was a distinction between amateurs and professionals; that distinction made possible a third category, which poets like Spenser shaped into the laureate. Helgerson’s book changed the terms of the dialectical opposition that structured the way many critics discussed the production, circulation, consumption, and interpretation of literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The previous generation had been conditioned largely by J. W. Saunders’s notion of the “stigma of print,” which split the literary world of the English renaissance into print (common, commercial) and manuscript (rare, aristocratic, noncommercial).26 By the time Helgerson took up Self-Crowned Laureates, the inability of the “stigma of print” paradigm

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adequately to explain the privileged status accorded many printed works (like Spenser’s Faerie Queene) was widely discussed. Helgerson’s solution changed the dialectical terms from print versus manuscript distribution to “amateur” versus “professional” poetics. The “literary system” of his title develops the dialectical opposition between amateur and professional. Moreover, he explicitly identifies his approach with the “semiotic turn” in the human sciences, which traced its intellectual roots to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between the axes of langue and parole in the study of language. As Saussure focused on the vertical, synchronic, metaphorical axis in his study of language, so Helgerson’a literary system is presented as a synchronic snapshot, a totality of relations among a group of signs at any given moment, a code the knowledge of which makes distinguishing individuals possible. The key to the code that makes laureate poetics legible is Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney is “that most laureate of amateur poets” because it is he, the protestant martyr and national hero, against whom the aspiring poet laureate Edmund Spenser must define himself and his work.27 In Helgerson’s semiotic account, Sidney is the pure signifier that stands above and authorizes the rest of the literary system. Whereas Helgerson reads synchronically and posits a system of shared possibilities, indeed a fully developed langue, within which laureate aspirations could be read, I suggest we can learn more by reading elements of the Helgersonian system as historically and materially contingent events, alive to their heterogeneity in motive and consequence, unfolding in time and connected by often-competing hopes to capitalize on Sidney’s reputation. In the wake of Self-Crowned Laureates, Sidney likewise tends to be the figure around which the writing to be studied has congregated. Raphael Falco’s 1994 Conceived Presences argues that especially in the 1590s, poets staked out their authorial identities not by differentiating themselves and their work from Sir Philip Sidney but rather by claiming Sidney as a literary ancestor. Building on and revising Helgerson’s paradigm, Falco posits that the logic of semiotics overrides the logic of historical cause-and-effect in the literary imagination of early modern England. Thus, although Edmund Spenser had published The Shepheardes Calendar before Sidney had completed any of his major works, in Astrophel, Spenser nevertheless “casts Sidney, by a kind of genealogical back-formation, as a vernacular predecessor.”28 More recent studies of the literary system likewise tend to evoke an order around the figure of Sidney without necessarily including his writings in that order. Wendy Wall (1993) and Arthur Marotti (1995) situate their accounts of the mutual influences of manuscript and print culture within the predominant critical discourse that seeks to interrogate the beginnings of a recognizably

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nationalist English literature in that period.29 Marotti sees sixteenth-century England as developing both its own literature and a sense of nationhood; he argues that during the seventeenth century, Sidney “was installed in a developing national literature,” and that Sidney “became a sign of the growing strength of the literary institution as a self-authorizing entity, less dependent than previously on traditional social and political authority for its existence” (210, 317). Wall’s The Imprint of Gender lays out English authors’ struggles to negotiate the printing of their works via gendered tropes—for example, speaking in women’s voices, and presenting the feminine literary text as a manuscript ravished from its rightful possessor and sold into a kind of prostitution (259, 232). While Wall’s account is far more concerned with the gendering of the English-reading public than with incipient literary nationalism, ultimately its distinction between manuscript and print culture relies on Helgerson’s earlier distinction between “amateur” and “laureate” literary aspiration, with all its ontological freight.30 In these studies of “social textuality” in manuscript and print culture, the 1593 and 1598 folios of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia mark the absolute difference between print and manuscript culture and open up the space in which an investigation of the interplay between print and manuscript culture may take place.31 More recently, Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s well-received Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (2002) follows Wall’s lead in privileging gender and class over national identity, and yet it returns us very close to Saunders’s original dialectical opposition between stigmatized popular print and valorized aristocratic manuscript circulation. Newcomb’s opposition arises between popular and elite culture, popular and literary literature (represented by Robert Greene’s oeuvre and Sidney’s), and it is the slippage between literature and culture that allows her to reproduce Saunders’s opposition in the name of deconstructing it. Thus she “postulate[s] that [in renaissance England] there was a category of popular authorship, perhaps not preceding literary authorship, but growing up side by side with it” and advances the canny argument that in early modern texts, gestures toward textual control and calculations of commercial strategy were strongly implicated in one another. [Robert] Greene’s publications were often transparently appropriated coterie gestures, while Sidney would be constructed as exclusive by the very coproducers who dragged his work posthumously into the marketplace.32 In all these studies, either Sidney or The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia figures as a cultural “other” for poets of lesser social rank and greater literary ambition; as my brief survey of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean mentions of

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Sidney indicates, they are accurate in this respect. It is in the ways that recent studies of this period frame their inquiries that Sidney and his Arcadia have become symptoms. They are symptoms of attempts to account for the origins of a specifically English literary system (as opposed to, for example, the international humanist republic of letters) in the early modern period, and they are symptoms of attempts to recover class and gender distinctions at the origins of the national literature of England. The point of the attempt to write a microhistory that recovers the early editions of Sidney’s writings as “applied texts,” and that frames itself explicitly as a response to readings that turn Sidney’s texts into symptoms, is not to supersede these readings with a definitive, comprehensive interpretation; nor is it to generate a case study in which the disciplinary crisis in literary studies, the notorious “division of the kingdoms” into textual scholarship and literary criticism, is overcome. I do not envision a program with the completeness that Jerome McGann does even in his relatively early work on it.33 Instead I hope to present an informed dialogue (not a dialectic) that crosses some of our intradisciplinary divides and, in particular, provokes productive engagements with cultural studies models that currently dominate publishers’ lists. The New Criticism, the New Bibliography, and the Invention of English Literature The semiotic approach to describing early modern English literary history did not arise by chance. It followed from the way we prepared critical editions of literary works for scholarly study for most of the twentieth century. As D. C. Greetham has observed, “It is . . . no accident that the hegemony of the New Criticism and the New Bibliography were virtually coterminous, for the critical concentration on ‘the text itself’ . . . needed a textual equivalent in which the critic and reader was offered an apparently seamless and perfected text, with the tension produced by variance banished to the back of the book, or even as a separate volume.”34 By the New Bibliography, Greetham means using textual scholarship to produce critical editions of literary works—particularly the “clean text” editions meant for students with minimally intrusive interpretive apparati and minimal commentary on the relations among the various witnesses to the work, like the Pelican Shakespeare or Oxford World’s Classics series. The ascendancy of the New Bibliography and the New Criticism coincided also with an increasing emphasis among some American historians on the history of ideas, as opposed to social, economic, or even religious or political history. The object of their study, ideas, could be studied most clearly in the kinds of critical editions being produced

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by the New Bibliographers.35 The goal of “clean text” editions of literature and historical documents is that students may encounter the work in all its immediacy and then subject it to varieties of “close reading” that adapted theoretical paradigms like the new criticism, the history of ideas, and later, prominently among poststructuralist approaches, deconstruction, and the new historicism. The accretion of critical practices that take as their objects of study such denatured texts, removed from the material and social circumstances that produced them and that they helped to produce, generated the conditions in which the question, “What are the semiotics of the literary system?” would be intelligible. In 1977, just six years before Richard Helgerson published Self-Crowned Laureates, Michel Foucault’s well-known essay “What is an Author?” became widely available in an English translation; it is part of the discipline-wide project in which Helgerson situates his own book. Foucault’s redescription of authorship as a function of discourse, and in particular his claim that discursive practice has reified the notion of an “author” specifically as a point of reference around which a set of “works” clusters, is as good a diagnosis of much critical practice in the 1980s and 1990s as it is of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discursive formations. The resonance between Foucault’s historical argument and current practices is the reason his essay has remained influential, of course, and it demands a close attention to the links between the production of Sidney as an author, of Sidney’s works as literary works, and their places in the literary system as we understand it. The question to pursue is, how have the practices of the New Bibliography turned Sidney and The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia into symptoms of our critical discourse? The precedent for the semiotic turn in the study of literary history lies in the formulation of stemmatic theory as it arose in the nineteenth century, and in a parallel development of a desire within the discipline of philology to rediscover points of origin in English literature. Stemmatics began as the deductive reconstruction of the relationships among fragmentary manuscript witnesses to a complete text, on which could be based an approximation of the “original” literary text. The German philologist Karl Lachmann developed the theory of stemmatics and applied it most brilliantly to his 1851 edition of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, proving that all three manuscript witnesses derive from a single archetype.36 In 1927, Paul Maas, another classicist interested primarily in Greek poetry, published the most concise formulation of the methods of stemmatics, Textkritik, the same year that English bibliographer Walter Wilson Greg published his attempt to suggest the usefulness of stemmatics for editing early English texts, The Calculus of Variants.37 Greg’s career as a bibliographer and textual critic focused largely

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on renaissance English drama and the renaissance English book trade, and his Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1906) contributed substantially to the Sidney scholarship of his era. The semiotic turn in our understanding of literature is related formally to the absolute distinction between a literary work and a record of historical events, a distinction that lends a literary work primary ontological status. The theory underlying stemmatics, in other words, makes the “literary work” a point of origin for a textual tradition, whereas it confers no such status on historical documents, which remain artifacts derivative of their origins in unreproducible historical events. For Maas, a historical tradition “begins with an event,” whereas a literary tradition begins with a literary work. Events, Maas claims, are inherently impossible to reproduce “in literary form”; moreover, events being recorded are “misrepresented” or even largely made up, sometimes deliberately, by “the earliest witnesses,” that is, by the most nearly contemporary records of said events. Thus only some basic facts, and sometimes not even these, are certain with respect to a historical event. By contrast, a literary tradition begins with “a work of literary art,” which is “an organic whole, and the reader is conscious of each element as standing in a necessary relation to every other element in it.” For Maas, the “thisness” of a literary work is self-derived from the organic unity of its parts and their relations, and the various parts of a literary work have no being in themselves apart from their relation to the organically unified whole; one may note that in this respect Maas’s definition of a work anticipates the structuralist definition of “structure.” Moreover, the literary work “can survive thousands of years without suffering serious damage, particularly in a civilization susceptible to its effect.”38 That is, the texts that witness a literary work bear a formal relation to their origins in the work itself, whereas the documents that record a historical event bear at best a merely contingent relation to their origin. Thus, the reliability of any given textual witness to a literary work can be determined by the relations among its various elements; the reliability of historical documents can only be ascertained via reference to evidence extrinsic to the document. Elements in a literary text that do not relate “organically” to the text as a whole are likely to arise from errors in the transmission of the literary work. The work itself cannot be recovered, and the attempt to reproduce it—or, better, to produce a perfect representation of it—can only approach perfection, like a curve that represents the mathematical idea of a limit (the ground of Greg’s metaphorical title, The Calculus of Variants). But while textual scholars felt themselves to be working in a primarily descriptive discipline, Maas’s absolute distinction between literary work and historical record regards the work as, effectively, spirit, while texts, whether they are historical records or witnesses to a literary work, are

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flesh. The significant difference between historical records and witnesses to literary works, for Maas, is that the latter remain flesh capable of very great refinement in virtue of their formal relation to literary works. Frequently in the practice of the New Bibliographers, stemmatics posit a lost, single, authoritative text: editors often conceived their task as reconstructing, as closely as possible, what the text of a literary work would have been at the moment an author had just finished his or her final draft. Lachmann developed his theory to reconstruct stemmae for ancient works of literature from fragmentary witnesses. But what about literary texts that exist in many nearly contemporary forms, like the manuscripts of the Old Arcadia, or poetry written for coterie circulation, or even presentation copies of printed books? We have established that, for many renaissance English poems, there is no single original text.39 Beyond that, one may question whether a work of literary art is indeed an organic whole in which each element necessarily stands in fixed relation to all others. In sonnet sequences, for example, each sonnet stands in peculiarly interchangeable relation to others in the sequence.40 Moreover, as in the case of Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, there are sonnets that are substantively different in one printed version than in another, where there is evidence that both printed versions have authority; for other writers (notably Sir Walter Raleigh), multiple manuscript versions of apparently the same poem all have authority.41 These are problems that stemmatic methods are not meant to surmount, because they are designed to reconstruct an archetype from a dearth rather than a plethora of witnesses. In at least some cases, it is reasonable to remain “agnostic” whether an author wrote two or more complete versions of the poem or whether the author preferred one, and it is reasonable to entertain the possibility that two versions of the same poem were written for different occasions or copied (and possibly altered) for different purposes.42 Texts that circulated in manuscript (for example, much of Sir Walter Raleigh’s poetry) are a perfect example of this condition: they were often conceived as ephemera with no stable base state, but rather as iterable utterances useful precisely because they could be altered to suit new occasions. When modern editors of renaissance English texts adapted stemmatics to the conditions peculiar to their own task, they retained the notion that a literary work is an organic whole. From a Foucauldian perspective, we might argue that the idea of the organically unified work (the work as semiotic structure) needed and ultimately created the complementary idea of a singular consciousness from which such a work would originate; that is, the discourse of criticism (itself a structure) created the possibility of a new structural position, the author, against which to understand the work.43 On this model, the author-function takes on a specific configuration during the

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rise of the New Bibliography and the New Criticism, and authorizes editorial choices to exclude some variants and to prefer others in the quest to reproduce a single, organically unified text each of whose elements is related necessarily to all the others. This description is congruent with Walter Wilson Greg’s dictum that the goal of a critical edition must be “to present the text, so far as the available evidence permits, in the form in which we may suppose that it would have stood in a fair copy, made by the author himself, of the work as he finally intended it.”44 Moreover, for Greg’s methodology, the author-function legitimates “eclectic” critical editions, in which, in cases where nothing intrinsic to the extant witnesses themselves allows editors to assign one variant more authority than another, editors must not slavishly follow their chosen copy-text but must instead choose, based on their surmise as to what the author must have intended, which reading to print (xxviii). That is, for Greg, the author-function frees the modern editor from too-great dependence on an earlier edition of a work, even when that edition is regarded as authoritative. The author-function does not always justify editorial choices exactly as it does for Greg, however. Greg’s mentor, R. B. McKerrow, had given editorial choice much less free play in the preparation of a critical edition. For McKerrow, “[I]f an editor has reason to suppose that a text embodies later corrections than any other, and at the same time has no ground for disbelieving that the corrections, or some of them at least, are the work of the author, he has no choice but to make that text the basis of his reprint.”45 Here the author-function may authorize editors’ changing their choice of copy-texts, but little else. In effect, McKerrow’s methods are much more closely bound to extant editions of a work than are Greg’s methods. Nor can we conclude simply that the presumptive organic unity of a work, dependent as it is on the author-function, posits that every author completes a single error-free master text. Maas’s dictum hypothesizes only that there is some ideal that critical editions must approach as closely as is possible, and Greg’s “fair copy” is only an illustration of one form Maas’s ideal might take. Fredson Bowers recognizes just this principle when he observes that even “an author’s [holograph] manuscript is not always self-sufficient or self-explanatory.”46 The stronger the effects of the author-function in the production of critical editions, then, the more freely the editor may make emendations. In this way, the author-function facilitates and augments the acts of interpretation that take place more or less prior to, and obscured from the consciousness of, most of the interpretation undertaken by literary critics today. At the same time, because the literary work is only to be approached by drawing inferences from extant textual witnesses, and because the author-function

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tends to authorize freer emendation in the production of critical editions, the author-function accelerates the denaturing of the “work” from its textual witnesses—not to mention the conditions in which those witnesses were produced. As the work is denatured, so its title (and author) can come to serve as signs in critical discourse, and so The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and Sir Philip Sidney have come to serve as signs in the story of English literature: aristocratic entertainment; heroic narrative; protonovel; national hero; protestant martyr; “English Petrarch.” *

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In our own critical discourse, a significant reason why such signs become symptoms of a desire to reveal the origins of English literature is that the project of textual criticism took shape under the strains of an ideological struggle in which dedication to the discipline itself stood in tension with nationalist currents that buffeted the academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Long before the advent of the New Criticism with its built-in demand for critical editions that isolated the authors’ intended texts from their social contexts, textual criticism had entered the service of the profession of English literature, borrowing both an ideology and a methodology from philology. Mid-nineteenth-century Germanic and romance philology had sought explicitly to recover the “essence of ‘race’” in grammar and etymology of a given language, a goal that helped legitimate the study of modern languages as against Greek and Latin.47 Broadly conceived, philology could attempt to discover in an especially rich literary work “the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, now and then of a race.”48 Philology so construed was susceptible to being co-opted into the service of a narrower literary nationalism, often itself infused with ideas about race as it was during the first decades of the twentieth century. As World War I approached, English academics felt “an urgent need for a sense of national mission and identity,” and so “what was at stake in English studies was less English Literature than English Literature: our great ‘national poets’ Shakespeare and Milton, the sense of an ‘organic’ national tradition and identity.”49 Indeed, Walter Wilson Greg declared that his own contribution to textual criticism arose from “an attempt to determine the relation of the manuscripts of the Chester Plays,” a problem that had formed the basis of his Sandars lectures at Cambridge University in 1913, at the eve of World War I.50 Greg’s training and his earlier work on pastoral literature had already acquainted him with a broad spectrum of continental literature, but during the period of heightened nationalist sentiments in the early twentieth century, Greg went to work on a particularly English literary

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inquiry. American universities felt nationalistic pressures to which books like the 1917 Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America by Charles Mills Gayley responded, and some discontinued courses in the German language.51 From one perspective it could appear that “the interests of professionalism and of cultural nationalism coincided,” but, as Gerald Graff has demonstrated, the loyalties of philologists tended to lie with their profession.52 This gap between nationalist projects and professional dedication to philology underlies Maas’s speculation, in an appendix to the 1959 English translation of Textkritik, that “the abstract nature” of his treatise may have prevented wider application of its principles. As nationalism threatened to co-opt philology, the English academy became particularly sensitive to its literary patrimony for another reason: in the second decade of the twentieth century, American collections that would become the Henry Huntington and the Folger Shakespeare libraries were acquiring books by the truckload from British sources. These American acquisitions also drove a great expansion in the amount of capital flowing through rare book markets. As the stakes in collecting rare books rose, markets needed increasingly sophisticated and fine-grained means of distinguishing and valuing rare books, and so bibliography became a commercially valuable area of knowledge. As the skills of analytical bibliography in particular became valuable, the British legal establishment strengthened regulations of intellectual property, granting rights to authors and their heirs for up to fifty years after the death of the author. While copyright was hardly at stake in early modern books, the New Bibliographical enterprise of sifting authorial work from the accreted work of lesser functionaries in the publication process became understood as complementary if not identical to assigning original agency. As Joseph Loewenstein has argued convincingly, “the founding myth of the New Bibliography [is] that textual integrity and regulated intellectual property are somehow mutually entailed: in this dream the choice of the ‘best text’ and the location of intellectual property rights are identical labors.”53 Under the auspices of the author-function, “textual integrity” was likewise a reflection of authorship, and it enabled the legal extension of authors’ rights. The synergies among asserting intellectual property rights, creating procedures to determine which editions are “authorized,” and transforming philology into English underlay the difference between Maas’s relative obscurity (in spite of the importance of his work) and Greg’s status as one of the great early twentieth-century English literary critics, and create an example of a motif that reappears throughout this book: the intentions (in this case, professional interests) of one group of writers are co-opted by an essentially unrelated quest to identify and explicate the literature of England.54 This

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process set up the narrative frame within which we typically understand the significance of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and Sir Philip Sidney, at just the same time as the Arcadia and Sidney were being detached from physical artifacts (early printed books and manuscripts). Sidney and the Arcadia became signifiers whose signifieds were determined by the changing narrative of English literary history. Thus they became symptoms of the confluence of professional and nationalistic complexes of desire that structures our profession and determines hierarchies of importance among both our objects of study and ourselves. *

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In a history of the earliest editions of Philip Sidney’s writings may be traced the contested process by which the texts, and the figure of Philip Sidney, acquired the range of meanings they have today. Literary historians have tended to agree that the clash of interests, between variously defined “inner circles” of those closest to Sidney and “outer circles” of poets and ambitious courtly hangers-on, accounts for at least some of that range of meanings.55 But at the same time, no inner/outer division, whether based on social rank or allegiance to the Sidney family, wholly accounts for the variety of early editions of Sidney’s works. The 1590 Arcadia, the 1591 Astrophel and Stella quartos, the 1595 quartos of An Apologie for Poetrie / The Defence of Poesie, and the folio Arcadia s acquired significance in relation to one another, and influenced the image of Sidney in relation to one another. The chapters that follow attempt to recover The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as a series of semiotic events unfolding diachronically at the nexus of several competing social, political, and familial discourses. Swirling around Sidney’s texts—and producing conflicting versions of them—were attempts to co-opt Sidney and his work into the ideological service of one faction of Queen Elizabeth’s court and attempts to set them above merely English concerns. Chapter one explores the politics of the way that paratexts of the 1590 Arcadia present the romance as a modern fictional politic history, marked for study. Chapter two demonstrates how the interpretation of Astrophel and Stella presented in the 1591 quartos ramified across the “sonnet craze” of the 1590s in terms of the poetics and the structure of books of amorous poetry printed in the period. Chapter three elucidates the ways that writers and printers appropriated the Sidney name to promote their products in the period 1590−1593, and it challenges arguments that such advertising strategies constitute the installation of Sidney at the center of a developing “national literature.” Chapter four reveals in the 1593 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia an incipient system that conflates the humanist concern

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for textual accuracy (of which modern textual criticism is the heir), cultural capital, and market value: the folio accomplishes this feat by carefully framing its revelation of previously unpublished parts of the Arcadia. Finally, chapter five shows how the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia attempts to establish an impermeable originary text that displaces all others and is marked as more authentic than all the others, first by its inclusion of early, occasional pieces (Certaine Sonets and the entertainment we call The Lady of May) and second by constituting The Defence of Poesie as a factual paratext that interprets the rest of the folio. The 1598 folio is thus the product of widely varied attempts to appropriate Philip Sidney’s writings and his name for heterogeneous and often-conflicting purposes, the product of an often-contentious dialogue among earlier editions of his writings revealed in their paratexts. While it was arguably constructed to appear as some kind of cultural monument, albeit more to the Sidney family and its affiliations with continental thought than to the dead Sir Philip himself, reading the 1598 folio as the culmination of a series of textual moments reveals a literary work much more like Eliot’s The Waste Land than the marmoreal tomb from which modern English literature arose.

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CHAPTER 1


How the 1590 Arcadia Advanced Textual Criticism The 1590 Arcadia must be understood as a work of literature in its own right, distinct from the 1593 Arcadia. Even more fundamental is the corollary that, in spite of the fact that ultimately both versions derive from Philip Sidney’s revisions of the “Old” Arcadia, there is no single “New” Arcadia of which the 1590 and 1593 editions are merely separate versions. The so-called “New” Arcadia is the symptom of the author-function as it expressed itself in the protocols of the New Bibliography. It is also the product of arguably the best textual scholarship practiced in the twentieth century. The letter that Fulke Greville wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham in November 1586, referenced in the preface, spurred textual scholars of the last century to account for the manuscript “correction” of the Old Arcadia , “wherof ther is no more copies.” The nature of this manuscript, which has never been discovered, remains the object of great speculation. William A. Ringler Jr., editor of the first modern edition of Sidney’s poetry produced by rigorous application of the methods of the New Bibliography (1962), designated the manuscript to which Greville refers in his letter “G” and supposed that it is the main but not the sole manuscript from which the 1590 Arcadia was printed. His stemma was largely accepted by Jean Robertson in her edition of the Old Arcadia (1973).1 In the muchanticipated 1987 critical edition of the New Arcadia , Victor Skretkowicz argued controversially that, to the contrary, the 1590 Arcadia was printed from the mass of papers that had accumulated as Sidney revised and re-revised his Arcadia , and that no separate manuscript “G” stands behind the 1590 printed quarto.2

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The debate initiated by Skretkowicz is underappreciated in both Sidney criticism and studies of the English renaissance.3 It implies significant consequences for interpreting Sidney’s writings and provides an important concrete example of the heterogeneity, the inherent multiplicity, of something we have always tried to designate a singular literary work. Following Jerome McGann’s revision of protocols of textual scholarship, we should properly categorize the editorial work and the typographical work that produced the 1590 quarto titled The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia as forms of interpretation. McGann’s insistence that an edition is an interpretation is a crucial point, because it forces us to confront exactly what we mean by a “work” of literature: to say that the editors and compositors of the 1590 quarto interpreted The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia begs the question. What exactly did these editors and compositors interpret? Did they interpret a pile of papers that a scribe in Sidney’s employ wrote out, in which the New Arcadia is set out on previously blank pieces of paper—a scenario more or less envisioned by Ringler’s hypothetical manuscript “G”? Or did they interpret a pile of papers written out by Sidney and scribes in his employ, in which the complete “Old Arcadia” had been supplemented (and in places supplanted) by literally thousands of revisions, some of which might have been inserted between lines of text or in the margins but many of which would have required new, separate sheets of paper? This second scenario requires us to imagine revisions and additions in a volume approaching or exceeding that of the entire Old Arcadia they were supposed to supplement. And, manuscript or messy pile of papers, where is the “work” in all this? The early modern editors of Sidney’s “Arcadia” papers certainly did interpret them as a coherent, though incomplete, romance, and their goals in doing so are well-articulated, if not transparent to us. But they were engaged in a process more like restoring old paintings than reconstructing Sidney’s final intentions. We cannot really lift Sidney’s final intentions free from the meddling of early modern editors in a single edition of the New Arcadia; we can, instead, in a work of literary history, trace some aspects of the heterogeneity of what we have designated the New Arcadia and grasp some of the important interpretive work that created the Arcadia. The problems presented by producing one critical edition of the Old Arcadia and another of the New Arcadia were ameliorated by recourse to the author-function: Faced with all too many relatively authoritative manuscripts, Sidney’s twentieth-century editors had to create the kinds of “eclectic” critical editions discussed by Walter Wilson Greg. Victor Skretkowicz’s edition of the New Arcadia explores the limits of textual scholarship and exposes the author-function as an ideological blind that limits our capacity to see the variety of relationships among textual witnesses to a work of

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literature. Skretkowicz begins with the supposition shared by Ringler and the editor of the standard edition of the “Old” Arcadia, Jean Robertson: a “single lost scribal transcript . . . of the foul papers of the Old Arcadia was the source of all the extant copies of that text’; they designate this hypothetical transcript T and argue that Greville’s manuscript, G, is partially derived from it.4 Their evidence consists of several errors among the nine main manuscripts of the Old Arcadia as well as the fact that none of the extant Old Arcadia manuscripts exhibits Sidney’s characteristic spelling patterns. Surveying only the poems, Ringler notes 91 errors common to two or more texts but distributed unevenly. Ringler and Robertson think that after Sidney had written a complete draft of the Old Arcadia, he commissioned a scribe to make a complete transcript (T), from which, ultimately, all 91 errors derive. Moreover, they contend, Sidney revised this transcript several times, and in the process, his scribe or scribes produced five “states” of the hypothetical transcript, designated T1-T5.5 Ringler believes that Sidney started fresh in composing the New Arcadia, and he designates that fresh start the New Arcadia foul papers (essentially Sidney’s messy first draft); he further posits that Sidney had another (presumably “fair” or neatly copied) scribal transcript made, which incorporated revisions from T5, designated G. He posits that G is the manuscript that Fulke Greville mentions in his October 1586 letter to Walsingham that served as the copy-text for the 1590 quarto, but— and this is an all-important but—that the editors of the 1590 quarto likewise made further emendations by once again consulting T5. For textual scholars whose task is to produce a single critical edition, positing T as a source of a bewildering array of scribal errors establishes “a strong precedent for absolving Sidney of responsibility for extremely difficult and unusual readings, and for introducing hypothetical emendation at those points.”6 In this case, that is, positing T justifies otherwise insufficiently supported inferences driven by the author-function: the author-function links on one hand a notion of Sidney as a completely self-consistent writer who never changes his mind, to a single text on the other—a text that is the best representation of the singular, monolithic, self-consistent work—by labeling many variants “scribal error” and positing a locus, T, from which all such error originated. Skretkowicz’s first major revision of this scheme changes the status of T: he speculates that all five states of T are, in fact, states of Sidney’s foul papers and should therefore be designated A1-A5 (A for Author). Skretkowicz rebuts claims that variants among Old Arcadia manuscripts must imply scribal errors, presenting in an appendix to his critical edition of the New Arcadia “reasons . . . which either support the reading of the manuscript tradition, or at the very least suggest some alternative to scribal incompetence causing the crux in question” (lxiv). Having explained many of the variants

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Ringler and Robertson had called “errors” as legitimate authorial variants (in effect, arguing that Sidney must have changed his mind many times in the course of revision and produced many legitimate, if inconsistent, readings), Skretkowicz turns to the remaining variants that must be scribal error. These remaining errors are not shared among groups of Old Arcadia manuscripts. Therefore, Skretkowicz can only conclude that “there are no errors common to the manuscripts of the Old Arcadia that clearly demonstrate that the manuscripts were copied from a single scribal intermediary between them and Sidney’s foul copy,” which he designates A (466). In effect, Skretkowicz’s close attention to the nature of textual variation, achieved through a truly monumental collation of the texts, vitiates the half of the author-function that posits a singular, monolithic author who never changes his mind. The facts that writers revise and don’t produce neatly arranged manuscripts have never, of course, escaped textual scholars. Textual scholarship assumes both these points and gives their product a name: the author’s foul papers. The advances Ringler, Robertson, and Skretkowicz made were to differentiate among several states of revision among Sidney’s foul papers, and to account for those states schematically, in their stemmae. Keeping in mind that Sidney was constantly tinkering and that the origins of the 1590 Arcadia are more likely to be piles of papers than singular manuscripts, we can reconsider Fulke Greville’s November 1586 letter, which has been interpreted as a claim that Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, possessed the only manuscript of the “New” Arcadia. Greville may well have thought the Lady Frances possessed the only copy of the “New” Arcadia in 1586, and it seems likely that the papers passed between Greville and the Lady Frances contained material that Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, did not have. But Greville was unaware of the Cambridge manuscript (a scribal transcript dated 1584). The countess and her husband’s secretary, Hugh Sanford, likewise possessed papers containing revisions to the Arcadia that Greville did not (or at least revisions that Greville and his team ultimately suppressed), which included revisions to books III-V included in the 1593 folio Arcadia that never appeared in the 1590 quarto. Even though both Ringler and Skretkowicz consider that the Cambridge manuscript demonstrates that more than one manuscript version of the “New” Arcadia existed before Sidney’s death, neither questions the assumption that the entire corpus of papers that became both the 1590 and 1593 versions of the Arcadia passed between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke between 1586 and 1593; that is, they operate under that aspect of the author-function that constitutes a single “work” (in this case, a single set of papers that contain Sidney’s final intentions for the Arcadia) as the opposite number, indeed the sign that guarantees the existence, and singularity of, the “author.” Their respective

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stemmae do not seriously entertain the possibility that papers that became the 1590 and 1593 Arcadias may have been separated into different packets, or that perhaps Sidney had left working copies of various parts of the romance, in various states, in separate locations.7 Considering that the tensions between Greville and the countess were reaching a head in 1586, some version of these scenarios is more likely than direct cooperation between Greville and the countess. In fact, the presumption that some singular mass of papers must have passed back and forth (whether Ringler’s hypothetical manuscript “G” or Skretkowicz’s hypothetical state A5 of the Arcadia manuscripts) reproduces an unexamined assumption in the protocols of the New Bibliography. Social and Political Pressures Working on the 1590 Text Our understanding of what happened between Greville’s letter of November 1586 and the publication of the 1590 quarto Arcadia has improved over the last two decades. We do not know why the work was not entered in the Stationers’ Register for two years after Ponsonby approached Greville, but Mark Bland has shown persuasively why it took two more years to see print. John Windet, the printer that William Ponsonby contracted for the work, bought new English roman type to print the Arcadia and, because that type was not being used for any of Windet’s other jobs during 1588−1590, he was able to remove the type from his chase (thus freeing the chase for other work) and to hold the type in galleys while editors or compositors corrected proofs of the Arcadia. Because of the expense of buying new type for a project that would not pay off for at least two years, Bland speculates that someone other than Ponsonby or Windet paid for the type and thus subsidized a painstaking and slow manufacture of a very accurate, high-quality quarto.8 Bland suggests it was the Sidney family that subsidized Windet because they maintained a residence at Baynard’s Castle, near Windet’s shop in London. But Robert Sidney was beset with money problems after his brother’s death, and while his sister Mary was part of a wealthier family in the Herberts, neither is it clear that she had discretion to buy type for a printer, nor is there strong evidence that she participated in the production of the 1590 quarto Arcadia. In contrast to Bland, I suggest that Fulke Greville subsidized Windet. Aside from an errand to the Low Countries to pacify a mutiny in late 1588, Greville remained in England and around London until December 1590, after the 1590 Arcadia had been printed. Besides the fact that it was Greville who notified Walsingham of the plans to print the Arcadia, two dedications to Greville link him directly to the 1590 quarto. The first is a 1589 Oxford pamphlet on the death of France’s Henry III—printed while the Arcadia was still in production. The translation reads “While you are printing Sidney’s regal

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poem, / We offer you this poem about the French king, / Be merciful, ghost of Sidney and hands of Greville: / No one here is a Sidney, no one a Greville.”9 The second is Thomas Wilson’s 1596 dedication of an unpublished translation of Montemayor’s Diana to Greville that says by his “noble virtue the world so happily enjoys” the Arcadia.10 Dr. Matthew Gwinne may also have contributed to the editing of the 1590 Arcadia: a note in an Elizabethan hand in a copy housed at the Huntington Library (69441) states that Gwinne had a hand in publishing the work and, in another copy at the Huntington (69442), a note states that Gwinne’s handwriting had been on the title page.11 But the printing of the 1590 Arcadia did not take place in a vacuum: it occurred as the antipathy that grew between Greville and the Sidney family throughout the late 1570s and the 1580s was reaching its apex. This antipathy helps explain both the multiple nature of the manuscript antecedents of the New Arcadia and the fundamentally different, indeed opposed, interpretations effected by the 1590 quarto and the 1593 folio Arcadias. The Sidney family and later their in-laws, the Herberts, struggled against Greville financially; Greville turned to Francis Walsingham for help, and later became a relatively loyal client of Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex. The trouble between Greville and the Sidneys began in May 1577, when Sir Henry Sidney sent a letter to his agent, Edward Waterhouse, in which he instructed Waterhouse to petition Queen Elizabeth to bestow an office— probably a share of the Clerk of the Signet of the Court of the Council in the Welsh Marches—on his younger son, Robert (Philip Sidney’s brother).12 Less than a year previously, Sir Henry had secured the same office in the Court for young Fulke Greville, Philip Sidney’s friend since childhood, but now the Sidney patriarch sought to remove Greville from the office in order to give it to his younger son. Sir Henry explained that “because Fulke Greville is sped so well already of the Reversions of two of the best Offices in that Court, whereof I am glad, I have therefore in his Stead named my Son Robert.”13 Sir Henry saw that his younger son Robert needed income from lucrative administrative offices in Elizabeth’s government. Philip, not Robert, would be expected to inherit the Sidney family estate; at the same time, as Elizabeth continued to centralize power, and inflation continued to erode the value of land holdings, offices became more important to aristocratic families. Elizabeth ignored the plea, and Greville kept the reversions from the offices on the Court. For his part, Robert Sidney seems not to have pursued a grudge against Greville during the 1580s and early 1590s, though by 1597, his henchman, Rowland Whyte, was warning Sidney not to trust Greville. Greville also found himself opposed by Mary Sidney Herbert’s husband, Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke. After 1577, Greville shared the reversions from the offices of clerk of the Council and clerk of the Signet with

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Charles Fox. In 1583, he gained a share of reversion from the office of secretary of the Council, again to be split with Fox.14 But in 1586, Pembroke took over the presidency of the Council from the late Sir Henry Sidney. He relieved Fox of his share of the Signet office and awarded that income to the crown. Fox, Greville, and other officers of the court of the Council protested the intrusions of Pembroke, and their ally John Amyas wrote to Francis Walsingham on their behalf on January 1, 1587.15 Fox protested against Pembroke because he was losing about five hundred pounds sterling annually. Greville knew that, barring Pembroke’s intervention, he stood to “inherit” this income on Fox’s death: he would, in fact, take sole possession of the clerk of the Signet office when Fox died in 1590, but his income from the office never increased as he had hoped it would. In spite of the obvious social and political tensions between Greville and the Sidneys, on one hand, and Greville and the Herberts, on the other, Greville undeniably had been a best friend to Sir Philip Sidney. Indeed, Philip Sidney had intervened on Greville’s behalf in what may have been another minor skirmish over Greville’s lucrative offices in the Court of the Council in the Marches of Wales. In April 1581, Philip Sidney had written his secretary, Edmund Molyneux, to insist that Molyneux not cross Greville’s title in his letters patent to one of his Clerkships; Molyneux replied that he did not stand in Greville’s way and asked Sidney to improve Greville’s opinion of him.16 Clearly, Greville had complained to Philip Sidney that Molyneux was abetting his enemies, and Sidney had come to the defense of his friend. Philip’s defense of his friend came right in the middle of Greville’s conflicts with Henry and Robert Sidney in 1577 and Greville’s later conflicts with Henry Herbert in the 1580s. Although we see no evidence that Philip Sidney fought directly against his brother, sister, or father over Greville, nevertheless it is difficult to imagine how Greville could not have elicited tension between Philip Sidney and the rest of his family. The tensions between Greville and Pembroke over the reversions from Fox’s share of the clerk of the Signet office were rising when Philip Sidney died on October 17, 1586. Greville’s November 1586 letter notifying Walsingham of the plan to publish Sidney’s Arcadia may have been an attempt to gain Walsingham’s favor against Pembroke’s bid to claim reversions from the clerk of the Signet for the crown: it is significant that the letter of Amyas, Greville’s ally against Pembroke, was also addressed to Walsingham on January 1, 1587. Thus Greville’s claim to have sent the most current copy of the Arcadia to Walsingham’s daughter Frances is plausible, but the argument that the countess of Pembroke must have cooperated with Greville between 1586 and 1590—a period punctuated by her husband’s denying Greville a lucrative reversion—seems far less likely.

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Differences between the spelling patterns in the 1590 Arcadia and the material added to the 1593 Arcadia indicate that Greville and the countess possessed separate Arcadia manuscripts. Elizabethan English lacked standardized orthography, which means first that some writers, like Philip Sidney, use idiosyncratic spelling patterns. Scribes felt no need to reproduce the precise spelling of certain words that appeared in the manuscripts they copied: for a scribe, “yow” and “you” were interchangeable. The 1590 Arcadia exhibits Philip Sidney’s characteristic ways of spelling words like you (yow), weighed (waied), further (furdre), and case (cace), for example, while the additions to the 1593 Arcadia tend to spell these words differently, indicating that they derive from a scribal transcript different from the one used to produce the 1590 Arcadia.17 A comparison of the eclogues in the 1590 and 1593 Arcadias likewise indicates that Greville’s team worked from an authoritative manuscript different from the countess’s. Where the 1590 eclogues differ from Old Arcadia manuscripts, new material is introduced by carefully lifting clauses from the Old Arcadia and “dovetailing” them into new contexts.18 Many sources surrounding the 1590 eclogues consist of clauses taken from widely separated parts of the Old Arcadia manuscripts joined together. In contrast, the 1593 Arcadia revisions tend to move large blocks of text, and not to break up individual sentences. For all these reasons, it seems most likely that Sidney gave Greville a packet of papers containing material that would reappear in the 1590 Arcadia and that the countess did not possess; and that Greville decided to preempt the plan to publish the Arcadia of which he heard in 1586. Staging the Page of Poesie Historicall In seeing the Arcadia into print, Greville was more than merely ensuring that only an “authorized” version of Sidney’s writing would be published. He also framed his friend’s romance as the kind of book that the fourth decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign really needed: a source filled with widely varied examples of character and action on which the reader might reflect profitably. The theory was fairly common that poetry, in the broad sense that includes prose fiction, might provide examples, although the kind of example wrought depended on the kind of poetry in which it appeared. While the low form of satire might expose and mock the vices of common people, the vices of princes found expression in tragedy. The genres of history and feigned history, however, held special interest for courtiers and other ambitious people. As Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) argues, these genres proffer the benefits of experience to the reader. So efficacious is the reading of history that Puttenham considers “the Poesie historicall . . . of all other [genres] next the divine most honorable

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and worthy, as well for the common benefit as for the speciall comfort every man receiveth by it.”19 The distinction here between “the common benefit” and “speciall comfort” for every man is that between the political and ethical aspects of judgment, which were inextricably linked in the discourses of renaissance moral philosophy.20 The ideal courtier for humanists like Puttenham was built on the Ciceronian notion of the ideal orator, a good man doing well, in which the ethical and political aspects of conduct could be contemplated separately but remained inextricably linked in practice. Puttenham cites Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia as excellent examples of feigned histories whose virtues include the fact that “more excellent examples may be fained in one day by a good wit, then many ages through mans frailtie are able to put in use.” Readers put such examples to use, in Puttenham’s typically humanist view, by drawing comparisons between textual exemplars on one hand, and real-life people and situations on the other. Yet although Puttenham cites several passages of poetry from Sidney’s Arcadia by name, he seems to have considered it pastoral poetry and not historical, likely because, since he was writing before the publication of the 1590 “New” Arcadia, whatever he had seen came only from the five-act manuscript “Old” Arcadia.21 The editorial apparatus of the 1590 Arcadia is designed with readers like Puttenham in mind: people who knew of and perhaps had seen some snippets of what they understood to be Sidney’s Arcadia but who had never had the opportunity to experience any of its complex world, and who might appreciate help extracting salutary examples from Sidney’s work and understanding them in their proper context. Like Puttenham, Greville saw the benefit of studying history—feigned or not—to lie in seeking out examples and drawing comparisons. But Greville, more interested in the workings of the mind than in the workings of poetics, and deeply skeptical of the human capacity to embrace virtue, imagined a much more indirect means by which exemplarity could aid our fundamentally corrupt judgment. Put bluntly, Greville absolutely rejected the notion that one might see, study, and directly emulate a virtuous exemplar or simply avoid the follies of a vicious exemplar. We can see most clearly how the 1590 Arcadia is designed to help readers profit by comparing its design and layout to those of similar books printed contemporaneously. As we can see from figure 1, the stage for reading created by the 1590 Arcadia —its mise-en-page, to borrow a term from Evelyn Tribble—is a hybrid between a work of moral philosophy and a history.22 As a kind of history, the 1590 Arcadia resembles Thomas Langley’s 1560 An abridgemente of the notable worke of Polidore Virgile (figure 2). Therein the chapter epitomes facilitate readers with little time who need to locate the episodes most relevant to their needs. The chapter summaries in the 1590

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Figure 1 Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London, 1590 (Sig 6r) Huntington Library Board.

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Arcadia perform a similar function, though they are slightly more detailed and can serve likewise the function of an “argument,” like the arguments in Milton’s Paradise Lost or those in Geoffrey Fenton’s 1579 translation of Guicciardini’s modern History of Italy (figure 3). Fenton’s Guicciardini lacks a division into chapters, so its arguments summarize “books” rather than briefer chapters. But Fenton’s Guicciardini features fairly restrained use of marginal printed glosses, which aid readers in extracting profit from the work. Perhaps most important, the 1590 Arcadia shares with Fenton’s Guicciardini that clean Roman typeface that Windet must have purchased specially to print Sidney’s work—a typeface by which the Arcadia resembles works of humanistic scholarship. The numbered members of the chapter summaries of the 1590 Arcadia serve a purpose similar to marginal glosses because the numbers are keyed to numbers printed in the margins, but they are less intrusive than marginal glosses because they leave the margins free of printing. The indexing function of the chapter summaries and marginal key numbers in the 1590 Arcadia is somewhat similar to a translation of moralist Francesco Sansovino, The Quintessence of Wit (London, 1590) in which each paragraph is numbered separately (figure 4). Each numbered paragraph contains its own aphorism, and yet each is part of a larger, more or less linear discourse on politics and history. In essence, then, the 1590 Arcadia is presented as a fictional narrative history along the lines of Guicciardini, framed in a hybrid editorial framework designed to allow studious readers to pick the most profitable elements out of the narrative with minimal intrusion on the text as we see in the contemporary edition of Sansovino’s moral thought. The mise-en-page of the 1590 Arcadia responds to a tension common in early modern humanist culture. On one hand, books were imagined as storehouses of discrete bits of wit, wisdom, and eloquence, much as do the numbered paragraphs of the Quintessence of Wit or the marginal glosses in Fenton’s Guicciardini. On the other, a book was imagined as an integral body, to be ingested whole. The 1570 English translation of a pedagogical manual by Johannes Sturm, the Philippist luminary of Strasbourg under whom Philip Sidney studied in the early 1570s, illustrates the tension well. Sturm insists that “in readinge we must runne over the whole Booke, or Oration, or Epistle, or some whole worke: and after we must take in hand by peecemeale to consider and judge, and weigh every point, least any thing should escape our understanding.”23 Sturm emphasizes digesting whole works over the familiar humanist practice of seeking the best passages among many works that created collections like Erasmus’s famous Adagia, but he nevertheless recognizes

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Figure 2 An abridgemente of the notable worke of Polidore Virgile. London, 1560 (Sigs a3v, a4) Huntington Library Board.

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Figure 2

Continued.

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Figure 3 Fenton, Geoffrey (trans). The historie of Guicciardin conteining the vvarres of Italie and other partes. London, 1579 (Sigs F6r, G1) Huntington Library Board.

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Figure 3

Continued.

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Figure 4 Sansovino, Francesco. The quintesence of wit being a corrant comfort of conceites, maximies, and poleticke deuises. London, 1590 (SigB2v) Huntington Library Board.

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the need to investigate individual parts of a work “peecemeale.”24 Many Arcadian flowers had been plucked and analyzed before the 1590 quarto was printed: Abraham Fraunce’s 1588 The Arcadian Rhetorike had printed passages from the St. John’s College MS of the Old Arcadia as illustrations of schemes and tropes to be analyzed alongside similar passages from classical and Continental authors, much like Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie did a year later. And the 1590 Arcadia continued to supply similar material for scholarly enterprises: John Hoskyns’s Directions for Speech and Style (1599) likewise borrowed illustrations of rhetorical figures from the 1590 Arcadia. Hoskyns specifies that he has taken his quotations from “Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the first edition in quarto, without Sanford’s additions,” and he gave his students a copy of the 1590 quarto that he himself had annotated, as a companion to his own Directions.25 Grevillean Skepticism, Arcadian Exempla, and “Glowe-Worme Lights” to Govern Princes The 1590 Arcadia was a book crafted for study and for troubled times. One might assume that Greville simply took the Arcadia for a compendium of exempla, citing the assertion in his so-called “Life of Sidney” that limn out such exact pictures, of every posture of minde, that any man being forced, in the straines of this life, to pass through any straights, or latitudes of good, or ill fortune, might (as in a glasse) see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversitie, and a stay upon the exhorbitant smiling of chance.26 But though it certainly offers exempla, the 1590 Arcadia presents them in a sophisticated framework very much in tune with Greville’s thoroughgoing skepticism about our capacity to effect moral reform by applying reason alone. The salutary effects Greville did hope might follow from studying a feigned history like the Arcadia are most clearly seen in his Senecan epistle, composed at about the same time he was overseeing the printing of the Arcadia but not published until 1633, A Letter to an Honorable Lady.27 Because it was composed in the same period as Greville was editing the Arcadia, A Letter to an Honorable Lady is a much better lens through which to view Greville’s interpretation of the Arcadia than the comments in his so-called “Life of Sidney.” In the first place, the “Life” was written two decades after the 1590 Arcadia had been printed. In the second, the “Life” is Greville’s attempt to assess the reign of Elizabeth I, and covertly that of James I, through his friend Sidney’s life—Greville wrote the “Life” after he had been denied permission to write

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a history of Elizabeth’s reign. The latitudes of good and ill fortune and the “exhorbitant smiling of chance” here have something to do with Greville’s notion of Sidney’s purpose, but Greville’s primary purpose in the passage is to characterize the frustrating latter half of Elizabeth’s reign and covertly criticize the conditions at the court of James I. As Greville composed his Letter, the Arcadia and its feigned examples were certainly on his mind: at one point he asks his unnamed interlocutor to “remember the Image of Cecropia: in whose narrowe, and unlovinge nature, there is yet expressed an unmeasurable, and bewitched love of her owne.”28 In the Arcadia, Cecropia is Arcadian King Basilius’s evil sister-in-law, bent on usurping the throne of Arcadia and marrying her son, Amphialus, to one of Basilius’s daughters. She loves her son fiercely even as she plots against Arcadia’s royal family. The fact that this reference is dropped with no introduction indicates that Greville expects his audience to be instantly familiar with Sidney’s revised Arcadia as well, for no Cecropia exists in the manuscripts of the Old Arcadia. It seems significant, too, that Greville’s Letter specifies a female audience, and the 1590 Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia opens with Sidney’s letter not only dedicating the work to his sister, but naming her the primary audience. In A Letter to an Honorable Lady, Greville uses the imagined intimacy of the Senecan epistle as a way to pierce the veil thrown over morality by courtly life. Greville tells his lady that in comparison with a “Poeticall Mappe . . . livelie describinge a pageant of worldlie vanities, with the plauges, and deformities of everie sinne,” the sights one sees “in those Tyrannical courts” of princes are far more “horrible, and fearfull images to the soules of men”; and yet even “theise misgovern’d courts of Princes” are poor representations of real moral evils compared to what one sees “in a private familie, faultes havinge there no purple to cover them, nor yet great hopes to excuse errors.”29 That is, poetic invention and political ambitions are both veils that obscure the true nature of sin that his lady experiences in the privacy of her marriage. Thus, learning from a “Poeticall Mappe” or from the examples of princely courts puts the student at one or two removes from a direct view of error itself. Yet examples have some redeeming ethical value because such images, even in purveying falsehoods, nevertheless affect fallen humanity by deceiving the senses and playing on the passions. The horror of fictional vices should be seen “as lively images to show the strength, and yet frailtie of all passions; which passions beinge but diseases of the minde, doe so disease-like thirst after false remedies, and deceivinge visions, as the weake become terrified with those glowe-worme lights; out of which wise subjects often fashion arts, to govern absolute Monarches by” (169−70). Here Greville compares moral examples—the images that show the power and frailty of the passions—to

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the rhetorical constructs formed by courtiers. We might compare Greville’s notion of “glowe-worme lights” to the more familiar “salutary deception” by which the good courtier lures the prince toward virtue in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier : the difference is that Greville holds out no hope of anyone arriving at an understanding of true goodness on his or her own, whereas Castiglione retains neo-Platonic optimism on this count.30 Greville thought of the Arcadia as so many “glowe-worme lights” out of which Sidney might have fashioned “arts” by which to govern. Odd as it may seem, it was the very facts that Sidney had died years earlier and that the Arcadia is a fictional history−indeed, that the book could be titled The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia−that made it, in Greville’s eye, so much the better a vehicle for inculcating political and moral wisdom. As Gavin Alexander has pointed out, Greville himself wrote for posterity and saw the value of writing to lie in stimulation of moral thinking.31 Greville understood historical writing as a means to provide a stage on which moral and political precepts might be tested among a variety of contexts. Astute readers of history on this model do not develop taxonomies of tactics keyed to particular situations; rather they develop more permanent, strategic attitudes. Thus, in spite of the gloomy assessment of human moral capacities from which he derived the notion that princes need to be led by “glowe-worme lights,” Greville did not entirely abandon hope in reason. He thought that reason, as opposed to the senses, could lead an audience to the most morally efficacious mental state, in some ways a blend between a relatively benign passion and the intellectual apprehension of a valid argument: he calls that morally efficacious mental state reverence and respect, writing that The wayes to this respect, and reverence (as shaddowes to the bodies of worth) are placed not in the sense, but understandinge, where they stand upon . . . reason, not to be approached with the flatteringe familiaritie of inferior humors . . . whence wee see kinges sometymes receive them not from their vassalls, but rather pay them as tributes to them. In this mysterie lies hidden that which some call; Applieinge it to matters of Estate the art of government; others the art of men. Thus we may see in “all soveraigne Estates, commandinge over other men born as free as their rulers, and those Soveraignes ruled againe, by the advantage of worth in their inferiors.”32 That is, as a good humanist, Greville sees governing the state and governing the men who govern the state as inseparable, though not identical, enterprises. Reason, at least in the hands of a man of true worth like Sidney, is the stay of both the arts of government and of men. Greville not only thinks Sidney worthy, but also presumes “the worthines of the booke” of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia in asking the

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reader’s pardon if any aspect of his own additions, the “division and summing of the chapters,” is found wanting.33 But the ways to reverence often entail the risk of inspiring the envy of lesser men, as we see by the ornamental capital with which the narrative of the 1590 Arcadia begins. The capital, one of the factota owned by the Arcadia’s first printer, John Windet, depicts the figures of Justice on the left and Prudence on the right, holding up the Tudor Rose on which a crown rests. Under the feet of Justice and Prudence lies the prostrate, snaky-haired figure of Envy.34 A glance at Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (Padua, 1603) reveals another, similar snaky-haired figure, Sin.35 From Greville’s point of view, both Envy and Sin were real threats to good government. At the same time, the capital stands as an emblem for the shepherds Strephon and Claius, whose laments for the departed shepherdess Urania open the revised Arcadia . Strephon and Claius are unsuccessful rivals for Urania’s love, yet they maintain their friendship. They are paragons of courtesy, and their courtesy, like the poetic prowess they demonstrate later in the narrative, is an outward manifestation of the prudence and justice with which they govern themselves. In maintaining their friendship, they have vanquished Envy; in their pursuit of Urania (the heavenly muse), they have come some way toward overcoming Sin in their own lives. This emblem, and the emblem of the exemplary shepherds Strephon and Claius, likewise extends into the vision of right political subjection given by Kalender’s description of the Arcadian people in book one, chapter four, as we shall see. If the ornamental capital says “here we see Justice and Prudence triumph over Envy (or Sin),” it says something similar about the agents whose work produced the 1590 Arcadia. Of course, Philip Sidney embodies justice and prudence, but if Sidney’s “child,” loath though he was to father it, could embody these virtues, so too could his “heirs,” namely the earl of Essex (to whom Sidney had bequeathed his “best sword”) and Essex’s clients, men like Greville and Edward Dyer (to whom Sidney had willed his books).36 The triumph of Justice and Prudence extends by analogy outward from Windet’s factotum, through Strephon and Claius, and into Greville and the Essex circle who stand behind the publication of the Arcadia. As the ornamental capital illustrates, the 1590 Arcadia foregrounds a consideration of the nature of political subjection. In overseeing the printing of the 1590 Arcadia, then, Greville compassed two main ends. First, he sought to create a text that might serve as a “glowe-worme light” and thereby as an instrument of government conceived as the broad, reciprocal enterprises expounded in A Letter. Second, Greville saw the need to keep the “worth” of the Arcadia (its own virtues, as well as those of Sidney and the Essex circle) in view as clearly as possible. To Greville, the Arcadia was that rare good

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deed in a bad world that might confer some benefit on himself and his allies. Such thinking is visible where Greville’s Letter turns to the topic of earning the reverence of one’s peers, or “the winninge of the world,” wherein, in our ends, we embrace the endes of all men; and thereby are advanced without prejudice, or discontent to anie . . . This is that servinge of the multitude, which commands them; this is to be least, and greatest; one and rule manie: yea, even this is that greate art, which have ever florished in the bravest spirits, and most florishinge ages; and which beinge forgotten by the corruption, or vicissitude of times . . . which beinge but renewed in showe, the vayne world (made to be deceived) will without suspition embrace, as a lively picture of her antient pomp and greatnesse.37 This is partly an exposition of the peculiarly Renaissance virtue of magnificence, but it is suffused with a blend of realpolitick and idealism. Unfortunately for would-be social climbers, Greville’s formula for winning reverence consists primarily of being worthy, but his analysis of the benefits thereof is revealing: to be “advanced without . . . discontent to anie” is the desideratum of all courtly careers. Such reverence eluded Greville (indeed advancement of any real kind eluded him in the 1590s) and his patron, the earl of Essex (who advanced but was beset by envious detractors). But Greville believed that to bring into print the Arcadia, even if it was only a “showe” of classical splendor, would indeed be a “salutary deception” of all its readers. In sum, A Letter to an Honorable Lady and The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia are for Greville two faces of the same analogy, the former directed to the private “government” of marriage and the latter toward the public government of the state. And both A Letter and the Arcadia contain within themselves an awareness of the analogy between the marriage and the state. Greville’s convoluted arguments in A Letter may be reduced to an imperfect analogy with Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier: the wife of a philandering husband may conduct herself with such grace and rectitude that she wins the reverence of all who know her, thus saving face for herself and providing an example of good government for the fallen world, because good government within a marriage is a model for good government within a state; just so, the courtier may conduct himself with such wit and grace that he guides—one might even say, seduces—his prince into just and prudent governing practices. Two Grounds of All this Storie in the 1590 Arcadia Of course, the master comparison for Greville is the analogy between the governance of the family and that of the state, exemplified in Arcadia’s royal

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family, which the 1590 edition designates “the ground of all this storie” in two separate places. The first is the summary to book one, chapter three, in which the Greek prince Musidorus is introduced to Arcadia after the shepherds Strephon and Claius have rescued him from the shipwreck. Here we read: “The 1pictures of Kalenders dainty garden-house. His narration of the 2 Arcadian estate, 3the King, 4the Queene, 5their two daughters, and 6 their gardians, with their qualities, which is the ground of all this storie” (Sig. C1v). The relative pronoun, “which,” creates an amphiboly: it designates alternately the “ground of all this storie” as the “qualities” of the princesses’ guardians, who turn out to be Dametas and Miso as well as Basilius and Gynecia. But it also points to other members of the sentence, namely, the qualities of the royal family itself and indeed the “Arcadian estate.” And here the indexing function of the numbers in the chapter summary comes into play, for the passage designated the “Arcadian estate,” numbered (2) in the margin of the text, is Kalender’s well-known description of the country, which had opened the Old Arcadia: This countrie Arcadia among all the provinces of Greece, hath ever beene had in singular reputation: partly for the sweetnesse of the ayre, and other natural benefites, but principally for the well tempered minds of the people, who (finding that the shining title of glorie so much affected by other nations, doth in deed helpe little to the happinesse of life) are the onely people, which as by their Justice and providence geve neither cause nor hope to their neyghbours to annoy them, so are they not sturred with false praise to trouble others quiet, thinking it a small reward for the wasting of their own lives in ravening, that their posteritie should long after saie, they had done so. (Sig. C3) The passage borrows heavily from the description of Arcadia in Polybius’ Universal History, but it recasts Arcadia in a pastoral light. It replaces Polybius’ emphasis on Arcadian piety with an emphasis on peaceful disposition, and whereas Polybius praises the Arcadians’ dedication to music, Sidney’s passage asserts that the Muses have chosen “this countrie for their chiefe repairing place” (Sig. C3).38 Yet the chapter heading elides Sidney’s pastoral emphasis, instead presenting the description as fodder for political analysis—as if we are reading Polybius and not Sidney. Basilius, we learn, is “a Prince of sufficient skill to governe so quiet a countrie, where the good minds of the former princes had set down good lawes, and the well bringing up of the people doth serve as a most sure bond to hold them” (Sig. C3). The “ground of all this storie,”—in the sense of the conditions from which the events of the narrative arise—is, for Greville, the combination of the disposition of the king and his people.

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Greville’s A Letter to an Honorable Lady conversely uses pastoral imagery to make an essentially political argument. Here the Ovidian Golden Age signifies what we call the honeymoon stage of marriage. Greville tells his interlocutor that In this estate of mindes, onelie govern’d by the unwritten lawes of nature, yow did at the beginninge live happilie together. Wherein there is a livelie Image of that Golden age, which the Allegories of the Poets figure unto us. For there, equalitie guided without absolutenese . . . the traffique beinge, love for love; and the exchange, all for all.39 The vehicle of Greville’s metaphor, the “estate of mindes,” refers to the marital relationship in which his addressee and her husband “did at the beginninge live happily together.” For Greville, an “estate” is a subject position limited and made possible by a nexus of social and naked power relationships; as the importance of power waxes, estates decline from pastoral egalitarianism into tyranny. Thus the characterization of the “well tempered minds of the people” of Arcadia is central to the characterization of the “Arcadian estate.” All golden ages decline, of course, through the husband’s willfulness in the case of Greville’s Letter and Basilius’s willfulness in the case of the Arcadia. Basilius’s willfulness, and the moral and political blindness it causes, are very closely linked to the second designation of “the ground of all this storie” in book two, chapter twenty-eight. There, after the Greek princes have wooed Basilius’s daughters, their Asian adventures have been told in the retrospective narratives of book two, and they have put down the Arcadian rebellion fomented by Cecropia’s agent Clinias, Basilius finally reveals the reasons he has quit his throne and retreated to the hunting lodge at Mantinea. The chapter heading describes “3Basilius his conference with Philanax of the Oracle (the ground of all this storie.) 4His wrong-construction of it” (Sig. Ff8). In the passage designated (3), Basilius tells Philanax of the oracle and recalls Philanax’s advice: “[Y]ou replied to me, that the onlely supernaturall causes were the humors of my body, which bred such melancholy dreames; and that both they framed a mind full of conceipts, apt to make presages of things, which in themselves were meerly chaungeable” (Sig. Gg2). In Greville’s reading, Philanax has pointed out the distemper of his sovereign’s mind, the ultimate “ground” of the Arcadia. Greville anatomizes the distempered mind in A Letter at length in an attempt to dissuade his interlocutor from attempting to accommodate her husband’s humors, explaining that one consequence of capitulation is “to drowne our Superiors in the inundacion of their owne follies, and make their Thrones a Grange, wherin there shalbe nothinge but sellinge of honor, to purchase scorne abroad, and servile feare home.”40 This

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neatly summarizes the Arcadian estate near the end of book two: Basilius has retreated to his hunting lodge, he has elevated the boorish Dametas to be the guardian of the Crown princess, as a result he has been threatened by a rebellion exported from Laconia, and his daughters are about to be kidnapped by his rival, the jealous Cecropia, who plots to take his throne. The Modes of the 1590 Quarto The 1590 Arcadia is divided into three books that are separated by two sets of eclogues. Although the books are linked by the primary characters and a continuous story line, each book presents its portion of the narrative in a distinct mode—or, more properly, a distinct blend of modes. In book one, presented predominantly in a pastoral mode, a shipwreck throws the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles onto the Peloponnese, where they learn the Arcadian King Basilius has abandoned his court for a hunting lodge in which he has sequestered his daughters Pamela and Philoclea; the princes fall in love with the fair princesses and disguise themselves as the shepherd Dorus and the Amazon Zelmane, respectively, to woo Pamela and Philoclea. Comedic complications ensue: both Basilius and his queen, Gynecia, fall in love with Zelmane/Pyrocles, while “Dorus” courts Pamela by pretending to flatter the ugly and uncouth Mopsa, the daughter of Pamela’s temporary guardian, Basilius’s chief shepherd Dametas. As in many pastorals, greater matters are glimpsed in the narrative: Basilius’s retreat to the lodge is dissected with unusual detail and perspicacity as an example of poor governance; we meet Pyrocles’s rival in affection for Philoclea (Amphialus, a nephew to Basilius who is later revealed to be the son of Cecropia, Basilius’s evil and ambitious sister-in-law); and perhaps most important, though it seems at first to be purely pastoral, the shepherds Strephon and Claius lament the departure of Urania from Arcadia. Book two, in contrast, is presented largely in the mode of heroic romance, principally modeled on the structure of Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Tale and endowed with modern Italianate touches along the lines of Ariosto and Tasso. The middle two-thirds of book two recounts retrospectively the adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus across a large swath of Asia Minor, before they arrived in Arcadia. These adventures are framed in part as stories told to one another by the principals, Pyrocles, Musidorus, Pamela, Philoclea, and Basilius, within the pastoral plotline initiated in book one. But the adventures are also framed within two very Heliodoran shipwrecks—the first, recounted in chapter seven, which cast the princes on the shores of Phrygia and Pontus in Asia Minor; and the second, recounted in chapter twentyfour, by which the princes initially arrived in Arcadia.

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It is in book three that the “background story” to the romance among the six principals erupts and engulfs them. The princesses (including the stilldisguised Pyrocles/Zelmane) are kidnapped by their evil aunt, Cecropia, who wishes to marry one of them to her son Amphialus, overthrow Basilius, and claim the throne of Arcadia for Amphialus. Book three follows the princesses’ resistance to the coercions and blandishments offered by Cecropia and Amphialus (who seems sincerely to love Philoclea), as well as Basilius’s military campaign to quash the rebellion and recover his daughters (largely, but not entirely, focused on besieging the castle in which Amphialus and Cecropia hold the princesses captive). Book three remains unfinished, ending in the 1590 version in the midst of a combat in the castle between Zelmane, who has escaped her bonds, and Anaxius, a thoroughly evil ally of Amphialus who intends to rape Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane. Book three has been called protonovelistic, often in procrustean attempts to fit it into the narrative of the development of the novel. Still, it shares with the novel a great range of narrative scope, from intimate moments between two characters rendered with great verisimilitude to epic battle scenes rendered with a thoroughly premodern, not to say un-novelistic, blend of stylization and realistic detail. It draws such a range in scope, as Greville and his editorial team must have observed, from Sidney’s deep knowledge of modern post-Machiavellian, neo-Tacitean historiography. Thus the narrative modes of the 1590 Arcadia fairly clearly progress—or perhaps devolve—from a predominantly pastoral mode, through a heroic or chivalric mode, and finally into what I call a historiographical mode of narration. The term “historiographical” refers to a typically Sidneian elaboration of the historical and political mode of reading commonly taken as one of the four modes of allegorical reading, as, for example, set out in the “Apologie of Poetrie” that prefaces John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso.41 But Sidney’s understanding of historiographical reading and writing blends all three of the senses that Harington outlines. In a letter dated October 1580, Sidney encourages his brother to read “as a very Historiographer,” noting “the examples of vertue or vice, with their good or evell successes, the establishments or ruines of greate Estates, with the cawses, the tyme and circumstances of the lawes they write of, the entrings, and endings of warrs, and therin the stratagems against the enimy, and the discipline upon the soldiour.”42 That is, Sidney reads history in the modern, post-Machiavellian and Tacitean sense. To learn to read this way, Sidney recommends that his brother pay attention to the methods of his tutor Henry Savile. Savile himself comments revealingly on what is to be gained from reading history carefully, namely knowledge of “the secrete causes of actions, and to see into the affections of their minds who were agents: things not easily seene of the common

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sort and finally to discover all the misteries both of pretended virtue and cloked vice.”43 Greville, however, did not share Sidney’s seeming optimism: he thought none of these modes could be sufficient to steer a reader toward wisdom. He did, however, think the way that Sidney had combined them could be highlighted in such a way that readers could begin to understand the limits of each. Moreover, the progression of modes signals something like a historical devolution of politics and ethics, wherein increasingly intricate uses of rhetoric and planning are the only possible responses to a world growing more and more corrupt. In short, Greville loads what Norbert Elias calls “the civilizing process” with the significance of moral decay.44 Time, Decay, and the Immanent The theme that dominates the 1590 quarto’s presentations of the Arcadia as a whole is moral, political, and social decay over time. Like many humanists, from Petrarch to Montaigne to Spenser and Shakespeare, Greville meditates intensely on time’s destructive effects. For Greville, the passage of time is inseparable from corruption: the corruption of minds, of spirits, of bodies, and of states. Only within the broad theme of the corruption of time does the significance of particular episodes in the narrative emerge. As we have seen, Greville’s pessimistic but hardly original notion of time-as-corrupter is especially evident in A Letter. For Greville it is inevitable that Golden harmony will decline into Brazen discord: “[T]there must of necessitie followe a Brasen age.” Therefore we might say the terms Golden and Brazen, honeymoon and estrangement, constitute a kind of travesty of typology. The promise of discord is implicit in every harmonious honeymoon phase. We postmoderns, taking “Golden Age” as a sign, might feel that we know all this, but Greville’s notion of a decaying marriage is quite substantial. It has a body—bodies, in fact—and the fact of embodiment entails the inverted typology of decay. Precisely this corrosive sense of time governs how the 1590 quarto presents Sidney’s Arcadia. Admittedly, the general notion of decay governing the Arcadia is not unique to Greville: any reader of the Old Arcadia or the New (1590 or 1593) can see that the state of Arcadia declines from pastoral perfection into war, lust, and so on.45 Surely this is part of Sidney’s own design. Nevertheless, the chapter divisions and summaries of the 1590 Arcadia, along with its selection and arrangement of eclogues, designates a set of fixed reference points that guide readers through the decay of Arcadia during the time that they read. More specifically, we can discern a two-part pattern in the way that the 1590 quarto presents its theme. The editorial apparatus of the 1590 quarto highlights the tension between the first element of the pattern, the static

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and skeletal structure of three books—divided into nineteen, twenty-nine, and twenty-nine chapters, respectively—and the narrative fluidity created by the much-remarked-on mixing of genres that characterizes the Arcadia.46 As the chapters divide each book, each has a roughly concentric structure centered on a chapter or a central group of chapters, and each book takes its readers through a set of generic transformations marked by chapter divisions (and sometimes by numbered members of the chapter summaries). Therefore chapters attempt to divide narrative episodes into four kinds, forming the basis for the second element of the pattern: pastoral episodes, heroic episodes, historiographical episodes that often delve into motives and strategies, and finally the set-pieces of moral philosophy. In more concrete terms, the decaying structure of the 1590 quarto is revealed in the fact that chapters containing one kind of episode are frequently surrounded by chapters containing another kind of episode. For example, in the middle of book one, the pastoral chapters nine and twelve envelop the chivalric chapters ten and eleven, analogous to an abba rhyme scheme in a quatrain of poetry. Contemporary George Puttenham calls this sort of pattern “Plaine compasse” and contrasts it with what he calls “Entertangle” (a cross-rhyme pattern—see figure 5).47 The pattern made audible and visible by the rhymes is in fact a pattern of ideas, similar to a periodic syntax. Critics have long noted such patterns on a much larger scale in sonnet sequences (the calendrical structure of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, patterns based on Plato’s Timaeus in Astrophel and Stella and Fulke Greville’s Caelica, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion).48 The chapter divisions and summaries of the 1590 Arcadia are designed to help its readers see larger structures constructed, more or less, by blending “plaine compasse” and “entertangle” techniques, albeit much more loosely than numerology demands. Over the course of each book and over the course of the 1590 Arcadia as a whole, the pastoral emphasis in the beginning gives way to a chivalric emphasis and finally a historiographical emphasis, a series of shifts that reflect, in the taxonomy Greville creates in A Letter, the decay wrought by time. Moreover, the way that the 1590 quarto is divided into chapters (in service of revealing the larger theme of decay) replicates the humanist Sturm’s method, in which the understanding of the “whole worke” is constantly in dialogue with parsing the work “peecemeale” to “weigh every point” (Sig. D.iii.v.). But the “plaine compass” and “entertangle” patterns plainly visible in the organization of the dominant narrative modes of the chapters of the 1590 Arcadia reveal a deeper significance, something that Roland Greene characterizes as a “startling crack in the surface of quotidian matters,” a threshold across which fictions invade reality and alert readers may enter

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fiction. Puttenham’s work on figures of poetry, in particular, reveals the almost ritualistic techniques that create this “poetics of immanence,” a realization that “while the fiction encrypts the world, the world contains the fiction in a code of its own”; that is, fiction and reality are mutually referential

Figure 5 Puttenham, George. The arte of English poesie Contriued into three bookes. London, 1589 (Sigs M2, M2v) Huntington Library Board.

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codes and not an ontological hierarchy in which one depends on the other.49 Fiction and poetry are immanent in civil life, and of course civility inheres in fictions of interest to anyone whose tastes matter. The intensive study of rhetoric and the humanist obsession with taxonomies of figures of

Figure 5

Continued.

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rhetoric, for which Puttenham is but one well-known writer among many (Abraham Fraunce and Thomas Wilson are well-respected fellow travelers), codify in language the intricate social tactics of the sixteenth-century court. The much-remarked-on mixed mode of the Arcadia on one hand differentiates among various kinds of fictional realities—pastoral, chivalric/heroic, historiographical, even humanist dialogue—but on the other, partly by just the process of differentiating among these modes, demonstrates the extent to which they inhere in one another and sometimes erupt in the midst of one another.50 The division into chapters and their carefully crafted summaries frequently demonstrates the extent to which, for example, chivalric pomp is made possible by intricate Machiavellian maneuvers; likewise, such division displays how often even the most experienced player of realpolitick finds himself thrall to the emotions that stir pastoral complaints. The rest of this chapter parses the ways the 1590 Arcadia presents the work as a series of worlds immanent in one another, in which one reality all too rapidly is swallowed up by another, in which the studious reader may learn to negotiate the startling cracks in various ideological realities.51 Book One: The Disruptions of Eros and Corruptions of Chivalry As figure 6 shows, book one is largely static and pastoral, beginning and ending with two-chapter pastoral episodes but centered on the chivalric adventures of chapter ten. At the center of book one, in the chivalric episode, lies decay in the sense that Greville attempts to emphasize. In the first half of book one, the shepherds Strephon and Claius rescue Musidorus (alias Palladius) recently washed up on the shore of Laconia, and help him search for his lost friend Pyrocles (alias Daiphantus). In the course of the search, Musidorus meets an Arcadian gentleman named Kalender, sets off to rescue Kalender’s son Clitophon, helps reunite the ideal chivalric lovers Argalus and Parthenia, fights against a rebellion and discovers none other than Pyrocles at the head of the rebels, and finally concludes a civil peace. After all this heroic action we encounter, in chapters nine and ten, the first hints that the princes are less than invulnerable. The summary for chapter ten begins with clearly pastoral elements, “Kalenders hunting 2 Daiphantus [Pyrocles’ initial Arcadian pseudonym] his close departure, 3 and letter. 4Palladius [Musidorus] his case,” before shifting abruptly to a chivalric frame: “and 5quest after him, 6accompanied with Clitophon [the son of Kalender]. 7His finding and taking on Amphilus [sic] his armor. 8 Their encounter with Queen Helens attendants. 9His mistaking Palladius” (Sig. K7). Misrecognition and disguise are proper to both chivalric and Hellenic pastoral romance, but in Greville’s scheme, misrecognition always

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1

Strephon & Klaius complain & save shipwrecked Musidorus; lose Pyrocles

2

Strephon & Klaius bring Musidorus into Arcadia and to Kalander's home

3

Kalender describes Arcadia and the discourting of Basilius

4

Discussion of Clitophon, Philanax's letter to Basilius, political status of Arcadian shepherds

5

Kalander off to rescue Clitophon, back-story of Argalus & Parthenia, Helots & Laconians

6

Musidorus leads fight against Helot rebellion, discovers Pyrocles at its head

7

Articles of peace between Helots & Laconians, Argalus & Parthenia reunited

8

Retrospective: adventures of princes since shipwreck; marriage of Argalus & Parthenia; Pyrocles falls in love with picture of Philoclea

9

Pyrocles and Musidorus begin disputing merits of women and love

10

Pyrocles slips away; Musidorus & Clitophon pursue & find armor of Amphialus; Helen mistakes Musidorus for Amphialus

11

Helen tells the story of her love for Amphialus; Amphialus' squire Ismenus mistakes Musidorus

12

Musidorus finds Pyrocles cross-dressed as "Zelmane," they conclude their argument over women and love, and reconcile

13

How Pyrocles fell for Philoclea; Pamela described; Dametas, Basilius, and Basilius' hunting-lodge described

14

Basilius & Gynecia banquet Zelmane & court her; Zelmane & Musidorus plan

15

Phalantus' insincere love of Artesia described; Phalantus issues formal challenge

16

Pageants of Phalantus' tournament, parade of beauties whose champions were bested

17

Combats of Phalantus' tournament

18

Musidorus declares his love for Pamela & disguises himself as shepherd "Dorus"

19

Lion and bear attack young lovers; Dametas' song; Cecropia suspected Predominantly Pastoral Predominantly Heroic Predominantly Historiographical

Figure 6 Modes.

1590 Arcadia Book 1: Modes of Narration and Arrangement of Narrative

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reflects the “fall of minds,” a failure of understanding that reflects spiritual failure, and all movement away from the pastoral Golden age is a decline.52 The ninth member of the chapter ten summary, “[Helen’s] mistaking Palladius,” reflects chapter nine, in which we read of “Pyrocles his inclination to love. 2His, and Musidorus disputations thereabouts 3broken of by Kalender” (35v). In chapter ten, Helen mistakes Musidorus for the knight whom she loves, Amphialus (Cecropia’s son) because Palladius wears Amphialus’s armor—a stock scene from chivalric romance that leads to another such scene in chapter eleven, in which Helen explains to Musidorus how she fell in love with Amphialus as he served as a romantic emissary for his less-virtuous friend, Philoxenus. Helen’s mistaking Musidorus thus follows from her earlier mistaking the emissary for the lover. Yet in an important way, all of the disputations about love in chapter nine are also a mistaking, in which Musidorus mistakes Pyrocles. Musidorus takes his friend to be a reasonable young man given “vehemently to the knowledge of those thinges which might better [his] minde; to seeke the familiaritye of excellent men in learning and souldiering: and lastly, to put all these thinges in practice by continuall wise proceedinge, and worthie enterprises, as occasion fall for them” (Sig F4v). To Musidorus, Pyrocles is anything but “one of these fantasticall mind-infected people, that children & Musitians cal Lovers” (Sig. F5v). But of course Pyrocles is a lover, even though he wears an “armor”—indeed, an “armor” that causes Musidorus to mistake him—of reasoned discourse. The dispute between the princes prepares readers for the Arcadia’s central act of disguising in chapter twelve, by which Pyrocles, “Transformd in shew, but more transformd in minde,” becomes the “Amazon Ladie,” Zelmane (Sigs. H3, H1v). It is also in chapter twelve that the princes conclude the substantive part of their debate on women and love, and agree to help one another. Thus between chapters nine and twelve, the 1590 Arcadia sets out a core group of chapters framed by the pastoral action of chapters nine and twelve. All of this is Sidney’s narrative, yet the division into chapters and the disposition of the summaries interpret the narrative, and they either reveal or impose (it is not possible in all cases to tell which) a distinct pattern on the narrative. The editorial apparatus neatly (if imperfectly) labels the irruptions of desire, the deferrals and dilations, that we understand as characteristic of romance, and weaves them into a larger structure of episodes nested within one another in the “Plaine compasse” arrangement blended with a more linear “Entertangle.”53 Indeed, we might suppose that the large-scale structures emphasized by the chapter divisions reflect the prevalence of balance and antithesis in Sidney’s sentence structures, so that just as close readings of the Arcadia reveal dialectical structures in which virtues and vices imply

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one another, even as they are set up in opposition to one another, so do such apparent generic oppositions as pastoral and heroic likewise imply one another.54 Thus the editorial apparatus in book one points out and labels erotic elements that threaten to disrupt a larger heroic narrative and yet contains these same elements within a broader understanding of the larger pattern in which eruptions of desire in book one foreshadow the inevitable moral and social decay anatomized by the 1590 Arcadia. The same pattern governs the second half of book one, in which the vain knight Phalantus’s tournament of unworthy love (chapters fifteen through seventeen) is sandwiched between pastoral love episodes: chapters thirteen and fourteen recount the cross-dressed Zelmane’s misadventures in love as Basilius falls in love with the Amazon disguise and his queen Gynecia with the young man she perceives beneath the disguise, while the final two chapters, eighteen and nineteen, return to the pastoral mode as Musidorus declares his love for Pamela and disguises himself as the shepherd Dorus. That is, the editorial apparatus presents readers not merely with the opportunity to compare the loves of Pyrocles and Musidorus against that of Phalantus, but also with the suggestion that Phalantus’s debased love might be the repressed but inescapable supplement to the princes’ apparently genuine love—a notion compatible with, though not identical to, the idea of the decline of love outlined in Greville’s A Letter. The Symmetries of the First Eclogues The eclogues of the 1590 quarto have received little critical attention except insofar as they differ from the eclogues presented in the Old Arcadia and the 1593 folio. But these eclogues are not arranged haphazardly, and there is evidence that they follow Philip Sidney’s design.55 After the introductory poem, “We love and have our loves rewarded,” the first eclogues follow a pronounced “plaine compasse” pattern (five eclogues arranged in an outer pair, an inner pair, and the third, central eclogue) that places the well-known “Ister Bank” poem in opposition to the great double sestina, “You Gote-Herd Gods,” and thereby inflects our interpretation of the poems. Among the five concentrically arranged eclogues, the first and last debate how to woo. In the first, Lalus’s simple country ways are outshone by Dorus’s more sophisticated courtly inventions. The last eclogue, Zelmane’s sapphics for Philoclea, strikes the well-worn Petrarchan theme that if poetry fails to woo directly, maybe the poetic monument of a dead lover’s verse might move the beloved. In the quarto, the “Ister Bank” poem is placed second and spoken by only an anonymous melancholy young shepherd rather than by Philisides, Philip Sidney’s alter ego, as in the Old Arcadia manuscripts and in the composite 1593 Arcadia. The poem is a beast fable in which the beasts, having failed to

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govern themselves, ask men to govern them and thereby raise above themselves a tyrant, essentially echoing in another form the Ovidian account of the fall from the Golden to the Brazen age. While the 1590 editors found the poem appropriate for the first eclogues, the 1593 editors (again apparently following the disposition of the eclogues in the Old Arcadia) place it near the end of the third eclogues.56 Ringler asserts that the 1593 edition places the poem correctly, since “it discusses the best kind of government for a state, just as the other marriage poems in the Third Eclogues [of the 1593 edition] discuss the best kind of government for the family.”57 But if we read the entire Arcadia as an extended analogy between the government of the self, the family, and the state, as the 1590 edition invites us to do, then the placement of the “Ister Bank” poem in the midst of marriage poems becomes defensible, especially in light of the fact that the prose that introduces the poem sets it apart from the poems that precede it: “Basilius called to a yong shepheard [Philisides in the Old Arcadia and the 1593 folio] who nether had daunced nor song with them” (Sig. N2). After the intervening song, in which the old shepherd Geron harangues the younger Histor to marry and thereby tame his passions—in which marriage at one point is figured as a “common-wealth”—the quarto places “You Gote-heard gods,” the lament of Strephon and Claius for the departed Urania. In the context set up by the 1590 quarto, “You Gote-heard gods” takes on a political cast. Indeed, if David Kalstone’s assessment is correct, the poem is well-suited for making a political critique. Kalstone asserts that the poem “must be taken as a criticism of the easy resolutions of [Jacopo] Sannazaro’s Arcadia,” and that it demonstrates why “the pastoral sections of [Sidney’s] romance strike a reader so often as un-Arcadian.” To extend Kalstone’s argument, the poetic critique performed by Sidney’s double sestina, in particular the way it moves toward a “violent climax of despair,” reinforces the movement of the fall from a Golden into a Brazen age.58 In fact, the poem suggests that Arcadia had fallen into a Brazen age by the beginning of the narrative, for the laments of Strephon and Claius for the departed Urania essentially recapitulate the shepherds’ condition when they rescued Musidorus. The sestina is perfectly suited to recounting the beginning of the decline of Arcadia: its repetitive structure replicates the static character of the pastoral, while the complaints that “she, whose parts maintainede a perfect musique . . . Is gone, is gone from or spoyled forrests, turning to desarts our best pastur’de mounaines” (Sig. N8v). Just as the departure of Urania begets the disorder that Strephon and Claius must attempt to reorder in their double sestina, so the departure of Urania signifies the loss of the divine favor by which Arcadia remained peaceful and well-governed even under so feeble a prince as Basilius.

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Book Two: The Heroic Immanent in the Pastoral As the narrative resumes, the 1590 Arcadia overlays a strikingly clear and symmetrical pattern over book two’s dizzying retrospective heroic narrative, told in parts by each of the principal characters except Gynecia. Most of book two recounts the Asian adventures of Musidorus and Pyrocles before the shipwreck that thrust them into Arcadia—adventures that began with another, earlier, shipwreck. The editorial apparatus omits the motives of the various narrators and presents something more akin to a pageant of one tableau after another, especially in the heroic middle section between the two shipwrecks. It thereby dissipates the diversity of narrative perspectives that give the Arcadia a texture akin to the framing fictions of the Decameron or the Canterbury Tales, imposing instead a single “objective” perspective. Yet the effect is not static. Instead, we witness a gradual progression from pastoral to chivalric to historiographical modes of discourse. Each mode fails to account for the events at hand and is superseded by the next in the series. The summaries tend to set out fairly straightforward recapitulations of chivalric events (love-passions, single combats) juxtaposed with flat statements of political realities. Readers get a relatively superficial overview in the summary but notice gaps that need to be filled in by deeper analysis. Thus, in the experience of reading book two, “the spatial, visual, diagrammatic, and contemplative tend to displace the more familiar modern expectations— temporal, aural, exploratory, and discursive.”59 As figure 7 shows, book two is bounded on one hand by the predominantly pastoral segment of five chapters that lead us to the tale of the princes’ first shipwreck, and on the other by five chapters of detailed historiographical analyses of a new rebellion in Arcadia and the heroic tale of the faithful servant Plangus and his beloved princess Erona, which follow the princes’ second shipwreck and arrival in Arcadia. In between, chapters six through twenty-four follow the princes’ adventures in Asia Minor and Iberia— a group which itself is structured by the core chapters twelve through nineteen. This core is centered on chapter fifteen, in which Philoclea tells one installment of the tale of Plangus and Erona; the pastoral chapters fourteen and sixteen contain Miso and Basilius’s interruptions of Philoclea’s tale; in the additional pastoral chapter seventeen, Pyrocles reveals his true identity to Philoclea. This center is bounded at the beginning by two chivalric chapters, twelve and thirteen, wherein Pyrocles, Musidorus, Philoclea, and Pamela discover a song recounting Plangus and Erona, and Philoclea takes up the tale; and at the end, by two chivalric chapters, eighteen and nineteen, in which Pyrocles recounts to Philoclea his rescue of the abused lady Dido from the philandering Pamphilus, and his subsequent betrayal at the hands

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1

Basilius, Gynecia, and Zelmane expostulate on love

2

Dorus recounts his suit to Pamela via Mopsa

3

Dorus brings his taie to Pamela up to date; Pamela responds cautiously

4

Basilius & Zelmane hawking; Gynecia's coach upset; Gynecia jealous of Philoclea

5

Dorus's letter to Pamela & success; Philoclea complains alone

6

Dorus tells Pamela of Euarchus & Pyrocles, the reform of Macedon, and Euarchus' nephew Musidorus

7

Dorus' Retrospective: lst shipwreck of princes in Phrygia; beginning of rétrospective story of Princes' adventures in Asia

8

Dorus: Pyrocles captured by king of Phrygia; Musidorus disguises himselfs rescues Pyrocles

9

Dorus: Princes venture to Pontus, find kingdom overthown by a tyrant, restore rightful king

10

Dorus: Princes defeat Plexirtus & restore Leonatus but Plexirtus obtains mercy; Princes hear beginning of tale of Plangus & Erona

11

Mopsa interrupts Dorus' tale; ladies bathe in Ladon & are espied by Amphialus & Zelmane

12

The four lovers read another part of the tale of Plangus & Erona

13

Philoclea tells beginning of Erona's tale, how Love, insulted by her, smote her with reckless passion for the worthless Antiphilus

14

Miso interrupts Philoclea & perversely anatomizes love

15

Philoclea continues tale of Plangus' rivalry with his own father for a common woman (Andromana); father (King of Iberia) wins & sends Plangus into danger

16

Basilius interrupts the lovers with a clumsy sonnet & asks Philoclea to plead with Zelmane on his behalf

17

Zelmane reveals himself to Philoclea; Pyrocles takes up retrospective story of princes in Asia.

18

Anaxius challenges Pyrocles; Pyrocles rescues Pamphilus from attacking ladies; Pamphilus turns on Lady Dido

19

Pyrocles' fight with Anaxius interrupted as Pyrocles rescues Dido from Pamphilus again; follows Dido to her miserly father Chremes, who betrays him to Artesia for gold; Musidorus rescues Pyrocles

20

Princes travel to Iberian court, where Queen Andromana loves both, is turned down, then imprisons the princes

21

Knight Palladius helps Princes escape Andromana but is slain; Philoclea encourages Pyrocles to continue retrospective tales to discourage his sexual advances

22

Princes encounter brothers turned against each other by resurgent Plexirtus, who has deposed Leonatus

Figure 7 1590 Arcadia Book 2: Modes of Narration and Arrangement of Narrative Modes.

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23

Original Zelmane pleads with Princes to save Plexirtus from an attack

24

Princes sail toward Greece but are seized by servants of Plexirtus; ensuing fight and fire cause 2nd shipwreck, by which Princes arrive in Arcadia; retrospective tale of Asian adventures ends

25

Gynecia has prophetie dream & is attacked by rebels, defended by princes, & battle is described in gruesome detail

26

Pyrocles disguised as Zelmane pacifies rebellion with a speech and a face-saving offer

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Cecropia's agent Clinias tries to stir up rébellion again, then flatters Basilius

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Philanax arrives with soldiers & puts down revolt, Basilius reveals the Oracle and his misprision thereof

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Basilius finishes story of Plangus & Erona: Erona is imprisoned & in need of rescue; princes deeds have been perverted to place unjust men in power Predominantly Pastoral Predominantly Heroic Predominantly Historiographical

Figure 7

Continued.

of Dido’s miserly father Chremes, which eventually leads him to the Iberian court. The tales of Plangus and Erona, in parallel with that of Dido and Pamphilus, show how heroism lays neglected as heroes fall under the sway of their passions.60 The overall effect of the book, especially divided as it is, plays off its elaborate structural balance against a dialogue between the pastoral and chivalric modes that progressively unravels, requiring the complex historiographical analyses of the final five chapters. The first five chapters of book two are the most intensely pastoral of the entire Arcadia. Nowhere except in the eclogues are poems as concentrated as the six that appear in these pages, and the chapter headings designate four of the six poems specifically with a numbered member. The chapter headings simply foreground the pastoral frame, although in terms of Sidney’s narrative, these chapters evoke the pastoral occasion for the telling of the chivalric tales that follow. For example, while the chapter three heading tells us of “Dorus-his tale of his owne 1education, 2travaile, 3 enamoring . . . ” it wraps everything up by naming pastoral elements of the chapter: “ 7His octave. 8Pamelas and Mopsas answere to his suit. 9His present to them; 10and perplexitie in himself.” Likewise, the chapter four heading for the episode in which the innocent Philoclea grapples with her “impossible” love for Zelmane designates her two poems a “5vowe of chastity” and “6revocation.”

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In spite of the emphasis the chapter heading gives Philoclea here, it pulls against the emphasis of Sidney’s narrative significantly at this point, again vitiating the textures created by Sidney’s emphasis on characters. The narrator’s single strongest intrusion into the 1590 text declares in chapter four “alas (sweete Philoclea) how hath my penne till now forgot thy passions, since to thy memorie principally all this long matter is intended” (Sig. Q3). The chapter four heading mentions Philoclea’s “lovepassions” (Sig. Q1) but gives no indication of the narrator’s statement. To find a similar summary claim about the point of the Arcadia among the chapter headings, we must look back to the heading for book one, chapter three, which designates the “Arcadian estate” as “the ground of all this storie” (Sig. C1v). Set against the pastoral opening of book two, the chapter six heading signifies a marked generic shift into the historiographical mode, specifying that Musidorus narrates the “historiologie of Euarchus kingly excellencies, 4his entry on a most corrupt estate, 5and reformation thereof by royall arts and actions.” As Lindheim and Lawry have noted, it is appropriate that Musidorus, the more studious of the princes, is narrating this section of the tale, and that he is trying to impress the more intellectual of the princesses, Pamela. Just as he tried to persuade Pyrocles to leave Arcadia once he had explored the land, noted its geography and the disposition of the people, and contacted the most significant noblemen in the realm, so his tale of heroic deeds is cast in the terms of political and military analysis.61 Whereas Lindheim and Lawry note that the proclivities that define Musidorus’ character shape the tale he tells, which is surely correct, the flattening effect of the chapter summaries tends instead to set up Musidorus’ point of view as the relatively “objective” editorial frame within which readers might understand the Asian adventures of the princes that occupy the central arc of book two, chapters seven through twenty-four. Even the relatively chivalric material of chapter seven, laid out in the rhetorical partition of the summary, presents the appearance of a history more than that of a heroic tale: “1The education of Pyrocles & Musidorus. 2Their friendship, 3 navigation, 4and first shipwracke. 5The straunge gratitude of two brothers to them, upon their liberalitie to those two brothers” (Sig. S1v). The “first shipwracke” sets out the major structural element of book two in the terms of Greek romance, but it is set in the midst of a set of topoi familiar to readers of Seneca’s epistles and many a Renaissance dialogue: education, friendship, gratitude, and liberality. The summaries for chapters eight through ten all introduce similar topoi for alert readers. They characterize the king of Phrygia as “That suspicious tyrant,” and the princes’ overthrow of him as “Their killing the bad King, 11and creating a better” (Sig. S5v). The chapter nine heading invokes

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exemplarity explicitly, pointing out the “2Inconstancy, and 3envie pourtraied in the King [of Pontus] & his Counsellor” (Sig. T2v). Only within the framework of the complex of enemies and allies the princes have made on their initial foray into Asia Minor does the complicated and predominantly chivalric tale of chapter ten make sense. Indeed, the function of Phrygia and Pontus as negative royal exemplars points implicitly to the proper functions of a king, in Greville’s scheme. He writes to his “Honorable Lady” that “It is most true, that exorbitancie of passions do manie times (like players upon stages) represent the office of a Kinge, in the person of a beggar. Aristides constancie, with the weaknesse of Philautus; and the courage of Turnus, with the cowardice of Nicias, acting that which they are not.”62 That is, the educated reader discerns the constancy of Aristides by comparing his actions to those of Philotas just as a good reader of the Arcadia will compare the kings of Phrygia and Pontus to either Pyrocles and Musidorus or to Euarchus, and from the comparison conclude how best to rule. This is one of the senses in which Greville felt the Arcadia might serve as a “glow-worme light” by which to educate his superiors. The vices of Phrygia and Pontus are particularly hateful to courtiers of middling rank like Greville under Elizabeth I (and Sidney before him): suspicion, envy, and inconstancy. The typical Elizabethan term for suspicion is “jealousy,” and Greville warns that under “jealouse” tyrants, “then the depravinge corporacions, which keepe downe all spirrits of hope, all encouragements of honor, with false narrowe axiomes of Tyrannie, are the charmers we must give eare unto” (147). This passage could well be an analysis of Sidney’s description of the king of Phrygia, “a Prince of a melancholy constitution both of bodie and mind; wickedly sad, ever musing of horrible matters; suspecting, or rather condemning all men of evill, because his minde had no eye to espie goodnesse” (Sig. S6v). Chapter ten recounts the episode of the Paphlagonian king, his good son Leonatus and the bastard Plexirtus, well-known because Shakespeare adapted from it the Gloucester plot in King Lear. The chapter heading contains a warning to beware one’s allies, explaining that the bastard Plexirtus is saved by “two brothers, that vertuously loved a most vicious man” in Plexirtus (Sig. T6). The two brothers, Tydeus and Telenor, “willingly hood-wink . . . themselves from seeing [Plexirtus’s] faultes,” and therefore “abuse . . . the vertue of courage to defend his fowle vice of injustice” (Sig. V3v). The princes overcome Plexirtus, but only with the help of the new king they had previously set on the throne of Pontus. Before the narrative arrives at the core of book two, the tragic tale of Plangus and Erona and the complicated series of events by which the princes enter that tale, Sidney had placed in chapter eleven the sensual interruption of the ladies bathing in the river Ladon, spied upon by the rivals Pyrocles and

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Amphialus. The 1590 edition pairs this event in chapter eleven with its opposite number in chapter twenty, where the Iberian queen Andromana lusts after and plots to entrap the princes. Chapter eleven is decidedly pastoral, though in the end it is infected with Arcadian politics when Pyrocles (as Zelmane) discovers his rival for Philoclea’s love, Amphialus, spying in the bushes nearby. Chapter twenty, on the other hand, consists largely of exemplary tableaux set in a superficially chivalric tale. The two chapters present two faces of desire. The chapter eleven summary is a decorous vision of indecorum, in which the “pleasantness of the river” and “the pleasure Zelmane had in seeing” the sisters bathe therein, which is then “uttered in speech, and song”—the well-known poem, “what toong can her perfections tell?” (Sig. V6v). The chapter twenty summary, in contrast, renders the lust of Andromana in terms of bald-faced tyranny, delineating “Andromanas omniregencie . . . Her parti-love to . . . both [Pyrocles and Musidorus, and] her faire and foule meanes to inveigle them” (Sig. Bb7). In chapter eleven, Cecropia’s son Amphialus spoils Pyrocles’ voyeuristic pleasure: he presents Pyrocles an inverted mirror-image of himself spying on the princesses, and reveals himself as a rival. But in chapter twenty, it is precisely unrequited love that saves the Greek princes whom Andromana has imprisoned. Zelmane, the virtuous daughter of the evil Plexirtus, having fallen in love with Pyrocles, agrees to help the Greek prince and his friend escape from Andromana. In remembrance of this action, Pyrocles takes on the name Zelmane for her Amazon disguise. Within this complex frame of unfulfilled desires and unrequited loves in chapters eleven and twenty, the 1590 Arcadia makes another frame visible: the chivalric adventures of chapters twelve and thirteen and those of chapters eighteen and nineteen. The summaries for these four chapters include none of the topoi we have seen elsewhere; rather, they focus primarily on the elements of chivalric narrative and particularly on misplaced love as a motive. The chapter twelve summary epitomizes that favorite transitional device of romance, the overhearing scene: “How Basilius found Plangus: 2 his lamentation. 3Philoclea entreated by Zelmane to relate the storie of Erona” (Sig. X3). The chapter thirteen summary proceeds similarly, though it addresses a far more eventful episode. It turns Erona into an exemplar of one “irreligious against Love” before it plunges into its redaction of the narrative (Sig. X7). The summaries of chapters eighteen and nineteen, wherein Pyrocles tries to rescue Dido from Pamphilus and fights a truncated combat against the evil and physically overwhelming knight Anaxius, likewise focus on brief sketches of minor characters, e.g., “Anaxius-his surcuidrie,” a “Light-of-love” (Pamphilus) and “his scoffing excuses” as well as “Didos revenge on him”; and the actions of the narrative like “The monomachie betweene Anaxius and Pyrocles,” the “treason” of Dido’s father Chremes

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against Pyrocles, Pyrocles “succoured by Musidorus” and “both saved by the King of Iberia” (Sigs. Aa4v, Bb1v). The two frames that surround the core of book two present a kaleidoscope of love and desire in a heroic narrative whose significance is revealed by the structure the chapter divisions impose. The difficulty of the narrative in book two, as Myrick observed long ago, is the complexity of the “structural design” into which specific episodes fit and not, as some critics have argued, because the narrative is merely episodic at this point.63 Thus the decorous desire of chapter eleven swiftly leads to the confusing sweep of love gone wrong in every imaginable way—a phenomenon that motivates all of the episodes narrated in chapters twelve and thirteen, eighteen and nineteen. These center on chapter fifteen, the center of book two. But chapter fifteen anticipates a further generic transformation from a predominantly chivalric into the historiographical mode. The chapter fifteen summary hints at the process, and implicitly argues that within the misplaced and misunderstood love of chivalry lurks an infusion of realpolitick and the early modern study of the passions. The summary reads: Plangus-his parentage. 2His trick of youth, 3espied, 4&[t]urned over by, and to his old father. 5An inveagling-womans arts. 6A guilty stepmothers divellish practices against Plangus. 7Her ministers false informations. 8 Plangus perplexities. 9His fathers jelousies. The Queenes complots 10to feede the ones suspicion, 11& work the others overthrow. 12Plangus taken; 13 delivered flieth: 14is pusued with old hate, & new treason. 15Yet must he serve abroad, while a new heire is made at home, 16This storie broken off by Basilius. (Sig. Y6) The plot elements are generally consistent with Greek and chivalric romance, but the summary emphasizes the plotting in the court and its dynastic implications. Here the medieval scope of the word “minister” (a subordinate acting on higher authority) mixes with its cousin in Renaissance statecraft. “The Queenes complots to feede [the King’s] suspicion & work [Plangus’s] overthrow” are reminiscent of Sejanus’s machinations in Tacitus, even if they are not wholly out of place in chivalric romance. The issue here is the fact that intramural plotting is cast as statecraft more than as the result of passions working on the queen. As Lindheim and Lawry point out, this episode is told by the high-minded Pamela, the princess who later disputes theology with Cecropia, and it serves in Sidney’s narrative to link her with the prince of her own temperament, Musidorus. But the chapter summary in the 1590 Arcadia does not reveal that this is Pamela’s tale. Again, it flattens out the textures created

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by Sidney’s shifting narrators and audiences, so that a single source (the artifact readers hold in their hands) speaks to a single audience (the reader herself ). Rather than seeing Pamela’s canny political analysis suited to her pairing with Musidorus, readers of the 1590 Arcadia see instead a political analysis set in the midst of a chivalric narrative. As if to emphasize difference between chapter fifteen and the rest of the “core” of book two, the surrounding chapters, fourteen and sixteen−seventeen, are all marked clearly as pastoral: we will hear of Miso’s “old-wives tale 5and ballad against Cupid” in chapter fourteen, as well as “1The cumber of Zelmane’s love and lovers[,] 2Gynecias lovelamentations . . . Basilius his wooing” in chapter sixteen, and in chapter seventeen, “1Zelmanes teares, 2and tearfull dittie. 3Philoclea enters conference with her. 4She shues, and shewes her selfe Prince Pyrocles. 5Philoclea feares much, but loves more” (Sigs. Y2v, Z4, Z8). Here we find the same focus on love and desire, but it is going wildly wrong (just as it has in the chivalric and historiographical parts of the frame) in a pastoral context; thus laughter is evoked rather than pity and fear. Now clearly Sidney’s dramatic sensibility led him to arrange the narrative in this way, and even in the absence of the chapter summaries we could experience the proto-Shakespearean juxtaposition of tragic and comic portrayals of love gone wrong. But once again, the chapter summaries elide the irony of heroic tales being told for the purpose of love-making in a pastoral and even comic mode, and instead focus attention on the structures generated by shifting among generic modes. The final part of the princes’ pre-Arcadian adventures, chapters twenty through twenty-four leading to the second shipwreck, is the complement to chapters seven through ten. It is cast in absolutely chivalric terms by the chapter summaries, in spite of the fact that the narrative matter itself is infused with political observations and the complicated study of causes practiced by historiographers. The effect is to balance the historiographical feeling of the beginning of the princes’ adventures against a chivalric emphasis in the series of adventures immediately previous to their arrival in Arcadia. Indeed, much of the narrative is chivalric: chapters twenty-one through twenty-four narrate the princes’ escape from Andromana and Iberia; their attempts to aid Leonatus; the problem of Plexirtus’ iniquity compounded by the princes’ debt to his daughter, Zelmane, who insists that he be saved; and finally the muchanticipated second shipwreck on their journey to the Peloponnese, engineered by (who else?) Plexirtus. But Sidney also writes that the brothers Tydeus and Telenor, realizing as they die how Plexirtus has deceived them, warn the Greek princes not to place their goodwill “on any other ground, then proof of vertue: since length of acquaintance, mutuall secrecies, nor height of benefits

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could bind a savage harte” (Sig. Dd3); the chapter summary here notes only “9the regreete of the dying brothers” (Sig. Cc7). In another place, Sidney notes that one of Plexirtus’s enemies had hated Tydeus and Telenor precisely because “they had been principall instruments of [Plexirtus’s] power” (Sig. Dd7v); the chapter summary does this a bit more justice, characterizing it as “8the course and cause of [Plexirtus’s] deaths-doome” (Sig. Dd3). The end of book two contrasts starkly with the beginning, especially as the chapter summaries present it. Whereas the opening of book two comprises the longest sustained series of pastoral chapters (six in all) in the entire romance, the closing six chapters are a decidedly mixed lot in which, wherever the pastoral mode appears, it is quickly subsumed in the chivalric and historiographical modes. This movement implies that traditional aristocratic modes of reflection, like the pastoral and the chivalric literary modes, are inadequate for expressing the full complexity of experience. The summaries for the final six chapters emphasize the mixed mode. For example, the chapter twenty-four summary (containing the second shipwreck) sets out the historiographical mode in “1The causes and provisions of the Princes embarking for Arcadia” and “4Sedition and slaughter in the shippe,” links the realpolitick and the plotting to the chivalric episodes “5Their shipwrack by fire. 6Pyrocles fight with the Captaine, and escape from sea,” and moves us back into the pastoral mode appropriate to the arrival in Arcadia with a zeugma: “7 The amarous concluding the olde, and beginning a newe storie, both broken of by Miso” (Sig. Dd8). Similarly, the chapter twenty-five heading forges verbal links between pastoral and historiographical elements, describing Gynecia’s “passionate jelousie in actions, 3speach, and 4song . . . 5Her troubling Philoclea and Zelmane, 6The rebels troubling her” (Sig. Ee4v). The chapter twenty-six heading is more politico-historiographical, forecasting “Zelmanes confident attempt to apease the mutinie. 2 A bone of division cast by her, 3and caught by them. 4Her pacificatorie oration. 5The acceptation and issue of it” (Sig. Ee8). The chapter twentyseven summary extends the trend, recounting “A verball craftie coward purtrayed in Clinias” as well as “4The uprore reenforced” (Sig. Ff4). As we have already seen, the chapter twenty-eight summary returns readers to “the ground of all this storie,” neatly conflating the pastoral and historiographical elements in its description of “3Basilius his conference with Philanax of the Oracle (the ground of all this storie.) 4His wrong-construction of it” (Sig. Ff8). At this point we see the oracle not merely as a force in itself, but rather as one force entering a set of conditions—namely, Basilius’s susceptibility to bad counsel and his resistance to good counsel—favorable to its action. The same traits that make Basilius a weak prince make him a foolish lover of the cross-dressed Pyrocles. Significantly, when Basilius takes up the tale

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of Plangus and Erona in chapter twenty-nine, leading to the pastoral second eclogues, the chapter summary characterizes his tale predominantly as chivalric. For the most part it focuses on plot elements, misplaced love, and personal hatreds—important features in the aristocratic imaginative modes that have been shown to be inadequate for organizing and understanding the flow of events. Yet Basilius’s tale also features an observation significant for understanding book three, the well-known “captivity episode”: he notes “4The mans weaknesse; and the womans strength in bearing captivitie” (Sig. Gg3v). Book two becomes more complex as the narrative declines from pastoral simplicity into chivalric and historiographical narrative modes needed to represent the passions, deceptions, and other machinations that tie together the large and various cast of the princes’ Asian adventures. Mostly ignoring the multiple points of view and audiences presented in Sidney’s narrative, the chapter summaries for book two impose the “vaulting symmetries” noted by Lawry in order to establish a single cogent overview, something like the understanding of a work as a whole that Johannes Sturm recommends.64 Against the symmetry of a book centered on chapter fifteen, the chapter summaries play a shift in emphasis away from the pastoral that dominates the first six chapters and toward the mixed modes of the final six chapters. The middle section, clearly marked by the references to the two shipwrecks in the chapter summaries, is likewise organized symmetrically, balanced especially by the chivalric presentations of love gone awry in chapters twelve and thirteen, eighteen and nineteen, which frame the pastoral presentations of love going awry in chapters fourteen, sixteen and seventeen—all of which frame the central chapter, fifteen, in which the heroic tale of Plangus and Erona must be supplemented by the political observations that explain the plotting and betrayals of the story. The analytical reader who seeks the structural center of book two experiences something similar to the linear reader who follows the book from beginning to end: the inadequacy of the chivalric and pastoral modes for understanding a complex tale with multiple motives and causes. The 1590 edition argues implicitly for replacing dominant literary modes with the newer, more studious practices of Renaissance historiography. The Eruption of Bathos in the Second Eclogues The second eclogues are the last eclogues in the 1590 quarto, and the selection of five poems presented therein represents the theme of the final twothirds of the 1590 Arcadia: a loss of reason leads to the debasing of love. The central poem, a bathetically comic singing contest between Nico and Pas, stands as an emblem of the eclogues and in some ways of books two

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and three as a whole. It is in a way linked to the first and fifth poems of the second eclogues, as well: none of these poems is as successful as the second and fourth poems, sung by the best shepherds Dicus and (Musi)Dorus, and Strephon and Claius, respectively. To follow the second eclogues is to move from a semblance of order toward increasing disarray. The first poem, sung and danced by two groups of shepherds in honor of the repression of the rebellion fomented by Clinias, performs a reconciliation between the rebellious Passion and the insufficiently masterful Reason. In the end both submit “to heavenly rules” together, “which Passions skill, and Reason do deface.”65 The line, which erroneously prints “skill” for “kill,” leaves us with an impression of cunning passions attempting to get around heavenly rules, and of Reason marring its case for obedience like an inept lawyer; “Passions skill,” in particular, gives us a sense that the Passions will win out. In the second eclogue, a much more elegant dialogue between Dicus and Dorus, Dorus’s unmistakably courtly case for the ennobling effects of love, which draws loosely on Bembo’s discourse in the end of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, sits in an uneasy tension with Dicus’s more austere, neo-Stoic case for moderating passions and avoiding love. The irony, of course, is that the very advice that makes Dorus angry—Dicus’s assertion that “A man to feare a womans moodie eye, / Makes Reason like a slave to servile Sense”—echoes Musidorus’s position when he and Pyrocles debated the merits of women and love in book one (Sig. Hh4v). Thus the second eclogue demonstrates how far Musidorus has taken leave of his own senses; moreover, the richness of his impassioned reply only emulates the soaring rhetoric Pyrocles had used in the book one debate. By the time we arrive at the “jolly yonker”—Nico and his mate Pas’s undignified squabbling over poetic primacy—we have already seen the decay in Musidorus’s state. As Nico and Pas compete ostensibly to out-praise the other, they slip in embarrassing stories about one another (“But who did lively skippe, / When for a treene-dish stolne, thy father did thee whip?”) and vulgar insults (“thou weariest even the ground / With sluttish song”) (Sigs. Hh6v, Hh8). Next, the crown of Strephon and Claius’s dizains, “I joye in griefe, and doo detest all joyes,” sung by Lalus echoes the skill and quality of the second poem and makes explicit the theme of the second eclogues. Love has driven Strephon and Claius to complain, but in their anatomy of grief they themselves, and specifically their loss of reason, are the cause of their woes: “Both cause, effect, beginning, and the ende / Are all in me,” and “My ship, my selfe” has broken its cable, which is “Reason,” tossed as it is in the storm of its sighs. Having lost reason, the poetic self founders “on rocke, Despaire,” and inhabits a living hell of absence from Urania, whose hellishness is reflected in the envoi by the breath of the shepherds blasting

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even the trees and herbs around them. The song is an emblem of the experience of reading: it causes its listeners to think of their own troubles, until Basilius entreats the “young melancholy shepheard” (Philisides in the Old Arcadia and in the 1593 and successive folio Arcadias) to sing. But if the young shepherds’ echo poem is agreeable to its listeners, that is because they have themselves begun to wander in a wood of their own passions. “Faire Rocks, goodly rivers” is a relatively unsuccessful poem that may have been chosen for its shortcomings. Logic breaks down in the poem, which hangs together on the thin thread of its repetitions and its predictable Petrarchan conventions: the lover believes his beloved is faithful and when the echo disabuses him, even calling her “A devill,” the lover responds that “in hell where such Devill is, to that hell I doo goe.” Fittingly, Basilius calls an end to the eclogues so that he (and Zelmane, though not in the way Basilius would wish) can have a sleepless night in which they “meditate on [their] private desires” (Sig. Ii3v). The Historiographical Mode and the Immanence of Passions in Book Three In book three, the private desires of the main characters most dramatically alter the epic sweep of the larger narrative, and in book three lies the narrative most closely related to the precepts offered in A Letter to an Honorable Lady. Most of book three explores the rebellion in Arcadia led by Basilius’s nephew Amphialus but fomented largely by Basilius’s sister-in-law, Cecropia. Like the kings of Pontus and Phrygia, Cecropia is a tyrant, but we get a much more intimate and detailed look at Cecropia’s life and court than at Pontus or Phrygia in book two. And readers can compare the conduct of Amphialus under the tyranny of Cecropia to that of Zelmane, Pamela, and Philoclea. The editorial apparatus of the 1590 Arcadia invites these kinds of comparisons, mentioning these characters by name more than any other characters in book three (Amphialus is mentioned twenty-one times, Philoclea fourteen, Cecropia eleven, Pyrocles/Zelmane eight, and Pamela six). Of course Greville’s notion of instructive reading involves another comparison between the reader’s own situation and that depicted in the narrative—a recognition of the Bergerian “heterocosm” and the “startling crack in the quotidian” that characterize fictions of immanence. When, in A Letter to an Honorable Lady, Greville is explaining how it is to be read, he relies on the venerable Renaissance man-as-microcosm homology to demonstrate to his interlocutor that “your estate is . . . such a modell of subjects estates under Princes, as mans litle world is of the greate; differinge onelie in more or lesse.”66 Greville’s explanation contains the four terms of a standard analogy:

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comparing “mans litle world” to “the greate” instructs us how to compare “a modell of subjects estate under Princes” to “your estate.” Just so, comparing Amphialus’s poor conduct under the tyrant Cecropia (first term) against the princesses’ exemplary conduct (second term) teaches the Elizabethan reader, engulfed in the poor conduct of courtiers in Elizabeth’s court (third term) to imagine what must be proper conduct in Elizabeth’s court (fourth term). Though he is noble, prudent, puissant, chivalric, courtly, refined, and an excellent military tactician, book three of the revised Arcadia destroys Amphialus. The editorial apparatus of the 1590 edition sets out Amphialus’s fall as a lesson; moreover, it links his downfall structurally to the pastoralchivalric-historiographical progression of discursive emphasis it draws out of the larger narrative, as can be seen in figure 8. In book three, Amphialus’s failures occur in the reverse order: first in the military tactics that make up an important part of historiographical discourse, second in chivalry, and last in the lovemaking central to pastoral discourse. At first it seems that Amphialus’s virtues, like his knowledge of military tactics and his personal valor, are completely separable from the vices stemming from his immoderate love for Philoclea. The chapter four summary places Amphialus’s traits in separate members that designate separate passages: “1Amphialus his warlike preparations. 2His justification. 3His fortifications. 4His Arte of men 5His Love-passions, and passionate complaints” (Sig. Kk8). Amphialus’s “Arte of men” is far more optimistic and Aristotelian than Greville’s.. The passage designated by the fourth member of the summary specifies that Amphialus knows “in the Arte of men stood the quintessence, & ruling skill of all prosperous good governement, either peaceble, or military,” and that Amphialus delegates duties according to the nature of each man, so that he “would . . . not employ the stil man to a shifting practise, not the liberall man to be a dispenser of his victuals, nor the kinde-harted man to be a punisher: but would exercise their vertues in sorts, where they might be profitable.” Indeed, “even of vices [Amphialus] made his profite, making the cowardly Clinias to have care of the watch, which he knew his own feare would make him very wakefully performe” (Sig. Ll2). That is, Amphialus assigns to each man the duties to which his moral disposition is best suited, and he does not hesitate to put men’s vices into the service of his government. In contrast, Greville’s advice to his “honorable lady” is almost Kantian: he specifies that the “art of men” lies in inspiring “respect, and reverence,” not through “the flatteringe familiaritie of inferior humors” but rather via reason.67 That is, Greville would have his lady conduct herself so that, should a reasonable individual weigh her actions in the light of moral philosophy, he would be forced to conclude that she is virtuous and therefore admirable.

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1

Dorus tries to kiss Pamela and, finding her insulted, writes a poetic apology

2

Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane deceived and taken prisoner by Cecropia at Amphialus' castle

3

Amphialus attempts to woo Philoclea and is rebuffed

4

Amphialus prepares to fend off Basilius' siege, deploys his men, makes his love-complaints

5

Cecropia tries and fails to win Philoclea for Amphialus

6

Cecropia tries to persuade Pamela, finds her at prayer, and fails to win her

7

Basilius' forces beslege Amphialus' castle & battle is described graphically

8

Amphialus sallies & is nearly cut off by fighting the Black Knight one-onone as Basilians encircle him

9

Amphialus sings to Philoclea, releases the captured Philanax for her sake

10

Cecropia tries to persuade Pamela, who answers her atheism with a logical defense of Christianity

11

Phalantus challenges Amphialus to single combat and loses the fight, wounding Amphialus

12

Basilius sends to Argalus for help; Argalus challenges Amphialus to single combat & is slain therein

13

Dametas and Clinias are lured into a cowardly, comedic combat

14

Clinias and Artesia plot to poison Amphialus & try to enlist aid of princesses; Pamela betrays the plot

15

Anaxius breaks siege & aids Amphialus; they make a sally but are rebuffed

16

Knight of the Tombe (Parthenia disguised) challenges Amphialus & is slain

17

Amphialus despondent; Cecropia suggests that he rape Philoclea

18

Combat of six knights

19

State of besieging and besieged forces asayed; Cecropia threatens to kill princesses & thereby lifts siege

20

Cecropia tortures princesses but fails to move them

21

Cecropia stages mock execution of Pamela but still fails to move Philoclea

22

Cecropia stages mock execution of Philoclea but still fails to move Pamela; Zelmane accidentally sees it and fails to pièces

23

Philoclea reveals to Zelmane that she lives, and comforts Zelmane

24

Amphialus excuses keeping the princesses captive but then discovers that Cecropia has tortured them; Cecropia dies in their confrontation & Amphialus attempts suicide

Figure 8 1590 Arcadia Book 3: Modes of Narration and Arrangement of Narrative Modes.

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25

Anaxius rages and swears revenge for Amphialus' fall; Queen Helen arrives and takes Amphialus away to nurse him; public dirge is sung for Amphialus

26

Anaxius threatens princesses; Zelmane challenges him but is ignored; Anaxius tries to win Pamela & fails

27

Zelmane temporizes with Anaxius; Basilius sends another messenger to the Oracle; Anaxius' brothers decide to rape the captive princesses

28

Zoilus tries to rape Zelmane but is killed with his own sword; Zelmane next slays Lycurgus and finally engages Anaxius

29

Combat of Zelmane and Anaxius interrupted mid-sentence Predominantly Pastoral Predominantly Heroic Predominantly Historiographical Predominantly Rhetorical Set-Pieces on Moral Philosophy

Figure 8

Continued.

Though on the face of it, it seems that Greville would hold Amphialus to a wholly different standard in the “art of men” than he would his “honorable lady,” on balance such a conclusion is untenable because Amphialus’ apparent virtues fairly quickly become tainted by his vices. Whereas in chapter seven we are to see “3brave courage imaged in Amphialus. 4His onset with the death of two friendes his foes” (Sig. Mm1v), we find in chapter eight two examples of courage causing poor military tactical decisions. Amphialus’s foe, Philanax, is captured because of his too-great courage, and Amphialus’s own too-bold blunder is caught only by one of his lieutenants. Moreover, the summary for chapter eight rearranges the narrative into a discursive pattern that emphasizes the distinction between tactics and valor: The Basilians reembattled 1first by Philanax, 4then by the black knight. 2 Ismenus slain by Philanax. 3Philanax captived by Amphialus. 4The black knight’s exploits. 5His encounter with Amphialus, parted by a by-blow. 6The Amphialians retreat, and departure of the black Knight. (Sig. Mm5v) The summary points us first to sections one and four, which between them render a tactical account of how the king’s army succeeds under its captain, Philanax, but falters when he is lost. Only after we have seen the effects that Philanax’s leadership and the loss of it have on his army does the apparatus direct us to the explanation, in the intervening sections two and three,

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of how Philanax is captured. These narrate Philanax’s enraged attempt to avenge the death of his brother—during which he kills Amphialus’s squire, Ismenus—and his subsequent capture. Although the chapter could be read for a moral like the truism that anger breeds rash decisions, the epitome makes explicit a connection between morality and military leadership: the passive virtue of declining to act on anger is a necessary moral part of military strategy. After we read the downfall of Philanax, the paratext returns us to Sidney’s original narrative order, which recounts the personal exploits of the black knight, his single combat with Amphialus, and, most important, how that single combat almost costs Amphialus the entire battle: Amphialus is distracted by his single combat with the black knight, and his army is nearly surrounded and cut off from its retreat into the castle by the king’s besieging army. Only at the end does the topical index direct us back to the wider strategic view of the battle. In this way, the order the summary imposes on Sidney’s chapter gives rhetorical emphasis to the tide of the battle overall. Thus, reading the chapter as the apparatus directs us to, we cannot miss the premise that the actions of the noble officers affect the outcomes of whole battles, and so the ethical obligations of their conduct extend beyond their private commitments to honor. This is one of several ways in which the 1590 edition’s editorial apparatus constructs Amphialus as a negative exemplar.68 Amphialus’s strategy completely succumbs to conflicting passions in the next chapter, where his love for Philoclea trumps his anger at Philanax for having slain his beloved squire. In a sense, Amphialus becomes an example of the flaws in his own “art of men,” in that he demonstrates how a dangerous passion that might be counted upon for its salutory effects—namely the anger that strengthens Amphialus’s valor—can be completely overthrown by another passion—love. The summary sets out the cause before the effect: “1The Love-divining dreame of Amphialus song to Philoclea. 2Philanax his captivitie, and deaths-doome, 3for Philocleas sake turnde to life and libertie” (Sig. Mm8v). Of course, Sidney’s narrative frames Amphialus’s change of disposition toward Philanax in chivalric terms: hearing Philoclea’s plea to spare Philanax at the moment he is about to pronounce Philanax’s doom, “Amphialus turned quite the fourme of his pretended speech, and yeelded [Philanax] humble thankes, that by his meanes he had come to that happinesse, as to receive a commaundment of his Ladie: and therefore he wilingly gave him libertie” (Sig. Nn4). But the triumph of Amphialus’s chivalry is also to be short-lived. The interrogation of chivalry is augmented by the way the 1590 Arcadia divides the chapters of book three into a clearly structured pattern. Eight chapters in the middle, eleven through eighteen, are divided into three

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functional groups. In the first, chapters eleven through thirteen, the depiction of chivalric combat progresses through the three phases—the chivalric combat between Phalantus and Amphialus in chapter eleven, the tragic combat between Argalus and Amphialus in chapter twelve, and the parodic combat between the boor Dametas and the coward Clinias in chapter thirteen—which have been discussed by Lindheim.69 The chapter thirteen heading draws attention to the parody, noting of the combatants “Their actions in it, not so doubty, as their fortune doubtfull” (Sig. Pp8v). The third functional group, chapters sixteen and seventeen, represents symbolically and in pageants the death of chivalry in Amphialus’s unwitting slaying of the disguised Parthenia (Argalus’s distraught widow), and it is sandwiched between the members of the second functional group, chapters fifteen and eighteen, in which a historiographical overview of siege warfare ultimately demonstrates the ineffectuality of knights engaging in single combat—something of a more emotionally intense reminder of the lesson expounded in chapter eight. The chapter fifteen summary seems to valorize the force of single knights, recounting “1Proude Anaxius breaketh through the besiegers . . . 5The sallie of Anaxius and his on the Basilians, 6backt by Amphialus, 7beaten backe by three unknowen Knightes,” but already the focus is shifting away from heroic single deeds to military tactics (304r). And the chapter eighteen summary ensures that we see masses of soldiers overwhelming “the heroicall monomachy” of Amphialus and the Black Knight [Musidorus]: the summary concludes with “10Amphialus rescued by Anaxius brethren, the Blacke Knight by the greene and white. 11The supply of both sides to cary away the breathles Knights. 12The Blackknights grieves.” Member eleven refers to soldiers sent by Cecropia and Philanax into the melee—the last formal chivalric combat of the revised Arcadia. More to the point, the brief member twelve gives short shrift to an extensive account in Sidney’s narrative of Musidorus’s efforts to remain disguised even as he is carried off the field, his concern for the princess Pamela, and above all his honor. That is, where Sidney’s text retains some of the ornaments of chivalric narrative, the chapter summary effaces them to emphasize the ineffectuality of single combat. Finally, the third group of chapters, chapters sixteen and seventeen, delivers the coup de grâce to chivalry in Amphialus’s unwitting slaying of Parthenia, who fights disguised as the Knight of the Tomb. Indeed, the center of book three in the 1590 edition, and the symbol of the death of chivalry therein, is the empty bordered space at the end of chapter sixteen, left for the epitaph on the tomb of Argalus and Parthenia. The chapter summary itself has no designation for the empty space, but readers responded directly to it: both Huntington Library copies of 1590 Arcadia, as well as two other

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extant copies, contain handwritten versions of the epitaph, as it appeared in the 1593 Arcadia and in subsequent editions, within their empty borders.70 Amphialus’s demise in courtly/pastoral pursuits is spread across book three: no chapter in book three of the 1590 Arcadia after the sixth is solely devoted to pastoral discourse. We glimpse Amphialus playing the lover throughout book three (chapters two, four, nine, twelve, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty-four), but lovers are supposed to be spurned by their beloveds, so his failures as a character are successes as a literary persona. Only near the end of Amphialus’s part in book three, after he has unintentionally slain Argalus, Parthenia, and his own mother, do we see the failure of pastoral itself as Amphialus inhabits it. The pastoral elegy in which Amphialus’s subjects lament his death, “Since that to death is gone the shepheard hie,” marks the demise of the pastoral mode in the 1590 Arcadia: nothing pastoral follows this poem.71 Its appearance at the end of chapter twenty-five seems to be partly Sidney’s and partly Greville’s choice. The poem was originally written for the fourth eclogues of the Old Arcadia where it mourned the supposed death of Basilius. It is not clear that when Sidney revised, he intended to use this particular elegy to mourn Amphialus, for the Cambridge manuscript of the revised Arcadia leaves a blank space where the 1590 edition prints the poem. On the other hand, it seems clear that Sidney did intend some poem for this spot, for both the Cambridge manuscript and the 1590 Arcadia contain the sentence that introduces the elegy, “Among the rest, one acounted good in that kinde . . . roared out a song of Lamentation, which . . . was gathered up in this forme” (Sig. Yy2). The 1593 and subsequent editions of the Arcadia omit both the introductory sentence and the elegy (restoring the elegy to the fourth eclogues). Thus, only in the 1590 Arcadia is Amphialus honored by a poem, and furthermore, only in the 1590 Arcadia is that poem a pastoral elegy. In contrast to Amphialus, the princesses are the only positive exemplars of virtuous conduct in the face of the vicissitudes of a fallen world. They represent the two paths to virtuous conduct laid out in A Letter to an Honorable Lady: first, absolute ignorance of evil and a corresponding incapacity to commit evil; and second, a clear intellectual apprehension of the good combined with the will not to commit evil. In Greville’s thinking, these are simultaneously ways to overcome the two passions that make people susceptible to evil: hope and fear. To be ignorant of evil is to be immune from hoping to gain by performing evil, and to know the good is, in Platonic fashion, to know better than to fear evil. Thus Greville seeks to inoculate his “honorable lady” against hope and fear, the “two false rudders” that (mis) govern worldly affairs (156).

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Greville lays out the way of the innocent by comparing it to the ways of the fallen in A Letter : For the restlesse confusion of error hath this plague, that her peace must be still in the power of others; where nature hath placed both the way, and the guide of true peace within our selves. But who are they that can walke this milkie way? Not those unconsant spiritts, which are wandered into the wildernesse of desire; nor those, whose uglie prospect is unrepentant horror; whose senses are but spies of conscience upon their faults; their reasons purchased into bondage by offers of ther servant-affections; and whose informinge consciences stand, like tormentors, with stained tables, to give in open evidence of secret deformitie. No Madame! This milken way is for those single, and simple spirritts, who foolish, and ignorant in evill, thincke the passage to it harde, if not impossible; or when they idlie slippe, do yet recover with a regenerate industrie; not joyinge, as those other vagabond soules, after they have deceived themselves, to stray abroad, and deceive others. (140−41) It is of course Philoclea who is “simple” and “ignorant in evill” and who “thincke[s] the passage to it hard.” As Sidney describes her, she is “in their degree of well doing, to whom the not knowing of evill serveth for a ground of vertue, and hold their inward powers in better forme with an unspotted simplicitie, then many, who rather cunningly seeke to know what goodness is, then willingly take into themselves the following of it” (Sig. Q3). The parallels suggest strongly that Greville has Philoclea in mind when he describes the “milkie way” of the innocent to his Honorable Lady. The chapter summaries describe Philoclea accordingly. When, for example, Amphialus pleads his love to her in book three, chapter three, Philoclea gives him a “pitifull answere” (Sig. Kk5). She offers “maidenly resistance” to Cecropia’s subsequent persuasions to marry Amphialus (Sig. Ll3v). Even at her most active in the chapter summaries, she remains passive, as the chapter twelve summary recounts: “Philocleas il-taking Amphialus wel-meaning.” Here Philoclea has a decision to make, how to receive Amphialus’s “rather suppliaunt, then victorious” posture before her when he has defeated Phalantus, yet it is Amphialus who initiates the action by posing as submissive; Philoclea merely chooses how to react (Sig. Pp1v). When Cecropia attempts to coerce Philoclea by proposing to kill her sister, the summary reads “Philoclea threatened, persisteth,” and when Zelmane proposes that she feign interest in Amphialus in order to put off her own execution at Cecropia’s hands, we hear of “Philoclea’s resolution rather to dye then dissemble” (Sigs. Tt8v, Uu4).

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Pamela, on the other hand, is not merely innocent and ignorant. Her path to virtuous conduct is much more self-aware and more conscious of evil than Philoclea’s path, so she is something akin to the fictional exemplar that Greville would have his Honorable Lady follow. Only because she is herself virtuous can Pamela discern vicious from virtuous behavior: as Greville argues, “as the straight line showes both it selfe, and the crooked, so doth an upright course of life yeeld all true wayes of advantage, and by masteringe our owne affections, anatomizeth all inferior passions.”72 The 1590 Arcadia points out the “straight” and “crooked” lines especially clearly in the scenes where Pamela confronts her evil aunt Cecropia. The book three, chapter six summary sets up “2Cecropias new fetch to attempt Pamela. 3Pamelas prayer, 4 and Sainct-like graces in it. 5Her Auntes fruiteles arguments” (Sig. Ll7). Later, when Cecropia returns in chapter ten to conclude her argument, we read of “4The Auntes Atheisme 5refuted by the Neeces Divinitie” (Sig. Nn5v). Thus the 1590 Arcadia is designed to help readers understand virtue as well as Pamela does. The other part of self-aware virtuous conduct lies in the need to discern when to act. Greville generally advocates inaction—choosing not to react might be a better way of putting it—over retaliation against wrongs. This applies to Pamela’s refusal to be part of the plot of Artesia and Clinias, abetted by Zelmane, to poison Amphialus and attempt an escape. Indeed the plot is “bewrayed by Pamela” (Sig. Qq5) directly to Cecropia. Against the “straight” line of Pamela’s behavior, the conduct of Clinias, Artesia, and, of greatest moral interest, Zelmane, is clearly “crooked.” The exemplarity of the princesses’ conduct is most forcefully displayed in book three, chapter twenty, where the topical index provided by the chapter summary re-orders narrative events, much like in chapter eight, in order to emphasize right conduct under duress. The summary reads: 2

The sweete resistance of the true sisters 1to the sower assaultes of their false Aunt. The whipping of 3Philoclea 5and Pamela. 4The patience of both 6and passions for their lovers. (Sig. Tt5v) In the text itself, the numbered sections are not simply paragraphs, and they follow neither ascending order nor the order laid out in the heading: the numbered sections are 1, 3, 4, 6, 5, 4. The superscripted numbers direct us initially to section two of the chapter, which recounts how the princesses resist Cecropia’s attempts to break their wills by making them uncomfortable and even starving them. Next, the summary directs us back to section one, which tells us of Cecropia’s intentions, as well as her gentler methods of persuasion: gifts and flattery. Then we are guided to section three, in which Cecropia, driven to “absolute tyrannies” by her “abominable rage,” has

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Philoclea scourged; Philoclea begs to die rather than to marry Amphialus or to be tortured more. In section five we find similar tortures visited on Pamela, as well as her quintessentially Stoic response: “Thou mayst well wrack this silly body, but me thou canst never overthrow. For my part, I will not do thee the pleasure to desire death of thee: but assure thyself, both my life and death, shall triumph with honour, laying shame on thy detestable tyranny” (Sig. Tt8). This is exactly the principle that Greville would have his Lady apply in response to the tyrannies of her husband. Next, the summary directs us again to the patience of the princesses in section four—and there are two section fours, one in the middle of the chapter and one at the end. In the first section four, Philoclea’s patience is “like a fair gorgeous armour, hammered upon by an ill-favored Smith” (Sig. Tt7v). In the second section four, Pamela is “conquering” her torturers “with her suffering” (Sig. Tt8). Only in the penultimate section, numbered six, are we to read of the princesses’ inward passions for their lovers. The “patience” of both “true sisters” named in member four of the summary brings together the two paths to virtue in the face of evil that Greville had outlined in A Letter. Philoclea is patient because she is innocent, and Pamela because she knows and lives by the Christian-Stoic moral code explained in A Letter. And just as the chapter twenty summary mirrors the Stoic model of human action proposed by A Letter, so its language echoes that of the same passages in A Letter. The Arcadian princesses offer “sweet resistance” to the “sour assaults” of their aunt, while Greville’s Lady is counseled to rely on her “moderate sweet humours” against the “inward assaults” of her own passions (142). In each case, “sweet” denotes the disposition of the lady in question—a disposition toward passive resistance deemed appropriate for women. Finally, the 1590 Arcadia asks its readers to compare the furious combats of its closing chapters to the passive virtue displayed by the princesses as it tilts the comparison in favor of passive resistance. Once Cecropia is dead and Amphialus has been carried off, the brutal Anaxius becomes the central villain of the narrative, and he and his brothers Zoilus and Lycurgus decide to rape their captives, which proves their undoing. In the penultimate chapter, after dispatching the would-be rapist Zoilus, Zelmane attacks Lycurgus. Sidney’s narrative clearly makes an epic allusion to the end of the Aeneid here. We recall that just as Aeneas is about to show mercy to Turnus, he spies the belt, “glittering with familiar studs” that Turnus had taken from Pallas, the son of Aeneas’ ally Evander. Inflamed with rage, Aeneas plunges his sword into Turnus, crying “It is Pallas / Who strikes, who sacrifices you, who takes / this payment from your shameless blood.”73 Zelmane likewise hears Lycurgus plead for mercy and is moved, but becomes newly enraged

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when s/he sees one of Philoclea’s jewels and declares “It is Philoclea that sends thee this stroke” as s/he dispatches Lycurgus. Sidney pointedly alludes to the Aeneid, but the chapter summary effaces the parallel, noting only that “4Lycurgus pointed to kill, 5is fought withal, 6foiled, 7&killed.” Thus the paratext of the 1590 Arcadia reduces an epic parallel to a new low point in the narrative. Chivalric codes are neither warranted nor followed at this point: the golden age is long gone, leaving behind only the debased pastoral elegy for Amphialus, and even heroic single combat is reduced to mere slaughter. *

*

*

The 1590 Arcadia exhibits the poetics of immanence through its carefully constructed editorial apparatus, but as we have just seen, it excludes the possibility of redemption from among the consequences of one world irrupting into another. In spite of the “plaine compasse” structures that complement the “entertangle” structures of the discursive modes comprising the 1590 Arcadia, the movement drifts steadily away from pastoral order into the kind of disorder that only historiographical discursive modes can adequately render. In counterpoint to the orderly rhetorical and syntactical structures of Sidney’s prose, the stripping away of magnificence, nobility, courtliness, and the rest of the vestiges of civility is emphasized by the editorial apparatus of the 1590 Arcadia. The final chapter summary ends midsentence, just as the text of the 1590 Arcadia ends, in the middle of a desperate and angry battle between a would-be rapist, Anaxius, and a prince whose desires very nearly led him to attempt rape, Pyrocles. Greville’s vision of a poetics of immanence, then, is one in which the gulf of moral chaos gapes beneath the surface of every act, and that chasm eventually swallows every action. In such a perilous moral universe, the “compasse” and “entertangle” modes of organization imposed on the modes of narration in the Arcadia confront the reader with the multifarious ways that moral chasms may open up at one’s feet, inculcating an eternal vigilance, though no worldly hope. One wonders what Sidney’s influence on literature might have been had it rested more completely on the 1590 Arcadia. As it happened, however, the 1590 quarto heralded a rush into print of all things Sidney and more than a few things riding Sidneian coattails.

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CHAPTER 2

The Performance of Astrophel and Stella in the 1591 Quartos

Why Study the 1591 Quartos? The two quartos of Astrophel and Stella published in 1591 for Thomas Newman started the late Elizabethan sonnet craze. Although Astrophel and Stella was not the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence in English, it was obviously the most influential. Between 1591 and 1609, the year in which Shakespeare’s sonnets were published, about forty sonnet sequences were published, so various in form that no single definition of a “sonnet sequence” is quite adequate.1 While the Elizabethans recognized the difference between fourteen-line poems with particular rhyme schemes and other lyric forms, they used the term “sonnet” to comprise all those kinds. In the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella , in fact, the fourteen-line “sonnets” go without labels or numbers, but the poems we call Sidney’s “songs” are labeled “sonnets,” including the fifteen-stanza, ninety-line song v. Sonnet sequences in my count comprise mostly standard sonnets arranged in groups and divided by shorter sections of more variable poetry, frequently designated “odes,” “madrigals,” “pastorals,” or “songs.” More to my point, the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella influenced the development of aesthetic principles in Elizabethan sonnet sequences far more than the “authorized” edition of the sequence printed in the 1598 folio of Sidney’s works. As Michael Spiller notes, “the sonnet craze was concentrated in four years, from 1593 to 1597,” and by the time of the 1598 folio, at least twenty-six (thirty-one including augmented editions) of the

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English sonnet sequences following Astrophel and Stella had already been published.2 Thus it is surprising that the 1591 quartos have not been studied more closely. But the reasons are clear on a closer consideration: even before William A. Ringler’s 1962 edition of The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney made the case on an exhaustive collation of texts, literary scholars typically considered the 1591 quartos unreliable witnesses to Philip Sidney’s final intentions. Literary criticism, following the conventional paradigm, need not concern itself with the merely corrupt 1591 quartos because textual scholarship has already determined their insignificance. The folly of this position, determined largely by the way literary scholarship divides itself into the subdisciplines of textual scholarship and criticism, is manifest. The failure to understand the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella as literary works deprives literary history of a clear understanding of two of the most influential books of an English sonnet sequence ever printed. The remedy is to examine the 1591 quartos themselves and to ask where they fit into our understanding of the aesthetics of Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Such a study requires an examination of the main accounts of the transmission of Astrophel and Stella from manuscript into the first two quartos. The starting place must be Ringler’s stemma, which reconstructs three main branches in the transmission of Astrophel and Stella: the X branch, the most reliable tradition from which the Bright manuscript and the 1598 folio edition derive; the Y branch, the next most reliable tradition from which the Drummond manuscript and many corrections made in the second 1591 quarto edition (Q2) derive; and the Z branch, the least reliable tradition from which the Houghton manuscript and the first 1591 quarto of Astrophel and Stella (Q1) derive. Thus the first part of this chapter uses Ringler’s stemma as a guide to the agents most likely to have contributed to bringing Astrophel and Stella into the print marketplace. Next I examine the Astrophel and Stella rendered in the first two quartos, but since we understand Astrophel and Stella through Ringler’s edition of Sidney’s poetry (which uses the 1598 folio as its copy text), I discuss the quartos using the terms Ringler designates.3 The sequence in the quartos tends to foreground the narrative implied in Astrophel and Stella , as a reading of the first quarto presentation of sonnets 71−86 demonstrates. Also, the way that both 1591 quartos gather the songs into a separate section reveals a significant dialogue on poetics that influenced subsequent sonnet sequences. Last, the division of the quartos into parts (Sidney’s sonnets, Sidney’s songs, and in the first quarto, the poetry of sundry other writers) set patterns that many books of poetry printed in the 1590s followed and elaborated. Finally, this chapter glances at some significant sequences that followed Astrophel and Stella in the early 1590s.

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The Performance of Astrophel and Stella ●

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Who Leaked Astrophel and Stella? The name that crops up most consistently in the investigation of the transmission of manuscripts resulting in Q1 is Sir John Harington of Kelston, but the paths that lead to him are devious. Harington can be linked to the Z branch of the stemma, from which Q1 descends. Q1 prints all of Astrophel and Stella except sonnet 37 (one of the few that pun on the name Rich, the married name of Penelope Devereux, once betrothed to Philip Sidney), parts of songs viii and x, and song xi entirely. It prints the songs in a section separate from the sonnets—unlike the “authorized” 1598 folio and the witnesses to the most reliable manuscript traditions (the Bright and the Drummond manuscripts), in which the songs are interspersed among sonnets 63−105. Q1 also includes a dedication to Francis Flower from the stationer Thomas Newman; an introduction by Thomas Nashe; and its third part comprises poems from Samuel Daniel, Thomas Campion, Fulke Greville, and at least one other poet. By September 18, 1591, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, had apparently ordered Newman’s quarto called in.4 Before the end of the year, however, another quarto appeared, Q2, with a partially corrected text of Astrophel and Stella and lacking both the prefatory material and the additional poems of Daniel et al. The corrections derive from a manuscript descended from the more accurate Y branch of the stemma, they extend only through sonnet 95, and they do not correct any songs. Even though the corrections come from a manuscript in the tradition that intersperses the songs among the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella, Q2 maintains the same sequence of poems as Q1 and likewise lacks sonnet 37. One of Harington’s associates, and a poet who may be connected to both 1591 quartos, is Samuel Daniel; however, Daniel cannot be linked directly to the Z branch of the stemma. Still, Daniel may well have had access to the Drummond manuscript of Astrophel and Stella (one of the most reliable manuscripts and a witness to the Y branch of the stemma). Daniel’s patron, Sir Edward Dymoke, owned the Drummond manuscript. Daniel had been one of Dymoke’s clients since at least 1584, and he was traveling in Italy with Dymoke during at least some part of Dymoke’s visit (some period of time between March 1590 and November 1591), during which he met the Italian poet Giovanni Battista Guarini.5 H. R. Woudhuysen speculates that Daniel and Dymoke may have shown Guarini the Drummond manuscript or a relative of it in defense of the quality of English poetry.6 Since a manuscript from the Y tradition was used for the corrections to Q2, Daniel may be implicated. Moreover, the Daniel poems printed in Q1 derive from an authorial manuscript, which likewise adds to the likelihood that Daniel was somehow involved with the publication of the 1591 quartos (377). And yet,

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while it is reasonable to suspect Daniel’s involvement, several facts militate against concluding that Daniel stands behind Q1. First, Daniel complains in the dedication to his sonnet sequence Delia of having been “betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer” who had printed a poorly edited version of his poems, and that Sidney likewise “had indured the like misfortune.”7 Second, Daniel may well have been in Italy with Dymoke when Q1 was being printed: Q1 was called in during September 1591, but we have no evidence that Dymoke returned from Italy until November 1591; thus we would have to imagine Dymoke returning in spring or summer 1591, or Daniel returning before his employer. Neither seems a great stretch, but we lack direct evidence. Third, we have no direct evidence that Daniel had access to an Astrophel and Stella manuscript in the Z tradition. Woudhuysen speculates that in 1591 Daniel may have worked with Harington, whose manuscript of Astrophel and Stella does descend from the Z branch. The most prominent piece of evidence Woudhuysen produces in support of this theory is that Harington wrote an undated epigram: “my good friend Master Samuel Daniel” (379−81)— a clear link between Harington and Daniel, but certainly not direct evidence that Harington lent Daniel his copy of Astrophel and Stella. Another case that Abraham Fraunce had a hand in the publication of the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella is still more tenuous, though in Roger Kuin’s hands it yields a witty literary detective story and points toward other links in the circulation of Sidneian manuscripts. Fraunce clearly had access to a manuscript of Astrophel and Stella from the most reliable X branch of the stemma, possibly the Countess of Pembroke’s personal copy, for he cites it in his 1588 Arcadian Rhetoricke. But like the case against Daniel, the case against Fraunce rests ultimately on the question of how he might have obtained a manuscript from the Z tradition. Kuin, who suspects Philip Sidney’s friend Edward Dyer owned a key manuscript witness to the Z tradition, points out that Fraunce claimed to have a somewhat familiar relationship with Dyer. Fraunce had at least dedicated an early manuscript version of his 1588 A Lawiers Logike, called The Shepheards Logike, to Dyer, and his previous dedications of works to members of the Sidney family seemed to have gotten him access to an excellent manuscript of Astrophel and Stella. So perhaps Fraunce borrowed and copied Dyer’s Z manuscript.8 Perhaps Fraunce owned his copy of Astrophel and Stella even before he asked the countess for permission to quote from her copy of the sonnets in his 1588 The Arcadian Rhetorike: one can imagine a scenario in which Fraunce, with the Arcadian Rhetorike project in mind, asks the countess if he may quote from his poor copy of Sir Philip’s poems, and the countess, feeling magnanimous, tells him to use her copy since it is of higher quality.

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From this point, Kuin’s story accelerates. Fraunce may have known Thomas Nashe, who wrote the preface for Q1, from a brief window of time during which both men attended St. John’s College, Cambridge. And at some point in 1591, Kuin supposes, Fraunce and Nashe may have met in London, during which Fraunce ill-advisedly lent Nashe his copy of Astrophel and Stella, which Nashe instantly transported to his disreputable printer friend, John Charlewood. The relationships among the printers, Charlewood and John Danter, and the stationer Thomas Newman, under whose imprimatur the first two quartos appeared, has been well-documented.9 And, as Newman explains in his preface to the first quarto, “I have used their helpe and advice in correcting & restoring [Astrophel and Stella] to his first dignitie, that I knowe were of skill and experience in those matters” (Sig. A2v). That is, Newman sought editorial help from poets—like Daniel or Fraunce. Another aspect of the first quarto, its dedication to Francis Flower, a fairly successful Elizabethan administrative functionary of questionable ethics, has been studied by Germaine Warkentin, who thinks the dedication to Flower incensed the Sidney family and caused the taking in of the first quarto. Warkentin helpfully focuses our attention on Q1 as a physical object, a book, as opposed to a text. She argues that Sidney’s sainted name was not to be spotted by association with such a shady fellow as Flower: “[T]he first quarto of Astrophel and Stella juxtaposed these courtly values [embodied at Wilton and Penshurst] and those of the vulpine administrative world in which Francis Flower functioned, joining in what must have been a very distasteful union the honoured name of the ‘secretary to the Muses’ [Philip Sidney] and that of the unattractive petty functionary [Flower].”10 Kuin and Woudhuysen dispute Warkentin’s claim on the grounds that Flower was less disreputable than Warkentin claims, and they offer alternative reasons for the calling in of Q1.11 Yet Kuin’s and Warkentin’s theories share a common assumption that, as Kuin puts it, “an extreme devotion to the memory of St Philip and his ideals” drove an inner, aristocratic circle centered on the Countess of Pembroke herself to move Lord Burleigh to call in the first quarto, as he did in September 1591.12 Woudhuysen circumspectly asserts only that if the Sidney family were, in fact, aggrieved by some aspect of Q1, “[T]they were not alone in their objections.”13 Indeed not: as Warkentin herself demonstrates, Burleigh distrusted Flower. In July 1582, he wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham warning against entrusting fiduciary responsibilities to Flower: I wish you to have some regard to y t I here secretly, y t Mr Flower thynketh by his Mr favor, to be ye mynt master, which if it shuld be, I shuld

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thynk any thing may pass unorderly, he hath all redy incroched upon ye custody of her Maty tresor of ye first fructes, kepying the same in his own handes w t out controllment . . . I have bene loth to compleyn herin, but I think therby I do not my duty.14 Were Harington involved in the printing of Q1, he may have felt some obligation toward Flower himself, and, as Woudhuysen observes, he wrote in Flower’s defense in 1596.15 There is no direct evidence that anyone other than Burleigh himself acted in calling in Q1, and Burleigh’s letter shows a distinct animus against Flower. Perhaps Burleigh had Q1 called in simply to demonstrate that a dedication to Flower had no power to protect a stationer. This scenario supposes that Burleigh nursed at least a nine-year grudge, which, considered in light of the brutal and often-petty factional politics of the late Elizabethan court, is at least plausible. Perhaps, on the other hand, it was Fulke Greville who was aggrieved by Q1. The first quarto printed his poem, “Faction that ever dwelles, in Court where wit excelles, hath set his defiance,” which is itself a reminder of grudges: Greville languished in the courts of Elizabeth and James I largely because of the antipathy of Burleigh’s son, Robert Cecil, upon whose death in 1612 Greville’s career accelerated rapidly. Q1 misattributes the poem to “E.O.,” presumably the Earl of Oxford—the villain in Greville’s well-known account of the great tennis-court spat that earned Philip Sidney a dressing-down from his queen. Greville was notoriously close with all his poetry, so perhaps the printing of his poem incensed him, or perhaps its attribution to Oxford annoyed him. And, given Greville’s expressed desire that only Sidney’s most serious works (the lost translation of Du Bartas, for example) be published, perhaps hindering the publication of Astrophel and Stella suited his agenda. In spite of the inconclusiveness of attempts to explain the transmission of texts of Astrophel and Stella that eventuated in the 1591 quartos, a few significant patterns emerge. First, the inner circle was almost certainly not coterminous with higher social rank: more than likely, Harington, Dyer, or Dymoke allowed a manuscript to be copied; all were outranked by Greville and the countess. Second, regardless of whether Daniel was betrayed as he claims, his reputation and ambitions were well-served by being published in Syr P.S. his Astrophel and Stella, and he found patronage from Harington, Dymoke, and Greville.16 Third, the degree of betrayal felt especially by those close to Sidney (Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Fulke Greville, perhaps Dyer) remains unclear; there is no direct evidence that any of them was involved in calling in a quarto of Astrophel and Stella. Moreover, the printing of Astrophel and Stella presented them with opportunities of which they

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later took advantage. Fourth, even as Astrophel and Stella disseminated from some kind of “inner circle” to an “outer circle,” it took on a particular form in the 1591 quartos, which was displaced only by the 1598 folio. Finally, while we cannot be certain exactly who was responsible for which parts of the publication of the 1591 quartos, we can assign their authority within the confines of a fairly small group of people, and we can assign to those people degrees of likelihood of involvement: Thomas Newman and Thomas Nashe with certainty; Sir John Harington of Kelston and Samuel Daniel with very great likelihood; and with decreasing degrees of likelihood Edward Dymoke, Edward Dyer, Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, Fulke Greville, and Abraham Fraunce. Interpretations of Astrophel and Stella arising from within this group shaped the 1591 quartos and one significant manuscript of the poems closely related to the quartos. Interlude: Shuffling Astrophel and Stella To prepare to read the 1591 quartos, it is worthwhile to glance at yet another arrangement of Astrophel and Stella poems. The only remotely complete manuscript witness to the Z tradition of Astrophel and Stella, the Houghton manuscript (Ho), has not been interpreted from any perspective other than those of enumerative and analytical bibliography.17 Even more directly than it has in the investigation of the printing of the 1591 quartos, the name of John Harington turns up in an examination of Ho. Harington’s name is mentioned in a note about Kelston in the manuscript, and we know that the manuscript was owned by William Briton of Kelston. Besides the extrinsic links to the Harington household it shares with the 1591 quartos, the Houghton manuscript of the sonnet sequence shares intrinsic qualities with the quartos. It presents only the fourteen-line sonnets from Astrophel and Stella, and therefore demonstrates that its compiler distinguished between the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella and the songs.18 It also groups the poems differently than either the 1598 folio or the 1591 quartos, and therefore asks us to imagine some principle or principles by which it organizes its sonnets. Last, it is the most complete manuscript witness to the Z branch of the Astrophel and Stella stemma; Ringler surmises, based on the fact that it is more accurate than Q1, that it is an ancestor. In Ho, the sonnets are arranged in three groups. The first consists of sonnets 1, 6−8, 10, 22, 31−32, 34, 38, 44, and 47, in that order. The second consists of 3−4, 49−54, 56, 55, and 57−108, in that order. The third consists of 2, 5, 9, 11−21, 23, 26−27, 29−30, 33, 36, 39, 41−43, and 48, in that order. Because the order of each group in Ho is sequential—with the exception of the reversal in the order of sonnets 55 and 56, which is repeated in

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the 1591 quartos—we know that Ho derives from a source wherein all the fourteen-line sonnets are in the same order as in all the witnesses we have to the sequence as a whole. But just as clearly, the sonnets have been grouped in some way. The first group contains some of Astrophel and Stella’s hexameter sonnets (1, 6, 8), several of the better poems with themes of light and darkness or nocturnal/sleep themes (7, 22, 31−32, 38), and some that display Astrophil in dialogue with himself (34, 47). The second contains the majority of the narrative development of the affair between Astrophel and Stella in 57−108, while sonnets 3 and 4 admirably frame two major themes within which the affair unfolds (the problem of Astrophil’s sincerity and the difficulty he has in truly loving virtue). Perhaps the third grouping manifests themes as well—it exhibits several with Anacreontic themes and several others that allude pointedly to life at court, namely 23, 26, 27, 30, and 41. Or perhaps it is a gathering of sonnets that did not fit, in the compiler’s judgment, with the other two gatherings. The manuscript omits all the sonnets that pun on “Rich,” Penelope Devereux’s married name (24, 35, and 37), as well as five other poems. Ho demonstrates clearly that someone fairly close to Harington—if not Harington himself—felt no compunction at rearranging Astrophel and Stella poems. Such freedom suggests the kind of fluidity demonstrated in scribal and coterie publication by Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, and others.19 The fact that, in each of the three groups of the Houghton manuscript, the poems are copied in what we would call ascending order does not necessarily mean that the compiler was attempting to preserve an aspect of the order of the manuscript from which he was copying. Compilers of commonplaces and the like tended very strongly to proceed from front to back of the codices from which they were copying.20 Annotations often follow the same pattern: much like we see in many a used book, annotations tend to be heaviest toward the beginning of a codex and to peter out toward the end, all other factors being equal. Still, the compiler of Ho omitted every poem (except perhaps song viii) that puns on the name “Rich,” which indicates an impulse to preserve that name as the object of a nondisseminating desire for a closed circle, and the selection of poems in the second sequence in Ho indicates a clear awareness of the narrative suggested by Astrophel and Stella. The Houghton manuscript forces us to delimit a middle ground between the most monolithic interpretations of Astrophel and Stella as a work of literature (one of the most important examples of which is A. C. Hamilton’s contention that it is “a single poem”) and the extremely fluid model of poems in manuscript circulation posited by Love, Marotti, et al.21 The compiler of Ho seems to have followed the Sturmian notion that detailed attention to each part of a work must be complemented by a grasp of the whole, as I discussed

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in chapter one. In Ho, an appreciation of a narrative implied by the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella limits and shapes the fluidity of the compiler’s rewriting of the poem(s). Moreover, even a fairly casual process of selection and arrangement of Astrophel and Stella poems is driven by active interpretations and an attempt not to stray too far from Sidney’s intentions, as well as by a decisive awareness of potential audiences. Astrophil’s Stolen Kiss in Q1 Q1, the quarto most closely associated with Sir John Harington’s household and the Z manuscript tradition, foregrounds the narrative implied in Astrophel and Stella in the 107 sonnets it prints separately from the ten songs. Moreover, it sets up a model with several significant consequences for interpreting the poetry of the 1590s, beginning with the kind of early modern subject that emerges in its sonnets: some important moments in the portrayal of Astrophil as a fundamentally self-divided subject are lacking in Q1. Although Q1 and Q2 differ in many places from the 1598 folio and Ringler’s text, in ways that indicate editorial intent, I have narrowed the focus here in the interest of producing a significant reading of Astrophel and Stella rather than a catalog of these particular variants as distinguished from obvious errors. A crucial part of the affair is dramatized most fully in the series of poems consisting of sonnets 71 and 72, song ii, and sonnet 73; A. C. Hamilton goes so far as to claim that sonnets 71 and 72 are “as carefully written as the allegorical cores of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.”22 In sonnet 71, Astrophil praises Stella’s virtue but cannot silence the famous cry of desire, “give me some food” (l. 14). In 72, he tries to banish his old friend Desire but wavers, asking dramatically “how shall” desire be banished? (l. 14). In song ii, he steals a kiss from the sleeping Stella, and he celebrates his stolen kiss in the face of Stella’s anger in sonnet 73. The folio version of these sonnets presents sonnet 73 in the past tense, so that it refers clearly to the events narrated in song ii. Yet in the first two quartos, we may easily infer the unfolding narrative without the lacking song ii, because in sonnet 73 Astrophil tells us in the present tense that “a sugared kisse, / in sport I sucke, while she a sleepe doth lye” (Q1 5−6).23 Moreover, a substantive variant in Q1 changes the familiar conclusion to sonnet 72 in a way that helps us make the leap from Astrophil’s failure to banish desire in sonnet 72 directly to his having stolen a kiss in 73. Sonnet 72’s well-known couplet, “But thou desire, because thou wouldst have all, / Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?” dramatizes Astrophil’s loss for words at having to suppress his desire for Stella in order to have her. However, in Q1, the conclusion is that desire is banished, “but

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yet within my call” (Q1 14), so that when Astrophil steals a kiss in sonnet 73 we can all the more clearly see him acting on the Desire not-quite-banished in 72.24 The couplet of the folio version of sonnet 72 allows Sidney to fit into a literary-historical narrative in which the divided subject emerges in the voices of sixteenth-century poetry. From a line of argument in which Astrophil is a kind of negative exemplar of the kind of poetics described in the Defense of Poetry, the new historicist appropriation of psychoanalysis as performed in Stephen Greenblatt’s “cultural poetics” and the “cultural work” envisioned by Louis Montrose leads critics to the divided subject emerging from early modern lyric.25 Astrophil’s inconclusive attempt to banish desire, embodied in his half-declamation, half-question “Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?” often signifies to us that “the scene of writing . . . for Sidney is a scene of profound internalized conflict,” in which “the ideological contradictions of the [early modern] period . . . opened a space for the molding of a new form of poetic subjectivity.”26 The subjectivity in question is divided and self-contradictory, it is entranced and frightened by Otherness (feminine, Eastern, tyrannical) that turns out to be one of its constituent elements, and it is enacted in and through a self-contradictory and even self-negating language, and it typically finds its fullest expression in Shakespeare’s sonnets.27 Even when read through the lens of psychoanalytic theory, the emerging subjectivity Astrophel and Stella sonnet 72 is nearly always understood in terms of spiritual failure. For critics who emphasize the ethical implications of the sonnet sequence, and those who use the Apology for Poetry as a model of the poetics of Astrophel and Stella, Astrophil often appears to be a negative exemplar. In one of its more influential forms, Astrophil’s negative exemplarity is set off for us by Stella’s positive example, in her reply to Astrophil in song viii, of “the proper discipline of the passion of desire by reason.”28 But of course Q1 lacks Stella’s reply in song viii. In the Q1 version of sonnet 72, Astrophil does not experience the “profound internalized conflict” seen by Miller and others working in the new historicist vein: his desire is more like a trusty henchman to be kept out of sight until needed than a frightening Other lurking in the recesses of the early modern psyche. Nor is this Astrophil engaged in a desperate spiritual struggle. He is more like a cynical lover trying to hide his motives—the sort who appears dreaming of casting a spell to facilitate the rape of his beloved at the end of Barnabe Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593) or bitterly calumniating the beloved by the end of Thomas Lodge’s Phillis (1593). The variant characterization of desire as banished, “but yet within my call” is unique to Q1, it is not obviously scribal error, and its absence from

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even the Houghton manuscript, descended from the same ancestor as Q1, suggests that it is an emendation devised by the editor of Q1. While we might lament that editor’s lack of appreciation for Sidney’s dramatic flair, we should also recognize his commitment to keeping the narrative of the sequence in view.29 The fact that Q2 restores Astrophil’s dramatic question to sonnet 72 indicates the tension between Q1’s imperative to make narrative sense of the sequence at this juncture and a competing imperative, inherent in the revisions Q2 makes to Q1, either to reproduce Sidney’s text without “error” or to differentiate Q2 from Q1 in an effort to make the text of Q1 appear to be less “authentic.” Another critical juncture in the narrative of the sequence, the series of poems in which Astrophil attempts to force himself on Stella, follows several baisers (poems about kissing) that celebrate the stolen kiss narrated in song ii and sonnet 73 and delineates the high point in the affair (at least from Astrophil’s perspective). By sonnet 84, set on a highway that leads to Stella’s house, Astrophil rhapsodizes on the road “Now blessed you beare onwards blessed me / To her where my heart safliest shall meet” (ll. 5−6), and offers the road a benediction, culminating in the wish that “Hundreds of years you Stellas feete may kisse” (l. 14). Sonnet 85 places Astrophil within sight of Stella’s house, where he makes a sophistical argument that he should enjoy Stella physically, but sonnet 86 begins with Astrophil’s disappointed question, “Alas whence comes this change of lookes”? In the 1598 folio, song iv intervenes between sonnets 85 and 86, and it plays an important narrative role. In song iv, Astrophil plies Stella with a carpe diem theme, Stella refuses him in the refrain “No, no, no, no, my Deare, let be,” and we infer from Astrophil’s questions in the final two stanzas that he has tried to force himself on Stella: He asks “why strive you thus?” exclaims “Leave to Mars the force of hands,” and complains “Wo to me, and do you sweare / Me to hate?” (ll. 43,45, 49−50). Thus when we approach sonnet 86, we are not surprised by “change of lookes” of which Astrophil complains and we find his complaint disingenuous. But if we read sonnets 84−86 in direct sequence with no song iv intervening, as Q1 presents the poems, we reconstruct a different narrative by the same process of inference. Astrophil whistles gaily to himself as he travels to Stella’s house in the encomiastic sonnet 84, then in sonnet 85 he stands in front of his lover’s house anticipating his pleasures, only to be met at the door by a frowning Stella in sonnet 86. The lack of the threat of rape in this section in the quartos makes us all the more sympathetic to Astrophil: why indeed has Stella become unreceptive? Only a few sonnets earlier, in sonnet 82, we were celebrating their kiss. Obviously the Stella of this part of Q1 is more changeable than the Stella of the 1598 folio.

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The other song that carries much of Astrophel and Stella’s narrative burden is the eighth, the trochaic song in the third person in which Astrophil tries to seduce Stella “In a grove most rich of shade.” Stella rejects Astrophil but assures him “In my selfe the smart I try, / Tyran honour doth thus use thee, / Stella’s selfe might not refuse thee.” In the 1598 folio, song viii is one of five songs that intervene between the change of looks in sonnet 86 and Astrophil’s attempt to be penitent in sonnets 87−92. In the folio, sonnet 87 (the first after the sequence of songs) refers to the moment in song viii when Astrophil was forced “By iron lawes of duty to depart” from Stella, and also recounts that “she with me did smart”: both the verbal resonance (“smart”) and the conceptual resonance (“iron lawes of duty” seems to rename “Tyran honour”) place sonnet 87 later in the narrative of the affair than song viii. But in the 1591 quartos, not only is song viii removed to the grouping of “variable verse” poems at the end of the sequence, but also stanzas 18−25, Stella’s sympathetic reply to Astrophil’s solicitations, are missing. Thus, in the quartos, rather than witnessing Astrophil burst into songs because he cannot contain his grief at Stella’s “change of lookes” in sonnet 86, we instead leap ahead in sonnet 87 to the moment he is “forst from Stella ever deere.” Moreover, the few substantive differences between the 1591 version of sonnet 87 and that of 1598 seem to respond to the lack of songs v−ix intervening between sonnets 86 and 87. The most notable difference lies in the nature of the “lawes of duty” that have forced Astrophil to leave Stella. The familiar 1598 version calls these “iron” laws, but Q1 uniquely designates them “Stellæs” laws. The Houghton manuscript has a lacuna at this point, and every other witness has “iron” instead, so we may suppose that the editors of Q1, encountering a lacuna or an illegible word, simply substituted “Stellæs.” But the substitution is reasonably well-considered: in the first quarto, Stella never tells Astrophil that it is “Tyran honour” rather than Stella’s own will that defeats him, which allows the interpolation “Stellas laws” to remain consistent with the developing narrative. Second, whereas the folio version of sonnet 87 tells us that Stella’s eyes “make all my tempests cleere,” the 1591 version tells us that her eyes “make all my temples cleere” (87.3). The tempests of the folio version seem to refer to Astrophil’s intemperate and sustained outburst in song v, in which he ascends a rhetorical gradatio by accusing Stella of being an “ungratefull theife,” a “murdering Tyran,” a “Rebell run away,” a “witch,” and a “Divill” before suggesting to Stella that if she “mend” her “froward mind,” his great poetic skill will turn “these cruell words” into her “praises.” The 1591 quartos, lacking this tirade between sonnets 86 and 87, may well have made the emendation “temples” to reference, on one hand, Stella’s house (which appears in sonnet 85) and on the other, Astrophil’s often-worshipful sonnets.30

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The Poetic Argument of the Songs in the 1591 Quartos: The Matter By this point it should be clear that many emendations to Q1 were made by competent versifiers familiar with Petrarchan conventions. If the 1591 quartos emend sonnets to heighten the sense of a narrative in the sonnets of Astrophel and Stella, they strip the ten “variable verse” songs of their narrative function entirely, relegating them to a separate section after the 107 sonnets.31 The textual scholarship on the first two quartos tells us that the songs lack a significant portion of song viii, as discussed above, they lack several stanzas in song x, and they lack song xi entirely. Their incomplete state alone might be sufficient reason to dismiss their disposition in the 1591 quartos as mere error, but formalists, working from Ringler’s 1962 edition, tend to justify ignoring the 1591 quartos on a rather circular argument instead. “There is every dramatic justification” for ignoring the arrangement of the 1591 quartos in favor of that of the 1598 folio, writes David Kalstone, meaning that the arrangement of the 1598 folio supports his reading of the sequence as an unfolding “drama of Astrophel’s awareness,” which justifies the arrangement of the 1598 folio that Ringler followed.32 This basic understanding of Astrophel and Stella remains influential, providing one dialectical pole for Roland Greene’s narrative-versus-ritual analysis in Post-Petrarchism (1991) and a basis for Heather Dubrow’s argument that the drama of Astrophel and Stella is the interplay of Petrarchism and anti-Petrarchism in Echoes of Desire (1995).33 It is the basis of Thomas P. Roche’s numerological account of Astrophel and Stella and its place among sonnet sequences in Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (1989), and it is the basis for Roger Kuin’s analysis of temporal duration in Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet- Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (1998).34 But again, if we are to understand the influence of Astrophel and Stella on the sonnet craze of the 1590s, we must consider the arrangement of the songs in the 1591 quartos. Whether it was the editors of Q1 or the compiler of some lost manuscript in the Z tradition who grouped the ten songs of the 1591 quartos together, we must ask, to what aesthetic end are they arranged as they are? 35 Reading the ten songs of the first quarto one after the other foregrounds an almost dialectical consideration of two rival poetics: one that emphasizes visual imagery and is often associated with Stella’s face, and one that emphasizes the musical qualities of prosody and is often associated with her voice.36 Although most critics of Astrophel and Stella have taken the sequence as a meditation on poetics, only James Finn Cotter has noticed the prominent role played by the songs, and not even Cotter, distracted as he is by the dogma that the 1591 quarto arrangement must be ignored, notices how clearly the

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1591 quarto sets out one of the earliest and most sustained considerations of poetics in Sidney’s printed oeuvre.37 Instead, Sidney’s much better known comments about energeia (forcibleness; liveliness) in the Defence of Poesy have been turned into a commentary on the poetics of Sidney’s sonnet sequence. There Sidney remarks that, were he a beloved mistress, the English love poetry he has read would fail to “persuade” him that anyone is in love, “so coldly do they apply their fiery speeches.”38 But in 1591, the Defence had not yet been published, and, for everyone except the select few who had read the Defence in manuscript, Sidney’s thoughts on poetics were to be found only in the 1590 Arcadia and in the new quarto of Astrophel and Stella. Songs iii, vi, and vii name the terms of the debate. Song iii poses the question, “O eyes O eares of men, how are you charmed?” That is, how does poetry work on the visual and aural senses?39 The first stanza considers poetry’s aural attractions, beginning with “Orpheus voyce” and Amphion’s lyre, and naturally ending with the greater voice with which “Stella singeth.” The second moves to visual imagery, all illuminated in the conceit of the stanza by the light of love and, of course, outshone, “for Stella shineth.” The third stanza brings the previous two together, in that it addresses the trees and stones moved by poetry’s music in the first stanza as well as the beasts and birds moved by poetry’s light in the second, though it does up the ante. It is unremarkable that trees, stones, beasts, and birds are moved by poetry, for they, unlike human beings, lack reason. The question, then, is not only how poetry moves human eyes and ears, but how its charm overcomes reason. Song vi complicates the debate by claiming that visual beauty and musical charm are intertwined effects: “each while each contends, / It selfe to other lends.” The song stages its own debate whether Stella’s face or voice is truly the “place” of poetic invention and the source of poetic delight—whether text precedes voice and so the poet “reads” true beauty in Stella’s face and copies it into his poems, or whether text merely records Stella’s musical voice.40 The “voice” and “face” of the beloved are typical Petrarchan “places,” and metapoetry like song vi can, in some cases, point to an Augustinian meditation on reading, hearing, invention, and authority; in others, to a facile school exercise.41 The real winner in the debate is “the Common Sense,” who, delighting in the advocates rather than judging their cases, “to both sides partiall is: / He laies on this chiefe praise, / Chiefe praise on that he laies.” That is, the interdependent effects of poetry—and of Stella’s charms— delightfully confuse the senses. Although to decide the question song vi turns in the end to Sense’s opposite number, “reason Princesse hie,” reason never speaks in song vi and we are left with a facile debate that primarily stimulates the senses. Song vii seems to recover the voice of reason, and its form—three stanzas, two of which consider beauty and music—mirrors that of song iii.42

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But the first stanza quickly renders reason as useless as the senses in deciding the question, eclipsing both in the exclamation “O let them hear these sacred tunes, & learne in wonders scholes, / To be (in things past bounds of wit) fooles, if they be not fooles.” The language here resonates with 1 Corinthians, where Paul warns “For it is written, I wil destroye the wisdome of the wise, and wil cast away the understanding of the prudent,” and explains that “it pleased God by the foolishnes of preaching to save them that believe . . . For the foolishnes of God is wiser then men.”43 Yet at the same time it replaces Paul’s warning with an invitation to hear and learn, so that the capacity for wonder is an opening through which grace might reach us. The limitations of reason and our senses’ fallibility become gifts of grace rather than curses of sin, and even in the extravagant praise of Stella arises the possibility of moral introspection. The last two stanzas of song vii (like the first two of song iii) once again take up beauty and music, through the newly won perspective of our divine capacity for wonder. This time, though, it is “the soule-invading voyce” of Stella to which the poem gives its final stanza, comparing it to “the verie essence of their tunes, when Angels doo re[j]oyce.” That the aural qualities of poetry get the last word in the topical debate anticipates the way that the prosody of the ten songs in the 1591 quarto grouping likewise develops. The Poetic Argument of the Songs in the 1591 Quartos: The Manner In a series of articles written for Poetry in 1939, Yvor Winters argued that the most influential lyric form to develop in late sixteenth-century England was not the Petrarchan sonnet, but rather the simpler songs (in the “plain” style) imitated by seventeenth-century writers as stylistically diverse as Jonson and Donne.44 Winters, a scholar, a critic, and a poet in the way that Albert Feuillerat had advocated, was also using Feuillerat’s edition of Sidney’s works, which prints the songs of Astrophel and Stella as a separate coda to the sonnets (Ringler’s edition of The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney would not be printed until 1962). Winters’s conclusion that Sidney contributed greatly to the development of simpler English “songs” is generally shared, but here I suggest that it was the editors of the 1591 quartos who first noticed Sidney’s argument. They saw in Sidney’s songs some of the first successful trochaic poems in English. The arrangement of songs in the 1591 quarto calls attention to an alternating pattern: in these poems, odd-numbered songs have longer lines, whereas even-numbered songs have shorter lines. Moreover, in the first seven songs, the lines in the odd-numbered poems get progressively longer,

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from pentameter in song i to hexameter in songs iii and v to heptameter in song vii, whereas songs ii and iv are in tetrameter and song vi is in trimeter.45 The metrical experimentation foregrounded in the ten songs likewise intertwines with the meanings offered by the poems as I have expounded them. As we might expect, the longer-stanza poems exhibit, at least at first, more overtly visual imagery than the tetrameter and trimeter songs. Thus, song i is a nine-stanza iambic pentameter blazon of Stella, rhyming aaba , built around a refrain in the third line of each stanza, “To you, to you all song of praise is due.” All three a-rhymes of each stanza are feminine, and so carry an unstressed eleventh syllable. The blazon is traditional and primarily visual, praising Stella’s eyes, lips, feet, breast, hand, and hair before praising her voice. Nevertheless, some of the visual imagery here makes aural witticisms for those schooled in poetics: in the second stanza, which confirms that the feminine-rhymed pentameter will dominate the entire poem, Stella hears that “Onely for you the heavens forget all measure,” and it is of course Stella, in stanza four, “Who hath the feet whose steps al sweetnes planteth” (my italics). That is, the song uses feminine endings because Stella makes even the heavens forget the more usual masculine endings in iambic pentameter measure; the final amphibrachs in the lines with the feminine rhyme lines are Stella’s “feet.”46 Song ii, in which Astrophil steals a kiss from the sleeping Stella, follows a falling meter: trochaic tetrameter. It might even be said that Astrophil’s feet in song ii are trochees. The four-line stanzas, rhyming in Puttenham’s envelope pattern (abba), place the masculine-rhymed seven-syllable b-lines that both begin and end on stressed syllables in between the femininerhymed, eight-syllable a-lines. The b-line pattern is x - x - x - x; probably the most familiar example is William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Moreover, song ii is primarily for the ears. Its pleasures lie in the almost effortless variations it offers. The first stanza invites a perfectly regular reading: Have I caught my heavenly Juel Teaching Sleepe most faire to be: Now wil I teach her, that she When she wakes is too too cruel.

x-x-x-xx-x-x-x x - x - x || - x x-x-x-x-

The effect is incantatory. In the third line a tension appears between the ictus (the pattern of stress dictated by the meter) and the “rhetorical stress” in which the stress on syllables reflects the meaning of the clause or phrase. One might scan line three thus: x - - x - || - x. Following the ictus shifts the emphasis from teaching to “I” and “her”; and we have an Astrophel enjoying the anticipation of imposing his will on Stella.

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Stella’s eyes are among the few visual images the poem offers, as it pauses briefly over her hand and her “lippes so sweetly swelling.” But even in the stanza on Stella’s lips, visual images are transmuted into aural effects. Thus when Astrophil decides to steal a kiss from the sleeping Stella, the feminine rhyme of the first and fourth lines accentuates the visual wit of the stanza: Yet those lippes so sweetly swelling, Do invite a stealing kisse Now but venture will I this, Who will read must first learne spelling. The conceit of “reading” Stella (and her virtue) is grounded in the visual faculty, but the wit is that, as “spelling” rhymes with “swelling,” so we are reminded that if mere spelling is like kissing, then “reading” must be a much more involved encounter. The rhyme on “swelling” is our aural cue. Indeed the poem has set us up for just this sort of reading by telling us, as we stand next to Astrophil over a sleeping Stella, that Her tongue waking stil refuseth, Giving franklie niggard no: Now wil I attempt to knowe, What no her tongue sleeping useth. For Astrophil, no means know, with a wink and a nudge. The ictus in effect steps on Stella’s tongue in this stanza. In the first and fourth lines, reading for rhetorical emphasis invites us to hear “her tongue” as an iamb, whereas the ictus pushes the emphasis onto “her.” The key words “waking” and “sleeping” both reassert the trochaic meter unambiguously and provide the conceptual poles around which the stanza, indeed the whole poem, revolves. Moreover, Astrophil seems to delight sophomorically again in the sexual connotations of “useth,” and the irony suggested by its rhyming with “refuseth.” In effect, the metrical tension plays out the sexual tension between Astrophil’s desire and Stella’s chastity. No wonder students often find the poem creepy and summarize it as a date rape. The pairing of songs i and ii displays Sidney’s superb metrical control, and the “variable verse” form allows flexibility not found in the sonnet form. In effect, the two songs together pose the question that song iii makes obvious: “O eies O eares of men, how are you charmed?” In a way song iii embodies the question it poses, as well. Its stanzas comprise four alexandrines followed by a pentameter couplet with the familiar feminine rhyme. And, just as the variations in song ii pull us away from the very strong incantatory

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pattern the trochaic tetrameter sets up, so the feminine pentameters in song iii provide relief from the regular hexameter couplets that constitute the rest of the stanza. In songs iv-vi, the contrast between the long- and short-line poems becomes all the more pronounced, and song v stands out: its hexameter lines build to a rhetorical crescendo in which a rejected lover vents his spleen entirely out of proportion to the wrong he has received. The imagery and tone suggest that, in some sense, we are to take song v as either bad or at least ugly poetry. Calling a hard-hearted beloved a thief, a tyrant, a murderer, and a witch evokes a choleric persona, and the explicit threat of the last three lines closes the case: “You see what I can say; mend yet your froward minde, / And such skill in my Muse you reconcil’d shall finde, / That by these cruell words your praises shalbe proved.” Here the emphasis is on the visual “you see what I can say,” rather than the aural. And the threat rings a little hollow, for we can easily imagine Stella responding, “Really, Astrophil, if that’s your best poetry, then I’m not sure I’d want to be the object of your praise.” Metrically, too, song v is something of a failure. Like the other longer-line poems, song v plays with feminine rhymes. Its six-line stanza rhymes aabccb, where the b-rhymes carry an extra syllable and rhyme feminine. But the big, blocky stanzas obscure the variation in the metrical pattern, and we lose one of the aural effects by which poetry charms us. Ultimately, song v gives the impression of a speaker who over-thinks his matter and renders strained metaphors, who counts his syllables correctly but is so wrapped up in his imagery that he loses sight of the musical aspect of poetry. Meanwhile the foils of song v, songs iv and vi, accomplish rather elegantly much more than song v promises explicitly. Song iv plies its carpe diem theme pleasantly even with minimal metrical variation: its six-line stanza consists of four trochaic tetrameter lines followed by a couplet in iambic tetrameter, rhyming feminine. Astrophil is less clever in his rhymes here than in song ii, though he still shows his wit, as when, telling Stella that her mother “thinkes you doo letters write,” he pleads, “Write, but first let me endite.” Here the dramatic tension that Rudenstine and Kalstone value is on display, as we infer that Astrophil tries to force himself on Stella in the penultimate stanza. The quartos lack the immediate context of sonnets 84−87 to flesh out the narrative, so songs iv and v produce for us a pair of contrasting moods: the pleading lover and the angry rejected lover. The other foil of song v, song vi, returns our attention abruptly to the debate whether poetry best delights the eyes or ears, completely abandoning the drama of songs iv and v. It implores reason, “Feare not to judge this bate, / For it is voide of hate” (ll. 5−6). As I pointed out in the section on the “matter” of the songs, song vi gracefully implies that both beauty and music sway

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the senses, and it therefore defers to reason. But following on the heels of the overwrought song v, in which metrical variation is rather difficult to discern in the blocky hexameter stanzas, the regular trimeter of song vi offers the reader a break. Its variations are restricted to trochaic substitutions in lines that begin with “Beauty” or “Music” and a few others; it humorously slows us down by suggesting spondees in the chiasmus at the end of stanza eight, in which “the common Sense,” beguiled by both beauty and music, “laies on this chiefe praise, / Chiefe praise on that he laies” (ll. 47— 48). The final plea to reason in stanza nine, “Say, whether thou wilt crowne / With limitlesse renowne,” arrests the reader’s generally effortless progress emphatically with two stressed syllables separated by the comma. Song vi epitomizes the debate in easy trimeter, in striking contrast to song v and also to song vii, which finally embodies the answer of reason in heptameter. In the heptameters of song vii, metrical variation and fairly heavy punctuation forcibly govern the speed and the stresses of the reading, particularly in the last two stanzas. Perhaps most important, song vii is the last directly to address the question, “O eies, O eares of men, how are you charmed?” and, as I have suggested, it matters that praise of Stella’s “soule-invading voice” gets the last word. Stella’s voice is, in the 1591 quartos, associated with the delightful variations in the shorter meters of songs ii, iv, viii, ix, and x. If we take (as Ringler does) the 1598 folio as our copy-text, then we notice the irony that the 1591 quartos delete the two most important instances of Stella’s voice in the entire sequence: her courtly and compassionate refusal in stanzas 18−25 of song viii and the whole of song xi. Moreover, Q1 omits three of the sexiest stanzas in song x, in which the rejected Astrophil recollects his dalliances with Stella. But if we read the last three poems in the Sidney section of Q1 on their own, they render the voice Astrophil has learned from Stella, a voice that recounts the affair yet once more from Astrophil’s chastened, if not reformed, point of view. These last three poems carry out increasingly sophisticated experiments with four-stress meter, so that by song x, lines like “O Deere Life, when shal it bee” (l. 1) begin to sound like triple meter rather than duple, by virtue of the two unstressed syllables (shal it) that attune our ears to anapests or perhaps trimmed dactyls (x - x || x - - x; by “trimmed” dactyls, I mean dactyls in which, at the end of a line or before a caesura, one or more unstressed syllables has been excised).47 Song viii tells (or re-tells) the story of a foiled tryst in which Stella’s rejection of Astrophil’s advances famously “breaks” his song: at the end of the poem she repels not only verbal but physical advances (“her hands his hands compelling, / Gave repulse, all grace expelling”) and she flees, leaving Astrophil “with passion rent, / With what she had done and spoken, / That therewith my song is broken.” Song viii is often considered the masterpiece

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of Astrophel and Stella in its longer form, which includes Stella’s extensive and very gentle speech rejecting Astrophil. The 1591 quartos exclude Stella’s speech, but perhaps they do not exclude her voice entirely. The sixth and seventh stanzas, where the young lovers are wrapped in mutual desire, include significant iambic substitutions (marks in parentheses I take as debatable): Their eares hungrie of each word Which the deare tongue would afford, But their tongues restraind from walking, Till their harts had ended talking.

-xx-x-x x - (x) x (-) - x x-x-x-xx-x-x-x-

But when their tongues could not speak, Love it self did silence breake: Love did set his lips asunder Thus to speake in love and wonder.

-x-xx-x x-x-x-x x-x-x-xx-x-x-x-

The first two lines of stanza six and the first of stanza seven all strain against the ictus and produce variation in the meter, but once Love takes over in the seventh stanza the trochaic meter is reasserted unambiguously. As in song ii, Astrophil’s desire presses the poem forward relentlessly in trochees until the dramatic conclusion, where as his song is broken so his third-person point of view is also violated. In song ix, Astrophil complains of his rejection, but he does so in a more varied form of trochaic tetrameter than in previous songs. The stanzas follow a more complex pattern, five lines rhymed ababb, which, like song viii, alternates between shorter masculine a-lines and longer feminine b-lines. Here more lines arrange two stressed syllables next to two unstressed syllables, as in lines 4−5: “From the stormes in my breast bleeding, / And showers from mine eyes proceeding” (x - x - - x x - / - x x - x - x - ). “Stormes in my breast” produces the same dactylic pattern of stresses as “when shal it be” in song x (x - - x), but with the difference that it is followed by a trochaic word, “bleeding,” so that we are rushed through the line only to crash against two consecutive stressed syllables. When we reach line 5, we are set up to read it with only three stresses, on “showers,” “eyes,” and the middle syllable of “proceeding”; to read it with four stresses requires that “from” or “mine” be promoted.48 Indeed, proper measure is all that remains to the sorry Astrophil, who in the second stanza bids his sheep, “Merrie Flocke, such one forgoe / Unto whom mirth is displeasure, / Onely rich in measures treasure” (ll. 8−10). The pun on Penelope Rich’s name is once again clear, and it appears in the only perfectly regular line in the group: absence of Rich = unfortunately rich in measure’s treasure alone. Lines 8 and 9, meanwhile, strain against the meter. Line 8 arguably presents three stressed syllables in a row in “Merrie Flocke,

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such one forgoe” (x - x || x x - x) and line 9 either reads quickly with only three stresses (“Unto whom mirth is displeasure”; x - - x - - x -), jams two stressed syllables together in “whom” and “mirth” (x - x x - - x -), or forces them together later in the line (- x - x x - x -). In song ix, then, Astrophil and the reader strain against the constraints of “measures treasure” together and produce a sort of fool-the-ear effect, making a simple duple meter sound at times triple.49 Song x ups the ante in the meter game still further, in six-line stanzas rhymed aabccb, where the b-rhymes are feminine. The b-lines tend to be strongly regular and thus provide a baseline against which the metrical variation of the a- and c-lines may be heard. They use iambic substitutions to vary rhythm, often resulting in a trimmed dactylic sound as in stanza 4, line 23: “Fearing her beames, take with thee” (x - - x || x - x). Iambic substitutions in the beginning of a line slow down the reading at key points, as in lines 10–11: “Let no tongue aspire to tell / in what high joyes I shall dwell” (- x - x x - x). Here the enjambment carries the alternating stress pattern from the end of line 10 into the beginning of line 11, helping to create the iambic substitution, which pattern is followed until the final three syllables, in which “I” and “dwell” demand stress. Likewise, the initial a-lines of each stanza often suggest spondees, even as they typically admit of regular readings. The “O Deere Life” of the first line, marked off with capitals as it is, is one such line, as are the opening lines of stanzas 3 and 4, “Thought therefore will I send thee” (x x - x - x -), and “Thought, see thou no place forbeare” (x || x - - x - x). Piled-up initial stresses tend to invite readers to demote metrically stressed syllables in the c-lines, reading them with three stresses rather than four, often in a pattern that resembles trimmed dactylic trimeter (x - - x - - x -). As a result, song x is full of stops and starts and its rhythms feel rhetorical rather than metrical, even though the poem remains remarkably regular. How are the ears of men charmed? As Astrophil finally tells his thoughts, “Thinke no more, but die in mee, / Till thou shalt received bee, / At her lips my Nectar drinking” (ll. 29−30). As Stella’s lips shape Stella’s voice, so her lips shape the final line of song x, demanding emphasis, suggesting that we elide the stress on the initial “At,” so that the first three syllables sound like an anapest and the line takes three stresses (- - x - x - x -). Astrophil’s complaints have at last received their most beautiful form at Stella’s celebrated lips. Succeeding Astrophel and Stella: Daniel’s Delia, Lodge’s Phillis, and Fletcher’s Licia If the editors of the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella saw a new consideration of poetics and metrical variation figured in Stella’s voice, then what did the writers and printers who created the “sonnet craze” of the 1590s see

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there? In the 107 sonnets of the 1591 quartos, they could see with greater clarity and emphasis than in any other sequence the implied unfolding of a love affair, wrapped up in Astrophil’s (in)constantly shifting expostulations. In the sequence of ten variable poems, they could see a revisitation of the same narrative from another perspective, out of which develops an unusually emphatic exploration of prosody. In the more scattered collection of other writers’ poems that completes Q1, they could see an updating of the stuff of Tottel’s Miscellany, the often-reprinted collection of courtly love poems from the late Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, and other gentlemen. Finally, to humanist-trained and philologically aware poets, multiple versions of Astrophel and Stella poems were visible in print as early as 1591 (in the 1591 quartos and in fragments that appeared in John Harington’s 1591 folio translation of Orlando Furioso and in Fraunce’s 1588 Arcadian Rhetoricke). These versions presented an opportunity to visit well-known Petrarchan themes that Sidney’s sequence for the most part had avoided: time, succession, and decay. These themes provided several poets influential in the early 1590s with an imaginary structure in which to situate their own writing. The poet-lover personae created in sonnet sequences of the 1590s could aspire to be regarded as worthy/unworthy successors to the inimitable Astrophil—worthy in that their songs resembled Astrophil’s songs in some ways, unworthy in that Sidney must remain ne plus ultra.50 While the poetlover conventionally bemoans his separation from the beloved, compares her to lesser beauties, and contrasts her worth with the worthlessness of verse, some sequences imply from such themes a kind of succession from Sidney and Sidney’s poetry, simultaneously making a connection to Sidneian poetics and occluding it behind the trope of absolute difference in kind.51 It is this double gesture, the assertion of a kind of sameness immediately followed by an insistence on absolute difference, that places the Sidney name at the nexus of many early modern assertions about poetics and yet absents his writing from participation in the give-and-take dialogue among poets and printers. Viewed synchronically, this is just the literary system as we know it; viewed diachronically, this is a series of opportunities to create the discourse that constitutes the system, passing sequentially from Samuel Daniel to Thomas Lodge to Giles Fletcher the Elder. It is Daniel’s work in the 1592 editions of Delia that makes possible and shapes the trope of literary succession for other poets. The diachronic account of Daniel’s, Lodge’s, and Fletcher’s sonnet sequences offered here intervenes in a twofold major critical debate over the structure of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean sonnet sequences. The first aspect concerns the unity of the printed version of a given English renaissance sonnet sequence; the extent to which authors controlled the printing

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process; the extent to which they envisioned the varied poems in these printed books as parts of a greater whole; how to interpret typographical evidence of unity and disunity; and how to interpret more thematic, stylistic, and generic evidence of unity or disunity. It is, ultimately, a debate about the nature of a literary work: does a book whose origins may be heterogeneous, like the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella or Brittons Bowre of Delights or even Giles Fletcher’s Licia or Samuel Daniel’s Delia count as a “work”? The second aspect hinges on what from one perspective we call a writer’s or a work’s influence and from another we call the expectations that readers brought to reading early modern printed books. The formalist point of view, more or less canonized in John Kerrigan’s 1986 Penguin edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, posits a “tripartite Delian” structure underpinning English renaissance sonnet sequences, modeled on Samuel Daniel’s sequence. Delia is divided into a sequence of amorous sonnets; a brief “Anacreontic” ode; and a concluding narrative complaint poem.52 (Kerrigan stretches the range of the term “Anacreontic” to include amorous poetry in trochaic meters as well as the more usual definition of amorous poetry featuring images of Cupid; he states that both are attributed in the sixteenth century to the Greek poet Anacreon via the widely read Greek Anthology). Kerrigan, following Katherine-Duncan Jones, claims that when Shakespeare’s sonnets appeared in print in 1609, readers would have expected a three-part structure. Like others in this vein, Kerrigan largely overlooks Astrophel and Stella in his survey of renaissance sonnet sequences, perhaps because he considers only the 1598 folio arrangement of Sidney’s sequence.53 Nowhere in sight in any of these arguments is the obvious threepart division of the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella. On the other hand, Heather Dubrow’s materialist rejoinder argues that readers of the 1609 Sonnets might have expected nothing more structured than “yet another instance of an amorphous and varying predilection for publishing sonnets together with other poems.” She attacks the legitimacy of looking for structure in books of sonnets, inferring from typographical irregularities among editions of Delia and Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion that structures found in printed books cannot legitimately be attributed to the authors of the poetry printed therein.54 Nevertheless, setting aside questions of authorial and editorial agency and focusing productively on the scene of reading in the book, Dubrow argues that “books [of amorous lyric poetry] not only stage but also thematize many versions of surrogacy,” which is “always based on a structure in which texts offer substitute visions and genres, [and] often impelled by a latent agenda of replacing one emotion or interpretation with a more acceptable one” (95). In fact, the structure that Dubrow glimpses in any single book of amorous poetry is most prominent in

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a few books of poetry printed immediately after the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella, and it marks a certain kind of self-conscious imitation of Q1. It is marked by a considered division of books in the line of succession into three parts, and it begins with Samuel Daniel’s Delia. Delia and the Broken Crown: A Fable of Succession and Decay Samuel Daniel’s Delia. Contayning certayne Sonnets: with the complaint of Rosamond, printed in two editions in 1592, is the sonnet sequence most intimately connected with Astrophel and Stella and thus most urgently in need of the trope of absolute difference. Twenty-three of the fifty-four sonnets printed in these two editions had already appeared (albeit in altered form and order) in the third part of the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella. As is well-known, Daniel’s dedicatory epistle to the Countess of Pembroke asserts that the Delia sonnets appear in the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella only because “I was betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer,” and because his sonnets saw print “uncorrected,” Daniel is “forced to publish that which I never ment” (Sig. A2). Without pausing to explain the betrayal (even a hint that he was in Italy with Edward Dymoke when his sonnets were printed would change our accounts of literary history), he rushes to compare his misfortune to the infinitely greater crime perpetrated on Philip Sidney’s “unmatchable lines,” nay, “holy Reliques,” which nevertheless leaves “Astrophel, flying with the wings of his own fame” untouched to “register . . . his own name in the Annals of eternitie,” invulnerable to “disgrace . . . howsoever disguised” (Sigs. A2-A2v). The double gesture of asserting absolute difference just after an assertion of similarity is nowhere more prominent than in Daniel’s dedicatory letter to the Countess of Pembroke. The three-part structure of both 1592 editions of Delia responds to and alters the three-part division of the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella —the quarto to which Daniel’s poems were originally “betraide” into print. As many critics have observed, the hinge in the structure of Delia is the trochaic ode of four six-line stanzas that divide the sonnets from The Complaint of Rosamond.55 It is worth noting that the first edition of Delia prints the ode on the recto and verso of a single sheet of paper so that the reader has to turn the page to read the entire ode; the tailpieces (arabesque or interlaced patterns at the bottom of a page which often set off individual poems) could signify two odes, rather than one. In the second edition, the ode is printed in a smaller typeface and fits onto one side of a page, which indicates that it was meant to be read as a single poem. Also, Daniel’s ode, like Sidney’s songs, features no Cupids. The first two stanzas of Daniel’s ode alternate, as Sidney’s trochaic

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songs were wont, between tetrameters rhyming masculine and feminine. In the third stanza, Daniel switches to exclusively masculine rhymes, with the consequence that the entire stanza rhymes masculine and is unvaried except for the iambic fourth line, in which “Eccho, daughter of the ayre . . . Knowes the name of my fearce Fayre / And soundes the accents of my ills” (H2v, ll. 1−4, l. 4 italicized). Daniel’s variation effectively winds up the reader’s metrical spring and releases it in the iambic line. In the final stanza of the ode, which likewise rhymes entirely masculine, the second and the final line (“And well he ends for love who dies”) are in iambic tetrameter. Tellingly, it is only in the second half of the ode, which works experimentally with trochaic and iambic lines together, that “Eccho,” the figure for voice, appears. While Daniel’s brief ode lacks the range and virtuoso aspirations of Sidney’s trochaic songs, it distills from them a clear grasp of trochaic tetrameter and two of the simplest and most effective variations that appear among Astrophil’s ten songs. If the hinge of Delia skillfully imitates the trochaic prosody explored in the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, the middle of the sequence of sonnets, the imperfect crown of sonnets 31−35, prefaced by sonnet 30, performs a more clearly diacritical imitation of the quartos by invoking the themes of time, succession, and decay. Sonnet 30 looks compellingly into the future but makes a temporal loop back to the present with an allusion to the Countess of Pembroke. The octave imagines an aged Delia whose golden hair has “chaunge[d] to silver wyer,” whose eyes “that kindle all this fyer / shall faile,” who indeed has been forced to “yeelde up all to tyrant Times desire”: that is, the aging of Delia is figured as her rape at the hands of Time. Into that post-lapserian future the poet-lover urges Goe you my verse, goe tell her what she was; For what she was she best shall finde in you. Your firie heate lets not her glorie passe, But Phenix-like shall make her live anew. (ll. 2, 7, 11–14) Tyrant Time may rob Delia of her desirability, but the desire (figured as fire) embodied in the poetry shall make Delia live again. The modifier, “Phenixlike,” refers at once adjectivally to Delia and adverbially to the way in which the heat of the verse will work on the aged, deflowered Delia. It also looks proleptically at The Phoenix Nest, the 1593 miscellany of gentlemen’s poetry prefaced with a defense of the late Earl of Leicester, begun with three elegies for Sir Philip Sidney, and in which some of Daniel’s poems appeared. In suggesting Philip’s Phoenix, the Countess of Pembroke, the poem repeats the double gesture asserting sameness and difference, but in this instance it does so at a distance. For the Countess of Pembroke was of course praised

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for her nearness to her deceased brother, not only by blood but also by writing: The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, even in the only edition printed by 1592, belonged to her in an important sense, and her own literary efforts were likewise coming to light in the 1592 publication of A Discourse on Life, and Death and The Tragedie of Antonie in a neat octavo. To many a poet like Daniel, Philip Sidney lived on in the Countess of Pembroke’s writing, in the possessive title of the Arcadia, and in the countess herself— and yet, in the end, she could only be like her brother, and to live anew was not the same to live eternally. The depredations of tyrant Time mark difference in this poem and they load it with a negative meaning: difference is decay. The imperfect crown of sonnets 31−35 extends the play on the theme, and it does so in its very imperfection. Daniel kept this series of sonnets together in every augmented edition of Delia, all the while revising and adding to his sequence, but he never extended or perfected the crown.56 Sonnet 31 begins “Looke Delia how wee [e]steeme the half-blowne Rose” and opens a typical poem on the carpe diem theme. Its successor is another carpe diem poem, beginning “But Love whilst that thou maist be lov’d againe” and ending with the warning, “Men doe not weigh the stalke for that it was, / When once they finde her flower, her glory passe.” The speaker promises Delia “My faith shall waxe, when thou art in thy wayning” and in the penultimate poem demands that Delia “Heere see the giftes that God and nature lent thee; / Heere read thy selfe, and what I sufferd for thee,” insisting that even after the deaths of the speaker and his beloved, “thou canst not dye” (32 ll. 13−14; 33 ll. 7−8, 14). Common as the conceits of the poems-as-mirror and poetic immortality are, here in Daniel’s crown they signify textual corruption. I specify textual corruption because sonnet 35, the last in the imperfect crown, begins by repeating only the “Thou canst not dye” half-line from the conclusion of sonnet 34; and its final line does not repeat the beginning of sonnet 31. Textual corruption—the failure to repeat identical lines when identity is necessary to complete the crown of sonnets—is embodied in the pages of Delia as sonnets 31−35 succeed one another. Likewise, we might note, figures of texts passing from hand to hand, which Wendy Wall has fruitfully explored as mimicking the “sociotextual event” of the coterie circulation of poetry, likewise imply decay in this prominent crown of sonnets.57 Sonnet 34 takes up the theme by insisting that Delia “take this picture which I here present thee,” self-referentially troping the poem and the book itself and placing the reader at once in the subject-position imagined for the aged Delia and displaced from the same subject-position, witnessing the passing of the text from one hand to the next. Sonnet 35 specifies its sociotextual event as reading, or more precisely, interpreting the text: The speaker promises Delia, “Thou canst not dye whilst any zeale abounde / In

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feeling harts, that can conceive these lines.” To conceive the lines of Delia requires interpretive skill not because of their intricacy or sophistication, but only because, as the speaker notes modestly, “Though thou a Laura hast no Petrarch founde, / In base attire, yet cleerely Beautie shines” (35, ll. 1−4). Striking a modest pose by means of a comparison to Petrarch, at the end of a crown of sonnets meditating on time and corruption figured in a philological vehicle, Daniel clears the way to return to his prefatory claim to resemble Sidney in that his poems, like Sidney’s, had been “betraide” into the hands of a greedy printer. Unlike Astrophil, who overtly differentiates himself from those sonneteers who sing “poor Petrarch’s longdeceased woes,” Daniel’s nameless speaker points out only that he is no Petrarch. Yet in Astrophil’s stance, readers like Daniel could clearly discern the point that Astrophil was indeed no Petrarch: no spiritual enlightenment awaits Astrophil, only despair. When Daniel’s speaker insists that “though that Laura better limned bee, / Suffice, thou shalt be lov’d as well as shee,” he builds a path of poetic succession around Sidney and Astrophil, substituting an incorruptible love for corruptible text in the end.58 Daniel’s double gesture would seem ultimately to instantiate the diacritical desire outlined by Dubrow and, under slightly different nomenclature, by Thomas Greene, for in the end he seems to claim similarity with Sidney and at the same time to proffer a vision of love superior to Astrophil’s love for Stella, thus differentiating his poems from, and simultaneously outdoing, Sidney’s sequence.59 Delia might stand only as a minor triumph of diacritical imitation were it not for the insistent return of the very opposite, materialistic gesture toward the corruption of texts in the very next line of the 1592 editions of Delia —a gesture that ultimately links the sonnets of Delia to the final poem in Daniel’s book, The Complaint of Rosamond. The opening lines of sonnet 36 in the first edition of Delia, the first place where the reader may confirm that Daniel’s crown of sonnets is completely broken, beg Delia “O be not griev’d that these my papers should, / Bewray unto the world how faire thou art” (ll. 1−2). These two lines in a sense mark the difference between a closed circle of nondisseminative desire demanded by the hard-hearted Delia and the disseminative desire that ultimately characterizes the poet-lover. In other words, among the ideas that the metaphoric language of sonnet 36 signifies, two of the most important are something like the circulation anxiety prevalent around the publication of the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella and the Petrarchan paradox of “scattered” rhymes signifying the singular paragon of virtuous, modest, indeed shamefast desirability. The corruption of texts is thus linked to their dissemination and, in the gendered moral logic of textual sexuality, corruption precedes dissemination.

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In the final part of Daniel’s volume, The Complaint of Rosamond , the same logic holds: one could argue that Rosamond is herself the figure for corruption preceding dissemination. Daniel’s complaint has long been understood in the de casibus tradition of The Myrroure for Magistrates (literature that teaches by negative moral example), but ever since Ronald Primeau’s reevaluation of Rosamond in 1978, critics have variously noted disjunctions in the construction of Rosamond as a speaking voice: her desire to be seen and heard, her duplicity, her complicity in her own fall, and the strong contrast drawn between the “purity of earlier times” and the slippery present in which Rosamond’s ghost is complaining to the narrator.60 Rosamond, the mistress of England’s Henry II, might fairly be described as a female character who heeds the kind of carpe diem message plied in Delia sonnets 31−32. She establishes the simplicity of the period of her youth in the only terms available to her: she declares “my beautie was mine owne, / No borrowed blush which banck-rot beauties seeke: / The newfound-shame, a sinne to us unknowne, / Th’adulterate beauty of a falsed cheeke” was hers (Sig. I2). As we might expect, Rosamond’s claim insinuates that the age to which she speaks, the modern period of the poet Daniel, is a brazen time of “banck-rot beauties” compared to the golden age of Henry II. And yet, suspicious as we may be of almost everything the ghost of the fallen Rosamond tells us, we might take her claim to beauty literally. As has long been observed, Rosamond’s motivation even before her fall was to be seen and praised for her beauty; indeed, she is a type of the “cruel fair.”61 The significance of the cruel fair for Daniel’s book of poems does not end with the occasion for writing poetry. The cruel fair allows Daniel to revisit the moral valences of seeing, being seen, concealing, and being concealed; and speaking, being heard, ventriloquizing, and being ventriloquized. Indeed, it extends Daniel’s response to being published in Q1 of Astrophel and Stella; in particular, his response to Thomas Nashe’s wellknown and perhaps less well-understood preface to the volume. In order to justify the unauthorized printing of Astrophel and Stella, Nashe asks that those that observe how jewels oftentimes com to their hands that know not their value, & that the cockscombes of our daies, like Esops Cock, had rather have a Barly kernel wrapt up in a Ballet, then they wil dig for the welth of wit in any ground that they know not, I hope wil also hold me excused, though I open the gate to his glory, & invite idle eares to the admiration of his melancholy. Quid petitur sacris nisi tantum fama poetis. Which although it be oftentimes imprisoned in Ladyes casks, & the president bookes of such as cannot see without another mans spectacles,

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yet at length it breakes foorth in spight of his keepers, and useth some private penne (in steed of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement. (Sig. A3) Nashe’s Ovidian tag from the tale of Pygmalion, “what is sought by the sacred poets except fame,” lends a certain sting to this passage, for its point is that poets seek fame for themselves, not for the women in their poems. Nashe’s relative pronoun, however, shifts the agency from the poet seeking fame to fame itself, metaphorically ascribing both a desire to be known and something like a means for acting. Daniel’s Rosamond likewise aspires to fame. She is a negative exemplar of such desire and a sustained critique of dissemination as Nashe frames it in his preface. Not only does Rosamond all but conflate being seen and being admired—“what is Beautie if it be not seene, / Or what is’t to be seene, unlesse admir’d” she asks—but also she asserts, apropos of Astrophil’s wellknown complaint to the moon in sonnet 31, that “[W]e love to be belov’d, yet scorne the Lover.” She is the object of some infamy, having dallied with Henry II, but she seeks to repair her reputation by association with a new poet and a new object of poetic epideixis: Delia. Thus she opens her plea to the narrator: because “No Muse suggests the pittie of my case, / [and] Each penne dooth overpasse my just complaint,” he might “forme my case, and register my wrong” (Sig. H3v); by the end of her complaint, Rosamond flatters her narrator: “were in not thy favourable lynes, / Reedified the wracke of my decayes . . . / Fewe in this age had knowne my beauties praise.” To this general frame, Rosamond adds an envoi of sorts: “Tell Delia now her sigh may doe me good, / And will her note the frailtie of our blood. / And if I passe unto those happy banks, / Then she must have her praise, thy pen her thanks” (Sig. M4). Rosamond seeks not only praise for her beauty but also, rather oddly, the pity of Delia. Fame depends, for Rosamond, on the good name of Delia: it is as if she were telling the narrator “[I]t is not only that you have praised well, but also that you have chosen a proper object for your praise in the virtuous Delia, that qualifies you to remind this world of my beauty” and, sotto voce, “even though my moral failings cannot be forgot.” But it is Rosamond’s account of her own moral failings that really commands attention, largely because it so plainly reveals that her downfall resulted from simple vanity, which thus ironically undermines everything she has to say about fame, rumor, and reputation. Indeed, the plot of Rosamond’s story is basically the plot of a January-May fabliau. Rosamond protests that she is not seduced by the king, but instead by the smooth speech of “A seeming Matrone [of Henry’s court], yet a sinfull monster” (Sig. I4) who convinces her to pursue the false honor of courtly preferment.

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The go-between appeals not to Rosamond’s lust and ambition but only to her vanity, telling her that in her affair with the aged Henry II, “Thy pleasures want shal be supply’d with gold,” and that she must “Esteeme not fame more then thou doost thy weale, [for] Fame . . . / Is but an Eccho, and an idle voyce” (Sigs. K1, K2). Rosamond’s punishment begins the minute she has surrendered herself sexually to the jealous old dotard, who falls asleep as soon as he has received “his short contenting,” and on awaking decides to imprison Rosamond so that no man may so much as look on her, much less dally with her (Sig. L1v). Imprisonment begets the very heart of Rosamond’s complaint: What greater torment ever could have beene, Then to inforce the fayre to live retired: For what is Beautie if it be not seene, Or what is’t to be seen unlessse admired? And though admired, unlesse in love-desired? Indeed, hiding Rosamond from view is a crime against nature, for “Nature created Beautie for the view, / Like as the fire for heate, the Sunne for light” (Sig. L3). Rosamond’s vanity is such that it dictates her vision of Natural Law. She is not only unreliable, vain, and manipulative, she is also, like the common fabliau characters who ape their betters, risible. Rosamond is a figure, then, for the imprisoned disseminative desire expressed in Nashe’s preface to the quarto that betrayed Sidney’s and Daniel’s poems alike into print. She is likewise herself a figure for textual corruption, not only because she transparently twists the representations of her own life, but also because she fails to grasp how her story will be interpreted. The final irony Daniel creates is that Rosamond has entrusted her representation to the poet who will quietly damn her with her own words under cover of recovering her reputation. Daniel’s handling of Rosamond’s story resembles a projection of his conflict with Nashe: Nashe’s preface (probably not solely, but almost certainly as a contributing factor, insulting as it was to those who had refrained from circulating Astrophel and Stella) doomed the quarto to be called in. Echoes of Fame in Phillis Daniel’s Delia laid down a pattern within which the naked fear of absolute corruption caused by uncontrolled dissemination might find limitations, boundaries, and codes: the trope of succession, encoding sameness and difference, decay but not dissolution, perhaps even the possibility of

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some philological restoration. The second edition of Daniel’s Delia, printed in 1592, holds out these same promises: it corrects errata in the first edition, and in so doing it reproduces for Delia many of the same possibilities created by the two quartos of Astrophel and Stella. Yet the event that constitutes Delia as the first link in a chain of English sonnet sequences, rooted in Sidney’s own efforts, is the publication in 1593 of Thomas Lodge’s Phillis: Honoured with Pastorall Sonnets, Elegies, and amorous delights. One could argue that Phillis reproduces the tripartite structure of its predecessors, for it features a trochaic ode followed by a complaint poem, but to be fair to Lodge and his publishers, the part that precedes the trochaic ode is in fact divided into Lodge’s Induction, followed by a section of twenty sonnets, a section consisting of an eclogue sandwiched between two elegies, and a final section of twenty more sonnets. Thus Phillis exhibits three semiconcentric tripartite structures: the eclogue-elegy-eclogue set within the sonnets-other poems-sonnets set, all wrapped up in the tripartite structure that Duncan-Jones noticed. Lodge’s Induction strikes the humble notes appropriate to the pastorals proffered in Phillis, and it encases a cipher for Sidney among references to Abraham Fraunce (under the sobriquet Amintas, alluding to The Countesse of Pembrokes Ivychurch, Fraunce’s pastorals printed in 1591) and to Henry Constable’s Diana (1592); it likewise singles out Spenser as “so bright a sunne / Who hath the Palme for deepe invention wunne.” Lodge saves Daniel for last, telling his poems to “kisse Delias hand” (Sig. A1v). But the only suggestion of Sidney derives from Amintas: Lodge’s poems have had “fore-bred brothers . . . / (Who in theyr Swan-like songes Amintas wept) / And twice obscur’d in Cinthias circle slept.” The Sidney name had been associated with the swan through the Latin cygnus, used frequently in the volumes of neoLatin elegies for Sidney’s death produced at Oxford and Cambridge. Were it not for the facts that Fraunce appropriated the Countess of Pembroke’s title for his own works and that Amintas grieves for Sidney’s death, Lodge’s suggestion of Sidney by the epithet of Amintas’s “Swan-like songs” would be tenuous at best, rather than merely timid. Lodge professes only to hope that, by dedicating Phillis to the redoubtable Bess of Hardwick, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, his verses might “escape neglect” (Sig. A1). Unfortunately, his mostly competent sonnets, his noteworthy trochaic poems, and most of Phillis did not escape neglect. The tragicall complaint of Elstred has, however, found a fit audience, though few, by its inclusion in Kerrigan’s collection of complaints. Though Elstred is the most rewarding of the poems in Phillis, Lodge’s two trochaic poems both mark difference in the sequence (similar to the way the trochaic poems in Astrophel and Stella and in Delia mark the division of the

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books into different parts) and take the exploration of trochaic poetics in a new direction. In Lodge’s hands, the falling trochaic meter becomes something like a dialectical opposite of rising iambic meter: in trochees, Lodge’s persona abjures the hopes that sustain and torment him in his iambic poems, and, in fact, the trochaic poems never fall into a seven-syllable masculinerhymed trochaic tetrameter. Rather than evoking relentless masculine desire as Sidney’s trochaic poems do or considering the erotic from a new angle as Daniel’s trochaic poems do, Lodge’s trochaic poems negate the erotic. If trochees can create a sense of reckless tumbling forward motion, Lodge’s trochees portray a jilted lover running away, blind with grief. Thus the second eclogue (placed at the end of the set that separates the first twenty from the last twenty sonnets) rushes forward incessantly in almost unvarying meter from its opening plea, “Muses helpe me, sorrow swarmeth” to its envoi begging that the poem will tell “How neglect my joyes hath daunted” (Sigs. E4-F1). The endstopped lines limit variation further and contribute to the rigidity of the poem; the effect is not one we value, but it certainly sets up strong expectations in the reader that come into play in the other trochaic poem, “An Ode,” that separates Elstred from the rest of Phillis. “An Ode” complains to the hard-hearted Phillis that “Of thine eyes, I made my mirror, / From thy beautie came mine error,” neatly contrasting the previous iambic sonnets pleading for love against the present trochaic rejection of love, signaled in the refrain: “Siren pleasant, foe to reason, / Cupid plague thee for thy treason” (Sig. H3r). If Lodge’s trochaic poems extend the trend of simplifying the flexible experiments with trochaic meter emphasized in the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella —with a purpose and not out of incompetence—then his Complaint of Elstred extends and sophisticates the meditation on succession and decay begun in Delia and Rosamond. The German princess Elstred, whose ghost complains to the narrator, is a spoil of war passed from prince to prince, and whose self-determination arises solely from her capacity to seduce her possessor. She provides Lodge an opportunity to engage the interplay of visual and aural poetics as he unfolds her fate. Elstred wins her first lord, Humber, by sight: he is drawn to court “Willing to see the face which Fame commends,” which is of course Elstred’s (Sig. I1). Humber sails to Scotland, where he defeats the king, Albanact, but soon falls to Albanact’s avenging brothers. The most powerful of these brothers, Locrinus, seizes Elstred, but the combined power of her voice and face seduce this conqueror as well: And then I cry’d, O pitty me my King, His eyes cry’d pitty me, by woe looking. Each motion of mine eyes, enforc’d commotion Betwixt his will and reason what to aunswere.

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Elstred’s success is nearly complete when Locrinus “Ennobl[es her] life by his desire” and takes her as his lover (Sig. I4). Unfortunately, Locrinus is constrained politically to marry Guendolen of Cornwall, so he keeps Elstred as his mistress. Elstred’s success ultimately leads to her downfall, for she so bewitches Locrinus that he eventually drives Guendolen and his legitimate children by her into exile, where, mutatis mutandis, she raises an army with her brothers, revenges herself by slaying Locrinus, and sets up the powerful and finely crafted scenes in which Elstred, with her own daughter Sabrina, pleads for Guendolen’s pity. Lodge renders the trial of Elstred and Sabrina with an almost Sidniean virtuoso display of rhetorical ornamentation, using figures of repetition (particularly ploce) to create the aural effect of an echo: here Sabrina succeeds from Elstred, imitating her almost syllable for syllable. When Locrinus is slain, Elstred tells us, I fainting fell, enfeebled through my sufferaunce, My child that saw me fall, for grief fell by me: I wept, she cryde, both gave grief sustenaunce, I fainted, and she fainting layd her nie me. Even what I kyst, she kist, and what I sayd She sayd, and what I fear’d, made her afraid. (Sig. L1) The pleas of mother and daughter find only pitiless ears, and, as if to translate Rosamond’s worst fear into an aural medium, Elstred laments “Ah-las that no man / Weepes now with me.” Nevertheless, the ghost of Elstred is not alone, for she is joined by her daughter in a duet narrating their drowning in the river Severn: Sabrine. Then you and I sweet Mother were led forth, Elstred. We were led foorth sweet daughter to our last; Sabrine. Our words, our beauties had but little worth, Elstred. So will the heavens: that purest, soonest wast. Sabrine. I cride, help mother, help, she I was drowne[d.] Elstred. Ah helpless both, yet wanting help renowm[ed]. (Sigs. L3v-L4) Lodge carefully plays out the echo metaphor to the end of the tale, so that it is not Elstred but Sabrina whose words are the last spoken before the narrator wraps up the tale. While the figure of ploce had insisted on both the sameness and the difference of mother and daughter in Elstred’s account of their mourning for Locrinus, difference emerges more important in Sabrina’s last words. And Sabrina, somewhat like Delia in The Complaint of

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Rosamond, provides whatever hope of redemption is allowed in the end. She tells the narrator, I thus we dyed, yet not with self like fame, For floting Severne loves Sabrinaes name. So may he prattle still unto his wave, Sabrinaes name, whilst brine salt teares sea weepeth: And if the Gods or men compassions have, Compassion that with tender hearts nere sleepeth, We both shall live. (Sig. L4) To the extent that compassion is a synonym for pity, Sabrina’s hopes lie in the same passion as her mother’s hopes. The narrator’s pathetic response to the ghosts raises the possibility that he has renounced one cruel fair for two ghosts who will no better requite his love. In a variety of ways, then, Lodge’s Phillis both enacts and thematizes succession in the Astrophil-Delia line. It repeats and elaborates the three-part structure, and its insistently regular trochaic poems create, by their very regularity, a sense that all that is constant in this line of succession is the difference figured by the trochaic poems themselves. The voices of mother and daughter echo one another in Elstred, yet the introduction of contained difference in rhetorical figures like ploce begins to expand until Sabrina’s voice, her “not with self like fame,” distinguishes her and at the same time aspires to recover the story of herself and her mother. Giles Fletcher, Sidney’s Other Heir Giles Fletcher the Elder’s learned and graceful Licia, or Poemes of Love, in Honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his Lady, to the imitation of the best Latin Poets, and others, printed in late 1593, creates a link between the poetic line of succession that it advertises among itself, Phillis, and Astrophel and Stella, and broader social institutions: the patronage system, the universities, and the inns of court. While Fletcher weaves all these institutions together under a relatively inclusive rubric, he pointedly identifies his bastions of gentle learning against the most zealous aspects of English Puritanism. Given Robert Stillman’s demonstration that Philip Sidney championed a deeply anti-confessionalist political, religious, literary, and ethical cosmopolitanism, Fletcher’s Licia is arguably the truest heir of Sidneian sensibility in the tradition of English renaissance amorous poetry.62 Fletcher was better placed than many of his contemporaries to appreciate Sidney’s intellectual legacy. He had served diplomatic missions in

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Germany, negotiating on behalf of the Merchant Adventurers with the cities of Hamburg and Stade (independent of the Hanseatic League) in 1587, and as a special ambassador to Moscow on trade in 1589. Lodge, Spenser, Drayton, and many other university-trained poets lacked Fletcher’s extensive experience on the continent and his numerous acquaintances from diplomatic circles. Even Daniel seems to have gone abroad only once. Fletcher’s urbanity, learning, and experience recommended him to the Earl of Essex, who self-consciously styled himself Sidney’s political and intellectual heir. Unfortunately, Fletcher was caught up in the aftermath of the Essex rebellion in 1601 and his career never fully recovered.63 The two prefatory epistles to Licia, addressed to the Lady Molineux and to the common reader, clearly stake out Fletcher’s position. Though he notes that the English have borrowed heavily from French, Italian, and Spanish writers, he asserts the primacy of English writers nevertheless and heaps scorn on those who claim the English tongue is “barbarous.”64 Next, Fletcher associates admirable literature in English with Sir John Harington’s translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and with Sir Philip Sidney, linking both gentlemen to the universities but at the same time obliquely excluding from this fraternity of the enlightened at least some elements of the “university wits.” Thus Fletcher answers the commonplace query why writing is not properly esteemed in England with two reasons: the one, that so many base companions are the greatest writers: the other, that our English Genevian puritie hath quite debarred us of honest recreation; and yet the great pillar (as they make him of that cause) hath shewed us as much witte and learning in this kinde, as any other before or since. (Sig. A2v) Everybody, it seems, may agree that the likes of Greene and Nashe are base companions; but Fletcher takes pains to separate “the great pillar” of the Puritan cause from the attacks of English Puritans. Fletcher’s twentiethcentury editor, Lloyd Berry, asserts that Theodore Beza, the Calvinist theologian and collaborator with Clément Marot on a metrical psalter, is the “pillar” referenced in Fletcher’s epistle.65 It is worth noting, however, that Thomas Nashe had designated Sidney one of the “chiefe pillers of our English speech” in his 1592 Pierce Pennilesse his supplication to the Divell (Sig. D3v). Sidney’s own learning and wit, and his relationship to powerful Protestant aristocrats, made him likewise a rather unwilling beacon for zealous English Calvinists like Stephen Gosson, whose attack on poetry The School of Abuse, dedicated to Sidney, helped trigger Sidney’s Defence of Poesie. Thus, while Fletcher may have meant his “pillar” to refer to Beza, his readers

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may well have thought of Sidney— especially considering that Fletcher refers to Sidney by name only a few lines later, when Sidney is made to “confesse” the virtues of King’s College, Cambridge, whose honor was likewise burnished by Harington’s attendance (Sig. A2v). Besides emphasizing links with the universities, inns of court, Sidney, and Harington in the prefatory letters, Fletcher’s complaint poem, The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the third. Written by him selfe, specifically references Daniel’s Rosamond and Lodge’s Elstred (as well as Thomas Churchyard’s Jane Shore, an addition to The Myrroure for Magistrates in 1563), and claims to outdo them. Fletcher’s Richard announces with a bit of a swagger that “Shores wife, a subject, though a Princes mate, / Had little cause her fortune to lament”; likewise, “Rosamond was fayre, and farre more fayre then she, / her fall was great, and but a womans fall”; although “Elstred I pitie, for she was a Queene,” neither her story nor the others are worthy of the best poets. Indeed, Richard offers another reason why poetry is not rewarded in the Elizabethan age: [I] smyle to see the Poets of this age: Like silly boates in shallowe rivers tost, Loosing their paynes, and lacking still their wage. To write of women, and of womens falles, Who are too light, for to be fortunes balles.(Sig. L2r-v) By extension, then, Fletcher, who writes of the more substantial fall of a king, deserves greater reward. In a certain respect, Richard’s comparison reflects Fletcher’s greater proximity to political power than Daniel or Lodge. Unlike Rosamond and Elstred, who find themselves powerless to affect their reputations without recourse to their respective poets, Fletcher’s Richard (like his predecessor in More’s history and his contemporary in Shakespeare’s play) knows very well how to manipulate fame and rumor. After he has killed off his rivals and is ready to ascend to the throne, Richard notes the proliferation of rumors (bruit, here rendered with a pun, “Brute”) and acts to redirect them: Nowe as the Sea before a Storme doeth swell, Or fumes arise before we see the flame: So whispering Brute began my drifts to tell, And all Imparted unto babbling fame. I dem’d it danger, speech for to despice, For after this I knew a storme would rise. Londons Lord Major, I used for my turne,

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And caus’d him to speake what treason had bene done, I by these meanes the peoples hearts did turne, And made them eye me as the rising Sunne. *** Thus whilest I ment the Iland to bring under, The peoples heads on news I set to wonder. When Richard concludes his poem with a plea, “My verse is harsh, yet (reader) doe not frowne, / I wore no garland but a golden Crowne,” the very conventionality reminds us of the difference in status between Fletcher and the poets whose narrative complaints he has referenced. While Fletcher strives to distinguish himself from his rival poets, his diacritical stance likewise entails its own meditations on time, succession, and decay. Thus, sonnet 47 compares the poet-lover to “Memnons rocke,” the ruins of a colossus which, when heated by the sun, would make a sound: so the poet-lover, warmed by the light of the beloved, creates poetry but falls silent or writes inferior verse when she is absent. In this configuration, poetry is the very product of ruin (Sig. H2). Similarly, sonnet 28 touches on the destruction wrought by time through the three quatrains only to declare in the couplet, “Thus all (sweet faire) in tyme must have an end: / Except thy beautie, virtues, and thy friend” (Sig E4). Fletcher’s most intricate and interesting performance on the theme, however, occurs in Elegie II. Like Licia sonnets 4, 13, 14, 19, 23, and 35, and several poems between Astrophel and Stella 73 and 82, Fletcher’s poem is a baiser. In Fletcher’s poem, the beloved sends a kiss to the poet-lover by one of her maids, and when the poet-lover kisses the go-between, he claims “I kist but her, whome you had kist before,” and justifies his behavoir by claiming that “still me thought (sweet fayre) I kissed you” in kissing the intermediary. He begs his beloved to “send me moe, but send them by your frend, / Kisse none but her . . . / Yet love me (deare) and still still kissing be, / Both like and love, but none (sweet love) but me).” In this poem, the passing along of kisses is a figure for succession: one kiss succeeds another, but is less pure and perfect than the previous. Moreover, the very striving for fidelity in kissing is the means by which the poet-lover may carry on an affair with the go-between. The final aspect in which Licia as a whole imitates the first quartos of Astrophel and Stella, Delia, and Phillis is its structural unity. As Prescott has demonstrated, Licia is carefully arranged in three parts following a numerological scheme that corresponds to the leap year of 1592, when it was most likely composed. The book retains a three-part structure when read numerologically, consisting of 52 sonnets (one for each week of the year), followed by a middle section of six poems and 360 lines, followed by the “Complaint”

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of Richard III.66 What has heretofore gone unnoticed about Licia, however, is how the “Ode” that marks the beginning of its middle section varies its trochaic meter. The poem recounts a light love affair that temporarily goes sour because the lovers, constrained by the need to keep their affair secret, misinterpret each other. Each thinks the other is rejecting him/her for a time, but in the end they recognize their mistakes and reconcile. Fletcher attempts to make the meter signify, so that lines expressing hope or reconciliation are usually rendered in eight-syllable trochaic tetrameter rhyming feminine, but lines in which the misinterpretation is visited tend to be in masculine-rhymed seven-syllable trochaic tetrameter. Thus, while Fletcher creates pleasing metrical variation, he also tries to match it to the shifting moods of his “Ode.” Finally, the point of view presented by the “Ode” is an inverted reflection of Astrophel and Stella song viii. Sidney’s song famously shifts from a reserved third-person account throughout the entire poem, down to Stella’s rejection of Astrophil, only to register Astrophil’s distraction in the final line’s slippage into the first-person declaration that “therewith my song is broken” (my emphasis). Fletcher’s ode, by contrast, is told in the first person throughout until the third line from the end, which narrates the reconciliation in iambs: “Thus both did kisse, and both did weepe” (Sig. I1v), neatly inverting Sidney’s play with the narrative voice. *

*

*

The line of succession that Daniel, Lodge, and Fletcher fabricated for themselves was not the only line of succession developed in the wake of Astrophel and Stella. The themes of time, succession, and decay began to spread throughout books of lyric poetry printed after 1592. Michael Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) is one prominent sequence that explores these themes extensively, and perhaps not coincidentally, Drayton dabbled in the complaint genre with Mathild, Peirs Gaveston, and others before more firmly framing such poems in an Ovidian mold with his Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597). Barnabe Barnes likewise visited the theme of time extensively in Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593), which also explored mixing up lyric forms much more variably and with almost no emphasis on an implied narrative, although its concluding triple sestina, which infamously contemplates casting a spell on the beloved to facilitate raping her, provides a disturbing endpoint to a series of failures to seduce her. The dedicatee of Parthenophil, William Percy, responded with a book of sonnets, Coelia (1594), which concludes with a sonnet rededicating the book to Parthenophil. Henry Constable’s Diana (1592) might be said to revive a tradition of books of sonnets unmixed with other poetic forms and arranged in groups of ten: some other books arranged

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in this way include Thomas Watson’s posthumous Teares of Fancie (1593)— Watson’s earlier Hekatompathia (1582), though composed of eighteen-line sonnets, is likewise arranged in decads—the anonymous Zepheria (1594) and E. C.’s Emaricdulfe (1595). On the other hand, Duncan-Jones and Kuin have argued convincingly that Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion fits into the paradigm of a three-part structure, even though its concluding poem is by no means a complaint.67 Throughout the efflorescence of lyric poetry printed in the early 1590s, Sidney’s name was invoked in increasingly perfunctory (if usually obsequious) ways; Daniel’s, Lodge’s, and Fletcher’s sequences had enshrined the Sidney name and at the same time created a line of succession from Astrophel and Stella whose importance eclipsed Sidney’s poems themselves. At the same time that English writers were building an edifice around the shrine of Astrophel and Stella, they were invoking Sidney’s name in ever-broader contexts as a way to promote themselves, as the following chapter reveals.

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CHAPTER 3

The One and the Many: The Sidney Name in Print, 1590−93

B

y the time that the Countess of Pembroke brought into print a revised and expanded folio edition of the Arcadia in 1593, the Sidneian ethos had been appropriated for many political, ceremonial, and literary purposes. One discourse into which the memory of Philip Sidney had been co-opted was the sort of forward Protestantism championed by the Earl of Essex, husband to Sidney’s widow. Sidney’s revised Arcadia had been printed in a modest if not cheap format, anatomized by its textual apparatus, and pressed into service as a feigned politic history. Sidney’s amorous poetry had also been disseminated far beyond courteous, aristocratic bounds and it, too, had been partially anatomized by the format in which it was printed in the 1591 quartos: it certainly became a model suitable for poets of widely varying ability. Even the stationer William Ponsonby, to whom the Sidney family entrusted the publication of the authorized folio editions of the Arcadia, may not have been an entirely trustworthy agent in seeing Sidney’s writings into print. As is well-known, the Ponsonby quarto of Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie was considerably less accurate than the earlier, “pirated” edition titled An Apologie for Poetrie and printed for Henry Olney.1 Moreover, Ponsonby seems to have taken some liberties in the publication of Edmund Spenser’s 1591 Complaints. While the Sidney name was most often invoked in relatively direct bids for patronage, it also appeared frequently in the voluminous and rather undignified pamphlet exchange between Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe in the early 1590s. Nashe satirized both Harvey and Spenser for their overblown claims to be reforming English poetics and to stand high in the favor of the Countess of Pembroke; meanwhile, the

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Sidneys’s friend Sir John Harington engaged in his own rather smug namedropping to enhance the cachet of his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso. In all these cases, the Sidney name is associated with an ill-defined poetics and justifies one writer’s work at the expense of other writers, whose works fail to embody the supposedly “Sidneian” poetics. From the perspective of the Countess of Pembroke, both these kinds of appropriation might be said to exert a centrifugal force on the control of her brother’s ethos and her family’s reputation. Ultimately, a web of references to Sidney began to connect books and pamphlets otherwise unrelated to one another and to pull in different directions. The effect was a multiplication of signifieds associated with the Sidney name, and a series of expansions of what I called an inferred paratext in the introduction, which surrounded Sidney’s writings in print. Nationalistic or Opportunistic? Essex, Spenser, and the Sidney Name Before 1593 George Peele’s Polyhymnia (1590) rather unsubtly announces that Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, is the heir to Sir Philip Sidney’s intellectual and political legacy. Peele writes that Essex entered the 1589 Accession Day tilt dressed “in funeral blacke, / As if he mourn’d to thinke of him he mist, / Sweete Sydney, fairest shepherd of our greene.” But the earl’s attempt to construct himself as Sidney’s heir was restricted by Sidney’s strong association with literary pastoralism (in particular, by the pastoralist’s status as an outsider).2 The clumsiness of the title of Peele’s previous publication, An Eglogue Gratulatorie. Entitled: To the Right Honorable, and Renow[n]ed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe for his welcome into England from Portugall (1589), makes the incongruity palpable. Essex simply failed to grasp the tension between taking up the Sidneian mantle of virtuous, loved, and never-properly rewarded outsider and displaying his own status as one of Queen Elizabeth I’s favorites. Although Peele describes Essex as Sidney’s “successor . . . In love and Armes,” it remains unclear how positively the association was accepted. Essex had to deflect greater and greater envy as he rose in Queen Elizabeth’s estimation, and some of his more literary clients considered the same problem. Essex client Fulke Greville, for example, makes the elementary political point that to serve as a personal example of virtue risks the envy of those less favored by fortune, but the remedy lies in the true scope of the would-be exemplar’s hopes “because in our ends, we embrace the ends of all men; and thereby are advanced without prejudice, or discontent to anie.”3 That is, one’s personal gain is less likely to arouse envy if it is masked as a general good. Essex, or some of his clients, may well have seen a happy

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coincidence between the English people’s mourning for the loss of Sidney and the earl’s need to defuse envious detractors: carrying on projects essentially in Sidney’s name, as Sir Philip seems to have wished when he willed his sword to Essex, might offer the earl some cover from his rivals’ aspersions. What often gets lost in our readings of the rhetoric of Essex and his clients is the distinction between incipient national interest and an expedient, if perhaps somewhat sincere, pose. The same distinction is often lost in considerations of how Spenser’s printed works appropriate the Sidney name and ethos. Much farther down the political food chain than Essex and his high-ranking clients like Greville, Spenser explicitly acknowledges a cadre of heroes for the 1590s in the sonnets dedicated to many of England’s peers appended to his 1590 quarto edition of The Faerie Queene. In these sonnets, Essex stands above Spenser’s “catalogue of English heroes,” a status marked by Spenser’s professed inability adequately to praise the earl. Thus the poet begs Essex, “doe not sdeigne, to let thy name be writt / In this base Poeme, for thee far unfit.”4 Essex’s position in Spenser’s catalog of English heroes influences Sidney’s position in the pantheon of English writers, for as the notoriously touchy Essex must be elevated above his peers, so Essex’s designated ancestor in love and arms must likewise be elevated above his peers in literary matters. Thus Spenser triangulates prudently between Essex and the rival Herberts by dedicating a sonnet to Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. The octave of the sonnet praises Philip Sidney as “that most Heroicke spirit . . . crownd with lasting baies . . . Who first my Muse did lift out of the flore,” which appropriates the Sidney name to authorize the catalog, but it avoids a conflict of precedence between Essex and the countess by using Sidney’s spirit as the authority for all praise: it is Sidney’s spirit that “Bids me most noble Lady to adore / His goodly image living evermore.”5 Apparently Spenser’s flattery got him somewhere with Essex, since he paid for Spenser’s funeral in 1599. And yet the ultimate significance of the sonnet to Essex, as well as the point of its placement among the sonnets appended to the 1590 Faerie Queene, is debated.6 Jean R. Brink has argued convincingly that Spenser himself likely had little control over the placement or perhaps even the choice of sonnets appended to the 1590 Faerie Queene: more than likely the permutations in various copies of the 1590 Faerie Queene indicates a series of errors in the printing house.7 Spenser controlled the content of the sonnet, but its placement (indeed, the fact that it got printed) seems to have fallen to William Ponsonby and his printers. Likewise, Spenser’s Complaints, published after queen Elizabeth had granted Spenser his famous £50 pension, was likely not authorized by Spenser himself and more the doing of William Ponsonby than of the poet, as Brink has shown.8 At stake for Ponsonby in “gather[ing] together these

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fewe parcels present” and printing the Complaints volume were sales of his two most time- and labor-intensive products, the 1590 Arcadia and the 1590 Faerie Queene. As Mark Bland has shown, similarities in the typography and format of the Arcadia and Faerie Queene, particularly in light of the lengths to which his printer John Windet had to go to obtain the English Roman type for the Arcadia, indicate that Ponsonby designed the books to resemble one another.9 The Complaints volume issued in 1591 by the Faerie Queene poet, praising the author of the Arcadia, might boost sales of both. Sidney became the guardian angel for Ponsonby’s business, standing over and authorizing a significant part of his printed inventory in the 1590s. The Complaints, particularly the opening poem “The Ruins of Time,” turn Sidney into a presiding but absent figure, fusing a learned and graceful poetics with a strongly partisan politics projected back onto the more recently deceased Earls of Leicester and Warwick, as well as Sir Francis Walsingham. A glance at the works printed for Ponsonby in 1591 confirms an overtly politically engaged group of books as well as a much less overtly engaged group of works, the latter group associated more closely with the Countess of Pembroke than the former. Overtly political works printed for Ponsonby in 1591 include Sir Walter Raleigh’s A report of the truth of the fight about the Iles of Açores, this last somer, which advocates a militant stance against Philip of Spain; and Spenser’s Complaints, in which “Mother Hubberds Tale” attacks Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and an advocate of caution against the so-called “forward Protestant” members of Elizabeth’s court. After Complaints was called in, the uncontroversial poem “Daphnaïda” was published separately. In the same year, Ponsonby also published Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembrokes Ivychurch and The Countess of Pembrokes Emanuel, which studiously avoided court politics in favor of an extended experiment in quantitative verse. Fraunce, unlike Raleigh and Spenser, needed the countess’s patronage and had pinned most of his hopes on her.10 Spenser’s Complaints does as much as any single literary publication in the 1590s to align Sir Philip Sidney in English politics. While the 1590 Arcadia paratexts implicitly present the romance as a feigned Tacitean history, the Complaints openly compares the virtues of the deceased Earl of Leicester with the vices of the still-living Lord Burleigh, aligning Sidney with the former. “The Ruines of Time” was completed sometime after the death of Frances Walsingham in April 1590, almost certainly after Ponsonby had published both the Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It comprises the lament of the spirit of the ruined Roman town of Verlamium, elegies for the Earl of Leicester and for Philip Sidney, and an encomium on poetic praise: three circles of progressively smaller scope, from a Roman example of civilization

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itself to the best of English civilization embodied in the house of Dudley and brought to an apotheosis in the figure of Sir Philip Sidney, capped off by an encomium of encomia that rather unsubtly, if less than perspicuously, underscores a difference between the prematurely forgotten scion of the Dudley line on one hand, and the never-to-be-sufficiently praised scion on the other. The pain and the shame of the Spenserian new poet inhabiting the dark, post-Leicestrian age of Burleigh dominance are palpable in the lament for the loss of Leicester: “I saw him die, I saw him die, as one / Of the meane people, and brought foorth on beare, / I saw him die, and no man left to mone / His dolefull fate” (ll. 190−93). Implicit in this pitiful scene is a comparison to the lavish funeral for Sir Philip Sidney, which nearly bankrupted Sidney’s father-in-law, Francis Walsingham. In upbraiding the poets’ silence on Leicester’s death—“His name is worne already out of thought, / Ne anie Poet seekes him to revive; / Yet manie Poets honourd him alive” (ll. 222−24)—the speaker includes even Spenser’s alter ego Colin Clout among the ungrateful. Worse yet, he intimates, now that Leicester is dead, “the whiles the Foxe [Burleigh ] is crept / Into the hole, the which the Badger [Leicester] swept” (ll. 216−17).11 Thus, similar to the way that Sidney functions as a sign of an absence to be filled by aspirant poets, the name of Leicester functions as a sign of an absence that has been filled malignantly by Burleigh, whose lack of regard for poets Spenser was not alone in bemoaning.12 Even more overt in its attack on the state of poetry under a Burleighdominated Privy Council is “The Teares of the Muses,” the second poem in the Complaints volume. “Teares of the Muses” lays out a set of mutually exclusive conditions (muses/ignorance, civilization/barbarism, feminine/ masculine, Leicester and Sidney/Burleigh) that force readers to experience one as the absence of the other.13 For example, Clio complains that both the newer and the older aristocracy neglect learning now in England, and Polyhymnia laments the vulgarization and debasement of poetry in the age of Burleigh (which signifies the absence of Sidney).14 This paradox of signification is the same pattern that Joel Fineman has pointed out in The Rape of Lucrece: there, the play of red and white in Lucrece’s cheek seems to mean alternately sexualized beauty and chaste virtue, each color appropriating the moral domain of the other, so that first red is beauty’s blush and white the color of virtue, but then shamefastness flushes her cheek and beauty claims the whiteness of “Venus’ doves.” Ultimately, the result is not a clear message but an arousal of rapacious desire in Tarquin, and Lucrece’s virtue is realized only by means of her violation.15 Similarly, in “Teares of the Muses” and “Ruines of Time,” the current fallen state of patronage for poetry confuses badly crafted and morally bankrupt verse with its opposite. Thus the new

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poet must write proper praise for genuine figures of virtue: Queen Elizabeth in “Teares of the Muses,” and Sir Philip Sidney in “Ruines of Time.” The voices of the Sidney family help to delineate the gap between poetry in the golden Leicestrian age and the brazen present, in which the new poet finds his voice. Thus in “The Ruines of Time,” two parisonic stanzas doubly distance Spenser’s “new poet” persona from those of the fallen Sidney and his living sister. The new poet exists largely to praise the absent Sidney, and Sidney’s absence is signified in the new poet’s claim to inadequacy. After vowing to “spend” his breath “in speaking of [Sidney’s] praise,” (l. 310), the “Ruines of Time” speaker declares Then will I sing, but who can better sing, Than thine owne sister, peerless Ladie bright . . . . Yet will I sing, but who can better sing, Than thou thy selfe, thine owne selfes valiance That whilest thou livedst, madest the forests ring, And fields resownd, and flockes to leap and daunce, And shepheards leave their lambs unto mischaunce, To runne thy shrill Arcadian Pipe to heare: O Happie were those dayes, thrice happie were. (ll. 316−29) That is, while the new poet will elegize Sidney as he has Leicester and (through another persona) Verlamium, the voices of the Countess of Pembroke and Sidney himself create the best elegies of all. Spenser’s ambitious, ambivalent, passive-aggressive praise clearly marks this passage, for whereas the recently published Faerie Queene dares to erect a poetical epitome of all British history in the “Briton Moniment” for Guyon’s perusal in Book II, the recently published Arcadia and everything the Countess of Pembroke might do are paradoxically limited in their “golden-age” scope to mourning and memorializing the passing of Sidney himself.16 The end of the “Ruines of Time” enacts the apotheosis of Sidney, the “Immortall spirite of Philisdes,” decked “with rich spoyles . . . which now art made the heavens ornament, / That whilome wast the worlds chiefest riches”; and the poet asks Mary Sidney Herbert, “ye faire Ladie th’honor of your daies,” to “Vouchsafe this moniment of his last praise” (ll. 654−682). Spenser rather effectively buries Sidney under cover of praising him.17 In the Complaints, Sidney becomes loosely analogous to Petrarch’s Laura in morte and his sister the countess analogous to Laura in vita: in either case, a singular exemplar of virtue and “an heavenly signe” (l. 601) of true aristocratic worth.18

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William Ponsonby, Abraham Fraunce, and the Construction of the Insider Ethos Ponsonby’s less aggressively political publications in 1591 nevertheless declared their association with the Countess of Pembroke. Their author, Abraham Fraunce, seems to have restricted his search for patronage to the Sidney family and did not attempt to flatter Essex—unlike Spenser. Fraunce’s works suited Ponsonby’s list because they made much of Sidney and his sister, and because Fraunce was one of very few English poets to write quantitative verse competently along the lines suggested by Spenser and Harvey and attempted by Sidney. Sidney had subsidized Fraunce’s education at Cambridge, perhaps out of some loyalty to the Shrewsbury School connection the two men shared. After Cambridge, Fraunce enrolled at Gray’s Inn (as had Sidney) and pursued a career as a lawyer, again relying on patronage from the Sidney family. Henry Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke and husband of Philip Sidney’s sister, advocated unsuccessfully on Fraunce’s behalf in 1590, but Fraunce seems not to have been deterred, for he placed Mary Sidney in the title of both works he published with Ponsonby in 1591. The countesse of Pembrokes Emanuel, conteining the nativity, passion, buriall, and resurrection of Christ: togeather with certaine psalmes of David, all in English hexameters is relatively unremarkable except for the possibility that it recognizes the countess’s interest in the Psalms and its advertisement of “English hexameters.” Fraunce’s other work, The countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, conteining the affectionate life, and unfortunate death of Phillis and Amyntas: that in a pastorall; this in a funerall: both in English hexameters, was entered into the Stationer’s Register on the same day as the Emanuel, February 9, 1591. The Yvychurch is known for its appropriation of Thomas Watson’s Latin Amyntas, which Fraunce had the decency to acknowledge in 1591 (as he did not in an earlier work dedicated to the countess that translated Watson’s poem), and for casting the countess as “Pembrokiana,” the huntress who commands the pastorals and the funeral entertainments for Phillis. The Yvychurch is one of many works that imagine their own idealized “virtual” Sidney circle in their bids for patronage; Fraunce’s relative insecurity and low social status render his literary representations less pointed than some other poets’.19 The Yvychurch also recycles some significant phrases from Sidney and Spenser. Amyntas tells us that he wishes he could hear the “soul-invading voyce” of Phillis, directly quoting Astrophil’s description of Stella’s voice in song vii of Astrophel and Stella; the sage of Ivychurch, Elpinus, borrows the Spenserian formulations of a “dungeon of despair” and a “bowre of bliss”; and he cribs from a Thomas Howell title in referring to “Dainty

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devises.”20 Given Fraunce’s title and the name of his huntress, the identification of Amyntas with Sidney/Astrophil comes as no great surprise, nor does Amyntas’s death after twelve days of song in honor of Phyllis, nor Pembrokiana’s determination to commemorate Amyntas in pastoral elegies every year. But the soul-invading voice of Phyllis (or at least Amyntas’s memory of it) should also alert us to poetic meter, as well. If Fraunce had a role in publishing Newman’s 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, he might have thought of a relatively direct connection between prosody and Stella’s voice. He certainly was interested in a “reformed kinde of verse” (sig. A2r): the unrhymed “English hexameters” of his title pages. First, although he wrote in a “strict quantitative pattern” that could be “scanned” by those trained in Latin prosody, he managed some English rhythms, occasionally getting accentual and quantitative prosodies to coincide in good lines at the cost of “slight distortions of language and the insertion of unnecessary syllables.” Derek Attridge concludes that Fraunce’s quantitative verse builds on techniques pioneered primarily by Sidney and proffers Fraunce the genuine, if faint, praise that the best of his quantitative verse is as good or better than the best of Sidney’s.21 Second, Fraunce’s hexameters demonstrate close attention to Sidney, for the third section of the 1591 Yvychurch (not to be confused with the 1592 Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Ivychurch, discussed hereafter) consists of a hexameter verse translation of Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History, a main source for The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia. Fraunce’s range of references and their knowingness, when taken together especially with his publisher Ponsonby, create a strong impression that Fraunce was close to the Sidneys; that is, they are effective parts of the inferred paratext surrounding printed editions of Sidney’s writings. Presumably they were intended to impress the countess as the products of a man who deeply and sincerely appreciated Philip Sidney’s literary accomplishments. But more significant, I think, both for Fraunce and for Ponsonby, is how convincingly these references portray Fraunce’s connectedness to readers outside the Sidney circle who might have learned something about it secondhand. A potential patron or a potential client might well overestimate Fraunce’s connections; someone browsing the bookstalls might well be struck by the constellation of writers under Ponsonby’s imprint. What exactly constitutes the “reformed kinde of verse” in England may well have mattered much less to most readers than the fact that they could see points of reference in Ponsonby books attributed to Sidney, Spenser, and the new master of hexameter, Fraunce. Thus in several Ponsonby publications c. 1590−91, Philip Sidney seems to be a key to a code that looks like a literary system in Helgerson’s sense. But even if the references Ponsonby writers made indicate a code,

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the heterogeneity of motives and consequences for those references hardly point toward widespread consciousness of a “national literature.” Instead, the 1590 Arcadia and the 1591 volume of Spenser’s Complaints point toward the circle of the rising Earl of Essex and the relatively bellicose Protestantism that the earl espoused in the 1590s. While Spenser’s characterizations of Sidney are congruent with such a political public-relations program, they cannot be taken at face value as the positions Spenser chose to adopt in print, because irregularities in the printing of the Faerie Queene and the Complaints indicate that Spenser lacked control over some aspects of their publication.22 Indeed, Ponsonby and his printers seem to have had at least as much influence as Edmund Spenser on which characterizations of Sidney and Essex reached print and how they might be positioned in relation to one another. On the other hand, it is clear that other writers, like Fraunce, whom Ponsonby published in the same time frame, sought to appropriate the Sidney name for completely different purposes, had little to say about Queen Elizabeth’s court, and did not recognize Spenserian laureate poetics in the way we have, even though they did recognize Spenser’s works and ambition. Thus Fraunce’s two books of 1591 point to a more exclusively literary circle than Spenser’s Complaints, and Fraunce sprinkles his text with phrases gathered from Sidney and Spenser. In the cases of both Spenser and Fraunce, references reward partially knowledgeable readers with a sense of having tracked down relationships among the “Sidney circle” statesmen and writers, while those relationships remain almost entirely textual constructions. In Fraunce and in Spenser, the voices of Sidney and the countess represent the gap between Sidney-as-heavenly-sign and a proliferation of possible signifieds: Spenserian new poet(ry), Fraunce’s reformed verse, and the reformed politics of Essex and his clients. Spenser, Harvey, and Nashe: The Art of Deflation Competition for status, notoriety, patronage, and literary allies spilled beyond the books printed for Ponsonby in the early 1590s. Spenser, for example, was part of the contemporaneous and well-known literary quarrel between his friend, Cambridge scholar Gabriel Harvey, and satirist Thomas Nashe. In retrospect, Spenser seems to have been wiser than Harvey in avoiding the hottest parts of the exchange: as Sir John Harington remarked, The proverbe sayes, who fights with durty foes, Must needs be soyld, admit they winne or lose. Then think it doth a Doctors credit dash, To make himself Antagonist to Nashe.23

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It is possible to see the intertextual references among Ponsonby’s authors as implicitly recognizing a circle of nondisseminative desire whose social esteem rises so long as a) intertextual references seeming to have something to do with Sidney proliferate, and b) the references only suggest some greater pattern without revealing anything concrete. That is, the circle of desire is nondisseminative in that while it advertises that it has knowledge of things Sidneian, it appears to conceal what that knowledge is.24 But, as Nashe announces with the “violent enlargement” of Sidney’s sonnets, disseminative desire often proves irresistible. In the Harvey-Nashe quarrel, Nashe tapped into a variety of disseminative desire, a certain pleasure in pricking the inflated claims of importance advanced by Spenser and Harvey dating all the way back to their 1580 pamphlet, Three proper and wittie, familiar Letters: lately passed betweene two Universitie men: touching the Earthquake in Aprill last, and our English refourmed Versifying. The attraction of deflating Spenser and Harvey is disseminative in that it spreads knowledge that Harvey has no privileged knowledge of Sidney’s poetics, after all. Spenser and Harvey probably agreed to publish their “correspondence” to promote The Shepheardes Calendar (1579). Three . . . Letters drops the names of Philip Sidney and Edward Dyer copiously amid excited references to “M. Drants Prosodye,” “M. Sidneys judgement” (D4r) regarding quantitative verse in English, and the “areopagus” to which Spenser claims to be privy— all of which point to exclusive circles of nondisseminative desire. Both Harvey and Spenser are coy about which principles, precisely, would guide a new English quantitative poetics and, significantly, neither published the volume of quantitative verse that Fraunce did. Spenser mentions Master Drant’s rules and the areopagus on several occasions, but suggests that Harvey send him his own observations on quantity so that Spenser might, apparently in consultation with Sidney, reconcile all these quantitative poetics, “that we might both accorde and agree in one: leaste we overthrowe one an other, and be overthrown of the rest” (sig. A4r). The more or less overt claim, familiar to anyone who has tangled with office politics, is that Harvey and Spenser ought to defer to Sidney’s judgment about quantitative prosody and form a united front with him. Given how little quantitative verse we have from Spenser, it seems that effecting a quantitative reform of English poetry was less important to him than advertising that he was discussing such matters with Sidney. How we ought to read Three . . . Letters and their hints about an “areopagus” is crucial to the “invention of English literature” as we understand it. Derek Attridge has argued influentially that in spite of a few precocious attempts in English, the movement to write quantitative verse in English became as widespread as it would get in England only when Philip Sidney

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began the experiments we see in some Old Arcadia and Certaine Sonets poems, c. 1577−1580. It is, of course, the Three . . . Letters that Attridge cites in support of the specific claim that Philip Sidney lay behind the coalescence of a quantitative verse movement in England; that is, on this point Attridge simply accepts Spenser’s assertion uncritically.25 I suggest that it is the account of the agency behind the brief spike in the popularity of attempting quantitative verse in English, and not its general outlines, that needs revision. The quantitative verse movement in Elizabethan England spread because Spenser and Harvey’s publications used Sidney’s name to promote their own causes; by 1580, Sidney had in all likelihood ceased to be much interested in quantitative verse. The most intriguing reason for the appeal of quantitative verse put forward by Attridge is that, like complex numerological schemes, quantitative measures do not advertise themselves to those who do not know to scan for them. Such elements check disseminative tendencies and can lend status to those who know their codes—if the circle of those who are aware of, but not privy to the code, is wide enough. In many ways, quantitative verse could serve as an ideal fetish around which to form such an “in group”: quantities are determined by a combination of duration, ictus, and the situation of a given vowel in relation to other letters surrounding it; they cannot simply be heard by the modern ear but must be known by visualizing the verse in written form.26 Thus, even though the quantitative verse movement in Elizabethan England sought to emulate classical and Continental precedents, its main thrust was to create a rarefied club indeed. Another reason to interpret Three . . . Letters in terms of relatively parochial interests is that only gentlemen like Sidney and Edward Dymoke (owner of one of the Astrophel and Stella manuscripts discussed in chapter 2), or diplomats like Giles Fletcher the Elder, or their fortunate servants like Samuel Daniel, could hope to introduce poets of other languages to refined English poetry; men of Spenser’s and Harvey’s more domestic stations, however ambitious, could only hope to arbitrate taste in poetry written in English and that perhaps their work might find its way into the hands of some literaryminded speaker of another language. Thus, while it is true that elements that would seem to contribute to a sense of English literary nationalism appear in Spenser’s and Harvey’s remarks about prosody, as well as some parts of the Harvey−Nashe quarrel, the immediate cause of their presence is apparent in their ambitions to outface one another. The extent of the conversation between Sidney and Spenser about prosody has been the subject of much debate, but this much is clear: Spenser’s assertions imply that he is connected with Sidney and Sir Edward Dyer and involved in deep conversations about poetics, and they provide a reason

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that no more concrete evidence of these relationships nor any specific poetic rules may be revealed— all of which can only enhance Spenser’s reputation. Harvey pursues a strategy similar to Spenser: indeed, the title of one of his letters promises “some Precepts of our Englishe reformed Versifying,” yet his text explicitly asserts “I dare geve no Preceptes, nor set down any Certain General Arte,” and only offers “Particular Examples” of reformed verse on the lines of “my las[t] English Hexameters” (sig. D4r-v). No one untrained in Latin prosody is in a position to evaluate the success of the examples Harvey offers, which is the point. Harvey offers several examples of verse, and the pamphlet contains several quotations of Spenser’s recent The Shepheardes Calendar to boot, but the “rules” by which such poetry works remain hidden from the reader. Instead, readers find references to Spenser’s works-inprogress and Harvey’s scholarly projects (including his windy discourse on earthquakes). Three . . . Letters catapulted neither man to instant fame and, as is well known, the experiments with quantitative meter led to no great breakthroughs in the poetry of Sidney, Spenser, or Dyer. But the self-promoting pamphlet certainly was not forgotten. Early impressions of Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592, printed by John Wolfe) contain passages mocking all of the Harvey brothers and specifically Gabriel Harvey’s claim to have “invented Englishe Hexamiter,” which appeared in the 1580 pamphlet. The passages were deleted from subsequent impressions, but they seem to have catalyzed, if not caused, the famous Nashe−Harvey literary quarrel— and Nashe’s part of the quarrel, in particular his send-ups of the pretensions of Spenser and Harvey, likewise indicate that Spenser’s and Harvey’s ambitions to reform the English language served primarily as pretexts for advertising their familiarity with Sidney.27 At the heart of the quarrel lies social status, as the subtitle of Greene’s pamphlet indicates: A quaint dispute between Velvet breeches and Clothbreeches. Wherein is plainely set downe the disorders in all Estates and Trades. Greene invokes sumptuary laws as a way to discern gentility from mere airs (in the process insulting the Harveys).28 As Harvey and Nashe take up the cudgels, each characterizes the other as a disingenuous social climber, and each invokes the Sidney name in his defense. Harvey continues the tactics begun in the Three . . . Letters pamphlet of 1580, hinting at connections with the Sidney family with such suggestions of insider knowledge as, for example, his intimation in A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593, also printed by Wolfe) of familiarity with the Countess of Pembroke’s work, “whom I do not expresly name, not because I do not honour Her with my hart, but because I would not dishonour Her with my pen, whom I admire, and cannot blason enough” (sig. B1r); Harvey names the countess’s recently

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published translations of The Tragedie of Antonie and The Discourse of Life and Death, rendering her identity fairly apparent. Harvey’s New Letter bristles with obscure references and culminates in a positively cryptic series of poems celebrating the year 1593, apparently because it has brought the demise of both Christopher Marlowe and the Ottoman Turks (linked in the image of Tamberlane) and, on the other hand, in 1593, “Pleased it hath a Gentlewoman rare, / With Phenix quill in diamont hand of Art, / To muzzle the redoubtable Bull-bare, / And play the galiard Championesses part . . . The mightiest miracle of Ninety Three” (sig. D3v). Though Harvey’s references are deliberately obscure, he seems here to be referring to the Countess of Pembroke once again, and, as Matthew Steggle has argued convincingly, to the 1593 folio Arcadia.29 Harvey’s method is pedantic mystification: he simply strews about obscure references to important people and significant events of the day, and sets himself forth as the one man equipped to decode all the references by virtue of his connections to the glorious Countess of Pembroke. Such a strategy would seem to make Nashe’s task difficult: were he to call out Harvey, he would have to prove a negative (that Harvey didn’t really know the countess all that well, and so on). Nashe’s strategy, therefore, is not to rebut Harvey’s insinuations but instead to profess his own admiration for Philip Sidney, to demonstrate his own “inside knowledge,” and simultaneously to tar the Harvey brothers with the brush of academic myopia. He does so most effectively by building around these claims a brilliant satire of Elizabethan literary fads in Pierce Pennilesse his supplication to the Divell (1592). In Pierce Penniless, predictably, the Harvey name stands for the busy pursuit and creation of passing literary fads, whereas the Sidney name stands for the constant patronage of real scholarly and literary virtue. Nashe’s central conceit (familiar in even more serious estimations of literature in England like Sidney’s Apology for Poetry, Gosson’s School of Abuse, Ascham’s Schoolmaster and the like) is that conditions in England make it impossible for the writer— or good writing, or good manners, or good behavior—to thrive, and thus Pierce Penniless is driven to beg the devil’s help. Pierce immediately complains that educated men are overlooked by those that “are enamoured of their own wits,” that “a Scrivener [is] beter paid for an obligation, than a scholler for the best Poeme he can make; that every grosse braind Idiot is suffered to come into print,” which prompts him to ask in exasperation, “How then can we chuse but be needy, when there are so many Droans amongst us: or ever prove rich that toyle a whole yeare for faire lookes” (Sig. A1v–A2r). None of these characterizations singles out specific targets; rather, they set up general characteristics that Nashe associates with a few specific targets later in his satire. Still, his punning epithet

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for sonneteers, “Droans,” singles out a certain kind of writer whose literary fad was in its infancy in 1592, and his casual assertion that writers may never “prove rich” suggests a link with Astrophil and Stella, to which Nashe contributed (at the least) the preface in Newman’s first quarto. Indeed, the very fact that it is not possible to determine whether Nashe intended to reference Penelope Rich tells us something about the nature of a semiotically construed literary system: though we are on safe ground asserting that writers referred to one another and to patrons frequently, particular references are sometimes difficult to judge, and a good deal depends on the interpretive framework we bring to our reading. Regardless of Nashe’s intentions with respect to the term “rich,” he castigates the writers and patrons of his time by reference to Philip Sidney. With a kind of sardonic nostalgia he apostrophizes: Gentle Sir Philip Sidney, thou knewst what belongd to a Scholler, thou knewst what paines, what toyle, what travel conduct to perfection: wel couldst thou give every Vertue his encouragement, every Art his due, every writer his desert: cause none more virtuous witty, or learned than thy selfe. But thou art dead in thy grave, and hast left too few successors of thy glory, too few to cherish the Sons of the Muses, or water those budding hopes with their plenty, which thy bounty erst planted . . . This is the lamentable condition of or Times. (Sig. A1v–A2r) In this passage, Sidney is the virtuous paragon of patronage against which the arbitrariness, parsimony, poor taste, and general philistinism of the present moment are to be measured. The complaint is similar to those Spenser registers in “The Ruines of Time” and “The Teares of the Muses” and perhaps parodies such laments, but it resists being parsed for specific targets. Presumably any potential patron or patroness could be a target, and yet, at the same time, a few “Sidneian” patrons seem to remain as beacons of virtue and castigations to vice. Nashe’s concern is not to elevate the status of Sir Philip Sidney, but only to create a portrait of a wretched literary present into which to fit the Harvey brothers. In this respect, Nashe’s rhetorical strategy is similar to those deployed in Spenser’s “Ruines of Time” and “Teares of the Muses” – even in Sidney’s own Apology for Poetrie – but the ends are very different. Once Nashe has, by his epideixis, co-opted his readers’ judgment (rather like Richard Nixon’s Great Silent Majority worked: we all remember when real virtue was rewarded and know who the bad poets and patrons of this benighted time are, don’t we?), his satiric invective winds up. Nashe’s attack on prideful courtly targets borrows a notion set out in Astrophel and Stella.

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Although he points out upstarts who wear the livery of “an Inamorato Poeta, & sonnet a whole quire of paper in praise of Lady Swinsnout, his yellow fac’d Mistres, & weare a feather of her rain beaten fan for a favor,” a more attractive target is the other self-inflated fellows who “thinke to be counted rare Politicians and Statesmen, by being solitary,” which seems to echo Astrophel and Stella 23, 27, and 28 (Sig. B2r), in which Astrophil pretends to deflect speculations about his own solitariness. When Nashe moves from general satire to the ridicule of specific targets, once again he invokes the Sidney name as his weapon, gathering around it names associated with wisdom and statesmanship to serve as a contrast to his target. Thus he intones, “What age will not praise immortal Sir Philip Sidney, whom noble Salustius (that thrice si[n]guler french Poet) hath famoused,” in one of the few references to Sidney’s lost translation of Du Bartas’ influential La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde. Furthermore he names Sidney, with Thomas More and Sir Nicholas Bacon, “the chiefe pillers of our English speech” (D3v). Such statements form parts of the factual paratexts of The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, and they also invite inferences. Inferences drawn from a semiotic and synchronic framework see statements like these as evidence of a fully formed English literary system to which even opponents like Nashe and Spenser might both refer. Nevertheless, Nashe’s immediate goal is to lash the Harvey brothers, and while praising Sir Philip Sidney in pursuit of such a goal relies on Sidney’s fame and a recognition of writers in English, it does not necessarily entail a complete literary system in order to be understood. The Harvey-Nashe quarrel is sufficient to make such statements intelligible. Thus Nashe praises a few more English humanists (Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham among others) before excoriating Richard Harvey, “a ridiculous Asse that many yeares since . . . . . wrote an obsurd Discourse of the terrible Conjunciton of Saturne and Jupiter” (D4vE1r), and lambasting all the Harvey brothers with their father’s occupation, making rope.30 It is the climax of Pierce Pennilesse that brings together the strands of Nashe’s satire in most revelatory fashion, because there Nashe takes most direct aim at the Spenser−Harvey strategy of implying patronage relationships with the Sidney family. He asks leave to “digres to [his] private experience, and with a toong unworthy to name a name of such worthines, affectionatelie emblason to the eies what wonder, the matchlesse image of Homer, and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Joves Eagle-borne Ganimed, thrice no[b]le Amyntas.” With Amyntas, Nashe twits Spenser, insisting that none but Amyntas [should] be the second misticall argument of the knight of the Redcrosse, Oh decus atque ævi gloria summa tui. And here

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(heavenlie Spencer) I am most highlie to acuse thee of forgetfulness, that in that honourable catalogue of our English Heroes, which insueth the conclusion of thy famous Fairie Queene, thou wouldst let so speciall a piller of Nobilitie pass unsaluted. (Sigs. I4r-I4v) The fun starts with the large collection of sonnets that conclude the 1590 Faerie Queene over which, as we have already seen, Spenser lacked complete control. On one hand, Amyntas can refer to Sir Philip Sidney and his shadow, Philisides, since Abraham Fraunce had used the name in that way in his The Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch and, of course, Nashe has been invoking Sidney’s name all throughout Pierce Pennilesse. But more important for Nashe’s joke is the fact that “Amyntas” does not name Sidney directly and, of course, brings with it a certain plausible deniability.31 Thus Nashe offers Spenser one last pointedly saccharine sonnet to complete his catalogue of English heroes: Perusing yesternight with idle eyes, The Fairy Singers stately tuned verse: And viewing after Chap-mens wonted guise, What strange contents the title did rehearse. I straight leapt over to the latter end, Where like the quaint Comædians of our time, That when their Play is done fal to ryme, I found short lines, to sundry Nobles pend. Whom he as speciall Mirrours singled fourth, To be the Patrons of his Poetry; I read them all, and reverenc’t their worth, Yet wondred he let out thy memory. But therefore gest I he suprest thy name, Because few words might not comprise thy fame. Nashe’s jab at the many dedicatory sonnets in the 1590 Faerie Queene and the ambition they reveal is brought to perfection by the absence at their center. Nicholas Breton, Thomas Nashe, and the Countess of Pembroke’s Love Beyond the immediate circle of writers being published by Ponsonby, one of the most prolific and insistent in invoking the Sidney−Pembroke names was Nicholas Breton. Like Fraunce, Breton tended to avoid overt engagement with court politics; like Spenser, he did not restrict his search for patronage to the Pembroke circle and he likewise felt some of Nashe’s jabs. Breton’s prolific

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and popular output is misrepresented by the relatively lean years 1591−93, during which Brittons Bowre of Delights (1591) and The Pilgrimage to Paradise, Joyned with the Countesse of Penbrookes love (1592) were published. Although Brittons Bowre was reprinted in 1597, Breton repudiated nearly all the poems it contained except for his elegy for Philip Sidney, and complained that the printer, Richard Jones, had acted without his consent.32 The only patronage we know he received from the countess was a letter the earl wrote in support of “Brittan a schoolmaster” in 1590.33 In light of the size of Breton’s oeuvre and the number of times his works were reprinted, it would be reasonable to characterize 1591−92 as a low point in his literary career; indeed, our sense of Breton’s relative literary significance undoubtedly is reduced because his association with the Sidney circle attracts critical attention to his least successful writings and away from other, much better-received efforts. Breton’s writing has nearly always been assessed in terms of how it accommodates itself to the overwhelming influence of the Countess of Pembroke and her dead brother’s works. Mary Ellen Lamb argues that Breton stands among those poets whose relationship to the countess was relatively insecure, and therefore his poetry rarely—and then only obliquely—acknowledges the countess’s own literary activities.34 Likewise, Margaret Hannay claims that Breton erred in his attempt to improve his relationship with the countess by portraying her as ascetically denying the pleasure of poetry.35 In almost direct contrast, Suzanne Trill argues that Breton recognizes the countess’s religious writings rather than her secular writings and, in “The Countess of Penbrookes love,” he goes so far as to appropriate her voice in order to imagine the selfabasement proper to penitence.36 The difficulty with Trill’s reading is that it requires us to presume that Breton had seen the countess’s work on the Psalms in manuscript in 1591−92, or else that he was aware of and had seen her translations of Robert Garnier’s Antonius and Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death in manuscript, neither of which is especially likely. Nevertheless, if we frame a brief examination of Breton’s work in terms of how it shapes the reputation of Philip Sidney and the countess, particularly in this window of time, Trill’s observations about Breton’s inappropriate aggressiveness begin to resonate with the claims of Lamb and Hannay. Brittons Bowre, entered on the Stationer’s Register on May 3, 1591, was printed before the Q1 of Astrophel and Stella, as is evident in Thomas Nashe’s ridicule of the former in his preface to the latter.37 A good portion of the Bowre engages the most superficial forms of name-dropping, far removed from the elaborate schemes of Spenser and Harvey, or even of Fraunce: a series of acrostic poems spell out “Philip” and “Philip Sidney,” and two others (apparently not noticed by the printer) spell out “Penelope Rich” and “Frances Haward.” The elegy that Breton affirmed as his own work, “Amoris Lachrymae,” very much praises the Philip Sidney of the 1590 Arcadia and the earlier elegy tradition. In

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six-line stanzas common in Elizabethan poetry, Breton limns Sidney as a soldier and a statesman mourned by scholars, soldiers, and the peers of the realm. Although Breton provides Nashe with an irresistible target in the line “Oh my love, ah my love, all my loves gone,” his elegy remains otherwise inoffensive and unremarkable.38 The structure of the Bowre anticipates Newman’s first Astrophel and Stella quarto. It is divided into four parts: “Amoris Lachrymae”; a section of varied “Poems and Sonets”; a section pairing an Anacreontic and a Complaint poem, “Brittons Vision and Brittons Dream”; and a final section of varied “Poems and Sonets.” “Brittons Vision and Brittons Dream” indicates an interest in combining anacreontic and narrative complaint poems similar to, and in fact predating, the sonnet sequences discussed in Chapter 2; moreover, the Bowre contains several poems in tetrameter and trimeter resembling some songs in Astrophel and Stella, including a song in trochaic tetrameter. That said, the volume more likely to have caught the countess’s attention is Breton’s 1592 Pilgrimage to Paradise, Joyned with the Countesse of Penbrookes love. The only book under Breton’s name to be printed by Joseph Barnes at Oxford, the Pilgrimage to Paradise appears to be something like an atonement for past offenses and is dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, though it seems to be at least as concerned with the gentlemen students and scholars of Oxford, whom Breton also addresses directly and assures that the previous year’s Bowre of Delights “was donne altogether without my consent or knowledge, & many thinges of other mens mingled with few of mine, except Amoris Lachrimae an epitaphe upon Sir Phillip Sydney” (not exactly true: Michael Brennan identifies as Breton’s work at least ten poems in Brittons Bowre). The Pilgrimage is set entirely in modern Roman type rather than the Gothic usual for Breton’s earlier work. It creates a sense of narrative progress and closure in that its first poem, “The Pilgrimage to Paradise” proper, recounts the narrator’s allegorical journey in which the five senses guide the humble pilgrim to overcome the seven deadly sins and find grace, while in the second poem, “The Countess of Pembrokes love,” the speaker has arrived at a hill and observes the spiritual crisis of a “grace” in a maze thereupon, whom every creature tries and fails to please, as if his state of grace enables him to see the crises of others more clearly. The “grace” on the hill is also called a “Phoenix,” fairly clearly identifying her with the Countess of Pembroke. The passivity of Breton’s “grace” is striking, at least when we compare it to the rather focused activity of the Countess of Pembroke during the early 1590s. Not only is Breton’s grace passive, she is also indecisive: “[S]till she wisht, but knew not what shee woulde” (I3r). The reason is that Breton, unlike Fraunce and some of the other writers who sought the countess’s patronage, had just seen his secular poetry lampooned in the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella. The gifts his “grace” is rejecting suggest the raft of

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poems dedicated to the countess in the years after Sir Philip’s death, which might well include the stuff of Brittons Bowre. Indeed, the dedication treats the countess like Castiglione’s duchess of Urbino, and the prefatory material in praise of Breton argues that there are so many “courts of Venus, so many Palaces of Pleasure” (referring to popular mid-Tudor and early Elizabethan collections of verse and prose fictions) that at first it seems there is no need to “revive the old art of loving”—until one understands that Breton is concerned with a divine love, “not the love of Martha, but the love of Mary who loved much, who loveth Christ.” The grace realizes that she wants God’s love, and the speaker asks “let my soule in her submission prove, / Hate of the world, and honour of thy love” (Sig. K3v). Ultimately, the “grace” resembles a Protestant Virgin Mary, and the speaker tells her “[I]t is thy love hath wrought this life in me” (Sig. N2v). Thus the Pilgrimage to Paradise attempts gamely to save face in the aftermath of the cool (Pembroke) to hostile (Nashe) reception of Brittons Bowre of Delights. Regardless whether Brittons Bowre was pirated, the lack of a positive response from the countess did Breton’s reputation no good, and the ridicule Nashe heaped on it impelled Breton to respond. In this respect, Breton’s avowal of only the “Amoris Lachrymae,” the poem from which Nashe quoted derisively in his preface to the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella, seems to be a good tactical choice. Breton comes off as, at worst, a sincere praiser of Sidney who wrote a few unskillful verses, for whose low quality the Pilgrimage to Paradise makes up, whereas Nashe comes off as a disingenuous opportunist. And the Pilgrimage to Paradise flatters the countess gracefully in a relatively nonsectarian way, praising her in terms of divine love rather than secular, yet still avoids idolatry. Unfortunately, while Breton’s praise effectively counters Nashe’s scorn, it also stands at odds with the countess’s own literary activities—her translations of Garnier and Mornay and the work aimed at publishing the Arcadia in folio. As Lamb, Trill, and Hannay have noted, the countess traded on her family name and took an active role in shaping its reputation in print. While Breton’s Pilgrimage might have made an appropriate homage to many another Elizabethan patroness, its publication in 1592 was particularly illtimed in that it tended to pigeonhole the countess and to reinforce the image of Philip Sidney promulgated by the 1590 Arcadia, the publication that the countess was certainly working to supersede by 1592. Fraunce Redux: Satirizing the Harvey-Nashe Quarrel Abraham Fraunce’s The Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Ivychurch, entered in the Stationer’s Register on October 2, 1592, offers one last

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perspective on both the jostling of ambitious, socially lower-ranking poets in relation to Sidney and the uses to which quantitative verse might be put.39 This last installment in Fraunce’s “Countess of Pembroke” franchise was printed by Thomas Woodcock rather than William Ponsonby, who had recently entered Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation A Discourse of Life and Death “to be Joyned together in one Booke” with her other translation from the French, Antonius a tragedye (May 3, 1592); Ponsonby also entered a Latin poem, Amynt[a]e gaudia, by Fraunce’s one-time source, Thomas Watson, on November 10, 1592.40 The Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Ivychurch is Fraunce’s most ambitious foray into imaginative writing, and consists mostly of Ovidian poems in a pastoral setting, whose yearly performance on the anniversary of Amyntas’s death had been promised in the second part of the Ivychurch. These Fraunce renders “in English Hexameters” as the subtitle advertises; Fraunce also provides “their auncient descriptions and Philosophicall explications” in the prose of the wise Elpinus, whom Fraunce fans would recognize from the other installments of the Ivychurch. Lamb has suggested that the Third . . . Ivychurch puts the countess of Pembroke in the position of a female reader being rather pedantically lectured to by Elpinus— something that Fraunce would have wanted to avoid at all costs had he an ounce of savvy.41 The brief Latin dedication to the countess in the volume, I think, demonstrates just that savvy: it praises the countess’s erudition as well as her beauty and virtue, and it alludes to the countess’s recent publication as it addresses her as “Nympha Charis Chariton, morientis Philippi.” Elpinus’s moralizing allegorical explications (complete with marginal finding-notes) of Ovidian narratives are, as others have pointed out, tiresome and pedantic, but the extent to which they explain Latin phrases in the original to an unlearned audience, they seem to exclude the erudite countess. If anything, the Third . . . Ivychurch seems to display Fraunce’s capacities as an apologist for the countess’s own learning and literary ambition as he, perhaps a bit opportunistically, adapts the fad for Ovidian Epyllia to the pastoral mourning for Amyntas. Fraunce’s “English Hexameters” also deserve a second look, for they outdo the efforts of Spenser and Harvey, at least in the estimation of Derek Attridge, who notes that “the movement [to codify and write quantitative verse in English] produced little verse as good as [Fraunce’s]—which is, of course, more a censure of the movement than a commendation of Fraunce.” Still, Fraunce emerges as the foremost practitioner of the “Sidneian” approach to writing classical hexameters in English and his approach more or less guides the countess’s approach to certain of the psalms.42 As Nashe

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mocked Harvey for “inventing” the English hexameter, so Fraunce seems to have shown Harvey up. Indeed, some scholars have surmised that Fraunce and Nashe stood as allies against Harvey and Spenser, noting Nashe’s praise of Fraunce and, perhaps more important, reading the final prose piece in the Third . . . Ivychurch as an attack on the Harvey brothers.43 The prose is given to “good old Daphne,” an apparently plain-speaking nymph who reluctantly follows Elpinus’s explanation of Nemesis and announces, “I meane not to be so full of parables, as that Elpinus shall have need to make any explication.”44 Daphne’s story is certainly a satire whose objects include the Harvey brothers, but it seems to comprise a Nashe-like figure as well, and it debunks debunkers of spurious scholarship as much as it has fun at the expense of academic excess. In Daphne’s account, the scholars of Cambridge, having determined “to finde out some way to mount up to heaven,” have split themselves into teams systematically combing land and sea in a grid pattern in search of a Babel-like stairway to heaven. It is the scholars on a ship who meet a stranger scholar from France, who tells the Cantabrigians he can tell them the way, if they will listen to his tale. The tale is an account of three scholars, whose university is called “the Garden” and who choose their scholarly names after herbs (Thistle, Parsnip, and Hemlock), who likewise seek access to heaven, because they have heard an astrological forecast of an impending catastrophic flood. The referents here are fairly clear—the Harvey brothers and Richard Harvey’s astrological writings—but more broadly the satire suggests that some scholarship travesties the very notion of a university. The gardenerscholars build a tower to reach heaven, and the stranger’s story digresses into a catalog of the observations Thistle makes from his high vantage point, until the Cantabrigians (incapable of recognizing irony) interrupt and demand the conclusion concerning the astrological prediction of a great flood. Because the Cantabrigians are missing the point of his story, the stranger-scholar tries another tack: he introduces a Nashean cony-catching figure, an “odde Astromomer” who predicts to the terrified that no flood would drown them all, turns out to be correct, and becomes a hero. The joke is that Nashean “odde Astronomer” reveals that his prediction was based on the principle that, were a flood to wipe everyone out, no one would remember his prediction, whereas were there no flood, everyone would admire his perspicacity. Finally, Fraunce’s gentle satire exposes the interplay of factual and inferred paratexts on which Harvey, Nashe, Fraunce himself, and their publishers traded: the odd astronomer need not know anything about the future in order to seem as though he does.

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In good old Daphne’s satire, Fraunce seems to be distancing himself from the entire Nashe−Harvey dispute rather than taking a side. He likewise seems to be indirectly chastising both by refraining from invective and taking care to observe decorum in his own satire. Finally, he links his own works to those of Sidney and his sister in his rather abrupt closing: Daphne’s scholars, having hardly begun to digest the words of the stranger-scholar in their midst, are “dasht to the bottome of the sea” by a sudden storm that destroys their ship “with such like rage and violence, as if a man would breake with his fist, the shell of a nut.” The cartoonlike suddenness of the ending throws into question all such academic disputes as trivial, and instead of shocking Pembrokiana it begets only a smiling reference to another shipwreck: “The Lady Regent [Pembrokiana] smiling, willed Daphne, to refer the pitifull description of so wofull a shipwrack, to some other time, when they might there meete againe, for the like celebration of Amyntas death.”45 Whether Fraunce knew of the plans to publish a new edition of the Arcadia or he meant only to set himself up for yet another sequel remains unclear. What is clear, however, is that Fraunce presents his works as closely linked to those of Philip and Mary Sidney—in particular, more closely linked than the stuff of Harvey and Spenser. Sir John Harington and the Case for Insider Truthiness Sir John Harington of Kelston, godson to the queen and a talented poet himself, would seem to be just the sort of aristocrat to rise above the undignified fray among Ponsonby’s stable of writers, university wits, aggrieved scholars, and desperate schoolmasters seeking to flatter the countess and trade on the Sidney name. But as we have seen in the investigation of the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, Harington was likely involved at some level in the dissemination of one version of Sidney’s sonnet sequence. Indeed, to have leaked Sidney’s sonnets and started an often-unseemly scramble would be perfectly consistent with Harington’s approach to the literary world. Harington’s Metamorphoses of Ajax and the story of how he came to translate Ariosto aside, the tenor and pattern of the references he makes to matters Sidneian in the paratexts of his 1591 edition of Orlando Furioso make his strategies abundantly clear. In 1993, Evelyn Tribble observed that, unlike the printed editions of Spenser and Ronsard, the 1591 Orlando Furioso is not designed to create an august, virtual literary circle the presentation of whose judgments authorize the work at hand; instead, it is designed to reveal Harington’s participation in literary circles of the English court, while implying the politic claim that the English court surpasses its Italian model, the Este court at Ferrara. Indeed, the content of Harington’s endnotes is particularly “gossipy” and

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“intimate,” and “play is transferred from the verse narrative to the notes and, by extension, to the space of the English court.”46 Here Tribble anticipates the form if not the terms of Kuin’s argument that the textuality of Astrophel and Stella generates competing nondisseminative and disseminative desires, whose competition is ultimately resolved by the disseminative nature of texts. The beauty of Harington’s Ariosto is that, to the very extent that it offers the illusion of decorous dissemination far removed from Nashean “violent enlargement,” it stirs up the very prurient appetites that decorum is supposed to disable; in a certain respect, we could see it as a reference point for Spenser’s vision of the Graces dancing on Mount Acidale. Furthermore, Tribble’s observation allows us to refine Gavin Alexander’s insight that two networks, one real and one “virtual,” coalesce around the absent figure of Philip Sidney. Alexander’s model (like that of Kuin) posits a more or less binary structure of concentric circles, insiders and outsiders, in which the outside “disseminative” circle creates the appearance (the “virtual” circle, often in pastoral guise) of a genuine circle of Sidneians. But Harington is the perfect insider: he owned manuscripts of Sidney’s Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella, not to mention other courtly writings.47 The “play” that Harington’s notes create makes possible ever-finer discriminations of privilege, access, and literary taste, so that the inner and outer, real and virtual circles resolve into many different orbits of varying eccentricity that sometimes, like those of Neptune and Pluto, overlap one another. Such play offers a challenge to readers who enjoy decoding his references. And while the process of chasing down Harington’s references is mostly the same as the process of figuring out Harvey and Fraunce’s allusions, the sense of mischief in Harington’s notes makes the two experiences markedly different. The play that Tribble observes has long been noted, but no one, I think, has interpreted it as well as T. G. A. Nelson did, long before histories of books and paratextual studies became fashionable. In 1970, Nelson surmised that the play in Harington’s paratexts constitutes a critique of Sidney’s more earnest moments, even “a touch of jealousy” toward Sidney and “Sidnealotry” and a desire to distinguish himself from poets of lesser social rank who engaged in such sycophancy. That is, Nelson also distinguished among elements within the “inner” circle, as well as between “inner” and “outer” circles of Sidneians. The role Sidney and his writings play in the “Apologie of Poetrie” that prefaces Harington’s translation is complex and not entirely consistent. Initially Sidney is invoked with reverence, as when Harington pretends to be declining to offer a definition of poetry, protesting “as for all, or the most part of such questions, I will refer you to Sir Philip Sidneys Apologie, who doth handle them right learnedly, or to the forenamed treatise where they are discoursed more largely.” And yet this

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reference to Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie, which would not be printed for another four years, again points out Harington’s participation in rarefied courtly circles. It allows Harington to perform a very strong misreading of Sidney’s Apologie when he asserts, “that which M Sidney and all the learneder sort have written . . . namely that [poetry] is a gift and not an art.”48 Such a gesture falls rather clearly under the rubric of the “total mystery” trope, in which a difference in degree is imagined as an absolute and impassable difference in kind, thus performing the ideological work of shoring up rather porous sociocultural boundaries: Harington, Sidney, and all the learneder sort fall, by their knowledge-that-marks-gentility, on the inside of a circle of “nondisseminative” desire that cannot be broken (at least not as Harington presents it).49 Indeed, Harington may participate in the dissemination of Sidneian texts without threatening his own status as literary insider, so long as he retains, and only partially reveals, copies that differ substantially from those distributed more freely in print. Sidney is the figure who authorizes Harington’s use of the “total mystery” trope, as when Harington addresses readers who complain that Ariosto “breaks off narrations abruptly so as indeede a loose unattentive reader will hardly carrie away any part of the storie”: “If S Philip Sidney had counted this a fault, he would not have done so himselfe in his Arcadia” (sig. ¶vii v.). Sidney’s Apologie is also the basis of Harington’s defense of feminine and sdrucciola rhyme (sig. ¶ viiii v.). Harington’s version of Sidney embraced love and sensuality far more directly than even the author of Astrophel and Stella’s “tragicommody of love . . . performed by starlight”: for while Newman’s 1591 quartos, as Nashe’s prefatory comment indicates, present the poems as artificial representations of passion, Harington remarks simply that “our English Petrarke, Sir Philip Sidney . . . often comforteth him selfe in his sonnets of Stella, though dispairing to attaine his desire . . . as in his eighteenth sonet which many I am sure have read”— and he quotes the poem in full in a version substantively different from that printed in Q1 (Sig. I iiii v). Harington did not naively confuse a persona for Sidney himself (he conveniently elides the difference, even as we often do when quoting sententiae ourselves). But he deliberately presents Astrophel and Stella 18, “With what sharp checks I in myself an shent” in which Astrophil is submitted to “reason’s audit,” as a simple complaint about having no more than a fortune to lose over love: “And thus much of this matter of love,” he announces brusquely, in the midst of commenting on a 38,000-line poem about a hero driven mad by love (Sig. I iiii v). Obviously, Harington could enjoy as clearly as we Astrophil’s selfironizing pose, and here he is performing an insouciant critique of idealized love. Sidney’s poem is used to illustrate the moral effects of the kind of love that we see in Ariosto’s minor character Griffino, “a young man besotted

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with love and affection of a vile strumpet” (Sig. I iiii v.). In comparing Sidney to Griffino, painting Sidney as a young man “dispairing to attain his desire” and comforting himself with sonnets of Stella, Harington opens up the same space that many of our own psychological and self-fashioning accounts of Sidney explore. Furthermore, the ends served by such an intimation are similar to our own: Harington punctures the hagiographical bubble surrounding Sidney and yet presents him as the more admirable for desiring as powerfully as any of us. Such an ethos is similar to Harington’s presentation of himself, as when he defends the “scurrilitie” of Ariosto’s subject matter with the glass houses defense: “Lucretia . . . will blush and be ashamed to read a lascivious booke, but how? Not except Brutus be by, that is if any grave man should see it, but if Brutus turne his backe, she will to it agayne and read it all.” Even the chaste Lucrece sneaks a peek at erotic narratives; likewise even “Sir Philip Sidney confesseth, Cupido is crept even into the Heroicall Poemes” like Orlando Furioso and, of course, the Arcadia itself (Sigs. ¶ v v. and vi r.). Harington’s vision of Sidney, and, consequently, the way he constructs his own writerly ethos, could hardly differ more strikingly from those of Harvey, Fraunce, Breton, Spenser, or even Nashe. Knowing as we do the relationships among the witnesses to Sidney’s oeuvre, we can appreciate all the more completely Harington’s display of insider knowledge. The first line of his version of Astrophel and Stella 18 distinguishes itself from the first line of the Q1 version, in which reason’s “sharp” checks are rendered instead “Straunge” ones. More important, Harington’s quotations of the Arcadia all derive from the Old Arcadia, including poems that never appeared in print until Albert Feuillerat’s edition of 1912. Harington could expect his friends to know something of Sidney’s Apologie and the manuscript Arcadia, but the majority of his audience in print, even granted a certain social and economic status requisite to purchase a beautiful folio like the 1591 Orlando Furioso, could not have been familiar with the Sidney writings not already in print. For this reason, Harington’s book implies participation in courtly circles much more successfully than Spenser’s Faerie Queene (with its botched “catalogue of English heroes”), Spenser and Harvey’s overblown claims to reform English poetry, Nashe’s satires thereof, or Fraunce’s “Pembrokiana” franchise. Spenser and Harvey’s letters discuss prosody and Sidney as intelligently as anything written around Sidney’s lifetime, but lack the combination of Sidney’s publicly known work (like Astrophel and Stella 18) and references to Sidneian works that remained private at the time (like the Apologie). It is reasonable to guess that Sidney spent as much time talking poetics with Spenser between 1577 and 1580 as he ever did discussing such matters with Harington, but the matter here is, in the cultural milieu of the early 1590s, the plausibility— or perhaps “truthiness,” with all the

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satiric connotations Stephen Colbert intended for the word— of Spenser and Harington’s representations in print, relative to one another. The Need to Reclaim Arcadia Harington, Nashe, Harvey, Spenser, Breton, and Fraunce hardly exhaust the universe of writers who referred to or professed admiration for Sir Philip Sidney in the early 1590s, but they do serve as a reasonably representative sample of late Elizabethan writers whose work plays a significant role in the constitution of the literary system as construed via the semiotic mode with which we are familiar. The network of references I have traced do indeed yield a structure that features the Sidney name prominently; indeed, the deceased Sidney provides the absent center, similar to the prince of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, around which all other relationships are structured. But read with attention to the chronology and material circumstances that put the references into print, and with the contingent, probabilistic reasoning in which the discipline of literary history must engage, the tremendous utility and fungibility of the Sidney name as a sign becomes legible, as well as the scope of the relationships among these Elizabethan writers. Moreover, as the signifieds attached to the Sidney name multiply, so do these signifieds begin increasingly to include notions of the Countess of Pembroke as poet, patron, and thinker, and as representative of the Sidney family. That is, Gavin Alexander’s assertion that “Sidney is his works” must be expanded and complicated significantly: Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Astrophel and Stella, the countess herself, the Sidney family, certain notions of patronage, political stances, and literary causes— all are active in multiple, expansive, and unstable processes of signification that serve a variety of purposes and that change dramatically over short periods of time. Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, experienced very directly the semiotic proliferation of her brother’s name, as well as its social, political, and no doubt personal consequences. In her literary inclinations, she was closer to Philip Sidney than either her brother Thomas or Robert, and she was herself an important sign in the aristocratic alliances between two great Protestant families: the Herberts and her own Dudleys. Regardless of the exact nature of her motives, the countess could not but be aware that publishing her own writings and those of her brother would ramify culturally, socially, and politically. As the following chapter argues, the countess’s publishing endeavors from 1592−1598 respond to the proliferation of signifieds that I have traced in this chapter.

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CHAPTER 4


T

he beautiful 1593 folio edition of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia has suffered more than any other version from the presuppositions governing the New Bibliography and the corresponding critical prejudices embedded in the New Criticism and all its successors. The shorthand way of describing the folio is to say that it grafts the ending of the Old Arcadia onto the New (1590) Arcadia, attempting to retain consistency by updating character names (the Old Arcadia’s Cleophila becomes Zelmane, Kerxenus becomes Kalender, and so on) and making a few other minor alterations, most notably reducing the suggestions of sexual activity among the princes and princesses. In the mid-twentieth century, C.S. Lewis argued that, despite its lack of unity, the 1593 Arcadia was nevertheless the Arcadia of “literary history” on which Sidney’s reputation must rest. The roughhewn summary of plot elements lends itself to Lewis’s faint praise and to the critical aspersions cast on the 1593 folio: it is a “broken-backed” tale whose conclusion “answers not to its precedents” and, according to the back cover of the relatively popular Oxford Classics paperback edition of the Old Arcadia, is a “hybrid monster which Sidney himself never envisaged” whose unreadability is largely responsible for the waning of the Sidney reputation in literary history.1 Much critical ink has been spilled attempting to sift the genuinely Philip Sidneian aspects of the 1593 Arcadia from those aspects to be ascribed to the editorial interventions of Mary Sidney Herbert and her husband’s secretary, Hugh Sanford. Such work has produced skillful stylistic analyses of those

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parts of the 1593 Arcadia where different witnesses to the text have been stitched together but to no overwhelming critical consensus concerning the authenticity of various parts of the 1593 Arcadia. Instead, we have a lessexamined presumption that the 1593 folio is the more pastoral New Arcadia, which tends to be taken as a sign of the feminine and perhaps family-oriented influence of the Countess of Pembroke. My own treatment of the two New Arcadia s in 2004 stopped more or less at the same point. Fortunately, bolder critics, especially Mary Ellen Lamb and Margaret Hannay, have gone some way toward illuminating the precedents to which the revisions in the 1593 Arcadia do in fact answer. Lamb has demonstrated the countess’s long-term interest in Stoic moral philosophy and something like passive heroism, and Hannay outlined the countess’s connections with Continental intellectual movements, including an international Protestantism whose scope and nuance greatly exceeded the aspirations of Sidney’s well-known intellectual heir, the Earl of Essex. This chapter interprets the 1593 Arcadia as a work in its own right, building on foundations laid by Lamb and Hannay. The following section explores the countess’s translations of Philippe du Plessis Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death along with Robert Garnier’s Tragedy of Antonie as pretexts for the 1593 folio Arcadia. Thereafter, I examine the effects of the additions new to the 1593 Arcadia on the work as a whole. The 1593 Arcadia emerges as a relentlessly political analysis of justice and the place of pity and friendship in the state, and a pointed surpassing of the analysis begun in the 1590 quarto. The 1593 Arcadia is by no means an attempt to withdraw the romance from political discourse. Rather, the folio counters the suggestion, implied from the truncated ending of the 1590 quarto, that political discourse and political practice tend only toward the dissolution of states no matter how well constituted. Instead, the folio presents aristocratic friendship as the crucial means by which to bind together the state, which implies that the 1590 quarto dangerously misreads the Arcadia. The Fabrication of the Sidney Family Discourse The Countess of Pembroke’s publishing strategy during the early 1590s did displace the panoply of signifieds that had arisen around the Sidney name following the printings of the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella and the 1590 Arcadia — especially the latter’s association with the circle of the Earl of Essex—with a decidedly more restricted, familial, and remote set of signifieds. The countess seems to have sought to lift her brother’s name free of the hurly-burly of English court politics and the even more odious print marketplace, and to place it, instead, in the more rarefied context of

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Continental fellow travelers. Perhaps coincidentally, within a month of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia’s entry onto the Stationer’s Register in 1588, the countess emerged from mourning, returned to the court at London, and began her most productive period of writing.2 In 1592, the countess published her translation of a neo-Stoic treatise by Philippe Mornay— an important French Huguenot and a close friend of Philip Sidney— as well as her translation of Robert Garnier’s refined Senecan drama, Marc Antoine. These translations made public the longstanding links between the Sidney family and French intellectuals. Although Garnier was a prominent French Catholic, his drama was attractive to Mary Sidney Herbert because of its neo-Stoic perspectives on death and tyranny.3 In effect, the countess overlaid a set of connections to the Sidney family’s Continental friends on top of the associations with the Essex circle that the 1590 quarto had presented. As Hannay observes, “[T]here is no indication that before her return to society, the Countess was viewed as the heir of Sidney’s muse, as writer or as patron.”4 But between 1588 and 1593, and particularly after her 1592 publication of The Discourse of Life and Death and The Tragedie of Antonie, Mary Sidney Herbert established herself as the preeminent literary scion of the Sidney family. In 1593, Thomas Churchyard dedicated to her his Pleasant Conceit Penned in verse . . . , calling her “a Sidney right” who “shall not in silence sit.”5 Churchyard’s dedication implicitly recognizes the Sidneys as a family of writers, and it declares that Mary Sidney Herbert is prominent among them. The differences between Churchyard’s characterization of the countess and those of Breton, Spenser, Fraunce, and even Harvey’s obscure references to the publication of the 1593 Arcadia, are notable: none of the latter so baldly places her on par with her brother as a writer. Still, some references in Harvey’s 1593 New Letter of Notable Contents are worth a second look: What Dia margariton, or Dia ambre, so comfortative, or cordial, as Her Electuary of Gems (for though the furious Tragedy Antonius, be a bloody Chair of Estate, yet the Discourse of life, and Death is a restorative Electuary of Gems) whom I do not expressly name, not because I do not honor Her with my heart, but because I would not dishonour Her with my pen, whom I admire, and cannot blazon enough.6 As Harvey suggests, the countess’s Discourse of Life and Death was the more popular of her early translations during her lifetime: it was reprinted three times before she died, while the Tragedie of Antonie was reprinted only once.7 Harvey’s dedication also implies that the value of the countess’s translations lay in their “comfortative, or cordial,” or “restorative” powers, rather than

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in the blood and passion of the story of Antony and Cleopatra.8 That is, the wisdom contained in the Discourse is medicinal, and Stoicism is the “restorative” wisdom to which Harvey alludes. Stoicism, argues Mary Ellen Lamb, proved an excellent vehicle for expounding the relatively passive virtues of endurance and constancy to which early modern women might aspire without running afoul of gendered codes of conduct. Moreover, the countess’s female ancestors had left bits of Stoic wisdom behind in family documents. Overturning the myth that the Countess of Pembroke created a circle of dramatic poets in an effort to reform the English drama along lines suggested by Sir Philip’s Defence of Poesie, Lamb argues that Mary Sidney Herbert found solace in Stoic thought, especially after the deaths in 1586 of her mother, father, and brother.9 In translating her brother’s great friend Phillipe du Plessis Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death, in Robert Garnier’s Senecan tragedy Marc Antoine, and in Petrarch’s The Triumph of Death the countess saw an intellectual task amenable to her bereavement but also consistent with the moral philosophy of her Dudley mother and grandmother.10 Lamb’s thesis has been extended by Hannay’s research on the countess’s metaphrases of the Psalms, which contends that the countess sought more broadly to participate in “a series of translations undertaken by [Philip] Sidney and his Continental friends to support [Philippe] Mornay and the Huguenot cause.”11 The Sidneys’ advocacy for international Protestantism and alliances with Huguenots like Philip Sidney’s Continental mentor, Hubert Languet, are well known. More recently, Robert E. Stillman has refined our understanding of the Sidneys’ Protestantism by explaining the deep affiliations of Languet, Mornay, and the Sidneys with Philippism, a branch of Reformed thought that sought to overcome Protestant sectariansm.12 The Phillipist, internationalist, Protestant and Neo-Stoic intellectual currents in which Mary Sidney Herbert carefully placed her translations in the 1590s effectively constituted the “Sidney family discourse.”13 Scholars have recently recognized an important formative moment for the Sidney family discourse in the will of Jane Guilford Dudley, the Duchess of Northumberland and grandmother to Philip, Mary, and Robert Sidney. Looking back on the ambitions she had shared with her husband, John Dudley—the Duke of Northumberland executed for treasonously conspiring to depose Mary I—the Duchess had presented herself as a negative exemplar: “[W]ho ever doth trust to this transitory World, as I did, may happen to have an Overthrow, as I had.” Likewise, she asked for a simple burial: her “wretched Carcass, at Times too much in this World, full of Vanities, Defeats, and Guiles,” should, she said, be left to the worms.14 Meanwhile, during his imprisonment in the Tower for his part in the conspiracy to place

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Lady Jane Grey on the throne, the Duchess’s attainted husband had translated Psalm fifty-five, which asks that God revenge him on his enemies.15 Additionally, the Sidneys could claim the “familial expression of Stoic philosophy” embodied in the poems of their mother, Mary Dudley Sidney.16 Mary Sidney Herbert’s published translations of Mornay and Garnier advertise this Sidney family literary tradition— a tradition which has been unearthed only since Sidney scholars have turned their attention to Mary Sidney Herbert. The Discourse of Life and Death For the Countess of Pembroke, Mornay’s tract was attractive in part because of its theoretical formulation of the origin of corruption: the Discourse of Life and Death ascribed the origin of corruption to the political and social atmosphere of the court, and not to the individual soul. Whereas the Arcadia presented in the 1590 quarto analyzes the fallen state of political affairs as a reflection of the individual soul giving in to sexual passion, Mornay’s treatise analyzes the weak human soul as a reflection of royal courts steeped in the passions greed, ambition, envy, and pride. Greville contends that moral decay spreads outward from an ill-governed woman to a passionate rather than rational marriage and thence to a society ruled by the whims of a tyrant rather than the rational strictures of law. For Mornay, the reverse is true: moral decay begins in a competitive, factionalized political milieu that drives men mad with ambition, and then spreads inward into the hearts of courtiers themselves: men forced to compete in an environment rife with favoritism and slander learn to curry favor rather than to conduct themselves virtuously. Fully one-third of Mornay’s Discourse attacks court life as the origin of evil. In a gesture that recalls the unrewarded ambitions and stifled careers of her father and brother, Mary Sidney Herbert writes in her translation that just as greed repays us with nothing but gold (the excrement of the earth), so ambition repays us only with “smoke and wind.”17 The successful courtier earns only the envy of his peers. Higher-ranking aristocrats disdain rising courtiers, while inferiors fawn on them only out of ambition. Every ambitious courtier “reputes himself low, because there is some one higher, instead of reputing himself high, because there are a million lower” (328−330). The ambition and envy of the court, which feed each other, also feed pride. Successful courtiers are “grown proud, as the Ass which carried the image of Isis” (273−274). This simile reflects the loss of good judgment (the virtue most valued in a courtier, whose duty is to advise the prince) that attends pride and ambition. The danger of the court, then, is twofold: it corrupts

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the moral constitution of courtiers, and as a result, it ruins their judgment. Even were a courtier to remain uncorrupted by pride and envy, should he become the prince’s favorite, his rewards would still be unjust and subject to the whims of his prince. The favorite, writes the countess, is like the Lion’s keeper, who by long patience, a thousand feedings and a thousand clawings hath made a fierce Lion familiar, yet gives him never meat, but with pulling back his hand, always in fear lest he should catch him; and if once in a year he bites him, he sets it so close, that he is paid for a long time after. Such is the end of all princes favorites. (243−248) Neither the favorite’s moral status nor the quality of his advice comes into consideration here: the inscrutable disposition of the prince solely determines the reward for the favorite’s service. The court of the Discourse of Life and Death is impossible to navigate morally. “For,” the countess translates, deal you in affairs of estate in these times, either you shall do well, or you shall do ill. If ill, you have God for your enemy, and your own conscience for a perpetually tormenting executioner. If well, you have men for your enemies, and of men the greatest: whose envy and malice will spy you out, and whose cruelty and tyranny will evermore threaten you. (438−444) The first dichotomy between acting morally or acting in the interests of the powerful is familiar. The courtier’s perils stem from God and “your own conscience” on one hand, and “men of the greatest” on the other. The paradox recapitulates Mornay’s explanation of the origin of corruption in courtly politics. But the threat that powerful men would “spy out” and tyrannize the courtier who crossed them points beyond power dynamics to the conversations and social exchanges at court, for these were means by which the courtier could be “spied out.”Hamlet’s famous accusation that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seek to “play” him like a recorder alludes to the high stakes of courtly small talk. Likewise, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that “public affairs are rocks, private conversations are whirlpools and quicksands. It is alike perilous to do well and to do ill.”18 Raleigh’s conclusion stems from the fact that a hostile interpretation of a courtier’s words or deeds could damage his reputation and political viability deeply. In an atmosphere in which “praise and blame, flattery and slander, interpenetrate absolutely,” good conduct might earn praise or it might earn slander; likewise the dispraise of base conduct might be discounted as slander.19

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In addition to the paradox that truly virtuous behavior might well earn the enmity of powerful courtiers, the Discourse adds a second, related paradox: “Please the people, you please a beast: and pleasing such, ought to be unpleasing to yourself. Please your self, you displease God: please him, you incur a thousand dangers in the world, with purchase of a thousand displeasures” (444−447). This second paradox works by repetition and equivocation to complicate the first. The courtier may “please” the people (i.e., the commoners), God, or himself. But his aristocratic duty prevents him from advocating for the welfare of the common people. On the other hand, to act as a politic courtier would be to “displease God” because the imperatives of court are not congruent with Christian ethics, as the first paradox explained: one cannot serve both the world and God at the same time. The second paradox argues that the courtier’s social, political, and moral obligations are disjoined from one another— exactly the lesson taught in Machiavelli, but couched in a discourse on moral decay rather than realpolitik. The Discourse compares the courtier to a prisoner: “[B]oth are enchained, both loaden with fetters, but the one hath them of iron, the other of gold, and that one is tied but by the body, the other by the mind” (304−308). That is, the courtier’s avarice limits his thoughts to narrow scope of satisfying his desires. So long as we look forward to the satisfaction of our desires, we will always “still gape, for that is to come” (848). Moral corruption is again presented in Stoic terms: freedom consists in using reason to understand and obey God’s will, whereas the courtier in golden fetters can neither understand nor assent to God’s will. His case is worse than that of the prisoner, since the prisoner’s mind, at least, remains free. Thus moral corruption infects everyone at court: “[T]the worst is, when we are out of these external wars and troubles, we find greater civil war within our selves: the flesh against the spirit, passion against reason, earth against heaven, the world within us fighting for the world” (498−501). At this point the countess’s translation carries the metaphor of external corruption invading the courtier’s conscience even further than Mornay, for she translates Mornay’s phrase “une guerre intestine” [an internal or intestinal war] as a “civil war in ourselves” (499).20 She takes extra care to ensure that we see that the conflict of court factions is transported into the minds of the courtiers themselves; that is, the relation is one of cause rather than analogy. Thus “[W]e are in the world, and the world in us, and to separate us from the world, we must separate us from ourselves” (514−516). Moreover, and perhaps most damning, We are, we think, come out of the contagious city, but we are not advised that we have sucked the bad air, that we carry the plague with us, that

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we so participate with it, that through rocks, through deserts, through mountains, it ever accompanieth us. Having avoided the contagion of others, yet we have it in ourselves. We have withdrawn us out of men: but not withdrawn man out of us. (516−521) The imagery of this passage drives home the point that corruption invades the individual soul from without. The locus of corruption is metaphorically a “contagious city” and its “bad air”— emphatically not the lustful man and seductive woman that Greville envisions. The “contagion” is the worldly ambition generated in courtly competition. And when the countess warns that even withdrawal from court society may not purify the aristocrat, the point is once again that the court has caused the inner corruption that the courtier now carries with him as a disease. The Discourse concludes with a long meditation on death as the soul’s release from the prison of the world and the final admonition, “Die to live, / Live to die” (962−963). The conclusion is filled with Stoic maxims: This whole life is but a death: it is as a candle lighted in our bodies: in one the wind makes it melt away, in an other blows it clean out, many times ere it be half burned: in others it endureth to the end. Howsoever it be, look how much it shineth, so much it burneth: her shining is her burning: her light a vanishing smoke: her last fire, her last wick, and her last drop of moisture. . . . If we call the last breath death, so must we all the rest. (739−747) Because living is indistinguishable from dying, to learn to die well is to learn to live well. The proper way to die is to make the world die within ourselves by refusing our worldly desires.21 Again, the root of passion and sin is not merely sexual passion, but rather the world itself. This model of the origin of moral decay contrasts starkly with that of Greville. Here the souls of men are tyrannized not by sexual passion, but by the ambition, envy, and pride that infect the courtier. Moreover, the submission to sovereign will, advocated by Greville both for wives and for subjects of the monarchy, becomes an untenable way to maintain virtue. If Greville qualifies his advice that his Lady obey her husband when he says she ought to refuse him sexually but obey him in other matters, the Discourse of Life and Death reveals that obedience is always fraught with moral and practical peril. Greville’s assumption that marital and political hierarchies reflect the will of God is challenged by the Discourse ’s unremitting attack on the corrupt foundation of courtly hierarchies. In these ways it reveals the philosophical framework within which Mary Sidney Herbert would have

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her readers interpret The Tragedie of Antonie. In The Tragedie of Antonie, as in the Discourse, sexual passion is not the root of corruption: indeed, this version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra sanctifies their relationship as a marriage. “Far from being a retrograde movement against the vibrancy of the popular stage,” Mary Sidney Herbert’s literary project instead ushered into England current Continental intellectual movements that provided a framework in which to interpret the causes of the Sidneys, the Dudleys, and the Herberts.22 The Tragedie of Antonie While the Discourse of Life and Death bewails the morally corrosive effects of court life, Antonie approaches the ethical dilemmas imposed by tyranny from three different points of view: that of Caesar, here depicted as a conquering tyrant; that of Antony, a fallen tyrant; and Cleopatra, the force of whose beauty had tyrannized Antony and who must decide whether to use her power on Caesar. In both tyrant tragedies and neo-Tacitean political and historical tracts, power relations are often sexualized so that the lustful, shrewish woman often forms a mirror image of the tyrant, and the tyrannical prince is often portrayed as an effeminate man subject to the whims of his own lust.23 To the extent that Antonie is a neo-Tacitean drama, it is unsurprising that Cleopatra figures so prominently. Nevertheless, Cleopatra is no machinating Livia or Messalina, but the play’s definitive protagonist— and she, not Antony, faces the only interesting moral choice in the drama. Cleopatra’s debates with her followers and councillors shape a specifically feminine (but by no means feminist) form of Stoic heroism. In fact, Cleopatra’s form of Stoicism differentiates itself from the form of Stoicism proper to the men in the play, for Cleopatra chooses to remain constant to her husband Antony rather than to bow to the exigencies of her country’s situation and turn from the defeated Antony to the conquering Caesar.24 Yet Antony, in a situation similar to Cleopatra’s, could have chosen to remain faithful to Caesar and Rome by rejecting Cleopatra for Caesar’s sister, Octavia, an action that the play clearly presents as rational. Caesar, who is depicted unambiguously as a powerful tyrant, is the dominant agent of the fortunes of Antony and Cleopatra. He declares himself “Fortunes King and Lord,” and is as bloody as he is proud.25 He declares that “We must with blood mark this our victory, / For just example to all memory. / Murder we must, until not one we leave” (1512−1515). Although he makes a halfhearted gesture toward justice, claiming only to want to make Antony a “just example,” he proposes not that Antony be tried for treason, but also that he be murdered, in order to exterminate all opposition to Caesar in the

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East, “until not one we leave.” Caesar’s designs for Cleopatra likewise glorify his personal conquest more than the state of Rome. He wants to put “Into our hands her treasure and her self,” so that “by her presence beautified may be / The glorious triumph Rome prepares for me” (1724−1729). Caesar envisions a captured Cleopatra not as an emblem of Rome’s might, not as an ornament of his state, but only as an ornament to himself. He is likewise interested in her treasure, like a common soldier pillaging a sacked village— again, not to glorify Rome, but only to glorify himself. As Antony explains, Caesar has “usurped” the empire, “corrupting first / With baits and bribes the most part of his men” (1121−1122). Antony presents Caesar as a strong tyrant corrupted by ambition: “Blood and alliance nothing do prevail / To cool the thirst of hot ambitious breasts: . . . This desire to command: . . . Such jealousy it kindleth in our hearts. / Sooner will men permit another should / Love her they love, then wear the Crown they wear” (1021−1028). This aphorism underlines the essential difference between the strong tyrant and the weak tyrant, who turns out to be Antony. For Caesar is not effeminate and not given over to sensuality. Indeed, his ambition is so strong that Antony thinks he would pander his own wife, if that meant getting and keeping the Crown. In contrast to Caesar, Antony is weak, effeminate, unable to stick to his purposes, unable to judge clearly, “a slave become unto [Cleopatra’s] feeble face” (17). Cleopatra conquered him “not by force / . . . but by sweet baits / Of [her] eyes graces, which did gain so fast / upon my liberty, that naught remained” (34−37). Antony compares himself Like to the sick, whose throat the fever’s fire Hath vehemently with thirsty drouth enflam’d, Drinks still, albeit the drink he still desires Be nothing else but fuel to his flame: He cannot rule himself. (935−939) From the Stoic point of view, Antony’s failure to rule himself is the lowest state a human being can attain, for the goal of Stoicism is to exert mastery over oneself, as the maxim imperare sibi maximum imperium est (rule over oneself is the greatest empire) signifies. Antony’s loss of reason makes him susceptible to every sort of pleasure. He tells his servant, Lucilius, that “[A]s the fatted swine in filthy mire / With glutted heart I wallow’d in delights, / All thoughts of honor trodden under foot. / So me I lost.” (1166−69). Antony has lost himself in the sense that his selfhood consists in making rational decisions, in exerting his will against the inward temptations of his passions and the outward temptations

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of the world; having given up all resistance to these temptations, he has lost the only “self” that has meaning to the Stoics. Moreover, the imagery of gluttony here resonates with Seneca’s description of the corrupted Roman empire, in which delight in exotic dishes is more than a metaphor for the depravity of the Romans; it is even the means by which that depravity is wrought.26 Gluttony and tyranny both arise from Antony’s loss of reason. Antony complains to Lucilius, “I robbed my subjects, and for followers / I saw my self beset with flatterers. / Mine idle arms fair wrought with spider’s work, / My scattered men without their ensigns strayed” (1175−1178). The repetition of the verb “stray,” first in Antony’s account of his moral decline and then in his account of his military decline, reinforces the sense that both stem equally from his loss of reason. Here Antony distinguishes between true subjects and flattering followers, and admits that he robbed all who refused to fawn on him. As a result, whatever prudent counsel his advisers might have offered has been drowned in the noise of sycophants. Theirs is the “spiders worke” that characterizes a corrupt court. Antony’s remaining Roman ally, Lucilius, sums up the plight of Egypt allegorically: “[E]qual Justice wandreth banished, / And in her seat sits greedy Tyranny” (1201−1202). Antony’s inability to rule either Egypt or his own passions constitutes his failure to live up to Stoic precepts for male virtue. To emblematize Antony’s failure, Lucilius compares him to Hercules “Spinning at distaff,” linking tyranny to feminization (1233). Although Antony now sees clearly how his own corruption caused his fall, his judgment nevertheless remains clouded. He misunderstands Cleopatra. He accuses her of ambition to rule the Roman empire because the atmosphere of his corrupted court has affected his mind, and he can no longer understand any motive other than self-serving ambition. He claims that Cleopatra is “[g]aping for our great Empires government”; the countess’s choice of “gaping” to render Cleopatra’s supposed ambition echoes her earlier assertion in the Discourse of Life and Death that ambition can never be satisfied because it causes us to “gape, for that is to come” (896).27 In Antony’s speech, Cleopatra’s alleged “gaping” ambition connotes her sexuality as well, for Antony fears that Cleopatra will desert him for the conquering Caesar. Antony’s inconstancy and corresponding inability to imagine Cleopatra’s faithfulness to him are foils for the model of female Stoic virtue that Cleopatra represents. From the first moment Cleopatra enters the drama, she demonstrates that Antony has misjudged her. Her opening speech lays to rest any doubts about her constancy. Its structure, balanced between the initial series of questions whether Cleopatra would betray Antony and the

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succeeding series of assertions that she would not, lends rhetorical weight to the assertions of her constancy by concatenating them in an elaborate anaphora: That I have thee betrayed, dear Antony, My life, my soul, my Sun? I had such thought? That I have thee betrayed my Lord, my King? That I would break my vowed faith to thee? Leave thee? deceive thee? yield thee to the rage Of mighty foe? I ever had that heart? Rather sharp lightning lighten on my head: Rather may I to deepest mischief fall: Rather the opened earth devour me: Rather fierce Tigers feed them on my flesh: Rather, o rather let our Nilus send, To swallow me quick, some weeping Crocodile. (394- 405) Cleopatra claims to be Antony’s wife rather than his mistress, whose “vowed faith” is pledged to him as to “my Lord, my King.” The force of Cleopatra’s rhetoric makes Antony’s doubts seem ill-founded; by comparison to Cleopatra, Antony is changeable. Cleopatra even contrasts her own sincerity to the legendarily deceptive tears of the Crocodile. The second period of Cleopatra’s initial speech interpolates an astute political analysis of her situation (she had been defeated with Antony by Caesar at Actium) within her declaration of constancy to Antony. Again, she begins with rhetorical questions, which the second half of the passage answers: And didst thou then suppose my royal hart Had hatched, thee to ensnare, a faithless love? And changing mind, as Fortune changed cheer, I would weak thee, to win the stronger, lose? wretch! o caitiff! o too cruel hap! And did I not sufficient loss sustain Losing my Realm, losing my liberty, My tender offspring, and the joyful light Of beamy Sun, and yet, losing more Thee Antony my care, if I lose not What yet remained? thy love alas! thy love, More dear then Scepter, children, freedom, light. (406−417)

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The general thrust of Cleopatra’s political argument is that it would have been foolish to weaken her own ally, Antony, so that he would fall to Caesar, for she would forfeit her crown, her children, and her liberty and would have to beg all these from the victorious Caesar. But Cleopatra’s political argument only lays the groundwork for her larger point, which is that she values Antony above all her political goods. In this Cleopatra presents herself as an extraordinary wife— extraordinary because she is a reigning queen, and a wife because she values her position less than she values Antony. Cleopatra is no feminist, for even as a reigning queen she accepts her subjection to Antony as “my Lord, my King.” Nevertheless she is a Stoic heroine because she faces the only important ethical and political choice left in The Tragedie of Antonie: whether to abandon the fallen Antony. Cleopatra is, in fact, the tragic hero of The Tragedie of Antonie. Her tragic flaw, which caused the naval defeat at Actium, is jealousy. Cleopatra explains to her servant, Eras, that she followed Antony to Actium with her fleet “[f]earing lest in my absence Antony / Should leaving me retake Octavia” (472−73). Having arrived at the battle, Cleopatra of course fled, and the well-known story of Antony deserting his own fleet in order to follow his queen is rehearsed. She delivers a political analysis of the defeat at Actium not unlike the analysis of military strategy given by Greville in his summary of Amphialus’s sally from Cecropia’s castle in the Arcadia, in which she takes the blame for Antony’s defeat at Actium because “my face too lovely” caused Antony to forget his military duties as commander of the fleet and follow her. That is, Cleopatra’s great fault lay in having acted on her own jealousy, which in turn “enflamed ” Antony’s love for her and clouded his military judgment when it was needed most (450). Cleopatra introduced passion into the battle at Actium when it should have been governed by reason: as a result, she and Antony were defeated. This account of Actium introduces two standards for measuring Stoic virtue: one male, the other female. For Antony, the right course lay in subordinating his passion to his rational will in order to fight most effectively. For Cleopatra, the right course lay not so much in subordinating her passion to rational will as in merely checking her own jealousy in order not to inflame Antony’s passion: her moral obligation is to help Antony rule himself by reason, and to subordinate her own interests to his, as she has explained in her opening speech. The Tragedie of Antonie allots to Cleopatra a path to virtue based on subordinating her own agency to the good of Antony. Nevertheless, The Tragedie of Antonie explores the nature of Cleopatra’s remaining choice—whether to desert Antony and entreat Caesar for mercy for herself and her people—with an eye toward a form of female heroism that remains possible even in the limited, subordinated form of agency left

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to Cleopatra. This agency emerges in the queen’s debates with her followers, all of whom counsel her to turn to Caesar. Initially Cleopatra’s servant, Eras, advises her to ensnare Caesar as she has Antony, claiming that “All things to yield to force of lovely face,” which Cleopatra rebuts by showing how she ruined Antony (436).28 The point is that exciting Antony’s passion subjects his reason absolutely and therefore unmans him. Indeed, the effects of tyranny on the Egyptian people have been as disastrous as on Antony, for they accept their subjection as absolute. Their aptly-named philosopher, Philostratus, entreats them to “make mournful sacrifice / On Isis altars: not our selves to save, / But soften Caesar and him piteous make / To us, his pray: that so his lenity / May change our death into captivity” (276−280). The chorus of Egyptians obliges Philostratus, lamenting its state and hopelessly acknowledging its powerlessness: “Yet all the plaints of those, / Nor all their tearful ’larms, / Cannot content our woes, / Nor serve to wail the harms, / In soul which we, poor we, / To feel enforced be” (356−361). The real damage that tyranny visits on its subjects becomes apparent, for as the Discourse of Life and Death suggests, tyranny has caused them to seek servitude rather than their own liberty. The servant Charmian also argues that Cleopatra turn to Caesar. To Cleopatra’s assertion that she followed Antony to Actium out of her own jealousy, Charmian replies, “Such was the rigor of your destiny” (474). Moreover, he argues, “[N]ever can our weakness turn awry / The stay-less course of powerful destiny. / Naught here force, reason, human providence, / Holy devotion, noble blood prevails” (492−495). Into his account of a wholly deterministic universe, he weaves attitudes characteristic of de casibus traditions discussed in chapter two, namely that the rise and fall of princes is governed wholly by the wheel of fortune. For an example, he cites the Trojan war, in which “Fortune’s wheel / Doubtful ten years now to the camp did turn, / And now again towards the town return’d” (503−505). He would have Cleopatra believe that if the ancient crown Of your progenitors that Nilus ruled, Force have taken from you; the Gods have willed it so, To whom oft times Princes are odious. They have to every thing and end ordained; All worldly greatness by them bounded is; Some sooner, later some, as they think best: None their decree is able to infringe. (514−521) But Charmian’s deterministic mirror for Cleopatra ultimately contradicts the principle of constancy, for he recommends that Cleopatra save herself from Antony’s ruin by changing her allegiance.

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All of Cleopatra’s counterarguments express her constancy. When Eras asks her what she hopes to gain by dying loyally for Antony, she replies, I neither pride, nor profit seek therein. Eras. What praise shall you of after-ages get? Cleo. Nor praise, nor glory in my cares are set. Eras. What other end ought you respect, than this? Cleo. My only end my duty is. Eras. Your duty must upon some good be founded. Cleo. On virtue it, the only good, is grounded. Eras. What is that virtue? Cl. That which us beseems. (645−652) Both the Stoic concept of “the god within us” and the Ciceronian concept of decorum (acting appropriately for one’s station and circumstances) inhere in Cleopatra’s definition of virtue. She seems to have united the honestum and utile (the good and the expedient) that Cicero’s De Officiis sets out to negotiate by restricting what she considers expedient to include only what is virtuous. Cleopatra’s sense of duty respects no apparent material gain, and therefore looks solely to ethical precepts for its ground. In her hierarchy of duties, Cleopatra elevates her spousal obligation to Antony above all others; these determine what “beseems” her. As The Tragedie of Antonie closes, Cleopatra laments her “holy marriage” to Antony, and in an apostrophe to Antony calls herself “thy wife, thy friend” (1969−1973). Her last prayer—and the last line of the play—asks “[t]hat in this office weak my limbs may grow, / Fainting on you [Antony], and forth my soul may flow” (2021−2022). In response to the political argument that she ought to turn from Antony to Caesar in order to protect her people, Cleopatra delivers a similarly uncompromising Stoicism. Although her subjects ask that she “make a conquest of the conqueror [Caesar]” by her beauty and charm, Cleopatra insists that “My face too lovely caused my wretched case. / My face has so entrap’d, so cast us down, / That for his conquest Caesar may it thank” (732, 436−439). Cleopatra acknowledges her sexual and rhetorical power over conquering Romans, but she refuses to use that power on Caesar because it is a form of tyranny—and so even if she could ensnare Caesar, her rule over Caesar would only perpetuate the sort of tyranny that her people experienced under Antony. Cleopatra’s plight boils down to the fact that she cannot rule Egypt herself because she lacks the military might to withstand Rome. She may rule only insofar as she dominates the putative Roman triumvir, Caesar or Antony, and she has discovered that such a dominion is tyranny. Therefore, Cleopatra’s only choice is to end her life, even though her suicide de facto surrenders her realm to the tyrant Caesar. In the end, Cleopatra finds herself

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in exactly the same predicament as Greville’s lady: because of their gender, for either woman to dominate a man would be a form of tyranny, and so both must resign themselves passively to endure their lots. The difference between the two is that Greville’s lady occupies an absolutely subordinate position, so she can resist passively and endure. But Cleopatra exerts power over men will she or nill she, and so she must put the asp to her breast. The impact of the 1592 publication of these two translations is only now beginning to be understood. Michael Brennan noted in 1988 that the “greatest coup” in the career of stationer William Ponsonby was to print the Discourse of Life and Death and The Tragedie of Antonie together for the countess, for it established Ponsonby as the printer for the Sidney family; I would add that, as we have seen, Ponsonby’s publication in 1591 of Spenser’s Complaints turned out to be a sound move. Ponsonby had also printed the 1590 edition of the Arcadia, but the implication of Brennan’s analysis is that after 1592, Mary Sidney Herbert became the key to Philip Sidney’s works.29 The primary achievement of the countess’s 1592 book was publicly to declare intellectual links between the Sidney family and Continental neo-Stoics independent of, and prior to, the 1590 interpretation of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. This may explain why the countess chose to publish the original dates of composition in her translations. The Tragedie of Antonie is postscripted “at Ramsbury, 26 of November, 1590,” and The Discourse of Life and Death is dated “The 13 of May, 1590, at Wilton.”30 In each case, the date of completion precedes the publication of Greville’s edition of the Arcadia. The 1593 Edition of the Arcadia When the Countess of Pembroke undertook to publish a new edition of the Arcadia, she had already laid a foundation— a public, printed version of a Sidney family discourse. And not surprisingly, the 1593 folio presents The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia in a manner that extends the positions explored in Antonie and in The Discourse of Life and Death. Simultaneously, the 1593 folio offers a mass of eclogues and prose never before printed, under the rubric of “supplying the defects” of the 1590 quarto Arcadia. On a far grander scale than Sir John Harington’s references to the Defence of Poesie and his inclusion of a few lines from Astrophil and Stella in his 1591 translation of Orlando Furioso, the 1593 Arcadia claims to be more authentically “Sidneian” than its predecessor by publishing a greater part of Sidney’s corpus than was previously available. As is well known, the 1593 Arcadia was a beautiful folio bound in gatherings of six sheets of paper, a more expensive and ostentatious artifact than

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the 1590 quarto.31 Likewise, the title page blazons the Sidney and Dudley family crests and, under the emblem of the pig and the marjoram bush, captioned “spiro non tibi”[I am not for you], the whole volume is enveloped in an aristocratic, familial sheath—which has been read as a kind of prophylactic against the common crowds of the booksellers’ stalls.32 As one turns the leaves, the 1593 Folio displays further layers of protection, circumscribing itself, as I have argued elsewhere, also from Fulke Greville and the editorial hands behind the 1590 quarto.33 The dedication to the countess of Pembroke, which first appeared in the 1590 quarto and has no manuscript witnesses, takes on a new significance in the Folio. When read in conjunction with the prefatory epistle of Hugh Sanford, secretary to the Earl of Pembroke, it distances Sir Philip and his Arcadia from the earlier quarto. The preface asserts that The disfigured face . . . wherewith this worke not long since appeared to the common view, moved that noble Lady [Mary Sidney Herbert], to whose Honour consecrated, to whose protection committed, to take in hand the wiping away those spottes wherewith the beauties therof were unworthely blemished.34 Most twentieth-century critics have passed over Sanford’s strident repetition that the Arcadia was “consecrated” and “committed” to the care of Lady Pembroke, interpreting the lines to mean merely that Sidney’s sister “not only edited her brother’s work but also exercised her own literary talents and judgment in revision,” or, more snidely, to indicate that “[T]he countess has been put to the trouble of re-editing” the poor work of the 1590 quarto edition.35 But the preface also makes a barbed reference to Philip Sidney’s epistle dedicating the Arcadia to his sister, which declares that the “chief protection” of the romance will be “the livery of your [Mary Sidney Herbert’s] name.” Sanford’s preface openly contradicts Greville’s 1586 claim to the right to control the publication of Sidney’s writings. It also discriminates between the folio and the 1590 quarto in terms of their “overseers” by asserting that Mary Sidney Herbert “begonne in correcting the faults, [and] ended in supplying the defectes” of the 1590 quarto. The “defectes” that have been “supplied” in the 1593 folio are the 1590 quarto’s lack of a conclusion and of the many eclogue poems newly included in the 1593 folio. The “faults” of the 1590 quarto point toward its division into chapters, its chapter summaries, and, most damningly, the editors who “are unfurnished to discern” either the worth of Sidney’s writing or the quality of the countess’ editorial work. Moreover, “[W]ho sees not the reason [for the countess’s editorial choices], must consider there may be reason which hee sees not,”

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for “Never was Arcadia free from the comber of such Cattell. To us, they say, the pastures are not pleasaunt. . . . They shall doe well to go feed elswhere: Any place will better like them: For without Arcadia nothing growes in more plenty, then Lettuce sutable to their Lippes.” In Sanford’s preface, the name “Arcadia” signifies the literary, intellectual, political, and even geographic demesne of the Sidney family, and the preface insinuates that Greville and his men ungratefully fatten themselves on the largesse of the Sidneys.36 The demand that such cattle “go feed elsewhere” thrusts Greville out of the Sidney demesne much as the pig and marjoram emblem of the title page excludes unworthy readers.37 The logic underlying such insularity is familiar: it trades on the “tropes of the gentle and the base”38 considered in the introduction, in order to assert an absolute difference in kind, rather than merely in degree, between those who stand behind the 1590 quarto and those who stand behind the 1593 folio: “The worthless Reader can never worthily esteem of so worthy a writing” as the Arcadia ; moreover, any reader with “true knowledge” would value the Arcadia “as being child to such a father” as Sir Philip Sidney— a claim that clearly echoes the dedicatory epistle, which had named the work “this child which I am loath to father.”39 This echo is one among a flurry of references to the dedication, reminding the reader that “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia [was] done, as it was, for her: as it is, by her” (c.f. the language of the dedication, which declares the book “done only for you [the Countess of Pembroke], only to you.”40 One final fillip reinforces the ambition of the 1593 folio to supersede the 1590 quarto Arcadia. The factotum of Justice and Prudence triumphing over a vanquished Envy (or, perhaps, sin— see chapter 1) has been moved in Ponsonby’s 1593 folio. No longer does it serve as the incipit for the story itself. Rather, it is the incipit for Sidney’s letter dedicating the Arcadia to his sister. Whereas in the 1590 quarto the factotum had resonated with Greville’s maxim that in embracing the good of all, the courtier might avoid envy, here in the 1593 folio the factotum resonates with the familial rhetoric of the prefatory letters. Justice and Prudence are associated with the Sidney family closing ranks against ambitious appropriators of the Sidney name as well as against “the worthless Reader [who] can never worthely esteem of so worthye a writing,” in Sanford’s words. Aristocratic Friendship and the Virtue of the Heroic Romance A reading of the 1593 Arcadia as a literary work in its own right, as a significant part of the chain of semiotic events that critical editions have reduced

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to a single “New ” Arcadia, reveals its pragmatic focus on the workings of politics. The 1593 Arcadia does indeed contain more passages written in the pastoral mode and more rhetorical set pieces on the nature and effects of friendship than its predecessor in print. It re-emphasizes our fallen nature and our weakness, not only against private passions but also in the face of events that lie outside our control, and its emphasis on friendship among aristocrats (specifically neither commoners nor royalty) proffers a practical solution to a political problem: faced with a weak monarch and indeed a state spiraling out of control, how does an aristocracy avoid splintering into factions or even a mob? Friendshipis one force that counteracts ambition (naked individualistic self-interest). In the 1593 folio, it is also constitutive of the difference between modern aristocracy and medieval vassalage. In a modern political milieu driven by the kinds of purely amoral exigencies diagnosed by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, medieval codes like chivalry and vassalage are hopelessly inadequate to provide cohesion among the ruling classes. Late sixteenth century aristocrats must look back with clearer eyes at the classical virtue of friendship and must, as Sidney has it in his Defence of Poesie, be moved to live by that virtue in order to maintain the cohesion of the modern aristocracy. This political analysis of the need for friendship begins in the very first prose passage added to the 1593 Arcadia after the inconclusive battle that ends the 1590 quarto. The passage is new in the 1593 Arcadia: it does not appear in any manuscript witness to the Old Arcadia. The editors of the 1590 quarto may have suppressed it from the bundle of papers Skretkowicz designates A5 (or from G in the Ringler-Robertson stemma), or the passage may have been in some part of A5 that the 1590 Arcadia editors never possessed. The final possibility is that the passage is not Philip Sidney’s work, and that it was written under the aegis of the countess of Pembroke specifically for the 1593 folio. If we could attribute the passage to Philip Sidney with absolute certainty, we would know that he intended to conclude his revised Arcadia in much the same manner as his Old Arcadia. Lacking that definitive attribution, we may instead accept the authority of the 1593 folio, granting its heterogeneous origins but seeking in the work an overarching vision— an editorial interpretation— and, therefore, we may examine the function of the passage in the context of the 1593 folio.41 Perhaps most important, the new passage deploys its analysis in a pastoral setting. Friendship is ultimately what constitutes the setting as pastoral, taking the term “pastoral” particularly in Harry Berger, Jr.’s sense of the “green world” into which subjects of the heterocosm of fiction may retreat and reflect. The “green world” mirrors the “second world,” or “heterocosm” into which the theatrical audience has entered and from which it, too, might

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reflect on the “first world” that lies outside the confines of the theatre.42 As Walter Davis, one of the few critics to focus in particular on the 1593 Arcadia, notes, Since the [Arcadia’s] pastoral circle is microcosmic, it represents a purification of the outer circle of the great world whose elements it abstracts. The outermost circle of the romance setting is the polar opposite of the inner circle: it is urban, complex, and sophisticated; it is turbulent, the realm of warfare and death; and it is not a pure artifact, but rather a naturalistically drawn version of the world men really live in. Moreover, “the chivalric and political events always parallel the action of love in Arcadia.”43 But whereas Davis finds the parallels to lie exclusively in Sidney’s artifice, I argue that the 1593 Arcadia shows its readers how private conversations between friends, generally in pastoral settings, guide characters in the chivalric and political worlds into which they pass. The middle period of the conversation between Musidorus and Pyrocles (it consists of only three periods) manifests Davis’s inner circle and all but explicitly anticipates Berger’s formulation of the “green world.” Musidorus, reunited with Pyrocles after the escape from Amphialus’s castle and, presumably, the suppression of Amphialus’s and Cecropia’s rebellion, prepares to reveal to his friend his plan to elope with Pamela to Thessaly: Sitting downe together among the sweet flowers whereof that place was very plentifull, under the pleasant shade of a broad leaved Sycamor, they recounted one to another their strange pilgrimage of passions, omitting nothing which the openharted friendship is wont to lay forth, where there is cause to communicate both joyes & sorows—for indeed ther is no sweeter tast of frendship, then the coupling of soules in this mutualitie either of condoling or comforting; where the oppressed minde findes itself not altogether miserable, since it is sure of one which is feelingly sory for his misery: and the joyfull spends not his joy either alone or there where it may be envyed: but may freely send it to such a well grounded object, from whence he shall be sure to receive a sweete reflection of the same joye, and, as in a cleere mirror of sincere goodwill, see a lively picture of his owne gladnes. (Sig. Ff3) While comfort for the miserable is one benefit of this “coupling of souls,” the joyful friend benefits even more, for he may share his joy without fear of being envied. Such freedom from envy is one of the significant desiderata of the countess’s Discourse of Life and Death, and it likewise allows “a sweet

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reflection” of joy for the happier friend.44 This “clear mirror of goodwill” is a genuine escape from courtly corruption, for its clarity is freedom from the “bad air,” the contagion of the court infected with envy, ambition, flattery, and slander.45 As Wendy Olmsted has pointed out, the metaphors of friend-as-physician and friendship-as-treatment were current in late Elizabethan courtly discourse, and these metaphors helped mediate the blending of classical doctrines on rhetoric and friendship, on one hand, with the emergent neo-Stoic and Protestant notion of “inner honor,” which represents a significant shift from the classical sense of “public honor” revived intensely in the earlier parts of the Renaissance.46 On the other hand, if friendship in this sense is an escape from court politics, it is at the same time the very basis for politics, the best kind of alliance. Moreover, the necessity for friendship becomes clear in the remainder of the 1593 Arcadia, which explores the power of the passions over the princes and their companions. For example, prior to the trial in book five, as Gynecia and the four young lovers are all held prisoner, the contrast between the torments of isolation and the virtues of friendly companionship are underscored. Gynecia, alone in her cell, wracks herself with guilt-ridden recriminations, sees “strange sights” and hears “the cries of hellish ghostes” (Sig. Pp6). She finds herself subject to the apparitions most concisely and tellingly described as those Such as in thick depriving darknesses, Proper reflections of error be, And images of self-confusednesses, Which hurt imaginations only see; And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils, Which but expressions be of inward evils.47 The fact that it is Fulke Greville’s Caelica sonnet that expresses so well Gynecia’s nightmare underscores the difference between the 1590 quarto and the 1593 folio Arcadias: whereas the Arcadia edited under Greville had descended into ever-greater fragmentation, isolation, and decay of virtue— culminating in Zelmane’s enraged, vengeance-driven battle with Anaxius— the Arcadia edited under the Countess of Pembroke restores aristocratic friendship to the tale and with it, hope even in a fallen world: though Gynecia despairs so greatly that she even blasphemes, she is restored to her rightful place in the end. Compared to Gynecia, princesses and even the princes bear up well: Pamela and Philoclea comfort one another and then decide to write letters in defense of their princely lovers, while Pyrocles and Musidorus overcome despair and steel themselves for the worst with a brief

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dialogue on metempsychosis before they settle more pragmatically on the defenses they will present at their trial (Sigs. Pp6-Qq2). The importance of friendship only becomes increasingly apparent as the nominally pastoral plot of the remainder of book three unfolds. Though the remainder of book three in the 1593 Arcadia presents Musidorus’s deceptions of the rustic family into whose care Pamela has been placed (Dametas, his shrewish wife Miso, and their daughter Mopsa) and Pyrocles/Zelmane’s sexual deceptions of Basilius and Gynecia, the comedy of the matter is tempered by a certain pitying sympathy with which all the characters are portrayed. The theme of the remainder of book three is the myriad ways that passion corrupts human judgment, from the lowest to the highest character on the social scale. We do laugh at the expense of Dametas, Miso, and Mopsa, caught as they are by their own obvious character faults: Musidorus appeals to Dametas’s greed, to Miso’s jealousy, and to Mopsa’s insatiable curiosity. And yet their very ignorance and susceptibility to their own passions make us sharply aware of what an unfair advantage Musidorus has over them. Musidorus is no New Comedy younger son winning the daughter of a rich merchant against the odds; he is, instead, a powerful and relatively wise prince playing funny but cruel tricks on his inferiors. Musidorus debases himself in taking such a decided advantage of her inferiors and we even begin to pity him: he is, after all, caught just as surely as are his dupes in the web of his own passion—his love and sexual desire for Pamela. Likewise the spectacle of Basilius tripping along singing “Phæbus farewell, a sweeter Saint I serve” elicits laughs, but Pyrocles’s sexual deception of Basilius and Gynecia is shot through with a much deeper tragic pity. Gynecia, conspicuously absent from book three of the 1590 Arcadia, returns to the 1593 folio. Her tragic self-awareness (she plans to betray her innocent daughter and hapless husband for a tryst with Zelmane, whose transvestite disguise she sees through) resonates eerily with the image Cecropia, the evil queen possessed nevertheless of a “bewitched” love of her own son, Amphialus, as well as with Amphialus’s own limited, conventionally chivalric sense of morality. Gynecia’s laments from within the darkened, private cave near Basilius’s hunting lodge sound to Zelmane like “a portracture of my miseries” (Sig. Ff6). Gynecia’s initial sonnet addresses “plaintfull ghostes, infernall furies” and concludes by characterizing her state as “Death wrapt in flesh, to living grave assign’d”; she reprises these sentiments in an octave in which she compares herself to “those sicke folkes, in whome strange humors flowe,” and laments her inability to share her darkest feelings with anyone (Sigs. Ff5v—Ff6). This is pastoral love-sickness, but it likewise extends to a tragic sickness of the state of Arcadia because of the kinds of stories that Gynecia and Zelmane inhabit.

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It would be easy to make the ostensibly political argument that it is because of Gynecia and Zelmane’s positions (queen and prince) that their lovesickness constitutes a sickness of the state, but that is not really the point of the 1593 Arcadia or the elements of pastoral it admits. It is, rather, the fact that Gynecia and Zelmane are characters in stories that range across an epic scope of modes, from the lowly pastoral, through comedy and romances of the Hellenistic, chivalric, and Italian heroic varieties, through tragedy as well, and, crucially, through the modern historiographical mode discussed in chapter 1, that their passions corrupt the state. While one might say that the 1593 Arcadia presents lovesickness from a number of perspectives, it is more accurate to say that the multiple and interconnected nature of the modes of the 1593 Arcadia offer varied perspectives on love. The point of Zelmane’s (mis)recognition of her own passion in Gynecia’s complaint is that their passions are at once the same and irreconcilably different. The isolation of main characters at the mercy of their own passions (and, at times, the passions of others) is the counterpoint to the consideration of friendship that opens the 1593 folio’s additions to book three of the Arcadia. This isolation resonates thematically with the action that remains truncated in book three: the kidnapping of the princesses and Zelmane and their subsequent isolation from one another (ultimately allowing Cecropia to stage mock executions in an attempt to break their spirits), and the dissolution of the military actions of the rebellion from organized, modern war to bouts of increasingly savage single combat. While the narrative of book three of the 1593 folio is split, the thematic focus on passions overtaking even the most noble characters as they become increasingly isolated from one another remains constant. In the final paired episodes of book three, the universality of the utterly personal pain the passions inflict, whether in a political milieu or a private venue, becomes fully apparent. The first episode narrates in a tragic vein Gynecia’s discovery that Zelmane has duped her and Basilius into a tryst with each other, their subsequent short-lived reconciliation, and Basilius’s apparent death. The apparent death occurs because Basilius drinks a love potion Gynecia had thought was an aphrodisiac but that turns out more prosaically to be a powerful Mickey Finn. His drugged state, much like that of Shakespeare’s Juliet, is mistaken for death. The second episode reveals, in the mode of chivalric romance, the pain that Pyrocles’s deception has inflicted on the innocent Philoclea. Gynecia and Philoclea, the two characters most isolated from the others—the one by the depth of her knowledge and self-accusing conscience, the other by her absolute innocence—show us the worst ravages of love in the many worlds of the Arcadia. In order to convince Gynecia of his sincerity, Pyrocles reveals his crossdressed disguise to the queen and promises to meet her in the cave where

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she had lately sung of her despair. When Philoclea sees the two together, she imagines that Pyrocles has inconstantly shifted his affections to her mother, Gynecia. In contrast to Gynecia, when Philoclea believes she has been betrayed, she “yield[s] up her soule to be a pray to sorow and unkindnes, not with raging conceite of revenge” (Sig. Hh5v). When Pyrocles arrives at last at Philoclea’s bedchamber, full of hope and desire, she receives him with rebukes: “O false mankind . . . How can an impostumed heart, but yeelde forth evill matter by his mouth? . . . Have you yet another sleight to playe, or doe you think to deceave me in Pyrocles forme as you have done in Zelmanes? Or rather now you have betrayed me in both, is some third sex left you, into which you can transforme yourselfe to inveigle my simplicitie?” (Sig. Ii5). Philoclea’s innocence, even more brightly than the gullibility of Dametas and his family, highlights the wrong of the prince’s deception. She is so emotionally spent that even when she realizes Pyrocles has come for her alone, she is too weak to flee with him. Thus it is that Dametas, in the course of his desperate search for his charge Pamela, discovers Philoclea and Pyrocles in bed together and locks them in the bedchamber, having removed Pyrocles’s sword. Pyrocles finds himself the victim of his own deception. But Gynecia’s isolation is even more tragic and more complete than Philoclea’s. As Basilius enters the cave praising Zelmane, the narrator renders Gynecia’s reaction with unusual sympathy: “In what case poore Gynœcia was, when she knewe the voyce, and felt the bodie of her husband, fair Ladies, it is better to knowe by imagination then experience” (Sig. Ii2v). Because she hopes that Zelmane has not deceived her and she will have another opportunity for an assignation, she remains silent throughout Basilius’s lovemaking. But Basilius’s antics the next morning finally prove too much. He sighs to himself, “[S]hould fancie of marriage keepe me from this paradise?” referring to what he thinks was his tryst with Zelmane, and Gynecia, who “saw in him how much fancy doth not onely darken reason but beguile sence,” feels compelled to reprimand him. She remarks drily that “[H]ard . . . is the destinie of womankinde . . . the tryall of whose vertue must stande upon the loving of them, that employe all theyr industrie not to be beloved,” before chiding Basilius less as a wife than as an equal: “Remember the wrong you have done is not onely to me, but to your children . . . to your countrey, when they shall finde they are commaunded by him that cannot commaund his owne undecent appetites: lastly, to yourselfe, since with these paynes you cannot do but build up a house of shame to dwell in” (Sig. Ll6v—Mm1). Gynecia’s admonishments engender Basilius’s shame, but shame gives way to gratitude when he grasps how mildly she treats him, and the Arcadia presents a textbook case of successful friendly counsel−until Basilius drinks the potion Gynecia had brought with her to seduce Zelmane.

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As the characters become increasingly isolated in the closing books of the 1593 Arcadia, and the anatomy of interpenetrating ethical and political forces unfolds with extraordinary rigor, precepts laid out in the Discourse of Life and Death are exemplified vividly.48 Particularly in scenes of oratory, climaxing in the trial with which the plot concludes, a good deal of Aristotelian analysis of the effects of passions of the sort carried out in the Rhetoric subtends the description of crowds, but such analysis also suffuses Sidney’s influences in classical history, the Hellenistic novel, and most notably among Philippist treatises like the Discourse of Life and Death. The resonances between the 1593 Arcadia and the Discourse, when understood in the context of the proximity of their dates of publication (by the same stationer, the fortunate Mr. Ponsonby), indicate that, at least in 1593, the countess intended that the 1593 folio be interpreted in the light of the Discourse of Life and Death rather than, as everyone following Kenneth O. Myrick’s lead since the early twentieth century has presumed, as an expression of precepts explored in the Defence of Poesie.49 The strong affinities with the Discourse ’s political and moral analysis hold in many different moments, even some of the most comic. As Musidorus’s deception of the rustic family of Dametas unfolds and the enraged Miso swoops about the village calling out her husband, whom she suspects to be occupied with a local lass, the narrator explains that the townsmen enjoy their schadenfreude because they envy Dametas. They pity him for being married to Miso, Yet such was the generall mislike all men had of Damœtas unworthy advauncement, that every man was glad to make himselfe a minister of that, which might redounde to his shame, and therefore with Panike cries and laughters, there was no suspected place in all the cittie but was searched for under the title of Damœtas. (Sig. Ll4v) Dametas’s greatness is the most transparently specious variety of rank, for which reason it inspires all the greater envy in his inferiors. Even more clearly than the Discourse, the Arcadia presents the envy of Dametas as a by-product of tyranny; namely, of Basilius’s unreasonable retreat to Mantinea against the counsel of his chief adviser, Philanax, accompanied by his misguided elevation of Dametas. As in the Discourse, envy proceeds not from the dark hearts of men but rather from a poisonous political atmosphere into the hearts of men. In more solemn modes, the passions likewise drive male characters to make decisions that appear especially misguided from the Philippist perspective that frames the 1593 Arcadia. Philanax demonstrates the brittleness of the Stoic

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position when he learns of Basilius’s supposed death as Dametas delivers the captured Pamela to him: “[C]arying a manfull sorowe and vindicatife resolucion in his face, he rose up, so looking upon the poor guiltlesse princesse transported with an unjust justice, that his eyes were sufficient herauldes for him, to denounce a mortall hatred” (Sig. Mm3v). Here and elsewhere, Philanax acts like an inflexible patrician who will ultimately alienate the plebs in Livy. More egregiously than Philanax, Musidorus falls victim to his own anger: his frustration grows as he defends Pamela from the mob of Phagonian rebels who interrupt his attempted elopement, and though he kills several after having given chase, his sally against the mob enables other rebels to circle around and capture Pamela (Sigs. Nn3v−Nn4), very much as Amphialus’s illadvised single combat in book three, chapter eight of the 1590 Arcadia had nearly distracted him from a flanking movement around his troops. The 1593 folio allows the reader to contemplate the analogy between Amphialus’s and Musidorus’s errors. In contrast to the isolated male figures, the female principals seem to hold up well in their distress. At his interrogation, Pyrocles insists that “[T]here needes no strength to be added to so inviolate chastetie, the excellencie of [Philoclea’s] mind, makes her bodie impregnable. Which for mine own part I had soone yelded to confesse, with going out of this place (where I found but little comfort being so disdainefully received) had I not bene, I know not by whom, [locked in]” (Sig. Nn1v). Philoclea’s physical intactness is safeguarded by her mental virtue, at least as far as Pyrocles’s account is to be trusted. In the 1593 Folio, unlike the Old Arcadia, Philoclea hews to Pyrocles’s line of argument, pleading that “If you rightly judge of what hath past, wherein the Gods (that should have bene of our mariage) are witnesses of our innocencies,” she and Pyrocles should be released (Sig.Nn2v). Critics have made much of the revision, since in the Old Arcadia Philoclea does not deny her sexual relations with Pyrocles, but perhaps more attention should be paid to her reference to marriage, which resonates with Cleopatra’s insistence on calling Antony her husband in The Tragedie of Antonie. The Political Analysis of Faction The Sidneian anatomy of political discord that first saw print in book four of the 1593 Arcadia is all the more Philippist and reflective of the Discourse of Life and Death printed only a year earlier. The description (particularly the first sentence in the passage below) could likewise have come from Tacitus or Livy. Pamela, having been delivered from the mob into Philanax’s custody, demands that Philanax obey her as his lawful princess on the ground that, though she is not of age to rule, she is married to Musidorus. The apparent death of Basilius,

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Philanax’s claim to authority as the King’s chief magistrate, and Pamela’s royal claim precipitate a crisis of authority worth extended attention: There was a notable example, how great dissipations, monarchall government are [sic] subject unto. For nowe theyr prince and guide had lefte them, they had not experience to rule, and had not whome to obaye. Publicke matters had ever bene privately governed, so that they had no lively taste what was good for themselves, but everything was eyther vehemently desirefull, or extreamely terrible . . . . Altogether like a falling steeple, the partes whereof, as windowes, stones, and pinnacles, were well, but the whole masse ruinous. And this was the generall case of all, wherein notwithstanding was an extreame medly of diversified thoughts; the great men looking to make themselves strong by factions, the gentlemen some bending to them, some standing upon themselves, some desirous to overthrowe those few which they thought were over them, the souldiers desirous of trouble, as the nurse of spoile, and not much unlike to them, though in another way, were all the needy sorte, the riche fearefull, the wise carefull . . . . . . For some there were that cried to have the state altred, and governed no more by a Prince; marry in the alteration many would have the Lacedemonian government of fewe chosen Senatours; others the Athenian, where the peoples voyce helde the chiefe aucthoritye. But these were rather the discoursing sorte of men, then the active, being a matter more in imaginacion then practice. (Sigs. Oo1— Oo1v) If the advocates of republican and democratic forms of government are “rather the discoursing sort of men than the active,” suggesting a certain distrust, monarchy is presented as a form of government that debilitates the governed, “so that they had no lively taste what was good for themselves, but everything was either vehemently desireful or extremely terrible . . . altogether like a falling steeple, the parts whereof (as windows, stones, and pinnacles) were well, but the whole mass ruinous.” The “great men,” the gentlemen, the soldiers, the rich, the needy, and the wise are all well enough in themselves, but they are not bound together by mutual civil duties or by a common vision. They are keenly aware of social hierarchies and many are predisposed to attempt to better their places in the tumult. In direct contrast to “the pleasant shade of a broad-leaved sycamore” under which Pyrocles and Musidorus had dissected each other’s passions and ministered one to the other (Sig. Ff3), here in the crowd passions sweep through and intensify, made contagious by the proximity of so many ungoverned and ambitious people at once. Into this already-unstable discursive milieu of interest, faction, fear, and ambition, the 1593 Arcadia introduces a figure drawn on the lines of Sejanus

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or Cataline: Timautus, a stirrer of rebellion far more dangerous than the drunken rout of the Phagonians had been. Timautus is “of extreame ambition, as one that had placed his uttermost good in greatnes, thinking small difference by what meanes he came by it. Of commendable wit, if he had not made it a servaunt of unbrideled desires . . . Servile (though envious) to his betters; and no lesse tirannycallie minded to them hee had advauntage of. Counted revengefull, but indeede measuring both revenge and rewarde, as the partye might eyther helpe or hurt him. Rather shamelesse then bolde” (Sig. Oo1v). He appeals to the peers of the realm, at first attempting to bend Philanax to his will by suggesting that the two of them marry Pamela and Philoclea and divide the realm between them. Such an appeal is a travesty of the aristocratic friendship enjoyed by Pyrocles and Musidorus. When the loyal Philanax rejects Timautus, the perfidious rebel gathers a crowd of “the chiefest Lordes, whome he knewe principally to repine at Philanax” and accuses Philanax of desiring to rule Arcadia, asserting that “[I]t was season for [Arcadia’s peers] to looke to such a weede, that else would overgrowe them all.” He calls Philanax “such a slye wolfe . . . that could make justice the cloake of tirannye” (Sig. Oo2). As the crowd begins to fear and envy Philanax, and to turn against him, news breaks of yet another disorder: a different mob has gathered to free the newly captured princes, and Philanax avoids Timautus’s slanders by calling on the crowd to follow him to suppress the new disorder. In the descriptions of the factious crowd, Timautus’s boundless ambition, and his perfidious rhetoric, the 1593 Arcadia exemplifies the diagnosis of the worst aspects of court life laid out in the Discourse of Life and Death, which seems to be warning Philanax of the dangers of his attempts to act morally: “[Y]ou have men for your enemies, and of men the greatest: whose envy and malice will spy you out, and whose cruelty and tyranny will evermore threaten you.”50 As we have already seen, Philanax is subject to his own “guerre intestine,” torn as he is by his love for the royal family and his desire to revenge the death of Basilius.51 The Prudence of Euarchus As both the dissection of factionalism and the benefits of aristocratic friendship stand in necessary tension with one another in book four of the 1593 Arcadia, so Arcadian political chaos creates the necessity for the intervention of Euarchus, King of Macedonia and Pyrocles’s father, in book five. Euarchus is the good ruler signified by his name, typically taken as the ideal monarch, but such an interpretation must be tempered by the observation that Arcadia is not suited to Euarchus’s rule. His decision in the trial of the princes and of Gynecia, condemning all to death, elicits not the final restoration of order

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to Arcadia but instead an outpouring of pity; indeed, even Euarchus himself is moved to tears when he discovers he has condemned his own son. He is thus not a simple exemplar of political virtue, but also something like a tragic hero, whose admirable abilities are ultimately ill-adapted for the task fate thrusts on him. And in the end, Arcadia needs the catharsis of tragedy rather than the rigor of an ideal monarch. Euarchus’s entry into Arcadia is rendered in the longest continuous passage added to the 1593 Arcadia as a modification of the Old Arcadia’s A5 state, which narrates the rather simple account of how Euarchus arrived in Arcadia (by shipwreck—how else?). It is part of a much more important and detailed characterization of Euarchus (“good ruler”) by his diplomatic and military preparations to fend off an Italian invasion of Greek states, all of which is cast within Euarchus’s larger vision of Greece as a whole (dependent on the strength of his own Macedon and of his friend Basilius’s Arcadia). In the 1593 Folio, Euarchus is, foremost, a statesman. The passage being replaced from the Old Arcadia (which neverappeared in the 1590 quarto) characterizes Euarchus more as a morally good ruler than as far-sighted. In the Old Arcadia, Euarchus did not further exceed his meanest subject with the greatness of his fortune than he did surmount the greatness of his fortune with the greatness of his mind; in so much that those things which oftentimes the best sort think the rewards of virtue, he held them not at so high a price, but esteemed them servants to well doing, the reward of virtue being in itself. . . . This made the line of his actions straight and always like itself, no worldly thing being able to shake the constancy of it.52 In contrast, the Euarchus of the 1593 Folio is in the first instance prudent and even Machiavellian in his foreign policy. He temporizes to forestall a military confrontation between his Greek allies and their would-be conquerors from the Italian peninsula, the Latins, having “determined so long openly to hold [the Latins] his friends, as open hostilitie bewraied them not his enemies; not ceasing in the meane time by letters & messages to move the States of Greece, by uniting their strength to make timely provision against [war]” (Sig. Pp2v). The Latins of Italy, perceiving the warlike preparations of Greece, eventually back down and return some ships they had detained. Only this event frees Euarchus to help his friend, the woeful Plangus, whose beloved Erona lies imprisoned. Thus, unlike Amphialus, Musidorus, and, most notably, Basilius before him, Euarchus prioritizes his own people (indeed all of greater Greece) before his personal desires and needs. When Euarchus at last sails for Byzantium to the aid of his friend Plangus, storms drive his ship to the coast of Laconia—a country recently

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pacified by Pyrocles but that has since backslid into civil war between the conquering Lacedaemonians, who have set themselves up as an aristocracy, and the conquered Helots, reduced to common status. The renewed civil war is so violent that Euarchus skirts the country and enters nearby Arcadia, only to discover the uproar caused by Basilius’s supposed death. What this passage, new to the 1593 Arcadia, demonstrates, is the degree to which the historiographical mode of narration has come to frame the plot. Moreover, other than the fact that the passage briefly picks up the thread of the Plangus and Erona plot (which subsequently disappears from the prose conclusion of the 1593 folio), its mode meshes perfectly with the material from the A5 state of the Old Arcadia into which it is grafted. Its general theme is that of book five: Justice in its intricate manifestations, the more prudential of which are removed several times from an obvious link to the virtue itself. Humanity and Judgment, Pity and Monstrosity in the Trial Scene As news of Euarchus’s arrival spreads in Arcadia, the 1593 folio invites readers to compare Euarchus’s diplomatic foresight across an international stage with the internal politics of Arcadia, and again friendship emerges as a significant factor. Philanax calls the peers together to greet Euarchus. Most of the nobility are drawn to listen to Philanax only because they “were alreadye growne as wearye to be followers of Timautus ambition, as before they were envyers of Philanax worthinesse.” But the noblemen Kalender (who had first welcomed the princes to Arcadia) and his great friend, significantly named Sympathus, are drawn instead by “vertuous friendship” and “naturall commiseration,” and choose to follow Philanax in hopes that the justice for which Euarchus is known will prevail and set free their friends Pyrocles and Musidorus (Sig. Pp1v). Indeed, the conflict that emerges from the trial opposes pity to rigorous enforcement of the law because it asks one central question: Is the rule of law or equity justice, rigor, or pity, the best means to a civil society? Neither the rule of law nor equity justice answers all our needs, and no single compromise between pity and rigor is satisfactory, either. Instead, the 1593 Arcadia offers us only the continuing dialogic tension between the two poles. To the prosecutor, Philanax, the princes are monsters and must be destroyed. But the narrator makes clear that Philanax’s point of view is not to be trusted, for Philanax—“incontinently” and “shewing in his greedy eyes, that he did thirst for . . . bloud” prosecutes his case with too much zeal (Sig. Qq4v). Philanax calls the crimes he imputes to the defendants “monstrous”— a charge that echoes the threat of monstrosity that has shadowed the Arcadia from the dedicatory epistle to Gynecia’s self-accusations

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and Pyrocles’s threats of vengeance near the end of the 1590 quarto Arcadia. Moreover, when Philanax describes the princes to the court, he says that “When they passe all degrees of unspeakeable naughtines, then finde they in themselves a hardenes to geve credit, that humane creatures can so from all humanitie bee transformed” (Sig. Qq6). Philanax’s Senecan rhetoric marks his conception of the event as a kind of revenge, so he characterizes the accused: “[T]o those persons who have vomited out of their soules all remnants of goodnes, there restes a certaine pride in evill, and having ells no shadowe of glorye lefte them, they glorye to bee constante in iniquitye” (Sig. Qq6v). This description of evil excess points directly back to the precept of Senecan tragedy that retribution must exceed the evil of the deed it avenges. The Latinate noun “iniquity” and its perversion of the virtue of constancy also point to the Senecan tragic frame in which Philanax understands his role. Here he traces a boundary of language around humanity, for when a crime exceeds the scope of language, it becomes “unspeakable,” and its perpetrator correspondingly is “transformed” from “all humanity” into something “monstrous.” Philanax’s prosecution blends a command of Stoic values with a morally questionable intent, which is reflected in the less-than-plausible case he makes; namely, that Pyrocles, Musidorus, and Gynecia conspired to kill Basilius and somehow claim the throne of Arcadia among themselves. He does not wish to discover the truth in the trial; rather, he seeks to avenge Basilius’s death, to which end he spins the most damning story he can. He even suppresses the letters that Pamela and Philoclea have written in defense of their lovers. Philanax’s prosecution is an emblem of rhetorical skill and Stoic wisdom being appropriated for the purpose of mere vengeance, untempered by pity and arguably “monstrous” itself. One of the most telling aspects of the trial rests on Pyrocles’s defense. At first the princes rest a lawyerly case on the diplomatic principle that as sovereigns, they should be exempt from Arcadia’s laws. But Pyrocles attempts to correct Philanax’s account by telling what the reader can recognize as essentially the truth: he and Musidorus, having fallen in love with the princesses whom Basilius had rusticated, disguised themselves to woo them and eventually attempted to elope with them (Sigs Rr1v−Rr2v). Significantly, his oration has absolutely no effect on either Philanax’s prosecution or the judgment Euarchus eventually renders. In spite of Euarchus’s impeccable character and his best attempts to render justice, the truth sets no one free. Euarchus himself enjoins the Arcadians to “[R]emember that I am a man, that is to say a creature, whose reason is often darkned with error” (Sig. Pp5v). And indeed, the narrator remarks, “[I]n such a shadowe or rather pit of darkenes, the wormish mankinde lives, that neither they knowe how to foresee, nor what to feare: and are but like tenisballs, tossed by the racket

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of the hyer powers” (Sig. Qq5v). For all Euarchus’s wisdom, he fails to distinguish the truth when it is presented to him and, even worse, condemns his own son and nephew. The narrator nevertheless praises Euarchus for sticking by his principles regardless of the personal cost: “wisdome being an [e]ssential and not an opinionate thing, made him rather to bend to what was in itselfe good, then what by evill mindes might bee judged not good” (Sig. Pp4v). To his judgment Euarchus prefixes an injunction that the princes must be judged “not by a free discourse of reason, and skill of philosophy: but [by] the lawes of Greece,” for “philosophicall discourses, stande in generall consideration of thinges, [and] they leave to every man a scope of his owne interpretation. Where the lawes applyinge them selves to the necessary use, folde us within assured boundes, which once broken man’s nature infinitly rangeth” (Sig. Rr5v). In essence, Euarchus refuses to temper his judgments with pity because he believes that any latitude for human interpretation of laws leads down the slippery slope to anarchy. He finds Pyrocles, Musidorus, and Gynecia all guilty of capital crimes, and he stands on that judgment even when a messenger reveals that the disguised princes are his son and nephew. It is because Euarchus also refuses to act on the pity that affects everyone present at the trial that his judgment leads not to a restoration of civil order but rather nearly to another rebellion in Arcadia. Euarchus’s strict doom elicits pity from everyone, even Euarchus himself. The narrator calls it a “pittiful spectacle” and says that “[A] man might perceive the teares drop downe [Euarchus’s] long white beard.” This is a crucial point, for it shows that Euarchus is not pitiless, but rather that he chooses not to act on the basis of his emotion; he displays Aristotelian continence, and thus avoids the neo-Stoic vice of pity. But the rest of the onlookers are overwhelmed by pity. Even Philanax “could not abstaine from great shewes of pittying sorrow, and manifest withdrawing from performing [Euarchus’s] commaundement” (Sigs. Ss1v−Ss2). Pyrocles and Musidorus recognize the surge of emotion and use it, vehemently protesting on each other’s behalf with explicitly sophistical pathetic appeals. Musidorus calls Euarchus “tyrannicall” because he appears to lack pity, and Pyrocles warns him to take heed, “lest seeking too precise a course of justice, you be not thought most unjust” (Sig. Ss2). Each pleads that Euarchus be satisfied with his own life so that the other may be spared. This spectacle of pity incites such an admiration of all the beholders, that most of them examining the matter by their owne passions, thought Euarchus (as often extraordinarie excellencies, not being rightly conceived, do rather offend then please) an obstinate hearted man, and such a one, who being pittilesse, his

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dominion must needes be insupportable. But Euarchus, that felt his owne miserie more then they, and yet loved goodnesse more then himselfe, with such a sad assured behaviour as Cato killed himselfe withall . . . he commaunded againe that [the princes] should be carried away, rising up from the seate . . . and looking who would take the charge, whereto everie one was exceeding backward. (Sig. Ss2v) Thus Arcadia teeters on the brink of civil disorder, almost as Euarchus’s earlier caution against mitigating the letter of the law had suggested. Euarchus feels pity, but the crowd misinterprets him— and this misinterpretation has brought them to the edge of rebellion. Euarchus responds to his emotion well— as an “extraordinary excellenc[y]”—but the Arcadians succumb to emotion, “examining the matter by their own passions.” The narrator seems to agree with the neo-Stoics that pity must not interfere with rational judgment, but, at the same time, the scene clearly argues that a polity united only by the strict observance of law cannot hold together – precisely because it appears to lack pity—notwithstanding the fact that its magistrates apply the law in the most just and virtuous way imaginable. This moment of nearrebellion is the 1593 Arcadia’s ultimate emblem of the tension between pity and rigorous adherence to neo-Stoic ethics. The very next sentence dissipates the specter of rebellion from Arcadia, for Basilius sits up under his funeral shroud, seemingly having returned from the dead. He pardons everyone, dispensing pity from perhaps the proper standpoint, “waying in all these matters his own fault had been the greatest” (243). Whatever Basilius’s faults, eventually he takes responsibility for them; this consists of granting to his subjects the same pity that his own mistakes require. In a sense, Basilius, Pyrocles, Musidorus, and Gynecia all benefit from the dedicatory epistle’s appeal to “blame not, but laugh at . . . the follies your good judgment will find in” Arcadia. Even Euarchus seems to have learned to judge according to Sidney’s precepts, for on his departure, he takes Sympathus with him into Macedon. *

*

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Before 1675, the Countess of Pembroke’s edition of Arcadia was reprinted more than a dozen times, whereas Greville’s 1590 edition was not reprinted again until the twentieth century. Moreover, the countess’s 1598 edition established the most significant part of the Philip Sidney canon of texts: his Arcadia, The Lady of May, Astrophel and Stella, Certaine Sonets, and The Defense of Poesie. In the process of reclaiming a family identity for her brother’s writing, the countess also established herself as the preeminent literary

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scion of the Sidney family. Greville’s claims on Philip Sidney and his vision of how history ought to record Philip Sidney, however, were not completely obliterated by the countess’s publishing projects. Although he retired from the competition to edit Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, he eventually wrote arguably the single most influential piece of literary criticism on the Arcadia ever written, his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, better known as the Life of Sidney, which presents Sidney’s work as a critique of monarchical excesses on the model of Tacitus’s Agricola.53 Greville composed his Dedication in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, in part as a strategy to get around the fact that his proposed history of the reign of Elizabeth had been censored: as is well known, Greville slipped lengthy commentaries on Elizabethan politics into his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. Thus, some twenty years after his literary quarrel with the Countess of Pembroke, Greville still turned to the Arcadia as a means of making his own political commentary— and effectively claimed the last word in his literary quarrel with Mary Sidney Herbert.54

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CHAPTER 5

Organic and Artificial Wholes in the Invention of English Literature: Or, the Ontological Status of the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

T

he Kuleshov Effect, which is the basis of montage editing in film, holds an instructive analogy for the study of the 1598 folio. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov tried an experiment in which he showed one group of spectators a still photograph of a handsome actor, followed by a photograph of a bowl of soup. To another group he showed the same photograph followed by a photograph of a pretty girl, and for the final group the actor’s image was followed by a photograph of a coffin. When asked to interpret what they had seen, spectators ascribed to the actor’s face varied emotions, based on what they presumed he was “looking at”: the soup, the girl, or the coffin. The point is that spectators create meaning by inferring relationships among images they see, and that the order in which the images are experienced affects interpretation. A similar idea was elementary to creators of renaissance emblem-books, and undoubtedly was quite apparent to the Sidneys, who were aware of the late Sir Philip’s famous speravi impresa (I had hoped), and to whom books interpreting imprese had been dedicated. To page through the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia is to experience something like the Kuleshov effect. The order of the texts creates the impression that one is entering ever-more-private chambers in a great house like Penshurst. If the titular heroic romance is analogous to the Baron’s Hall, the next part, Certaine Sonets Written by Sir Philip Sidney: Never

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before printed is perhaps akin to the solar, the private dining room that overlooks the Baron’s Hall and connects to the Buckingham Building, wherein one glimpses a few casual scenes from Sir Philip’s life, artfully preserved, signifying personal experience but rendered aesthetically for semipublic consumption. The end of the Certaine Sonets, “Splendidis longum valedico nugis” (I bid a long farewell to splendid trifles), intensifies the irony of the opening of the Defence of Poesie, wherein Sidney confesses his “unelected vocation” and invites readers to compare his own self-love to John Pietro Pugliano’s spectacular display of the same. The wry comment on the power of Pugliano’s discourse on horsemanship, “[I]f I had not been a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I thinke he would have perswaded me to have wished myselfe a horse,” implies that readers ought to take the Defence with a grain of salt. The final ironic pronunciation of the Defence is aimed at him who fails to appreciate good poetry: “[W]hile you live, you live in love, and never get favor, for lacking skill of a Sonet, and when you die, your memorie die from the earth for want of an Epitaph.” What better preface might we ask for the following part of the folio, Astrophel and Stella, in which Astrophil’s first sonnet protests (again with destabilizing irony) his sincerity in professing love? While both the Defence and the newly authoritative edition of Astrophel and Stella present richly ornamented state rooms, part of their attraction lies in imagining the aristocrats and conversations that once animated them. Finally, as the reader sees Astrophil complain in sonnet 108, “Ah what doth Phoebus gold that wretch availe, / Whom iron doores do keep from use of day,” we encounter the last part of the folio, Her Most Excellent Majestie Walking in Wansteed Garden, better known by the shorter title The Lady of May. Here is a private chamber, the relic of an entertainment for the Queen herself. The Lady of May is probably a lovingly preserved bauble in a special closet, truly the sort of “trifle” that dedication of the Arcadia mentions, and it fits easily within the capacious Arcadia. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia of 1598 comprehends all these works, and one may see in the heroic romance reflections of each of the other works presented in the folio. Accordingly, this final chapter treats the 1598 folio as a whole, as a framework within which to read Sidneian texts. Rather than reexamine The Lady of May, Certaine Sonets, The Defence of Poesie, and Astrophel and Stella in depth, I focus on their places in the 1598 folio. Because I have already discussed Astrophel and Stella at length in chapter two, here I focus only on the ways the 1598 text differentiates itself from the 1591 quartos. Likewise, I take up the early quartos of the Defence briefly as pre-texts for the edition in the 1598 folio. The 1598 folio reifies a pattern of interpretation already present in print cultures of the renaissance: it presents itself, the latest edition, as the most nearly authentic and original version of Sir Philip Sidney’s writings. One might say it presents itself as a product of renaissance

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philology, the discipline from which both textual scholarship and literary criticism descend. This last chapter returns to the fixation on origins and the problems of literary (as opposed to merely historical) authority addressed initially in the introduction. It places the 1598 folio in the context of one further force driving the invention of English literature during the first decades of the twentieth century: the modernist obsession with primitivism that conditioned the interpretation of renaissance texts and the renaissance in England itself. The Lady of May as Emblem for Sir Philip Sidney The last part of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia goes by the nickname The Lady of May because its actual title, Her Most Excellent Majestie Walking in Wansteed Garden, As She Passed Downe into the grove, there came suddenly one among the traine, one apparelled like an honeste mans wife of the countrey, where crying out for justice, and desiring all the Lords and Gentlemen to speak a good word for her, she was brought to the presence of her Majestie, to whom upon her knees she offred a supplication, and used this speech, is unwieldy. But for the editors and publishers of the 1598 folio, the title served its purpose perfectly: it brings the reader immediately into the occasion of its composition, the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Wanstead in which a young Philip Sidney had participated. Rather like a souvenir or a photograph in an album, The Lady of May confers on the folio a sense of authenticity, a certification that the stuff of the folio is the stuff of a man whose literary efforts entertained the Queen herself; it is something like the ultimate Elizabethan “celebrity endorsement.”1 Predictably, much criticism of The Lady of May focuses on the occasion of its composition, just as the folio title encourages. Louis Montrose is exactly right in asserting that The Lady of May is paradigmatic in its attempt “to obliterate the distinction between life and art.”2 But whereas Montrose reads the entertainment as a model for all courtly activity, I read it as a printed representation that evokes the “virtual court” for readers of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, again following Gavin Alexander’s terminology. Indeed, The Lady of May as it is situated in the larger folio may well have been consumed, more or less in the modern sense, by early modern readers. In no copy of the folio that I have perused are any marks left by readers on The Lady of May, which suggests that few readers other than professional literary critics of the modern academy have parsed it closely.3 Still, the question may arise whether, in 1598, the Countess of Pembroke may have sought to influence Queen Elizabeth, or, perhaps more likely, James VI of Scotland. After all, Robert Sidney had been a special envoy to

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James and certainly hoped that James would succeed Elizabeth; his elevation to the peerage in the reign of James indicates his success. Robert and his wife Barbara were close to the countess, as is seen in the countess’s letter to Barbara enclosed with the Bright Manuscript of Astrophel and Stella.4 In these conditions, the printed Lady of May ’s comparison of the active and contemplative lives might have reflected well on Robert Sidney, in whom virtues of both kinds were apparent. To understand how the 1598 folio could represent both the Sidney family and the late Sir Philip, Alan Hager’s reading of the Lady of May is immediately useful. It is true that Hager, like nearly every significant critic of Sidney’s pastoral entertainment, explicates it in terms of the social and political context of the late 1570s, in which it is thought to have arisen. But Hager is sensitive to the need precisely to avoid seeming to “instruct” the monarch. Montrose, by comparison, takes the Lady of May as almost explicitly didactic.5 In Sidney’s Rhombus, Hager finds a gentle and humorous warning against the dangers of idealism and excessive rigor, something of a gentler precursor to Voltaire’s Pangloss.6 James, schooled by the sometimes harsh but also decidedly Philippist humanist George Buchanan— a man known to the Sidney family—may have found in the twenty-year-old entertainment a self-deprecating plea for the monarch’s goodwill.7 Many other readers of the 1598 folio might find in the Lady of May, as have many twentieth-century critics, the more populist distrust of what Sidney elsewhere calls “the discoursing” kind of men in favor of the more active.8 Discerning readers may also have noted the irony that Sidney points out in his Defence of Poesie, namely that he had himself become one of those discursive men. But while the Lady of May may signify many things to many audiences, one function in the 1598 folio remains constant: it authenticates and authorizes the folio by presenting a fiction whose factual paratext, advertised in the title, is Sir Philip’s participation in a royal progress. Moreover, this authenticating function is enhanced by that other piece of Sidneiana new in the 1598 folio: the Certaine Sonets. The Certain in the Certaine Sonets Certaine Sonets Written by Sir Philip Sidney: Never before printed, which follows the Arcadia, mark the beginning of the end of the folio—the final one-sixth of the literature of the 1598 folio and of every folio from the 1598 to the 1674 (the thirteenth and last folio titled The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia)— each one proclaiming without a trace of irony that its Certaine Sonets were “never before printed.” From this perspective, one might conclude that everything in the folio following the romance really only constitutes an

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appendix, slighter in proportion, even, than the poems of sundry gentlemen that graced the end of the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella. Those poems suggested that the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella was something of an anthology or a gentleman’s miscellany. The gentleman’s miscellany provides an important vantage point from which to view not only Certaine Sonets but also the 1598 Arcadia as a whole. As Germaine Warkentin has usefully explicated the term, the two most significant aspects of a gentleman’s miscellany are the lack of a grand organizing pattern and the insistence with which its poetic personae point toward some versions of the poet.9 In turning away from narrative or other modes of organization, the miscellany embraces the principle of pleasing variety. The poems are trifles assembled to entertain and coyly to reveal the sprezzatura (nonchalance that hides meticulous craft) with which they are understood to have been created. The sense of sprezzatura collapses the distance between the poems’ personae and the identities of their authors, although to claim that as a result the boundary between life and art is obliterated would be an overstatement. Instead, the poems of a miscellany invite readers to speculate what kind of gentleman might dash off such delightful little works and, perhaps, under what circumstances. Certaine Sonets evoke a more private world than Sidney’s romance, largely owing to the sense of nonchalance they project. While a plurality are titled “to the tune of” one or another presumably popular song, the songs are labeled Italian, Spanish, and Dutch, as if the 1598 folio were bringing English readers up-to-date with Continental fashion or perhaps reminding readers where the late Sir Philip may have learned the tunes. A few titles suggest particular moments, as does the title to the four sonnets “made when his Ladie had paine in her face,” but no title is nearly as specific as the full title of The Lady of May. Instead, readers are invited to imagine occasions on which certain of Certaine Sonets might have been appropriate. Indeed, “certaine” means “particular” here, emphasizing at once the scattered variety of poems in the collection, their occasional nature, and the fact that while occasions are indicated, more specificity is not forthcoming. In these ways, Certaine Sonets suggest an image of Sir Philip Sidney partly veiled and partly revealed by the personae of the poems themselves. Many of Certaine Sonets were no doubt composed at very nearly the same time as the Old Arcadia, and the italic print in which they are presented recalls the italic that sets off the poetry of the printed Arcadia proper. The variety of verse forms likewise reminds readers of the Arcadian poems, so much so that it has been suggested that they were conceived as a coda of Philisides’ songs to the Old Arcadia.10 And clearly the 1598 folio presents them as such a reprise, albeit a reprise of “new” Arcadian poetry. The figure

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of Philisides, restored to the texts of the 1593 and 1598 folios after being excised from the 1590 quarto, serves as the double for the Sir Philip who stands behind Certaine Sonets. In some respects, the Certaine Sonets as arranged in the 1598 folio comment on the substance of the Arcadia, something like the final ten songs of the second quarto of Astrophel and Stella comment on the sequence. The initial two sonnets capitulating to love’s “bondage” recall the beginning of the Arcadia and start a new sequence of love-passions. Embedded in the gathering of Continental tunes are a few translations of the kind that soothe the wise courtier: a passage critical of court from Horace, an epigram on female inconstancy glossed “out of Catullus” (the only gloss in the 1598 folio, in fact). A sonnet ascribed to Edward Dyer and what seems to be Sidney’s graceful reply likewise reassure readers that they glimpse minimally refracted scenes from Sidney’s life. Translations from Montemayor also reward the astute reader with a demonstration of Sidney at work on one of the sources for his Arcadia. A significant moment lies in the passage from Seneca’s Oedipus, “Qui sceptra saevus duro imperio regit, / Timet timentes, metus in Authorem redit,” wrenched into the argot of courtly love as “Faire seeke not to be feared, most lovely beloved by thy servants, / For true it is, that they feare many whom many feare.”11 The passage and its translation—both printed in the text— are keys to interpreting the Arcadia: the English translation for the unlearned forms an innocuous courtly surface, but the Latin tag is the sterner stuff of tyrannomach political philosophy, both an admonition to princes and a reminder that resistance to tyranny can be powerful if its cause is just. Such an admonition reminds readers of Philisides, the melancholy shepherd who offended pastoral decorum by performing the political “Ister Bank” poem at a marriage banquet. Two well-known farewell-to-love poems conclude Certaine Sonets. In the first, the speaker laments that “desire I have too dearely bought” and declares himself to be “Desiring nought but how to kill desire”; perhaps even better known is the opening quatrain of the final poem: Leave me o Love, which reachest but to dust, And thou my mind aspire to higher things: Grow rich in that which never taketh rust: What ever fades, but fading pleasure brings. Not for nothing did some critics argue that these final two Certaine Sonets ought to be read as the conclusion to Astrophel and Stella, for they sum up the lesson that Astrophil notably fails to live by, and so, spoken in his voice,

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they would redeem his failure at the end of that sequence.12 In such arguments we see once again the force of the author-function rearranging whole sequences of poems to conform to the “fore-conceit” in the critic’s mind. But it is no accident that the author-function exerts a force strong enough to rearrange the authorized text of Sidney at just this juncture. The Certaine Sonets are even more tempting for critics of a biographical bent than Astrophel and Stella, in part because the 1598 folio casts them as a gentleman’s miscellany. If Certaine Sonets “tell, in effect, the story of Philisides’ love” and so may be regarded as the Arcadia’ s “appendix or coda,” they have also been read as a step in the development toward Astrophel and Stella and the revised Arcadia.13 At the same time, it is salutary to note that the organization of the 1598 folio inclines readers toward biographical and developmental interpretations. The Authentication Effect of Astrophel and Stella in the 1598 Folio Astrophel and Stella appears complete in print for the first time in the 1598 folio, with the songs interspersed among the sonnets. It includes sonnet 37, which does not appear in the 1591 quartos, and it includes significant stanzas lacking in the versions of songs viii and x printed in the quartos— significant largely because they represent Stella’s voice directly. Finally, the Astrophel and Stella of the 1598 folio includes an additional song. As William Ringler points out, the 1598 folio is the most accurate and complete early printed text of Astrophel and Stella, and no one seriously disputes his point that the editors of the 1598 folio no doubt wanted to present the sequence in its most complete form. Nevertheless, critics have speculated on the significance of the material that appears in the 1598 folio for the first time; for example, they deliberate over whether to ascribe some form of protofeminism to Sidney for including a passage in Stella’s voice in the 1598 version of song viii.14 Another topic of critical debate has been the fact that the 1591 quartos exclude sonnet 37, which seems to refer to Sidney’s one-time betrothed, Lady Penelope Rich; some have argued that sonnet 37 was excluded from the 1591 quartos in order to protect Lady Rich and others from scandal.15 Problems with this argument include the fact that Lady Rich’s affair with Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, was public as early as 1590.16 Moreover, other poems that play on Lady Rich’s name openly appeared in the 1591 quartos, most notably sonnets 24 and 35. Ringler points out that Sir John Harington presumed that Stella referred in some way to Lady Rich, both in the Arundel-Harington manuscript and in his 1591 printed edition of Orlando Furioso, and another manuscript contains a transcript of the sonnet under the title “Ladie Rich.”17 As often as the much-remarked-on sonnet

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37 mentions the name Rich, it is nevertheless difficult to believe that the Penelope Rich–Stella connection could be much more obvious than in the 1591 version of sonnet 35: “[N]ow long needie Fame / Doth even grow rich, meaning my Stella’s name.”18 Again, the fact that readers of Astrophel and Stella do speculate on the reasons for the differences among the quartos and folios tends to lead readers to biographical speculations and to imply greater authority for the 1598 folio. Publishing An Apologie for Poetrie: 1595 The 1595 quartos, An Apologie for Poetrie and The Defence of Poesie, follow a familiar pattern in the early editions of Sidney’s printed works, with one exception: scholars agree that the first quarto, printed for Henry Olney, was far more carefully and accurately produced than the second quarto printed for William Ponsonby. Peter Herman goes so far as to argue that Sidney’s treatise should properly be titled An Apologie for Poetrie in part because of the superior quality of Olney’s quarto, and in part because the earliest mention of the tract, in Sir John Harington’s “An Apologie of Poetrie” prefacing his magnificent 1591 edition of Orlando Furioso, also calls Sidney’s tract an “Apology” rather than a “Defense.”19 Herman’s arguments notwithstanding, The Defence of Poesie is the conventional title of a treatise whose direct influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is difficult to prove. The Huntington Library copy of the Ponsonby 1595 quarto microfilmed for the STC series displays findingnotes summarizing content in the margins up to signature E1, not much more than a third of the volume; later versions in the 1598 folio and later editions did stimulate some readers to underline.20 But the preface to the Olney quarto reveals a significance of a more mundane kind: its publication revealed yet another Sidney text previously known to most readers by reputation only. That is, what was once part of the inferred paratext for Philip Sidney and The Countesse of Permbrokes Arcadia became part of the factual paratext. And the more inferred paratexts that are verified as factual, the more weight is given other inferred paratexts. For this reason, scholars hope to find Sidney’s translations of Du Bartas and of Aristotle, and do not lightly brush off references to them as apocryphal. Thus Olney observes in the preface, “Those great ones, who in themselves have interr’d this blessed innocent, wil with Aesculapius condemne me as a detractor from their Deites: those who Prophet-like have but hear presage of his comming, wil (if they wil doe wel) not onely defend, but praise mee.” (A4v). As is familiar, the “great ones” who have “interr’d” the Apologie desire it as a nondisseminating object, whereas Olney and his ilk desire its dissemination. In terms of my

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extension of Gennette’s terminology, moving An Apologie for Poetrie from the inferred to the factual paratext of things Sidneian benefits some outsiders like Olney but reduces the perceived worth of the knowledge of insiders and of those who have posed as insiders – of courtiers like Harington and of aspiring literati like Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser. Olney’s quarto also provided an opportunity for a fine poet, Henry Constable, whose four sonnets preface the 1595 Apologie (and in whose 1594 Diana eight of Sidney’s Certaine Sonets were printed). Spenserians will find Constable’s opening gambit familiar: his first sonnet asks pardon from the soul of the divine Sidney for not expressing grief over his death sooner than 1595. Couching his delay in aphorisms, Constable asserts, “The greater stroke astonisheth the more . . . / I stood amaz’d when others teares begun, / And now begin to weepe, when they have done” (A3). Constable’s delay, that is, signals that he feels the loss of Sidney more severely than other poets. Both the third and the fourth dedicatory sonnet perform rhetorical partition, dividing Sir Philip’s glory into many virtues, each of which is, of course, praiseworthy. The vehicle of the third poem is telling: “Even as when great mens heires cannot agree,” Constable writes, “So ev’ry vertue now for part of thee doth sue” (A3v). As we have seen, dozens of people lay claim to Sidney’s name on broad grounds of poetic and literary inspiration; on more concrete grounds of the possession (authorized or not) of copies of Sidney’s writing−or, for a few aristocrats, possession of his sword or his books; political and intellectual grounds whose roots in factions of the 1570s and 1580s Elizabethan court had shriveled; and most grandly the Countess of Pembroke’s familial claim that extended beyond blood in a bid to encompass all the other claims in the Sidney family estate. Constable’s final sonnet recognizes precisely this last aristocratic trope by using the collection of kingdoms that fell under the sway of Alexander the Great to illustrate that Sir Philip remains “King of all the vertues . . . alone” (A3v). Finally, the year 1595 saw two other publications from the Ponsonby enterprise whose significance to literary history and relevance to Sidney are undoubted: Edmund Spenser’s own sonnet sequence, the Amoretti together with the Epithalamion, and a book of pastorals in which Spenser was the headliner: Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, (CCCHA) which features Spenser’s pastoral elegy, “Astrophel.” As John Kerrigan and Roger Kuin have shown, the three-part design of the former book owes something to Daniel’s Delia. Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, on the other hand, is a true anthology of pastorals, collecting together with Spenser’s poem others that have been attributed to Lodowyck Bryskett, Fulke Greville, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sidney’s sister the Countess of Pembroke.21 The fact that the authorship of “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda” remains in dispute (the

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countess herself or Spenser’s clever ventriloquism) underscores the power exerted by the author-function over our critical discourse. More significant is that Ponsonby had CCCHA printed, apparently not bothering to enter it on the Stationer’s Register, in the same year he printed his own edition of Sidney’s Defence and Spenser’s celebrated sonnet sequence. Marketers today would recognize these moves as cross-promotion, and would no doubt applaud Ponsonby’s opportunism in responding to the Olney quarto of the Apologie. And, especially given the clear awareness of a commercial demand for Sidneiana displayed by Olney’s preface, it seems likely that such calculations did enter Ponsonby’s mind. Spenser’s opening poem, “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe,” suggests that Colin has brought the rest of the poems in CCCHA back to his pastoral world. Just as the sobriquets in Colin’s initial poem point toward courtiers and ladies, so too do the appellation “his sister that Clorinda hight” and the initials L.B. (presumably Lodowyck Bryskett). Again we encounter the “virtual court” that appears so often in poems mentioning Sidney. But while many of Spenser’s appellations invite readers into a challenging game of guessing identities, Astrofell and his sister are transparent screens (regardless whether the countess composed Clorinda’s lay herself). Once again, such name-dropping, however coy, reinforces the sense among readers that real ladies and courtiers stand behind Spenser’s other pastoral nicknames. In this way, CCCHA represents Spenser as extraordinarily well-connected, as it also does the Stationer Ponsonby. And while we tend to see the shadows of Ireland in the world of the shepherds to whom Colin is recounting his journey, literate Londoners who might buy the little book could likewise see, in the gap Colin has crossed on his journey, the social gap between themselves and the court, suggested by Colin’s hints and paratextual elements. The Prominence of The Defence of Poesie: A Little Critical Genealogy It would be an exaggeration to claim that it is an article of faith that the Defence of Poesie provides a crucial lens through which to read Sidney’s other works, but only a slight exaggeration. The famous discussions of exemplarity in the Defence, such as the assertion that the poet creates not just one Cyrus but a template for creating many Cyruses, are touchstones in most commentaries on the New Arcadia. Likewise, critics typically read the equally famous passages on energeia as ways to understand the development of Sidney’s poetics from the early, mannered compositions in the Old Arcadia through the masterpiece(s) of Astrophel and Stella.22 One striking aspect of Sidney criticism is that, across the divide between New Criticism and

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the advent of structuralist and poststructuralist theoretical approaches, the Defence has consistently been parsed for clues about Sidney’s intentions in composing other works. It has been understood as a distillation of the ideals toward which Sidney aspired in writing other works. How the Defence came to be valued for the insights it affords into Sidney’s creative process, however, has little to do with its formal relation to Sidney’s other works. The causality of the narrative of how the Defence became prominent is contingent, rather than formal. The Romantic critic William Hazlitt’s execration of the Arcadia, reproduced more delicately in T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement that the Arcadia is “a monument of dulness,” thrust studies of Sidney into the wilderness with the exception of intermittent interest in Astrophel and Stella.23 Largely by escaping Hazlitt’s most direct assaults, the Defence remained on the critical radar screen as the discipline of English took shape under the influence of the New Criticism and the New Bibliography of the early twentieth century. Albert Feuillerat’s four-volume critical edition of Sidney’s works, published 1922−26, put the Defence in the context of the first critical edition of the Old Arcadia as well as the New, and other works. In this environment, perhaps further stirred by the publication of Hazlitt’s complete works in 1930, Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935) offered a learned source-analysis of Sidney’s Defence that ultimately recuperated the Arcadia and Sidney’s poetry as objects of literary, and not merely antiquarian, study. Myrick recovered Sidney by offering the relatively unsullied Defence as the key to interpreting Sidney’s other works. The observation that the Defence is organized as an oration founded Myrick’s seminal argument that Sidney’s literary expertise, his analysis of techne (craft) in the Aristotelian sense, could likewise be traced in his less admired works.24 Myrick’s approach is formalist in that it seeks to recover the principles that guided Philip Sidney’s literary output—namely the Italian humanist theories of Antonio Minturno and Julius Caesar Scaliger— and historicist in its claim that, as Sidney wrestled with his predecessors toward an ethical view of literary activity in the Defence, he composed the New Arcadia according to these new principles. Myrick is arguably the most influential twentieth-century critic of Sidney. Many of the most influential formalist studies of Sidney’s work all likewise use the Defence as a lens to read other Sidney works, for example: Neil Rudenstine’s Sidney’s Poetic Development (1967), David Kalstone’s Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations(1965), Jon Lawry’s Sidney’s Two Arcadias (1972), and Nancy Lindheim’s The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia (1982). These critics tend to see in Sidney’s works various attempts “to discover ways in which the courtly love-lyric could be shaped to express something of the Arcadia’s vigorous drama of love, and yet do so with all the

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polish, ease, and wit required of a courtier among his familiars,” which the Defence articulates as a problem.25 Intention in the Defence has been understood to encompass Sidney’s artistic intentions, which have, naturally, been the subject of spirited debate. Roland Greene has argued, for example, that the Defence should be understood as “merely one installment in the both fictional and theoretical project in which [all of Sidney’s works] are engaged, which can be defined loosely as a description of the borders between fiction and reality.”26 Indeed, it is the whole of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia that continually redefines borders between fiction and reality. Intention, corrupted by the infected will, has likewise been prominent in criticism of the Defence during the long reaction against the New Criticism. In a display of sprezzatura typically self-deprecating and urbane, Sidney opens the Defence by characterizing his horsemanship curriculum at the hands of John Pietro Pugliano, master of a Viennese riding school, as lessons in self-love. Pugliano’s praise of horsemanship and even horses was so vehement, writes Sidney, “that if I had not bene a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I thinke he would have perswaded me to have wished my selfe a horse.”27 Sidney’s comment frames the Defence as a good-natured self-parody. Margaret Ferguson’s “Sidney’s A Defense of Poetry: A Retrial” (1979) likewise recognized that the Defence is framed by a deeply ironic profession and demonstration of “self-love,” asserting furthermore that the frame of self-love impels readers of the Defence to consider how their own selfinterest limits their interpretive capacities, thus teaching readers to improve their art.28 Kinney and Ferguson drew attention to the passage, early in the Defence, in which Sidney draws the lesson that figures so prominently in modern criticism: that “selfe-love is better then any guilding to make that seeme gorgeous, wherin our selves be parties.” Moreover, Sidney immediately applies the lesson to his own Defence, protesting that despite “having slipped into the title of a poet,” he nevertheless has “more just cause to make a pitiful defence” of his “unelected vocation” than does Pugliano of his own, since poetry has “from the highest estimation of learning . . . fallen to be the laughingstock of children” (Sig. Ss6). The opening gesture is matched by Sidney’s closing performance of self-love, the concluding mock-curse offered to him who fails to value poetry, that “when you die, your memory die with you” for want of an epitaph (Sig. Xx 1v). Arch though this conclusion is, it nevertheless resonates with the sincere conviction that poetry is the lasting monument to the great, especially if we recall Spenser’s laments at how quickly forgotten was the late Earl of Leicester in the Complaints (1591). Much of the appeal of the Kinney and Ferguson line of argument is that it grounds symptomatic readings of Sidney and his works. Self-love, of course, is a manifestation of desire, and is thus a significant marker

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in interpretations that would reveal Elizabethan cultural poetics in the Defence. Feminist critics reading the Defence found poetry and poetic discourse gendered feminine and therefore in danger of provoking self-love and other forms of desire.29 While Ferguson read the fragmentation of subjectivity in the Defence as an invitation to introspection, others, including Herman, found in both the split subject and the impulse toward introspection the marks of Protestant humanism clashing with more optimistic strains of humanism.30 Herman’s Sidney, torn by a love of poetry and conviction about its virtues on one hand, and by a Protestant distrust of human nature and the commonplaces of Protestant antipoetic (and antitheatrical) discourses on the other, is representative of many Sidneys crafted in response to the semiotic turn in historicist criticism in the 1980s. As this troubled Protestant Sidney mirrors the troubled Protestant account of the Defence, it reveals the author-function at work, and so we can see how the semiotic turn extends the reach of the author-function. At first blush, symptomatic accounts seem simply to parse the Defence for traces of Sidney’s unconscious mind at work. But, as literary criticism follows the linguistic turn in Anthropology, Sidney becomes a native informant: in his Defence are traced the unquiet motions of the Elizabethan cultural unconscious as a whole. The Place and Function of the Defence in the 1598 Folio Certainly the Defence may be interpreted as a statement of Sidney’s poetics and a wider cultural poetics, and his other works may be read in relation to those poetics. But here I argue that the place and function of the Defence in the 1598 Folio is to mark and remark on intention, though not authorial intention in the ways we generally understand it in the wake of the New Criticism and New Bibliography, nor in the unconscious sense explored by cultural poetic readings. Rather, the Defence is one signpost among many indicating the sweep of a greater historical and eschatological intention, of which The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia provides a privileged space for understanding. Robert Stillman has explicated such intention as the scopus dicendi (in which the “scope” of discourse comprises its purpose as well as the range of its topics) and he has linked Sidney’s Defence clearly to the Philippist view of Biblical text as divine oratory. For Philip Melanchthon and those who embraced his teachings, the Word of God has a purpose in this world, not just a meaning, and right understanding requires a hermeneutic that grasps the whole in terms of its aim, rather than merely analyzing the meaning of its parts.31 In this context, the intention that matters is a supraindividual phenomenon— one in which individual agency and intentions

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may be discerned, to be sure—immanent in all creation but specially linked to language and to that art form whose medium is language. The Defence argues explicitly that poesy mirrors the word of God in that both create in the world of flesh. As particular deformities and evils in our world cannot be ascribed to God, so, Sidney argues, the skill of the artificer lies not in the finished object but in the “Idea, or foreconceit of the work”; moreover, the “delivering forth” the work is “not wholly imaginative . . . but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been a particular excellency, as Nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright how and why that maker made him” (my emphasis, Sigs. Tt1v−Tt2). I emphasize “substantially” because Sidney is predicating substance, with its full Aristotelian metaphysical freight, to the imaginative product of the “right poet.”32 That is, Sidney says unequivocally that the poet affects the real world, at least if the audience attends to the poet’s intentions (the “how and why that maker made him”). The intentions of right poets participate in divine Logos in virtue of their shared medium, language. Right poetry, therefore, entails a proper reading practice, one that gives “right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man in His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature, which in nothing he showeth so much as Poetry” (Sig. Tt2). That is, proper reading requires sensitivity to the workings of the divine, the ultimate maker, in right poetry. Poetry creates in the real world by stimulating our capacity for self-knowledge and self-transformation. Readers come to fiction able to “use the narration but as an imaginative groundplot of invention” in their own minds (Sig. Vv2v). Poesy touches “the mistress-knowledge . . . [architektonik] which stands . . . in the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well knowing only” (Sig. Tt3). Right poetry produces more than mere exemplars; its morality produces exemplars that place readers under moral obligation to reproduce right moral action; thus it produces “many Cyruses.” In drawing readers toward the particular self-knowledge that entails self-transformation, poesy changes the world substantially. Thus, both the Defence and The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia point beyond Sir Philip. They “practically audition their audiences to meet elevated and perhaps elusive standards of transculturation and tropological thinking—to muster the knowledge and experience to read a text . . . in terms of how it may be represented or applied elsewhere.”33 That is, the texts encourage a perspectivalist approach to interpretation, a “broad imaginative acquaintance with ethical perspectives” other than one’s own that is “a prerequisite of nondogmatic ethical debate,” and nondogmatic ethical debate is the ground

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for self-transformation—well-doing, in Sidney’s terms.34 Such tropological thinking is needed to recover the motions of the divine in right poetry. The point here is that not all Cyruses are the same Cyruses: especially here in the sublunary sphere of worldly affairs, conditions vary widely, and whereas the sort of virtue necessary for a Cyrus may remain constant, its application requires judgment and empathy, that perspectivalist kind of knowledge that understands that all knowledge in the sublunary sphere is by definition partial and requires supplementation to be had by empathetic thinking. Thus, to call Sidney a neo-Platonist concerned with the imitation of virtue is akin to calling Newton an arithmetician. As Stillman has shown, the well-doing that most greatly concerned Philip Sidney as he wrote the Defence was compassed by Philippism, the internationalist Protestant movement based on the teachings of Philip Melanchthon, among whom many acquaintances and friends of the Sidney family were prominent advocates. Politically, Philippism sought to rise above sectarian infighting and unite Protestants against the papacy and the imperial aspirations of Catholic Spain. And although Philippism’s political fortunes had been ebbing between the composition of the Defence (c. 1582) and its republication in the 1598 Arcadia, it remained relevant. While in hindsight 1598 may not seem like a watershed, to Ponsonby and the Sidneys it may have seemed a propitious year: Philip II of Spain passed on his crown to a milder son and by September had died; the military campaigns of Maurice of Orange, son of the assassinated William the Silent, had reached nearly their peak of success against the Spanish; and Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes, effectively ending the French Wars of Religion. In light of some of these developments, some of the old songs recalled among the Certaine Sonets, like “Who hath his fancie pleased,” sung “to the tune of Wilhemus van Nassaw,” might have had special resonance (Sig. Ss2). At the same time, the pressures that would erupt in the English Civil Wars and the Continental Thirty Years War remained in play. In 1598, Philippist pluralism and irenicism, and the lessons of “tropological thinking,” were needed as much as ever and may have seemed tantalizingly near to achieving their ends. The Modernist Myth of Organic Elizabethan Culture The 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia is the most heterogeneous Arcadia studied here, which is part of its paradoxical nature, for the typography and other paratextual features of the folio seem to attempt to frame it as a unity. The tension between unity and multiplicity is analogous to a tension that occupied the modernist literary critics under whose

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influence the discipline of English took shape. T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” attempts to theorize how individual authors become assimilated into the English literary tradition by placing on the aspirant poet an obligation to read, understand, and emulate, similar in form to the Philippist interpretation of divine oratory. One important difference, however, lies primarily in the source of authority: Eliot writes that “What happens is a continual surrender of [the artist] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable”; namely, “the existing monuments” of the tradition that “form an ideal order among themselves.”35 For Melanchthon and his adherents, the ultimate origin is the divine Word, but the scope of the Word (its ends) is embodied in dialogues among Philippists themselves, in the intimate and friendly transmission of wisdom from master to student. For Eliot, on the other hand, such intimacy and the entire humanist edifice of friendship has been evacuated of spiritual weight. While Eliot sees the literary tradition as separate from religious injunction (in fact, that separation is part of the “dissociation of sensibility” that he feels afflicts modernity), he must insist on a unity in the tradition, for there is nothing else in which meaningful unity may inhere. In Eliot’s formulation, because the monuments of Western literature “form an ideal order among themselves,” then to be able to accommodate the proper offering from the individual poet and yet maintain continuity, “the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered” (28, Eliot’s emphasis). Eliot’s tradition, “an ideal order” among the canonical texts of western literature which can only be altered as a “whole,” anticipates the Helgersonian “literary system” that becomes legible from the synchronic perspective. The urgency of this search for wholeness in the English literary tradition— a tradition that was being constituted as an object of study as Eliot wrote— subtends the New Bibliographical production of the texts of English Literature, which I last considered in the introduction. In the introduction, I attempted to demonstrate how particularly unsuited to the multiplicity of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia are the procedures of the New Bibliographers, whose presumption of organic unity in a work of literature authorized the clean-text critical editions through which we often study literature. I also argued that the intelligibility of the literary system, as it has become known since 1983, depends largely on imposing assumptions of the organic unity of a “work of literature” onto the interpretation of heterogeneous textual artifacts—books—produced during the English renaissance, as well as to the interpretation of the culture and commerce of the English renaissance. Over the intervening chapters, I have traced, diachronically, a multiplicity of competing contingent factors that influenced the printing of the earliest editions of Sidney’s imaginative works. Many of these contingent factors include English court politics, several varieties

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of literary opportunism, philosophical conflicts, and the pressures of commercial printing. Moreover, I have attempted to describe these print publications as semiotic events by combining the framework developed by Jerome J. McGann in his seminal critiques of textual scholarship with paratextual theories created to analyse the interpretive space of the early modern printed page. In this view, the 1598 folio Arcadia is not merely passively marked by conflict and fragmentation. To the contrary, it is an intentional response to the conflicts that produced its predecessors. Moreover, it advertises its heterogeneity and offers a markedly pluralist political and even theological argument aimed, not at reifying Philip Sidney’s status as a “national” hero, but instead at integrating its readers into much broader Continental religious, philosophical, and geopolitical movements significant to the Countess of Pembroke and her family. From the generally Philippist perspective of the Sidneys and their Continental fellow-travelers, such unity as might be found in the 1598 folio would be the living voice of God, transmitted through friendly conversations and reproduced in the reader’s intercourse with the text. The folio can facilitate such intimate interactions in part by providing a number of private “places”—loci in the sense of topics but also in the sense of literary settings and imagined situations. Yet in emphasizing its own heterogeneity and claiming a valued place among the series of semiotic events in which it participates, the 1598 folio becomes subject to two separate currents of desire. In its contemporary context, the factual paratexts of literary opportunism and renaissance philology inflect the desire for exclusivity most prominently shown in chapter 3, and this desire constitutes the folio as the closest approach a common reader might make to the rarefied circles of the Sidney, Herbert, and Dudley families. In some sense, such desires cast the texts of the folio in the shadow of the admired Sir Philip Sidney. In the context of the twentieth-century invention of English literature as a discipline, conditioned by the marriage of positivist analytical philosophy to classical philology and by rising tides of nationalism, the desire for literary origins disassembles, rearranges, and strips the 1598 folio of significant paratexts. Thus denatured, Sidney and his writings are available for narratives of how Shakespeare became the pre-eminent writer in English, of how the renaissance invented the novel and invented “English literature,” and, to a later generation of critics, the English literary system. Sidney and The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia became, in short, symptoms of the disciplinary need for a unitary center and origin— at first around which to build the discipline, then later against which to construct more interesting margins. That is, the discipline of English literature is infused with the Modernist fixation on “organic unity” I observed in Eliot, which arose out of a pervasive

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sense of fragmentation and alienation: the notion of organic unity provided modern culture with a polar opposite against which to understand itself. As Richard Halpern observes, Eliot’s idea of an “organic” society predating the famous seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility” is an analogue to Modernist notions of “primitive” societies; in essence, Eliot and his peers transposed primitivist thinking onto the study of the English renaissance. By “primitivist thinking,” I refer to the colonialist and imperialist assumptions that anthropologists and other students of culture in the modern period carried into their investigations of technologically unsophisticated societies. “To put it bluntly,” Halpern writes, “modernism constructed the English Renaissance as an allegory for the colonial encounter itself; the [early modern] period’s catastrophic experience of modernity and the disintegration of its organic and ritualized culture offered an historically displaced and geographically internalized image of the effects of contemporary [modern] imperialist penetration into indigenous third-world societies” (26−27). On Halpern’s view, that is, Modernists’ interest in Renaissance culture developed as a symptom— a reaction-formation, in the Freudian sense—to Modernism’s perceptions of itself.36 As colonialist and imperialist endeavors ravaged African and some south Asian cultures during the modern period, so modern criticism imposed its technologies on the artifacts of its own past, constituting that past as essentially “primitive” and in need of both excavation and preservation. Thus, just as the organicism that Eliot projected onto the Elizabethan period is a negative projection of his perception of the compartmentalized, rational, analytical nature of modernity, so the New Critical and New Bibliographical pure text, lifted free from the dross of historical contingency, is a similar negative projection of the analytical and “scientific” methods developed in the New Criticism and the New Bibliography onto the literary artifacts of the English renaissance. This account of renaissance-as-symptom leaves untouched one further consequence of “othering” renaissance texts: it blinds the putative modern critical colonizer to the “other’s” own hegemonic impulses. The reason that Robert E. Stillman’s account of Sidneian Philippism is so powerful and timely, and why it needs to be set against Modernist “historical colonialism,” is that if Halpern is right, then those of us laboring in the wake of modernism are insensible to the ways renaissance texts colonize their readers, including ourselves. And make no mistake about it: Elizabethan and Jacobean texts have colonized readers of English with breathtaking success. To steal a line from one of my betters, who hasn’t heard of Hamlet? The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, too, loomed large: Walpole’s and Hazlitt’s and even Virginia Woolf’s criticisms all responded to a felt need not simply to take the work off its pedestal, but to free English from its grasp. Moreover,

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the institutional repression enabled by the less-than-fully conscious primitivism of modernist thought first hid from us the extent to which the Elizabethans still colonize our language, and second created the symptom that we (mis)recognize as the protocols of New Critical formalism. As I have already shown, the procedures of the New Bibliography follow a parallel path. Likewise, the so-called “division of kingdoms” widened to an almost unbridgeable gap that split our discipline into critics and scholars, and further subdivided the scholars into textual and historicist scholars. One might say that the heterogeneity that was repressed from our “pure” texts of the English renaissance uncannily reappeared in the division, and subdivision, of methods used to reconstruct and interpret those very texts. If, as I suggested in the introduction, the developments of the New Criticism and the New Bibliography created the conditions that make intelligible a question like “What is the structure of the early modern English literary system?” then here it becomes evident that the very allure of the idea of an early modern English literary system is the return of primitivism repressed during the modern period of the twentieth century. While Shakespeare’s native wood-notes warbl’d wild proved excellent quarry for the modernist critical sensibility, writers who wore their learning more ostentatiously, like Milton and Sidney, proved less resilient (or less pliable) in their encounters with modernist criticism. Though some of the off-putting characteristics of the Sidney oeuvre could be attributed by the New Bibliographers to the misguided sophistications of some editors, and the character of the man himself continued to impress scholars concerned with such things, ultimately the intellectualism and erudition of Sidney’s writings appeared as a premature growth of modernity, remarkable for vigor and monstrosity. By contrast, Shakespeare and renaissance English drama, particularly in light of their popular and even ritual origins, were easier to imagine as subjects of a colonizing modernist criticism. *

*

*

Sidney’s last great editor, Victor Skretkowicz, concluded in 2000 that students of Sidney would benefit greatly were the 1593 Arcadia reprinted as far as possible without hypothetical emendation.37 In a certain respect, Skretkowicz was advocating an edition of the Arcadia based on the principles of the copy-text as espoused by R. B. McKerrow, in which the copy-text selected restricts the editorial agency sanctioned by the author-function. Now that critical editions have been disseminated in many different forms of hypermedia, and that both the technology and theories of editing have imagined critical editions without a singular copy-text, the notion of

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any copy-text or base-text for a critical edition of Sidney works may sound quaint, if not outright reactionary. Jerome McGann has, for example, not only imagined but helped produce the Rossetti Archive, and the Blake Archive likewise stands as a monument not only to the digital representation of handcrafted illustrated books, but also to organizing representations of them in a navigable way. Should we not have a Sidney archive representing every manuscript, edition, and impression possible, complete with an apparatus useful for navigating the whole complex? Certainly we should, and we already have some excellent electronic editions of Sidney works, such as the Renascence Editions version of the 1590 “New” Arcadia, facilitated by Risa Bear. But there are compelling reasons for using a single base-text around which to build an archive.38 Scholars and critics need to know which text they are talking about, and in fact, difficulty answering that question with respect to Sidneian texts has caused no end of confusion. Part of that confusion has resulted from editions of Sidneian works printed in isolation from one another, so that they seem to be connected only by virtue of their author (and here I use “author” in the way reified by the author-function: the singular consciousness from which singular texts originate). One of the hopes I have held out for this book is to demonstrate the many other, extraauthorial and even extra-Sidneian and extra-literary links that combine to authorize the Sidney canon. Still, would not an archive similar to those imagined by Jerome J. McGann in “The Rationale of Hypertext” be best able to represent the myriad relationships that create what we call, somewhat self-deludingly, the Sidney canon?39 I would answer, not quite. In the first place, students of all stripes (undergraduates, graduates, faculty expanding their fields of expertise, and intellectually curious readers) need reference points around which to orient their explorations. In the second place, digital archives need to be organized somehow, and an organizational principle that naive readers recognize will make such archives more accessible. To imagine a Sidney archive, one would do well to recall C. S. Lewis’s assertion that, for better or worse, the “historical” Arcadia by which Sidney has been known through the centuries is the 1593 “composite.” Of course the 1598 folio, which contains the highest-quality early modern printed texts of most of Sidney’s most famous works, extends the range of Lewis’s reasoning. As should be obvious from the arguments I have made in this book, a 1598 folio base-text should be supplemented by easily accessible, accurate, and minimally emended critical editions of earlier versions of Sidney’s works. Reliable critical editions of both the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella, are needed for the study of the great efflorescence of lyric poetry in English in the 1590s. The 1590 quarto Arcadia is fortunately available in two editions; Skretkowicz’s

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critical apparatus could be used as a guide to a critical edition of the 1590 quarto. The 1595 quartos of the Defence of Poesie have received less study, and we have a critical edition of the Norwich manuscript of the Defence. An important tertiary aspect of the kind of Sidney archive I imagine would be representations of the many texts that mention, emulate, dispute, or otherwise engage with Sidneian writings— and that tertiary dimension of the archive should at least attempt to distinguish between those texts that engage only printed Sidney texts and those that evince access to Sidneian manuscripts. Such digital representations, whether replicating libraries as in the Harvard University Open Collections Project or more closely organizing related texts as in the Blake and Rossetti archives, bring us closer to the idea whose possibility has lured literary scholars since philology was invented in the renaissance: a disembodied textual ideal capable of being in many places at once. The permanence of such a thing, however, requires, as Paul Maas noted, “a civilization susceptible to its effect.”40 Simply making the Arcadia accessible confronts odds nearly as long as those faced by the Philippism that Sidney sought to introduce to England, though one might hope for a less catastrophic failure than the Thirty Years War. The list of challenges facing the humanities and renaissance studies is daunting indeed, as are those facing higher education and the publishing industry more broadly. To realize an archive of Sidneiana requires maintaining at least an academic culture susceptible to the effects of Sidney’s writings, which is why textual scholarship is incomplete without historical and critical interpretations.

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Preface 1. Victor Skretkowicz, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), lviii. 2. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), 39, 107. 3. The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 164, 174. 4. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 28. 5. See, for example, Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983); Stanley Wells, The Oxford Shakespeare (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987); Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England, (London and Charlottesville, VA: The Univ. Press of Virginia, 1993) and one of the major theoretical statements in the field, Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997). 6. Three such studies are Jan van Dorsten et al., Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1986); Alan Hager, Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1991); and Lisa Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1998). 7. Because my subject is early modern printed editions of Sir Philip Sidney’s writings, I distinguish between An Apologie for Poetrie, the title given to the 1595 quarto of Sir Philip’s celebrated discussion of poetics printed for Henry Olney, and The Defence of Poesie, the title given to the quarto of the same treatise printed for stationer William Ponsonby in 1595, apparently after the calling-in of the Olney quarto. The 1598 Folio and subsequent early modern editions all the treatise The Defence of Poesie.

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8. For a lucid account of how and why such systems are not obvious to inhabitants of the post-Cartesian world, see Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London, Methuen, 1977), 32−58. 9. See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993); see also Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). 10. An excellent recent example of such scholarship is Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); another is Jason Scott-Warren’s Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). Many such studies avow Annales-school methodology. Literary critics interested in the purposes of reading often cite Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s “Studied for Action: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 3−51, though it should be pointed out that the reading of annotations and commonplace books has its own long history; moreover, the most immediately useful theoretical account of the sort of criticism offered by Hackel, Scott-Warren, Grafton and Jardine is Warren Boutcher’s “The Analysis of Culture Revisited: Pure Texts, Applied Texts, Literary Historicism, Cultural Histories,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 489−510. 11. Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 261, 64. 12. See especially McGann’s A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago and London: Chicago Univ. Press, 1983), and The Beauty of Inflections; Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

Introduction 1. These are the epitaphs for the ideal lovers Argalus and Parthenia, the Arcadian shepherds Strephon and Klaius’s narrative “Barley Break” poem, and “The ladd Philisides,” designated in Ringler OP 3, 4, and 5. See William Ringler, ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), 241−59 and commentaries on pp. 493−98. Significant recent scholarship on the “Barley Break” poem and the texts of the Arcadia include Regina Schneider, “‘And are you there, old Pas?’: The Fate of the Pastoral Element in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia” and Victor Skretkowicz, “From Alpha-Text to Meta-Text: Sidney’s Arcadia,” in The Author as Reader: Textual Visions and Revisions, ed, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner and Wolfgang Görtschacher, Salzburg Studies in English Literature and Culture, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 11−32. 2. A partial list of these includes William Alexander’s supplement, meant to bridge the gap between the interrupted narrative of the New Arcadia’s book 3 and the modified ending of the Old Arcadia grafted into the 1593 and subsequent editions, which was first published in 1618 and appears in all issues of the Arcadia

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3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

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published in 1621 and after; Richard Beling’s Sixth Book of the Arcadia, first published in the 1627 edition; and James Johnstoun’s Supplement to Book III, first published in 1638. Peter Lindenbaum provides a convenient appendix of these additions in “Sidney’s Arcadia as Cultural Monument and Proto-Novel,” in Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 90. “Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘Complete’ Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 18.2 (2000): 70. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 166. See also William Godshalk, “Gabriel Harvey and Sidney’s Arcadia,” Modern Language Review 59 (1964): 497−99. Jerome J. McGann, “Introduction,” The Beauty of Inflections; Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 5. By “semiotic event,” I mean (and I take McGann to mean) a historical event that produced an artifact expressly created (by a single agent or perhaps multiple agents) to signify. Warren Boutcher, “The Analysis of Culture Revisited: Pure Texts, Applied Texts, Literary Historicisms, Cultural Histories,” in Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 497. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England, 137−195. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane Levin, intro. Richard Macksey, Literature, Culture, Theory No. 20. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 7−12. One of the best recent studies of books as “applied texts,” and a study germane to my own, is Jason Scott-Warren’s Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). I am thinking here especially of Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993). Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago Univ. Press, 1987), 65−80. Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1990), 26. Most current scholarship attends to contradictions among these terms, naturally. Examples of these ways of seeing Sidney may be found in Alan Stewart, Sir Philip Sidney: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001); Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier-Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), 168; Andrew Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1978), 178−85; Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authority in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 85–101; Alan Sinfield, “The Cultural Politics of The Apologie for Poetrie,” in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 124−43; Kent Lenhoff, “Profeminism in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry” SEL 48 (2008): 23−43.

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14. Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Mass Press, 1994), 106. 15. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 97. 16. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 28. 17. C. S. Lewis, Sixteenth Century Literature, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 324. 18. Bod Lib MS Malone 792; also “A Gallant familiar Letter” is printed in Three Proper, and Wittie Letters: lately passed betweene two Universitie men, STC 23095, cited in Martin Garrett, Sidney: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1996), 91−92. 19. See, for example, Frederic E. Faverty, “A Note on the Areopagus,” Philological Quarterly 5 (1926): 278−280; James E. Phillips, “Daniel Rogers: A Neo-Latin Link between the Pleiade and Sidney’s ‘Areopagus’,” in Neo-Latin Poetry of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, (UCLA Press, 1965), 5−28; James E. Phillips, “Spenser’s Syncretistic Religious Imagery,” ELH 36 (March 1969): 110−30; Sharon Schuman, “Sixteenth-Century English Quantitative Verse: Its Ends, Means, and Products,” Modern Philology 74 (1977): 335−349; and Kevin Pask, The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 12 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101−103. 20. Waterhouse to Sir Henry Sidney, Sept. 30, 1577, Letters and Memorials of State of the Sidney Family, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. London, 1746, vol. 1, 228. 21. London, 1581, cited in Martin Garrett ed., Sidney: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1996), 94. 22. Leiden, 1586, cited in Garrett, 196−7. 23. “Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys, the father and the son,” in Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, 1587, fols 1554-5b, cited in Garrett, 112−13. 24. A poetical rapsody containing, diverse sonnets . . . (London, 1602), “To the Reader,” STC 6373 (2nd ed.). 25. Richard Helgerson, Self- Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 24. 26. J. W. Saunders, The Profession of English Letters (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), 43−44. 27. Helgerson, 31. 28. Falco, Conceived Presences, 95. 29. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995). See also H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558−1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). 30. Wall, 17 n. 35. 31. The term “social textuality” is Marotti’s; see Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 135−208.

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32. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 1, 24−27. 33. See McGann, The Beauty of Inflections, “Introduction,” 3, 6, 10, 12. 34. D. C. Greetham, “Editorial and Critical Theory: From Modernism to Postmodernism,” in Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities, eds. George Bornstein and R. Williams (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), 12. 35. Warren Boutcher, “The Analysis of Culture Revisited,” 491. 36. J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 3 (1908), 127−131. Also see Allen Frantzen, Desire for Origins, 66−67. 37. Textkritik went through three editions in German and at least one in Italian before being published in an English translation in 1958 (Textual Criticism, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press). 38. Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, 20−21. Also see Victor Skretkowicz, “Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘Complete’ Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 18.2: 37−70. It is perhaps not surprising that “the susceptibility of a civilization to the effect of a literary work” is functionally similar to “the conditions” in which laureate poetics might become legible in the Helgersonian paradigm. 39. Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric, 137. See also H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 299−317. 40. Carol Thomas Neely, “The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences” ELH 45 (1978): 359−389. See also Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 18−19. 41. See Michael Baird Saenger, “Did Sidney Revise Astrophil and Stella?” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 417−38; and see Michael Rudick, ed., The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh: A Historical Edition (Tempe, AZ: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), xxviii. 42. The term “agnostic” in this sense belongs to Rudick’s preface to The Poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, xxviii. Rudick’s edition seeks to acknowledge the effects of what Marotti calls the “social textuality” of the poetic miscellanies in which most of Raleigh’s works appear. Similarly, Marotti notes that privileging the “best, latest, authorially sanctioned version of a text . . . Generally ill-suits not only the literature of manuscript culture but also much of the literature of the early print era” 137. 43. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 107. 44. Greg, The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), x. 45. The Works of Thomas Nashe vol. 2, p. 197, quoted in Greg, xlvii n. 1. 46. Fredson Bowers, “Textual Criticism and the Critic,” in Textual and Literary Criticism: The Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, 1957−58 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1959), 13.

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47. Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussurre: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minn: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982) 36−39. 48. Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature trans. H. Van Luan, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus 1897), vol. 1, 34. 49. Eagleton, 28. 50. Skretkowicz (“Textual Criticism and . . . Arcadia”: 61) points out Greg’s claim, which he makes in the preface to The Calculus of Variants (vi). 51. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature, 129. 52. Graff, 71−72. 53. Joseph Loewenstein, “Authentic Reproductions: The Material Origins of the New Bibliography,” in Textual Formations and Reformations, eds. Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1998), 28. Pages 23−31 contain the argument summarized in this paragraph. 54. Allen Frantzen similarly claims that the study of the origins of English literature was “invested with the ideological concerns of Germanic, English, and American nationalism” in Desire for Origins, 5. 55. For example, Gavin Alexander distinguishes between the network of the Sidney family, its friends and clients, on one hand, and a “virtual network” of “literary representations of these men and women” on the other hand, in which “the image of Sidney had far more importance and value” than in real life (128). In contrast, Roger Kuin distinguishes inner and outer circles primarily by social rank. For Kuin, a noble “inner circle” valued Sidney’s writings precisely to the extent that they could be kept from common eyes, whereas a lower-ranking “outer circle” valued Sidney’s writings because they might be disseminated (Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet- Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998], 175−78, 188−190).

1 Feigning History in the 1590 Arcadia 1. See William A. Ringler Jr., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), 380; see also Jean Robertson, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), lxiv. 2. Victor Skretkowicz, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1987), lxiii-lxxxii. 3. Significant contributions to the debate have been made by H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 299−317, and Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 88−102. 4. Skretkowicz, New Arcadia lxiii. 5. Ringler, Poems 371−72; Robertson, Old Arcadia lvii. 6. Skretkowicz, New Arcadia lxiii.

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7. Woudhuysen, in contrast, bases his theory of the relationships of the texts of the Arcadia s on the presumption that Sidney and his sister had multiple scribal transcripts made during various states of composition (299−317). 8. Mark Bland, “The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England,” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Textual Studies 11 (1998): 107−110. 9. De caede et interritu Gallorum regis, Henricii tertii, valesiorum vitimi, epigrammata. Oxoniae: Ex officina Iosephi Barnesij, celeberiimae Academiae Oxoniensis typographi, Anno 1589. STC 13099. The Latin text reads “Dum tu Sidnæi regale poema recudis, / Nos hoc de Gallo Rege poema damus. / Parcite Sidni Manersque, manusque Grivilli: / Nemo hic Sidnus, nemo Grivillus adest. The translation is William Godshalk’s in “Sidney’s Revision of the Arcadia, Books III-V,” Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 173 n. 12. 10. See Greg, 147−49. Skretkowicz notes these sources in his textual introduction to the New Arcadia, lviii. 11. Gwinne had been present at a dinner given for Giordano Bruno at Greville’s house in 1584. See William Ringler, ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 532. John Florio has also been conjecturally associated with the editing of the 1590 Arcadia by Joan Rees and William Godshalk. 12. Penry Williams, The Council in the Marches of Wales (Liverpool: Univ. of Liverpool Press, 1958), Appendix III. 13. Sir Henry Sidney to Edward Waterhouse, May 20, 1577, rpt. in Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State in the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, 2 vols. (London: 1746), vol. 1, 185−87. 14. Williams, Council in the Marches of Wales, 160. 15. Ibid., 278. 16. Philip Sidney to Edmund Molyneux April 10, 1581, HMC DeL’ isle and Dudley, vol. 2, 96; Molyneux to Sidney April 27, 1581, Collins, vol. 1, part 2, 293−94. Also note that in 1576, Sir Henry Sidney had recommended Molyneux to be Greville’s assistant in his office in the Court of the Council. HMC DeL’ isle and Dudley, vol. 1, 355. 17. Ringler (lxiv, 374), Robertson (liii), Skretkowicz (lxiv, lxxvii), Woudhuysen (306). 18. Sukanta Chaudhuri, “The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia ,” Review of English Studies n.s. 35 (1984): 185−202. See also Woudhuysen, 313. 19. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589, STC 20519.5) Sig. F4. 20. Blair Worden puts the case clearly when he states, “The language of Elizabethan politics could find a home in the Arcadia because, like the language of politics in most times, it was largely ethical” in The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CN: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 8−9. 21. Puttenham, Sigs. F4v - F5. 22. Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (London and Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1993).

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23. A ritch Storehouse or Treasurie for Nobilitye and Gentlemen, which in Latine is called Nobilitas literata, written by a famous and excellent man, John Sturmius, and translated into English by T.B. Gent. (London, 1570, STC 23408), Sig. D.iiii.v. 24. Rebecca Bushnell (A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice [Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996]) argues that, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “a neoclassical aesthetic of symmetry and wholeness” emerges and largely displaces the earlier humanist habit of reading for choice passages (143). 25. John Hoskyns, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1935), xv, 1. 26. John Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 11. 27. For the dating of the Letter, see Ronald Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), 82−85 and 328 ff.; see also Davis, “‘Presidents to Themselves’ A Letter to an Honorable Lady, Merciful Commentary, and Ethical Discourse.” Sidney Journal 19.1–2 (2001): 165−66; for another argument regarding the dating of the letter, see Gouws, “Introduction.” 28. A Letter to an Honorable Lady, in John Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 161. 29. Ibid., 147−48. 30. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 293−94. 31. “Fulke Greville and the Afterlife,” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature, 62 (1999): 203−31. 32. John Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 139. 33. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia 1590, Sig. A4v. 34. See Skretkowicz, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), lx. For more information on Windet, see also G. W. Williams, “The Printer of the First Folio of Sidney’s Arcadia,” The Library 5th Ser. xii (1957): 274−75. 35. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (Padua, 1603); New York: Garland Publishing reprint, 1976, 408. 36. See Sidney’s will, reprinted in Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State in the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, 109−13. 37. John Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 174−75. 38. Polybius: The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert, ed. and intro by F. W. Walbank (London: Penguin, 1979), 280−82. It is worth noting that the Sidney family library apparently contained two copies of Polybius: see V. L. Forsyth, “Polybius’s Histories: An Overlooked Source for Sidney’s Arcadia,” Sidney Journal (2003): 21.2, 60. 39. John Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 138. 40. Gouws, 147. The obsession with intellectual, moral, and political decay that forms a background to A Letter is well-explored in Matthew Woodcock, “‘The

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41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

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World is Made for Use’: Theme and Form in Fulke Greville’s Verse Treatises,” Sidney Journal 19.1/2 (2001): 143−59. Harington explains “The ancient Poets have indeed wrapped as it were in their writings divers and sundry meanings, which they call the sences or mysteries thereof. First of all the literall sence (as it were the utmost barke or ryne) they set downe in manner of an historie, the acts and notable exploits of some persons worthy memorie; then in the same fiction, as a second rine and somewhat more fine, as it were nearer the pith and marrow, they place the Morall sence, profitable for the active life of man, approving virtuous actions and condemning the contrarie. Manie times also under the selfsame words they comprehend sometrue understanding of Naturall Philosophie, or sometimes of politike governement, and now and then of divinitie: and these same sences that comprehend so excellent knowledge we call the Allegorie” (¶iiii). Albert Feuillerat, ed. The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney vol. 3, Cambridge English Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922−26), 130–31. See Henry Savile, The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Fower Bookes of the Histories of Tacitus. The Life of Agricola (Oxford, 1591), STC 23642; “A.B. to the Reader” adumbrates this philosophy, Sig. ¶3. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols (New York: Pantheon, n1978, 1982). For a biographical-cum-psychological interpretation of this pattern, see Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979), 138−150 and 214−218. For a more formalist approach to the pattern, which reads the 1593 Arcadia and therefore finds a more comedic resolution, see Walter Davis, A Map of Arcadia: Sidney’s Romance in its Tradition, in Sidney’s Arcadia, Yale Studies in English 158 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 37−38 and 134. See, for example, Kenneth O. Myrick’s claim that, on the model Sidney was following, heroic poetry compasses all forms (Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman [Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965], 110, 128. See also Stephen Greenblatt, “Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode,” in Kinney, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986): 347−56; Michael McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham, N.C.: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 13, 143, 161; and A. C. Hamilton, “Sidney’s Arcadia and its Relation to its Sources” in Kinney, et al. eds. Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 119−150. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1590), STC 20519.5, Sigs. M1-2. See, for example, Thomas Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989); Tom Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Greene, “Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy,” 176−202.

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50. See Greenblatt, “Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode,” 269−78; see also Jon S. Lawry, Sidney’s Two Arcadias: Pattern and Proceeding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), 156−66 and 209; Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), 69; and Clare Kinney, “Chivalry Unmasked: Courtly Spectacle and Abuses of Romance in Sidney’s New Arcadia” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 35 (1995): 35−52. 51. See Greene, “Fictions of Immanence, Fictions of Embassy,” 189, 197. Greene avows his affinity to Harry Berger Jr.’s Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1988). See also Stanley Fish, Self- Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1972) and Joan Webber, The Eloquent I: Style and Self in Seventeenth- Century Prose (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968). 52. A Letter to an Honorable Lady, in Gouws, ed. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 141. 53. See Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), especially her chapters on Ariosto and Spenser. 54. McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World , 25−41, 161. 55. Chaudhuri, “The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia,” 185−202. 56. The poem has attracted considerable attention since the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps none as detailed as Blair Worden’s The Sound of Virtue, 288−91. 57. See Ringler, 412−415. Walter Davis justifies the poem’s placement in the 1593 folio (A Map of Arcadia , 109−110). 58. David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 83. 59. Lawry, Sidney’s Two Arcadias, 162. 60. See Jane Kingsley-Smith, “Sidney, Cinthio, and Painter: A New Source for the Arcadia,” Review of English Studies 57 (2006): 169−75. 61. Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia, 88; Lawry, Sidney’s Two Arcadias, 219. 62. A Letter to an Honorable Lady, in Gouws, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 167. 63. Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney, 169. 64. Lawry, Sidney’s Two Arcadias, 209. 65. Ringler correctly emends the line to “which Passions kill, and Reason do deface.” But the 1590 variant is substantive, even if it is erroneous. 66. A Letter to an Honorable Lady, in Gouws, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 165. 67. A Letter, 142. 68. We might compare this chapter with Arthur’s battle against Impotence and Impatience in the siege of the House of Alma, FQ 2.11.23–33. Both the Arcadia and the Faerie Queene warn against succumbing to impatience in

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69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

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battle, but whereas Spenser gives us allegorical characters, Sidney focuses on the consequences in the wider scope of the battle at large. Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia, 221. The Huntington copies are STC 22359 and 22359a. Skretkowicz (572, n. pp. 399−400) states that the third specimen is in the Bodleian Library, Douce D 238, and the fourth is in the Houghton Library. Somewhat ironic, given that, excepting only Spenser’s November Eclogue in The Shepheardes Calendar, “Since that to death” is the earliest pastoral elegy printed in English. A Letter to an Honorable Lady, in Gouws, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, 169. Publius Vergilius Maro, The Aeneid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 2004) 12.1261−1268.

2

The Performance of Astrophel and Stella in the 1591 Quartos

1. The number rises to fifty-six if we include augmented editions, like Samuel Daniel’s constant tinkering with Delia. I am guided in this survey by Thomas P. Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), Appendix A, 518−22, as well as the appendix of British sonnet sequences in Michael G. Spiller’s Development of the Sonnet: an Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1992), whose criteria are more stringent that Roche’s and whose list is therefore smaller. Perusing the Chadwyck-Healy database led me to include a few collections of poetry not on Roche’s list, like Breton, and I am convinced that longer perusal would only turn up more cases. 2. Spiller, 103. 3. William A. Ringler Jr., ed. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 456. 4. Edward Arber, ed. A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. vol. 1 of 5 (New York: P. Smith, 1951), 555. 5. John Pitcher, “Daniel, Samuel (1562/3–1619),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/7120, accessed August 23, 2007] 6. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 15581640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 359. 7. Delia (London, 1592), sig A2r (STC 6243.2). 8. Roger Kuin, Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet- Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998), 177; and William Barker, “Fraunce, Abraham (1559?–1592/3?),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10133 (accessed October 8, 2007). 9. Besides Ringler’s excellent commentary, three essential articles on the printing of the first quartos remain: J. A. Lavin, “The First Two Printers of Sidney’s

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

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‘Astrophil & Stella.’ The Library 5th ser. v. 26: 249−54; MacD. P. Jackson, “The Printer of the First Quarto of Astrophil and Stella (1591),” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1979): 201−03; and Christopher Wilson, “Astrophil and Stella: A Tangled Editorial Web,” The Library 6.1 (1979): 336−46. Germaine Warkentin, “Patrons and Profiteers: Thomas Newman and the ‘Violent enlargement’ of Astrophil and Stella,” The Book Collector 34.4 (1985): 480−1. See Warkentin, 461−87. See also H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 368−71, and Kuin, Chamber Music,181−82. It should also be noted that Woudhuysen suggests that Newman sold out of Q1 and then printed a corrected Q2 before the Sidney family had Astrophel and Stella called in. Arber, 555. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 369. Burleigh to Walsingham, July 16, 1582, Public Records Office: SPD 12/154/60. quoted in Warkentin, 477. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 380. For Daniel’s involvement with Greville, see Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 2007), 136−41; and Kelly Quinn, “Fulke Greville’s Friendly Patronage” in Studies in Philology 103 (2006): 417−35. The entire discussion of the Houghton manuscript (designated “Ho” in Ringler) is based on Ringler’s description (pp. 540−42), and reference to his stemma for Astrophel and Stella: Ringler The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney , 455. It is possible that several ancestors intervene between Ho and Sidney’s original manuscript(s) of Astrophel and Stella , but a) Ho’s relative accuracy makes it unlikely that there were many steps in the transmission of the text (see Ringler, 542), and b) accounting for other possible transcribers is not necessary to my argument. Three major studies that approach the fluidity of texts in scribal publication include Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth- Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995); and Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993). See Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 146. A. C. Hamilton, “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as a Sonnet Sequence” ELH 36 (1969): 59−67. Hamilton, “Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,”83. Nearly every study of the sequence as a whole acknowledges their importance. Other more or less formalist studies in which the role of sonnets 71−73 is emphasized include David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 122−23, 140−78; Neil Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 250−62; and Thomas P. Roche Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, 193−242 (esp. 198, 206, 209−11,

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23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31.

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242). Their significance with respect to court politics is explored in Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,” SEL 24 (1984): 54, 59, 68. Two fairly recent studies that bring psychoanalytic theory to bear on political analysis likewise consider sonnets 71−73 significant: Paul Allen Miller, “Sidney, Petrarch, and Ovid, or Imitation as Subversion,” ELH 58 (1991): 505−06; and Andrew Strycharski, “Literacy, Education, and Affect in Astrophil and Stella,” SEL 48 (2008): 54. Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry, believes the songs “carry a heavy narrative burden” (175). Q2 revises sonnet 72’s line 14 to the familiar form of the question, yet it, like Q1, leaves the stealing of the kiss in sonnet 73 in the present tense. Perhaps whoever revised Q2 either did not notice the variant in 73, or else considered it insignificant; perhaps the editor of Q2 felt that it was important to leave the stealing of the kiss in the present tense for the sake of narrative continuity, but decided that Q1’s revision of line 14 of 72 altered Astrophil’s persona more than was desirable. A strong formulation of the Astrophil-as-negative example theory is Thomas P. Roche Jr., “Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading,” in Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 3 (1982): 139−191. See also Margreta de Grazia, “Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature: Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1800 21 (1981): 23, 35. The paradigmatic new historicist texts to which I refer are Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis Montrose’s “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986), 303−40; and his “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret Ferguson et al. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 65−89. Miller, “Sidney, Petrarch, and Ovid,” 506. Probably the strongest version of this argument is Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986). Roche Jr., “Astrophil and Stella,” 139−191. See also Henry W. Russell, “Astrophil and Stella: Hell in a Very Small Place,” Renascence 44.2 (1992): 105−114, and C. Stuart Hunter, “Erected Wit and Infected Will: Sidney’s Poetic Theory and Practice,” Sidney Newsletter 5.2 (1984): 3−10. Rudenstine particularly emphasizes Sidney’s capacity to develop dramatic situations as the cornerstone of his “poetic development” (150−88). “Temples” is unique to the 1591 quartos. The Houghton manuscript, the other witness to the Z hypearchetype, has “tempests.” Therefore, I take “temples” to be an emendation. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 251−58; see also Richard B. Young, “English Petrarke: A Study of Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella” in Three Studies in the Renaissance: Sidney, Jonson, Milton, Yale Studies in English vol. 138 (New Haven, CT, Yale Univ. Press, 1958), 75−80.

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32. Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry, 175, 133. 33. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 110, 114. 34. Roche, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences, 193−242 and Appendix H; Kuin, Chamber Music, 56−76. Roche’s reading has been influential, notably in Tom Parker’s Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 35. H. R. Woudhuysen and Michael Baird Saenger have suggested that Q1 bears witness to an early version of Astrophil and Stella. If this were the case, it might be argued that at some point Sidney himself intended the ten songs printed in the 1591 quartos to be considered together. See Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney, 383, and Michael Baird Saenger, “Did Sidney Revise Astrophil and Stella?” Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 417−38. The only sustained consideration of the songs separate from the sonnets of the sequence is Annibel Jenkins, “A Second Astrophel and Stella Cycle,” in Renaissance Papers (1970), 73−80. Jenkins, however, reads the songs as they appear in Feuillerat and therefore includes the elements (part of song viii, all of song xi) missing from the 1591 quartos. 36. James Finn Cotter considers the entire sequence to be an ars poetica and follows Rudenstine in asserting that energia is the heart of the lesson (“The Songs in Astrophil and Stella” Studies in Philology 67 (1970): 178−200. 37. Cotter, 179. 38. Herman, Peter C., ed., Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella: Texts and Contexts, (Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2001), 119. Astrophel and Stella, as Ringler, Kalstone, and Rudenstine have argued influentially, is the embodiment of the understanding of energeia Sidney developed in the Defence. See Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, xlv; Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry,175; Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 150; also his “Sidney and Energia” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays and Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 210−33. 39. Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, one of the few critics to address song iii, argues that Stella becomes the Orpheus—the source of poetic invention— of song iii, usurping that power from Astrophil (“The Unauthorized Orpheus of Astrophil and Stella,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 35 (1995): 24. Young, reading song iii as a kind of response to sonnet 83, which it follows in the 1598 folio, finds in it a universalizing tendency (Young, “English Petrarke,” 70); Cotter likewise reads it in relation to its place in the 1598 folio but insists that “the effect of the song is realized not in hearing . . . nor in sight . . . but in its appeal to reason through hearing and sight” (“The Songs in Astrophil and Stella,” 184). 40. Cotter, 188−89. 41. See Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York; Columbia Univ. Press, 2002), 42−45 and 179−80. 42. Young, “English Petrarke” (76) notes the same mirroring.

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43. 1 Corinthians 19−25, Geneva Bible, 1560. The glosses to the passages that introduce this section designate “the wisdome of wordes” to be rhetoric, and warn against attributing to the power of rhetoric “what onely belonged to the power of God.” 44. Yvor Winters, “The Sixteenth Century Lyric in England: A Critical and Historical Reinterpretation,” Poetry 53 (February and March 1939): 258−72, 320−35; 54 (April 1939): 35−51. 45. Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, xlv; Cotter, “The Songs,” 182. 46. For the notion of reading prosody as a carrier of meaning, I am indebted to Annie Finch, The Ghost of Meter: Culture and Prosody in American Free Verse (Ann Arbor, MI: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1993), especially chapters 1–3. 47. See Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (New York: Random House, 1979), 103. 48. Elizabethans typically scanned dipthongs like “showers” and “hours” as monosyllables. 49. Fussell, 103. 50. Frank Whigham, Ambition & Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 33−36, 63−70. 51. See Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1994) for the complete version of this argument. 52. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. and intro. by John Kerrigan (New York: Penguin, 1986), 13−15. 53. Kerrigan follows Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Was the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets really unauthorized?” Review of English Studies 34 n.s. (1983): 151−71, whose argument entails that regardless how little authorial control Shakespeare might have exercised over the printing of his sonnets, the 1609 edition would have conformed generally both to his and to readers’ expectations. In her outline of the sequences displaying three-part structure, Duncan-Jones attempts to make Astrophil and Stella fit because its 108 sonnets equals the number of sonnets between Shakespeare’s marriage group and the Dark Lady sonnets (18−126); her argument is driven toward numerology because it considers only the 1598 folio arrangement of Astrophil and Stella. Kuin follows in the same vein in Chamber Music, 86. 54. Heather Dubrow, “‘Dressing old words new’? Re-evaluating the ‘Delian Structure,’” in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Carl Schoenfeldt (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 90−103. 55. Duncan-Jones, “Shake-speare’s Sonnets”151−71 and Kerrigan, 13. 56. In a crown of sonnets, the last line of the first poem is repeated as the first line of the second poem, and so on. It is completed when the last line of the last sonnet repeats the first line of the first. 57. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 93. 58. Cf., for example, Elizabeth Harris Sagaser’s conclusion that Delia, particularly in the crown and in Rosamond, attempts “to reconcile momentary pleasure . . . with lasting meaning and power . . . in a way that values pleasure and

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59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66. 67.

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beauty for their own sake” (146); but Sagaser finds that the structure of the crown “challenges the illusion produced by the autonomous carpe diem poem that time is racing” (149) in “Sporting the While: Carpe Diem and the Cruel Fair in Samuel Daniel’s Delia and The Complaint of Rosamond,” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 10.1 n.d. (1998): 145−70. Dubrow, Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses pp. 53ff.; Greene calls this “Heuristic imitation” in The Light in Troy pp. 40ff. Kelly Quinn, “Mastering Complaint: Michael Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston and the Royal Mistress Complaints” ELR 38 (2008): 444; Ronald Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition: Dramatic Irony in The Complaint of Rosamond ” SEL 15 (1975): 21−36; see also Quinn’s “Ecphrasis and Reading Practices in Elizabethan Narrative Verse” SEL 44 (2004): 19−35. John Kerrigan’s Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and “Female Complaint” (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991) is an excellent critical anthology of the subgenre. Primeau, “Daniel and the Mirror Tradition,” 25. Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2008). See Lloyd E. Berry, ed. The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 3−49; and Lucy Munro, “Fletcher, Giles, the elder (bap. 1546, d. 1611),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, January 2008 [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/9726, accessed November 5, 2009] Giles Fletcher the Elder, Licia, or Poemes of Love, in Honour of the admirable and singular virtues of his Lady, to the imitation of the best Latin Poets, and others (Cambridge, 1593), STC 11055, Sig. A4. All citations of Licia refer to this edition. Berry, The English Works of Giles Fletcher, 418 n. 32. See Anne Lake Prescott, “Licia’s Temple: Giles Fletcher the Elder and Number Symbolism,” Renaissance et Réforme 2 (1978): 170−181. Kuin, Chamber Music, 84−93.

3

The One and the Many: The Sidney Name in Print, 1590−93

1. See the introduction and textual apparatus of Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, eds. Katherine Duncan-Jones and J. A. van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973). 2. Alan Hager, “The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader,” in Dennis Kay, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986), 1−16. 3. Fulke Greville, A Letter to an Honorable Ladie, in John Gouws, ed., The Prose Works of Fulke Greville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 175.3−5. 4. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 2001) DS6. 5. Ibid., DS15.

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6. The best single collection of scholarship on the topic remains the special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.2 (2005), with an introduction by William Oram. 7. See Jean R. Brink, “Precedence and Patronage: The ordering of Spenser’s dedicatory sonnets (1590)” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.2 (2005): 51−72. 8. Jean R. Brink, “Who Fashioned Edmund Spenser?: The Textual History of the Complaints” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 153−68. Brink’s case is compelling, particularly in two respects. First, Ponsonby’s preface states that he has collected Spenser’s works together here. Second, Brink asks why would Spenser, before collecting the first installment of his pension in May, risk it with an open satire against Lord Burghley in “Mother Hubberds Tale”? Brink also points out that this evidence is routinely ignored in favor of supposing for the sake of one argument or another that Spenser personally oversaw the printing of the Complaints. Since the publication of her article, the only significant engagement I have found is that of Richard Rambuss (Spenser’s Secret Career, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), who argues that Brink’s case is weakened by her assertion that the Faerie Queene did not sell particularly well and that Ponsonby surely would not want to undermine Spenser’s career ambitions by publishing the “volatile” satire in “Mother Hubberds Tale” (144−45, n. 48). Rambuss’s objections are not particularly strong: assigning Ponsonby the simple motive that I have suggested (boosting sales of two expensive books, the Faerie Queene and the Arcadia, whether they were selling especially well or not) answers both of Rambuss’s objections to Brink’s arguments. 9. Mark Bland, “The Appearance of the Text in Early Modern England” Text 11 (1998): 107−11. Bland also points out that Windet’s only other print job during the period was Peele’s Eglogue Gratulatorie. Entitled: To the Right Honorable, and Renow[n]ed Shepheard of Albions Arcadia: Robert Earle of Essex and Ewe, for his welcome into England from Portugall (London: 1589, STC 19534). 10. Mary Ellen Lamb (Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle [Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990]) places Fraunce among the “less secure” of the writers patronized by the countess, arguing rightly, I believe, that Fraunce’s relative lack of self-confidence impedes his capacity to imagine the countess as a writer herself (1−31). 11. See Richard Schell’s gloss on the line in the Yale edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 242; and see Dennis Moore, The Politics of Spenser’s Complaints and Sidney’s Philisides Poems (Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies, 101), Salzburg, 1982: (17−19). 12. See, for example, Dennis Moore, The Politics of Spenser’s Complaints and Sidney’s Philisides Poems, 17−22. Spenser’s most aggressive characterization of Burghley, of course, appears as the Fox in another of the Complaints poems, “Prosopopoeia, or, Mother Hubberds Tale.” 13. Mark David Rasmussen, “Spenser’s Plaintive Muses,” Spenser Studies 13 (1999), 139−148.

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14. “The Teares of the Muses,” in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. Oram et al. (New Haven, CN and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), ll 55–114, 541–600. 15. William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, in The Norton Shakespeare, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987) ll. 50−91; Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape,” Representations 20 (1987): 25−76. 16. See, for example, Raphael Falco, “Spenser’s Astrophel and the Formation of Elizabethan Literary Genealogy,” Modern Philology 91 (August 1993):1−25; and Lisa Klein, “Spenser’s Astrophel and the Sidney Legend,” Sidney Newsletter and Journal 12. 2 (1993): 42−55. 17. For the same conclusion based on entirely different evidence, see Jan Karel Kouwenhoven, “Sidney, Leicester, and The Faeirie Queene ” in J. A. van Dorsten et al. eds., Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute No. 9 (Leiden: Leiden Univ. Press, 1986), 149−169. 18. Richard D. Brown, “A ‘goodlie bridge’ between the Old and the New: the transformation of complaint in Spenser’s The Ruines of Time,” Renaissance Forum 2.1 (1997) ¶58−59, www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v2no1/brown.htm 19. Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 128; Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 31−40. 20. The countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, conteining the affectionate life, and unfortunate death of Phillis and Amyntas: that in a pastorall; this in a funerall: both in English hexameters (London: 1591) Sigs C1r, F2r, and D3r. 21. Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan verse in classical metres (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), 193. 22. See Jean R. Brink, “Who Fashioned Edmund Spenser?: The Textual History of Complaints,” Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 153–68; see also Brink’s “Precedence and Patronage: The Ordering of Spenser’s Dedicatory Sonnets (1590),” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (2005): 51–71; and Wayne Erickson, “The Poet’s Power and the Rhetoric of Humility in Spenser’s Dedicatory Sonnets,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38 (2005): 91–118. 23. Epigram 132 in N. E. McClure, ed., The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, together with “The Prayse of Private Life” (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 199. 24. Kuin, Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet- Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998), 187−90. Kuin grounds his account in an oft-cited appendix to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s L’Anti- Oedipe (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 471−72, but the interest in “desiring-machines” here lies in the context of a decidedly precapitalist society. 25. Attridge, 114−22; 129−33. 26. Ibid, 114−22. 27. See Edwin H. Miller, “Deletions in Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592),” HLQ 15 (1952): 277−82; and R. B. Parker, “Alterations in

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28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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the First Edition of Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592),” HLQ 23 (1960):181−86. See Margaret Rose Jaster, “Of Bonnets and Breeches: Sumptuary Codes in Elizabethan Popular Literature,” Proceedings of the PMR Conference: Annual Publication of the International Patristic, Mediaeval, and Renaissance Conference (Villanova, PA) 16−17 (1992−93): 205−11. For the most considered recent scholarship on Harvey’s references in A New Letter and Pierce’s Supererogation, see Matthew Steggle, “Gabriel Harvey, the Sidney Circle, and the Excellent Gentlewoman,” Sidney Journal 22.1_2 (2004): 115−29. Nashe refers to Richard Harvey’s 1583 treatise, An astrological discourse upon the great and notable conjunction of the two superiour planets, Saturne and Jupiter, which shall happen the 28. day of April, 1583. With a briefe declaration of the effectes, which the late eclipse of the sunne 1582. is yet heereafter to woorke. Written newly by Richard Haruey: partely, to supplie that is wanting in co[m]mon prognostications: and partely by prædiction of mischiefes ensuing (London: 1583, STC 12909.7). Brink (“Precedence and Patronage, 54−55) notes Nashe’s twit at Spenser but thinks Nashe characterizes Spenser as “a representative client whose work is cheapened by the patronage system,” who should not waste dedications on nobles who don’t know how to appreciate good work. Brittons Bowre of Delights: 1591 ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), vii−xii. Michael G. Brennan, “Breton, Nicholas (1554/5–c.1626),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb. com/view/article/3341, accessed December 18, 2008] Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), chapter 2. Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 1990), 135. Suzanne Trill, “Engendering Penitence: Nicholas Breton and ‘the Countesse of Penbrooke,’” in Kate Chedgzoy (ed. and intro.) et al. Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1997), 25−44. Rollins, 71 n. 12.10 In “Somewhat to reade for them that list,” which prefaces the first quarto of Astrophel and Stella , Nashe comments sarcastically that Sidney’s verse “cannot daunce trip and goe so lively, with oh my love, ah my love, all my loves gone” (Sig. A4), mocking the line in Breton’s “Amoris Lachrymae.” Arber, Edward. ed. A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D. ii, New York: P. Smith, 1951. 621. Ibid., 611, 623. Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 32−40. Attridge, Well-weighed syllables, 194, 198−208. See Kathrine Koller, “Abraham Fraunce and Edmund Spenser,” ELH 7 (1940): 108−20 and the introduction to Gerald Snare’s edition of Fraunce’s The Third

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44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49.

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Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Ivychurch (Northridge: California State Univ. Press, 1975). The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch, Entituled, Amintas Dale (London, 1592), 55r. Fraunce, Third . . . Yvychurch, 59r. Evelyn Tribble, Margins and Marginality: The Printed Page in Early Modern England (London and Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1993), 93−96. Besides William Ringler, H. R. Woudhuysen, and Victor Skretkowicz, see P. J. Croft, “Sir John Harington’s Manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia,” in Literary Autographs: Papers read at a Clark Library Seminar, 26 April 1980, eds. P. J. Croft and S. Parks (Los Angeles, CA: W. A. Clark Memorial Library, 1983), 37−75. I cite the facsimile edition, Ludovico Ariosto: Orlando Furioso in English heroical verse, 1591 (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), ¶iii. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The social tropes of Elizabethan courtesy theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 64−70.

4


1. C.S. Lewis, Sixteenth Century Literature, Excluding Drama, Oxford History of English Literature vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 333. See also the back cover of Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). 2. Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), xi, 60. 3. See Alexander Witherspoon, The Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama, Yale Studies in English, vol. 55 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924), 82. 4. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 60. 5. A Pleasant Conceit Penned in verse. Collourably sett out, and humblie presented on New-yeeres day last, to the Queenes Majestie at Hamton Court (London, 1593, STC 5248), Sig. B1v, quoted Margaret P. Hannay, Noel Kinnamon, and Michael Brennan, eds., The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1 (Poems, Translations, and Correspondence) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 25. 6. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents. With a Strange Sonet, intituled Gorgon, or the wonderful yeare (London, 1593, STC 12902), Sig. A4v−B1. 7. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 22 8. Evidently Harvey hadn’t read either Garnier’s or Mary Sidney Herbert’s version of the story very closely, since these are the most sedate, bloodless, and philosophical versions of the story popularly available at the time.

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9. Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle.”Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 194−202. Her companion article, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Patronage,”ELR 12 (1982): 162−79, attempts to distinguish between poets over whom the countess did and did not exercise great influence, and points out that dedications to her all but disappeared after the death of her powerful husband, Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in 1601. 10. Lamb, “The Countess of Pembroke and the Art of Dying,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (New York:, Syracuse Univ. Press, 1988), 207−26. 11. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 61. 12. Robert E. Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008). 13. Beginning in the later 1980s, a notion of the “Sidney family discourse” begin to emerge partly because of attention generated by the Psalms metaphrases that prompted closer study of the “Sidney Psalter,” the family’s fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the Psalms. See Victor Skretkowicz, “Protestant Men, Protesting Women – A Sidney Family Discourse,”Sidney Newsletter and Journal 14 (1996): 3−14. In the same issue of the Sidney Newsletter and Journal , see also Jennifer Richards, “Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, and Protestant Poetics”: 28−37, and Michael Brennan, “‘First rais’de by thy blest hand, and what is mine / inspird by thee’: the ‘Sidney Psalter’ and the Countess of Pembroke’s Completion of the Sidneian Psalms”: 37−44. Brennan claims that the “linking of the Psalms with concepts of family dynasty was a well-established practice within the Sidney circle” (39). Because the psalter predates the Reformation, Brennan writes that it offered the Countess of Pembroke “a kind of continuity or bridge between the Catholic origins and Protestant present of the Sidney and Herbert families” (43). Germaine Warkentin (“The Library of the Sidney Family,”Sidney Newsletter & Journal 15 [1997]: 3−18, and “Ins and outs of the Sidney family library,”Times Literary Supplement December 6, 1985: 1381, 1411) also sheds light on the development of the Sidney family discourse. 14. Quoted in Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 8. I cannot find Hannay’s source. 15. Hannay, “‘Princes you as men must dy’: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney,”English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 27. John Dudley’s brother, Robert, also attainted and imprisoned by Mary, also paraphrased Psalm 94 while in the Tower awaiting his execution. 16. Skretkowicz (“Protestant Men, Protesting Women,”(5) deems the poems as a “familial expression of Stoic philosophy.” 17. Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, A Discourse of Life and Death, trans. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, in Margaret Hannay et al. eds. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1: Poems, Translations, and Correspondence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 235.218−19. All subsequent citations of A Discourse of Life and Death use this edition, and line numbers are indicated parenthetically, except where otherwise noted.

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18. Quoted from “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Instructions to his Son,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 207−08. 19. Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The social tropes of Elizabethan courtesy theory (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 40. 20. Diane Bornstein, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of Philippe de Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death, Medieval and Renaissance Monograph Series, vol. 3 (N.P.: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983), 88 n.50.7. 21. Margaret Hannay, Noel Kinnamon, and Michael Brennan, eds., The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1, 218. 22. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 119−20; see also Lamb, The Art of Dying, 213. 23. Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), 22. 24. Antony and Cleopatra refer to one another as husband and wife throughout the play. 25. The Tragedie of Antonie, by Robert Garnier, trans. Mary Sidney Herbert, in Hannay, et al. Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, vol. 1, line 1381. All parenthetical citations refer to line numbers in this edition. 26. See Seneca’s epistles 95 and 114, “On the Usefulness of Basic Principles” and “On Style as a Mirror of Character,” in Gummere, 58−103, 300−317. 27. See Discourse of Life and Death l, 848. 28. Likewise, in the New Arcadia, Cecropia tries to convince Pamela to marry Amphialus, saying essentially the same thing, that she will rule Amphialus by force of her beauty; Pamela’s counterargument is somewhat like Cleopatra’s—it is not right for woman to rule man or for man to be governed by his passion. 29. Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1988), 47, 57. 30. Hannay, et al. eds., Collected Works of the Countess of Pembroke, 207, 254. 31. See Michael Brennan, “William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer,”Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 7.3 (1983): 101. Brennan cites William A. Ringler Jr., The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 532 as one source, but also notes that “by an endorsement in the letter of Nashe to Sir R. Cotton (BL MS Jul.C.III), it appears that the price of a copy of the Arcadia in 1593 was 6s 6d ” (110, n.49). Brennan also notes that the price of the Arcadia had gone up to 9s by 1598; see F.R. Johnson, “Notes on English Retail Book-prices, 1550−1604,”The Library 5 (1951): 172−78. Finally, Ringler’s note on the price of the Arcadia refers to “Collier’s Bibliographical and Critical Account, ii [1865], 350.” 32. See Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 151−59. Also see Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix, 71−75, and Lori Humphrey Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002). See also “The Printer to the Reader,” in Tottel’s Miscellany, vol. 1, ed. Hyder Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 2.

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33. Joel Davis, “Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke,”Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 401−430. I should point out that in “Multiple Arcadias,” I argued that the 1593 folio presents a much more pastoral version of the romance, and that Sanford’s preface characterizes the difference between the two Arcadias in terms of a conflict over pastoralism. As should already be clear, my interpretation of the 1593 Arcadia has developed and changed considerably. 34. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended. (London, 1593), STC 22540, Sig ¶4. All quotations of the 1593 folio refer to this edition unless noted otherwise. 35. William Godshalk, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Revision of the Arcadia, Books III−V,”Philological Quarterly 43 (1964): 175. 36. The accusation of Greville’s ingratitude for Sidney family favors takes on more significance when set in the context of Greville’s career. He got some of his earliest and most lucrative offices in the Court of the Marches of Wales with the favor of Sir Henry Sidney, the Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales; Sidney later tried to replace Greville with his own son, Robert, but failed. See Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State in the Reigns of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, King James, 2 vols. (London: 1746), vol. 1, 145−46, 185−87, 194, 209 for the relevant correspondence. Greville’s diplomatic career was also closely tied to that of Philip Sidney (although not necessarily for the better), and to this day his literary reputation has depended largely on his close association with Sidney. 37. Feuillerat, The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 524. 38. See Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, 40. 39. Kenneth T. Rowe, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Editorship of the Arcadia,”PMLA 54 (1939): 122. See also Jean Robertson, ed., The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3. 40. Feuillerat, The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 528; Robertson, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 3. 41. Nancy Lindheim argues, rightly in my view, that Sidney’s work on the trial scene that concludes the Old Arcadia must have led him fairly directly to the revisions of books 1−3 in the New Arcadia (The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982]), 139. 42. Harry Berger Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance FictionMaking (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). See also Walter Davis, “A Map of Arcadia: Sidney’s Romance in its Tradition, in Sidney’s Arcadia,” in Yale Studies in English 158 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press. 1965), 6−35, 45−50. 43. Walter Davis, “A Map of Arcadia: Sidney’s Romance in its Tradition, in Sidney’s Arcadia,” 37, 54. 44. See Mornay A Discourse of Life and Death, in Hannay et al. eds. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1: Poems, Translations, and Correspondence, 237.328−330. 45. See A Discourse of Life and Death ll. 516−522.

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46. See Wendy Olmsted, “The Gentle Doctor: Renaissance/Reformation Friendship, Rhetoric, and Emotion in Sidney’s Old Arcadia,” Modern Philology (2005): 156−86. On “public honor,” see Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (New York: Vintage, 1997), and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 47. Fulke Greville, Caelica 100, cited in Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 48. Blair Worden’s observation that the sixteenth-century lexicons of ethics and politics overlapped almost completely is apropos here. See The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 8−9. Worden focuses especially on the relationship the Old Arcadia bears to that other, more directly monarchomach antityranny Huguenot tract, the Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, frequently attributed to Philippe Mornay or Philip Sidney’s one-time mentor, Hubert Languet. But pace Robert Stillman, it should be noted that both Languet and Mornay were committed Philippists, and so it might be best to characterize the particular thoroughness of the interpenetration of ethical and political language common to both the 1593 Arcadia and the Discourse of Life and Death as Philippist. 49. See Kenneth O. Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965). 50. See Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, A Discourse of Life and Death, trans. Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, in Hannay et al. eds. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, ll. 273−444. 51. See Bornstein The Countess of Pembroke’s Translation, 88 n.50.7. 52. Sidney, Sir Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), 357–58. 53. John Gouws, ed., The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), xiv. 54. I owe the idea that Greville effectively got in the last word in his conflict with Philip Sidney to Cynthia Bowers, “‘What is the Meaning of this Work?’: Fulke Greville, Censorship, and Silence,” conference paper delivered at the 34th Annual International Medieval Studies Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 7, 1999.

5

Organic and Artificial Wholes in the Invention of English Literature: Or, the Ontological Status of the 1598 folio of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

1. I borrow the term from Steven Mentz’s “Selling Sidney: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the Boundaries of Elizabethan Print and Manuscript Cultures,” Text 13 (2000): 169. 2. Louis Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 8 (1977): 3−35. Some other significant interpretations of the entertainment seeking to recover

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

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its purposes in the conditions of its performance include the following: Alan Hager, “Rhomboid Logic: Anti-Idealism and a Cure for Recusancy in Sidney’s Lady of May” ELH 57 (1990): 485−502; Marie Axton, “The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama,” in English Drama: Forms and Development: Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, eds. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 24−47; and Dorothy Connell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). I merely corroborate Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005), 163. British Library MS Add. 15232 Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation,” 3–35. Hager makes this argument first in “Rhomboid Logic,” 485−502. He expands the point to emphasize the text’s resistance to being interpreted as any single argument in Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991). On Buchanan’s relationship with his charge, the future king James, see Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), 63−72. On Buchanan’s Philippism, see Robert Stillman, Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 159−216. For versions of this view, see, for example, Montrose, “Celebration and Insinuation” and Marie Axton, “The Tudor Mask and Elizabethan Court Drama,” in English Drama: Forms and Development: Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, eds. Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 24−47. See Germaine Warkentin, “The Meeting of the Muses: Sir Philip Sidney and the Mid-Tudor Poets,” in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and Ours: A Collection of Critical and Scholarly Essays, eds. G. F. Waller and M. D. Moore (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 20. A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 58−106. The passage reappears more appropriately in a discussion of tragedy in the Defence of Poesie, where it is not translated. William Ringler Jr. summarizes and dismisses such nineteenth-century arguments in his commentary on the Certaine Sonets, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 423. But the error persisted, for example in David Kalstone’s otherwise perceptive study, Sidney’s Poetry: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), 178. A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney, 75. See also Germaine Warkentin, “Sidney’s Certain Sonnets: Speculations of the Evolution of the Text,” Library 6th Ser. 2 (1980): 430−44; Warkentin, “The Meeting of the Muses”; Paul Marquis, “Rereading Sidney’s Certain Sonnets,” Renaissance Studies 8.1 (1994): 65−75;

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14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

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Neil Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), 115, 150–63. See, for example, Nona Fienberg, “The Emergence of Stella in Astrophel and Stella.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 25 (Winter 1985): 5−19; also Christine Macleod, “Stella Speaks: The Petrarchan Convention Revisited.” Critical Survey 3.1 (1991): 3−13. For some of the more influential considerations of the “rich” references, see Jack Stillinger, “The Biographical Problem of Astrophel and Stella.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 59 (1960): 617−39; John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 269−94; and A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977), 58−106. Alison Wall, “Rich, Penelope, Lady Rich (1563–1607)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23490, accessed February 13, 2011]. See the commentary on Astrophel and Stella 37 in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William Ringler Jr. (London: Clarendon Press, 1962), 473. Sir P.S. his Astrophel and Stella (London: 1591), STC 22537, Sig. C1. I quote from the second quarto, but the passage is identical in the first quarto, STC 22536. Peter Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Spenser, Milton, and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1996). Heidi Brayman Hackel notes that the prose of the folios received considerably more attention from readers than did the verse. She notes that compilers of commonplace books frequently discriminated between prose and verse sources. See Reading Material in Early Modern England, 163−64. On the disputed authorship of “The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda,” see Michael O’Connell, “Astrophel: Spenser’s Double Elegy” SEL 11 (1971): 27−35; and Gary Waller, The “Triumph of Death” and other Unpublished and Uncollected Poems by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1561-1621) (Salzburg: Institut fuer Englische Sprache und Litertur, 1977), 53−59 and 176−79. Spenser and Pembroke’s more recent editors have extended the dispute into the twenty-first century. See William Oram et al. eds. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), 563−69; see also Margaret Hannay et al. eds. The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 119−32. For example, the references to energeia underpin Neil Rudenstine’s entire analysis in Sidney’s Poetic Development. See also Jon Lawry, Sidney’s Two Arcadias: Pattern and Proceeding (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972) 2−4; Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study, 125; and David Kalstone, “Sir Philip Sidney” in History of Literature in the English Language vol. 2, English Poetry and Prose, 1540-1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), 41−59. “The Apology for the Countess of Pembroke,” in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1933), 51.

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24. In particular, see “Sidney’s Theory of Poetic Truth” and “Poetic Truth in the New Arcadia,” chapters 6 and 7 in Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 194−297. 25. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 163. 26. Roland Greene, “Fictions of immanence, fictions of embassy,” in eds. Elizabeth Fowler and Roland Greene, The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 177. See also Ronald Levao, who argues that, for Sidney, the stakes involved in crossing the border between fiction and reality are the very possibility of rational communication. Trying to communicate rationally must “lead . . . to fiction-making. Our only choice is whether or not to acknowledge the pretense” (Renaissance Minds and their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985]), 149. 27. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: 1598), STC 22541, Sig. Ss 6. 28. See Arthur Kinney, “Parody and its Implications in Sydney’s Defense of Poesie” SEL 12 (1972): 1−4; Margaret Ferguson, “Sidney’s Defense of Poetry: A Retrial,” Boundary 2: A Journal of Postmodern Literature and Culture, 7.2 (1979): 61−96. 29. One of the most extensive treatments of the Defence, Mary Jane Doherty’s The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1991) reads poetic invention as a surrender and Sidney’s Defence as a “struggle to make gender and sexuality holy” (173). Mary Ellen Lamb argues that Sidney saw the value and also the danger of poetry to lie in its capacity to make learning pleasurable; too much pleasure and not enough discipline threaten to effeminize, or even worse, infantilize the reader (“Apologizing for pleasure in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry: The nurse of abuse meets the Tudor grammar school,” Criticism 36 (1994): 499−519). See also Frances Dolan, “Taking the Pencil out of God’s Hand: Art, Nature, and the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England,” PMLA 108 (1993): 224−39. 30. Ferguson, “Sidney’s Defence of Poetry,”61−95. Revised in Trials of Desire. Some critics read Sidney primarily in terms of Calvinist doctrine: see Andrew Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1978) and Alan Sinfield’s influential “The Cultural Politics of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry” in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours: A Collection of Critical and Scholarly Essays, eds. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1984), 124−43. 31. Stillman, Philip Sidney, 71−72, 89−103. See also Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven: CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1997) and Deborah Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988). 32. See Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth- Century England (Amherst, MA: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 262−71. 33. Greene, “Fictions of Immanence,” 189.

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34. Daniel Jacobsen, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Dilemma: On the Ethical Function of Narrative Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 334−35. 35. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 28−30. 36. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare Among the Moderns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 26−28. Halpern cites T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” and also Elizabethan Essays, 10−18. 37. “Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘Complete’ Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 18.2 (2000): 70. 38. See Peter M. W. Robinson, “The One Text and the Many Texts.” Making Texts for the Next Century. Spec. issue of Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.1 (2000): 5−14 39. Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 53−74. 40. Paul Maas, Textual Criticism, trans. Barbara Flower (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 20−21. Also, see Victor Skretkowicz, “Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘Complete’ Arcadia,” Sidney Journal 18.2: 37−70. It is perhaps not surprising that “the susceptibility of a civilization to the effect of a literary work” is functionally similar to “the conditions” in which laureate poetics might become legible in the Helgersonian paradigm.

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ambition, xv, 9, 40, 84, 108, 127, 129–30, 138, 148–9, 152, 154–5, 162–3, 165, 174, 217, 220, 223 Amphialus (character in Arcadia) his chivalry, 54, 69–75, 78, 157, 164, 166, 170 general discussion of, 40, 46–7, 53–4, 58, 62, 69, 70, 72–4, 76–7 his political and military strategy, 68–9, 70–3, 77–8, 170, 173 Amyas, John, 29 Anaxius (character in Arcadia), 47, 58, 62, 70–1, 73, 77–8, 165 Antonius, Marcus (character in The Tragedie of Antonie), 135, 138, 147, 234 An Apologie for Poetrie (Sir Philip Sidney), xvii, 3, 20, 119, 141–3, 186–8 An Apologie of Poetrie (Sir John Harington), 47, 81–2, 84–7, 100, 113–14, 120, 127, 140–4, 160, 185–7, 202–3, 209, 218, 220, 231, 234, 237, 240 Arcadia relation to Sidney family, 42, 44–5, 46, 167, 172–7

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setting in The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, 40, 44–8, 56–7, 60, 62, 68 state of its people, 142, 145, 157, 160–3, 165, 169–70, 177–8, 179–86, 191–3 areopagus, 8, 128, 204 n. 19 Argalus (character in the Arcadia), 52–3, 70, 73, 202 n. 1 Astrophel and Stella 1591 quartos of, 3–4, 20, 79–99, 101–2, 106–7, 117, 136–7, 183–4 1598 Folio version, 1, 180, 185–6, 198 Bright manuscript, 182 Drummond Manuscript, 80–1 Houghton Manuscript, 80, 85–6, 89–90 as “pure text” literary work, 16, 49, 141–2, 184, 186, 188 stemma of, 80–2, 85 Astrophil (male speaker of Astrophel and Stella), 86–90, 94–9, 100, 103, 105, 116, 125, 142 Attridge, Derek, 126, 128, 129 authenticity, 3, 146, 181 Author-function, 16–19, 23–6, 185, 188, 191, 197–8 authority, 3, 6, 12, 16–17, 63, 85, 121, 163, 171, 181, 186, 194

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baiser (kissing poem), 89, 115 Basilius (character in Arcadia), 40, 44–7, 53, 55–9, 62–6, 68, 70–1, 166–70, 172–5, 177 Bear, Risa, 198 Berger, Harry Jr., 68, 163, 164, 206 Bland, Mark, 27, 122, 207 Blount, Charles, Lord Mountjoy, 185 Boutcher, Warren, 4 Brennan, Michael, 136, 160 Breton, Nicholas, 134–7, 143–4, 147 Buchanan, George, 182, 225 n. 7 Campion, Thomas, 81 Castiglione, Baldasarre, 40, 41, 43, 67, 137, 144, 208 n. 30 Cecil, Robert, 84 Cecil, William, Lord Burleigh, 81 Cecropia (character in Arcadia), 40, 45–7, 53–4, 59, 62–3, 68–70, 73, 75–7, 157, 164, 166–7, 222 n. 28 celebrity, 9 Certaine Sonets, 3, 21, 129, 177, 179, 180, 182–5, 187, 193, 225 n. 12 Charlewood, John, 83 chivalry, 63, 69, 72, 73 Churchyard, Thomas, 114, 147 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 31, 159 Claius (character in Arcadia), 42, 44, 46, 52, 56, 67 Cleopatra (character in The Tragedie of Antonie), 148, 153–60, 170, 222 n. 24, 222n. 28 Clinias (character in Arcadia), 45, 59, 65, 67, 69–70, 73, 76 Clitophon (character in Arcadia), 52–3 comedy, 166, 167 Constable, Henry, 109, 116, 187 Cotter, James Finn, 91 The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia 1590 quarto edition: chapter divisions and summaries in, 31, 37, 41, 44–6, 48–9, 52, 54, 57, 59–66, 71–8; chivalric (heroical)

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mode in, 47, 49, 52, 54, 57, 59, 62–6, 69, 72–3; historiographical mode in, 47, 49, 52, 57, 59–60, 63–6, 68–9, 78; pastoral mode in, 1, 3, 44, 46–9, 52, 54–7, 59–60, 62, 64–6, 69, 74, 78; structures in, 46, 49, 54, 56, 57, 63, 64, 72, 78 1593 Folio edition: chivalry in, 164, 166–7; friendship in, 146, 162–72, 174; historiographical mode in, 167, 174; justice in, 146, 170–6; pastoral in, 164, 166–7; politics in, 146, 150, 163, 165, 174, 178 1598 Folio edition, 179–86, 193–9 stemma of, 14, 16, 23, 26–7, 163 culture court, 6, 9, 20, 40, 43, 55, 83, 97, 100, 107, 132, 141–3, 150–2, 165, 181, 184 manuscript, 11–12, 205 n. 42 print, 11–12, 180 as social phenomenon, 12, 37, 193–4, 196, 199 Daiphantus (pseudonym for Pyrocles, character in Arcadia), 52 Dametas (character in Arcadia), 44, 46, 53, 70, 73, 166, 168–70 Daniel, Samuel, 81–5, 99–110, 113–14, 116–17, 129, 187 Danter, John, 83 Davis, Walter, 164 Davison, Francis, 10 Day, Angel, 9 decay, 100, 103 The Defence of Poesie, 1, 3, 20, 21, 113, 119, 148, 160, 163, 169, 180, 182, 186, 188, 199 desire as appetitive, 54, 55, 62–4, 68, 75, 78, 86, 91, 95, 98, 103, 105–8, 110–11, 123, 142–3, 151–4, 166–8, 171–3, 184, 190–1

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Index diacritical, 6, 107, 141, 195 disciplinary/institutional, 5, 6, 7, 14, 18, 20, 195 disseminative and non-disseminative, 84, 107–8, 123, 141, 142, 186, 195 Devereux, Lady Penelope, see Rich, Lady Penelope Devereux, Robert (Earl of Essex), 28, 42–3, 113, 119–21, 125, 127, 146–7 difference and decay, 104–5, 108, 110–11, 123, 163 in degree, presented as absolute difference in kind, 100, 102–3, 110–11, 115, 142, 147, 162 The Discourse of Life and Death, 131, 135, 138, 146–53, 155, 158, 160, 164, 168–72 Dorus (pseudonym for Musidorus, character in Arcadia), 46, 53, 55, 58–9, 67, 70 Dudley family, 123, 148, 153, 161, 195 Jane Guilford, 148 John, 148 Mary, 149 Robert, 144 Thomas, 144 Dyer, Sir Edward, 8, 42, 82–5, 128–30, 184 Dymoke, Sir Edward, 81–5, 102, 129 echo effect in poem, 111–12 poem, 68 textual, 67, 77, 133, 162, 174 editing, 14, 28, 39, 161, 179, 197 as interpretation, 7, 13, 17–24, 54, 85–7, 101–4, 152–3, 161, 170, 179–80, 190, 194–9 editors, 2–6, 16–17, 23–7, 31, 37, 47–8, 54–7, 60, 68–9, 72, 78, 83, 87, 89–93, 99, 101, 113, 145, 161, 163, 181, 185, 197

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elegy in books of sonnets, 109 pastoral, 9, 74, 78, 135–6, 187 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 21, 189, 194–6 Elizabeth I, 8, 28, 30, 40, 61, 69, 84, 120–1, 124, 178, 181–2 empathy, 193 envy, 42, 61, 120, 149–50, 152, 162–5, 169, 172–4 Euarchus (character in Arcadia), 60–1, 172–7 Factotum, 42, 162 Falco, Raphael, 6, 11 fame, 9, 102, 107–14, 130–4, 186 Fenton, Geoffrey, 35–7 Ferguson, Margaret, 190–1 Feuillerat, Albert, 3, 93, 143, 189 flattery, 41, 46, 69, 76, 121, 125, 137, 140, 150, 155, 165 Fletcher, Giles, 100–1, 112–17, 129 Flower, Francis, 81–4 Foucault, Michel, 14, 16 Fox, Charles, 29 Frantzen, Allan, 5 Fraunce, Abraham, 9, 37, 52, 82–5, 100, 109, 122, 125–7, 128, 134–44, 147 friendship, 42, 60, 146, 162–7, 172, 174 Genette, Gerard, 4, 5 Graff, Gerald, 5, 19 Greene, Robert, 12, 113, 130 Greene, Roland, 49, 91, 190 Greene, Thomas, 105 Greetham, D. C., 13 Greg, Walter Wilson, 14–19, 24 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke, 23–31, 39–49, 52, 61, 68–71, 74–81, 84–5, 120–1, 149, 152, 157, 160–2, 165, 177–8, 187 Gynecia (character in Arcadia), 44, 46, 55, 57, 64–5, 165–8, 172, 174–7

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Index

Hackel, Heidi Brayman, 4 Halpern, Richard, 196, 228 n. 36 Hannay, Margaret Patterson, 135, 137, 146–8 Harington, Sir John (of Kelston), 47, 82–7, 100, 113–14, 120, 127, 140–4, 160, 185–7 Harvey, Gabriel, 8–10, 119, 125–48, 187 Hazlitt, William, 189, 196 Helgerson, Richard, 10–14, 126, 194 Heliodorus, 46, 126 Herbert, Henry, Earl of Pembroke, 125 Herbert, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, 85, 121, 124, 138, 145–60, 169–70, 178, 182, 191–7 Herbert family, 27–9, 121, 144 history of books and reading, xiv-xv, xvii, 2, 7, 20, 24 as an early modern genre, 20, 30–1, 37–41, 44, 47, 60, 114, 119, 122, 124, 169, 178 literary, xiv-xvii, 2, 5–7, 13–14, 20, 80, 102, 144–5, 178, 187 Hoskyns, John, 39, 208 n. 25 Howell, Thomas, 8, 9, 125 intention authorial, 3, 5, 11, 14, 16–19, 24–6, 80, 87, 132, 189–91 editorial, 2, 4, 6, 16–17, 19, 23–5, 27, 31, 37, 47, 54–7, 60, 68–9, 72, 78, 83, 87, 89–93, 99, 145, 161–3, 181, 185, 195–7 eschatological, 190–2 interpretation and “applied texts,” xvi, 5, 21, 85–7, 101, 104–5, 108, 116, 129, 132, 141, 146, 150, 153, 184, 189–90, 199 diachronic, xvi, 20, 129, 153, 199 editing as, xiii, xv-xvi, 7, 13, 17, 24, 26, 28, 39, 54–5, 85–7, 101, 141, 161, 163, 179–81, 184–5, 194–5

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and “pure texts,” 7, 13, 17, 194–7 semiotic, 4, 7, 10–11, 13–16, 20, 132–3, 144, 162, 191, 195 symptomatic, xvii, 189–91, 194–5, 197 synchronic, xiv, 8, 10, 13, 101, 194–5 isolation, 165, 167–8, 198 James I, 39, 84, 181–2, 225 n. 7 Jonson, Ben, 10, 93, 204 n. 25, 213 n. 31 judgment, 31, 86, 132, 140, 149, 150, 155, 157, 161, 166, 174–8, 193 justice, 42, 44, 61–2, 146, 153, 155, 162, 170, 172, 174–6, 181 Kalender, Arcadian nobleman, 42, 44, 52–4, 145, 174 Kalstone, David, 56, 91, 96, 189 Kennedy, William J., xiv Kerrigan, John, 101, 109, 187 Kinney, Arthur, 190 Kuin, Roger, 82–3, 91, 117, 141, 187 Kuleshov effect, 179 Lachmann, Karl, 14, 16 The Lady of May, 1, 3, 8, 21, 177, 180–3, 225 n. 2 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 135, 137–8, 146, 148 Langley, Thomas, 31 Languet, Hubert, 148, 224 n. 48 Laureate poetics, 10, 11–12, 14 Lawry, Jon, 60, 63, 66, 189 A Letter to an Honorable Lady, 39–78 Lewis, Clive Staples, 7, 145, 198 Lindheim, Nancy, 60, 63, 73, 189 love, 40, 42, 45–7, 52–5, 57, 59–70, 72–7, 88–9, 92, 96–100, 103–8, 110–12, 115–16, 120–1, 134–7, 142–3, 154–9, 164–8, 172–7, 180, 184–5, 189–90 Maas, Paul, 14–17, 19, 199, 205 n. 38, 228 n. 40 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 47, 52, 151, 163, 173

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Index Marotti, Arthur, 11, 12, 86 marriage, 40, 43, 45, 48, 56, 149, 153, 159, 168, 170, 184 McGann, Jerome J., 4, 13, 24, 195, 198, 202 n. 12, 203 n. 5, 203 n. 6, 205 n. 33, 228 n. 39 McKerrow, R. B., 17, 197 melancholy, 45, 55, 61, 68, 106, 184 Melanchthon, Philip, 191–4 meter duple, triple, 97–9 quantitative, 126, 130, 138–9 trochaic, 94–9, 101–3, 110, 116 Miso (character in Arcadia), 44, 57–8, 64–5, 166, 169 Modernism, 196, 205, 233 Molyneux, Edmund, 9, 29, 207 n. 16 Mopsa, daughter of Miso and Dametas, 46, 58–9, 166 Mornay, Philippe DuPlessis, 135, 137, 146–51 Musidorus (character in Arcadia), 44, 46, 52–8, 60–4, 67, 73, 164–6, 169–77 Myrick, Kenneth O., 63, 169, 189 Nashe, Thomas, 81–5, 106–8, 113, 119, 127–40, 142–4 nationalism and intellectual property, 19–20 literary, 4, 12, 18, 19, 129, 195 and racial ideology, 18, 19 Natural Law theory, 108 Neo-Stoicism, 67, 147, 160, 165, 176–7 New Bibliography, 13–21, 23, 27, 145, 189, 191, 196–7 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 12 New Criticism, 13–21, 145, 188–91, 196–7 Newman, Thomas, 79, 81, 83, 85, 126, 132, 136, 142, 212 n. 10, 212 n. 11 obedience, 67, 152 Octavius Caesar (character in The Tragedie of Antonie), 153–9

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249

●

Olmsted, Wendy, 165 Olney, Henry, 119, 186–8, 201 n. 7 Palladius (pseudonym of Musidorus, character in Arcadia), 52–4 Pamela (character in Arcadia), 46–7, 55–60, 63–4, 68, 73, 76–7, 164–75 paratext factual, 4, 21, 133, 139, 182, 186–7 inferred, 5, 120, 122, 139, 186–7 as interpretive threshold, 4–5, 20, 72, 78, 122, 139–41, 188, 193, 195 Parthenia (character in Arcadia), 52, 73–4 passion, 40–1, 56–78, 88, 97, 112, 125, 142, 148–58, 163–71, 176–7, 184 pastoral (other than in the Arcadia), 18, 31, 45, 54, 79, 109, 120, 125–6, 138, 141, 146, 163–7, 182, 184, 187–8 Peele, George, 120 Philanax (character in Arcadia), 45, 65, 71–3, 169–76 Philippism, 37, 148, 169–70, 182, 191, 193–6 Philisides (character in Arcadia), 55–6, 68, 134, 183–5 Philoclea (character in Arcadia), 46–7, 55–78 Philology, 14, 18–19, 181, 195, 199 Phrygia, King of (character in Arcadia), 46, 58, 60–1, 68 pity, 64, 107, 111–22, 146, 166, 169, 173–7 Plangus (character in Arcadia), 57–63, 66, 173–4 Plexirtus (character in Arcadia), 58–62, 64–5 poetics aural, 91–9, 110 laureate, xv, 10–11, 127

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250

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Index

poetics— Continued Renaissance, 8, 20, 31, 40, 42, 50, 67, 78, 80, 88, 119–22, 191 Sidneian, 92, 99–117, 128–9, 143, 187–91 visual, 91–9, 110 Ponsonby, William, xiii, 27, 119–22, 125–8, 134, 138, 140, 148, 160–2, 169, 186–8, 193 Pontus, King of (character in Arcadia), 46, 61, 68 Prescott, Anne Lake, 115 primitivism, 181, 196–7 Protestantism, xiv, 6–7, 11, 18, 113, 118, 122, 127, 146–8, 191–3 prudence, 42, 162, 172 Puttenham, George, 8, 10, 30, 31, 39, 49, 50, 51, 52, 94, 207 n. 19, 207 n. 21, 209 n. 47 Pyrocles (character in Arcadia), 46–7, 52–68, 78, 164–77 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 16, 122, 150, 187 reason, 41, 45, 54, 67, 69, 75, 88, 92–3, 96–7, 110, 142–3, 151–8, 169, 175–6 Rich, Lady Penelope (nee Devereux), 81, 86, 98, 132, 135, 185–6 Ringler, William A., 2, 23–7, 56, 80, 85, 87, 91, 93, 97, 163, 185 Robertson, Jean, 23, 25, 26 romance, xiii, xv-xvi, 12, 20, 46–7, 52, 54, 60, 63, 164, 167 Rudenstine, Neil, 181 Sanford, Hugh, 26, 145, 161 Sansovino, Francisco, 37–8 Saunders, J. W., 10, 12 Saussure, Ferdinand, 11 Savile, Henry, 47, 209 n. 43 self-love, 180, 190–1 semiotic turn in criticism, xv-xvi, 11, 14–15, 191

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Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, 39, 40, 60, 147–8, 155, 175, 184, 222 n. 26 Sidney, Lady Frances (nee Walsingham), xiii, 26, 29 Sidney, Sir Henry, 8, 28–9 Sidney, Sir Philip as an author-figure, xv-xvii, 3, 5–7, 9, 11, 18, 55, 80, 83, 99–117, 124, 125–9, 131–4, 135, 137, 141–3, 144, 188–91 as a biographical figure, 5, 7, 8, 28–30, 40, 81, 83, 119–22, 124, 132, 134, 144, 148, 161–2, 178, 179–86, 187, 195 literary influence of, 2, 20, 93–4, 99–117 Sidney, Sir Robert (1st Earl of Leicester), 28–9, 148, 181–2 Sidney family, xiii-xiv, 9, 20–1, 27–9, 82–3, 119–20, 124–5, 133, 144–9, 160–3, 177–8, 180, 182 , 193, 195 Skretkowicz, Victor, 3, 23–4, 75, 153, 157, 197 song, 53, 56–7, 62, 65, 67–8, 72, 74, 79–81, 85–100, 102–3, 109, 116, 125–6, 136, 183–5, 193 sonnet, 79, 87–90 sonnet sequences, xiv, xviii, 2, 16, 79–80, 91–2, 99–119, 186–8 Spenser, Edmund 1590 Faerie Queene, 121–4, 127, 134, 143 Amoretti and Epithalimion, 49, 101, 117, 187 as an author, xiv-xv, xviii, 2, 8–11, 48–9, 87, 101, 113, 117, 119–44, 147, 187–90 Colin Clouts Come Home Again, 187–8 Complaints, 119–27, 160, 190 and English poetics, 119–25, 127–34

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Index stemmatics, 14–16, 23, 26–7 Stillman, Robert, 112, 148, 191, 193, 196, 216 n. 62, 221 n. 12, 224 n. 48, 225 n. 7, 227 n. 31 Stoicism (see also Neo-Stoicism), 148, 153, 154, 159 Strephon (character in Arcadia), 42, 44, 46, 52, 53, 56, 67, 202 n. 1 structuralism, xiv-xvii, 3, 7–23, 189, 193–9 Sturm, Johannes, 36, 37, 49, 66, 86, 208 n. 23 subjectivity, 87–91, 191 substance, 184, 192 suicide, 70, 159 Sympathus (character in Arcadia), 174, 177 symptom, 5–23, 190–7 Tacitus, Cornelius, 63, 170, 178, 209, 239 textual scholarship and textual criticism and copy-text, 17, 25, 80, 97, 197–9 and critical editions, 2–5, 13, 17–18, 23–5, 162, 189, 194, 197–9 and defining a “work” of literature, see work and emendation, 3, 17–18, 25, 89–91, 194, 197–8 and stemmatics, see stemmatics Timautus (character in Arcadia), 172, 174 time, 43, 48, 49, 100, 103–5, 115 tradition, literary, 15, 149, 194 The Tragedie of Antonie, 104, 131, 146–7, 153, 157, 159–60, 170

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251

tragedy, 30, 61, 64, 73, 109, 138, 142, 146–8, 157, 166–8, 173–5 transcendental signifier, 6, 7, 11, 20 transmission of texts, 15, 80–4, 194 Tribble, Evelyn, 31, 140, 201, 207 tyrannomachy, 184 tyranny, 45, 62, 68, 77, 147, 150–5, 158–60, 169, 172, 184 unity, 6, 17–18, 193–6 Wall, Wendy, 11, 104 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 23, 25–9, 83, 122–3, 212 n. 14 Warkentin, Germaine, 83, 183 Waterhouse, Edward, 8, 28, 207 n. 13 Whitney, Geoffrey, 9, 10, 35, 36 Whyte, Rowland, 28 Winters, Yvor, 93, 215 n. 44 women, 12, 54, 67, 77, 107, 114, 148 work of literature, 2–7, 11–21, 24–7, 37, 47, 49, 80, 86, 101, 140, 143–4, 146, 162–3, 180, 190–5, 198–9 as opposed to historical event, 15–16 as a semiotic event, 4, 162–3, 195 Woudhuysen, H. R., 81–4 “You Gote-herd Gods” (double sestina in Arcadia), 55–6 Zelmane character in Arcadia, 53, 58, 62, 70, 71, 75, 77 pseudonym for Pyrocles, character in Arcadia, 62, 68, 166–8 Žižek, Slavoj, 6

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