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

WRITING AFTER SIDNEY This page intentionally left blank Writing After Sidney The Literary Response to Sir Philip Si...

Author: Gavin Alexander

83 downloads 1631 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

WRITING AFTER SIDNEY

This page intentionally left blank

Writing After Sidney The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 GAVIN ALEXANDER

1

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Gavin Alexander 2006

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–928547–0

978–0–19–928547–1

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

for Jan


Preface I could hardly write a book like this and not be acutely conscious of the many debts I owe to friends, family members, and colleagues, or mindful of how influential even the most casual conversations can turn out to be. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been drawn to a literary family if my own family hadn’t been so crowded with extraordinary people. For their love, support, and example, I am deeply grateful. My research has taken me to the British Library in London, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, and the Newberry Library in Chicago, and I am grateful to the staff of those libraries for their help. But the book has been principally researched and written within the intellectual community and the libraries of the University of Cambridge, and I owe a great debt to the many teachers, colleagues, friends, and librarians not named below. My first home in Cambridge was Caius College, and much of my early work was done in its marvellous Library, a place where I have had more than my share of serendipity. My longest-standing debt is to my brilliant teachers at Caius, John Casey, Jeremy Prynne (who also ran that Library), and especially Colin Burrow, who went on to be a wise supervisor of my doctoral work. A master’s course had a huge impact on the way I work and the kinds of question I ask. My teachers on the course—especially Marie Axton, Anne Barton, John Kerrigan, and Jeremy Maule—offered a formidable challenge to my ways of thinking; they subsequently became colleagues, and I am deeply grateful for their example and support. The first phase of my research was completed as a Research Fellow at Caius, and I remain profoundly indebted to the Master and Fellows of that College for all they have done for me. A hiatus coincided with a busy few years establishing myself as a lecturer in the Faculty of English and a Fellow at Christ’s College. I am grateful to the academic and administrative staff of both institutions for the support that enabled me to keep my eye on what still had to be done. And the AHRC made completing this book possible with a Research Leave award in 2003. The help of David Colclough, Katrin Ettenhuber, and Hester Lees-Jeffries has been vital. Other friends and colleagues who have shared work, ideas, or good advice, or offered much appreciated support and encouragement are Sylvia Adamson, Richard Axton, Kate Bennett, Joseph Black, Ian

viii

Preface

Donaldson, Katharine Duncan-Jones, Elizabeth Goldring, Margaret Hannay, David Jays, Noel Kinnamon, Roger Kuin, Mary Ellen Lamb, Raphael Lyne, John Pitcher, Claire Preston, John Rathmell, Matthew Reynolds, Jason Scott-Warren, Victor Skretkowicz, Brian Solts, Tiffany Stern, Robert Stillman, Germaine Warkentin, and Andrew Zurcher. I am grateful to Viscount De L’Isle for permission to consult his manuscripts of the Sidney Psalms and Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, and to reproduce the portrait of Mary Wroth and her mother discussed in Chapter 9. Material from ‘Sidney’s Interruptions’, Studies in Philology, 98 (2001), 184–204 appears in revised form in Chapters 1 and 3, and a part of ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2000), 203–31 is used in Chapter 7; I am grateful to the editors of these two journals for permission to reprint. It is not enough to say that this book could not have been written without the love and patient support of my partner Jan, without her inspiring strength and wisdom; I owe her much more than that. I should also acknowledge the not insignificant roles of a horse called Tarde and a dog called Charlie; without the latter at my feet I would have been able to leave my desk rather more easily, and the writing of this book would have taken much longer. GRA

Contents List of Illustrations Note on Spelling, References, and Abbreviations Introduction 1. Dialogue and Incompletion: Philip Sidney

xi xiii xix 1

2. Elegies and Legacies

56

3. The Last Word: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

76

4. Families and Friends

128

5. Finding and Making: Robert Sidney

149

6. Lyric After Sidney

193

7. Life After Sidney: Fulke Greville

220

8. Versions of Arcadia

262

9. The Constant Art: Mary Wroth

283

Postscript

332

Bibliography Index

339 363


List of Illustrations 1. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, engraving by Simon van de Passe (1618). National Portrait Gallery, London. 2. Sir Robert Sidney, by unknown artist (c.1590). National Portrait Gallery, London. 3. Lady Mary Wroth and Lady Barbara Sidney, by Marcus Gheeraerts II (1612). Reproduced by kind permission of Viscount De L’Isle, from his private collection at Penshurst Place.

77 154

289


Note on Spelling, References, and Abbreviations In quotations, use of i/j, u/v, and ß has been brought into line with modern practice. I have in most cases silently lowered raised letters and expanded contractions and abbreviations, including ampersands. References to classical texts are to the editions in the Loeb Classical Library series unless otherwise stated. I have followed an eclectic practice in quoting from Sidney’s works. Quotations from the poems follow Ringler’s old-spelling edition; his sigla to refer to individual poems are used (AS: Astrophil and Stella; AT: attributed poems; CS: Certain Sonnets; OA: poems from the ‘old’ Arcadia; OP: other poems; PP: poems possibly by Sidney; PS: Psalms). Quotations from the ‘old’ Arcadia follow Robertson’s modern spelling edition. Quotations from the revised, or ‘new’, Arcadia follow the 1590 text, since I am often interested in its accidentals, with any substantive readings from the 1593 text that are preferred by Skretkowicz incorporated silently, and with alternate references to the page number of Skretkowicz’s modern spelling edition; where reference is made to a passage without its being quoted, page and line references to Skretkowicz’s edition are given. Similarly, in the case of Mary Wroth’s Urania, where I am again interested in the accidentals, I have quoted from the original printed and manuscript texts, with alternate references to the page numbers of Roberts’s editions; again, where passages are only referred to, page and line references to these editions are given. In naming Sidney’s works one also faces dilemmas. I have followed Ringler, for convenience rather than from conviction, in referring to Astrophil and Stella rather than to Astrophel and Stella. I refer not to An Apology for Poetry (the title of the unauthorized 1595 printing) or to A Defence of Poetry (a title invented in the Clarendon edition) but to The Defence of Poesy (the title with which Sidney’s work appeared in its authorized 1595 printing and all subsequent reprintings). Reference to the Arcadia is often misleading. There is no such thing as the Old Arcadia or the New Arcadia and many students and scholars labour under the misapprehension that The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the

xiv

Note on Spelling, References, and Abbreviations

title used for both forms of the Arcadia in both manuscript and print) refers only to one form of Sidney’s work. The naming of the original Arcadia as ‘old’ at least has the licence of Fulke Greville, who in a celebrated letter to Sidney’s father-in-law refers to ‘sr philip sydneys old arcadia’ and ‘that old one’. But it is still misleading to italicize the word, as if it was ever a part of the work’s title. The naming of the revised Arcadia as ‘new’ has no authority and I try to avoid it. The following titles (and abbreviations) are therefore used: The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

the work in its original manuscript form, and its various, revised, printed forms

the ‘old’ Arcadia

the original, manuscript form of the work

the revised Arcadia or the ‘new’ Arcadia

the revised version of Books I–III

the 1590 Arcadia (90)

as printed in 1590, incomplete in three books

the 1593 Arcadia or the composite Arcadia (93)

as printed in 1593, with an ending from a revised and edited form of the original Books III–V

the 1598 Arcadia (98)

including the Arcadia as in 1593 plus Certain Sonnets, The Defence of Poesy, Astrophil and Stella, and The Lady of May

The following abbreviations are used to refer to editions: Defence

The Defence of Poesy [edited as A Defence of Poetry], in Prose

Feuillerat

The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1962) [for the correspondence]

Major Works Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 2002) [reissue of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Oxford Authors (Oxford, 1989)]

Note on Spelling, References, and Abbreviations NA

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford, 1987)

OA

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1973)

Prose

Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973)

xv

Ringler The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962) For editions of other authors, the following abbreviations are used, with the author’s name given only where necessary to avoid confusion: Bullough

Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, 2 vols., ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh and London, 1939)

Croft

The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft (Oxford, 1984)

Dedication A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford, 1986) Poems

The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, 2nd edn. (Baton Rouge, La., 1992)

Remains

Fulke Greville, The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1965)

U1

The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995)

U2

The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts and completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, Ariz., 1999)

Works

The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols., ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford, 1998)

xvi


The following additional abbreviations are used for primary and secondary sources of which frequent use is made: 1586

Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed. Jan van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (Leiden, 1986)

Achievements

Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements, ed. M. J. B. Allen, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (New York, 1990)

Buxton

John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (London, 1964)

Chronology

Michael G. Brennan and Noel J. Kinnamon, A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654 (Basingstoke, 2003)

Daniel, Poems Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. A. C. Sprague (Cambridge, Mass., 1930; repr. Chicago, 1965) Duncan-Jones Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London, 1991) Elegies

Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney (1587), facsimile, ed. A. J. Colaianne and W. J. Godshalk (Delmar, N.Y., 1980)

Garrett

Sidney: The Critical Heritage, ed. Martin Garrett (London and New York, 1996)

Hamilton

A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge, 1977)

Hannay

Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York and Oxford, 1990)

HMC

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle and Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, 6 vols. (London, 1925–66)

Jonson

Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52)

Kay

Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford, 1987)


xvii

May

Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts, 2nd edn. (Asheville, N.C., 1999)

Nobilis

Thomas Moffett, Nobilis … and Lessus Lugubris, ed. and trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, 1940)

ODNB

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols., ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004)

Shorter Poems Edmund Spenser, The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London, 1999) Woudhuysen Henry Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996)


Introduction The most important event in the literary career of Sir Philip Sidney was his death in 1586 at the age of 31, shortly after the period (from around 1578 to around 1584) in which he wrote his major works. The next most important event was the printing of those works, some of which he had allowed to circulate in manuscript during his lifetime, between 1590 and 1598. Sidney was ahead of his time as a writer, and he died before his time. And his time, in the event, was the 1590s. Had he lived, his works might never have been printed: only in this way—the manuscript author entering print posthumously—could the 1590s become a decade in which Sidney dominated literary culture. It is true that his works had their readers during his lifetime and while they remained in manuscript, but the creation of Sidney as a major English author was the work of those who saw him into print.¹ His life as a published author was posthumous, and as such he was only to be found by his new readers in his texts. If he was to be approached, addressed, or discussed as a writer, he had to be inferred or resurrected from the printed page. His voice in the period of his ascendancy was always cut off from the agency and immediate context of his mind and body; his texts were therefore especially open. The aim of this study is to look at what was found in those texts by those who wrote after his death and, in one way or another, following his example; at how their own writings respond to that example; and at what it was in Sidney and his writings that provoked that response. The story of Sidney’s reception can of course be traced to the present day, but it makes sense to end this study with the end of the generation immediately following Sidney and the period of the most intense response to his example—that is, around 1640. By this date Ben Jonson was dead, Mary Wroth’s surviving writings had been finished, and Sidney’s works

¹ On the printing of Sidney see the introductions to the Oxford editions of his works, Victor Skretkowicz, ‘Building Sidney’s Reputation: Texts and Editions of the Arcadia’, in 1586, 111–24, Woudhuysen, esp. ch. 8, Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995), 228–38, and Steven Mentz, ‘Selling Sidney: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the Boundaries of Elizabethan Print and Manuscript Cultures’, Text, 13 (2000), 151–71.

xx

Introduction

had let in the last continuation of the Arcadia to be included between their boards. Sidney’s career as a writer of vernacular poetry and prose fiction began in around 1577. Songs for court tilts and an early pastoral dialogue—though in each case hard to date—probably came first.² An entertainment for Queen Elizabeth known now as ‘The Lady of May’ followed in 1578 and by 1580 Sidney had probably completed the seventy-seven poems and five books of prose narrative of his first version of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, named for his younger sister Mary. Next came a treatise on poetry written in the form of a forensic speech for the defence, known now by either of the two titles under which it was printed in 1595—The Defence of Poesy and An Apology for Poetry. At about the same time—whether before or after we do not know—Sidney was working on his celebrated sonnet sequence, Astrophil [or Astrophel]³ and Stella, and in 1581 he helped to devise a major court entertainment in which he participated, known now as The Four Foster Children of Desire.⁴ At some point in these years a set of miscellaneous poems—songs, translations, occasional pieces, experiments, and poems that were not used in the Arcadia—took shape as the Certain Sonnets.⁵ Sidney’s major work of the years around 1583 was a thorough revision of the Arcadia, with few new poems being written but a great deal of fresh prose and rearrangement and expansion of existing passages. He got as far as the closing stages of a completely ² On the Ottley Manuscript, which includes songs written by Sidney for a tilt probably in 1577 (‘Waynd from the hope’ and two poems previously rejected by Ringler, AT 19 and 21) see Peter Beal, ‘Poems by Sir Philip Sidney: The Ottley Manuscript’, The Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978), 284–95, a reply by Jean Robertson in The Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 202–5, Woudhuysen, 266–78, Duncan-Jones, 144–5, May, 74–5, and William A. Ringler, ‘The Text of The Poems of Sidney Twenty-five Years After’, in Achievements, 129–44 (137). For the pastoral dialogue PP 1 see Chapter 1 below, n. 31. ³ See Ringler, 458. Before the unauthorized 1591 printing of Sidney’s sequence as Astrophel and Stella, references to his persona were to ‘Astrophil’; thereafter both spellings were used; the authorized 1598 text keeps the ‘Astrophel’ spelling for the title and in the text itself. ⁴ For discussion of Sidney’s role see Duncan-Jones, 205–11. See also A. C. Hamilton, ‘Problems in Reconstructing an Elizabethan Text: The Example of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘‘Triumph’’’, ELR, 26 (1996), 451–81. Ringler included two poems in his edition as possibly by Sidney (PP 4 and 5); they are included in the report of the entertainment by Henry Goldwell, A Briefe Declaration of the Shews … (1581), an edition of which is provided in Major Works. ⁵ See Ringler, 423–6, Germaine Warkentin, ‘Sidney’s Certain Sonnets: Speculations on the Evolution of the Text’, The Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 430–44, and Woudhuysen, ch. 9.

Introduction

xxi

new Book III and stopped, in the middle of a sentence. This may not have been his last act as an author. Lost translations of religious works by Du Bartas and Duplessis-Mornay perhaps occupied his last years, and an incomplete metrical translation of the Psalms might be dated at any time between about 1580 and his death.⁶ His works—with the exception of those written for known occasions—are so hard to date because Sidney only twice refers to them in his voluminous correspondence, and vaguely at that—mentioning ‘my songes’ (probably some of the Certain Sonnets) in the early summer of 1580 and ‘My toyfull booke’ (presumed to be the Arcadia) later in the same year.⁷ Editors and biographers have ventured dates on fairly sound internal and contextual evidence. Sidney’s stylistic development as a poet, for example, makes clear that the sonnets of Astrophil and Stella post-date those of the Arcadia. The indication that Astrophil shadows Sidney and Stella Lady Penelope Rich—because the work is autobiographical, or a fantasy based in fact, or a courtly compliment—also helps to date that work. And periods when we know Sidney was at Wilton, the seat of his sister’s husband the Earl of Pembroke, seem to present the only opportunities for the sustained work needed to produce his carefully wrought poetry and prose.⁸ But then again, whatever dates we choose to assign to individual works, it is not disputed that Sidney’s extraordinary and varied oeuvre was produced in a short space of time, between about 1577 and his death in 1586—in a period of at most ⁶ Greville mentions Sidney’s translations of ‘monsieur du plessis book agains[t] atheisme’ and ‘bartas his semeyne’ in his letter to Walsingham about the printing of the Arcadia of November 1586 (text in full in Woudhuysen, 416–17). The Du Bartas was entered by Ponsonby in the Stationers’ Register along with the Arcadia in 1588. The translation of Duplessis-Mornay’s De la verité de la religion Chrestienne was incomplete according to Golding’s A woorke concerning the trewnesse of the christian religion. Begunne to be translated by Sir P. Sidney and finished by A. Golding (1587); Sylvester refers to the unfinished state of the translation of Du Bartas’s La Semaine in one of the prefatory poems to his version, Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works … translated by Josuah Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979), 2.892. Other references are summarized in Ringler, 339, and by Duncan-Jones in Prose, 155–7. Less certainly, Sidney may have begun a translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, although the only evidence in this case is John Hoskyns’s remark in his ‘Directions for Speech and Style’ that Henry Wotton had a copy of Sidney’s version of the first two books: The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638, ed. Louise Brown Osborn (New Haven, 1937), 155. On the dating of the Psalmes see Chapter 3, n. 32. ⁷ James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577 (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1972), 540 (Sidney to Edward Denny, 22 May 1580); Feuillerat, 132 (Sidney to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580). ⁸ See, e.g., Ringler, 435–40 (Astrophil and Stella) and 365–6 (‘old’ Arcadia).

xxii

Introduction

eight years, with the major works probably covering only five or six years between them. The works printed were not in all cases the works known in manuscript or heard in the company of Sidney, his friends, and his family. The Certain Sonnets is a collection of thirty-two poems, between one and thirty-one of which are found in various configurations in a large number of early manuscripts and printed books prior to the collection’s printing in the 1598 Arcadia, where it is placed immediately after the Arcadia and before the Defence and Astrophil and Stella. Two manuscripts of the ‘old’ Arcadia have substantially complete versions of the collection appended (called ‘Dyvers and sondry Sonettes’ and ‘Certeine lowse Sonnettes and songes’), a smaller selection follows a third manuscript version of the ‘old’ Arcadia, and a substantial selection is included with a number of poems from the ‘old’ Arcadia and three songs from Sidney’s appearances in tilts in the Ottley manuscript.⁹ Sidney seems to have given one isolated poem from this miscellany (CS 30) to an acquaintance, and written another (CS 6) into a book perhaps belonging to his secretary William Temple.¹⁰ Astrophil and Stella circulated little in manuscript, although its separable songs were allowed to stray further; when first printed in 1591 it was incomplete, lacking two poems and other lines and passages.¹¹ The most important case is Sidney’s great prose romance The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The Arcadia survives in its original form in eight manuscripts (and a ninth containing only the poems) witnessing several stages of subtle revision; other manuscripts can be conjectured as lost, and others still can be guessed at.¹² In its revised form it survives in one manuscript only, and a second is represented by the printed version, published in 1590 under the supervision of Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville.¹³ This printed version presented the incomplete text of the three revised books and only some ⁹ This information is usefully tabulated in Woudhuysen, 247. ¹⁰ CS 30: see Ringler, 555, Ringler, ‘Twenty-five Years After’, 134, and Woudhuysen, 242–5; CS 6: see Peter J. Croft, Autograph Poetry in the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1973), item 14, Ringler, ‘Twenty-five Years After’, 133–4, and Woudhuysen, 221–2. ¹¹ See Ringler, 447–57, 538–46, and 566–7, and Woudhuysen, ch. 11. ¹² See Ringler, 366–70 and 525–9, OA, xlii–lxvi, Woudhuysen, ch. 10, and the discovery reported by Woudhuysen of a page from an unknown manuscript copy: ‘A New Manuscript Fragment of Sidney’s Old Arcadia: The Huddleston Manuscript’, in English Manuscript Studies, 11 (2002), 52–69. ¹³ See Ringler, 370–82 and 529–38, NA, liii–lxxix, and Woudhuysen, ch. 10. For full bibliographical descriptions of Sidney’s printed works see Bent Juel-Jensen, ‘Sir Philip Sidney, 1554–1586: A Check-list of Early Editions of his Works’, in Kay, 289–314.

Introduction

xxiii

of the poems that in the original Arcadia are gathered into four sets of eclogues between each of the five books; the editor of the 1590 volume claims that their arrangement is his doing, although this claim has been challenged.¹⁴ In 1593, under the Countess of Pembroke’s stewardship, the work was freed of the chapter divisions introduced by the editors of the 1590 text, and completed by the addition of a revised text of the last three books of the original Arcadia. These are much shorter in length than the revised books, but they do provide the ending that remains predicted throughout the revised version. The eclogues were expanded to include almost all of the poems from the original eclogues, as well as two new poems involving characters on the fringes of the world of Arcadia and perhaps not intended by Sidney for such incorporation.¹⁵ There is no avoiding these complexities if we are to interpret the Arcadia. A basic story seems clear enough, but to understand it we will need to remind ourselves of the Arcadia’s own story. Basilius, Duke of Arcadia, removes his family from court into pastoral hiding, because of an ill-omened, riddling oracle. Coming to Arcadia, the cousins Pyrocles, prince of Macedon, and Musidorus, Duke of Thessaly, fall in love with Basilius’ two daughters, Pyrocles with Philoclea and Musidorus with Pamela. In order to gain access to them Pyrocles disguises himself as an amazon, Cleophila, and Musidorus as a shepherd, Dorus, but their wooing is thwarted because one is the wrong sex and the other the wrong class, and they must find a way of making the princesses fall for them without letting their masks slip. Musidorus, by telling tales of himself in the third person, succeeds, and persuades Pamela to elope with him. However, they are captured, just as Musidorus is overcome with the urge to rape the sleeping Pamela. Pyrocles’ case is more complex, because both Basilius, believing his disguise, and his wife Gynecia, seeing through it, have fallen passionately in love with him. He arranges the same tryst with each and they are reconciled, but Basilius drinks what Gynecia thinks is a love potion and falls down, apparently dead; meanwhile Pyrocles and Philoclea agree to elope, and make love. They are trapped by Basilius’ servant, the clownish shepherd Dametas, whose family Pamela and Dorus have lodged with, and both Musidorus and Pyrocles, revealed now as princes but using assumed names, are put on trial for ravishing the princesses and murdering Basilius. Pyrocles’ father Euarchus happens ¹⁴ See the editorial note on A4v, Sukanta Chaudhuri, ‘The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 35 (1983), 185–202, and Woudhuysen, 313. ¹⁵ Ringler usefully tabulates the different configurations of the eclogues, 381–2.

xxiv

Introduction

to be passing through Arcadia, to visit Basilius and persuade him out of his seclusion (and even, in an irony mercifully removed in the revised Arcadia, to propose that his son and nephew marry Basilius’ daughters). Euarchus agrees to act as an anonymous judge, and neither he nor Pyrocles, who was brought up with Musidorus from the age of six, recognizes the other. The princes are found guilty and sentenced to death, and only then are their true identities discovered; Euarchus, however, stands by his judgement. Basilius at this point awakes from what was only a drug-induced coma, and a happy ending sweeps all problems away. After completing the Arcadia Sidney became dissatisfied with its ending. He expanded a passage dealing with Euarchus’ journey to Arcadia, and removed from Musidorus’ love scene with Pamela his wish to rape her, and from Pyrocles’ with Philoclea the consummation of their union. The revisions simplify the case the princes must argue and involve them in fewer falsehoods; they therefore make Euarchus’ condemnation seem more undeserved and Basilius’ forgiveness less inappropriate. But this stage was not preserved in copies of the ‘old’ Arcadia, which probably indicates that Sidney soon took on the task of rewriting the whole thing from the start, adding many more sophisticated touches to the prose of passages he substantially preserved; a prelude to Book I that established that the princes are men of virtue and action, as well as a lengthy chivalric digression; and a great deal of retrospective narration of their earlier careers to the scenes in Book II in which, through story-telling, the princes woo and win their princesses. The most important addition is a new character, Basilius’ nephew Amphialus. Counterbalancing the love matches of the four main characters, Amphialus is loved by Queen Helen of Corinth but loves Philoclea, and this asymmetry causes the death of his friend in Book I and the rebellion episode of the new Book III. His evil mother Cecropia, who wants to depose her brother-in-law Basilius and put Amphialus on the throne, has Pamela and Philoclea kidnapped, together with Zelmane (the name Pyrocles-as-amazon takes in the revised version), and tries to make either of the princesses agree to marry her son. Amphialus goes along with what she tells him of this plan, out of desperate love for Philoclea, but presents the rebellion as a just political uprising. The book turns to epic, as Basilius’ forces lay siege to Cecropia’s castle, and Amphialus and a disguised Musidorus distinguish themselves first in battle and then in a series of staged single combats. By the end of the book as we have it Cecropia is dead, Amphialus is close to death and has been taken off to be nursed

Introduction

xxv

to health by Helen, Musidorus is about to break into the castle, and Pyrocles/Zelmane has killed two of the three brothers who have been left in charge, and will just manage to finish off the third.¹⁶ How the work must end is clear enough. The problem, for Sidney as for those who wrote bridging passages connecting the composite work’s two halves, was how to return to the confines of pastoral retreat and the original dénouement (confirmed for us by a second visit to the oracle in the revised Book III) after this exhilarating epic interlude.¹⁷ Sidney may have run out of time, or will, or ideas—we will never know. There are two theories of the evolution of Sidney’s text and each sees the revised Arcadia differently. The first, proposed by Ringler and Robertson, the Oxford editors of the poems and the ‘old’ Arcadia respectively, sees the original version as a finished work, to be read as such, and the revised Arcadia as a different work, terminating in a different manuscript document lacking any indication as to the arrangement of the eclogues, and therefore to be read in a bare form shorn of them.¹⁸ Such a text was perforce provided in Victor Skretkowicz’s Oxford edition, although at odds with the second theory that he himself developed. According to this theory a single working copy of the original Arcadia evolved into the revised Arcadia and was also therefore the source for the ending supplied in 1593. We should therefore read the work in that form, since it represents the Arcadia in the state in which Sidney left it. The fragmentary form of the 1590 Arcadia and Skretkowicz’s Oxford edition, it follows, is Greville’s achievement; the Countess of Pembroke’s edition of 1593 restores Sidney’s work back to a sort of completeness it always possessed. Editors have to make up their minds. Readers of Sidney must be aware of this picture but can use any or all of the texts available. The 1593 Arcadia was the ultimate source of all subsequent printings and, as C. S. Lewis insisted, has a priority as the only form in which the work was read from that date until the early twentieth century.¹⁹ But the 1590 text was preferred by some notable early readers of Sidney, ¹⁶ Skretkowicz, xxxvii–viii, shows how this victory is inevitable because of the careful way in which throughout the revised Arcadia Sidney indicates a pecking order among the principal heroes—Pyrocles, Musidorus, Amphialus and Anaxius, and Argalus. ¹⁷ The bridging passages by Sir William Alexander and James Johnstoun are discussed in Chapter 8 below. ¹⁸ See Ringler’s summary of how ‘today I believe we should read’ the Arcadias, 379. ¹⁹ C. S. Lewis, English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), 332; manuscripts of the ‘old’ Arcadia were first recognized as such by Bertram Dobell (see articles in the Athenaeum, 7 September 1907 and the Quarterly Review, 211 (1909)),

xxvi

Introduction

and others writing between 1586 and 1590, or even after, make good use of the ‘old’ Arcadia.²⁰ Some of the earliest readers of Sidney knew that there were two Arcadias,²¹ but after the 1590s this seems to have been forgotten, and the old manuscripts of the ‘old’ Arcadia went into hibernation for three hundred years. Most early readers would therefore have understood the 1593 ending to be a sort of draft and would not necessarily have guessed that Books I–III of the revised Arcadia were a revision of a work that had already reached a perfected form. The 1593 preface by Hugh Sanford, an employee of the Earl of Pembroke who probably did much of the work on the Countess of Pembroke’s behalf, mocks the 1590 edition and is very unclear about the different states and statuses of Sidney’s texts: all we are told is that Pembroke, ‘by the view of what was ill done guided to the consideration of what was not done’, has given us ‘the conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia: and that no further then the Authours own writings, or knowen determinations could direct’ (¶4r). The editorial comment at the point where the 1590 text had ended and the material new in 1593 is added focuses not on the state of Sidney’s papers but on the fictional events: How this combate ended, how the Ladies by the comming of the discovered forces were delivered, and restored to Basilius, and how Dorus againe returned to his old master Dametas, is altogether unknowne. What afterward chaunced, out of the Authors owne writings and conceits [i.e. plans, intentions] hath bene supplied, as foloweth. (2F3r)

Readers from 1593 onwards, therefore, saw a gap and an imperfection, had what they believed was the completest form of the Arcadia, and were left to form their own judgement on whether this was what its author intended, from the riddling remarks of the 1593 editors.²² As the leading to an edition in vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1912–26). ²⁰ John Hoskyns, in ‘Directions for Speech and Style’, uses ‘the first edition in quarto, without Samfords Additions’ (Life, Letters, and Writings, 115); Abraham Fraunce uses a manuscript of the ‘old’ Arcadia in his The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and Robert Greene has read Sidney’s work in manuscript before writing Menaphon (1589). ²¹ Sir John Harington distinguishes between Sidney’s ‘first Arcadia’ and ‘the printed booke’ in his Orlando Furioso (1591). See the discussion of Harington and the Sidneys in Chapter 4 below. ²² In the 1613 edition, and only in that edition, a new leaf was inserted (replaced in later issues and subsequent editions by Alexander’s ‘Supplement’, a bridging passage) that offered a fuller explanation: ‘Thus far the worthy Author had revised or inlarged that first written Arcadia of his, which onely passed from hand to hand, and was never printed: having a purpose likewise to have new ordered, augmented, and concluded the

Introduction

xxvii

succeeding chapters will show, both Greville’s incomplete Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke’s complete Sidney are powerful models. My only choice is to prefer both to the Clarendon editions, which in striving to remove the layers of editorial varnish represent neither printed text of the revised Arcadia well.²³ The work that must be our starting point for any attempt to understand why and how Sidney wrote is The Defence of Poesy. Printed in 1595 and thereafter included in every edition of the Arcadia, it is a treatise about literature concerned exclusively with its formal qualities and its moral force. Building on classical and continental accounts of rhetoric and poetics, the Defence tells us that poetry (which means fiction in verse or prose) has the power to change us. The poet feigns ‘notable images of virtues, vices, or what else’ (Defence, 81); he teaches, delights, and moves his readers, drawing them in by delighting them so that they learn from these idealized images and are moved to imitate the good and shun the bad in their own lives. The poet is a more effective force for good than the historian (historical events cannot offer the best patterns for behaviour) and the philosopher (who lacks the ability to move the reader to follow his precepts). The poet’s power resides in the ability to formulate a Platonic ‘idea or fore-conceit’ (79) of the work (this may be rest, had he not bene prevented by untymely death. So that all which followeth here of this Work, remayned as it was done and sent away in severall loose sheets (beeing never after reviewed, nor so much as seene all together by himself) without any certaine disposition or perfect order. Yet for that it was his, howsoever deprived of the just grace it should have had, was held too good to be lost: and therefore with much labor were the best coherencies, that could be gathered out of those scattered papers, made, and afterwards printed as now it is, onely by hir Noble care to whose deare hand they were first committed, and for whose delight and intertaynement only undertaken. What conclusion it should have had, or how far the Work have bene extended (had it had his last hand thereunto) was onely knowne to his owne spirit, where only those admirable Images were (and no where else) to bee cast.’ (‘2E5r’) This repeats topoi from Sidney’s dedication to his sister and Sanford’s 1593 preface, is by no means clear, and very probably overstates Sidney’s nonchalance. But it does distinguish the complete ‘old’ Arcadia from the incomplete revised Arcadia. ²³ In editing the 1590 text Skretkowicz removes the chapter divisions and assigns the eclogues to an appendix. But the highly important Sidneian revisions of OA III–V, as well as the careful and necessary editorial revisions of 1593, are relegated to the apparatus of Robertson’s edition of the ‘old’ Arcadia. For a careful and sensible account of the two theories see Woudhuysen, 303–17; Skretkowicz restates and further develops the implications of his textual theory in ‘Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘‘Complete’’ Arcadia’, Sidney Journal, 18.2 (2000), 37–70, insisting that ‘the edition of 1593 is the best possible representation of the completest form of Sidney’s entire text’ (38) and ‘represents in its entirety the nearest text we shall ever get to Sidney’s final concept of the romance’ (69).

xxviii

Introduction

its plot, its characters, or its form) and to impose this idea on the mind of the reader. In its shortest formulation Sidney’s definition of poetry is this: ‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mim¯esis —that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight’ (79–80). The term ‘speaking picture’ covers both a work, personified and given a voice, and the idealized characters it depicts. The two highest forms of poetry are first the heroic (like the Arcadia) and then the lyric. In a digression Sidney considers practical questions of generic decorum, literary rhetoric and style, and prosody as they concern modern English writing.²⁴ As a theory of literature, the Defence is all about the reader. What it tells us very little about is the author, and especially the ways in which writing might relate to the author’s immediate personal or political contexts, which is where many critics have looked for the meanings of Sidney’s works. Sidney’s life is one of the best documented of early modern writers, and there are some gaps between that life and Sidney’s writings that we must acknowledge. Ringler puts the matter bluntly and insightfully: Sidney did not write any poems about his campaigns in the Netherlands, or if he did no record of them survives. His poetry is remarkable for what he did not write about. He was a courtier, but except for some passages in The Lady of May he never wrote in praise of the Queen. He was sincerely religious, but he never wrote a poem of personal devotion. He placed a high value upon friendship, but except for his ‘Two Pastoralls’ and a single mention of Languet he never wrote a commendatory or memorial poem for a real person. The major interest of his life was politics, but only once did he deal with problems of government, and then under the veil of a beast fable. Except for Astrophil and Stella his verse was neither official nor personal and dealt almost entirely with imagined situations. Most of it was concerned with love; but even in his love poetry when he spoke as ‘I’ he usually did so through ²⁴ For a fuller account see the Introduction to my edition Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London, 2004), lii–lxii. Especially useful studies are the Introduction to An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965; repr. Manchester, 1973), John C. Ulreich, Jr, ‘‘‘The Poets Only Deliver’’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15.1 (1982), 67–84, S. K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park, Pa., 1989), and the article by Stillman cited below. Ulreich’s article and other useful articles by Hardison, Weiner, Craig, and Barnes are reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden, Ct., 1986).

Introduction

xxix

a created character, Philisides—and even Astrophil. He remained aloof, and so could view both his productions and himself with a sometimes quizzical detachment.²⁵

Ringler is talking only about Sidney’s poems, and excluding his prose works and his verse translations. Sidney did write about kingship and politics (to a limited extent) and friendship (quite unforgettably) in the Arcadia; and he did translate the Psalms. But in his imaginative and poetic work Sidney addressed his interests obliquely, via fictions that interested him for their own sake, in poetic forms and plot structures the shaping of which he took to levels of intricacy and polish not seen before in English (or very often since). He did of course write many letters, mostly not printed until the nineteenth century, that witness his engagement in European politics.²⁶ And he wrote three prose works that engage directly in contemporary affairs: a ‘Discourse on Irish Affairs’, surviving only in a single, fragmentary holograph manuscript; a letter to Queen Elizabeth dissuading her from the French match, which achieved great popularity in manuscript over many years and was printed in 1663; and a Defence of the Earl of Leicester (his mother’s brother), answering a specific printed libel, which, although initially intended for print publication, survives in only three manuscript copies.²⁷ The Letter to Queen Elizabeth is the most effective of these, and in it we see much of the rhetorical and intellectual brilliance of The Defence of Poesy. But Sidney devoted more thought, study, and energy to the latter, and in it he turned away from political concerns, conspicuously failing to elaborate a detailed theory even of the one genre (placed bottom in his pecking order of genres) that Renaissance writers saw as having political motives—pastoral. The gap between what we know of his life and what we find in his literary works remains something of a paradox, and this is especially the case where politics are concerned. In his lifetime, Sidney was not known by the majority of his contemporaries as a poet and ²⁵ Ringler, li–ii. ²⁶ Notably in The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Steuart A. Pears (London, 1845). Printings of letters to and from Sidney from 1591 onwards are listed and described in Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism (1554–1984), ed. Donald V. Stump, Jerome S. Dees, and C. Stuart Hunter (New York, 1994), items 164–208. Sidney’s European context is usefully stressed in Alan Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London, 2000). ²⁷ All in Prose. For the Letter to Queen Elizabeth in manuscript see also Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), ch. 4, and ‘Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that ‘‘False Knave’’ Alexander Dicsone’, English Manuscript Studies, 11 (2002), 1–51.

xxx

Introduction

maker of fictions, and was celebrated, especially on the continent,²⁸ for his political rather than his poetic vision, and for his public rather than his private life. After his death readers had to construct an image of the author of the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and the Defence, and most sought for meanings not in Sidney’s political projects but in that private life. It may be that the force with which Astrophil and Stella impels us to imagine the life of a poet-lover was responsible for Astrophil rather than Sidney the politician dominating the imagination of readers of Sidney’s other works too. We can of course resist the temptation to cut literature off from its political context. The Arcadia has been read for its references to politics, as either offering a general political theory—as Greville wants it to—or as commenting directly on contemporary events. But it could very easily have done more to help the political readers. There are many opportunities for digressive political analysis in the Arcadia, and very few are taken. Euarchus’ analysis of the state of Greece in the revised Book V (OA, 355–6) is the closest we come, but the many different states of Asia Minor whose turmoil the princes settle are riven not by ideological schism but by personal love and hate and by family strife; again, Basilius is very barely a study in pacific government and isolationism, and far more a great comic creation whose retreat allows a superbly plotted pastoral drama to unfold.²⁹ In an important recent article on the Defence, Robert E. Stillman brilliantly demonstrates the theoretical reasons ‘why Sidney, among all the major Renaissance poets, in spite of the potency of his political and pious objectives, is the least topical, the least likely to load his fictions with allusions to specific historical persons or events’. Stillman persuasively redefines the political, separating it from the topical to argue that politics are not excluded in Sidney’s literary theory. Sidney has political aims, but these are not restricted to current issues: ‘The move from topical allegory to speaking pictures of (universal Ideas of) virtue and vice is not a remove from history or politics … but instead the very means by which to effect the ²⁸ See Stewart’s Sidney: A Double Life. ²⁹ Richard C. McCoy surveys political readings of the Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, 1979), 38–40, and these are brought together and extended comprehensively in Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1996). Worden sees the Arcadia as commenting directly on the French match (and therefore as sharing an occasion with the Letter to Queen Elizabeth) as well as outlining a coherent political theory (see esp. chs 12–16).

Introduction

xxxi

most important kind of political-historical transformation—the kind that transforms the way people think’.³⁰ When Sidney theorizes literature in the Defence he is not interested in what it can tell us about authors, but in what it can do to its readers. Literature can transform the way we think, can educate us in human nature and moral values, can teach us how to live. This is not to say that Sidney’s texts have nothing to tell us about their context, only to insist that they were designed also to have something to tell us about ourselves. One thing that clearly marks his theory is a concern with educating and transforming the future reader; and of course many of Sidney’s readers were, or became, writers.

* * * Sidney’s impact on English literature is diverse and not always easy to characterize. He looks over the shoulders of English writers until well into the seventeenth century, but whilst some respond by trying to write like him others simply acknowledge him as a great forerunner, the man who showed that English was a language in which poetry and prose could be written to rival the best of the ancients and the modern Europeans. For John Buxton, the influence Sidney exerts after death is similar to the encouragement his patronage offered writers during his life.³¹ For A. C. Hamilton, likewise, Sidney ‘by his literary criticism, writings, and influence’ created ‘a Renaissance of English literature’.³² But in one recent study Sidney’s status as point of origin for later writers is seen as a convenient genealogical myth: a founding father was needed, and Sidney fitted the bill; this is why writers who say he inspires them write nothing like him.³³ Another approach, looking at Sidney’s centrality to the development of lyric poetry, sees not a fountainhead for imitative practice but a legendary image to be contested—the relationship and contradictions perceived in Sidney’s life and writings between the active and contemplative lives, between public aims and private passions, become a theme that each sonneteer reformulates.³⁴ ³⁰ ‘The Scope of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics’, ELR, 32 (2002), 355–85 (384). ³¹ Buxton, chs. 6 and 7. ³² Hamilton, 9. ³³ Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, Mass., 1994). ³⁴ Lisa M. Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark and London, 1998). A similar point about Sidney’s legacy is made by Elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (New York, 2003), 30.

xxxii

Introduction

Important in each case are the texts and writers chosen to tell the story: no story of Sidney’s impact will have much point if the writers examined seem indifferent to his writings, to what he intended those writings to do, and to what they achieved. For that reason I do not look at every writer of the period, only at those for whom Sidney was of particular importance. And there is a further distinction to be made, between those who respond simply to Sidney’s writings and those who respond to Sidney’s writings within the setting of Sidney’s life, a life lived according to a particular ethos, placing a certain value on writing, and intending certain consequences for both writing and action. In all the cases examined here the life meant a great deal to the writer: their idea of Sidney was as important to their response as any words he wrote. I use the word ‘response’ in this book’s subtitle to characterize the sort of relationship between Sidney and later writers that interests me. I use other words along the way: these include ‘influence’ (which tends to flow powerfully in one direction); ‘imitation’ (an important Renaissance model, driven not by the model but by the imitator); ‘reception’ (which also places the creative burden on those who receive instead of on those who transmit); and ‘afterlife’ (a more neutral term for what becomes of writings once they escape their authors’ control). Other words still I use less: ‘allusion’ (which though central to some brilliant recent work on Roman and Augustan poetic inheritance often gets used in Renaissance studies to describe less purposive kinds of reference);³⁵ and ‘intertextuality’ (which moves in the direction of more intricate networks of connection than the binary one of text to text, and usefully pitches agency towards the reader and away from the texts involved).³⁶ What ‘response’ gives us is a concept that implies agency on both sides (action and reaction), that encourages us to imagine the connections between texts in terms of a dialogue, and that reminds us of the hermeneutic logic of question and answer:³⁷ it requires that we consider both the response and the thing that provoked that response, that we endeavour

³⁵ As in the allusions gathered in the useful article by Jackson Boswell and Henry Woudhuysen, ‘Some Unfamiliar Sidney Allusions’, in 1586, 221–37. Cf. Stephen Hinds, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 2002) and Christopher Ricks, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford, 2002). ³⁶ See Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’, in Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Clayton and Rothstein (Madison, Wis., 1991), 3–36. ³⁷ See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn. (London, 1989), 369 and Chapter 1 below.

Introduction

xxxiii

to learn about those who responded to Sidney by looking at Sidney, and about Sidney by looking at the response to him. Sidney himself would have recognized two ways in which one might write after an earlier writer. ‘Chaucer,’ he tells us, ‘did excellently in his Troilus and Criseyde; of whom, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he in that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age go so stumblingly after him’ (Defence, 112). But to imagine Elizabethan writers as following in Chaucer’s footsteps is only to recognize that they must tread the same path in their own attempts to renovate English letters, and not to recommend the imitation of a writer who had ‘great wants, fit to be forgiven in so reverent an antiquity’ (ibid.): they write after him because he wrote before them. Close stylistic imitation—the other sort of writing after—is something Sidney practised, most evidently in those eclogues based on models by Petrarch, Sannazaro, and others. In this manner of writing after another he distinguished two methods: the first aims to achieve an authentic mastery of the style of a classic writer, usually Cicero; the second aims to transform what is admired in various exemplary writers into a unique individual style that learns from them.³⁸ The first sort of imitation is derivative, slavish, a secondary achievement, ‘for the mere follower must always lag behind’, as Quintilian had said.³⁹ The second is critical, revisionist, and original, at the same time embracing and modifying tradition. The writers considered in this study are inspired variously by Sidney’s example and by his style: some write because he wrote; others try also to write like him. In whichever way they follow him, they can be seen again to fall into two groups in respect of their attitude to their debt. Some acknowledge it, embrace Sidney’s example, and require that their writings be seen in relation to Sidney’s; others are more ambivalent, wishing to be seen as independent and original, and the construction of a comparison requires some critical intervention. Is writing after Sidney to take him as a point of departure or to risk absorption by him? Does ³⁸ For Sidney’s scattered comments on imitatio see Defence, 116–18 and Feuillerat, 132 (Sidney to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580). For a useful discussion see Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), esp. 135–40 and 199–203. ³⁹ necesse est enim semper sit posterior qui sequitur (Institutio oratoria, 10.2.10). See G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ, 33 (1980), 1–32, esp. 19–26. My thinking on imitation has benefited especially from Thomas M. Greene’s superb book The Light In Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Ct., 1982).

xxxiv

Introduction

imitation lead to dependence or is it a careful route to originality?⁴⁰ These questions are mirrored by our own questions about what a study like this is for. Is it about Sidney or about those who write after him? Does it aim to tell us what later writers did with Sidney, or what Sidney did to them? Sidney’s example has been studied before. Useful studies have been made of the myth of Sidney in the fifty or so years after his death, of the range and effect of his patronage, of the scribal publication and printing of his works, of the influence of his works and theories on other writings within particular genres, and of the adaptation of his plots in the drama.⁴¹ Efforts likewise have been made to discuss the writings of those who show particular debts to Sidney. Too often these fail to find a productive way of proceeding because they do not balance influence—where a later author is discussed in terms of Sidney—with reception—where Sidney is discussed in terms of a later author. Studies of the influence of Sidney will find everything influenced to be a pale imitation; studies of his reception will not find ways of making their findings a part of the study of Sidney; and studies of writers indebted to Sidney will too often mention the debt in passing or as a premise where it cannot in fact be separated from the story of Sidney’s reception, and where that reception cannot be separated from the story of the development of those writers. I aim to strike a balance, to look at writing after Sidney as a response to Sidney, both the man and his works. The response can show us something in Sidney that we would not otherwise be able to see; and Sidney can likewise show us something ⁴⁰ There is a sociological side to such questions: for those courtly writers whose ethos was based in an aristocratic culture of autonomy, any sort of dependence was charged in a very different way than it was for non-courtly, professional writers. See Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), and cf. May, 199. ⁴¹ General studies of the Sidney afterlife include the excellent introductions to Garrett and to Kay. Myth: R. S. Esplin, ‘The Emerging Legend of Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1652’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah, 1970), W. H. Bond, ‘The Reputation and Influence of Sir Philip Sidney’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1941), and Berta Siebeck, Das Bild Sir Philip Sidneys in der Englischen Renaissance (Weimar, 1939); patronage: Buxton; scribal publication and printing: see note 1 above; prose fiction: Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford, 1985), esp. ch. 10; poetry: Thomas P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989), esp. ch. 5; drama: M. C. Andrews, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia on the English Stage’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1966). Other references can be gleaned from Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography, ed. Stump, and are found in Chapters 6 and 8 below.

Introduction

xxxv

in a later text or writer that would be invisible without viewing it as a response to him. The response can be seen as an answer to a question, and that answer may pose another question in turn. This exercise is worth conducting because Sidney and his contemporaries are especially concerned with questions of literary imitation and debt, and with ways in which writing has an impact on its readers. It is not excessive to say that the only way to read literature of this period is in connection to other literature; comparisons may be made locally or in general terms, but comparisons must be made because all Renaissance texts court them. The wish to strike a balance between Sidney and the text or author that responds to him accounts for there being almost no Shakespeare in this study, little Spenser, and less Jonson. It is partly a matter of genre: Sidney was a non-dramatic writer, and the most interesting responses to him are in non-dramatic literature. I do not look at the refraction of Sidney’s plots and the echoes of his language in the drama, because it tells us little more about him than that he was celebrated. Where this study is most relevant to Shakespeare and Jonson, therefore, is when I discuss lyric poetry; Jonson also figures in Chapter 4, because of his closeness to members of the Sidney family in the 1600s, and in my postscript. Spenser, for whom the connections to Sidney are much more important, plays an important part in my second chapter. But I have not devoted a chapter to any of these because they seem to be too big for this study. They each in their own way explode the two-way relationship between origin and response that interests me: they do not tell us about Sidney, only about themselves. There is of course much to say. Shakespeare clearly knows his Sidney, borrowing the Gloucester subplot of Lear from the revised Arcadia, perhaps thinking further about the dramatic unities in reading the Defence so he could flout them in The Winter’s Tale and observe them in The Tempest, studying Astrophil and Stella hard as he wrote his own sonnets; the glittering rhetoric and dense visual descriptions of his early plays and poems certainly show the same captivation by Sidney that held the rest of his generation in the 1590s. The relations of Jonson and Spenser to Sidney cannot be avoided in larger studies of those individual authors. But I have preferred here to study writing after Sidney from the perspective of writers for whom the relation to Sidney was a far more fundamental matter. What this study therefore concentrates on delivering is a prosopographical account of the literary response to one of the most important writers of the English Renaissance: it is in the main about individuals who wrote after Sidney—Sidney’s sister the Countess of Pembroke,

xxxvi

Introduction

his brother Robert Sidney, his best friend Fulke Greville, and his niece Mary Wroth—rather than about texts that were written after Sidney. My prosopography is licensed by the prosopographies the texts I discuss enact. Prosopographia (the Greek word means ‘mask-writing’) is a trope that conjures the voice and form of those absent, dead, or imagined into some sort of rhetorical presence. It is what we would call characterization. In more recent theoretical terms prosopography is a sort of historical narrative concerned not with impersonal processes but with the relations between individuals.⁴² The authors I discuss—in texts in which characters are often both more and less than simple fictions, in which personation is especially complex—all write Sidney, resurrect him, shape or transmit his voice. Their approach encourages me to do the same with Sidney and with them, to give them agency and voice. This book is prosopographical, about people. It is not in the business of constructing and refining categories of imitation (however useful those such as Greene’s are)⁴³ or reception. But it may consequently have much to say about the details of literary response precisely because it works through detailed case studies, by examining agency, at least in so far as we can configure it by our acts of prosopographia. It makes imitation personal. My approach means that I cannot claim to have delivered a general narrative of the literary response to Sidney in the period under consideration. The shorter chapters, between each of the main chapters on single figures, do some of this work, but they remain prosopographical in their approach, bringing into view a greater number of individuals, all intensely engaged with the idea of Sidney.

* * * When Philisides gives an account of his upbringing in the fourth eclogues of the ‘old’ Arcadia (OA, 334–5) it deliberately mirrors what we know of the careful training and early promise of Sidney himself in the years leading to his return from his European travels in 1575.⁴⁴ In the years that followed, Sidney was granted one important diplomatic mission, but found his career at court failing to advance with the speed he and others felt he deserved. His letters to his mentor Hubert Languet ⁴² See OED2, ‘prosopography’, 2. ⁴³ See The Light in Troy, esp. 38–48. ⁴⁴ On Sidney’s creation of Philisides and its literary precedents see Ringler, 418 and Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, 439–45; Heninger looks at persona throughout his ch. 7 (see esp. 496–7). For a lively study of Sidney and the persona see Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto, 1998).

Introduction

xxxvii

represent a descent into idleness, or at least an enforced devotion to the vita contemplativa: And, as you can see, I have obviously lost the use of my pen; and my mind itself, even if it was ever of any worth, is beginning, through my wretched idleness, to lose strength without my noticing it. For why should our thoughts be aroused to various kinds of knowledge, unless we have some opportunity of exercising them so that some public benefit may result?⁴⁵

Sidney turns this around in a gesture he calls ‘playing the Stoic’: action is not everything, ‘For while the mind is thus, as it were, drawn out of itself, it cannot turn its keen sight inward to examine itself thoroughly, a task to which no other that men can undertake may be compared’. Sidney, in this letter from early 1578, never tells Languet that he has begun to write poetry; instead, idleness and self-contemplation act as figures for writing. Philisides finds his career thwarted in another, parallel way. Returning from his travels and ‘thought of good hope’ (OA, 334), his ‘well guided life’ is ‘diverted’ by love (335). Love comes to him in a dream, and this dream Philisides puts into verse (OA 73). In the dream vision, Diana and Venus ask Philisides to choose between them, and he chooses, in a rather under-motivated sort of way, Diana’s waiting maid Mira, a precursor of the Stella with whom Sidney’s other persona Astrophil will be in love in his famous sonnet sequence. There is a recollection of Sidney’s early entertainment The Lady of May —in which the Queen had to choose between the May Lady’s two suitors—in this choice, but also an extended glimpse at the mythic episode of the judgement of Paris, in which lie the origins of the Trojan War, of epic and heroic poetry, and therefore of the Arcadia. Philisides finds himself caught up in a sort of blind repetition, as if literary precedent is showing him the way in life—he simply knows that the choice he makes must involve falling in love. This is an aetiology, a tale of origin, for Sidney. It tells us how the man came to love (if he did) and how the poet came to write amorous poetry. And it offers no stronger explanation than a story that imitates another story. It seems to tell us that the logic of literature, of stories and past fictions, is an unavoidable imperative. In the passage that follows the dream vision this is made clear. Philisides meets the girl he has dreamed of, falls in love, and has to write her another poem (340–1).

⁴⁵ Sidney to Languet, 1 March 1578 (trans. John Buxton), in Major Works, 282.

xxxviii

Introduction

Astrophil comes to replace Philisides; each name means ‘star lover’, but Astrophil’s takes the persona’s name further from the sound of its author’s. Astrophil is reproached by a friend (perhaps an imaginary Greville)⁴⁶ for risking the disappointment of the ‘Great expectation’ his learning, birth, and youthful career have raised by turning to love and to love poetry. Astrophil’s answer is barely adequate: Sure you say well, your wisdome’s golden mine Dig deepe with learning’s spade, now tell me this, Hath this world ought so faire as Stella is? (AS 21, 12–14)

It is important that this sonnet ends with a reason for loving, and for writing poetry, that is only semi-articulate. No articulate reasons will ever be given. In all the fictionalized versions of Sidney’s origins as a poet, love is to blame, but it stands for something else, for the frustration of Sidney’s designs on the world, for the failure of his career quite to take off: just as Astrophil and Philisides fall in love, Sidney falls into literature. Sidney becomes his personae after his death: in countless elegies and anthologies poems are addressed to Astrophil and Philisides, and poems by Sidney are ascribed to his personae.⁴⁷ When Philisides enters in the 1590 Arcadia we see the typographical equivalent of a fanfare of trumpets: the unnamed ‘Star, wherby his course was only directed’ is given an initial capital and italicized, becoming thereby a proper noun, like ‘Stella’; and ‘PHILISIDES’ himself is marked in italic capitals as no other name in the text.⁴⁸ Greville calls the Arcadia ‘delicate, though inferior, pictures of himself’,⁴⁹ as if his mind is preserved in the text. Some, including Greville, could look at the portraits of Sidney he gave them or they had copied after his death. Roy Strong observes that Sidney had six different portraits painted (one each by ⁴⁶ See Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554–1628: A Critical Biography (London, 1971), 102–3 for this suggestion. ⁴⁷ I see more continuity in this process than does Edward Berry, who concludes his study of Sidney’s personae: ‘The image of Sidney that survived was essentially that of idealizing poets and biographers, such as Fulke Greville, Thomas Moffet, and Sidney’s sister, the countess of Pembroke, not the image, or series of images, provided by Sidney himself in his fictional autobiography. The creators of the Sidney legend invented a fictional self less interesting and perhaps less ‘‘true’’ than the fictional selves that Sidney had created before them’ (The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 212). ⁴⁸ 2C4r; the typography is preserved in the 1593 and 1598 editions. ⁴⁹ Dedication, 134.

Introduction

xxxix

Veronese, Abondio, Ketel, and de Critz, and two by Hilliard) in a relatively short span of time, ‘which statistically is enormously high in late sixteenth-century terms’. Just as Sidney’s literary theory and practice depend upon the formulation of exemplary images, so he seems to have been concerned with the power of his own image to an unprecedented extent, especially for a commoner.⁵⁰ That the life and spirit, as well as the likeness, is somehow preserved in a portrait, that it is ‘lively’ and therefore communicative like the exemplary images of poetry, helps to make sense of the cryptic couplet that Sidney wrote for the portrait by Cornelius Ketel that he gave to his sister in 1578: ‘Who gives him selfe, may well his picture give | els weare it vayne since both short tyme doe lyve.’⁵¹ This seems to say that it is only meaningful to give your picture if you also give yourself; to give only the picture is pointless, for it will live no longer than the person. The life of the picture, then, is limited by the ability of the viewer to see in it the idea of the person; when he dies only those who have known him will be able to see this, will be able to see the picture as a ‘selfe’ that lives. Portraits, personae, and fictions: it is in such ‘pictures of himself’ that it is easiest for Sidney’s readers to find him after his death. That he becomes his writings, as he becomes his personae and portraits, is a function of an important metonymy, whereby we say ‘Sidney’ for ‘Sidney’s works’ and talk about what ‘he’ says when we mean what those works say. Abraham Fraunce actually uses this example to illustrate metonymy in The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). Breaking the trope into various sub-categories, he begins its definition (and his whole taxonomy, for metonymy heads his list) with the metonymy of the efficient cause, ‘when the Autor and inventor is put for the things by him invented and found’ (A3r): ‘And here it is usuall, nay necessarie, for want of words, to ⁵⁰ ‘Sidney’s Appearance Reconsidered’, in Achievements, 3–31 (16). See Berry, ch. 3, for a consideration of Sidney’s image. Among Daniel Rogers’s Latin poems to Sidney is one on his picture and why it does not talk; it is reproduced in Jan van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden and London, 1962), 174–5. See further Roger Kuin, ‘New Light on the Veronese Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 15.1 (1997), 19–47. Stephen Orgel, ‘‘‘Not on his picture but his book’’: What the Elizabethans Wanted Their Poets to Look Like’, TLS, 22 August 2003, 9–10, suggests that a portrait of a youth attributed to Tintoretto may be the lost Veronese. ⁵¹ PP 3. See the reproduction in Strong, ‘Sidney’s Appearance Reconsidered’, 21 (plate 2), where the original inscription (in capitals) and the date ‘1578’ appear underneath overpainting.

xl

Introduction

put the Autors name for the booke by him made’ (A3v–A4r). Fraunce’s illustration, from an epistle to the Spanish poet Boscan, combines this metonymy with apostrophe—the writer addresses various authors (Boscan, Jerome, Augustine) instead of their books. To identify an author (Sidney) with his works is to imagine that his mind is preserved in his books; to address him is to make him a speaking presence, to find that the words of his books are his living voice. When we speak of Sidney, we mean the Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, and his other writings; and we mean the voice that we hear in them and attribute to him. Classical and Renaissance rhetoric is adept at theorizing the various kinds of personation that animate writing. The central figures are prosopopoeia, by which the orator or poet creates a speaking voice, and prosopographia (not always distinguished from it), by which a body and face are attached to that voice. Prosopopoeia is at its simplest the attribution of words to things that cannot speak (inanimate objects or animals), or to people who are absent or dead. In most treatises that apply rhetoric to poetics, it is recognized that this figure, along with prosopographia, belongs to fiction: every voice in poetry is in some way absent or dead or not real. The example Fraunce takes from Sidney in The Arcadian Rhetorike is the scene in the ‘old’ Arcadia in which Pyrocles/Cleophila first sees Dorus the shepherd, overhears him singing and speaking, and does not yet recognize him as Musidorus (Fraunce, G3v–G4r; OA, 39.34–40.15). In this example, the prosopopoeia (literally ‘mask-making’) is shared between Sidney and Musidorus and involves the creation of an additional mask of Dorus the shepherd to overlay the persona or character of Musidorus the prince. A neighbouring figure is apostrophe, which turns to address someone present, but can also summon the absent, dead, or inanimate as auditors: it may act as a prelude to prosopopoeia, creating an auditor who is then given a voice. I will look further at the voices we find in Sidney and give to Sidney in the next chapter. For now we can observe that Sidney—as a writer celebrated for his characterization, who represents himself in personae, constructs a literary theory based on the exemplary character, and addresses his readers and auditors in the various first-person voices he adopts—is an author who makes great creative use of these figures and their ability to create convincing illusions of presence.⁵² They ⁵² See Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, 410–14 on prosopopoeia, and Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 292–3 n. 3. Cf. Robert L. Montgomery, Jr, Symmetry and

Introduction

xli

therefore belong at the heart of any reading of Sidney or writing in response to him. Not until 1725 did it occur to any of Sidney’s editors or publishers to call his works his Works. Until then, they had been included under the title The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Already in Hugh Sanford’s preface to the 1593 Arcadia a conceit is apparent whereby ‘Arcadia’ is not just the setting of a story but also a site for the editing and reading of Sidney’s works (¶4v). By this conceit Arcadia comes to be a place that contains Sidney’s writings and personae—so that in the 1598 edition Certain Sonnets, the Defence, Astrophil and Stella, and The Lady of May, are all found in Arcadia. It is in a place like Arcadia that Sidney himself is mourned in the gathering together of pastoral elegies that Spenser presents in Astrophel (1595). Arcadia is the place where we find Sidney, speaking to us in apostrophe in a voice created by a prosopopoeia that is part his and part ours—for it is by an effort of imagination that we raise him from the dead and hear him speak. In a haunting and neglected poem first printed in the 1598 Arcadia Sidney speaks to us in a voice that seems just such a resurrection: To the tune of The smokes of Melancholy Who hath ever felt the change of love, And knowne those pangs that the losers prove, May paint my face without seeing mee, And write the state how my fancies bee, The lothsome buds growne on sorrowe’s tree. But who by hearesay speakes, and hath not fully felt What kind of fires they be in which those spirits melt, Shall gesse, and faile, what doth displease, Feeling my pulse, misse my disease. O no, O no, tryall onely shewse The bitter juice of forsaken woes, Where former blisse present evils do staine, Nay former blisse addes to present paine, While remembrance doth both states containe. Come learners then to me, the modell of mishappe. Engulfed in despaire, slid down from fortune’s lappe: Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (New York, 1961), 40 and appendix C for Sidney’s use of personification.

xlii

Introduction And as you like my double lot, Tread in my steppes, or follow not. For me alas I am full resolv’d, Those bands alas shall not be dissolv’d, Nor breake my word though reward come late, Nor faile my faith in my failing fate, Nor change in change, though change change my state. But alwayes one my selfe with eagle eyde trueth to flie, Up to the sunne, although the sunne my wings do frie: For if those flames burne my desire, Yet shall I die in Phænix fire. (CS 24)

There is no reason to read this poem without our knowledge of how important learning from examples is to Sidney. Gabriel Harvey confirms this when he recommends reading the Arcadia: ‘He that will Loove, let him learne to loove of him that will teach him to Live’.⁵³ Such learning for Sidney is not just an understanding in theory of something that can then be tried out in practice—that, he shows in the Defence, is how learning from philosophers works. To learn from Sidney’s speaking pictures is to apprehend an idea or fore-conceit, and that is the same thing as to have had the experience. This poem is caught up in the question of what can be learned from a love poet. The first stanza presents the lovelorn speaking voice as a suffering patient who can either be understood and (as it were) depicted and written up by those whose similar experiences enable them to empathize, or be misdiagnosed by those who have only heard of such things. The second stanza pivots oddly from what ‘tryall’ only can teach to an apostrophe that summons up ‘learners’ who can find in the speaker—that is, in the poem—‘the modell of mishappe’ and either follow the example (‘Tread in my steppes’) or ignore it. The third stanza turns away from concern with addressing, or being perceived by, others, to a solipsistic determination to love constantly. A beloved is taken out of personification into inanimation, transformed into a sun that the truth of the lover can confront squarely—this truth matching the fabled ability of the eagle uniquely to be able to look at the sun. It is recognized that self-immolation is the likely outcome, but this is ⁵³ Pierces Supererogation (1593), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), 2.263.

Introduction

xliii

rescued by suppressing allusion to Icarus and turning the eagle into a phoenix—that is, something unique that (perhaps) can be reborn.⁵⁴ The poem ends with that image of prospective rebirth, and we are left to ask how this might work. But the answer has already been provided: by writing and by sympathetic reading. The speaker becomes a unique example or idea of loving constancy in the face of rejection, an example from which we may learn, and that we may follow, but only if we already know. The imagined sympathetic reader can perhaps hear the tune (‘The smokes of Melancholy’) that is no longer known, and so will tread out the steps of this poem accurately, without stumbling over the quantitative patterns of the first five lines of each stanza.⁵⁵ That tune is a mark of community—other songs can be like this, others can sing this song, love makes us identical. The winged resolve of the last stanza seems to carry its speaker over the threshold of his death at the poem’s end and into our hands, in which he is reborn as we read, providing always that we know how to, that we understand.⁵⁶ Such sympathy is connected to the ‘remembrance’ that stands at the heart of the poem, looking back and forward: our memory, which enables us to understand, to ‘Tread in my steppes’; the speaker’s memory, which this poem preserves. Remembrance is what haunts the opening of Sidney’s revised Arcadia, calling Strephon and Klaius to kiss the footsteps of their lost beloved Urania (NA, 3.30–1), to recall and again lament their loss, ‘to pay the rent, for which we are so called unto by over-busie Remembrance, Remembrance, restlesse Remembrance, which claymes not onely this dutie of us, but for it will have us forget our selves’ (B1v/3). Sidney’s princes, believing themselves destined to die at the Arcadia’s end, discuss whether the memory lives on in the soul after death (OA, 372–3), and Sidney in one account had the same discussion on his deathbed.⁵⁷ Plato’s Socrates teaches that memory is also something we are born with, a half-memory of the ideal forms we have glimpsed in the soul’s flight between incarnations, and that it is this memory that enables us to know certain things intuitively, and to ⁵⁴ On Sidney as phoenix see Chapter 2 below. ⁵⁵ On the poem’s musical prosody see Ringler, 431. ⁵⁶ On mutual love as a resurrection from death see Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s ‘Symposium’ on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock, Ct., 1985), 56. ⁵⁷ Greville, Dedication, 81–2. Nancy Lindheim makes the connection between the princes’ discussion and Plato’s Phaedo in ‘Vision, Revision, and the 1593 Arcadia’, ELR, 2.1 (1972), 136–47, repr. in Sidney in Retrospect, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Amherst, Mass., 1988), 175.

xliv

Introduction

learn others.⁵⁸ In Certain Sonnets 24 ‘remembrance’ may also be such a thing: if the speaker is an ideal ‘modell of mishappe’, our ability to understand him and learn from him may be innate. Put another way, to understand Sidney, to find that his mind is preserved in his book, may require that we knew him—as some of the authors in this study would on occasion like to think. Or it may just require that we have the imaginative sympathy to be taught to know him. Either sort of reader may then be able to tread in his steps and find him resurrected on the printed page. ⁵⁸ See the demonstration in Meno in which Socrates shows that an uneducated boy understands geometry. Cf. Ficino, Commentary, 117: ‘anything that we love must necessarily have been known to us beforehand in some way.’ Åke Bergvall, in The ‘Enabling of Judgement’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala, 1989), points out that Sidney’s inherited Augustinian Platonism configures this issue slightly differently: ‘where Plato had posited metempsychosis to explain how the Ideas could be remembered, [Augustine] suggested divine illumination of the human mind’ (23). Cf. Ficino, 132–5.

1 Dialogue and Incompletion Philip Sidney So there thou livest, singing evermore, And here thou livest, being ever song Of us, which living loved thee afore, And now thee worship … ¹

During his lifetime Sidney was the recipient of scores of dedications and commendatory poems, and hundreds of letters. Even after his death people he knew, and some he did not, continued to write to and for him. Hundreds of elegies represent moments of address to his departing soul. In the 1590s his sister wrote a poem to his ‘Angell spirit’, Henry Constable wrote sonnets to his soul in heaven, and Robert Dallington dedicated a work to his ‘ever lyving vertues’;² in the 1600s Fulke Greville planned to dedicate his works to his lost friend. More rarely, writers dared to make their dead master speak, bringing him back from the dead and giving him a voice, as Nathaniel Baxter does in Sir Philip Sydneys Ouránia (1606).³ But as we have seen, by a metonymy fundamental to literary history, Sidney was now his works. If they knew that they could not raise the dead, or even conjure a reply from Sidney’s ghost, Elizabethan and Jacobean writers knew that they could still discover the voice of Sidney in his writings, and engage that in conversation. ¹ Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Time, 337–40, in Shorter Poems. ² For Mary Sidney’s poem see below, Chapter 3; for Constable see Chapter 6; for Dallington, in Hypnerotomachia (1592), A1v, see Chapter 2. ³ The ghost of Astrophil, dressed for battle, comes to Cinthia (Mary Sidney) and her nymphs, M3v–N2v. Other examples include John Philip’s The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), which is written entirely in Sidney’s voice; and, in manuscript, two fictitious verse epistles between Sidney and Penelope Rich, for which see Josephine A. Roberts, ‘The Imaginary Epistles of Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Rich’, ELR, 15 (1985), 59–77 and Garrett, 178–86.

2

Dialogue and Incompletion

Sidney’s works exist in a network of voices and agencies. Within his texts words are uttered, overheard, repeated, translated, mediated, and answered, by Sidney, Astrophil, Philisides, the Psalmist, unknown lyric and narrative voices, and countless characters. Those texts themselves are read out, heard, sung, copied, passed from hand to hand, criticized, and revised. After his death, even more clearly, for his voice to be heard required the intervention of others—scribes, editors, printers, family, friends. It is straightforward and rewarding to discover some connections between the context of his words inside his texts and their context outside those texts, to recognize analogies between the voices Sidney writes and the voices that frame his writings. I want to look at two related dynamics in Sidney’s writings in this chapter, both of which offer models for thinking about the response to Sidney. In the second half of the chapter I will look at how the incomplete nature of Sidney’s works and the abrupt and untimely nature of his death focus our attention on images of incompletion and interruption in Sidney and offer openings to readers and imitators. But first I wish to examine how dialogue functions in Sidney, and whether it has anything to tell us both about how Sidney’s voice is understood, and about how a response to it might be framed. D I A LO G U E It is a characteristic of Sidney’s humanist mind-set that he sees options as alternatives and discussion as dialogue. The world he makes sense of operates according to a binary logic. His works are consequently built on pairings and oppositions, with plot, character, and language partitioned into binaries.⁴ The ‘old’ Arcadia, for instance, confronts tragedy with comedy in its plot, pastoral with heroic in its mode. Princes, princesses, shepherds, siblings, friends, lovers, and enemies are ⁴ On the pattern of conflict and opposition in Sidney, see Richard C. McCoy, whose excellent Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, 1979) develops the idea that Sidney’s Arcadias and Astrophil and Stella ‘pose a series of deliberately sharpened conflicts between obedient submission to authority and the recalcitrant urges of desire, conflicts that Sidney never subdues or resolves’ (ix). McCoy concludes that Sidney’s death ‘may also represent a kind of compromise between irreconcilable contradictions, the same contradictions encountered in his works’ (214). His bringing together of dialectical conflict and its evasion through incompletion is based on an observation of many of the dynamics that direct the present study. A key difference is that while McCoy is looking for causes in Sidney’s life, I am looking for meanings from the retrospect of the afterlife.


3

paired and paired off. Dialogue, discussion, and debate, in both prose and verse, are often managed with a high degree of formality—from the debates that open the work (Basilius and Philanax, Pyrocles and Musidorus: OA, 6–9, 13–26) to the forensic speeches of its final act. And the rhetoric of Sidney’s characters and narrator favours schemes and tropes—antimetabole, antithesis, synoeciosis—that work by strictly managed contrasts. This observation is not especially new.⁵ But it remains, I believe, particularly important. Because if we can establish a basic dialogical or dialectical principle at work in Sidney’s language, if we can propose that in its case ‘every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates’,⁶ it may be an appropriate extrapolation to extend that principle to Sidney’s works as they relate to their readers, contemporary and future.⁷ To do this will be to utilize a critical metaphor for the hermeneutic process rather than to describe an actuality, but it is often in metaphors that our most searching glimpses into literary processes and meanings are achieved, especially when those metaphors are developed from the texts under discussion, and glimpsed by their authors, as I believe is the case here. Previous hints that the dialogues within Sidney’s works might relate to those metaphorical dialogues with his works have raised a question of intention that may be a red herring.⁸ What readings of ⁵ See Richard A. Lanham, Sidney’s Arcadia: The Old Arcadia (New Haven and London, 1965), 345. Cf. McCoy, 44; John Carey, ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Kay, 245–64; and Åke Bergvall, The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala, 1989), 61: ‘instead of allegorical layers, he creates complex dialectical structures, ranging from the antitheses at the sentence level to the entrelacement of a whole work’. ⁶ M. M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 280. Cf. McCoy, 29, paraphrasing Lanham: ‘Dialectic predominates over synthesis, demanding a more alert and flexible response from the reader, something approaching negative capability’. ⁷ This is an extension also implicit in Bakhtin’s dialogic model: instead of viewing a work as ‘a self-sufficient and closed authorial monologue’, we might ‘imagine the work as a rejoinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue (in the totality of the conversation)’ (‘Discourse in the Novel’, 273–4). Bakhtin argues elsewhere that the future reader ‘becomes a third party in the dialogue’: ‘The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis’, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, 1986), 126. On dialogue as a metaphor for interpretation see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn. (London, 1989), esp. II.ii.3(c), 362–79. ⁸ Whereas Bergvall, in his discussion of the ‘old’ Arcadia, insists that Sidney directs interpretation (‘Sidney never left the outcome of a debate open’, 72), McCoy takes issue

4


his works, what responses to them, does Sidney intend or expect? There are no definitive answers to these questions. Sidney may or may not control the hermeneutic dialogues he begins, but to decide this either way is simply to contribute to such a metaphorical dialogue rather than to establish a literal fact. So we must be satisfied with a more provisional answer to the question of intention. The hermeneutic dialogue only works in certain ways, as Hans-Georg Gadamer shows; readings that the text cannot support will fall down. To this extent the interpretation of a text reflects the intentions of its author. But that dialogue is still open-ended: it includes not only valid readings (that is, readings that the text can support) from a past text’s time but those from its future, from our time. Gadamer sees a text as an answer to a question, and interpretation as the asking of a question that the text can then answer. But discovering the dialogic pattern of question and answer in the text does not reduce interpretation to the discovery of ‘the author’s meaning’, since this is ‘just as inappropriate as the reduction of historical events to the intentions of their protagonists’. ‘Rather, reconstructing the question to which the meaning of a text is understood as an answer merges with our own questioning. For the text must be understood as an answer to a real question.’⁹ Interpretation requires an active contribution from the reader, which is why dialogue is an appropriate metaphor. The model of dialogue enables us to think of responses to Sidney as delimited by Sidney, but not controlled. It also reminds us that he too is shaped by this dialogue: ‘To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were’ (Truth and Method, 379). In seeking for clues as to the nature of the dialogues that Sidney’s writings initiated, that his followers joined, and that we may continue, I will begin with a survey of the kinds of dialogue Sidney inherited. I will then look at dialogue in Sidney’s works, examining the Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella before tracing some key developments of Sidney’s with representations of ambivalence in Sidney that make it a coherent scheme controlled by the author (e.g. 134–5). As I will suggest below, we may be able to sketch a movement in Sidney’s literary career from relatively controlled to relatively open texts and dialogues. ⁹ Truth and Method, 373–4. Cf. Bakhtin, ‘Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences’, in Speech Genres, 165, against the theoretical identification of ideal or implied readers rather than real readers (for the subsequent development of a theory of an implied reader see the so-called reader-response theory of Wolfgang Iser, in for example The Act of Reading (Baltimore, 1980)).


5

ideas about dialogue in the revised Arcadia. After a brief examination of the treatment of dialogic concerns in the rhetorical theory of Sidney’s followers I will look at some paradigmatic responses to Sidney, works that quite explicitly use dialogue to represent their relation to him. Much of the material, then, will be towards the literal end of the critical metaphor that I will use throughout this book to talk about how works respond to Sidney. Various models of dialogue were familiar to Sidney. Their differences stem in the first instance from the fundamental antagonism between Greek philosophy and rhetoric. A distinction was commonly made between rhetoric, which enacts arguments before a judge or audience and must persuade them, and dialectic, in which two positions dispute a thesis and may or may not reach agreement.¹⁰ It should be remembered that what the tradition of dialectic handed down was the fictive representation of discussion, written by one person in a position to prejudge that discussion’s conclusions. Plato’s Socrates does sometimes make good his claim not to know the answers, but as often as not the Platonic dialogue is a carefully choreographed approach to a foregone conclusion. This is why Socrates did not write, since written words cannot respond to their reader: ‘if you question anything that has been said because you want to know more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever’.¹¹ Dialectic, then, is often stage-managed by a writer so that the reader can reach only one conclusion and will not need to ask more questions. Written rhetoric, on the other hand, depends on the reader’s judgement just as much as spoken rhetoric depends on the good favour of the audience. This is why the peroration to Sidney’s Defence turns to its readers in an apostrophe that makes us a spectral audience raised by Sidney’s word: ‘I conjure you all that have had the evil luck to read this ink-wasting toy of mine …’ (Defence, 120–1).¹² Sidney’s basic education covered the composition of rhetorical declamations in utramque partem (on both sides of the question),

¹⁰ See Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.14.27–9. Cf. Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, corrected edn. (Oxford, 1989), ch. 3, on ‘Territorial Disputes: Philosophy versus Rhetoric’. ¹¹ Plato, Phaedrus, 275d. ¹² Virginia Cox, following Ong, writes about the ‘residual orality’ that dialogue helps to sustain in literary culture, observing that Sidney’s references to poetry in the Defence are to an oral medium, not a written one: The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1992), 102 and 200 n. 21.

6


the study of formal logic, and the practice of disputation.¹³ We have The Defence of Poesy as evidence of his ability in the former discipline, where he is also enough of a ‘piece of a logician’ to be able to see though Pugliano’s arguments for the pre-eminence of horsemanship (73). His abilities in disputation were put on display at Oxford when, probably in 1569, the fourteen-year-old Richard Carew, ‘upon a wrong-conceived opinion touching my sufficiency’, was ‘called to dispute ex tempore … with the matchless Sir Ph. Sidney, in presence of the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, and other great personages’.¹⁴ While rhetoric claimed access to the resources of logic and dialectic (it might employ a watertight, perfect, syllogism), it could also use types of proof that would not stand up to dialectical scrutiny (the rhetorical or imperfect syllogism or enthymeme).¹⁵ The French Protestant scholar Petrus Ramus, who challenged the inherited forms and methods of Aristotelian logic, stripped rhetoric of its separate science of argument, assigning inventio and dispositio to logic, and leaving rhetoric with only elocutio and pronuntiatio, style and performance.¹⁶ Sidney patronized such Ramists as Abraham Fraunce and William Temple, but the arguments of the Defence do not stand up very well to close logical scrutiny, as Temple shows in his manuscript analysis of the work, conducted at Sidney’s request.¹⁷ It would have been a surprise if the Defence had passed this test: it is a piece of traditional forensic rhetoric in dialogue with the case for the prosecution and intended not to establish the truth but to persuade the reader. But this odd encounter does point us to a methodological dialogue between perfect syllogisms and imperfect enthymemes, strict philosophy and flexible rhetoric (or reason and passion, perhaps), that patterns many oppositions in Sidney’s works, such as that which divides judgement at the end of the ‘old’ Arcadia: we might agree ¹³ On arguments in utramque partem see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), 26–30 and 97–9. ¹⁴ In The Survey of Cornwall (1602): see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London, 1991), 42. ¹⁵ Sidney would have been very familiar with Aristotle’s account of the enthymeme in Books I and II of The Art of Rhetoric, especially if, as Hoskyns reported, he translated these two books (see Introduction, n. 6). Cf. Rombus’ analysis of the use of enthymeme and syllogism in The Lady of May (Prose, 29). ¹⁶ Vickers, 206, 283, and 476 (he points out that things were not quite as simple as my account suggests). See further Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 58–65, on the Elizabethan reception of Ramist rhetoric. ¹⁷ Analysis tractationis de Poesi, edited with a translation as William Temple’s ‘Analysis’ of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Apology for Poetry’, ed. John Webster (Binghamton, N.Y., 1984).


7

with Euarchus’s logical judgement but Sidney has long ago persuaded us to fall in love with his two princes and we would forgive them almost anything. The simplest way to characterize dialogues is as closed (monological) or open (dialogical).¹⁸ The closed dialogue, a debased form of the Socratic method, uses an appearance of dialogue to deliver an unquestioned message. Didactic uses of the dialogue come under this heading. In the open dialogue both sides have strong arguments and the reader is left to decide which he or she favours. Important didactic dialogues in the Elizabethan period include Daniel’s 1585 translation of Giovio’s Dialogo dell’Imprese and Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597).¹⁹ But Sidney would also have been familiar with Cicero’s De oratore and a work heavily influenced by it, Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528), published in Hoby’s English translation in 1561.²⁰ These are both open dialogues, elegant conversations around particular themes—the ideal orator, the ideal courtier—that admit various perspectives and disagreements and leave the reader to draw conclusions. A related dialogic mode over which we should at least pause is the epistle. Gadamer describes the exchange of letters as ‘a kind of written conversation that, as it were, stretches out the movement of talking at cross purposes and seeing each other’s point. The art of writing letters consists in not letting what one says become a treatise on the subject but in making it acceptable to the correspondent. But on the other hand it also consists in preserving and fulfilling the standard of finality that everything stated in writing has’.²¹ The exchanges of letters between Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser printed in 1580,²² in part devoted ¹⁸ For this tradition see Cox, 2–4. For further background see Jon R. Snyder, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1989), esp. ch. 1, and David Marsh, ‘Dialogue and Discussion in the Renaissance’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge, 1999), 265–70. ¹⁹ Abraham Fraunce drew heavily on Giovio in a manuscript collection of imprese presented to Sidney (Bodleian ms Rawl. D. 345 [c. 1577]), and Robert Sidney may also have been influenced by him (see Chapter 5); a copy of Morley was in the Penshurst library in Robert Sidney’s lifetime (see Lynn Hulse, ‘The Musical Patronage of the English Aristocracy, c.1590–1640’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1992), 337–8). ²⁰ On Castiglione’s establishing of the centrality of De oratore and the Ciceronian dialogic model see Cox, 15. ²¹ Truth and Method, 369. ²² Three Proper and Wittie Familiar Letters and Two Other Very Commendable Letters.

8


to a discussion of Sidney’s experiments with quantitative vernacular metrics, show one way in which discursive prose may be addressed to a particular reader and occasion and depend upon an answer. At the foundations of humanism stand some interesting examples of epistolary dialogue. Petrarch, who in the Secretum scripted a dialogue between himself and Augustine, wrote a letter to posterity as well as letters to Homer, Varro, Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy, Quintilian, and Seneca; Seneca was himself imagined to have conducted a correspondence with St Paul. Letters had the ability to construct dialogues across cultures and ages, to address the past as if it might answer, or the future as if it might ask. Sidney’s own correspondence is voluminous, and the most important element is his long correspondence with his mentor Hubert Languet:²³ like any good humanist he used letters to construct an ideal circle of imagined presences, ‘For, thus friends absent speake’.²⁴ Formal dialogue is represented as belonging to Sidney’s milieu in at least two cases. Giordano Bruno dedicated two works in dialogue form to Sidney, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (‘Paris’, 1584) and De gl’heroici furori (‘Paris’, 1585), and in a third, La cena de le ceneri (1584), dramatized, as a report by a character in a dialogue, a supperparty at Fulke Greville’s lodgings at which Copernicus’s ideas are debated and, along the way, Sidney is praised.²⁵ Lodowyck Bryskett was Sidney’s companion on his continental tour from 1572 to 1575, and later a colleague of Spenser’s in Ireland. His A Discourse of Civill Life (1606) purports to be a dialogue set in Ireland in 1585, at which the characters discuss and re-enact Cinthio’s Tre dialoghi della vita civilè (1565). The speakers include Spenser, who, asked by Bryskett to define virtue, pleads that he is trying to do this in The Faerie Queene (E1v); predictably, Sidney is praised as an example of the prodigiously wise young man (X3v–X4r). The work thus becomes a representation of the milieu that produced the great works of Sidney and Spenser printed in the 1590s: a discussion of the educational value of poetry and of ²³ Languet’s half of the correspondence was printed in Frankfurt in 1633 (Huberti Langueti … epistolae politicae et historicae … ad … Philippum Sydnaeum) and reprinted in Leiden in 1646. ²⁴ John Donne, ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’, l. 2, in The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1985). ²⁵ On Bruno and Sidney see Buxton, 160–7; Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964); and Yates’s essay ‘The Emblematic Conceit in Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori and in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences’, JWCI, 6 (1943), reprinted in Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays Volume I (London, 1982), 180–209.


9

Plato’s condemnation of it (V1v–V3v) shares common ground with Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, for example. What we also see very clearly in the case of Bryskett’s Discourse is how dialogue is well suited to acts of cultural and linguistic translation and comparison—how its multiple voices encourage dialogues between different times, places, and traditions.²⁶ This last point is especially true of eclogue, the pastoral poetry that provides the most important dialogic model for Sidney. In the eclogues written for the Arcadia Sidney writes in the self-conscious tradition of the great pastoral poets, each new work a careful exploration of its distance from its predecessors, so that any utterance carries echoes back down the line to Sannazaro, Virgil, and Theocritus. The eclogue is an appropriate site for the critical engagement with models that Thomas Greene has called ‘dialectical imitation’,²⁷ not least because it is already dialogical: dialogue functions as a symbol and a means of the dialectical questioning of the past, and gives that past a voice with which to question the future. Again, the highest form of imitation in another recent taxonomy, competitive or eristic imitation,²⁸ finds a vehicle in the pastoral singing competition, in which two shepherds vie for supremacy. At the same time as Sidney was following the singing match of The Lady of May with the eclogues for the Arcadia, Spenser was writing The Shepheardes Calender, which was printed in 1579, dedicated to Sidney.²⁹ It included in its highly self-conscious pages a singing competition (August), the argument to which points out that it is an imitation of Theocritus, who was also imitated by Virgil. Spenser’s work contains more voices than those of its shepherds. The poet and the commentator E.K. frame each eclogue, and the work as printed includes woodcut illustrations at each eclogue’s head. A dialogue of modes and media frames the dialogues of the shepherds; not the least of the doublenesses fostered by this method is the ambiguity of reference that Renaissance literary critics always attach to pastoral, with its design

²⁶ On this aspect of dialogue see further K. J. Wilson, Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, D.C., 1985), esp. 177. ²⁷ The Light In Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, 1982), 45–7. ²⁸ G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ, 33 (1980), 1–32 (4 and 16–22). ²⁹ Ringler believes the contest in The Lady of May to be ‘the earliest example in English’ (362), closely followed by OA 7 and 29, and by Spenser. Sidney draws on Sannazaro and Montemayor in the contests in the Arcadia (Ringler, 385).

10


‘under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters’.³⁰

* * * It is in dialogue that Sidney introduces himself as a poet. Perhaps ‘A Dialogue between two shepherds, utterd in a pastorall shew, at Wilton’ was among his earliest works, although it is not known in manuscript and was first printed only in the 1613 edition of the Arcadia.³¹ The Lady of May, another early work, requires the Queen to choose between the May Lady’s two suitors, Therion the racy forester and Espilus the safe shepherd. Its in utramque partem structure pits the two against each other, and is complicated by the efforts of the pedant Rombus and the old shepherd Lalus to direct proceedings. Each text also stages a confrontation between the pastoral tradition and Sidney’s vernacular appropriation of it: the shepherds of ‘A Dialogue’ are called Will and Dick; The Lady of May sets itself in the very Essex landscape in which it was performed in 1578. Dialogue takes us into the world of the shepherds’ eclogues in the Arcadia. Both the first and second eclogues in their original form open with a short introductory dialogue between groups of shepherds, the first between requited and unrequited love, the second between reason and passion. In both cases the brief dialogue stands as an emblem of the matter (and indeed the form) of the preceding book and the succeeding eclogues.³² The four sets of eclogues include monologues and dialogues and a great deal of metrical innovation. Vernacular voices and forms are countered by foreign influences, most evidently in Sidney’s introduction into English verse of the sestina, as practised by his earlier sixteenthcentury predecessors Sannazaro and Montemayor.³³ Both in fact and in their disguises, Pyrocles and Musidorus come from outside, and from ³⁰ [George Puttenham], The Arte of English Poesie (1589), F4r; cf. Defence, 94–5, OA, 56.8–9, and NA, 24.33–4 for Sidney’s comments on pastoral indirection. ³¹ PP 1: for a date of 1577 see Duncan-Jones, 139–40, and Woudhuysen, 239 n. 29. ³² Sukanta Chaudhuri observes that conflict and debate at all levels in the Arcadia, right up to the level of plot structure, may derive from the pattern of the debate eclogue: Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford, 1989), 300. ³³ On Sidney and Sannazaro see David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), as part of an excellent account of Sidney’s relations to the Petrarchan tradition and to Petrarch and Sannazaro in particular. On Sidney and Montemayor see A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s ‘Diana’ and Gil Polo’s ‘Enamoured Diana’, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968), xxxiii–ix.


11

a higher station. Pyrocles is Cleophila the Amazon princess; Musidorus is Dorus, the shepherd sent to finishing school in Athens. And Sidney gives to these outsiders the metrical option unavailable to the Arcadians of poems in quantitative metres. Philisides, Sidney’s persona, is also given quantitative verses, and he too is from another country and was not born a shepherd.³⁴ This dialogue of lexical resource orders two of the longer eclogues, in which Dorus is called on to sing with Lalus, in the first eclogues, and Dicus, in the second. The dialogues (OA 7 and 28) are modelled in form on contests in Sannazaro and Montemayor.³⁵ In each case, the use of forms in which rhymes are passed from one speaker to the other makes for a hard-hitting poetic tennis match, and in each we see a subtle differentiation of lexicon. Both poems are rich in feminine and triple rhymes, but Dorus has far readier access to the Romance vocabulary that makes their manufacture straightforward.³⁶ Where Lalus struggles with rhymes like ‘honie is’, ‘Conie is’, and ‘monie is’ (OA 7.29–33), Dorus’ Latinate vocabulary gives him sequences like ‘perfection’, ‘confection’, and ‘collection’ (44–8). He can then set Lalus a rhyme like ‘comparison’ (47) and watch him struggle with ‘‘‘tarrie sonne’’’ (49). Lalus, as Ringler observes, ‘is not able to keep up the pace’ (385). The contrast of lexis backs up a contrast of matter, the homely Lalus again put in the shade by the Petrarchan and metaphysical Dorus. The necessity and superiority of continental and classical influences is asserted in the matter and form of this dialogue; traditional vernacular verse may work in its own terms, but it cannot answer all the questions asked of it by the more sophisticated new poetry.³⁷ This elegant and gentlemanly rivalry is burlesqued in a point-scoring dialogue between Nico and Pas, based on Virgil’s third eclogue but aimed squarely at comic effect, as Sidney gives Virgil the lie. And the dialogue of old with new is given a bitter edge when the impatient young man Philisides sings against the old crock Geron (OA 9). Not all of the ³⁴ Of the twenty-seven poems in the OA eclogues, eight are in quantitative metres, all but one among the sixteen poems of the first and second eclogues: OA 12, 13, 32, and 33 (Pyrocles); OA 11, 13, and 34 (Musidorus); and OA 31 and 74 (Philisides). There are no poems in quantitative metres in the main body of the work; an ironic exception is Dametas’ one-line impresa (OP 2), among the handful of lines written expressly for the revised Arcadia. ³⁵ See Ringler, 385–6 and 398. ³⁶ Cf. Kalstone, 67, and Defence, 120 on the suitability of English for masculine, feminine, and triple endings. ³⁷ I use the term ‘new poetry’ after Buxton, ch. 4.

12


dialogue eclogues are antagonistic, however. We also have sympathetic discussion (OA 30) and collaboration (OA 13). Most importantly we have the double sestina performed by Strephon and Klaius (OA 71), as well as the corona in dizains that follows it (OA 72). Sidney’s models in the double sestina include Petrarch, Canzoniere 332 and Montemayor, Diana, 5.1, both monologues.³⁸ But the poem is in closest dialogue with the double sestina dialogue in Sannazaro’s Arcadia, 4.³⁹ The lexicon and end-words are similar, but, as Kalstone shows, and for all the reasons spelled out famously by Empson,⁴⁰ Sidney’s effort is far superior. The contrast is most evident in the difference in overall direction. Sannazaro’s poem is split between a first half in which both shepherds complain and a second in which only one discovers hope and joy, so that the poem fades out without resolution. In Sidney’s ‘the shifts in attitude from one pair of stanzas to the next mark the stages in a magnificent crescendo that is absent in its Italian model’.⁴¹ The poem is a perfect machine in which dialogue is simply a bifurcated monologue; the shepherds are mirror images of each other, joined in an unending cycle, a bitter harmony of despair: Strephon. These mountaines witnesse shall, so shall these vallies, Klaius. These forests eke, made wretched by our musique, Our morning hymne this is, and song at evening. (OA 71.73–5)

Dialogue belongs equally to the prose and poetry of the ‘old’ Arcadia’s five books. It can represent violent clashes of outlooks and belief systems; it can represent friendship; and it can represent love. It is found in easy metaphors, as when Basilius is left alone while the others attend the ‘pastorals’ (the first eclogues): smitten by Pyrocles/Cleophila he has ‘a sufficient eclogue in his own head betwixt honour, with the long experience he had had of the world, on the one side, and this new assault of Cleophila’s beauty on the other side’ (OA, 45). And Basilius is not the only one to suffer an internal contest between amorous hope and despair, or reason and passion. But dialogue can also be mutual. At the start of Book III Musidorus and Pyrocles get some time alone together ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹

See Ringler, 416. Kalstone discusses the two sestinas, 32–6 (Sannazaro) and 73–85 (Sidney). William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930), 45–50. Kalstone, 77.


13

and exchange progress reports, ‘for, indeed, there is no sweeter taste of friendship than the coupling of their souls in this mutuality either of condoling or comforting’, where if either shows any joy, ‘he shall be sure to receive a sweet reflection of the same joy, and (as in a clear mirror of sincere goodwill) see a lively picture of his own gladness. Then would there arise betwixt them loving debates of their ladies’ beauties, of their own constancies; and sometimes gloriously strive whether had been the most wretched’ (168). This friendly harmony and rivalry, like that of Sidney and Edward Dyer in Sidney’s Certain Sonnets (CS 16a and 16), is bodied forth in a pair of poems, in which Pyrocles answers Musidorus by matching his verse form and developing the conceits of each of his stanzas in turn. When Musidorus and Pamela elope they too use language and poetic form to symbolize their love. First Pamela inscribes their names on trees, ‘sometimes intermixedly changing them to Pamedorus and Musimela’ (198). Then she writes a poem on a tree (OA 47) and Musidorus matches this with another (49). And finally she sings and he replies (OA 50), before she falls asleep in his lap. But all is not well. A certain excess that will lead Musidorus to be overcome by lust as Pamela sleeps unbalances the dialogues, as he answers each of her poems with longer pieces in forms that only allude to hers, and do not mirror them. In the last instance Sidney’s narrator gives us a metaphor that anticipates the dense allegory of military engagement that on the following page will describe Musidorus’ fall (201.9–202.5): Pamela’s song ‘seemed unto him a new assault given to the castle of his heart, already conquered; which to signify, and withal reply to her sweet notes, he sang in a kind of still but ravishing tune a few verses’ (199). One of the most interesting of the ‘old’ Arcadia’s dialogues crosses, from one point of view, a chasm. Musidorus is one of Sidney’s two heroes and exists in and for the fiction. Philisides is a representation of Sidney, a persona, who has at least one parallel life as the shepherd knight of the Elizabethan tiltyard (in AT 19). In Book II, the two pretend shepherds exchange terza rima sonnets, Musidorus beginning with ‘Feede on my sheepe’ (OA 23) and Philisides answering with ‘Leave of my sheepe’ (OA 24). As Ringler observes (396–7), paired poems of this sort were not uncommon, but Sidney’s are ‘more elaborate than any … heretofore attempted in English’ because in Philisides’ reply every one of Musidorus’ rhyme words is repeated. This formal example was followed by the poets of the Sidney homage A Poetical Rapsody (1602), and its context should make us think about what such an exchange can

14


represent. By engaging his persona, who has at least one foot in the world outside the text, in dialogue with his hero, Sidney makes formal poetic dialogue a site of exchange between the voices inside a text and the voices outside it, a place where, in the end, readers can come to hear the text speak to them, and to answer it back. As Pyrocles/Cleophila sings in the second eclogues: ‘Alas it is no comfort, | To speake without an answere’ (OA 32.5–6). The main action of the first half of the ‘old’ Arcadia concerns the efforts of Musidorus and Pyrocles to speak to Pamela and Philoclea in their own persons, and not as a shepherd and an amazon, and thus to be spoken to. The doubleness of ambiguous address is no substitute for dialogue and mutual love. One speaker who speaks with an answer is Philisides in OA 31, but the answer is of his own making: ‘he began an eclogue betwixt himself and the echo, framing his voice so in those desert places as what words he would have the echo reply unto, those he would sing higher than the rest, and so kindly framed a disputation betwixt himself and it’ (OA, 159–60). In the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Echo represents the failure of amorous dialogue, reduced to an answering voice because of unrequited love, just as Narcissus represents the failure of the reciprocal love that in the Platonic tradition sees its own reflection as in a mirror.⁴² By dramatizing Echo, Philisides shows that he has given up on dialogue. The editors of the 1593 Arcadia added to the third eclogues a poem about ‘The ladd Philisides’ (OP 5), and had Philisides himself perform it, who ‘to shew what a straunger he was to himselfe, spake of himselfe as of a thirde person’ (Ringler, 496; OA, 254n.; 93, 2K4r).⁴³ This prose can only be editorial, and it is revealing. Sidney uses the phrase ‘third person’ four times in the revised Arcadia, always when talking of how Dorus the shepherd tells Pamela about Musidorus the prince, ⁴² Phaedrus, 255d. Cf. Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium: ‘There is also the fact that the lover engraves the figure of the beloved on his own soul. And so the soul of the lover becomes a mirror in which the image of the beloved is reflected. For that reason, when the beloved recognizes himself in the lover, he is forced to love him’ (Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s ‘Symposium’ on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock, Ct., 1985), 57). ⁴³ There is an odd analogue of this phrase in a passage added at the end of Montaigne’s essay ‘On Practice’ in the posthumous, 1595 edition. Montaigne contrasts his self-examination in the first person to the pride of those ‘who call it madness and idleness to be concerned with yourself; for whom enriching and constructing your character is to build castles in the air; who treat themselves as a third person, a stranger to themselves’ (Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London, 1991), 426). There may be a common source.


15

‘determining to find some means to tel (as of a third person) the tale of mine own love, and estate’ (P1v/129; cf. 152.17, 173.9, 308.13; and cf. OA, 218.1 for a different sense). Musidorus is bound to Philisides in some mysterious way in both versions of the Arcadia, but where the two could be paired in the ‘old’ Arcadia, in the revised Arcadia they are joined by a third person. In Book III, Musidorus, as the unknown black or forsaken knight, is accompanied by a knight of the sheep and a knight of the pole[-star]; the former is recognized as Philisides in Alexander’s bridging passage, the latter is almost Philisides’ double because of the star references, almost Astrophil, though Sidney also appears to signal that he is Musidorus’ new friend Clitophon.⁴⁴ The most important third person from Pyrocles’ point of view is of course Amphialus, who obstructs the first and second person dialogue of Pyrocles and Philoclea with a troubled presence, a stranger to himself who tells us both about Pyrocles and about Sidney. The editorial introduction to ‘The ladd Philisides’ thus helps us to see one of the dynamics new to the revision. The poem may belong outside the Arcadia. Its reintroduction in 1593 is problematic, since Sidney in the revised Arcadia had removed the stranger shepherd Philisides of the ‘old’ Arcadia and replaced him with an Iberian ‘star’-loving shepherd knight encountered only in a retrospective narration. But since both represent Sidney, the 1593 editors are happy to reunite them and to reassign to Philisides those eclogues that in 1590 are spoken by an anonymous young shepherd. Philisides doesn’t get back all his material from the ‘old’ Arcadia. His answer-poem dialogue with Dorus had been revised out by Sidney, and his long prose account of his life remains edited out. And Dorus and Amphialus continue to borrow Philisides’ first-person voice: Dorus retains ‘Unto the caitife wretch’ (OA 74), which had been Philisides’ complaint in the ‘old’ Arcadia, and Amphialus retains ‘Now was our heav’nly vaulte’ (OA 73), the dream vision of destined love also borrowed from the author’s persona.⁴⁵ But the 1593 editors’ decision to assign the third-person account of Philisides to Philisides is astute, telling us much about how telling, listening, addressing, and overhearing function in the economy of ⁴⁴ He might even be Coredens, a companion of Philisides referred to in OA (see OA, 245.7 and note on 461); Johnstoun in his bridging passage renames the Knight of the Pole the Knight of the Star and reveals him to be Philisides; see Chapter 8 below. ⁴⁵ On the rearrangements of the eclogues in 1590 and 1593 see Ringler, 372 and 378. On Philisides’ status in the different versions of Arcadia see Victor Skretkowicz, ‘‘‘A More Lively Monument’’: Philisides in Arcadia’, in Achievements, 194–200.

16


Sidney’s fictions of character and persona. The poem is a canzone based in form on one of Sannazaro’s, itself based on one of Petrarch’s.⁴⁶ Its matter is also influenced by Sannazaro but Sidney refines both structure and method to produce a striking study in selfhood. Philisides is discovered by his narrator alone ‘by a river’s side’ (2) and is made by everything he sees ‘To thinke, and thinke with paine’ (10) of his absent beloved Mira. His direct speech is introduced with an interesting equivocation: ‘And thus, with eyes made dimme | With teares, he saide, or sorrow said for him’ (13). A personified emotion has taken him over and speaks for him, testament perhaps to the fragility of his own identity, a fictitious voice, a persona, the sum total only of the words he speaks. Overheard and twice ventriloquized, he turns in each of the succeeding 13-line stanzas to address one of the things around him. He begins with ‘O earth, once answere give’ (14), repeating the imprecation, ‘I aske, now answere me’ (20). Wishing the earth the blessing of Mira that he lacks, he asks if it would not pine in the absence of the sun. The succeeding stanzas employ a parallel rhetoric: ‘Tell me you wanton brooke’ (27), ‘Tell me you flowers faire’ (40), ‘Tell me my seely pipe’ (53). Of course none answers, and so Philisides’ voice gives them a voice: Earth, brooke, flowrs, pipe, lambe, Dove Say all, and I with them, ‘‘Absence is death, or worse, to them that love.’’ (92–4)

He then turns to address ‘My song’ (105), wishing it to carry on the East wind to Mira’s ears, before the narrator reports that ‘This said, at length he ended | His oft sigh-broken dittie’ (115), envying a ram who can fight to the death over a ewe, and envying too the setting sun. The poem looks westward and towards death, and Philisides, physically and vocally frail as his narrator now describes him, is effectively extinguished, as if exhausted by the effort to find voice and life beyond himself, to animate the world around him by prosopopoiea and apostrophe. In need of Mira and the reciprocation of love, and in search of dialogue, being overheard and presented as a third person is no consolation. When, in the 1593 framework, the third person is a projection of the first person,

⁴⁶ See Ringler, 497.


17

the apostrophized second persons become even more fictional, and the two voices of Philisides a more tragic absence of dialogue.⁴⁷

* * * Sidney, or Astrophil, engages Astrophil and Stella in dialogue only three times. In song iv Stella’s only role is to repeat at the end of each of the nine stanzas, ‘No, no, no, no, my Deare, let be’, though at least in the first, unauthorized quarto of 1591 Stella’s line is set apart by leading and set in italics against the roman font of Astrophil. (No such differentiation is seen in the authorized 1598 text, in part because the different voice of the songs is set in its entirety in italics against the roman font of the sonnets.) In song viii the lovers, like Philisides in OP 5, are projected into the third person by a narrator who suddenly declares an interest at the poem’s abrupt close: Therewithall away she went, Leaving him so passion rent, With what she had done and spoken, That therewith my song is broken. (101–4)

Two related manuscripts read ‘was broken’ in the last line; perhaps the scribe of a common ancestor found ‘is’ confusing, since it implies more than that the song is ended simply because there is no more to describe. If the song were a heart we would understand more readily what happens here: the narrator is Astrophil; recollection and re-enactment are painful; he and his song are therefore rent by passion.⁴⁸ Emotion causes him to drop the mask, and the spectres of Astrophil and Stella conjured up by prosopographia disappear. In the unauthorized 1591 edition, the song is broken at the first sign of resistance from Stella, that last stanza following on from lines 65–8, where the speech of Astrophil’s hands is repelled by that of Stella’s, just before her seven stanzas of spoken reply. The third dialogue, the last song in the sequence, is even less stable a symbol of reciprocal love. There is no narrator in song xi, just a dialogue between a constantly loving Astrophil and a Stella who does not want ⁴⁷ Philisides’ status in this regard is similar to Colin’s in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (dedicated to Sidney in 1579), just as ‘The ladd Philisides’ has marked affinities to Colin’s lament in the January eclogue. As McCabe puts it, Colin is ‘a figure locked in solipsistic dialogue with himself’ (Shorter Poems, 570). ⁴⁸ Cf. John Kerrigan, ‘Astrophil’s Tragicomedy’, in On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford, 2001), 138–51 (148).

18


him moping underneath her window and sends him away. Dialogue has become simply ironic. There is no meeting of minds here, no sharing in passion or language or form; the desire for dialogue that is love is now entirely one-sided. The eleventh song is not even given in the 1591 quarto: after song iv Stella never speaks again.⁴⁹ As a phantasm projected by Sidney, Astrophil is born to self-division, to alienation from himself. In sonnet 34 he is in dialogue with himself: Come let me write, ‘And to what end?’ To ease A burthned hart. ‘How can words ease, which are The glasses of thy dayly vexing care?’ Oft cruell fights well pictured forth do please. (1–4)

Words enable him to see his care. What is more, they create that care, by Sidney’s choice to conjure Astrophil into voice with his pen. The argument about aesthetics, referencing a topos in the Poetics and in Sidney’s Defence,⁵⁰ is fallacious—the comfort of self-expression (‘To ease | A burthned hart’) has slipped into the pleasure of reading (‘Oft cruell fights … do please’), the pleasing of a third person who could be Stella, or an imagined reader. The next stage of the argument takes us into a world that students of the strictly limited manuscript circulation of Sidney’s sequence, and its subsequent printing, will recognize: ‘Art not asham’d to publish thy disease?’ Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare: ‘But will not wise men thinke thy words fond ware?’ Then be they close, and so none shall displease. (5–8)

To publish or to keep close? Fame is achieved by a voice that is uncertain about whether it wants or needs to be heard. Why write for oneself; why ‘speake without an answere’? ‘What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?’ What harder thing then smart, and not to speake? Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard. ⁴⁹ Kerrigan sees the force of a near-silent Stella. He observes that the imaginary epistles between Sidney and Penelope Rich (see above, n. 3) ‘partly correct the sonnets’ inequality of utterance’, but, ‘in doing so, drain energy from a situation in which Stella registers as Astrophil ‘‘reeds’’ her’ (141). ⁵⁰ Poetics, 1448b; Defence, 92: ‘as Aristotle saith, those things which in themselves are horrible, as cruel battles, unnatural monsters, are made in poetical imitation delightful’.


19

Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake My harmes on Ink’s poore losse, perhaps some find Stella’s great powrs, that so confuse my mind. (9–14)

There are of course no quotation marks in any contemporary manuscript or printed text of the poem, for the convention had not yet been established. Ringler’s editorial quotation marks inevitably privilege one voice over the other. In songs iv and xi he gives the quotation marks only to Stella, with Astrophil’s voice not needing them; here, similarly, one voice (without quotation marks) is designated by Ringler as Astrophil and the other (with quotation marks) as the irritating alter ego. With quotation marks we have a dialogue between Astrophil and his wit (mind, understanding). Without quotation marks, as in the original, it is a dialogue within Astrophil’s wit, with both speakers being addressed in the apostrophe of line 11 (‘Peace, foolish wit, with wit my wit is mard’). Viewed rhetorically, the dialogue is hypophora gone wrong: a figure of monologic question and answer, which is designed to side-step and neutralize the arguments of a real opponent, has got out of the control of the schizophrenic orator Wit. In line 12, the voices that had been speaking about writing are already written (‘Thus write I while I doubt to write’), and, now silenced, they have been replaced by a personified and pitiable ‘Ink’, using the transferred epithet (‘poore’) or pathetic fallacy to which Sidney’s lovelorn speakers so often resort to stop themselves feeling lonely. Again, who are the ‘some’ who can now judge Astrophil and recognize that Stella has caused this strife of wit? The poem’s last act, it would seem, is to conjure into being readers who have already read the poem. Thomas Nashe, in the preface to the unauthorized quarto of 1591, called Sidney’s sequence a ‘tragicommody of love performed by starlight’ on a ‘paper stage’.⁵¹ The voices of Astrophil and Stella do seem performed, staged, but the status of their audience is confused. In sonnet 55, Astrophil’s ‘eloquence’ seems to be directed neither to Stella nor to any other reader: But now I meane no more your helpe to trie, Nor other sugring of my speech to prove, But on her name incessantly to crie: For let me but name her whom I do love, ⁵¹ Syr P.S. His Astrophel and Stella. Wherein the Excellence of Sweete Poesie is Concluded (1591), A3r.

20

Dialogue and Incompletion So sweete sounds straight mine eare and heart do hit, That I well find no eloquence like it. (9–14)

Once again, he has become his own audience and reader, speaking and not being heard. The language of voice and presence can be interrogated: what ‘trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love’ (AS 6.14) on a paper stage? But confusion is needed in such a poem as song vi. It begins ‘O you that heare this voice, | O you that see this face’ (1–2) and our immediate response must be ‘Who? what voice and face? where?’. The poem develops a debate that is concisely explained by Ringler: ‘In order to settle their dispute concerning precedence, Stella’s Voice and Face appear before the judge Common Sense in the court of True Delight. They engage Music and Beauty as lawyers to plead their respective causes, and bring Wonder and Love as character witnesses and the Ear and the Eye as technical witnesses. Common Sense finds the claim of each to be equal and cannot decide the case, so appeal is made to the sovereign Reason’ (485). It is hard to locate Astrophil and Stella in this allegory, so crowded is the stage with prosopopoeias and personifications. A judgement is never made, and just as we might have felt that we were being addressed at the start, so at the end it seems to be our judgement that is required to give the case a conclusion after its inconclusive ending: Then reason, Princesse hy … Say whether thou wilt crowne, With limitlesse renowne. (49, 53–4)

The confusion is perpetuated in the song that immediately follows. Who is so insensate, it asks, that they are not moved by ‘these sacred tunes’ (Stella’s voice, we assume) and ‘these heavenly beames’ (AS vii.5, 11). The deictic ‘these’ tries to conjure something to see and hear, but a failure is registered in the textual metaphor that describes ‘sweet beautie’s show’ (7): ‘O let them see these heavenly beames, and in faire letters reede | A lesson fit, both sight and skill, love and firme love to breede.’ (11–12). The final of the three stanzas starts to sound almost crazed: ‘See, do you see this face? a face? nay image of the skies’ (15). But again Stella vanishes, obscured by the metaphors that define her: as an ‘image of the skies’ she has become an imitation of an idea in the terms of The Defence of Poesy, the product of a poet.


21

Astrophil’s world is crowded with imagined voices. A friend’s is heard in the white space before a number of sonnets (14, 21, 51, 92; and cf. 69). Others include ‘The curious wits’ (23) and similar groups of courtiers or acquaintances (27, 30, 104); ‘The courtly nymphs’ who speak in sonnet 54; and the readers who try to guess the reasons for Sidney’s poetic facility in sonnet 74: ‘‘‘What, is it thus?’’ Fie no: | ‘‘Or so?’’ Much lesse: ‘‘How then?’’’. Then there are the parts of Astrophil that are given a voice, like his heart (76) and his desire (71), the voices of Cupid or Love (19, 53) and of Morpheus (32), the emotions, abstractions, places, and systems personified and frequently apostrophized, from Reason (10), Virtue (4), and Hope (67) to the Moon (31), the ‘Highway’ (84), and ‘Grammer rules’ (63). And there is the first voice Astrophil hears, in the last line of the first sonnet: ‘‘‘Foole,’’ said my Muse to me, ‘‘looke in thy heart and write.’’’ Stella may be addressed, but this is in her absence in poems that seem written for their poet or for us, and not for her—she remains a character on a paper stage. Astrophil resorts to dialogue with other, imagined presences instead of with the absent Stella. The need to address, to conjure into sympathetic presence, becomes manic at times, towards the end especially, as when in a cluster of sonnets Astrophil directs his words to Grief (94), his faithful sighs (95), Thought (96), and his bed (98). Astrophil is strained by the effort to animate an imagined world to witness a convincing love, and to animate a tired lexicon to express it.⁵² Because it is all too easy to simulate presence with apostrophe and voice with prosopopoiea, Astrophil’s own identity is always brittle. Dorus tells us how love can deracinate selfhood: Such weight it hath which once is full possest That I become a vision, Which hath in others’ head his only being And lives in fancye’s seing. O wretched state of man in selfe division! (OA 7.162–6, revised out in later manuscripts) ⁵² Cf. Kerrigan, 149 and Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, 1991), 83–5. Like me Greene relates address in Astrophil and Stella to Bakhtinian dialogue (85). The protagonist needs ‘a cast of interlocutors and antagonists, against whom to affirm and define himself’ (85) and this need may also lead the sequence ‘to reach back diachronically and find interlocutors in its own fictional tradition’ (86). Michael R. G. Spiller in The Development of the Sonnet (London and New York, 1992) observes that 62 of Sidney’s 108 sonnets contain apostrophe, ‘a far higher proportion than in any other British sonneteer’ (109).

22


Astrophil is in similar danger of becoming someone else’s performance, as we see in the third person of song viii. In sonnet 57, Stella sings Astrophil’s verse, and his suasive lover’s oratory is emptied out into a generalized lyric aesthetics: ‘I hoped her to bring | To feele my griefes, and she with face and voice | So sweets my paines, that my paines me rejoyce.’ (12–14) In the sonnet that follows, her reading of his verse is made a case study for whether the orator’s elocutio (‘words … | Cloth’d with fine tropes, with strongest reasons lin’d’) or pronuntiatio (‘pronouncing grace, wherewith his mind | Prints his owne lively forme in rudest braine’) is the more powerful instrument of persuasion (AS 58.5–8): Now judge by this: in piercing phrases late, Th’anatomy of all my woes I wrate, Stella’s sweete breath the same to me did reed. O voice, oˆ face, maugre my speeche’s might, Which wooed wo, most ravishing delight Even those sad words even in sad me did breed. (9–14)

The five parts of rhetoric, and stages of the composition and performance of an oration, were inventio (invention), dispositio (arrangement), elocutio (style), memoria (memorization), and pronuntiatio (performance). The separation Astrophil experiences of the first three from the last is possible when the element that joins them, memoria, is replaced by a text. The intentions of the writer are then overridden by those of the performer, and Astrophil the amorous orator is answered and refuted by his own words. Denied love and true dialogue, Astrophil is stuck, in the arid couplet that ends the sequence, in a binary trap of mirrored oxymorons:⁵³ So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevaile, That in my woes for thee thou art my joy, And in my joyes for thee my only annoy. (AS 108.12–14)

And there we leave him, still addressing Stella, and still getting no answer.

* * * There are two different versions of the eclogues for the revised Arcadia. Neither seems to be authorial. In the ‘old’ Arcadia, the first two books ⁵³ Cf. Greene, Post-Petrarchism, 101–2.


23

and their eclogues are as tidily managed as any of Sidney’s rhyme schemes. Each book builds to a climax where overspilling passions are interrupted by, in Book I, the lion and bear episode and, in Book II, the Phagonian rebels. This intrusion having been dealt with by the disguised princes, Dametas then in each book gets a comical song in two six-line stanzas of tetrameter. In each set of eclogues a short communal dialogue is followed by a long dialogue between Dorus and one of the Arcadian shepherds; then follow three poems that include comic relief and Philisides, before Dorus and Cleophila take the stage with three poems in quantitative verses.⁵⁴ The revision makes it impossible to preserve the eclogues exactly as they were in the ‘old’ Arcadia, since a number of poems have been put to use within the text of Books II and III. But there are other differences that are probably editorial, and that shed interesting light on how the revised Arcadia was seen by its two most important readers, Fulke Greville in 1590 and the Countess of Pembroke in 1593. Strephon and Klaius, promoted to a role within the main text in the revision, are called away by Urania and so are unavailable for the eclogues. The 1590 text of Greville’s team preserves their two dialogues, OA 71 (‘Yee Gote-heard Gods’) and 72 (‘I Joye in griefe’), moving them from the fourth eclogues to the first and second respectively. Because their speakers are absent, they are performed by the shepherd Lamon. This was probably not Sidney’s intention, but it is made to look like it was: in the revised Book II Dorus refers to the two shepherds, ‘one of whose songs not long since was song before you by the shepheard Lamon’, but the clause looks like it has been squeezed in rather clumsily by the editors (P6v/137). Lamon, like Philisides with Echo, sings ‘with great cunning, varying his voice according to the diversitie of the persons’ (2H8v/499). In the 1593 text, Lamon is reduced in the first eclogues to performing OP 4, the long tale about Strephon and Klaius, which only partially satisfies the terms of Dorus’ reference in Book II. But OA 71 and 72 are reunited, following in succession in the second eclogues, and they are performed by two speakers, Histor and Damon. The prose introduction has a different emphasis to that of 1590: Lamon is sick, ‘which gave occasion to Histor and Damon two yonge shepheards, taking upon them the two frendly rivalles names, to present Basilius with some other of their complaints Ecloge-wise’ (T5v). So complete is the immersion in their roles that the prose from the ‘old’ ⁵⁴ Cf. Ringler, xxxviii–ix

24


Arcadia that introduces their second poem is copied verbatim: ‘But, as though all this had bene but the taking of a taste of their wailings, Strephon againe began this Dizaine, which was answered unto him in that kind of verse which is called the crowne’ (T6v; cf. OA, 331). Two things can be said about what happens to the dialogues of Strephon and Klaius. The first is that they can be voiced by others, performed, adapted, repeated. Their voices have become textual. The second is that the 1590 text, and possibly Sidney himself, goes so far as to imagine their dialogue performed as monologue, which may be only too appropriate when we recall that OA 71 is the most closed and monologic of any of Sidney’s dialogues. A similar modification of a simple dialogue from the ‘old’ Arcadia goes one stage further and turns the dialogue between Plangus and Boulon, reported by Histor in the second eclogues (OA 30) into a dialogue between Plangus and Basilius written down in ‘a little booke of foure or five leaves of paper’ (X1r/195). Zelmane finds that the pamphlet has a title—‘the complaint of Plangus’ (X3v/198)—and ‘willingly opened the leaves, and read it, being written Dialogue-wise’(X3v–X4r/199; cf. 306.37). There are other examples of voice becoming text in the revised Arcadia. The debate between Basilius and Philanax that opens the ‘old’ Arcadia is revised into a letter from Philanax preserved in a copy taken illicitly by Kalander’s son Clitophon and read to Musidorus by Kalander (20–2); the letter is later ‘read and well marked’ by Pyrocles (F3r/47). The elegiacs (OA 74) sent by Philisides to Mira, and performed when Philisides gives his autobiographical narrative in the fourth eclogues of the ‘old’ Arcadia, become a poem sent by Dorus to Pamela at the start of the revised Book III. Pamela’s indecision over whether to read it (311.3–12) is as nothing in comparison to Musidorus’ problems in composing it: But pen did never more quakingly performe his office; never was paper more double moistned with inke and teares; never words more slowly maried together, and never the Muses more tired, then now with changes and rechanges of his devises: fearing howe to ende, before he had resolved how to begin, mistrusting ech word, condemning eche sentence. This word was not significant, that word was too plain: this would not be conceived; the other would be il conceived. Here Sorow was not inough expressed; there he seemed too much for his own sake to be sory. This sentence rather shewed art, then passion; that sentence rather foolishly passionate, then forcibly moving. At last, marring with mending,


25

and putting out better, then he left, he made an end of it; and being ended, was diverse times ready to teare it … (2I5v–6r/310)

No fair copy is made, so part of the pronuntiatio that must move Pamela will be tear stains and crossings-out. By showing the investment of passion in paper the scene alters our relation to the book we hold in our hand. Where in the ‘old’ Arcadia we must imagine voices as we read, we can now imagine reading. As we align our scene of reading with that described, we can imagine ourselves to be addressed by the author, the character, or the text. The Renaissance printer’s habit of marking off such inset texts visually, with titles and different fonts, enhances this experience. Other read texts include the many challenges to and from Amphialus in Book III, and Amphialus’s scribally published ‘justification of this his action’ (2K8v/325). But the most central scene of reading added to the revised Arcadia involves the perfect lovers Argalus and Parthenia. These two are the revised Arcadia’s model of ideal love: they are faultless, they are constant, and their love has endured through dreadful trials.⁵⁵ When Basilius sends a messenger to summon Argalus to challenge Amphialus, he is discovered ‘sitting in a parler with the faire Parthenia, he reading in a booke the stories of Hercules, she by him, as to heare him reade; but while his eyes looked on the booke, she looked on his eies …’ (2P2v/371). The messenger arrives with Basilius’ letter (which we never read); Parthenia draws to one side, and reads her husband’s reactions in his face as he reads the letter (372.6–17). Parthenia then reads it, and their argument begins as she tries to dissuade him from going to what she senses will be his death. The idealized reading is interrupted by a text, the letter that is suppressed by Sidney’s narrative as is the voice of Basilius generally in the new Book III; this letter must be acted on. Of course Argalus takes the honourable course, and the lively image of Hercules’ idealized virtue probably helps move him to this act of well-doing, as The Defence of Poesy would predict. But Sidney is setting up a tragedy, a point at which his text goes wrong. Argalus dies, and Parthenia follows, challenging Amphialus in her disguise as the Knight of the Tomb and dying as she wishes. Sidney’s plot has destroyed the only model of happy, mutual love that it could manage to create: Argalus and Parthenia are too good for their world. They are ⁵⁵ Cf. Åke Bergvall, ‘The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’: An Old Reading of the New Arcadia’, SP, 85 (1988), 471–88 (478–9).

26


buried, and on their tomb ‘Basilius himself caused this Epitaphe to be written’ (2R7v/399): The Epitaph. His being was in her alone: And he not being, she was none. They joi’d one joy, one griefe they griev’d, One love they lov’d, one life they liv’d. The hand was one, one was the sword That did his death, hir death afford. As all the rest, so now the stone That tombes the two, is justly one. ARGALUS AND PARTHENIA. (93, 2C1r/399–400/OP 3)

Like the only surviving manuscript of the revised Arcadia, the 1590 text lacks the epitaph; it advertises that this imperfection creates a figurative space in the text by creating a literal space, an epitaph-sized empty frame made of printers’ lace, like a tombstone worn bare by time. The 1593 text keeps the lace border but fills the space with the epitaph, its layout a little symbol of coupling that helps us to see that the poem begins and ends with the same rhymes. According to Puttenham, this return to the start makes the poem a circle, which, ‘for his indefinitenesse having no speciall place of beginning nor end, beareth a similitude with God and eternitie’ (N3r). And this is one circle that is squared: its eight octosyllabic lines, ‘by using no moe verses then your verse is of sillables’, make it a square according to Puttenham, and give it qualities of ‘solliditie and stedfastnesse’ (N4r). With each couplet the poem reinforces its message that the two lovers are one. We can interpret the significance of these idealized lovers, united in life and in death, as the myth of perfect, monologic, closed dialogue and its ritualistic death and burial. The poem may even be by the Countess of Pembroke, for a rather elaborate explanation is otherwise needed as to why this alone of the material clearly belonging to the revised Arcadia was unavailable to the 1590 editors (the addition in 1593 of OP 4 and 5 being a different case, since neither seems to belong to the Arcadia in either form).⁵⁶ The epitaph consummates the story of Argalus and Parthenia, and enshrines their myth of perfect ⁵⁶ Ringler allows this possibility (493), but Woudhuysen is silent on the matter. Skretkowicz (NA, 572) believes the epitaph to be authentic. Ringler also notes that three


27

mutuality in the heart of the work, where it can reproach the stories around it. The status of dialogues, spoken and metaphorical, in the revised Arcadia betrays a growing hesitancy towards consummation, a suspicion of reflective mutuality, tidy circles, and closed dialogue. This has the effect of opening up the text to the reader, as we shall see. Dialogue becomes incompletion. And the performance of dialogue becomes a re-performance—it becomes text.

* * * It will help us to think through these dynamics if we look at how Sidney’s dialogic concerns are reflected in the theoretical treatments of writing and reading that owe most to him—the rhetoric books of Abraham Fraunce and John Hoskyns. Hoskyns, in his Directions for Speech and Style (c.1599), applies the theory of Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy to the practice of the revised Arcadia in finding that the making of lifelike representations of people and their voices is key for Sidney, that, as Sidney puts it, ‘it is that feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with that delightful teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a poet by’ (Defence, 81–2). It is this ability to form an image of a person that Hoskyns identifies at the end of his discussion of character depiction in Sidney: ‘Sir Phillip Sidney’s course was (besides reading Aristotle and Theophrastus) to imagine the thing presente in his owne brayne, that [h]is pen might the better presente it to yow’.⁵⁷ The common ground shows how deeply rooted in contemporary habits of thinking about art and the imagination was Sidney’s account of poetry, with its central definition of the ‘speaking picture’ (Defence, 79–80).⁵⁸ The Defence itself creates speaking pictures. Hoskyns draws our attention to the ability of apostrophe and prosopopoeia to create presence and speech respectively, ‘by feighning the presence or the discourse of some such persons, as either are not at all, or if there be, yet speake not, but by imaginacion’ (162). It is by apostrophe that Sidney animates the ideas that order his work: ‘Alas, Love, I copies of 90 have the epitaph written in by hand (493). Samuel Daniel would be another candidate for the epitaph’s ghost-writer. ⁵⁷ The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638, ed. Louise Brown Osborn (New Haven, 1937), 156. ⁵⁸ The context and implications of Sidney’s theory are explored brilliantly in S. K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park, Pa., 1989).

28


would thou couldst as well defend thyself as thou canst offend others’ (Defence, 103). It is by apostrophe, a constant turning of his discourse to ‘you’, that he animates his reader. The margins of the Defence are thus populated with mute presences. And Sidney gives a voice to others by prosopopoeia, most memorably when the Philosopher and the Historian are dramatized, the former in reported speech, the latter in direct speech. Other figures that invoke are the variously classified figure of questioning (e.g. erotesis and hypophora), used for example when Sidney asks ‘Is it then the Pastoral poem which is misliked?’ (94) and proceeds to ask and answer the question of each of the genres in turn; and the figure prolepsis, by which the speaker may pre-empt an opponent’s objections and answer them (e.g. 114). All these figures are dealt with in the economical taxonomy of the rhetorical figures provided in Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588). Rhetoric always had such categories as mimesis, prosopopoeia, and dialogismus to describe the orator’s playful creation of miniature scenes of speech and debate. But the terms were not used to describe larger structures, and here Fraunce’s literary rhetoric makes an advance in mapping rhetorical terms not simply on to literary examples within a conventional oratorical framework, as for example does Puttenham in Book III of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), but on to literary forms and conventions. This step forward comes from Fraunce’s Ramism: the methodological habit of binary subdivision means that Fraunce, following Talaeus, whose Rhetorica (1548) Fraunce adapts, makes a fundamental distinction between monologue and dialogue and starts to move away from the oration as the basic model of communication. When Fraunce discusses ‘figures of sentences’ (E4v), he makes a crucial distinction: ‘These figures consist in simple speach alone, or in conferring and debating with others’ (E5r).⁵⁹ The monologic figures concern matter—simply exclamation and its obverse, the statement that is withdrawn (epanorthosis) or interrupted (aposiopesis)—or person—apostrophe and prosopopoeia, either imperfect (a partial giving voice in passing) or perfect, ‘when the whole speach of anie person is ⁵⁹ Cf. Audomari Talaei Rhetorica, e Patri Rami Regii Professoris Praelectionibus Observata (Paris, 1577) [Talaeus’ Rhetorica with a brief preface by Ramus], F1r: ‘Figurae sententiae, est in logismo aut dialogismo’. On the context of Fraunce’s treatise see W. S. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York, 1961), esp. 257–8, and the Introduction to Ethel Seaton’s edition (London, 1950); Seaton provides a useful Ramistic chart of the structure of the treatise, 137.


29

fully and lively represented’ (G2v).⁶⁰ The dialogic figures of ‘conference or debating’ (G7r) are divided into those of asking and those of answering, the Ramist binary here giving an appropriately dialogical division.⁶¹ They include prolepsis (praeoccupation); when this is ‘direct’ (‘But you will say etc.’, H4r), it implies the presence of another voice, ‘so that commonlie it hath a kind of prosopopoia adjoyned unto it’ (H3v). The Ramistic rhetoric that Fraunce develops from Talaeus is interested in ways in which literary texts make statements in imagined voices, and to imagined auditors, who may then reply. Prolepsis (‘praeoccupation’) is explicitly connected to prosopopoeia, which tells us that to imagine a response from an interlocutor is for them to come into being. We may be in dialogue with ourselves as well as in monologue with others. Sidney would have read Talaeus and perhaps discussed it with Fraunce. Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike, derived in its theory from Talaeus though it adds a great many literary examples, offers in 1588 a guidebook to the rhetoric of an author who was to enter print two years later, and is a highly relevant indication of how Sidney’s own rhetoric might be viewed. John Carey has shown how the Arcadia is ordered by its use of figures of opposition.⁶² John Hoskyns sees as much in an aside that also points us towards the appropriateness of binary models. Describing synoeciosis, the figure of paradox or expanded oxymoron which he calls ‘a composicion of contraries’, he remarks that ‘This is an easie figure nowe in fashion not like ever to be soe usuall’ (150). That fashion was led by Sidney and followed by his many imitators. Something in Sidney finds expression through binary patterns. By the tropes of metaphor and metonymy that are fundamental to literary meaning production in Fraunce’s book, that something can be likened to dialogue wherever it is found. It is, I believe, simply an extrapolation from the position of Fraunce and Hoskyns to suggest that the binary patterns and the dialogic models of rhetoric are related to those of Sidney’s voices, plot structures, and poetic forms.

* * * Sidney represents dialogue in his works but he also expects it. He envisages a dialogic give and take in the darker folds of The Defence of ⁶⁰ Cf. Talaeus: prosopopoeia is ‘fictio personae’ (F4v) and ‘Prosopopoeia est imperfecta vel perfecta’ (G1r). ⁶¹ Cf. Talaeus, G3r: ‘sequitur dialogismus, qui est in interrogatione et responsione’. ⁶² In ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’.

30


Poesy. A dead author can have designs on a living reader, can decide to transform him or her, in Sidney’s theory through the exemplary image of virtue, the Cyrus created ‘to make many Cyruses’. But this can only happen ‘if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him’ (Defence, 79). The reader must open the book and wish dialogue to commence.⁶³ To view Sidney’s texts as participants in a dialogue is to see them expecting something in return. Centrally for this study, part of what they expect is imitation or continuation. At the end of the ‘old’ Arcadia Sidney lists those loose ends of his story that have not been tied up: the marriages; more pastorals; Artaxia, Erona, and Plangus; Menalcas—all these, with ‘the poor hopes of the poor Philisides in the pursuit of his affections, the strange continuance of Klaius’s and Strephon’s desire, lastly the son of Pyrocles named Pyrophilus, and Melidora the fair daughter of Pamela by Musidorus, who even at their birth entered into admirable fortunes, may awake some other spirit to exercise his pen in that wherewith mine is already dulled’ (OA, 417). This is as open an invitation as one could imagine, and it was accepted by many writers. Sidney’s own literary theory is founded on a model in which the reader is moved to imitate the virtues of fictional characters, and this pragmatic version of literary imitation often overlays accounts of the imitation of Sidney, so that what is being imitated is not the details of the text, but the artistic virtues of the man. For Greville, Sidney, as known, remembered, and immortalized, is himself a notable image of virtue: in [Sidney] the life itself of true worth did (by way of example) far exceed the pictures of it in any moral precepts: so that (if my creation had been equal) it would have proved as easy for me to have followed his pattern in the practice of real virtue as to engage myself into this characteristical kind of poesy in defence whereof he hath written so much as I shall not need to say anything. (Dedication, 3)

Sidney is found both in his works and in writings about him and is an example to be imitated, in life and in writing. For Hoskyns, similarly, ⁶³ Cf. Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Rhetoric and Fiction in Elizabethan England’, in Renaissance Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983), 385–93. Jacqueline T. Miller examines the language of reading and writing in Astrophil and Stella in relation to questions of interpretation in ‘‘‘What may words say’’: The Limits of Language in Astrophil and Stella’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London and Sydney, 1984), 95–109. The best study of this issue is Bergvall, The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’ ; he rightly insists that ‘The ontology of Elizabethan poetics, as far as it is rhetorically oriented, resides not in the sender, the receiver, or the message, but in the process of communication which they together represent’ (19).


31

reading Sidney ‘may make yow eloquent, and wise’ (‘Directions for Speech and Style’, 156); the ‘notable and lively portracts’ of his characters inspire both better behaviour and better fictive writing, for Sidney’s practice in characterization provides an ‘example’ that ‘I would yow durst followe till I pulld yow backe’ (ibid.). Cicero had written of the need to train the student ‘to copy in such a way as to strive with all possible care to attain the most excellent qualities of his model’ (De oratore, 2.22.90). And this had become by Sidney’s day a doctrine of the exclusive copying of Cicero’s own style.⁶⁴ Sidney more than once opposes this fashion,⁶⁵ and it is important that we recognize that two versions of imitation are available: the imitation of Sidney may be simply stylistic or may involve, rather, the construction of Sidney as a ‘lively’ presence or authorizing model. One can write like Sidney, or one can write because of him. For Thomas Moffett, writing an exemplary narrative about Sidney to inspire the Countess of Pembroke’s son William Herbert, Sidney ‘Lives, prospers, flourishes, is vigorous indeed, in the mouths of all men’.⁶⁶ In Moffett’s Latin elegy Lessus Lugubris, he depicts Willoughby, Sidney’s comrade at Zutphen, before Sidney’s corpse, performing the ultimate apostrophe: ‘cherishing again those eyes with his eyes, and that breast, now growing cold, with his warm breast, and reviving that heart with his heart, to the corpse lying in view he begins to speak thus: ‘‘O Sidney …’’’ (106). Apostrophe, prosopopoeia, and dialogue belong to writing about and after Sidney, because each rhetorical act is a metaphor for interpretation, for the asking of questions and the framing of a voice to reply to those questions: addressing Sidney, resurrecting Sidney, conversing with Sidney. It is the dialogistic condition of such conversations that each speaker determines the other, that Sidney emerges for us in the terms of interpretations that he himself has conditioned.⁶⁷ All of the authors dealt with in this study write dialogues, and some address Sidney directly. All create voices that we as readers can put ⁶⁴ See for example Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1999), 156, and, for a discussion of Ciceronianism, Vickers’s Introduction, 26–8. ⁶⁵ Defence, 117–19; letter to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580, Feuillerat, 132 (‘Ciceronianisme the cheife abuse of Oxford’); and AS 15 on stylistic imitation more generally. ⁶⁶ Nobilis, 94. ⁶⁷ See ch. 2, ‘Existence as Dialogue’, in Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London and New York, 1990).

32


in dialogue with Sidney’s. For now, I want just to look at two books that are full of voices and present dialogue with Sidney as what licenses them. They are two of the best, most substantial, and most important of the Elizabethan verse miscellanies, in the tradition of Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets of 1557. Englands Helicon (1600) contains a large number of Sidney’s poems, from Astrophil and Stella, the Arcadia, and the more recently printed Certain Sonnets and The Lady of May. Sidney’s poems are attributed in their titles to ‘Astrophel’, regardless of whether or not they belong to Astrophil and Stella, and ‘Astrophel’ is often ‘the Sheepheard’, an elision of personae made possible by the pastoral allegory of AS ix, ‘Go my flocke’, included here. The anthology as a whole is pastoral, a medley of shepherdly voices inspired by Sidney’s own pastoral performances: a poem by Shepherd Tony (Munday) addresses Colin Clout; a poem from Tottel is followed by ‘An other of the same subject, but made as it were in aunswere’. The opening three stanzas of Spenser’s Astrophel become ‘Colin Cloutes mournfull Dittie for the death of Astrophell’. Poems by Sidney and such other major contributors as Yong, Greene, and Drayton are scattered throughout rather than clustered, emphasizing community and conversation. We see this at the start, where ‘Astrophel’ and ‘E.B.’ (Edmund Bolton) take turns with the first five poems in a strictly managed dialogue initiated by Sidney, the first voice in the anthology. Englands Helicon includes of course the Ralegh–Marlowe exchange (‘Come live with mee, and be my love’ and its reply), as well as an anonymous imitation, as a third party tries to join the conversation. Sidneian dialogues include the singing match between Therion and Espilus from The Lady of May, AS iv and viii, and the Dyer–Sidney exchange CS 16a and 16. The work venerates Sidney’s dialogues and puts him in dialogue with the other poets assembled on its pages. It takes poems and fits them into a new work, in which their authors have become the personae they created, and speak as characters in a new dialogue. And Sidney’s voice is one of the reasons they speak: the work represents imitation as dialogue. A Poetical Rapsody is another miscellany, though representing a more exclusive community. Edited by Francis Davison, the son of Elizabeth’s secretary, Sidney’s kinsman William Davison, it was published in 1602 and dedicated to Sidney’s nephew William Herbert; subsequent, expanded, editions followed in 1608, 1611, and 1621. The poets represented are Davison, his brother Walter (the two brothers clearly wish to be Dorus and Cleophila, or Strephon and Klaius), an anonymous friend or (in later editions) friends, Sidney, his sister the Countess of


33

Pembroke, and various other poets, identified by name or initials, including Campion, Davies, Constable, Ralegh, and Spenser. The Davisons had excellent access through family connections, patrons, and the Inns of Court to poems in manuscript, and many of the poems (including Sidney’s and his sister’s) had not previously been printed. Again, a brief survey of the contents gives us a good impression of how Sidney’s presence and influence are managed. The collection opens with a section entitled ‘Pastorals and Eclogues’, and just as Englands Helicon had started with a poem by Sidney, this collection opens with ‘Two Pastoralls, made by Sir Philip Sidney, never before published’ (OP 6 and 7). Then follows a poem by ‘Anon.’, and then the Countess of Pembroke’s ‘Dialogue betweene two shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in praise of A’. Next comes a dialogue between Sidney’s Strephon and Klaius in the presence of Urania, by Walter Davison, and two poems forming an exchange between Strephon and Urania by Francis Davison. Various eclogues follow, including one in dialogue form on Sidney’s death. A second section is called ‘Sonnets, Odes, Elegies, and Madrigalls’; all the poems are by the two Davisons, and it is heavily indebted to Astrophil and Stella in design and detail (Francis Davison’s sonnets, for example, are almost all in Sidney’s favoured form, abbaabba cdcdee). A third section of ‘Sonets, odes, elegies, and other poesies’ by ‘Anomos’ has on its separate title page the very epigraph that ends Sidney’s Certain Sonnets, ‘Splendidis longum valedico nugis’ (98, 2S5v), as though it begins where that recently printed collection ends; the section, like Certain Sonnets, includes translations and poems in quantitative metres, some of the latter addressed to Sidney. A final section comprises ‘Diverse poems of sundry authors’. All sorts of dialogues, communities, and occasions are represented within the book and in its context; like Englands Helicon it presents lyric poetry as a mode of writing to be conducted both in dialogue with Sidney and in dialogues and contexts that imitate those of Sidney. The two dialogues that follow those of Sidney and his sister are striking. Form is used carefully in each to render and represent dialogue, with stanza answering stanza ‘in inverted rhymes’ (B6v) in the exchange between Strephon and Klaius, and Urania’s poem also answering Strephon’s in ‘inverted Rimes, Staffe for Staffe’ (B9r). The rhetoric of dialogue, as in Sidney, gravitates towards schemes and tropes that pattern binaries—synoeciosis, isocolon, antimetabole. Form and content are built on dialogue, of speaker with speaker, stanza with stanza, feminine rhyme with masculine, iambic line with trochaic. The

34


impetus for this is clearly the elaborate dialogues of Sidney’s Strephon and Klaius. If these dialogues seem formally too tidy, this is surely because of the effort to symbolize dialogue with Sidney and dialogue like Sidney: a sacrifice of content is made so that form and rhetorical ornament can multiply doubles, antitheses, and mirror images. Dialogue is made a sign of connection to Sidney, and difference from him. That Sidney authorizes the method and contents of Davison’s anthology is made clear by the opening poems. These are accepted as Sidney’s by all his editors, because Davison was in a position to acquire even poems not widely circulated (no manuscript versions survive). But what is interesting is that nothing like them exists elsewhere, with the exception of the talismanic Sidney–Dyer exchange (CS 16a and 16), for they are celebrations of the poetic friendship of Sidney, Greville, and Dyer. A Poetical Rapsody thus opens with Sidney’s invitation to sing: Upon his meeting with his two worthy Friends and fellow-Poets, Sir Edward Dier, and Maister Fulke Grevill. Joyne Mates in mirth to me, Graunt pleasure to our meeting: Let Pan our good God see, How gratefull is our greeting. Joyne hearts and hands, so let it be, Make but one Minde in Bodies three. Ye Hymnes, and singing skill Of God Apolloe’s giving, Be prest our reedes to fill, With sound of musicke living. Joyne hearts and hands, so let it be, Make but one Minde in Bodies three. (B1r/OP 6.1–12)

The poem that follows forms a companion to ‘The Ladd Philisides’. Entitled ‘Disprayse of a Courtly life’ it is framed by a narrator who comes across a man lamenting his exchange of the shepherd’s life for life ‘in servile Court’ (OP 7.12). And what he misses is the same poetic community described in the previous poem, and helpfully marked for us here by the editor, who adds ‘Sir Ed. D. and M. F. G.’ in the margin (61): Well was I, while under shade Oten Reedes me musicke made,


35

Striving with my Mates in Song, Mixing mirth our Songs among, Greater was that shepheard’s treasure, Then this false, fine, Courtly pleasure. (B3r/OP 7.43–8)

The tone of nostalgia and idealized pastoral companionship is well suited to the character of the anthology as a whole, for it too seeks to create a realm away from its own court context in which Sidney can be engaged in pastoral dialogue. There is something quite haunting in the second poem, as printed in A Poetical Rapsody, about the way Sidney is discovered overhearing himself: the transmission of his voice in print is aligned with the narrator’s report of his voice in the poem, and we feel Sidney’s presence crossing freely the thresholds between reader, book, narrator, and persona—he appears to be there. Sidney’s Pyrocles had complained, ‘Alas it is no comfort, | To speake without an answere’ (OA 32.5–6), and Astrophil’s wit had asked ‘‘‘What idler thing, then speake and not be hard?’’’ (AS 34.9). Sidney’s afterlife testifies that for his writings it is better to speak and be heard, and best to speak and be answered. INCOMPLETION SOCRATES: What are we to do now? Are we breaking off in the midst of the discussion? CALLICLES: That’s for you to decide. SOCRATES: They say that one ought not to leave even a story half-told. It should be brought to a point and not left to go about pointless. So answer the rest of my questions, and let our discussion have a fitting end.⁶⁸

We have seen that in the revisions of the Arcadia many of its tidy dialogues are lost, upset by asymmetry, turned into monologues, or reported or performed by third persons. A similar set of worries about the possibility of dialogue and full mutual understanding is developed in Astrophil and Stella. Sidney moves towards a representation of dialogue ⁶⁸ Plato, Gorgias, 505c–d. My translation is a conflation of the versions of the passage in Gorgias, trans. Walter Hamilton (London, 1960) and Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997).

36


as something that represents a challenge: a voice or a text seeks it, but they may not always find it straight away, or where they expect it. Similarly, those works that respond to Sidney by managing a ready representation of his voice or a simple dialogue with his poems, characters, and personae can be juxtaposed to others where the response is less tidy, where it is to something more open-ended. Both kinds will be found in the subsequent chapters, and we will often see that poetic, narrative, or rhetorical form will symbolize the relation to Sidney. What the next section offers is another metaphorical model for the interpretation of Sidney and the response to him. It is one that complements the dialogic model and that focuses our attention on the moment of interpretation and understanding, the point at which a difference can be seen between full mutual understanding (or at least an illusion of it)—closed dialogue—and something more open-ended, where the burden of imposing meaning and determining outcomes and interpretations is put on the reader or later writer. It is a model that represents, on the smallest and grandest of scales, the hermeneutic challenges posed by Sidney’s works. It is a model that theorizes incompletion. The many literary responses to Sidney have in common an intense interest in his death, and in the incomplete nature of his works. Sidney died abruptly, before his time. His revised Arcadia ends in mid-sentence; his Psalmes were unfinished; and so (we are told) were the translations of Mornay and Du Bartas.⁶⁹ An observable tendency in the immediate literary response to all this abruption is to emphasize, moralize, and mythologize it to the point where it becomes far more than unfortunate: the incompletions are made a part of our idea of Sidney, and achieve something like the character of intentional actions. The aim of this section is to look with just such hindsight at various gestures of completion and incompletion in Sidney’s life and writings. At times an illusion of intention will be created, as if Sidney meant not to finish the Arcadia, or intended to die before his time; something like this illusion—which is just an effect of our attempt to make sense of Sidney—informs such an observation as Oscar Wilde’s, who remarked that ‘The most perfect of all his poems was his own life’.⁷⁰ In trying to make sense of Sidney in this way I will—here and elsewhere ⁶⁹ See Introduction, n. 6. ⁷⁰ ‘Two Biographies of Sir Philip Sidney’ [editorial title of an unsigned review from December 1886], in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (London, 1970), 38–42 (42). Cf. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), 154: ‘His life has rather the closed and conventional


37

in this study—set the almost intentional gestures of completion and incompletion in his life and writings in dialogue with responses to Sidney’s life, death, and works in the aftermath of 1586; and I will read them all in relation to classical rhetorical theory, and one rhetorical figure in particular: aposiopesis, the figure of not finishing what you started.⁷¹ Sidney is himself a figure of incompletion. Fulke Greville writes of ‘the too short line of his life’ (Dedication, 83), and introduces his account of the ‘passage’ of his friend’s death with an eloquent equation of broken forms: Thus shall it suffice me to have trod out some steps of this Briton Scipio, thereby to give the learned a scantling for drawing out the rest of his dimensions by proportion; and, to the end the abruptness of this treatise may suit more equally with his fortune, I will cut off his actions—as God did his life—in the midst, and so conclude with his death. (76)

The speaking picture of Greville’s Sidney is only a sketch, but the idea or fore-conceit comes across clearly enough to the reader who makes the effort to flesh out the picture. This tension between the unexecuted plan and the complete, or completed, picture is connected by Greville to the scene of Sidney’s death, where completion and incompletion coalesce. Indeed, that scene can be narrated in two ways. One draws on the ars moriendi tradition, and emphasises the death bed scene, the good death, completion. The other emphasizes the untimely nature of Sidney’s death, an abrupt cutting off of future promise, incompletion. We find the rhetoric of both in Thomas Moffett’s Nobilis, the manuscript Latin biography commissioned by Sidney’s sister for her son William. On the one hand, Sidney’s ‘pattern of life was so marvelous that the last of his days harmonized with the earliest, the mid-period with the beginning and the end, and all with virtue and lettered learning’ (95). On the other hand, ‘Sidney … is snatched off and killed, hardly as yet at the mid-point of his span of life’ (92). All the biographical accounts dwell on the death bed scene, a scene that Sidney appears to have played out with careful heed to convention.⁷² And his will shows him attending shape of the Certain Sonnets than the open-ended design of the two Arcadias or Astrophel and Stella, the inconclusive but intriguing works of his rebellion.’ ⁷¹ Also known as reticentia, praecisio, abscisio. See below, and cf. Puttenham, T4r: ‘The Greekes call him Aposiopesis. I, the figure of silence, or of interruption, indifferently.’ ⁷² See for example Greville’s Dedication, chs. 12–13; the anonymous The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death, reproduced in Prose, 161–72; and the three poetic accounts

38


to the details right to the end, finishing things off. But he seems also to have been engaged by the other perspective, and his very last letter, to the physician Johan Weyer, shows him not exactly prepared to let go: Mi Weiere veni, veni, de vita periclitor et te cupio.—Nec vivus nec mortuus ero ingratus. Plura non possum sed obnixe oro ut festines. Vale. Arnemi. [16 October 1586] Tuus Ph. Sidney [My Weyer, come, come, my life is in danger and I wish for you.—Neither alive nor dead shall I be ungrateful. I can no more but with all my strength I beg that you hasten. Farewell. From Arnhem. Your Philip Sidney]⁷³

There are two ways, similarly, of talking about Sidney’s works. One emphasizes the perfectness of their plan or fore-conceit, what Greville calls ‘that excellent intended pattern of his’ (Dedication, 134) in the case of the Arcadia, so that works that are not finished can somehow be thought of as complete: as Sidney says, ‘the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself ’ (Defence, 79). The other sees them as mute fragments, ‘perfectunperfect’: we do not know how they would have been ended, and we may try to end them ourselves.⁷⁴ We can make use of an analogy that Sidney himself draws between two structures. A narrative is like a sentence: it must be grammatical, its elements arranged logically and coherently; it can be rhetorical, thought through or arranged according to the pattern of a figure. When Musidorus has forgiven Pyrocles for being in love, he asks, in a passage new to the revised Arcadia, for a narrative of events: Let me therfore receive a cleere understanding, which many times we misse, while those things we account small, as a speech, or a look are omitted, like as a whole sentence may faile of his congruitie, by wanting one particle. printed shortly after Sidney’s death, Whetstone’s Sir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true vertues, John Philip’s The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney, and Angel Day’s Upon the life and death of … Sir Phillip Sidney, all of which are reproduced in Elegies. See also Hamilton, 6. ⁷³ PRO SP 84/10, no. 13; Feuillerat, 183; my translation. The letter was included in Molyneux’s account of Sidney (conveniently reproduced in Major Works, 311–14) in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), and so was very much a part of the early mythography of Sidney. An edition of Sidney’s will is given in Prose, 143–52; it is itself caught short, with Sidney’s last bequest to his witnesses George Digby and Henry Goodyere, ‘a ring of ’, left incomplete. ⁷⁴ ‘Perfect-unperfect’ is John Florio’s word for the revised Arcadia as printed in 1590, used in his extended criticism of the composite 1593 Arcadia. See Chapter 4 below.


39

Therefore betweene frends, all must be layd open, nothing being superfluous, nor tedious. (H8v/78)

What grammar may object to, rhetoric can allow. Pyrocles might choose to miss elements out, as Sidney does; the analogy would then be to the rhetorical figure ellipsis. Or he might interlace other tales, as Sidney does, with analogy to parenthesis. Or he might give his narrative in a peculiar order, as Sidney does, just as the figure hyperbaton upsets ordinary word order. And he might stop before the end, as Sidney does, and the analogy then would be to the incomplete sentence, the aposiopesis. This analogy is explicit at moments where Pyrocles and Musidorus narrate their past, and contemplate the unknown narrative of the future. ‘And thus (my Musidorus) you have my Tragedie played unto you by my selfe, which I pray the gods may not in deede proove a Tragedie. And there he ended, making a full point of a hartie sigh’ (I8r/88). And again, when Dorus tells Pamela about Musidorus in Book II: ‘My speach hastneth it self to come to the ful-point of Musidorus his infortunes’ (P5v/136), which is the present. There is therefore a particular potency to the breaking off of the revised Arcadia mid-narrative, and mid-sentence: two sorts of structure, each of which can serve as metaphor for the other, are broken together, ‘without full point’, as Spenser puns at a related moment.⁷⁵ We can look briefly at aposiopesis, because here, again, there are two ways of thinking about the incompletion. One takes aposiopesis as a figure of speech, as a whole thought delivered incompletely; examples are threats or insinuations not fully stated but made clear enough. The other takes aposiopesis as a figure of thought: not only an incomplete sentence, but an incomplete sententia, an idea not fully formulated and unclear to the auditor who hears the broken sentence; an example here is the inability to find expression through sorrow or rage.⁷⁶ Often these distinctions are only implicit in the textbooks; but tradition hands down a clear set of ⁷⁵ The Faerie Queene, 2.10.68. ⁷⁶ For the difficult distinction between figures of speech (usually verborum) and figures of thought (usually sententiarum) see the Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.13.18; Cicero, De oratore, 3.52.200–1; and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.1.17f.. For treatments of the figure of the broken sentence, variously named, see Ad Herennium, 4.30.41 (praecisio, figure of speech) and 4.54.67 (abscisio, as a species of emphasis, figure of thought); Quintilian, 9.2.54–7 (figure of thought) and 9.3.59–61 (figure of speech, but disputed); and other authorities cited below. The Elizabethan definitions cited elsewhere in this chapter offer a substantial development from their less elaborate originals in such neo-Latin treatises as those of Scaliger, Susenbrotus, and Talaeus.

40


emotions denoted by the figure: fear, shame, anger, sorrow.⁷⁷ The figure denotes the emotion because rhetoric simulates passion; it believes that its origins are in natural or non-rhetorical speech; it observes failures to complete sentences in life, and imitates them in rhetoric.⁷⁸ The flipside of this is that poets and dramatists who have had a rhetorical training will use a figure of speech in order to signify the emotion itself in the character who is speaking instinctively. We therefore have a complex choice when we encounter the aposiopesis in fictional, non-rhetorical situations: do we analyse it as if it is on some level rhetorical, intentional, a pretence, do we question the motives of speaker or writer, do we expect something to be implied by it; or, conversely, do we hear an eloquent silence? Do we on some level complete the sense, or do we just find the incompletion expressive? We begin to see that aposiopesis can figure a hiatus in the hermeneutic process itself, a moment when monologue requires dialogue, when the reader must ask questions of the text. I will look in a moment at aposiopesis in Sidney; what it represents for him, and how its use in the revised Arcadia in particular relates to other interruptions. My attention is directed by the tendency in those who follow and respond to Sidney to dwell on moments of conclusion and inconclusion. This emphasis has general causes; Frank Kermode stresses in The Sense of an Ending how ‘Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle’.⁷⁹ But the rhetorical tradition was also clear that the end of a sentence, and the end of an oration, were the most important parts of their respective structures.⁸⁰ As Sidney’s rhetorician student Abraham Fraunce puts it in The Arcadian Rhetorike when discussing clausula (sentence cadence): For the beginning, a little consideration will suffice, for the middle, lesse; but in the end the chief care is to bee had, for it is most examined, and longest ⁷⁷ Henry Peacham is typical: ‘Aposiopesis is a forme of speech by which the Orator through some affection, as either of feare, anger, sorrow, bashfulnesse or such like, breaketh off his speech before it be all ended.’ (The Garden of Eloquence (1593) [2nd edn.], R3v). Peacham classes aposiopesis among the figures of sentences (i.e. as a figure of thought) and in a sub-category, ‘Figures of Permission, or Concession’, which ‘commit the cause in hand, or matter in controversie to the consideration and judgements of others’ (N3v). ⁷⁸ See Quintilian, 3.2.3. ⁷⁹ The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1968), 17. ⁸⁰ See for example Quintilian, 6.2.1; and 9.4.13 and 57–62. Cf. Cicero, Orator, 59.199–200.


41

continueth in memorie. It must therefore bee sweetlie contrived, that it seeme not hastie and abrupt.⁸¹

Aristotle distinguished between two kinds of prose style—the loose and the periodic. In the loose style ‘the sentence has no end prescribed by its own structure, unless the thing being talked of is finished with’. Whereas the period ‘has a beginning and an end determined by its own structure and a length that can be seen as a whole’; and, he continues, the neat endings of periodic sentences (with their use of metre) are like poetic forms.⁸² Demetrius follows Aristotle, and emphasizes the circularity of the period, ‘an image drawn from paths which go round and are in a circle’ (the literal meaning of periodos).⁸³ Because period means circuit, both writers use an image from the running track, the period having its goal in view like runners in a race. St Paul likens life to a running race with a prize at its end (I Corinthians 9:24). These two uses of the metaphor come together when the writer of ‘The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death’ describes the end of the period of Sidney’s life: Perceiving that death did approach, he did with a few and short speeches (for it was grievous for him to speak much) exhort his two brothers in an affectionated manner, giving them instruction in some points, and namely to learn by him that all things here are vanity. His speech failing, he made sign with his hands to be still spoken unto, and could then less endure that I should make any ⁸¹ C4v–C5r. The tradition of reading Sidney as a practical manual of rhetorical excellence started with Fraunce and continued with Hoskyns. As Garrett puts it: ‘Sidney’s rhetorical tour de force in Arcadia was recognized as a particularly remarkable achievement—it is perhaps the single most important reason for the exaltation of Arcadia from the 1590s and through the seventeenth century, and for its unpopularity and neglect from the mid-eighteenth century’ (14). But where earlier critics were suspicious of Sidneian ornament, recent work has started to reconsider Sidney’s rhetoric. In particular, Richard Lanham retrieves an intellectual and artistic point to Sidney’s rhetoric in The Old Arcadia, esp. ch. 3, ‘The Speeches’, and ch. 5, ‘Rhetorical Style’. He points to Sidney’s broad knowledge of rhetorical treatises and the lack of evidence that he followed any one in particular (338–9), as well as challenging the view that Sidney’s kind of rhetoric was only ‘copious verbal embroidery’ (340). And John Carey’s important study (‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’) has shown how Sidney’s figuration has an ethical content. Concentrating on antimetabole and synoeciosis, Carey argues that Sidney’s rhetoric ‘emphasizes a single … pattern’ (246) of inevitable ‘indecision and inner conflict’ (261). Carey notices in support of this thesis, without naming the figure, various aposiopetic moments, as characters are overpowered by ‘the opposition between their words and their feelings’ (261). ⁸² Rhetoric, 1409a–b, in the translation of Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1972), 147–8. ⁸³ On Style, 11.

42


intermission. Even as one that runs a race, when he comes near to the end, doth strain himself most vehemently, so he would have all the help that might be, to carry him forward now to the very end of this his race unto God.⁸⁴

The anonymous writer’s account of what follows is painful reading, because it depicts Sidney, almost dead and with his eyes closed, still apparently conversing with his enthusiastic ministers by gesture alone, a dialogue of whole with half rhetoric. Whatever he might feel as they egg him on to his meeting with God, without the ability to speak he requires their interpretation: ‘Sir, if you hear what we say, let us by some means know it, and if you still have your inward joy and consolation in God, hold up your hand.’ With that, he lifted up his hand, and stretched it forth on high, which we thought he could scarcely have moved; which caused the beholders to cry out with joy, that his understanding should be still so perfect, and that the weak body, beyond all expectation, should so readily give a sign of the joy of his soul. (171)

The shapes of a life, of a narrative, and of a sentence are not just bound by their ability to serve as metaphors for each other; in many representations of Sidney, and in many scenes in his work, they belong together. John Dickenson gathers all three when he says that Sidney has ‘put an endlesse periode to his ever-living lines, being prevented by untimely death’,⁸⁵ allowing aposiopesis to slip into immortality with the ambiguous ‘endlesse periode’. We can look at one response to Sidney’s broken sentence, Sir William Alexander’s completion of it in his passage bridging between the new and the old Arcadias. We start with Sidney: But Zelmane strongly putting it by with her right hande sword, comming in with her left foote, and hand woulde have given him a sharpe visitation to his right side, but that he was faine to leape away. Whereat ashamed, (as having never done so much before in his life) The fire of rage then burning contempt out of his brest, did burst forth in flames through his eyes, and in smoake from his mouth: so that hee was returning with a terrible madnesse (all the strength of his whole body transferred to the one hand for a singular service) which the resolute Zelmane did earnestly observe with a providently all-despising courage, whilest the eares of Annaxius were suddenly ⁸⁴ Prose, 171. Duncan-Jones in that edition is inclined to accept Zouch’s attribution of the account to George Gifford, because a minister named Gifford is remembered in Sidney’s will; but in Major Works she is more cautious: ‘it seems safest to treat the work as anonymous’ (406). ⁸⁵ Arisbas (1594), A4r. On Dickenson, see Chapter 8 below.


43

arrested by a sound; whereof they were onely capable, which (since in consort with his owne humour) could onely of him with authoritie have challenged a due attendance: straight a martiall noyse (raysed by the violence of Invaders, and distractednesse of others, dreadfully tumultuous) giving him intelligence what a bloudy Scene was acting without in the Court of the Castle, where he was expected as a speciall Actor. Though his eye (as harbinger of his blow) had already marked the roome where his bended arme threatned to lodge it; yet his feet did so suddenly ravish away the rest of his body, that even his own thoughts (much more Zelmanes) were prevented by the suddennes of his flight … ⁸⁶

Alexander’s supplement was published separately in about 1617, perhaps the only work ever to begin not only in mediis rebus, but in the midst of a sentence too. And yet, as if to compensate, this is an exceptionally long period. The emotion that Alexander produces from the breach is rage (‘The fire of rage …’); before it is shame (‘Whereat ashamed …’). These are both textbook causes of aposiopesis; it is as if the interruption is being blamed on Anaxius. Because the rage comes out of Alexander’s reading of Sidney’s aposiopesis, it is not surprising that it too is interrupted, as Anaxius’ feet are swept from under him to his own and Zelmane’s surprise. Alexander says ‘suddenly’ twice and ‘suddennes’ once, but this is a calculated duplication of narrative interruption. Alexander’s answering of Anaxius’ shame with Anaxius’ rage emphasizes Anaxius’ role as a figure of interruption, and draws attention to the rhetorical nexus surrounding a broken sentence that the retrospective view gives sense to, and so reads as not accidental. Aposiopesis always has the potential, either intentionally or as it is interpreted, to simulate the failure of rhetoric at any one of its five stages: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, pronuntiatio. Plutarch describes the oratory of the Athenian leader Alcibiades, a man of deeds more than of words: But since he strove to find not only the proper thing to say, but also the proper words and phrases in which to say it; and since in this last regard he was not a man of large resources, he would often stumble in the midst of his speech, ⁸⁶ 2Z8v/465; Alexander’s supplement (STC 22544a.3 [1617?]), ¶1r. I have removed the first word in this variant issue (‘Thus the fire of rage …’), since it is not found in the others; see Bent Juel-Jensen, ‘Sir Philip Sidney, 1554–1586: A Check-list of Early Editions of his Works’, in Kay, 289–314 (295–7). Alexander talks elsewhere of having begun ‘at the very half Sentence where [Sidney] left with the combat between Zelmane and Anaxius’ (Anacrisis (c.1635), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1908), 1.187).

44


come to a stop (apesi¯opa), and pause a while, a particular phrase eluding him. Then he would resume, and proceed with all the caution in the world.⁸⁷

The word Plutarch uses makes Alcibiades’ style the origin of aposiopesis. Plutarch knew this was a figure, but chose to describe a failure of oratory—in strict terms a failure of elocutio or memoria—with this word. At the same time as rhetoric contains aposiopesis, aposiopesis threatens it. Cicero’s discussions and uses of aposiopesis want the figure always to make clear what is missing, and why.⁸⁸ But Quintilian wants some uncertainty, and he is joined by Demetrius and, again, Plutarch, who talk of aposiopesis being more forceful or effective than words.⁸⁹ Their point is not only that leaving room for inference is more powerful than making an allegation.⁹⁰ They imply that silence has an expressive force. Elocutio, the rhetorical choosing of words and figures of speech, means eloquence, and is opposed by ineloquence. And elocutio means speaking, which is opposed by silence. But it also, literally, means speaking out, and that is opposed by significant silence, speaking in, aposiopesis. Silence therefore runs the risk of being taken for insignificance, and it is this flirtation with ineloquence that gives aposiopesis its force. Controlling your speech is hard; but controlling your silence is harder.⁹¹

⁸⁷ ‘Alcibiades’, 10.3. ⁸⁸ Quintilian attributes some lines to Cicero at 9.2.54 that make clear his association with a mannered refusal to speak (‘I do not dare to complete the sentence’). Cf. Cicero, Orator, 40.138: ‘he will claim to be suppressing something’ (ut aliquid reticere se dicat). Cf. Fraunce, F6v–F7r: ‘Aposiopesis, Reticentia [Cicero’s term], concealing, is when the course of a speach begun is in such sort staid, that some part thereof not uttred, is nevertheless perceived.’ ⁸⁹ Demetrius, On Style, 103, 253, 264. Plutarch, Platonic Questions, 10 (‘What was Plato’s reason for saying that speech is a blend of nouns and verbs?’): ‘and, by heaven, suddenly falling silent (aposi¯op¯esis) with a smile often makes speech more expressive and yet has not the force requisite for signifying as do the verb and the noun but a certain supplementary force embellishing speech …’ (Moralia, 1009E). Quintilian 9.3.60–1: ‘I would not even allow the name of aposiopesis to all cases where what is omitted is left to be understood’. ⁹⁰ Cf. Peacham’s astute discussion in The Garden of Eloquence (1593), R3v: ‘The use of this forme of speech serveth either to stay the vehemency of our immoderate affections, proceeding to some excesse or outrage, or to signifie by the halfe what the whole meaneth, that is, to raise a sufficient suspicion without danger of the adversary … The Caution. If the sentence be broken off too soone, it leaveth the sense most uncertaine: contrariwise, if it be continued too long, it maketh that manifest that should be secrete and shadowed with silence.’ ⁹¹ Cf. Puttenham, T4r.


45

In Sidney, the aposiopesis and the interruption are crucial to his understanding of various gaps between intention and result: the rhetorical gap between speaker and auditor, the hermeneutic gap between writer and reader, the narrative gap between the conundrums of a plot and their solution, and the pragmatic gap between a work and its moral efficacy—gaps enacted within the text, which describe its status viewed from without. His first essay in the structurally incomplete work requires Queen Elizabeth to choose between two ways of ending the ‘Lady of May’ entertainment.⁹² If the ‘old’ Arcadia is incomplete it is only so in the possibility that the future lives of its characters and their offspring ‘may awake some other spirit to exercise his pen in that wherewith mine is already dulled’ (417). There is something benignly Chaucerian about this sort of ending, the statement of insufficiency to continue a simple means of pointing the conclusion: ‘I kan namoore; my tale is at an ende’.⁹³ The careful construction of the ‘old’ Arcadia, like one of Sidney’s sestinas, ties up everything in the predetermined form of the oracle with which it begins. Even aposiopesis and interruption, only occasional in the original Arcadia, are contained by wholeness and completion. Basilius dies in a manner that comes back to haunt Sidney in his revision, as we shall see: ‘he having had time to declare his case only in these words: ‘‘O Gynecia, I die! Have care—.’’ Of what, or how much further he would have spoken, no man can tell’ (278–9). Except of course for Sidney, who knows, as the reader does not, that these are not by any means Basilius’ last words; we might only suspect that something is not quite right in the dark comedy with which Sidney’s narrator puns on Gynecia’s reaction, as ‘she suddenly saw the matter come to that period’ (279). In a way this non-death symbolizes the non-ending that Basilius’ later revival allows, as the careful edifice of an ethically and politically strenuous tragic dénouement is brought crashing down by the facile romance happy ending that has so delighted readers and troubled critics. In a similarly overt manner Philanax, that most manipulative of forensic orators, is made to end his accusation in Book V with a classical aposiopesis of the stated kind: ⁹² See Bergvall, The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’, 62–5, for a theoretical consideration of the rhetoric of this work. ⁹³ The end of the Franklin’s Tale, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford, 1988), 189.

46


‘… Alas, though I have much more to say, I can say no more; for my tears and sighs interrupt my speech and force me to give myself over to my private sorrow.’ Thus, when Philanax had uttered the uttermost of his malice, he made sorrow the cause of his conclusion … (391)

In both cases we are made suspicious of the degree of control exercised over aposiopesis. And this stands in parallel to our suspicions about the ‘old’ Arcadia itself, about its contrived plot, and its troubling relation to the pragmatic model for poetry outlined in Sidney’s Defence. If the end of the ‘old’ Arcadia may fail to satisfy us, it was certainly found unsatisfactory by its author, who broke it open and eventually rewrote the whole, leaving both an incomplete work and a work that confronts incompletion at every step.⁹⁴ Sidney invites his own revision in the opening pages of the ‘old’ Arcadia, where the career of Pyrocles and Musidorus before they come to Arcadia—which is the main matter, in retrospective narration, of the revised Book II—‘is a work for a higher style than mine’ (11). Greville, in the letter to Walsingham that begins the history of Sidney in print, calls the revised Arcadia ‘a correction of that old one’.⁹⁵ That word may seem odd, as if there was something wrong with the ‘old’ Arcadia, either morally or stylistically, and seems not to account for the massive expansion of the ‘old’ Arcadia that the revision provides. ‘Correction’ only means something more appropriate in the rhetorical tradition, where the figure epanorthosis or correctio is ‘When we restate something we have said before. By this we revise either what was said or our means of saying it and express our repentance.’⁹⁶ The pattern of the figure is that the speaker states, and then goes back and restates, leaving the original statement intact. This sense fits far better what Greville describes—a re-expression or amplification that aims at ‘a greater vehemencie of meaning’ (Hoskyns, ‘Directions’, 143), apologizes for the original, but does not expunge it. We remember that for Fraunce the two figures that oppose the master-figure of statement, ⁹⁴ Sidney’s revisions began in the preparations for the trial, shifting the basis of the princes’ culpability to make their absolution less incredible (see Introduction, p. xxiv). McCoy sees the lack of an ending to the revised Arcadia in terms of the unsatisfactory ending of the ‘old’: ‘Incompletion allows Sidney to have it both ways in less explicit fashion’ (Rebellion in Arcadia, 151). ⁹⁵ Text in Woudhuysen, 416–17. ⁹⁶ Talaeus’ definition, translated in Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London, 1968), 65.


47

exclamatio, are epanorthosis and aposiopesis. His example from Sidney of epanorthosis cleverly associates the figure with some sort of doubleness or indirection, using the opening of Dorus’ doublespeak tale to Pamela of Musidorus: In the Countrey of Thessalia (alas why name I that accursed Countrey, which brings forth nothing but matter for tragedies? but name it I must) in Thessalia I say there was (well I may say there was) a Prince: no, no Prince, whom bondage wholly possessed, but yet accompted a Prince and named Musidorus. O Musidorus, Musidorus! But to what end serve exclamations, where there are no eares to receave the sound? (F6r–v; = OA, 103)

And this example fits in nicely with Fraunce’s taxonomy, ending as it does by questioning exclamation just as the figure does in Fraunce’s scheme. The figures of epanorthosis and aposiopesis offer two ways of disturbing a simple and whole (monologic) statement; we might add that they also bring the statement into dialogue—in epanorthosis two authorial statements are compared, and in aposiopesis the audience must supply the missing words. As a correction, therefore, the revised Arcadia looks back to the ‘old’ Arcadia; as incompletion it looks forward to the interpretation it necessitates. Aposiopesis in the revised Arcadia is most frequently expressive. So often sentences are finished within the mind, by Philoclea or Pamela, too ashamed to speak their love,⁹⁷ or by an auditor like Musidorus, forced to interpret the gestures, sighs, and eye-language of the incoherent Pyrocles.⁹⁸ We have our first example from Strephon within a page of the start: ‘O Urania, blessed be thou Urania, the sweetest fairenesse and fairest sweetnesse: with that worde his voice brake so with sobbing, that he could say no further’ (B2r/4). The antimetabole (‘sweetest fairenesse and fairest sweetnesse’)⁹⁹ seems to cause the aposiopesis here, rather as the revised Arcadia’s open-endedness stands, deliberately or unintentionally, as a reaction to the superficial unity of the ‘old’. Gynecia is the most obvious victim of this infectious inability to finish sentences,¹⁰⁰ and such passion is interestingly juxtaposed to the work’s solitary aposiopesis of calculated implication when Cecropia is encouraging Amphialus to rape Philoclea with the example of Theseus and Antiope: ‘but having ravished her, he got a child of her. And I ⁹⁷ e.g. 149.36, 151.34, 336.20. ⁹⁸ e.g. 50–2 (= OA, 14–16). ⁹⁹ This is one of Hoskyns’s examples in Directions (128). ¹⁰⁰ e.g. 278–80 (expanded in part from OA, 122–3, which lacks the aposiopetic details at 278.14 and 279.23).

48


say no more, but that (they say) is not gotten without consent of both sides.’ (2S1v/402) It is impossible in the revised Arcadia to finish anything off.¹⁰¹ Each state the princes put back on its feet in Book II falls over again after they leave, and the ramifications (focused in the Plexirtus subplot) refuse to leave them alone. In order to leave the Helots in Book I, Pyrocles has to promise to come to their aid if needed, and, in one of Sidney’s earliest revisions to the ‘old’ Arcadia, such a need is announced in the passage describing Euarchus’ journey to Arcadia: the civil war in Laconia ‘immediately upon [Pyrocles’] departure had broken out more violently than before’ (OA, 357; 93, 2P3v). Any action seems to breed a far from equal reaction: Anaxius’ dangerous vendetta against Pyrocles is caused by Pyrocles’ defeat in battle of his uncle; the shipwreck of the princes that opens the revision is caused by the machinations of Plexirtus on the occasion of a celebratory gathering of all the princes who have been helped by Pyrocles and Musidorus. A basic romance law is in operation, so that solutions to problems cause greater problems. Rather than the single, perfect circle or period of the ‘old’ Arcadia, the revised text looks set to become trapped in perpetual circles of dilatory regression, a cycle of epanorthosis.¹⁰² One thing that marks the development from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ Arcadia is that the ‘new’ is based on a structure of interruptions. This relates to the interlacing of narrative strands that Sidney learns from epic romance, but it goes further.¹⁰³ The structure comes in with Amphialus and Cecropia, both new to the revised Arcadia. Amphialus haunts the ¹⁰¹ Cf. McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia, 150 and 158. ¹⁰² On endlessness as a condition of romance structure see Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J., 1979). ¹⁰³ Harington draws attention to Sidney’s use of entrelacement in the preface to Orlando Furioso, ¶7v. Cf. Skretkowicz in NA, xxxix: ‘The formal structure of longer speeches is seldom developed from exordium to peroration; more usually, it is interrupted by some twist in the plot or fragmented to reflect emotional turmoil. The impression of formality is sustained, however, by metaphors comparing broken speeches with the structures they were intended to fulfil …’. Examples of episodes, tales, and explanations interrupted include 88, 187, 214, 223, 277. Attention is drawn to these, often with conscious wit, by the editorial chapter headings in the 1590 text. It should be noted that Kenneth Myrick, in Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, 2nd edn. (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965), argues that Sidney is influenced by Minturno’s Aristotelian critique of romance structure in L’arte poetica (1564) in the revised Arcadia, breaking off the narrative less awkwardly and less often than in the ‘old’ Arcadia in pursuit of a kind of unity of action (131–50). Skretkowicz does not follow Myrick in explaining away the revised Arcadia’s many interruptions, but observes usefully that ‘Sidney was at pains to relate these


49

princes like an unwittingly malign doppelgänger.¹⁰⁴ His education with Philoxenus parallels the princes’, but love causes these companions to fall out and Amphialus to kill his friend. He loves Philoclea, which is the only reason why he allows his mother to start a civil war that makes the solution to the simple love plot in Book III of the ‘old’ Arcadia look very far away. It serves as a sign of his effect on the plot that the first textual lacuna in the revised text concerns him: ‘by the devise whereof, which was [Clitophon] streight knew it to be the armour of his cousin, the noble Amphialus’ (G2r/57). The badge by which we recognize him is a textual gap. The structure of interruption expresses Cecropia’s malice, and Amphialus’ fundamental inability to connect his best intentions to the outcomes he produces. One conventional use of aposiopesis, which we see in the deaths of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra as in Basilius’ temporary loss of vitality, is to telescope the breaking of language that comes with the loss of life.¹⁰⁵ There are two such deaths by aposiopesis in the revised Arcadia. They follow Amphialus’ two worst moments. The first follows his killing, in self-defence, of his companion Philoxenus, who loves Helen, who loves Amphialus. Timotheus, Philoxenus’ father, arrives: Alas what sorrow, what amasement, what shame was in Amphialus, when he saw his deere foster father, find him the killer of his onely sonne? In my hart I know, he wished mountaines had laine upon him, to keepe him from that meeting. As for Timotheus, sorow of his sonne and (I thinke principally) unkindnes of Amphialus so devoured his vitall spirits that able to say no more but Amphialus, Amphialus, have I? he sancke to the earth, and presently dyed. (G7v/64–5)

The aposiopetic emotions, anger, sorrow, and Amphialus’ shame, cluster round this moment in the text, nudging it into its broken sentence. If Helen’s love for Amphialus causes this first death, the second death by aposiopesis is caused by his love for Philoclea, the other side of his failure to connect. The killing of Argalus is the point at which any pretence suspended units to the action, as if they took the form of scenes naturally interrupting one another as the series of events unfolded in dramatic sequence’ (NA, xxvii). ¹⁰⁴ As Garrett cleverly observes, his ‘very name (αμϕιαλoς, ‘‘between two seas’’) suggests his dilemmas and those of the reader assessing his conduct’ (18). ¹⁰⁵ For the connection between the aposiopetic death and literary form see also ch. 6 of Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997), on Hamlet: ‘It is no accident that Hamlet, almost uniquely in Shakespeare, should end upon a half-line … for its whole form, one might say, is that of a great aposiopesis, whose ‘‘sudden breaking off ’’ is nothing less than the sign of Death’s arbitrary arrest’ (241–2).

50


of representing the chivalric ideal in Book III collapses. Amphialus is then forced unknowingly to kill Parthenia, whose last words are to God: ‘And this O Lorde: But there Atropos cut off her sentence’ (2R6v/398). The broken sentence is a central symbol of this explicitly tragic turn of events, the tragedy being signalled by Sidney’s description of a reaction that matches ‘pity with admiration’, the Aristotelian paradigm that he wheels out at key moments in the text. The empty frame for Argalus’ and Parthenia’s epitaph in the 1590 text participates in this breaking of forms, and connects these moments to the text’s interrupted end. It is Amphialus’ mother Cecropia who causes the interruption by a lion and bear of Book I, just as Zelmane, putting Philoclea’s hand to her lips, is half way through the first sentence of an apostrophe to Love. And it is Cecropia who causes the interruption by rebellion of Book II, just as Gynecia is starting to display ‘the storehouse of her deadly desires’ (2E6v/280). These interruptions are causeless in the ‘old’ Arcadia, elegant collocations of passion and chance interruption that demonstrate the charming guile of the author. In the revised Arcadia they are attributable, in retrospect, to sophisticated and dangerous human intentions. The interrupter Cecropia and the sufferer of aposiopesis Amphialus finally kill each other in a book of fake deaths and schematic misunderstandings. Amphialus is losing the ability to finish sentences; he is expressing the alienation of his actions from his intentions by cursing his hand for killing Philoxenus and Parthenia.¹⁰⁶ It is right that Cecropia dies because she misunderstands Amphialus’ body language (what Fraunce calls rhetorical ‘gesture’) as he comes angrily towards her, and that he bungles his suicide. His failures to connect make him perhaps the figure for Sidney’s apprehensions about his role in life and about the moral efficacy of his fiction; apprehensions that we cannot help finding in the Arcadia’s final incompletion. Pyrocles is always there at these moments of structural interruption, as he is when Cecropia causes the interruption by kidnapping that doesn’t end Book III but begins it. In Books I and II Musidorus is able to help Pyrocles save the day. But their separation by a castle wall in Book III is never overcome; the two cannot join, the work cannot end, the sentence cannot be concluded. The other half of the structure of interruption takes us back from the point where the text breaks off to its double in Book II when Anaxius and Pyrocles first meet, and their fight is again broken off. Clusters of aposiopetic emotions signal the parallel ¹⁰⁶ e.g. 328.13–17, 398.4, 440.10–12, 441.23–7.


51

for us. Pyrocles’ choice to defer the fight in order to help Dido again is in despite of hoots of derision. He overcomes imputations of fear, and his own shame and anger, in spite of Anaxius’ ‘railing at me, with all the base wordes angry contempt could endite; I said no more, but, Anaxius, assure thy self I neither feare thy force, nor thy opinion. And so … I ranne … after Pamphilus, but in al their conceipts from Anaxius’ (2B2v/242). Sidney’s final interruption is matched to Pyrocles’ here, and we can read them in parallel: each both chooses to defer the fight with Anaxius, and finds the interruption forced on him by irreconcilable demands, by circumstances that present incommensurable alternatives. And each of necessity suffers misreading.¹⁰⁷ I think Alexander presents these patterns to us when he mirrors the first interruption of the fight with the third that he himself writes; and when he ends his bridging passage with an impassioned reunion of Pyrocles and Musidorus.¹⁰⁸ The tales one tells can often be hijacked by one’s motives in telling them. When in Book II of the revised Arcadia that rhetorical maestro Musidorus, as Dorus the shepherd, is telling tales of himself in the third person to impress Pamela, he reaches a point of unprecedented narrative tension. Musidorus’ public execution is prevented by the intervention of Pyrocles and the slim chance of fighting his way free: ¹⁰⁷ The incommensurable alternatives in Sidney’s case might be external (abandoning the Arcadia because of the need to fight the Spanish or write more godly works) or internal (joining the revised Arcadia to the ending still preordained by the oracle). All of these explanations are popular. Less well-known is the generic explanation, that Sidney suffered, or manufactured, a crisis of literary sources: see Thomas P. Roche, Jr, ‘Ending the New Arcadia: Virgil and Ariosto’, Sidney Newsletter 10.1 (1989), 3–12, and Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993), 139–42. Previous arguments about the ‘emblematic impasse’ are summarized in McCoy’s Rebellion in Arcadia, 212–14. Part of McCoy’s argument is that ‘Each of Sidney’s works reveals some problem of development or closure’ and that ‘few critics have understood their origins in his life’ (10). See also Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, ch. 7, esp. 151–5; and Hamilton, 173: ‘Sidney sought to fulfil in the work the virtues which he despaired of being able to fulfil in virtuous action for his country … the Arcadia rightly remains incomplete. It is unfinished because his life was unfinished, and he expected always to be summoned to virtuous action; but chiefly because it is to be finished by the reader.’ Jonathan Gibson, ‘Sidney’s Arcadias and Elizabethan Courtiership’, Essays in Criticism, 52 (2002), 36–55 looks at the two Arcadias from the point of view of manuscript culture, and at their representations of writing: in the revised Arcadia, ‘the problematic features of courtly communication which were evaded in the old Arcadia are stressed’ (47). He therefore concludes of the work’s incompletion that ‘Such open-ended brokenness, whether or not intentional, feels appropriate: for the Elizabethan courtier there was no escape from the prison-house of a speech genre waited on by anxiety, unreality and bad faith’ (51). ¹⁰⁸ Discussed further in Chapter 8 below.

52


Musidorus (said he) die nobly. In truth, never man betweene joy before knowledge what to be glad of, and feare after considering his case, had such a confusion of thoughts, as I had, when I saw Pyrocles, so neare me But with that Dorus blushed, and Pamela smiled: and Dorus the more blushed at her smiling, and she the more smiled at his blushing; because he had (with the remembraunce of that plight he was in) forgotten in speaking of him selfe to use the third person But Musidorus turned againe her thoughts from his cheekes to his tongue in this sorte: But (said he) when they were with swordes in handes … (T1r/173)

Does Musidorus do this on purpose? The textbook cause of aposiopesis, shame, is here after the event, and encourages us to think of the slip within the rhetorical nexus, in relation to Musidorus’ strategy of gradually teaching Pamela to recognize his true identity. Without modern quotation marks and punctuation the passage in its 1590 form is especially slippery: that the final ‘But’ is spoken by Musidorus makes us think that the previous two, breaking in hastily without waiting for full stops, may be his as well.¹⁰⁹ As soon as we think this, the narrator’s or author’s rhetorical consciousness has somehow merged with the character’s. Rhetorical theory as it is applied to imaginative literature offers a route to concerted speculation about perlocutionary and illocutionary intents, without ever quite demystifying the status of the fictional speech act. Musidorus’ previous rhetorical practice encourages us to read this moment in rhetorical terms. And this is what happens at the end of the work, when Sidney’s own intentions are hijacked by his aposiopetic habits. The texts and their author, after his death, take on a life of their own, a life in constant dialogue with the possibilities of rhetorical utterance and explanation. The book can never be closed on a reading of Sidney, because he so determinedly left it open. This is not the place even for the briefest history of literary incompletion, though my determination to view the end of the revised Arcadia as if it were intentional might find the support of analogue at the end of Lucan’s Pharsalia, or in the unfinished manuscript that presents Cervantes with a crisis managed in a fashion strikingly similar to Sidney’s in Part I, chapter 8 of Don Quixote.¹¹⁰ Neither do I propose to try and explain why the revised Arcadia ends where it does and how it does. My ¹⁰⁹ The 1593 text is tidied up unhelpfully at this point (M1r): each of the first two ‘But’s is followed by a full stop. ¹¹⁰ The fragments of Pierre Menard’s rewriting of Cervantes begin just after this point, with ch. 9 (in which the narrator discovers a continuation in Arabic in a street


53

aim is to show that sense can be found in this both prospectively and retrospectively, both in terms of Sidney’s preoccupations, and in the light of how they were read by those who followed Sidney and presented him to the world. The seeds of the revised Arcadia’s end are, I believe, not accidental but structural: this is why it is possible in retrospect to impose such a strong pattern on the material that the ‘fore-conceit’ is almost one of interruption. The ideas of ending and wholeness are key to the theoretical frameworks that condition, both explicitly and indirectly, the writing and reading of a text like the Arcadia, its morality, its plot, its rhetoric, and the poems and sentences it contains. The way aposiopesis hovers over Sidney’s endings, and over the efforts of others to understand or complete him, suggests to me that figurative rhetoric may present a framework for thinking about these endings. Aposiopesis is all about words that are not said, or not even formulated; it is about implying by not saying, or failing to communicate; it is about the expressive force of failures to complete and connect; and it is about deciding what has not been said, or what is meant by the not saying. It perches in its literary guise on interpretations of intention: are we moved by the Arcadia’s incompletion, or do we wonder if it isn’t intended; is the work in some way complete? Sidney is intensely interested in the mid-points between thought and expression (that is, between inventio and elocutio, and between elocutio and pronuntiatio) and between expression and understanding. Throughout his writings there is a great deal of speaking without words, or of adding gesture to language to inflect meaning. When Musidorus is taking Pyrocles to task, Pyrocles looks at his cousin ‘with a countenance as though he desired he should know his mind without hearing him speak’ (OA, 15). Later in the same scene he succeeds in reprimanding him ‘with a silent look upon Musidorus, as who should say, ‘‘and is it possible that Musidorus should threaten to leave me?’’’, which strikes Musidorus so dumb that ‘they rested with their eyes placed one upon another, in such sort as might well paint out the true passion of unkindness’ (OA, 25)—a mute speaking picture. When Pyrocles finally approaches Philoclea in her bedchamber, with a ‘long oration’ ready in his mind, ‘both his heart fainted and his tongue failed, in such sort that he could not bring forth one word, but referred her understanding to his eyes’ language’ (OA, 232). And it is a point of pride that Astrophil in Toledo), in Jorge Luis Borges’ brilliant tale about interpretation, fore-conceits, and forgetting, ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’.

54


can employ ‘dumbe eloquence’ (AS 61.2) but that he does not ‘give each speech a full point of a grone’ (54.4). His lover’s rhetoric is the more true for being incomplete—silent actions, speech without gesture, and a sentence that is figuratively aposiopetic because it does not complete speech with gesture. By the time he came to work on the revised Arcadia Sidney had perfected a style in which emotions cause imperfect communication, and he was able to manipulate the components of this style to have his own jokes, for instance aligning aposiopetic emotions with interruptions of speech that have other causes. In the ‘old’ Arcadia, Pyrocles/Cleophila, ‘taking the fair hand of Philoclea, and with more than womanish ardency kissing it, began to say these words: ‘‘O love, since thou art so changeable in men’s estates, how art thou so constant in their torments?’’—when suddenly there came out of the wood a monstrous lion, with a she-bear of little less fierceness …’ (OA, 46). The revised version of this passage is turned into a moment we have to heed by a clever addition: ‘… taking the hande of Philoclea, and with burning kisses setting it close to her lips (as if it should stande there like a hand in the margine of a Booke, to note some saying worthy to be marked) began to speake these words …’ (M1v/111). Again, we can see how Sidney amplifies the playful rhetoric in this comparison from Book II: At length Philoclea, having a while mused how to wade betwixt her own hopeless affection and her father’s unbridled hope, with blushing cheeks and eyes cast down to the ground, began to say: ‘‘My father, to whom I owe myself, and therefore must perform all duties unto—’’, when Cleophila straitly embracing her, and (warranted by a womanly habit) often kissing her, desired her to stay her sweet speech … (OA, 119) At last Philoclea (having a little mused how to cut the threede even, betweene her owne hopelesse affection, and her fathers unbridled hope) with eyes, cheekes, and lippes, (whereof each sange their parte, to make up the harmonie of bashfulnesse) began to say, My Father to whom I owe my self, and therefore, When Zelmane (making a womanish habite to be the Armour of her boldnesse, giving up her life to the lippes of Philoclea, and taking it againe by the sweetenesse of those kisses) humbly besought her to keepe her speech for a while within the Paradise of her minde … (2A1r/230)

The revised passage is at a higher emotional temperature, but also plays with the images and machinery of aposiopesis—cutting the thread in the right place, the aposiopetic emotion in the ‘harmonie of bashfulnesse’, and most of all the sentence, already cut off in the ‘old’ Arcadia, that Sidney cuts in half again. Aposiopesis belongs at the moments in the


55

revised Arcadia where there is simply a lot more interpreting to be done. And it comes to stand for the greater hermeneutic issues that such moments figure. We see the half-sentence as a way of not ending a text in many of Sidney’s most subtle followers. Robert Sidney and Fulke Greville make good use of it.¹¹¹ It is powerfully significant for both Mary Sidney and Mary Wroth, as we shall see below. Moffett knows what he is doing when he gives his biography an overdetermined ending, and the elegy that follows an aposiopetic one. Ben Jonson breaks off one of his poems to Sidney’s daughter mid-sentence, to represent the success of a literary lineage and the failing of a genetic one.¹¹² These echoes of Sidney are interpretations; they show the incomplete Arcadia becoming in retrospect the sort of deliberate fragment that makes artful use of abrupt termination, as with Virgil’s and Spenser’s half-lines. Responses to Sidney use incompletion as a figure for the gap between them and Sidney, and for the imperfect condition of a hermeneutic relation to him. It becomes the sign of a dialogue that Sidney has initiated and left open. Responding to, interpreting, Sidney—picking up that dialogue—is like deciding what his aposiopesis leaves unsaid.¹¹³ Sidney’s many incompletions allow space to think about him, to write in response to him, to take up his invitation to dialogue. We shall see this both in simple terms, when writers like William Alexander and Gervase Markham finish off his texts; and in more complicated cases where the important contributions of Wroth and the Countess of Pembroke come out of this fractured hermeneutic—out of the necessity of inferring completion, but of only partially understanding Sidney’s partial texts. In the chapters that follow I will look at writers who respond both to the invitation to engage Sidney’s writings in dialogue, and to the challenge to complete—metaphorically with their interpretations and imitations, as well as literally—his incomplete texts. ¹¹¹ Robert Sidney at the end of his incomplete ‘Crown of Sonnets’; Greville at the end of the ‘Letter to an Honourable Lady’, to which he added ‘not fynyssed’ in the Warwick manuscript scribal copy (The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford, 1986), 176); and Wroth at the end of both parts of the Urania (see Chapter 9 below). ¹¹² See Chapter 4. ¹¹³ In his case study of the 1655 Arcadia, Stephen B. Dobranski remarks that the Arcadia’s incompletion is what makes it such a ‘popular site of authorship’ (Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), 63).

2 Elegies and Legacies Reader, Within this Church Sir Philip Sidney lies, Nor is it fit that I should more acquaint, Lest superstition rise, And Men adore, Souldiers, their Martyr; Lovers, their Saint.¹

Many poets tried to imagine what Sidney’s epitaph should be. Edward Herbert’s effort probably dates from the 1600s and manages an economy that seemed impossible in the years immediately following Sidney’s death. For Herbert, Sidney has become a byword for the love-poet and chivalric soldier, so he need only glance metonymically at these aspects of the myth. In late 1586 and early 1587 the sense of why Sidney mattered and what legacy he had left was rather less clear: For his witt, learninge, and knowledge in divers languages he was muche admired, for his courtasie and affability towards all men no less beloved. and for all other his singuler parts of bounty, courag and liberaliti (bothe to strangers and his owne countrey men) as greatly honored of all that harde his fame (which was spred about the worlde) as of those that knew him hear at home.²

Thomas Lant was a servant of Sidney who went with him to the Low Countries, and his own tribute was to design thirty images recording Sidney’s funeral procession in detail.³ But Lant’s text for the final plate might ¹ Edward Herbert, ‘Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney lying in St. Paul’s without a Monument, to be fastned upon the Church door’, in The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1923), 53. ² Thomas Lant (engraved by de Brij), Sequitur celebritas et pompa funeris … (1587), plate 30; facsimile in Elegies. ³ On Lant see ODNB, Elizabeth Goldring, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Politics of Elizabethan Festival’, in Court Festivals of the European Renaissance, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (Aldershot, 2002), 199–224, Sander Bos et al., ‘Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed’, in 1586, 38–61, and J. F. R. Day, ‘Death be very proud: Sidney, Subversion, and Elizabethan Heraldic Funerals’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), 179–203.

Elegies and Legacies

57

still prompt the reader to ask: why all this fuss?⁴ John Buxton answers that question by stressing the loss of patronage Sidney’s death meant for poets and scholars.⁵ Dominic Baker-Smith and others point instead to the political purpose to be served by creating the image of Sidney the protestant martyr.⁶ Whichever aspect we emphasize, we must remember that the Sidney mourned in 1587 was not the Sidney of the 1590s, because he was not an author the stature of whose writings had come to dwarf his other achievements. Very few of the elegists and ballad-writers even knew that Sidney was a poet, and of those who mention his works perhaps only a handful had even seen them. In the first years after Sidney’s death, then, Sidney’s legacy was something other than the contribution to the literary tradition that was generally recognized in the 1590s. Whether it was an orchestrated effort or a spontaneous show of grief, the scale of the literary mourning of Sidney is staggering.⁷ Four collections of University verse (one from Cambridge, two from Oxford, and one from Leiden) containing hundreds of poems;⁸ three lengthy ballads, and perhaps others now lost;⁹ a write-up in Holinshed, a long Epitaph by Churchyard, and two funeral songs by Byrd¹⁰—all this was published in 1587–8. Much of this writing is formulaic—one suspects that some of the University men had the same themes for amplification ⁴ A more specific question was also: why should a commoner get the funeral of a baron? See Day, ‘Death be very proud’, esp. 190–9, answering the new historicist reading of Ronald Strickland, in ‘Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity in Sir Philip Sidney’s Funeral’, ELH, 57 (1990), 19–36. ⁵ Buxton, esp. chs. 5–7. ⁶ ‘Great Expectation: Sidney’s Death and the Poets’, in 1586, 83–103. Cf. Alan Hager, ‘The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader’, ELH, 48 (1981), 1–16. ⁷ For a good survey see John Buxton, ‘The Mourning for Sidney’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 46–56. ⁸ Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae (1587), Exequiae … (Oxford, 1587), Peplus (Oxford, 1587), Epitaphia in Mortem … Philippi Sidneii (Leiden, 1587). All are reproduced in facsimile in Elegies, and the last has been translated in Theodore L. Steinberg, ‘Weeping for Sidney’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 11.2 (1991), 3–15. ⁹ George Whetstone, Sir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true vertues [1587], John Philip, The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), and A[ngel]. D[ay]., Upon the Life and Death of … Sir Phillip Sidney [1587], all reproduced in facsimile in Elegies. Buxton lists three ‘lost’ ballads, entered in the Stationers’ Register in February and June of 1587 (273): A doleful dyttie of the death of Sir Philip Sidney, A Ballad of the buriall of Sir Philip Sidney, and A Mirrour of the life and death and vertues of Sir Philip Sidney. The latter is certainly Whetstone, the long title of which continues ‘A perfect Myrror for the followers both of Mars and Mercury’. For other entries in the Stationers’ Register see Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, 1990), 69 n. 9. ¹⁰ See notes 12, 17, and 18 below.

58


suggested to them—though some of it does offer glimpses of a personal connection. But even those who talk about Sidney’s motto, or his devotion to his sister, or the report that he was considered for the crown of Poland have little to say about him as a writer.¹¹ Churchyard seems only to have heard the vaguest of rumours.¹² Whetstone, who served in the Low Countries, has heard of ‘His Archadia, unmacht for sweet devise’ and reports that ‘What else he wrote, his will was to suppresse’.¹³ Angel Day does slightly better, and has an idea of Sidney as a pastoral poet, distinguished for his metrical skill: *A book by him *Archadia now, where is thy soveraigne guide, penned, called who stately Penbrooke erst did to thee knit, the Countesses Where be the notes, his skill did earst devide, of Penbrooks In sondry meeters, wounde from finest wit. Archadia. Which he so well in covert shapes could fit.¹⁴

The poets of the University anthologies do not know much more for the most part, and those who do say very little.¹⁵ Printed references in Sidney’s lifetime—from Thomas Howell and in the Spenser–Harvey correspondence—had been little different.¹⁶ As Martin Garrett observes, ‘Sidney’s poetry … tends to figure as simply one aspect of the larger construct ‘‘Sidney’’, potential Protestant leader, source of patronage, soldier or military expert’ (1). There had of course been a demand for Sidney’s works in court circles, but no sense that they might reach a wider readership. Writing in the summer of 1586, Edmund Molyneux, Sir Henry Sidney’s secretary, had added to his obituary of his master for Holinshed’s Chronicles an account of Philip Sidney’s promise. When Sidney himself died, Molyneux expanded his ¹¹ Motto: e.g. George Carleton, in Exequiae, L2v and Richard Butcher, in Peplus, G3v; his sister: John Owen, in Peplus, F1r; Poland: Robert Dow, in Exequiae, D2r–v. ¹² Thomas Churchyard, The Epitaph of Sir Phillip Sidney Knight (1587), A4r. ¹³ Whetstone, Sir Phillip Sidney, B2v. ¹⁴ Day, Life and Death, A3v. ¹⁵ A number of the Oxford and Cambridge men have connections to Sidney, some close—such as Matthew Gwinne (Exequiae, D2v–D3v), William Temple (Lachrymae, L4v–M1v), Robert Dow (Exequiae, D1v–D2v), and Gabriel Harvey (Lachrymae, A1r–A2r, A3v–A4r). References to Sidney’s works in the university anthologies are summarized in Garrett, 2. For a fuller discussion of the anthologies see Christopher A. Upton, ‘‘‘Speaking Sorrow’’: The English University Anthologies of 1587 on the Death of Sir Philip Sidney in the Low Countries’, in Academic Relations between the Low Countries and the British Isles, 1450–1700, ed. H. de Ridder-Symoens and J. M. Fletcher (Ghent, 1989), 131–41. ¹⁶ For the few references to Sidney’s poetry in his lifetime see Garrett, 1–2, Ringler, lxi–ii, and Hamilton, 8–9 and 180–1 n. 35.


59

piece into a ‘Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys, the father and the son’. Sidney was alive when Molyneux wrote about the Arcadia, but he wrote in the past tense because that was where he believed the work—for all its brilliance—belonged; he was talking about Sidney’s promise as a public servant and not as a poet: Not long after [Sidney’s embassy of 1577] … he made his booke which he named Arcadia, a worke (though a mere fansie, toie, and fiction) shewing such excellencie of spirit, gallant invention, varietie of matter, and orderlie disposition … as nothing could be taken out to amend it, or added to it that would not impaire it, as few works of like subject hath beene either of some more earnestlie sought, choisely kept, nor placed in better place, and amongest better jewels than that was; so that a speciall deere freend he should be that could have a sight, but much more deere that could once obteine a copie.¹⁷

It was only with the publication in 1588 of Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike that those outside such exclusive manuscript circles could ‘have a sight’ of parts of the Arcadia, and start to wonder if they might soon get their hands on a printed copy of the whole. For the most part, then, Sidney was mourned as a patron and public figure. That mourning, copious, conventional, often tedious, tends even—and especially—in its more distinguished cases, to get stuck in a grief-stricken impasse that has no obvious way out: Come to me, grief, for ever; Come to me, tears, day and night; Come to me, plaint, ah, helpless; Just grief, heart, tears, plaint worthy. Go fro me, dread to die now; Go fro me, care to live more; Go fro me, joys all on earth; Sidney, O Sidney is dead.¹⁸

Nicholas Breton strikes a similar tone in his long elegy ‘Amoris Lachrymae’, as does Sidney’s literary legatee Edward Dyer in the eloquently ¹⁷ Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (1587), in Garrett, 113; a fuller, modernized, text is given in Major Works, 311–14. For discussion of the circulation of the Arcadia in Sidney’s lifetime see Woudhuysen, ch. 10. ¹⁸ William Byrd, Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs (1588), song 34.1–8, in English Madrigal Verse 1588–1632, ed. E. H. Fellowes (3rd edn., ed. Frederick W. Sternfeld and David Greer, Oxford, 1967). This poem is written in sapphics, a classical stanza used by Sidney in OA 12 and CS 5, and is set to musique mesurée, as described by Sidney in the debate on metrics and music between Dicus and Lalus found in some manuscripts of the Arcadia (OA, 89).

60


unrhymed sonnet with which he mourns his friend, ending: ‘Thou dead dost live, thy dier living dieth’.¹⁹ In each case the emphasis is put not on the mourned but on the mourner, not on the legacy but on the sensation of loss: we are told not about Sidney, about what his life after death might look like, but about how it feels to be left behind. But this dead-end was only figurative. The ballads and elegies that had spent less time on grief had held up the image of Sidney as an example to be imitated, and those left behind were encouraged to think their way into one or other of his various roles. The need to imagine continuities and inheritances focused at first on those aspects Sidney was celebrated for in his life—patronage and military or political leadership. Robert Sidney was the most straightforward case—he simply, after some delay, took over his brother’s post in Flushing. Margaret Hannay, John Buxton, and others have written eloquently about how Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, came to recognize her role as the patron of those writers Sidney had, or would have, supported.²⁰ Pembroke announced this intent in a splendidly ceremonious arrival in London in November 1588 (Hannay, ix–x). And it was in courtly ceremony that the other area of Sidney’s legacy was addressed. The Ditchley manuscript of Sir Henry Lee (British Library Add. MS 41499) is a record of the devices of Lee and others for tilts and court entertainments. It includes ‘A remembrance of Sir Ph: Sidnie Knight the 17th November 1586’. Sidney had been very active with Lee and others in establishing the annual Accession Day tilts at the core of Elizabethan courtly ritual. It seems that the tilt just one month after Sidney’s death was used as an occasion to remember him. Three Latin poems are recorded. The first two seem to speak for Greville and Dyer, the remnants of what Sidney called the ‘happy blessed Trinitie’ (OP 6.20): they ‘were three, joined in a faithful covenant, of whom one fell’; Sidney will be honoured annually. The third is in the voice of ‘the mo[u]rning horse’, who once bore Sidney and now bears mourning sable.²¹ This riderless horse, draped in black, was a fitting emblem of loss. Later tilts, however, tried in various ways to enact succession. ¹⁹ Dyer’s poem 12 in May, 311, from manuscript. The poem was used to conclude Byrd’s Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs, with ‘friend here’ substituted for ‘dier’ in that last line. Dyer, with Greville, was given ‘all my books’ in Sidney’s will (Prose, 149). ²⁰ See Buxton, ch. 6, and Hannay, passim. ²¹ E. K. Chambers, Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936), 272, and for discussion see Frances Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts’, in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), 102 (the essay was first


61

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, fought at Zutphen alongside Sidney and returned to England soon after Sidney’s death to make his debut in the Accession Day tilt described above, taking on Sidney’s role as one of the principal challengers.²² In John Philip’s verse prosopopoeia of Sidney’s ghost printed in 1587, Sidney addresses Essex as ‘My Devorax, my deare, my joy, my friend’,²³ and Philip addresses the whole work to Essex, telling him that Sidney’s ‘virtues so revive him from the grave, that he in truth speaketh unto you’ (A2v). Essex was being encouraged to think of himself as Sidney’s military and political heir from the day Sidney died, with the bequest to him in a last-minute codicil to Sidney’s will of ‘my best sword’ (Prose, 152). And Essex himself expressed this legacy through symbols—his next New Year’s gift to the Queen was a jewel representing a rainbow over two pillars, one cracked for Sidney, the other sound for Essex.²⁴ In 1590, the year that the Arcadia was printed, Essex married Sidney’s widow Frances, and the Accession Day tilt became an elaborate performance of the ways he was following Sidney. The occasion was written up by George Peele, who in the year before had addressed An Eglogue Gratulatorie to Essex on his return from the expedition to Portugal.²⁵ This earlier poem uses pastoral to clarify the relation between Essex and Sidney. Spenserian in manner, it therefore reminds us that The Shepheardes Calender (1579) was dedicated ‘To him that is the president | Of noblesse and of chevalree’—that Sidney had presided over Spenser’s sort of pastoral from the start.²⁶ The full title of Peele’s Eglogue calls Essex the ‘Shepherd of Albions Arcadia’, and the dialogue between Spenser’s Piers and Palinode makes clear that Essex has taken on the mantle of the shepherd knight: Fellow in Armes he was, in their flowing deies, With that great Shepherd good Philisides: And in sad sable did I see him dight. Morning the misse of Pallas peereles Knight … published in JWCI, 20 (1957), 4–25). Only Greville participated in the tilt—see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977), 207. ²² His impresa on this or possibly a later occasion was par nulla figura dolori (nothing can represent [my] sorrow)—see Alan R. Young, The English Tournament Imprese (New York, 1988), 101 (no. 315) and Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987), 138. ²³ The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney (1587), B3r. ²⁴ See Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999), 54. ²⁵ For an account see Hammer, 82–5. ²⁶ ‘To his booke’, ll. 3–4, in Shorter Poems.

62

Elegies and Legacies With him he serv’d, and watcht and waited fate, To keepe the grim Wolfe from Elizaes gate: And for their Mistresse thoughten these two swaines, They moughten never take too mickle paines … But, ah for griefe, that jolly groome is dead, For whome the Muses silver teares have shed: Yet in this lovelie swaine, source of our glee, Mun all his Vertues sweet reviven bee.²⁷

This chimes with Essex’s New Year’s gift—he and Sidney the twin pillars of Elizabeth’s realm—and with other works that revive Sidney’s virtues in Essex, like R.D.’s abridged translation of the Hypnerotomachia, dedicated to the ‘ever lyving vertues’ of Sidney on one page and to Essex as patron of those virtues on the next.²⁸ Peele’s Polyhymnia, the record of the 1590 tilt, carries on this work. Essex enters ‘all in Sable sad, | Drawen on with cole-blacke Steeds of duskie hue’ and ‘Yclad in mightie Armes of mourners hue’.²⁹ Peele interprets this show as one would expect: As if he mourn’d to thinke of him he mist, Sweete Sydney, fairest shepherd of our greene, Well lettred Warriour, whose successor he In love and Armes had ever vowed to be.

Steven May, following Alan Young, disagrees with Peele’s reading: ‘The earl was not mourning for Sidney, he was responding to the queen’s intense displeasure over his secret marriage to Philip’s widow, Frances’ (9).³⁰ Of course both readings were available then as now, and the one might have offered a useful public disguise for the other. But there is reason to think that this tilt was especially concerned with the question of succession. We only have Peele’s report, and an equally detailed prose account from the herald William Segar,³¹ because it was at the 1590 tilt that the Queen’s ageing champion Sir Henry Lee (the Lelius of Sidney’s Arcadia)³² retired and was succeeded by George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland—it is this succession that is announced on Peele’s title page. And it is possible that Essex was trying to upstage this element of the occasion ²⁷ An Eglogue Gratulatorie (1589), A3v. ²⁸ R. D. [Robert Dallington?], Hypnerotomachia (1592), A1v. ²⁹ Polyhymnia (1590), A3r. ³⁰ Cf. Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, 138. ³¹ See Strong, 207–8, and Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, 204 for a list of all sources for the 1590 tilt. ³² See NA, 255–6 and xiv–xv.


63

with his own symbolism of succession, declaring himself, as Richard McCoy argues, ‘the heir to a worthier line of chivalric heroism’.³³ But Sidney may also have been on the mind of Sir Henry Lee. From the complicated evidence of the Lee and Ditchley manuscripts, it seems that a book was handed over to Cumberland by Lee on this occasion. This may have been the Lee manuscript of parts of the ‘old’ Arcadia, or the Ditchley manuscript discussed above; or a copy of either. Frances Yates argued that it was Sidney’s writings that formed part of this ceremony: ‘the true Bible or inspiration of the Tilt, the scriptures of the perfect knight of Protestant chivalry’.³⁴ Woudhuysen is more sceptical.³⁵ But these are not the only references to Sidney in the 1590 tilt. Sir Philip’s youngest brother Thomas Sidney, ‘at which name I sigh, | Because I lacke the Sydney that I love, | And yet I love the Sydneys that survive’ (B2v), was among the challengers, for only the second time, as was Fulke Greville. According to Peele, Sir Charles Blount, Sidney’s successor as the lover of Essex’s sister Penelope Rich (and in Blount’s case we know for certain that this was more than an imaginary affair), appears in the Sidney colours of gold and azure, ‘Rich in his colours, richer in his thoughts’ (B1r), and Essex’s friend Sir Philip Butler appears ‘In mourning Sable dight by simpathie’ (B2r). Sidney was clearly on Peele’s mind, and probably on the minds of Sidney’s chivalric heirs, who seem to have turned the celebration of the Queen’s accession on 17 November 1558 into an occasion for remembering 17 October 1586—the annual commemoration promised in the ‘Remembrance’ presented at the tilt four weeks after Sidney’s death. The Earl of Essex had inherited the Sidneian legacy of courtly chivalry yoked to leadership of what Blair Worden calls the ‘forward Protestants’—those who believed in military intervention on the continent and who shared Sidney’s dream of a pan-European Protestant alliance. But Essex never struck the balance between chivalric display and military or political pragmatism quite as finely as Sidney had. And this strand of the legacy ended, for now, with Essex’s disgrace, rebellion, and execution in 1601.³⁶ ³³ Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 82. Young suggests that the portrait of him in black by the herald William Segar commemorates this occasion—Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, 140 and fig. 68. ³⁴ Yates, 103–4. ³⁵ He gives a full account of the manuscripts, 332–5. ³⁶ On Sidney and forward Protestantism see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Ct., 1996); for Essex, see Hammer (for the period up to 1597), Mervyn James, ‘At a Crossroads of the Political

64


With the printing of the Arcadia in 1590 and Astrophil and Stella in 1591, Sidney began posthumously to enjoy the new status of major author. When Thomas Churchyard wrote his lumbering verse paraphrase of The Defence of Poesy in 1595, he could very conveniently convert Sidney’s comments about the poor state of English literature³⁷ into praise of Sidney: Our age and former fathers daies (Leaue Goore and Chauser out) Hath brought foorth heere but few to praise Search all our soyle about. Yet of all those that newly wrate In prose or verse of late Let Sydney weare (for stile of state) The garland lawreate.³⁸

This pre-eminence informs Francis Meres’s assessment of contemporary letters in Palladis Tamia (1598). As Raphael Falco observes, in Meres’s view ‘Sidney, more so than Spenser or Chaucer or any other, is the poetic progenitor and first patriarch of the modern vernacular’.³⁹ Falco’s thesis is that it is not from Sidney’s writings so much as ‘from the mythologized figure of Philip Sidney, fabricated in the decade following his early death, that English literary genealogy chiefly descends’ (51), and the view has much to commend it. But Sidney was only available for such mythologizing once his works had been published, and it is just possible that some of what was said at the time about their influential importance is true. The likes of Nashe, Harvey, and Harington all put Sidney at the centre of the new map of English literature that emerged in the 1590s.⁴⁰ So did Samuel Daniel, in a poem written in 1594 to Sidney’s sister: Culture: the Essex Revolt, 1601’, ch. 9 of Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), McCoy, ch. 4, and Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments, 170–6. For Essex as a Sidneian patron see Buxton, 205–8. ³⁷ Defence, 110–13, esp. 112. ³⁸ ‘A praise of Poetrie, some notes thereof drawen out of the Apologie, the noble minded Knight, sir Phillip Sidney wrate’, in A Musical Consort (1595), G1v. ³⁹ Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 50. ⁴⁰ Nashe, in the preface to Astrophel and Stella (1591); Harvey, in various works and marginalia (Garrett, 129–33); Harington, in his Orlando Furioso (1591) (Garrett, 115–17, and see Chapter 4 below).


65

Now when so many pennes (like Speares) are charg’d, To chace away this tyrant of the North: Gross Barbarism, whose powre growne far inlarg’d, Was lately by thy valiant Brothers worth, First found, encountred, and provoked forth: Whose onset made the rest audacious, Whereby they likewise have so well discharg’d, Upon that hidious Beast incroching thus.⁴¹

Much as they admired Sidney, many writers were happier to try to write like Spenser, and there is something oddly and appropriately Spenserian about this moment. Spenser, after all, wrote in his sonnet to the Countess of Pembroke in The Faerie Queene (1590) that Sidney ‘first my Muse did lift out of the flore, | To sing his sweet delights in lowlie laies’,⁴² and he allowed others to record an even greater debt, which charted Sidney’s influence on Spenser from The Shepheardes Calender through to The Faerie Queene. Wishing to praise Elizabeth, To seeme a shepeheard then he made his choice, But Sydney heard him sing, and knew his voice. And as Ulysses brought faire Thetis sonne From his retyred life to menage armes: So Spencer was by Sidneys speaches wonne, To blaze her fame not fearing future harmes … What though his taske exceed a humaine witt, He is excus’d, sith Sidney thought it fitt.⁴³

So Daniel builds a bridge between Sidney the patron and soldier and Sidney the poet by imagining him as a Spenserian knight encountering the Barbarous Beast, rather as Spenser’s Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Sidney depicted in Spenser’s Astrophel, was to pursue the Blatant Beast in Book VI of The Faerie Queene (1596). Daniel continues by bemoaning the limited ⁴¹ The Tragedie of Cleopatra, in Delia and Rosamond Augmented. Cleopatra (1594), H5v. Successive rewritings of the dedication can be traced in Works (1601) and Certaine Small Workes (1611). ⁴² STC 23080, 2Q4v. ⁴³ W. L.’s commendatory poem, 2P5r. For Sidney and Spenser see S. K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park, Pa., 1989), passim, with an especially useful summary of his view of how crucial Sidney was to Spenser’s development (394–5), and a survey of other scholarship (503 n. 47).

66


reach of English—if only the language were current on the Continent, English authors could be compared to the greats of Italian literature: Wherby great S and our S might, With those Po-singers beeing equalled, Enchaunt the world with such a sweet delight, That theyr eternall songs (for ever read,) May shew what great E  raigne hath bred. (H7r)

When Daniel revised this for a second time in 1611, Sidney was no less central, but Spenser was more easily forgotten: Let them produce the best of all they may … And we shall parallel them every way … They cannot shew a Sidney, let them shew All their choice peeces, and bring all in one And altogether shall not make that shew Of wonder and delight, as he hath done: He hath th’Olimpian prize (of all that run Or ever shall with mortall powers) possest In that faire course of glory and yet now Sydney is not our all, although our best.⁴⁴

Daniel was returning to Sidney and to Pembroke in the same poem. He had distanced himself from her patronage, first toning down his debt to her in the 1601 version of this poem, and then dropping the poem altogether in editions of 1605 and 1607. But here, ‘glad I am I have renewd to you | The vowes I owe your worth’ (E4r). At a greater distance, both the worth of Pembroke’s patronage and the significance of Sidney’s legacy seemed more substantial to Daniel, less about convenience or hype. Most of the writers of the 1590s and 1600s had something to say about Sidney, but we get a more vivid picture of his literary legacy from those volumes of poetry that take Sidney as their point of origin, that mourn him and that try to follow him. Brittons Bowre (1591) begins with ‘Amoris Lachrymae’, Breton’s elegy for Sidney.⁴⁵ Byrd’s songbook of 1588 and Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigals Englished (1590) do new things with English verse for music whilst commemorating their ⁴⁴ Certaine Small Workes (1611), E4v. ⁴⁵ The collection also includes a long epitaph and a brief summary of it (C3r–C4r), as well as three brief acrostics on Sidney (D3r–v).


67

lost patron. Englands Helicon (1600) and A Poetical Rapsody (1602) are also suffused with debts to and memories of Sidney, as we have seen. But the two volumes, one growing out of the other, that do the best job of mourning Sidney whilst establishing a new literature on his foundations are The Phoenix Nest (1593) and Spenser’s Astrophel (the second part of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 1595). The Phoenix Nest was the most literary and courtly of the Elizabethan miscellanies before Englands Helicon. The phoenix of its title may well be Sidney,⁴⁶ and the poets represented here his nestlings. Edited by a still unidentified ‘R.S. of the Inner Temple Gentleman’, its contributors include Thomas Lodge and Nicholas Breton (identified only by their initials) as well as Edward Dyer and Walter Ralegh (anonymously). Although a brief defence of the Earl of Leicester (‘The dead mans Right’) was put at the start at the eleventh hour, the volume had been intended to begin with three elegies for Sidney, as Rollins shows (xxxv), and the new beginning—writing in defence of Sidney’s late uncle as Sidney himself had done⁴⁷—does not disrupt the Sidneian theme. An emphasis on sonnets within the collection as a whole, and even a poem in correlative verse, shows Sidney’s influence. The three anonymous elegies are ‘An Elegie, or friends passion, for his Astrophill’ by Matthew Roydon, ‘An Epitaph … ’ by Ralegh, and a poem beginning ‘Silence augmenteth griefe’. Though attributions of the first two can be made quite firmly, there is no evidence to support any attribution of this last poem, but it has often been ascribed to Greville or Dyer. The latter is the more likely author, since it is in poulter’s measure, which Greville only used in a poem that imitates one of Dyer’s.⁴⁸ Roydon’s poem is the most interesting of these. Set in the ‘woods of Arcadie’ (12.1), it is an inset lament reported by a poet-figure. The lamenting friend gives a hyperbolic and idealized picture of Sidney’s life and character, and both his love of Stella and the verses he wrote are central to this. Astrophil is sent to battle by Pallas and killed in envy by Mars. This abrupt death then rather brilliantly disorders the whole elegy. The friend’s lament ends at the moment he reports Astrophil’s death: ‘And so our Astrophill was slaine’ (14.27). The next stanza describes the impact of these last words: ‘The word (was slaine) straightway did move … ’ (14.28). The sky darkens, the winds rise, and ⁴⁶ See The Phoenix Nest, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), ix–x. References are to Rollins’s pagination and lineation. ⁴⁷ In his Defence of the Earl of Leicester. ⁴⁸ Caelica, 83, imitating poem 2 in May.

68


Astrophil is mourned by birds that both sympathize with Sidney and symbolize aspects of him: nightingale, dove, swan (singing ‘his funerall dirge’—the swan’s or Astrophil’s?), phoenix (which immolates itself), and eagle. There is then a second abrupt ending, as we cross from recollection to writing: And while I followed with mine eie, The flight the Egle upward tooke, All things did vanish by and by, And disappeered from my looke, The trees, beasts, birds, and grove was gone, So was the friend that made this mone. This spectacle had firmely wrought, A deepe compassion in my spright, My molting hart issude me thought, In streames foorth at mine eies aright, And heere my pen is forst to shrinke, My teares discollors so mine inke. (16.6–17)

The effect imitates the end of the eighth song of Astrophil and Stella, where the threshold between emotion reported and emotion felt in reporting is also collapsed abruptly. Roydon shows that out of the scene of Sidney’s death must come writing, but that this writing is vulnerable because of the abruptness of that death—it can too easily collapse back into silent grief; any literary effort to remember or imitate Sidney may result in interruption and incompletion. Spenser, it seems, had not found it easy to mourn Sidney in writing.⁴⁹ One problem may have been that after 1590 the presence of Sidney’s own poetic voice might make it difficult to speak. In the Dedication to the Countess of Pembroke of The Ruines of Time (1591), Spenser drew attention to his own failure up to that point to remember Sidney in verse. That poem is ‘not so much an elegy as a short outcry at the loss of Sidney as poet and patron’,⁵⁰ and it was not until 1595 that Spenser could try to do justice to the challenge. Colin Clouts ⁴⁹ For references that show writers urging an apparently reluctant Spenser to commemorate Sidney, including a pastoral elegy later printed in A Poetical Rapsody, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Astrophel’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto, 1990), 74–6 (75). ⁵⁰ Duncan-Jones, ‘Astrophel’, 75.


69

Come Home Againe ends with a section marked by its own title page: ‘Astrophel. A Pastorall Elegie upon the death of the most Noble and valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney. Dedicated To the most beautifull and vertuous Ladie, the Countesse of Essex.’ Spenser gathers a number of works into a pastoral framework, suiting with the recollections of the dialogic scene of The Shepheardes Calender already presented in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. His own Astrophel is followed by a ‘dolefull lay’ voiced for Astrophel’s sister Clorinda either by Spenser or by Mary Sidney herself, and that by two poems by Sidney’s friend Lodowyck Bryskett, ‘The mourning Muse of Thestylis’ (which had been entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1587) and ‘A pastorall Aeglogue’ spoken by Colin (Spenser) and Lycon (Bryskett). The three elegies from The Phoenix Nest are then added. Throughout the collection Sidneian and Spenserian pastoral are brought together in dialogue. The diction, for example, is never quite either the ‘old rustic language’ that Sidney had criticized Spenser for adopting in The Shepheardes Calender (Defence, 112) or the more modern language Sidney was teaching poets to speak, and this particular language is a sign that the poets gathered in Astrophel are thinking between Sidney’s way of writing eclogues and Spenser’s. The frame gradually dissipates, but it is established clearly enough at the start of the poems for us to see that we are meant to find a parallel between the community of writers who have contributed to the collection and the sort of community that pastoral conventionally represents. Spenser opens in a voice that is hard to situate. It may be the poet addressing those holding the book, with his allegorical mask only half on; or it may be intended to represent the fully fictionalized voice of the shepherd narrator within the poem itself: Shepheards that wont on pipes of oaten reed, Oft times to plaine your loves concealed smart … Hearken ye gentle shepheards to my song, And place my dolefull plaint your plaints emong. To you alone I sing this mournfull verse … ⁵¹

These words present us with a simple test—are we in Spenser’s community of shepherds or not? ‘If any nycer wit,’ Spenser continues, ‘Shall hap to heare, or covet them to read’ (13–14), that person should see that Spenser’s verse is suited to those shepherds with ‘softened hearts’ ⁵¹ Astrophel, ll. 1–2, 5–7, in Shorter Poems.

70


(9), and is ‘Made not to please the living but the dead’ (16). If we claim fellowship with Spenser’s exclusive community, we are joining a club still governed by a dead poet-patron: any address to that community is ultimately an offering to Sidney. The elegy that follows this opening is a more thoroughly allegorized account of Sidney’s life and death than Roydon’s.⁵² And it is not all that well-judged. Borrowing from Bion via Ronsard, Spenser aligns Sidney with Adonis, both killed by a wound to the thigh.⁵³ This requires the hunting of animals to be brought allegorically close to the war in the Low Countries, so that Astrophel is depicted trapping huge quantities of wild beasts and then slaughtering them, only to be brought low by an unexpected tusk. Only the allegory thinks that these beasts are men; Astrophel believes himself to be a real shepherd and the beasts to be real beasts. But there is still too much of mad Ajax killing the sheep he believed to be the Greeks in this scene, and so Sidney’s own sense of purpose seems infected by allegorical fog. And the Stella whom Spenser represents as Sidney’s wife (and not Penelope Rich) oddly dies of grief, leaving only Astrophel’s sister to mourn him. This may be an elegant solution to the problem that only Pembroke could be represented mourning Sidney now that Penelope Rich was engaged in an open affair with Charles Blount and Frances Sidney was Countess of Essex,⁵⁴ but it still feels clumsy.⁵⁵ The poem ends with a convocation of shepherds, who merge with those shepherds who had been addressed at the opening and now clearly represent the other authors gathered in

⁵² Spenser’s poems on Sidney have obviously received more attention than those of others. Recent studies include Theodore L. Steinberg, ‘Spenser, Sidney, and the Myth of Astrophel’, Spenser Studies, 11 (1990), 187–201, Kay, Melodious Tears, 52–66, and Falco, Conceived Presences, 95–123. For an argument that Muiopotmos too is about Sidney, see Elizabeth Mazzola, ‘Spenser, Sidney, and Second Thoughts: Mythology and Misgiving in Muiopotmos’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 57–81. On the vexed question of the authorship of the ‘Dolefull Lay’ see most recently Pamela Coren, ‘Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney and the ‘‘Dolefull Lay’’’, SEL 42 (2002), 25–41. ⁵³ This had already become a topos. Sidney figures directly and indirectly in the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, 3.6. Jon Quitslund explores this topos and related ones (such as annual commemoration, developed in Fraunce’s Ivychurch series), in ‘The Work of Mourning in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis’, Renaissance Papers (1997), 23–31. ⁵⁴ As Duncan-Jones argues, Spenser Encyclopedia, 75. ⁵⁵ Steinberg argues strongly that the fault lines are deliberate—Spenser rejects ‘parts of the Sidney myth’, and his poem ‘simultaneously glorifies and criticizes its subject’ (187). Cf. Lisa M. Klein, ‘Spenser’s Astrophel and the Sidney Legend’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 12.2 (1993), 42–55.


71

Spenser’s book. They take turns to mourn, beginning with ‘his sister that Clorinda hight’ (211). What sets these vernacular elegies apart from the poems in English and Latin from 1587 and the years prior to the printing of Sidney’s works is their agreement that a pastoral setting is appropriate to the job of mourning Sidney (it had been tried by only a few of the University elegists). Because Sidney was a pastoral poet, and because Spenser’s great pastoral work had been dedicated to him, the pastoral world seemed the literary space most haunted by Sidney’s presence, a place where writers who had never met him could go to claim fellowship with him, as happens clearly when the next generation turns to Sidney in A Poetical Rapsody (1602).⁵⁶ But Spenser did know Sidney, as did all of those assembled in Astrophel, with the probable exception of Matthew Roydon. So when he represents a community, it is Sidney’s actual milieu and it tells us something—just as Sidney’s own pastorals do—about Sidney’s status as a writer in relation to a very particular literary community. We have seen the same effect in Bryskett’s A Discourse of Civill Life (1606), a dialogue set in Ireland in Sidney’s lifetime: Spenser, Bryskett and their friends and colleagues are represented having the sort of conversations that Sidney and his friends must have had (about virtue or the soul’s memory), and therefore embody the community out of which Sidney’s and Spenser’s works came. One poet who is not involved in the Astrophel volume, but who very clearly exploits the ability of pastoral to imagine new configurations of the literary scene, is Michael Drayton. Like Roydon, he may, by showing Spenser’s influence in his Idea. The Shepheards Garland (1593), have reminded Spenser of how he should commemorate Sidney. Drayton’s nine eclogues include one on Sidney and one on the Countess of Pembroke. In each case what is especially interesting is the way Drayton revised his text for his collection Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall (1606). In the Pembroke eclogue, the ‘heire-loome’ of virtue, ‘bequeathed’ by the ‘legacie’ of her ‘ancestrie’ to Pandora, ‘The Muse of Britanye’ in 1593⁵⁷ became a more precise writerly legacy in 1606: Sister sometime she to that shepheard was, that yet for piping never had his peere, ⁵⁶ See Sukanta Chaudhuri, Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford, 1989), 457–60 for how the reception and commemoration of Sidney and the patronage of his sister were central to the development of pastoral lyric in the 1590s. ⁵⁷ Idea. The Shepheards Garland, F4v.

72

Elegies and Legacies Elphin that did all other swayns surpasse, to whom she was of living things most deare, and on his deathbed by his latest will, to her bequeath’d the secrets of his skill.⁵⁸

Careful recalibration of hyperbole also marks the revised elegy for Sidney. This poem in its 1593 version is not unlike the lament for Dido in Spenser’s ‘November’ eclogue, and Drayton was clearly thinking about Spenser throughout his collection. The shepherds have English names (unlike Sidney’s), and each eclogue has an argument that is a single ballad-stanza, imitating those that begin each canto of The Faerie Queene. In 1593 ‘Wynken bewayleth Elphins losse, | the God of Poesie’ (D2v) in a song attributed to Drayton’s absent persona, Rowland (as Hobbinol had sung Colin’s song in Spenser’s ‘Aprill’). Wynken tells us first about Elphin: A heavenly clowded in a humaine shape, Rare substance, in so rough a barcke Iclad, Of Pastorall, the lively springing sappe, Though mortall thou, thy fame immortall made. Spel-charming Prophet, sooth-divining seer, oˆ heavenly musicke of the highest spheare, Sweet sounding trump, soule-ravishing desire, Thou stealer of mans heart, inchanter of the eare. God of Invention, Joves deere Mercury, Joy of our Lawrell, pride of all our joy: The essence of all Poets divinitie, Spirit of Orpheus: Pallas lovely boy. But all my words shalbe dissolv’d to teares, And my tears fountaines shall to rivers grow: These Rivers to the floods of my dispaires, And these shall make an Ocean of my woe. (D4r)

One hyperbole leads to another here. However sincere this praise is, it tells us very little. The lament that follows is static and ceremonious: Oh Elphin, Elphin, Though thou hence be gone, In spight of death yet shalt thou live for aye, ⁵⁸ Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall, F4r.


73

Thy Poesie is garlanded with Baye: and still shall blaze thy lasting prayse: Whose losse poore shepherds ever shall bemone. (E1v)

Gorbo’s reaction is to draw our attention to his own copious tears and—in the way pastorals always do—blame the setting sun for the poem’s need to stop. Drayton’s poem is an enchanting guess at what a Spenserian lament for Sidney should look like, but its hyperbolic rhetoric takes us no further than loss and grief. All this changes in the 1606 version. There is no formal lament, but instead a much more carefully considered and drawn picture of what difference Sidney’s absence actually makes. Gorbo at first doesn’t have much time for Wynken’s grief: ‘Best doth the meane befit the wise in mourning: | And to recall that, laborst but in vaine, | which is by fate prohibited retourning’ (E4v). Wynken won’t hear this: ‘But oh his losse requireth more then wordes, | Nor it so slightly can be overpast’ (E4v). He describes how for a long time after Elphin died the whole of nature grew sad, dark, and wintry. And then he turns, as Gorbo had advised him not to, to address Elphin directly. This passage of apostrophe tells Elphin about the fame of ‘thy lasting poesy’ and the poem’s imagery starts to come alive again: Not mournefull Cipresse nor sad widowing yew about thy tombe to prosper shall bee seen but bay and mirtle which be ever new in spight of winter flourishing and greene. Summers longst day shall sheepheards not suffice to sit and tell full storyes of thy prayse Nor shall the longest winters night comprize Their sighs for him the subject of their layes, And gentle shepheards (as sure som there be) That living yet his vertues do inherit … (F1r–v)

With this turn to those who remember Elphin, the dead poet is back in the third person. Drayton cleverly creates a link between the Sidney who could once be addressed in the second person and the poetic heirs of the 1600s who never knew him: Melibeus (Samuel Daniel), ‘that so wisely hast | Guided the flocks delivered thee to keep’; Alexis (Drayton’s friend Sir William Alexander, already a Sidney imitator in verse, and to

74


be his most important imitator in prose); Rowland (Drayton himself). Wynken’s last words are to remind these new shepherds of their duty to remember, which is also a duty to keep writing: Then gentle shepheards where so ere you rest … Still let your pipes be busied in his prayse, Untill your flocks be learnt his losse to know, And tatling Echo many sundry wayes, Be taught by you to warble forth our woe. (F2r)

Drayton is instructing his poetic peers both to understand what Sidney meant (‘his losse to know’) and to write with a sense of his legacy. But this sense of legacy was even in the 1600s starting to look nostalgic. Drayton’s fellow-poets had in common both a debt to Sidney and some dislocation from the Jacobean literary scene. As a sonneteer, as Hardin points out, Alexander was faithful to a tradition no longer in fashion.⁵⁹ Daniel and Drayton were the great Jacobean revisers of their Elizabethan works. All three writers, then, might have seemed too connected to the past: a debt to Sidney can look anachronistic. But Drayton continued to insist on the relevance and centrality of Sidney’s legacy, and this perspective informs his brilliant critical verse essay, ‘To Henry Reynolds’ (1627). Here Sidney is ‘That Heroe for numbers, and for Prose, | That throughly pac’d our language as to show, | The plenteous English hand in hand might goe | With Greeke and Latine, and did first reduce | Our tongue from Lillies writing then in use’.⁶⁰ Between 1593 and 1606, Drayton took elegy for Sidney from the dead-end of static and hyperbolic lament to a more precise tool for understanding loss and envisaging succession.⁶¹ And having established a picture of Sidney’s role in the English tradition, Drayton held to it. Because Sidney fictionalized himself—as Astrophil and Philisides—it was possible to approach him in fiction, to merge the space of his writing with that of later writing. All of the pastoral elegies exploit the ability ⁵⁹ Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence, Kansas, 1973), 24. ⁶⁰ The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel et al., 5 vols., corrected edn. (Oxford, 1961), 3.228. ⁶¹ Cf. Works of Michael Drayton, 5.185: the revised version ‘expresses a much sharper sense of loss in Sidney’s death, and a perception of the contrast between his lifetime, as a golden age for poets, and the present bad times’. On Drayton and Sidney see Hardin, esp. 19 and 113–15. On Jacobean pastoral see Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (London, 1969), esp. ch. 4.


75

of pastoral to bring the dead and the living together, by making them part of one community.⁶² What Kay calls ‘The established metaphorical connection between the pastoral life and the poetic vocation’ transforms ‘a company of swains into a community (whose scope was diachronic as well as contemporary) of like-minded poets’ (77). The elegies of Spenser, Drayton, and others idealize actual literary communities by fictionalizing them; they blur the distinction between authors (dead and living) and pastoral personae, between pastoral space and the real places of literary activity. The effect was to remake the map of contemporary English literature and rechart its lines of succession. Sidney had become the centre-point and founding father of later Elizabethan literature. ⁶² Cf. Kay, Melodious Tears, 76, part of a very good reading of Drayton’s Sidney elegies, 74–7.

3 The Last Word Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke The Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621) remained a Sidney throughout her married and widowed life. Letters from her were signed ‘M. Pembroke’, but they were sealed with the Sidney heraldic arrowhead or pheon.¹ When in 1604 another Mary became her daughter-inlaw, and took over her title and signature, she started to sign herself plain ‘Pembroke’; in a letter of 1607 the name was surrounded with a device of esses, which, as used by Pembroke and her niece and goddaughter Mary Wroth, seem to combine ‘S’ for Sidney with the arrowhead; the seal was a device of her married initials ‘MH’ formed from two interlocking Sidney pheons.² She decorated her new home of Houghton House with that same device, combining her Herbert and Sidney identities.³ Henry Peacham commented on Mary Wroth’s use of the pheon, placing her in the category of those ‘borne Ladies; who though they be marryed to Knights, yet they are commonly stiled and called after the Sirname of their fathers … for the greater Honour must ever extinguish the lesse’.⁴ This makes sense in Wroth’s case: when she was married to Sir Robert Wroth in 1604 her father had recently been made a baron; by the time Peacham wrote he was an earl. But Wroth’s aunt Mary Sidney was the daughter of a knight who married an earl; her surname and identity should have become, and remained, that of a Herbert. ¹ See Works, 1.289–96 (letters 7 and 8, to Cecil, 1597; letter 9, to the Queen, 1601; letter 10, to Cecil, 1602; letters 11 and 12, to Sir Julius Caesar, 1603; letter 15, to the Shrewsburys, 1604). Since the publication of Works two more letters have come to light: see Steven W. May, ‘Two Unpublished Letters by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’, in English Manuscript Studies, 9 (2000), 88–97. ² Works, 1.297 (letter 16, to Cecil, 1607) and Hannay, 193 and (on the Wroth analogue) 273 n. 123. ³ Hannay, xi and 193. ⁴ The Compleat Gentleman (1622), Y1r.

The Last Word

77

Figure 1. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, engraving by Simon van de Passe (1618). National Portrait Gallery, London.

78

The Last Word

Odd then, that the lesser honour extinguished the greater throughout her life, and most comprehensively in a copper-plate engraving of Pembroke that is rich in significance (figure 1). Printed in 1618 and engraved by Simon van de Passe (whose work in these years also included the title page to Wroth’s Urania), the engraving must have been designed to be sold separately to those who would find such an image edifying or inspiring. Here Pembroke is presented as ‘The Right Honorable and most Vertuous Lady M S, Wife to the late deceased Henry Herbert Earle of Pembroke etc.’. The Sidney pheon tops the image, surmounted by her countess’s coronet, which in turn is crowned by the poet’s laurel wreath; the composition is framed by two quills in ink pots,⁵ like heraldic supporters; she holds a book labelled ‘Davids Psalmes’, standing both for the biblical text she studied and the metaphrase of it she produced, the Sidney Psalms. She is a poet and a Sidney, and these greater honours eclipse her married titles; her nobility seems to derive from this source more than from her marriage. One riddling detail has been overlooked in comment on this provocative image—the patterns in the lace double collar and cuffs around her neck and around the one visible hand, holding that book. The inner lace has a repeating motif that may be a pheon or an anchor or perhaps a lyre. The repeating motif of the outer lace is a swan shaped like an ‘S’.⁶ Why a swan? The University Latin elegies for Sidney play on the proximity of the Latinized ‘Sidneius’ to the Latin cygnus, swan, and its adjective cygneus, both pronounced by the Elizabethans with a soft c, like ‘cygnet’. Punning references include an elegy by Thomas Playfair beginning ‘Sidneius, sydus, signum, cygnusque; Philippus’ (‘Philip Sidney, star, constellation, and swan’) and one by Richard Latewar in which the ‘swan-born’ offspring of Leda—Castor, Pollux, and Helen—are ⁵ See Margaret P. Hannay, ‘ ‘‘Bearing the livery of your name’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Publication’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 7–42 (13–14), repr. as ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture’ in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 17–49. ⁶ I am grateful to Clare Browne, Curator of European Textiles, 1600–1830 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for discussing Pembroke’s lace with me. She observes that the lace will have been very costly and probably Venetian or Flemish, and the engraving is likely to be an accurate representation of actual lace, and therefore of how Pembroke dressed and chose to be depicted. Contemporary Italian pattern books include musical instruments, hence the suggestion that a lyre figures in Pembroke’s lace. (Personal communication.)

The Last Word

79

compared (‘Cycnigenae, Sidnaeigenas’) to Robert, Philip, and Mary Sidney.⁷ Thomas Moffett, the physician who lived with the Pembrokes at Wilton, resurrects Sidney in his Nobilis, a biography intended to inspire young William Herbert, Pembroke’s son. As Sidney nears death Moffett tells Herbert to ‘Hear … those last words, like the song of a swan!’.⁸ The swan sang only at its death, as Sidney recalls in AS 54.13 (‘Dumb Swannes, not chatring Pies, do Lovers prove’) and as E.K. explains in his gloss on l. 90 of the ‘October’ eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. John Dickenson, in the preface to his Arisbas (1594), equates the swan song with the incompletion of Sidney’s life and writings: ‘Although the whitest Swanne and sweetest of Apolloes musicall birdes hath put an endlesse periode to his ever-living lines, being prevented by untimely death’ (A4r).⁹ Richard Barnfield, in his Epitaph on Sidney, finds that the swan song transcends death: ‘Here lyes the man: lyke to the Swan, who knowing shee shall die, | Doeth tune her voice unto the Spheares, and scornes Mortalitie’.¹⁰ Sidney has Pyrocles and Musidorus ‘like quiet swans, sing their own obsequies’ when they ready themselves for death before their trial (OA, 374), and he tends to use the swan as an image for the lover, close to death through love, as in Strephon’s ‘deadly Swannish musique’ in the sestina OA 71.25, and Cleophila’s ‘If the Swanne’s sweet voice be not heard, but at death’ in the sapphics of OA 12.14. His best use of the image ends CS 7, a song to a Spanish tune in which the first three lines and the last line of each stanza are repeated in each of the four stanzas: O faire, O sweete, when I do looke on thee, In whom all joyes so well agree, Heart and soule do sing in me. Sweete thinke not I am at ease, For because my cheefe part singeth, ⁷ Playfair: Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae (1587), I1v; Latewar: Exequiae (Oxford, 1587), F1v. Other allusions include Lachrymae, C1v (‘R.S.’); Exequiae, B2r (Richard Edes on the swan song, ‘Sidneia Cygnea … | Cantio’), D1v (William Gager), and E1v (Latewar); and Peplus (Oxford, 1587), E2v (Thomas Bastard) and F4r–v (Henry Bellingham). ⁸ Nobilis, 91 (‘Audi … ultima illa (ceu Cygneam cantionem) verba’, 41). ⁹ Singing swans are not always moribund, of course: Du Bartas puns on ‘Cydné, qui cigne doux-chantant’ in his poem on the three pillars of the English language (More, Nicholas Bacon, and Sidney), given in full with Sylvester’s translation in Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, Mass., 1994), 54–5; and Pembroke herself is ‘Thames fairest Swanne’ in Drayton’s Idea. The Shepheards Garland (1593), eclogue 6, G1r. ¹⁰ From the section ‘Poems: in divers humors’ in The Encomion of Lady Pecunia (1598), E4r.

80

The Last Word This song from deathe’s sorrow springeth: As to Swanne in last disease: For no dumbnesse nor death bringeth Stay to true love’s melody: Heart and soule do sing in me. (31–40)

The poem carries on singing at its end. Sorrow at impending death—of the lover and of the poem—is why the whole poem (‘This song’) can be sung: ‘For no dumbnesse nor death bringeth | Stay to true love’s melody’. Does this mean that death cannot prevent the swan song, but that at its end both song and lover die? Or does it mean that the love song is unending, resounding after death? Because of this ambiguity the poem seems to be caught in suspended animation at its end: an echo born out of the poem’s repeated refrain (‘Heart and soule do sing in me’) rings on, and because both death and swan were only metaphor, so, in a way, is this poem’s ending. After Sidney’s own death the swan songs were of those who mourned and wished to follow him: ‘My song is now a swanne-like dying song’, says Wyncken in the fourth eclogue of Drayton’s Idea. The Shepheards Garland (1593), Drayton’s elegy for Sidney (D3r). And Sidney, because in part of wordplay, became his own swan: Upon that famous Rivers further shore, There stood a snowie Swan of heavenly hiew, And gentle kinde, as ever Fowle afore; A fairer one in all the goodlie criew Of white Strimonian brood might no man view: There he most sweetly sung the prophecie Of his owne death in dolefull Elegie. At last, when all his mourning melodie He ended had, that both the shores resounded, Feeling the fit that him forewarnd to die, With loftie flight above the earth he bounded, And out of sight to highest heaven mounted: Where now he is become an heavenly signe; There now the joy is his, here sorrow mine.¹¹

¹¹ Spenser, The Ruines of Time (1591), 589–602, the first of the visions of Sidney, in Shorter Poems. Hamilton draws attention to the pun, functioning as in the Playfair example above, in the penultimate line’s ‘signe’ (197 n. 70).

The Last Word

81

As Spenser recognizes, the swan suits Sidney because his hero’s death was central to the reading of his works: the reader reads the words of a poet famous for being dead, and for the way he died; the powerful elegies Sidney himself wrote become prophecies of his own death (rather as Mozart, in retrospect, wrote his own requiem, and Donne ‘preach’t his own funeral Sermon’),¹² and all his works become a swan song. The Sidneian swan that adorns Mary Sidney is a memorial of her brother, but it is also a badge of her own writing, which chose to occupy the threshold of Sidney’s death and afterlife, a ‘swanne-like dying song’, and to concern itself with death and dying. As she represents her literary activities, and allows others to represent her, she becomes a memento of Sidney’s death. Her face brought his to mind: Spenser sees Sidney’s ‘goodly image living evermore | In the divine resemblaunce of your face’, and Fraunce calls her ‘morientis imago Philippi’ (‘the image of the dying Philip’).¹³ And she seems to have striven to be as like her brother as her sex allowed: she wrote the same humanist italic as both her brothers, but her hand bears a close resemblance to Philip’s.¹⁴ During Philip Sidney’s lifetime his sister’s role in fostering his writing was key.¹⁵ She may have given him ideas for works—Ringler even suggests that the Arcadia followed on from their shared reading of continental romances (xxiv). And she certainly gave him the time and space to write—at Wilton and another estate, Ivychurch. Sidney commemorated this influence by giving her ownership of his great work, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. After Sidney’s death, writers turned first of all to his male relatives, but with his uncle Leicester dying in 1588 and his father-inlaw Walsingham in 1590, and with Robert Sidney in Flushing, they learned to address the wealthy Countess of Pembroke as Sidney’s main literary heir.¹⁶ Most of the writers who addressed Pembroke were already members of her household or beneficiaries of her husband’s patronage—men like ¹² Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670), F4r. ¹³ The Faerie Queene (1590), STC 23080, 2Q4v; Fraunce, the dedicatory poem to Pembroke in The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch. Entituled, Amintas Dale (1592), l. 1. ¹⁴ For a sample of a facile hand see May, ‘Two Unpublished Letters’, 93 (plate 2). For examples of Sidney’s hand see Ringler, facing lxiii (cursive) and Duncan-Jones, plates 10 (set) and 12 (facile). For examples of Robert Sidney’s hand see Croft, 75 (facile) and 117 (cursive). ¹⁵ See, for example, Hannay, 47–8. ¹⁶ Hannay, 60, 78; Works, 1.107.

82

The Last Word

Abraham Fraunce and Thomas Moffett. Others, though, were probably taken on at Wilton after addressing works to her—the case with Samuel Daniel and perhaps Nicholas Breton. Lines can be traced back from some of this work, and from related writings by Pembroke, to Philip Sidney’s own projects—the hexameters of Fraunce and the Psalm translations in quantitative metres by Mary Sidney continue Sidney’s interest in vernacular quantitative verse; the paired Antonius (1592) of Mary Sidney (translated from the French of Robert Garnier) and Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594) are closet tragedies that obey the dramatic unities recommended for all drama by Sidney in the Defence. But there are limits to how far we should take speculation that Wilton operated as a misguided school for the Sidneian reform of English literature. Writers liked to represent Wilton as an alternative court and to credit Mary Sidney (as Daniel did) with more influence on their writing than she probably had. The myth of the Countess of Pembroke’s circle has been debunked of late, and more recent commentators concentrate on the parochial nature of Pembroke’s literary coterie.¹⁷ It remains important, though, to remember that she engaged in collaborative literary projects, and that the reading of those writings that were not printed was contained within a network or coterie of manuscript exchange and circulation. Mary Sidney would not have taken her writing so seriously without her brother’s example, and without being spurred to leave his works in a fitting state of completion. In the Psalmes, as her editors point out, she speaks through the ‘authorizing voice’ not only of God and the Psalmist but of Philip Sidney too.¹⁸ But examples of female rhetoric and performance are also easy to find in her writings and her life. She was able in her translated works to represent a Laura who sings Petrarch’s words back to him, and a Cleopatra who is a powerful orator—a choice in the first case of one reading over another in competing editions of Petrarch, and in the second her own licence in translation.¹⁹ And she ¹⁷ For a traditional view see Buxton, ch. 6. For a revisionist account see Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, 1990), as well as her important earlier articles, ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 194–202, and ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Patronage’, ELR, 12 (1982), 162–79. See also Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London, 1988). ¹⁸ Works, 2.9; cf. 1.77. ¹⁹ Laura: Pembroke’s translation from Petrarch, The Triumph of Death (hereafter ‘Triumph’), 2.150 and note, Works, 1.344. As Hannay points out (109), Laura ‘is praised for her eloquence and her wisdom as much as for her chastity’. Cleopatra: Garnier has ‘des artifices | De son esprit divin, ses mignardes blandices’, little more than coquetry;

The Last Word

83

had in her mother a powerful example of verbal skill in a woman: the write-up of Lady Mary Sidney’s death gives great emphasis to her rhetorical abilities.²⁰ Her own literary voice nevertheless emerges from the aftermath of Sidney’s death—Mary Ellen Lamb rightly observes that she ‘creates her authorship as a form of mourning’.²¹ And this condition can constrain that voice. Translation liberates it, but her few original compositions tread the line between duty and indecorous assertion with a fascinating mixture of hesitancy and assurance. The problem of the status of her poet’s voice is acute in the disputed ‘Dolefull Lay of Clorinda’. This 96-line poem was the first of the elegies that followed Spenser’s in the Astrophel section of Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595). It is written in the same form and Spenserian language and it shares conceits with Spenser’s poem, whereas the poems that follow it are all known to be by other poets, including Ralegh and Bryskett, and are in different forms. Perhaps it was a collaboration; perhaps Pembroke wrote it in response to Spenser’s poem; perhaps Spenser designed his poem as a frame for Pembroke’s. Unanswerable questions include why Pembroke would allow Spenser to present Sidney’s Stella (whom she knew to be Penelope Rich) as Sidney’s widow, and why if she did not write the ‘Lay’ she would allow Spenser to speak in her voice. Whoever wrote the poem, the end result is the same: an awkward mixture of complaint and pastoral elegy in a female voice presented by a male poet. Either Spenser writes a prosopopoeia of Pembroke, or she writes herself into a Spenserian world in Spenserian language; in both cases her voice emerges through ventriloquy, and in both cases she only speaks because a man invites her to.²² Pembroke (Antonius, ll. 727–8) gives us ‘th’enchaunting skilles | Of her caelestiall Sp’rite, hir training speache’ (‘training’ implying the chains from orator’s mouth to auditors’ ears of the Hercules Gallicus emblem, referred to in AS 58). ²⁰ See the account in Holinshed, 1587, quoted in Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 122. ²¹ Gender and Authorship, 116; cf. Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994), 61. ²² The ‘Lay’ is attributed to Pembroke in Works, 119–32; arguments pro are summarized by Hannay, 63–7; and contra by McCabe in Shorter Poems, 662; see also May, 344–5. Lamb (Gender and Authorship, 61–7) elegantly manages to leave the question open and for it not to affect her argument. Editions of Spenser include the ‘Lay’ as his. Michael O’Connell, in ‘Astrophel: Spenser’s Double Elegy’, SEL, 11 (1971), 27–35, argues that ‘If the Countess had written this part of the poem, she would have been Spenser’s closest student and most exact imitator’ (27–8), and Margaret Hannay takes up this suggestion in ‘The Countess of Pembroke as a Spenserian Poet’, in Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts (Tempe, Ariz., 1999), 41–62. See further Chapter 2, n. 52 above. Other examples

84

The Last Word

Most signs point to the period 1590–3 as one of intensive work by Pembroke in each of the three main areas of her literary activity: her editing of Sidney’s Arcadia, her completion of the Psalmes, and her own translations from Garnier and Mornay. Daniel refers to the Psalmes as in progress in 1594 and in that year Henry Parry praised the work as having ‘at long last received its final polishing’.²³ In 1595 John Harington could quote in print one of the three Psalms he seems to have acquired in the 1590s.²⁴ Pembroke’s translations, A Discourse of Life and Death and Antonius, were published together in 1592, subscribed respectively at their ends ‘The 13. of May 1590. At Wilton’ and ‘At Ramsburie. 26. of November. 1590’. The year 1590 is when Greville’s edition of the revised Arcadia was printed; the text included Sidney’s letter dedicating the work to his sister. And in 1593 the edition of the composite Arcadia produced under her aegis went on sale. These different projects proceeded in tandem: the printing of Sidney’s works did not encourage her to write, but it did encourage her to see her work into print. The efforts of the stationer William Ponsonby are key in this regard.²⁵ Ponsonby had informed Fulke Greville of a rival’s plan to print the ‘old’ Arcadia, and Greville repaid Ponsonby, who at the same time became Spenser’s publisher, by giving him the rights to the Arcadia. Ponsonby published a number of other works dedicated to Pembroke in the early 1590s,²⁶ and he gained the status of the Sidney family publisher: he published Pembroke’s translations in 1592, the composite Arcadia in 1593, the authorized Defence of Poesy in 1595, and in 1598 a third edition of the Arcadia including Certain Sonnets, the Defence, of prosopopoeia include the poems of Nicholas Breton that use Pembroke’s voice (see Hannay, 136–9) and a witty poem by John Davies of Hereford that rings far more true, in The Scourge of Folly [1611], R8r: imagining her reaction on receiving her gift copy of the book it begins ‘Gods mee! how now? what Present have we here?’. ²³ See Michael G. Brennan, ‘The Date of the Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of the Psalms’, RES, new ser. 33 (1982), 434–6 (436), citing Henry Parry, Victoria Christiana (1594). ²⁴ See Chapter 4 below. ²⁵ On Ponsonby and Pembroke see Brennan, Patronage, 55–8, his ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer’, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 7 (1983), 91–110, and his ‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘‘Sidney Psalms’’’, Sidney Journal, 20.1 (2002), 27–53. ²⁶ These include Spenser’s ‘The Ruines of Time’, in Complaints (1591); Fraunce’s The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuel (1591), and The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1591); and Watson’s Amintæ Gaudia (1592), although the latter was published later in 1592 than Pembroke’s A Discourse of Life and Death … Antonius (see the list in Brennan, ‘William Ponsonby’).

The Last Word

85

and Pembroke’s authorized and complete edition of Astrophil and Stella (pirated in a defective text in 1591). It is striking, given Mary Sidney’s ‘growing commitment to the medium of print’,²⁷ that the Sidney Psalms were never printed. A number of writers who had access to the Psalmes in manuscript wondered that they were not printed, but there is no evidence that any effort was made to this end, or even that Pembroke and Ponsonby gave it any thought.²⁸ This may have been because of the vexed legal position of printed metaphrases in relation to the separate patents protecting the rights of printers of the Biblical Psalms, of metrical psalters, and of music (including psalm settings).²⁹ On the other hand, it can be argued that the Psalms remained in manuscript because they were not the safe and simple translations readers were used to seeing in print, and because they needed to tread a careful line between public and private devotional conventions.³⁰ The situation may also have had something to do with Pembroke’s wish to continue applying the ‘final polish’ to the Psalmes: revisions were still being made in around 1599, when Moffett suggested that it was time to ‘give rest to Sacred Writte’³¹ and a manuscript copy was being prepared as a gift for the Queen. The Psalmes seems to have been Philip Sidney’s last literary project.³² While there may be literary as well as biographical reasons for the incompletion of the Arcadia, the failure to complete the Psalmes seems down to circumstance alone. But we cannot discount the possibility ²⁷ Brennan, Patronage, 57 ²⁸ See John Davies of Hereford, The Muses Sacrifice (1612), fol. 3*3r, and A1r; Sir John Harington, Treatise on Play (c.1597), in Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington, 2 vols. (London, 1769–75), 2.6; and Francis Davison in a manuscript booklist cited in Brennan, ‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit’, 31. ²⁹ See Brennan, ‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit’. ³⁰ See Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon, ‘Revisioning the Sacred Text’, in Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 53–77 (54, 55, 71, and passim); repr. as ‘Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, 50–72. ³¹ The Silkewormes and their Flies (1599), A2r. ³² See e.g. Ringler, l–li and Duncan-Jones, 276–8, using Pembroke’s poem to Sidney to argue for a late date; see also Michael G. 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’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 14.1 (1996), 37–44 (37–8). Some critics, on stylistic grounds, think the Psalms may have been one of Sidney’s earliest projects. The arguments are recounted in The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J. C. A. Rathmell (Garden City, N.Y., 1963), xxv–vi. Richard Todd has Sidney writing psalms in the summer of 1586: ‘Humanist Prosodic Theory, Dutch Synods, and the Poetics of the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, HLQ, 52 (1989), 273–93.

86

The Last Word

that the metaphrase was always intended to be a collaborative effort. Many contemporary models, from the French psalter of Marot and Bèze to the ‘Old Version’, were of multiple authorship, and some allusion to this tradition is possible. It is equally possible that Sidney intended Pembroke to complete the metaphrase after his death, and even expected her to revise his portion, as Coburn Freer suggests.³³ Certainly, the idea that the work was a collaboration with her dead brother was dear to her. Sidney metaphrased Psalms 1–43 before his death; Pembroke completed the task, and also revised Sidney’s translations quite substantially. No holograph manuscript of either Sidney’s or Pembroke’s portion survives, but in 1694/5 Samuel Woodford made a copy of what appears to have been the original draft; this copy records in detail all emendations, and is especially useful in recording in the margins those portions of Sidney’s text that Pembroke revised, although Woodford seems to have thought the revisions Sidney’s.³⁴ Eighteen complete or substantially complete manuscripts of the Psalmes survive, and others have been lost;³⁵ the manuscript evidence provides a good deal of information about the process of composition and revision. In the 1593 Arcadia Sidney’s dedication to his sister from the 1590 edition is followed by Hugh Sanford’s explanatory preface. Sanford uses the terms of Sidney’s piece to justify the production of the composite Arcadia. Sidney had given mixed signals about the circulation he envisaged for his work. Where the famous ascription ‘onelie for you, onely to you’ (90, A3v) keeps the work within their circle of two, what follows relaxes the constraint a little: if you keepe it to your selfe, or to such friendes, who will weigh errors in the ballaunce of good will, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in it selfe it have deformities. For indeede, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflinglie handled. Your deare selfe can best witnes the maner … (A3v)

The talk of witnessing expects precisely the sort of public judgement—the ‘severer eyes’—that will not be tempered by good will. ³³ Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore, 1972), 89. ³⁴ On Woodford’s transcription (designated MS B in the agreed sigla for manuscripts of the Sidney Psalms), see Ringler, 501–5 and 547–8, and Works 2.308–10. ³⁵ See Works for a listing complete save for the addition of a new manuscript: see my ‘A New Manuscript of the Sidney Psalms: A Preliminary Report’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 43–56.

The Last Word

87

When the work becomes public, then, Pembroke’s role changes from that of sister to that of patron: ‘his chiefe safetie, shalbe the not walking abroad; and his chiefe protection, the bearing the liverye of your name’ (A4r). It is for this reason—that the private keepsake is in fact a liveried servant—that Sanford can present the 1593 edition as an act of public duty. The work has appeared ‘to the common view’ and this has ‘moved that noble lady, to whose honour consecrated, to whose protection it was committed’ to act in its defence. Where Sidney had of course expected a readership beyond his circle of friends, the 1590 edition is here made at fault for making public a work that is only designed to stand up to private scrutiny. Pembroke’s intervention is therefore essential to its survival: But as often in repairing a ruinous house, the mending of some olde part occasioneth the making of some new: so here her honourable labour begonne in correcting the faults, ended in supplying the defectes; by the view of what was ill done guided to the consideration of what was not done. (93, ¶4r).

There is some sleight of hand here: the addition of ‘what was not done’ (Sidney’s ending) does not really follow from the correction of ‘what was ill done’ (Greville’s edition). Nevertheless, what we are presented with acknowledges its limitations: it is ‘the conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia: and that no further then the Authours own writings, or knowen determinations could direct’ (¶4r). When Sidney says he has half a mind ‘to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father’ (90, A3r–v) Pembroke becomes a sort of adoptive mother. And when Sidney dies, the fact that the work is named for her devolves on her some of the duties of godparent. Sanford plays with these metaphors as well. The wise will honour the Arcadia, ‘as being child to such a father’: Whom albeit it do not exactly and in every lineament represent; yet considering the fathers untimely death prevented the timely birth of the childe, it may happily seeme a thanke-woorthy labour, that the defects being so few, so small, and in no principall part, yet the greatest unlikenes is rather in defect then in deformity. But howsoever it is, it is now by more then one interest The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: done, as it was, for her: as it is, by her. Neither shall these pains be the last (if no unexpected accident cut off her determination) which the everlasting love of her excellent brother, will make her consecrate to his memory. (¶4v)

Pembroke now delivers the premature foetus, and so is mother, midwife, and foster parent. The parallelism of ‘as it was, for her: as it is, by her’ is

88

The Last Word

licensed by its reminiscence of Sidney’s double prepositions ‘onelie for you, onely to you’. But her achievement of conclusion is not the last word, as Sanford’s final sentence makes clear: there is more to do ‘(if no unexpected accident cut off her determination)’. That parenthesis is required in the circumstances: texts and people exposed to Sidney’s grand fragments are apparently more than likely to stop short of the end. Greville and Pembroke produced two different visions of the revised Arcadia.³⁶ Greville’s 1590 text of the Arcadia delights in abruption and local meaning. The eclogues are thinned down; the chapter divisions carve the work up into units of narrative, episodes for interpretation, and the chapter headings tell the reader what to look for; the epitaph for Argalus and Parthenia is missing, and we are given in its place an empty frame. The text is so tickled by its mid-sentence ending that it ends the chapter summary above it with an abrupt ‘and’. Pembroke’s 1593 text (‘most by her doing, all by her directing’, ¶4r) adds a full stop to Sidney’s final sentence (2F3r). It does not select on interpretative criteria but includes in the eclogues everything that can be got into them (including OP 4 and 5, two poems probably never intended for the Arcadia), as if comprehensiveness is the only meaning sought. The only poem omitted is the burlesque poetic contest between Nico and Pas (OA 29) which furnished Fraunce with a bawdy illustration of aposiopesis: to Nico’s ‘And if I better sing, let me thy Cosma kisse’ Pas replies ‘Kisse her? now mayst thou kisse—’. The chapter divisions are removed, making each book a seamless whole; and the restored epitaph

³⁶ For treatments of the roles of Greville and Pembroke in the editing of the Arcadia see the introductions to Ringler, OA, and NA, as well as the following: Joan Rees, ‘Fulke Greville and the Revisions of Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 17 (1966), 54–7; Sukanta Chaudhuri, ‘The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 35 (1984), 185–202; and Victor Skretkowicz, ‘Building Sidney’s Reputation: Texts and Editions of the Arcadia’, in 1586, 111–24. See 90, A4v for the statement of the edition’s ‘over-seer’, and 2R7v for the empty frame. Chaudhuri believes that the framework and arrangement of the 1590 eclogues may be closer to Sidney than has been assumed. John Buxton juxtaposes the 1590 and 1593 Arcadias in a way I find simplistic: ‘To her the Arcadia remained always a romance, written mostly in her company and always for her delight, and she preferred it so, rather than in Fulke Greville’s recension, with chapter headings that invite the reader to interpret the romance as a moral allegory’ (134). Cf. his Elizabethan Taste (New Jersey and Sussex, 1963), 256, where Pembroke reads the work as a romance and Greville as a heroic poem. Of all Sidney’s readers Mary Sidney was the most likely to understand the political references and share the moral programme, her gender notwithstanding (cf. Hannay, 48). The evidence for Buxton’s view of her aims in 1593 is slight, whereas the evidence that she liked literary works to be finished is substantial.

The Last Word

89

fills its space. Most importantly, the 1593 text provides the unfinished Arcadia with an ending.³⁷ If Greville’s grand gesture seems to emphasize the defeat of a writer’s best intentions, Pembroke’s affirms that Sidney’s curtailed life has a whole meaning, and his work has integrity. The Arcadia in this form is not perfect, but it is complete: the end result is brought in line with the fore-conceit instead of eluding it. And it concludes—that is to say, it is self-contained and not open-ended; it is wrapped up, confined and included within itself. Only Pembroke can cause a Sidney text to be ‘augmented and ended’, as the 1593 title page declares, and the Arcadia now needs no further addition. I N C O M P L E T I O N A N D C O N C LU S I O N As goodly buildings to some glorious ende cut of by fate, before the Graces hadde each wondrous part in all their beauties cladde, Yet so much done, as Art could not amende; So thy rare workes to which no witt can adde, in all mens eies, which are not blindely madde, Beyonde compare above all praise, extende. (‘To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney’, 64–70)

Mary Sidney wrote these words to accompany the text of her revision and completion of her brother’s Psalmes. She was exempt from her own strictures on the impossibility of adding to his works, because she believed that only she could fully comprehend each work’s idea or fore-conceit and bring it to a conclusion. What is striking here is ³⁷ Pembroke was not alone in wishing to fill the gaps in Sidney’s text. Alexander’s bridging passage and Markham’s continuation, The English Arcadia (1607–13), were only the best of several seventeenth century efforts, including those of Belling and Johnstoun, that found their ways into later editions of the Arcadia. These are discussed in Chapter 8 below. Individual readers also offer evidence, such as the owner of Newberry Library, Chicago, Case Y 1565. S 555, a copy of the 1590 Arcadia, who filled the lacuna where Lelius’ impresa should have been at 2C4r (= NA, 255), with the couplet ‘lead by Love both from and too: | this can Love and Fancy doo:’. Skretkowicz (NA, 572) also notes that several copies of the 1590 text have the missing epitaph for Argalus and Parthenia added by hand. On the other hand, Heidi Brayman Hackel discusses the Harvard copy of the 1613 Arcadia in which an annotator has copied back into the text Greville’s chapter divisions and summaries (Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 166–7).

90

The Last Word

the eagerness, betrayed in that over-anxious ‘blindely madde’, to place Sidney’s unfinished works in a position of unassailable authority. The dynamic enjambment of ‘to some glorious ende | cut of by fate’ asserts Pembroke’s proximity to works that for her are not fixed in the past, but retain the fluidity of present existence. For the rest of us, their incompleteness is set in stone. In this section I will look at what Pembroke does with Sidney’s incompletions, and at how various images of ending come together in her own works. Sidney is a poet who knows how to conclude. Conclusion is often a matter of completing a circle in formal terms. In OA 72 (‘I Joye in griefe’), Strephon and Klaius express their unending misery in the closed chain form of the corona: So close unto my selfe my wrackes doo lie; Both cause, effect, beginning, and the ende Are all in me … (41–3)

Each ten-line stanza begins by repeating the last line of the previous stanza. The tenth stanza then ends by repeating the first line of the poem and, with the circle completed, an ending has to be manufactured as an abrupt breaking out of the form: [Klaius] … I joy in griefe, and doo detest all joyes. Strephon. I joye in griefe, and doo detest all joyes. But now an ende, (ô Klaius) now an ende, For even the hearbes our hatefull musique stroyes, And from our burning breath the trees doo bende. (101–4)

In many other poems the end echoes the beginning in some clear way.³⁸ In the first song of Astrophil and Stella, the meaning of the poem is very clearly bound up with its form. The third line of each four-line stanza is the same throughout, and the variations on its theme are tied up by the repetition of the entire first stanza at the poem’s end, for an obvious reason: To you, to you, all song of praise is due: Only in you my song begins and endeth. (3–4/35–end) ³⁸ These include OA 12, 15, 34, 45, 69; CS 5, 23; OP 3; and PS 8.

The Last Word

91

This means to be too easy, and allows the collapse of form later in the sequence to mimic the overall narrative development. It is accepted that in constructing a sequence of 108 sonnets, Sidney was alluding to the 108 unsuccessful suitors of Penelope.³⁹ The missing 109th makes this sequence incomplete yet perfect. But in the eighth song the form quite deliberately falls short of the consolation of perfect meanings offered by this numeration: Therewithall away she went, Leaving him so passion rent, With what she had done and spoken, That therewith my song is broken. (101–4)

Of course, stanzaic form is not violated here: the poem does end. But it has collapsed one stanza short of 108 lines, with an abrupt shattering of the narrator’s third person mask. The rhetoric of the author here depends on a significant failure of rhetoric, and of numerical structure. Daniel discusses the particular aptness of stanzaic form to closural effect: ‘the certaine close of delight with the full body of a just period well carried’: For the body of our imagination, being as an unformed Chaos without fashion, without day, if by the divine power of the spirit it be wrought into an Orbe of order and forme, is it not more pleasing to Nature, that desires a certaintie, and comports not with that which is infinite, to have these clozes, rather than, not to know where to end, or how farre to goe, especially seeing our passions are often without measure: and wee finde the best of the latines many times, either not concluding, or els otherwise in the end then they began.⁴⁰

Poetic closure, for Daniel as for Barbara Herrnstein Smith, seems to relate to the place of the self in the cosmos: ‘Haunted, perhaps, by the specter of that ultimate arbitrary conclusion, we take particular delight, not in all endings, but in those that are designed.’⁴¹ If poetry is to allude ³⁹ See Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970), 175–80. Two other important studies of Astrophil and Stella use numerology and numerical structure, and see it as a key part of the imitation of Sidney in subsequent sequences: Thomas P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989) and Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford, 1998). ⁴⁰ A Defence of Ryme, in Daniel, Poems, 138. ⁴¹ Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968), 1. Cf. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1968), 17, quoted in Chapter 1 above. On the analogy between stanzaic and

92

The Last Word

to the patterns of life and death, to bring measure to passion and shape to ideas, the ways in which it concludes sentences, stanzas, and poems will be crucial. And the different ways in which two poets interpret such conclusions will be expressive of larger differences. A striking feature of Sidney’s metaphrases is his use, learned in part from the Marot-Bèze psalter, of the half-stanza ending. It is found in two of the Certain Sonnets, 17 and 23, also musical in form. Around a fifth of the 43 psalms metaphrased by Sidney make use of some kind of formal deviation for closural effect.⁴² It is an extraordinary and significant fact that the Countess of Pembroke identified each such case and worked hard to regularize them all. That Pembroke introduced often indifferent variants at all stages of transcription and scribal publication is well known. Harold Love comments intelligently on this activity: Mary Countess of Pembroke’s lifetime of work on the translation of the psalms begun by her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, while stimulated by a sense of family and religious duty, was also the result of an unwillingness to bring an absorbing activity to too precipitate an end. It is a mistake in such cases to assume that revision is the consequence of a Platonic impulse towards the perfect, unalterable text.⁴³

This desire for inconclusiveness sorts oddly with the basic rationale of Pembroke’s activity on the Psalmes: to conclude what Sidney had left unfinished. And this desire to supply the ending is writ small in her rewriting of each and every formally irregular ending in Sidney. An example of her method can be seen in Psalm 23. First of all, Sidney’s version: The lord the lord my shepheard is, And so can never I Tast misery. He rests me in green pasture his. By waters still and sweet He guides my feet. He me revives, leads me the way Which righteousness doth take, For his name’s sake. poetic closure see Ernst Häublein, The Stanza, The Critical Idiom, 38 (London, 1978), 68. Häublein’s comprehensive study of Sidney’s use of stanza form, Strophe und Struktur in der Lyrik Sir Philip Sidneys (Bern and Frankfurt, 1971), is highly instructive. ⁴² Psalms 1, 16, 22, 23, 26, 29, 31, and 42, discounting 8 (repeating the opening as in the Bible) and 21 (perceived as a half stanza only through visual grouping of pairs of quatrains into octaves). ⁴³ Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993), 54.

The Last Word

93

Yea tho I should thro vallys stray Of death’s dark shade I will No whit feare ill. For thou Deare lord Thou me besetst, Thy rodd and Thy staffe be To comfort me. Before me Thou a table setst Ev’en when foe’s envious ey Doth it espy. With oyle Thou dost anoynt my head, And so my cup dost fill That it doth spill. Thus thus shall all my days be fede, This mercy is so sure It shall endure, And long yea long abide I shall, There where the Lord of all Doth hold his hall.

The stanza form expresses the comfort of divine protection. Each tercet nestles into the combination of shortened line length—from four to three to two feet—and rhyme. The parallelled first and fourth lines of each stanza look outwards, equal in length and joined by rhyme. But the movement to the third line of each tercet, shorter still so that each rhyme word in the b and c couplets is kept from the other by only three syllables, is clearly inwards, just as the movement in lines four to six from ‘pasture’ to ‘waters’ to ‘feet’ is visually a shortening of focal length. The irregular or half-stanza ending as Sidney uses it has the effect of opening the poem out. This is the case here, with the ‘And’ of line 25 heralding the ending whilst making syntax more fluid. But in this metaphrase, where assertion seems simultaneously to recede, the expansion of vista at the poem’s end and its increased euphony—‘fill’/‘spill’, and ‘shall’/‘all’/‘hall’ are linked by consonance—make for an even greater cosiness: the ‘long yea long’ eternity is by the final line humanly small. Because the strength of Sidney’s poem is, precisely, its mastery of closure, Pembroke’s version of its final stanza will always represent a loss: Thou oil’st my head thou fill’st my cupp: Nay more thou endlesse good, Shalt give me food. To thee, I say, ascended up,

94

The Last Word Where thou, the Lord of all, Dost hold thy hall.⁴⁴

Mary Sidney does not understand that asymmetry can give greater poetic closure. The condensation awkwardly conveys the feeling that meaning and not only form has been swallowed up: the fourth line in particular seems elliptical, and Pembroke’s cup does not run over. By removing what she sees as an abruptness of poetic form she causes abruptness of meaning; addition to Sidney is here subtraction from him. The manuscript evidence shows many stages to Pembroke’s engagements with Sidney’s irregular final stanzas; revision and re-revision—at least four unsuccessful attempts in one case (Psalm 42). The most eloquent detail, though, is that provided by the Penshurst manuscript, the fair, final copy of the Psalmes produced after perhaps ten years’ work. This shows that once the whole of the Psalmes had been copied in ink, and then decorated in gold, the scribe had still not been supplied with the final stanzas, replacing Sidney’s asymmetrical endings, of four of Sidney’s psalms; three are added in after gilding; a fourth is pasted in even later.⁴⁵ Pembroke’s final act in taking her leave of the Sidney Psalms was to offer a belated revision of Sidney’s irregular last words. By ending the Psalmes Pembroke makes the metaphrase a shared labour. But by rewriting Sidney’s endings she crosses some threshold between the two poets—a threshold of time and poetic; what was linked becomes merged. It is a nostalgia that is not content to come after, but must be present. That the revision of Sidney came not first but last, and that the final copying of Sidney’s psalms came after that of hers confirms this.⁴⁶ She places herself before him; she inverts chronology, and influence. And by having his poems head to her endings Sidney is almost forgotten as their originator: she becomes their aim.

⁴⁴ Text from Psalms, ed. Rathmell, which remains the only modern edition of the complete Psalmes in the form in which the Countess of Pembroke left them. ⁴⁵ See the apparatus and commentary in Ringler for the final stanzas of Psalms 1, 29, 31, and 42 (final stanzas revised); Psalms 22, 23, 26 (revised and added in A after gilding); Psalm 16 (revised and pasted into A even later, possibly by the J scribe). See also Works, 2.312 and 358, and, for other signs of scribal confusion around these cruces, 324 and 349. See further Noel J. Kinnamon, ‘The Sidney Psalms: The Penshurst and Tixall Manuscripts’, in English Manuscript Studies, 2 (1990), 139–61 (143, 147), and my ‘Five Responses to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1628’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996), 15–26. Pembroke also revised her own irregular endings of the early variant Psalm 46 and the probably early Psalm 49. ⁴⁶ The Penshurst manuscript was transcribed in the order 44–150, 1–43. See Works, 2.312.

The Last Word

95

* * * When Mary Sidney finally finished the Psalmes in about 1600 she appended a poem to Sidney’s soul, returning the compliment of his dedication to her of the Arcadia. She had probably been working on the poem for nearly ten years.⁴⁷ This is how it ends: Receive theise Hymnes, theise obsequies receive; if any marke of thy sweet sprite appeare, well are they borne, no title else shall beare. I can no more: Deare Soule I take my leave; Sorrowe still strives, would mount thy highest sphere presuming so just cause might meet thee there, Oh happie chaunge! could I so take my leave. (85–91)

The words ‘I can no more’ were becoming rather familiar: Shakespeare’s Laertes uses them before his death; they are Antony’s last words; the chorus in Newton’s version of Seneca’s Oedipus breaks off a lament for Oedipus with ‘I can no more: my tears do stop my voice’; there are countless other examples. In the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonius (1592), Cleopatra swoons with ‘I can no more, I die’ (1893), before picking herself up again and seeing out the end of the play. When Pope in Peri Bathous, his spoof treatise on the art of sinking in poetry, deals with the rhetorical figure aposiopesis, he presents the failure of eloquence as a mask for a failure of invention, saying ‘I can no more, when one really can no more’.⁴⁸ And we have already seen the figure in Sidney’s very last letter: ‘plura non possum’, I can no more. (That using this figure was at the front of his mind we can glimpse in an abortive ‘p’, not expunged, which was itself interrupted because Sidney had thought of something else to say first: ‘et te cupio.—p | nec vivus …’.)⁴⁹ The Psalmes is another effort of completion, and so the Countess of Pembroke’s prefatory poem must flirt with, and overcome, rhetorical incompletion: ‘I can no more’. An earlier version of this poem turned up in Samuel Daniel’s papers at his death, and was printed as his in the posthumous complete works edited by his brother. It ends at line five of the last stanza: ‘I can no more deare soule, I take my leave, | My sorrow strives to mount the highest Sphere.’⁵⁰ ⁴⁷ Samuel Daniel seems to echo it in the opening sonnet of his 1592 Delia (see Works, 1.33), suggesting a date early in the 1590s, at least for the early draft of the poem discussed below. ⁴⁸ Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge, 1987), 189. ⁴⁹ The letter is reproduced as plate 17 in Duncan-Jones. See above, Chapter 1, p. 38. ⁵⁰ The Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel esquire in Poetrie (1623), M7v–8v; Works, 1.113–15.

96

The Last Word

This may be accidental, or it may record a way of ending rejected in the end. As it stands in the final version, Pembroke’s aposiopesis does not break the stanza form; the poem is ended on the identical rhyme of ‘take my leave’ with ‘take my leave’, as if to negate the threat of aposiopesis. The poem ends, and life does not: Pembroke cannot stop completing things, but these terminations take her no nearer to the dead Sidney. In translating Garnier’s Marc Antoine and Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte Pembroke chose to do so line-for-line.⁵¹ No less remarkable than this choice is the single exception to its stark rule that meets Garnier’s 1999 lines with 2001 lines. For, after matching him half-line for halfline through every chorus, monologue, and passage of stichomythia, Pembroke adds two lines from nowhere because Antony has left a sentence of suicidal self-reproach unfinished. In Garnier, Antony’s desperate, retrospective hypothetical dissolves into a hopeless aposiopesis in the blood of an imagined glorious death. He has been outmanoeuvred by Octavian; but if only … . Pembroke gives the hypothesis and the sentence a logical and syntactical conclusion, missing the point in giving a point: Yet if to bring my glorie to the ground, Fortune had made me overthrowne by one Of greater force, of better skill then I; One of those Captaines feared so of olde, Camill, Marcellus, worthy Scipio, This late great Cæsar, honor of our state, Or that great Pompei aged growne in armes; That after harvest of a world of men Made in a hundred battailes, fights, assaults, My bodie thorow pearst with push of pike Had vomited my bloud, in bloud my life, In midd’st of millions felowes in my fall: [The lesse hir wrong, the lesse should be my woe: Nor she should paine, nor I complaine me so.] No, no, wheras I should have died in armes … (Antonius, lines 1091–1105; lines 1103–4 not in Garnier, bracketed here for clarity)⁵²

⁵¹ May talks of Pembroke’s ‘timidly literal translation of Garnier’ (210). This is to miss many points. The lineation of the Garnier translation is obscured in Works because the text of act and scene divisions is included in the line count. See my review of Works in Translation and Literature, 8 (1999), 78–91. ⁵² Cf. Œuvres complètes de Robert Garnier, ed. Lucien Pinvert, 2 vols. (Paris, 1923), 1.207: ‘Encor si pour ternir ma louange et l’abatre | … | Je vomisse la vie et le sang au milieu | De mille et mille corps abattus en un lieu! | Non, non! Ou je devois mourir entre les armes …’.

The Last Word

97

Pembroke’s added couplet ties up incompletion with some tidy knots of anaphora, zeugma, and internal rhyme, a very typical example of the sort of involved parallel structures with which her verse is so rich. An excess of rhetoric has met an aposiopesis that has been deemed not a rhetorical figure so much as a failure of rhetoric. We notice from these examples that aposiopesis belongs in Pembroke’s poetry alongside death. The most important factors in her literary career were the death of Sidney and the fact that at least two of his works were unfinished. Death, completion, and incompletion are central concerns in her writings, and it is impossible not to connect this interest to her relation to Sidney’s death and his works. Mary Ellen Lamb observes that Pembroke’s works are linked by concern with the ars moriendi tradition.⁵³ The Discourse of Life and Death offers a neo-Stoic view of death and dying, and its companion text, Antonius, explores the other side of Seneca’s legacy; together the works focus questions of death, honour, and reputation. Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, like Antonius, concerns the death of an exemplary woman. In Lamb’s account Pembroke’s interest in the art of dying drew on the deaths of her brother and mother, but also was a way of creating a space for herself as a female poet: ‘Through translating works about women who died well, she cleansed her writing from the contamination of illicit sexuality inherent in female authorship’ (120). Other writers pick up on the association of the Countess of Pembroke with death and the ‘gain’d honour’ (Triumph, 1.28) it brings. Drayton writes in 1593 of what might be written on her tomb,⁵⁴ and in the same year Barnabe Barnes looks forward to her stellification: After thy mortall pilgrimage dispatch’te, Unto those Planettes where thou shal’t have place With thy late sainted brother to give light: And with harmonious Sphæres to turne in race … ⁵⁵

⁵³ Gender and Authorship, 115. ⁵⁴ Idea. The Shepheards Garland, G2r; cf. G1v: ‘When by thy death, thy life shalbe begun’. ⁵⁵ Parthenophil and Parthenophe [1593], dedicatory sonnet (one of several), *2r.

98

The Last Word

Lanyer sees Pembroke as having a ‘double life’, as in some way straddling heaven and earth.⁵⁶ But both Garnier’s Cleopatra and Pembroke herself in her poem to Sidney’s soul can only imagine and plan for their deaths. In Cleopatra’s case it takes Daniel to write the death itself. An interesting aspect of Pembroke’s interest in death is the way death and afterlives fare in her translator’s lexicon. There are many words that she uses in her translations that are rare, relatively new to English, or her own coinages. They include words and phrases used by Sidney, like ‘after-livers’ (OA 18.10, Defence, 95.9; Antonius, 630) and ‘This life-dead man’ (OA 9.83; Antonius, 1664),⁵⁷ as well as other powerful forms, like the Old English form ‘overlive’ (Antonius, 1997; cf. NA, 276.1) and the neologism ‘after goers’ (PS 79.62) or ‘after-goers’ (PS 87.10). Pembroke forges her own muscular lexicon of death and posterity, of mourning, survival, and duty to the dead. This is seen very clearly in an exhilarating passage of Antonius in which Cleopatra discusses death and repute with Iras and Charmion. Cleopatra rejects Charmion’s idea that when Antony dies she should ‘builde for him a tombe’ (612), ‘let him have sumtuouse funeralles’ (614), ‘And yearly plaies to his praise institute’ (621), an attitude that chimes with the yearly memorials of Amintas instituted by Pembrochiana in Fraunce’s Ivychurch and with a similar commemoration on the Salisbury Plain ‘For Astrophill’s byrth-day’ imagined by Barnes:⁵⁸ What shame were that? ah Gods! what infamie? With Antonie in his good happs to share, And overlive [survivre] him dead: deeming enough To shed some teares upon a widdowe tombe? The after-livers [races a` venir] justly might report That I him onlie for his empire lov’d … (625–31)

Eras interrogates her: ⁵⁶ ‘The Authors Dreame to the Ladie Marie, the Countesse Dowager of Pembrooke’, in The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, ed. Susanne Woods (New York and Oxford, 1993), 28. ⁵⁷ Both first usages in OED2 are attributed to Sidney: ‘after-livers’ (‘after-’ II); ‘life-dead’ (‘life’ 17). ⁵⁸ Fraunce, The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1591), L1v–L2r and The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1592), opening. Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, ‘Canzon 2’, P1r; typically, the poem makes use of Echo and features Colin Clout and Stella in cameo roles. Cf. Hannay, 112 (citing Lamb’s doctoral dissertation) and Jon A. Quitslund, ‘The Work of Mourning in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis’, Renaissance Papers (1997), 23–31, speculating that some commemoration of Sidney was in fact a feature of Pembroke’s circle (28).

The Last Word Er. Cl. Er. Cl.

99

What praise shall you of after-ages [race future] gett? Nor praise, nor glory in my cares are sett. What other end ought you respect, then this? My only ende my onely dutie is … (646–9)

That last line is especially telling. Garnier has ‘Le seul but de ma mort sera le seuldevoir’,butPembrokeseesthat‘ende’isawordthatcombines‘purpose’ (but) and ‘death’ (mort). Such condensings are required to reduce alexandrines to pentameter, but here the pun is deeply significant: ultimately the onlyprojectthatcomestoanythingisdeath,asPembroke’sMornayteaches us; and any kind of literary teleology is a shadowing of death. Pembroke’s psalm metaphrases include one of the most popular texts of the dying, Psalm 51: O lord, whose grace no limitts comprehend; sweet lord, whose mercies stand from measure free; to mee that grace, to mee that mercie send, and wipe o lord my sinnes from sinnfull mee O clense, o wash, my fowle iniquitie: clense still my spotts, still wash awaie my staynings, till staines and spotts in mee leave noe remaynings.

The psalm had become a standard element in the ritual for executions,⁵⁹ and rhyme royal with a feminine ending in the final couplet is a good choice of form for the psalm recited in English on the scaffold by Pembroke’s royal aunt Lady Jane Grey. Pembroke’s metaphrase is one of the few psalms to circulate separately at an early date, and one of two to be found set to a lute accompaniment in manuscript.⁶⁰ Pembroke brings Antony’s plans for death into contact with this psalm: But goe we: die I must, and with brave ende Conclusion make of all foregoing harmes: Die, die I must: I must a noble death, A glorious death unto my succor call: I must deface the shame of time abus’d, I must adorne the wanton loves I us’de With some couragiouse act: that my last daie By mine owne hand my spotts may wash away. (1247–54) ⁵⁹ Works, 2.6. ⁶⁰ British Library, Add. MS 15117, 4v–5r; the other is Psalm 130, another of the penitential psalms, 5v.

100

The Last Word

Garnier gives Pembroke ‘Lave mon deshonneur, me punissant moymesme’ for that last line, and she responds by overlaying dishonour with the ‘spotts’ of Psalm 51. Perhaps she implies some critique of the pagan idea of the honourable suicide: only God can wash away sin; death ‘By mine owne hand’ will only compound sin. But her approach to the play as a whole suggests that she has the negative capability to associate the suicides of Antony and Cleopatra imaginatively with the good Christian death. It is the idea of ending and its literary representation that fire her imagination more than the moral niceties. Her translation emphasizes pattern and finality (‘and with brave ende | Conclusion make’) at this point, where Garnier attempts to bridge pagan and Christian ethics (‘d’un brave trespas | Expier mon deffame’). And through reiteration, the play becomes an allegory of literary form, a continual metaphor of ending. In Dircetus’ report of Antony’s speech before stabbing himself, Pembroke keeps the language simple to emphasize the connection between the end of Antony’s rhetorical designs on the world and the act of self-murder: Of speaking thus he scarce had made an ende, And taken up the bloudie sword from ground, But he his bodie piers’d … (1623–5)

Pembroke’s ‘made an ende’ translates Garnier’s far less focused ‘ce propos achevé’. Pembroke’s writings engage intensely, in both theme and form, with death and ending; it is her way of writing in response to the death of her brother and the incompletion of his works. While Greville’s edition of the unfinished ‘new’ Arcadia was in press, she was working on her translations of Garnier and Mornay, and their concern with the right way of finishing things off feeds into her decision to republish the Arcadia with the only ending it had, the as yet only partially revised material that had formed Books III–V of the ‘old’ Arcadia. One of her other works, the superb and compact translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della morte, can in a way be seen as part of another project to finish Sidney’s works off.⁶¹ The Trionfi were frequently published alongside Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and Pembroke’s editors argue that Pembroke may have used Castelvetro’s 1582 commentary, which sees the Trionfi as a continuation of Petrarch’s sonnet sequence.⁶² Even on its own The ⁶¹ Cf. Works, 1.266

⁶² Works, 1.258

The Last Word

101

Triumph of Death functions as a sort of afterword on any Petrarchan sequence, in which lover and mistress, separated by death, enjoy a dialogue and mutual understanding denied them in life. It can therefore very easily be seen as a response or conclusion to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. But there are signs that this meeting of the living and the dead figured in Pembroke’s mind as an analogue to her own dealings with her dead brother’s ghost. In the early draft of the poem she wrote to his soul both Pembroke and the work she dedicates to her dead brother are engaged in performing his ‘rites’ and erecting a monument to him: Remayning as the tombe of life disceast: Where, in my heart the highest roome thou hast There, truly there, thy earthly being is plac’t Triumph of death: in life how more then blest. (32–5)

The meaning is elliptical at many points in the draft, but seems here to chime with what Petrarch and his translator Pembroke manage in the work alluded to—the representation of death triumphing over life in a monument that itself eclipses death. The Triumph of Death rewrites Laura’s death in a passage movingly translated by Pembroke:⁶³ Not as great fires violently spent, But in themselves consuming, so her flight Took that sweet sprite and pass’d in peace content, Right like unto some lamp of clearest light, Little and little wanting nutriture, Holding to end a never-changing plight. Pale? No, but whitely, and more whitely pure Than snow on windless hill that flaking falls, As one whom labour did to rest allure. And when that heav’nly guest those mortal walls Had left, it nought but sweetly sleeping was In her fair eyes, what folly dying calls: Death fair did seem to be in her fair face. (1.160–72) ⁶³ This is the only text in which I do not follow the edition in Works, for reasons outlined in ‘Mary Sidney Herbert: the Psalmes, the Triumph, and the Scribes’, Sidney Journal, 16.2 (1998), 16–30 and in ‘The Triumph of Death: A Critical Edition in Modern Spelling of the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte’, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 2–18. Instead I use the text presented in the latter article and online at http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/sidneiana/triumph.htm.

102

The Last Word

This speaking picture concludes the first book of the Triumph, and in the second Laura’s ghost visits Petrarch. Pembroke’s interest in the work, and in translating this passage with such control, is to be seen not simply as a concern to rewrite Sidney’s own death, but rather as belonging to a poetic that aligns death with literary pattern, that gives conclusion a point. The enemy is not death but its abrupt and untimely arrival: But what is this? if I in the mid way should fall and dye? My god to thee I pray, who canst my praier give; turne not to night the noonetide of my day, since endlesse thou dost aglesse live. (PS 102.73–8)⁶⁴

In the Discourse of Life and Death, we get a different perspective on the problems of death and abruption. Mornay and Pembroke argue that we must learn not how to live but how to die, and live ‘so prepared, as if the ende of every dayes worke, were the ende of our life’ (1.251). If night comes at noon, we should be ready for it: if God the employer ‘will pay thee liberally for thy labour, as much for halfe a dayes worke, as for a whole: as much for having wrought till noone, as for having borne all the heate of the day: art thou not so much the more to thanke and prayse him?’ What stands in the way of such preparedness is the reluctance to leave projects half completed and life half lived: ‘It is thy houses and gardens thou lamentest, thy imperfect plottes and purposes, thy life (as thou thinkest) imperfect: which by no dayes, nor yeares, nor ages, might be perfected: and yet thy selfe mightst perfect in a moment, couldest thou but thinke in good earnest, that where it ende skilles not, so that it end well’ (1.252). Sidney ended well, but he left many plots and purposes imperfect, not least the Arcadia. Pembroke’s response is to reveal the preparedness for conclusion in each of his works, to show that the Arcadia was ready to end, since the end had been written once before, and that the completed Psalmes are only an extrapolation of Sidney’s work, not a supplement to it: in each case the fore-conceit was already stable; the plot was perfect, even if its execution was incomplete. But Pembroke also avoids works short on conclusion—each of her works is in a way hyper-conclusive, ready to end at a moment’s notice, ‘as if the ⁶⁴ AV, vv. 23–4: ‘He weakened my strength in the way; he shortened my days. | I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years are throughout all generations.’

The Last Word

103

ende of every dayes worke, were the ende of our life’—in every stanza and psalm of the Sidney psalter, in every speech and scene of Antonius. Antonius is one long preparation for death, and demonstrates that it is in writing about death that Pembroke comes alive as a poet. Antony is ready to die in his monologue in Act 1, and Cleopatra in the scene in Act 2 in which she contemplates life after Antony. In Act 3 Antony prepares for death, and his suicide is reported to Caesar in Act 4. In Act 5 Cleopatra grieves and prepares for the suicide that will (at Pembroke’s instigation) form the entire action of Daniel’s Cleopatra. The lovers have no scenes together in Garnier’s play; the emphasis is on the way they individually prepare for their deaths and imagine their afterlives. The end of the play is such a tour-de-force in this respect that one might think Cleopatra dies with it. Rhyming couplets, assonant half-rhymes, alliteration, paronomasia, chiastic patterning, and internal rhyme all help to turn up the poetic heat as Cleopatra wills herself to an ending: What say I? where am I? oˆ Cleopatra, Poore Cleopatra, griefe thy reason reaves. No, no, most happie in this happles case, To die with thee, and dieng thee embrace: By bodie joynde with thine, my mouth with thine, My mouth, whose moisture burning sighes have dried: To be in one selfe tombe, and one selfe chest, And wrapt with thee in one selfe sheete to rest. The sharpest torment in my heart I feele Is that I staie from thee, my heart, this while. Die will I straight now, now streight will I die, And streight with thee a wandring shade will be … But yet I stay, and yet thee overlive, That ere I die due rites I may thee give. (1983–98)

In the end, though, the play concludes by exhausting itself rather than by making a tidy gesture. Cleopatra promises a thousand tears but her eyes are for the moment wept dry: ‘Mine can no more’ (l. 2007). When it comes, therefore, the end, like Laura’s in the Triumph, is a passing away as much as a conclusion: I spent in teares, not able more to spende, But kisse him now, what rests me more to doe? Then lett me kisse you, you faire eies, my light, Front seate of honor, face most fierce, most faire! O neck, oˆ armes, oˆ hands, oˆ breast where death

104

The Last Word (Oh mischief ) comes to choake up vitall breath. A thousand kisses, thousand thousand more Let you my mouth for honors farewell give: That in this office weake my limmes may growe, Fainting on you, and fourth my soule may flowe. (2013–end)

The reversed first foot in the last line is especially well-judged, acting out the collapse it describes. Cleopatra ends, but the work dies, and, as Laura tells Petrarch, ‘An unrepented sigh, nought else, is death’ (Triumph, 2.51). This proleptic representation of death, ending the work with the idea of death if not the event, is shared, as we have seen, with Pembroke’s poem to Sidney’s soul. The alternative to ending with death is to end with God. The Sidney Psalms attempt to contain the divine in poetic measure, and yet ‘The praise of him … | Unbounded bides, noe time can it define’ (PS 111.19–20). Those words conclude Psalm 111, which Pembroke writes as an alphabetical acrostic, from A to U, alluding to the alpha and omega that God is. Measure in other contexts can be upset by passion: Our plaints no limits stay, Nor more then doo our woes: Both infinitely straie And neither measure knowes. In measure let them plaine: Who measur’d griefes sustaine. (Antonius, end of Act 2 chorus, 386–91)

But where measure attempts to describe the ineffable, it becomes something almost infinite. In Pembroke’s ‘Dialogue’ Piers objects to each of Thenot’s hyperbolic similes because they do not go far enough. It is not enough to call Astrea ‘chiefest’: Where chiefest are, there others bee, To us none else but only shee; When wilt thou speake in measure? (34–6)

The joke here is that inappropriate content (speaking out of proportion or ‘measure’) somehow equates with defective form (a lack of measure). The dialogue ends, appropriately enough, by finding language pointless:

The Last Word

105

Then. Then Piers, of friendship tell me why, My meaning true, my words should ly, And strive in vaine to raise her. Piers. Words from conceit do only rise, Above conceit her honour flies; But silence, nought can praise her. (55–60)

Silence is enjoined, and, in a double meaning, nothing but silence is adequate praise for Astrea. The dialogue measures itself out to this conclusion with great care, paradoxically managing to praise by not praising, to use metre to measure the immeasurable. And it is a similar effect that sets the seal on the Sidney Psalms. Pembroke takes the final psalm of praise and uses it to redeem sonnet form, in a sacred parody that reconfigures Sidney’s favourite sonnet variant, the Petrarchan octave with English sestet. This enables Pembroke to end with a couplet, and she makes her intent clear by adding one key concept not in the Bible—that the Psalter itself must now be ended:⁶⁵ conclud: by all that aire, or life enfold, lett high Jehova highly be extold. (PS 150.13–14)

D I A LO G U E S W I T H T H E D E A D The question of address and occasion—of the reader the rhetoric of a text is aimed at—is not straightforward in Pembroke’s case. A wish is evident in recent criticism to associate her writings with Sidney’s politics, and to find in her print and scribal publication of certain of her works a religio-political practice of some sort. This may be viewed in general terms as the support of reform—certainly any vernacular translation of the Psalms is ideologically charged.⁶⁶ Or it may enmesh Pembroke in the network of international militant Protestantism fostered by Sidney and Leicester.⁶⁷ But the logic is suspect: Philippe du Plessis Mornay was an important Protestant political theorist and friend of the Sidneys; Philip Sidney is said to have translated his De la verité de la religion Chrestienne; ⁶⁵ As is pointed out in Works, 2.446. ⁶⁶ Cf. Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 52. ⁶⁷ Hannay, 16; and her ‘‘‘This Moses and This Miriam’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Role in the Legend of Sir Philip Sidney’, in Achievements, 217–26 (217).

106

The Last Word

so by translating Mornay’s Discours de la vie at de la mort, a work with no political purpose, ‘the countess was aiding the Protestant alliance’.⁶⁸ And it looks even more problematic when we recall that the work that Pembroke’s Discourse accompanied, Antonius, was a translation of a play by a Catholic.⁶⁹ Political meanings are especially dependent on an audience. The strongest evidence of political intent comes in a poem, ‘Even now that Care’, preserved only in a single copy of the Psalmes and probably lost from another, which was apparently intended as a dedication of the Psalmes to the Queen in 1599. The possibility is intriguing: ‘Like the Geneva Bible, dedicated to Elizabeth at her accession, the Sidney psalter, dedicated to Elizabeth at the close of her long reign, served as a reminder of the duties of the godly monarch.’⁷⁰ But it clearly was the close of Elizabeth’s reign in 1599, and the time for such counsel had long since passed. And there is a further problem: ‘the political intent of her gift would be unmistakable; perhaps that is why her psalms were never delivered to the queen.’⁷¹ This large doubt ⁶⁸ Hannay, 62, and ‘‘‘This Moses and This Miriam’’’, 221. Hannay summarizes her position thus: ‘as the last strong voice of the Dudley/Sidney alliance left in Elizabethan England, the countess not only supported the Protestant cause through her translation of a work by the Huguenot leader Mornay and through her encouragement of a hagiography that elevated her brother to the status of a Protestant martyr, but also attempted to address the queen, decorously but directly’ [in the dedicatory poem to the Psalmes] (96). Cf. Schleiner’s argument that Pembroke had to create for herself ‘a base for addressing a broader audience to urge commitment to international Protestantism’ (53). ⁶⁹ See Hannay, 127, where, although Garnier’s associations with Guise’s League are mentioned, attention is drawn to the common ground between Garnier and the ideology of the Sidneys. Hannay says that Pembroke’s use of Garnier, ‘By importing this Continental model’, is ‘consistent with her other translations’ (121). Danielle Clarke finds a less specifically factional politics in Antonius, the play providing ‘a timely analysis of the meanings of passion in the public sphere’, ‘The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 149–66 (157). ⁷⁰ Hannay, ‘‘‘Princes you as men must dy’’: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney’, ELR, 19 (1989), 22–41 (41). Theodore L. Steinberg, in ‘The Sidneys and the Psalms’, SP, 92 (1995), 1–17, finds wider contexts for the moral, political, and theological intent of the Sidney Psalmes, most especially by demonstrating the likelihood that Pembroke knew some Hebrew. He concludes: ‘I would not deny that these Psalms carry an ideological message, but that message is the message of David, not of Calvin’ (16). ⁷¹ Hannay, ‘‘‘Doo What Men May Sing’’: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 149–65 (164). Cf. (without the qualification) Philip’s Phoenix, 95. It is not entirely certain that the Queen never received a copy of the Psalmes. Pembroke missed the opportunity to make a presentation on her own territory, for the Queen’s projected visit to Wilton was cancelled

The Last Word

107

about whether Pembroke was ever actually seen as making any sort of political gesture may not prevent us from finding political overtones in her works. But it is a caution not to hang too much on supposition, and a reminder that successful rhetoric needs an audience. The Psalmes were known to all who might be called Pembroke’s associates: Daniel, Moffett, and others seem to have read them. John Donne saw a copy,⁷² Herbert was influenced by them,⁷³ and the existence of the work seems to have been no secret. But there is nevertheless something of self-effacement in Pembroke’s dissemination of the work. It may have been beyond her control, but it still tells us something that of the twelve manuscripts with title pages only three mention Pembroke (and in one of these, MS R, the title was added much later) and nine attribute the Psalmes only to Sidney; similarly, the majority of all manuscripts do not include the note ‘hitherto [or ‘hactenus’] Sir Philip Sidney’ after Psalm 43. This evidence may simply represent collective blindness in the community of scribes, but it may tell us that Pembroke made little effort to advertise her part in the Psalmes. Hence perhaps the disbelief of Ben Jonson: ‘Sir P. Sidney had translated some of the Psalmes, which went abroad under the name of the Countesse of Pembrock.’⁷⁴ If Pembroke was in the business of forging new lines of literary influence, or of constructing political meanings, she seems to have been strangely reluctant to disseminate her major work in a way that made clear her authorship. Are Pembroke’s works public statements or private conversations overheard? The two works printed in 1592 both end by referring, like private letters, to the date and place of their completion. They lack any preliminaries or other paratextual material from Pembroke’s pen. Instead of presenting her works to the reader, Pembroke releases them from her private study, and we can only read them—we can only step into her private world—because they have been sent to a printer. The (see further Brennan, ‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton House’). But this does not mean that either the Penshurst manuscript (A) or the Tixall manuscript ( J ) was not subsequently given to the Queen at court, although only the provenance of the latter makes this at all likely (see Works, 2.316). ⁷² See his poem, ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister’. ⁷³ This is the subject of Freer’s Music for a King; see also Noel J. Kinnamon, ‘A Note on Herbert’s ‘‘Easter’’ and the Sidneian Psalms’, George Herbert Journal, 1.2 (1978), 44–8, and below, Postscript. ⁷⁴ Conversations with Drummond, ll. 204–5 ( Jonson, 1.138).

108

The Last Word

Sidney Psalms seem better suited to private devotions than to public worship, but devotional practice may in the end have come second to the devotion to Sidney that Pembroke expressed by completing the work. Indeed, critics tend to view the Psalmes as process more than as product, stressing that they describe a learning curve in Pembroke’s education as a poet.⁷⁵ The work may in the end be directed not to the living but to the dead. The Tixall manuscript of the Psalmes contains two unique poems placed before the text. The second will be discussed below. The first is a dedication of the work to Queen Elizabeth, and confirms that either this or the Penshurst manuscript (from which J was copied, and which wants the first few leaves) was intended as a presentation copy for the Queen. ‘Even now that Care’ consists of twelve stanzas in one of only two stanza forms that occur twice in the Psalmes; that form is the regular pentameter version of the characteristic Spenser-influenced scheme ababbcbc. It is characteristic because it combines the enfolding mirror-image of the order of the b rhymes with some actual linear progress from a to c to achieve a sort of retreating assertion. The poem itself combines boldness and humility, as we see in the worries of the opening stanza: Even now that Care which on thy Crowne attends and with thy happy greatnes dayly growes Tells mee thrise sacred Queene my Muse offends, and of respect to thee the line outgoes, One instant will, or willing can shee lose I say not reading, but receiving Rimes, On whom in chiefe dependeth to dispose what Europe acts in theise most active times? (1–8)

The growing of cares, the offending, and the stepping over lines in the first four lines take us closer and closer to Elizabeth, but this approach is halted by the abrupt transition of the Queen from second (‘to thee’, l. 4) to third person (‘can shee’, l. 5). This is a sort of backing away, couched in the fretful qualifications of ‘will, or willing can’, ‘not reading, but receiving’, that deflects emphasis from the unflinching final line. Here, ⁷⁵ See, e.g., Brennan, Patronage, 68; Beth Wynne Fisken, ‘Mary Sidney’s Psalmes: Education and Wisdom’, in Silent But for the Word, ed. Hannay, 166–83 (esp. 182–3); Hannay, 89; Works, 1.9; and Rienstra and Kinnamon, ‘Revisioning the Sacred Text’, 55 and 67.

The Last Word

109

suddenly, we have a European political context out of nowhere. The periphrastic curtseys of the first seven lines have not prepared us for the directness of reference to the ‘active times’. The phrase is loaded.⁷⁶ For a moment we have a blatantly political poem. After this coup the poem backs off again, starting the second stanza with more bowing and scraping: ‘Yet dare I so, as humblenes may dare | cherish some hope …’ (9–10). And as Pembroke begins to describe the Psalmes her mind is deflected back to Sidney. The threat is of course there of a reminder of what Sidney died for, a reproach from the past, but this past is too emotive not to absorb Pembroke’s poetic attention for its own sake: Then these the Postes of Dutie and Goodwill shall presse to offer what their Senders owe; Which once in two, now in one Subject goe, the poorer left, the richer reft awaye: Who better might (O might ah word of woe.) have giv’n for mee what I for him defraye. (19–24)

The ‘Subject[s]’ are servants of the Queen, and of God, but they are also the theme or style of the work: its muse, and what it is about. And ‘Subject’ is also by some elliptical metaphor of grammar the agent of the action that is the writing of poems. So the reading of these lines slides between emphasis on duty to the monarch, duty to the work, and the duty of Mary to Philip Sidney. And this last focus seems to rise above the others, though, of course, the collapse into emotive recollection may be advertised here rather self-consciously as a way of not stepping over the line of political admonition: How can I name whom sighing sighes extend, and not unstopp my teares eternall spring? (25–6)

So the political Sidney is kept at bay, and the inspirer of his sister’s technique is displayed. And the emphasis of the following stanzas is on the technical achievement of Englishing the psalter, which can ⁷⁶ See Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven and London, 1996), 139–40 and 252, and Greville, Dedication, 7.11–12 (‘those active times’ contrasted to ‘this effeminate age’, as pointed out by Hannay, 90).

110

The Last Word

be credited to the Queen’s influence without demanding anything in return: for in our worke what bring wee but thine owne? What English is, by many names is thine. (41–2)

Pembroke next asserts the appropriateness of the Psalms to the Queen on the grounds of her godliness, and moves through a comparison of Elizabeth to David to another suddenly plain reference to contemporary politics: For ev’n thy Rule is painted in his Raigne: both cleere in right: both nigh by wrong opprest … proud Philistines did interrupt his rest, The foes of heav’n no lesse have beene thy foes … (65–6; 69–70)

Using the weight of the Psalms to make an unanswerable case for militant Protestantism is risky, and the poem again backs down by separating its muse from the irreproachable psalmist: But soft my muse, Thy pitch is earthly lowe; forbeare this heav’n, where onely Eagles flie. (79–80)

This confuses: her muse ought to be Urania, who belongs in heaven, but instead we have Icarus and the divinity of the sun-queen.⁷⁷ What follows pretends to back off further, with a vision of an ideal state of affairs couched in some hefty paralepsis: Kings on a Queene enforst their states to lay; Main=lands for Empire waiting on an Ile; Men drawne by worth a woman to obay; one moving all, herselfe unmov’d the while: Truthes restitution, vanitie exile, wealth sprung of want, warr held without annoye, Let subject bee of some inspired stile, Till then the object of her subjects joye. (81–8) ⁷⁷ For the Queen as sun compare Pembroke’s letter to Elizabeth (Works, letter 9): ‘the same sunn which evermore hath powre to perfit the greatest imperfection by the rarest example of all perfection’ (1.291).

The Last Word

111

What sounds like the state of affairs is suddenly undercut in the last two lines. The vision is still to be styled, by inspiration; the description is now a utopia, an ‘object’ in the double sense of a desired end. And whilst the Queen has ‘subjects’, her power is ‘subject’ to the poet. The poem closes with more aggressive humility. The Queen’s ‘handmaid’ (90) only goes so far as to ‘wish’ (93), that is demand, that Elizabeth will realize the necessary connection between godliness and whatever politics Mary Sidney espouses, that she will ‘Sing what God doth, and doo what men may sing’ (96). The poem is hard to read. That it may never have been delivered to its addressee, and was not circulated, might suggest that Pembroke here is playing a game with political rhetoric by herself. Sidney is used as a refuge whenever Pembroke might seem to overstep the mark; her devotion to him is suitably self-effacing, and retrospective, and allows her to smuggle in political opinion. But the retrospection is also instinctive, and the refuge more attractive for itself than for the cover it affords. It is in this spirit that the poem that follows ‘Even now’ is addressed solely to Sidney. He is subject and object enough.

* * * The most striking aspect of the Sidney Psalms is their metrical variety.⁷⁸ Very few forms are repeated, and the poems tend to push well beyond the boundaries of contemporary prosodic convention. In some cases it can be suggested that the form grows out of the psalm’s own rhetoric;⁷⁹ in others it may seem to be imposed at random; and in some a particular form might seem to have the potential for metaphorical connection to the matter of the psalm. But the aesthetics of overall variety seem as important as those of the individual psalm. There is a reason, particular to the Psalmes, why poetic effect should be lodged in form, for whereas the glory of a form can be dedicated to God, the translation of his words ⁷⁸ Discussions include Works, 1.57, Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, 1984), ch. 5, and May, 207 (but cf. 177: ‘the countess was quite attentive to these technical matters’). Among contemporary comments are those of Henry Parry (see Works, 1.47, translated in Brennan, ‘Date’, 436). The title page of MS J is: ‘The Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kindes of verse, more Rare and Excellent for the Method and Varietie than ever yet hath been done in English. Begun by the Noble and Learned gentleman Sir Phillip Sidney knight. and finished by the Right Honourable the Countess of Pembroke his Sister’ (Works, 2.314) ⁷⁹ Häublein examines this tendency in Strophe und Struktur.

112

The Last Word

risks pride.⁸⁰ And what the Sidneys are able to do is to merge the pursuit of formal variety with the aims of the psalmist, to ‘sing a new song’ (PS 33.13): Sing and let the song be new unto him that never endeth: sing all Earth and all in you. sing to god and blesse his name, of the help, the health he sendeth, daie by day new ditties frame. (PS 96.1–6)

Coburn Freer has examined the rationale of the varied versification initiated by Sidney and pursued by Pembroke: For her, formal variety signifies something more than the statistics, more even than the sum of relationships with literal meanings. Her psalmody is a devotional act: to her brother more than to God … Thus the formal variety with which Sidney inaugurated the psalter is, for the Countess, a real part of its consecrated purpose. That variety is an end in itself and a meaningful end.⁸¹

Critics have, it is true, had some success in connecting subtle choices of word and more evident embellishments in translation to the concerns, even the social and political agenda, of Mary Sidney.⁸² They have also found moments where Pembroke picks up the wording of a poem by her brother.⁸³ But it is, paradoxically, in the mute poesy⁸⁴ of her forms that she speaks of and to him most clearly. Sidney’s poetics attaches great importance to the ability of poets to make things visible. Quintilian had valued a similar ability in the orator, and in Sidney’s hands the theory of enargeia and the ‘speaking picture’ ⁸⁰ On these questions see Rienstra and Kinnamon, ‘Revisioning the Sacred Text’, 60 and passim. Cf. Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in SeventeenthCentury English Poetry (New York, 1978), 20: ‘Devout translators of the psalms felt obliged to put faithfulness to the original above other considerations, for to do otherwise would be to set up their work in place of God’s.’ ⁸¹ Music for a King, 106–7. ⁸² See for example Hannay, ‘‘‘House-confinèd maids’’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke’, ELR, 24 (1994), 44–71 and ‘‘‘When riches growe’’: Class Perspective in the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes’, in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary Burke et al. (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 77–97; and Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 6. ⁸³ See for example Works 1.68–70. ⁸⁴ See Chapter 9, n. 2 for the popular formula of poetry as speaking picture and painting as mute poesy.

The Last Word

113

makes the appeal to the reader’s eye an indispensable stage in the stirring of heart and mind that will issue in some visible result.⁸⁵ We can take this visual metaphor in the direction of pictures, and emphasize colour, detail, and fine workmanship, language and characterization. Or we can take it in the direction of architecture, taking our cue from Mary Sidney’s comparison of Sidney’s works to buildings (‘To the Angell spirit’, 64). Our emphasis would then be on line, balance, ratio, a harmonious composition of parts into a clear and elegant whole: in narrative we would emphasize plot, as Aristotle does, and in verse we would emphasis both rhetorical dispositio and, more importantly, poetic form. That emphasis could call on an interesting distinction Sidney himself makes: for any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them. (Defence, 79)⁸⁶

Puttenham, in Book II of The Arte of English Poesie, compares poems to buildings, and stanzaic form to the bond (pattern of stones or bricks) used by the mason.⁸⁷ Puttenham gives ‘ocular examples’ of stanza forms, and recommends that new verse forms be mapped out diagrammatically before composition begins (M3v). In the manuscripts of the Psalmes, form is experienced visually through the use of functional indentation.⁸⁸ Where this is done well, as by Davies of Hereford in the Penshurst manuscript, the reader’s first response to each form is to a visual pattern; the reading that follows is in some ways a mere peering closer at the pleasing artifice. As Puttenham puts it: Likewise it so falleth out most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible: for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well and è converso: and this is by ⁸⁵ Institutio oratoria, 6.2.32 and 8.3.61–70. The source for poetics is of course Horace, Ars poetica, 361–2: ‘A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away.’ ⁸⁶ For a parallel formulation from England’s first architectural theorist see Sir Henry Wotton, The Elements of Architecture (1624), cited in Timothy Mowl, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London, 1993), 143: the architect’s ‘glory doth more consist, in the Designment and Idea of the whole Worke, and his truest ambition should be to make the Forme, which is the nobler Part (as it were) triumph over the Matter’. ⁸⁷ The Arte of English Poesie, 2.10, M3r. ⁸⁸ For an example of how layout contributes to meaning in Pembroke’s autograph letters see Works, 1.291, headnote to letter 9 (to the Queen).

114

The Last Word

a naturall simpathie, betweene the eare and the eye, and between tunes and colours, even as there is the like betweene the other sences and their objects of which it apperteineth not here to speake. (M1v)

It is worth looking closely at one especially striking instance of the Countess of Pembroke’s poetic artifice. Pembroke seems in translating Psalm 55 to have stuck fairly closely to the French psalter, suspending her usual practice of collating different texts, translations, and commentaries, because she had something else in view.⁸⁹ That something is one of the most technically demanding verse forms ever attempted. Not everyone who has looked at the poem has seen its pattern.⁹⁰ Some see that the same three rhyme sounds are used throughout, but do not see that the six twelve-line stanzas of this poem are a single seventy-two line form.⁹¹ Others misrepresent it entirely.⁹² The rhyme scheme is abccbaacbbca, and this in essence is repeated in each stanza. To see the real pattern, though, we need to put the successive rhymes on a grid: stanza 1 stanza 2 stanza 3 stanza 4 stanza 5 stanza 6

a b c c b a

b a b a c c

c c a b a b

c c a b a b

b a b a c c

a b c c b a

a b c c b a

c c a b a b

b a b a c c

b a b a c c

c c a b a b

a b c c b a

Sidney scarcely ever begins a rhyme scheme abc. For him, repetition must occur sooner, so ab … will always be followed by a or b.⁹³ Pembroke, on the other hand, is frequently prepared to stretch the line of rhymes to abc. And the encouragement may have come from Puttenham’s Arte. Three of his four elaborate examples from Petrarch begin abc (M2r); one of his seven versions of the ‘staffe of seven verses’ is the improbable abcccba (M3v); and his ten versions of the ‘Sixaine’ include the base unit of Pembroke’s poem, abccba, the obvious abcabc, and two stanza forms offering in their second triplet two of ⁸⁹ Works, 2.13; for discussion of Pembroke’s methods see Works, 10–32, and Noel J. Kinnamon, ‘God’s ‘‘Scholler’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes and Beza’s Psalmorum Davidis … Libri Quinque’, NQ, 242 (1997), 85–8. ⁹⁰ A photograph of the second half of the psalm from the Penshurst manuscript is given in Kinnamon, ‘Penshurst and Tixall’, 148. For good descriptions of the form see Works, 1.57 and 2.471, and Gary F. Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg, 1979), 198. ⁹¹ Buxton, 154; Woods, Natural Emphasis, 292. In Psalms Rathmell does not reproduce the indentation of his copy-text, making the pattern harder to see. ⁹² Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 75. ⁹³ Exceptions are OA 43, PS 12, and OA 76.

The Last Word

115

the other orders of the three rhymes that we can see above: abcbca and abccab (M3v). The base form abccba is also singled out earlier when Puttenham is discussing the possible ‘distances’ of lines that may be allowed between rhymes: ‘There be larger distances also, as when the first concord falleth upon the sixt verse, and is very pleasant if they be joyned with other distances not so large [with a diagrammatic representation of abccba]’ (M2r). The pattern of Pembroke’s structure starts to emerge if we read down the stanzas at the first rhyme of each, for this too forms the pattern abccba. It can be seen again in the middle two and last rhymes of each stanza. Mapping stanza 1 to stanza 6, 2 to 5, and 3 to 4, we can see each as the counterpart of the other, as making its choices for each sestet in the opposite order. So stanza 1 has as its first sestet stanza 6’s last, and vice versa. But the result of this is the poem’s great coup. For just as the basic unit is a palindrome, abccba, so is the whole poem. It goes through 36 lines, and then turns round and runs backwards: one half is the mirror-image of the other. This is dazzling architecture, a complex geometry Puttenham would have loved. As technical artifice the poem is already unrivalled. But what makes it a marvel is that the formal fore-conceit does not constrain the rhetoric, but is fundamental to it. A syntax founded in both parallel and chiastic repetition confirms the larger pattern of lines and mirror images: My god most glad to look, most prone to heere, an open eare o lett my praier find, and from my plaint turne not thie face away. behold my jestures, harken what I say while uttering mones with most tormented mind, My body I no lesse torment and teare. for loe their fearfull threatnings wound mine eare, who griefs on griefs on me still heaping laie, a mark to wrath and hate and wrong assign’d therfore my hart hath all his force resign’d to trembling pants, death terrors on me pray, I feare, nay shake, nay quiv’ring quake with feare. (1–12)

A sort of musical gradatio orders the sounds in the opening three lines, from ‘most’ to ‘most prone to heere’ to ‘open eare’, and the repetition of diphthongs that follows, moving from ‘my praier find’ to ‘thie face away’ causes this opening sestet to pivot on the exact correspondence

116

The Last Word

of sound pattern and meaning in ‘from my plaint turne not thie face away’. The rhetoric of the whole sestet follows the rhyme pattern, as we move from the imprecation to be seen and heard, to God’s turning face, and back to the tormented ‘body’. Where the first sestet couples the first person with the second person God, the second couples it with its third person enemies, and enacts a similar arc, upwards through the heaping up of ‘griefs on griefs’, and then downwards with the resigned heart. In the second stanza, another reason for the hinged stanza form suggests itself: Then say I oˆ might I but cutt the wind, born on the wing the fearfull dove doth beare: stay would I not, till I in rest might stay. farr hence, oˆ farr, then would I take my way unto the desert, and repose me there … (13–17)

The dove’s wings of the psalm’s most famous verse are at this point graphically represented in the verse form and a pattern of duplication continues in the language, with its repetitions ‘Then say I oˆ might I’ and ‘farr hence, oˆ farr’. But a clearer set of patterns follows, prepared for in the chiasmus ‘only hee, hee only’ in the third stanza (l. 30) and reaching a climax at the point where the poem’s rhymes turn about. For over this bridge between the third stanza and the fourth we learn that the speaker is betrayed not by ‘my foe’ (l. 31) but by ‘my … frend’: But this to thee, to thee impute I may, my fellow my companion, held most deere, my soule, my other self, my inward frend: whom unto me, me unto whom did bind exchanged secrets … (37–41)

And here the rhetoric, the meaning, the sound pattern, and the rhyme scheme are all about coupling and the mirror image. We see a verbal abccba in ‘whom unto me, me unto whom’. And the repetitions—‘to thee, to thee’, ‘my fellow my companion … my soule, my other self, my inward frend’—cement the moment at which the complementary becomes antagonistic. Identity is revealed as opposition, and the poem proceeds both upwards and downwards, to its faith in God, and its violent conclusion:

The Last Word

117

But my oreloaden soule thy selfe upcheare cast on Gods shoulders what thee downe doth waigh long borne by thee with bearing pain’d and pin’d to care for thee hee shall be ever kinde by him the just in safty held allway chaunglesse shall enter, live and leave the yeare: but lord how long shall these men tarry heere fling them in pitt of death where never shin’d the light of life and while I make my stay on thee, let who their thirst with bloud allay have their life-holding threed so weakly twin’d that it half-spunne, death may in sunder sheare. (61–72)

This may seem paradoxical; at the moment when the poetic form reaches its determined end, completes the circle, we have the breaking of a ‘half-spunne’ thread. We might read this as a contrast: the perfect form implies the wholeness of the godly person’s destiny, whereas the evil are cut off abruptly and pointlessly. This is certainly the moral. But the achievement of formal closure through abruptness means that the poem does not rest in some self-satisfied cocoon. It looks out, it continues to worry, and it fails entirely to console itself. And as this is Mary Sidney’s creation, we cannot help thinking of her mirror-image and counterpart. On a deeper level the poem may draw from the images of Sidney’s death and Pembroke’s labours of completion: its perfect return to abruption in some way charts a movement away from Sidney and then back to him. When Henry Peacham, in The Compleat Gentleman (1622), turns his attention to music, he knows he must answer the puritans: But, say our sectaries, the service of God is nothing advanced by singing and instruments as we use it in our cathedral churches, that is by antiphony, rests, repetitions, variety of moods [i.e. modes, keys] and proportions [verse forms], with the like. For the first, that it is not contrary but consonant to the word of God so in singing to answer either, the practice of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses, when she answered the men in her song, will approve; for repetition, nothing was more usual in the singing of the Levites, and among the psalms of David the 136th is wholly compounded of those two most graceful and sweet figures of repetition, symploce and anaphora.⁹⁴ ⁹⁴ Source Readings in Music History. Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. edn. Gary Tomlinson (New York and London, 1998), 69.

118

The Last Word

There is an interesting associative slip here from antiphony, the music of statement and answer, to figurative patterning based on repetition. Donne was to call Sidney and Pembroke ‘this Moses and this Miriam’ because in Exodus 15:1–21 Miriam takes up the song of praise Moses has sung.⁹⁵ And Pembroke seems to know, perhaps better than Sidney, that the ‘rules … not yet fully found’ (Defence, 77) of the Hebrew verse of the Psalms involve patterns of repetition, antiphony, and chiasmus (e.g. PS 57.31: ‘My hart prepar’d prepared is my hart’).⁹⁶ Both in her attitude to Sidney’s example and in her rhetoric and prosody, therefore, Pembroke exploits the ability of devotional song to involve repetition. Of course, part of Pembroke’s education as a poet involves disagreement with her teacher Sidney on particular details, as we have already seen. But it is important that repetitions by echo and mirror condition much of her finest poetry, as in Psalm 55. One crucial aspect of the antiphonal reply to Sidney has been overlooked because it concerns poetic form—namely, the sacred parody of Sidney’s secular poetry, in the narrow sense of the conversion of a poetic or musical form from secular to sacred ends.⁹⁷ Thus, Psalm 99 uses the form (trochaic

⁹⁵ ‘Upon the translation of the Psalmes …’, 46. ⁹⁶ Cf. ‘Psalm’ in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton, 1993), 996. Discussions of Pembroke’s use of figures include Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 63 and Works, 2.19. On Pembroke’s possible knowledge of Hebrew or use of the Hebraicist Gervase Babington, chaplain at Wilton, for advice see Works, 2.16 and Steinberg, ‘The Sidneys and the Psalms’. ⁹⁷ I use the term parody to designate a poem written in reaction to a previous poem and in the same form, a version of contrafaction (writing new words for an old tune). See Rosemond Tuve, ‘Sacred ‘‘Parody’’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert’, Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 249–90 for an excellent treatment of this practice, and for the musical aspect my ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s ‘‘French Tune’’ Identified’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 378–402 and Robert Falck, ‘Parody and Contrafactum: A Terminological Clarification’, The Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 1–21. Louis L. Martz, in The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Ct., 1954), 184–93 uses the term ‘sacred parody’ to refer to the redemption of the words, images, and tropes of particular poems, converted from secular to sacred use. The example of AS 5 (‘It is most true’) and PS 73 is discussed in Works, 1.68–9 and the implications are developed further in Beth Wynne Fisken, ‘‘‘The Art of Sacred Parody’’ in Mary Sidney’s Psalmes’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 8 (1989), 223–39. This is a cogent examination of how Pembroke recognizes and exploits ‘the parallel functions served by the sonnet cycle and the Psalms, the resemblances between the anxiety of the lover beseeching his beloved and the anguish of the worshiper pleading with God’ (223). But it does not address the formal question: when the essay concludes ‘only by translating the Psalms can [Pembroke] write a sonnet’ Fisken means not a poem in sonnet form but a poem using the tropes of the sonneteer; neither of Pembroke’s two sonnets (PS 100 and 150)

The Last Word

119

4 aa7 bb8 ) of AS viii, and Psalm 100 is a Spenserian sonnet.⁹⁸ A cluster of such contrafacta occurs towards the end of the Sidney Psalms. It is possible that Pembroke worked to some extent in order, from Psalm 44 to Psalm 150,⁹⁹ but more certain that the effect of returning to Sidney’s voice and poetic forms is deliberately managed. Psalm 141 thus borrows the odd form of AS v. Psalm 142 borrows the complex form of CS 3 and 4, written by Sidney as a contrafactum to an Italian tune,¹⁰⁰ and thus, like the psalms of the French Huguenot Psalter, uses sacred parody of secular song to provide music and enable sung devotional use. Psalm 146 imitates the form of OA 63, the marriage eclogue. And Psalm 143, most strikingly, borrows the form of Sidney’s wonderful dirge, CS 30: Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread, For love is dead: All Love is dead, infected With plague of deepe disdaine: Worth as nought worth rejected, And Faith faire scorne doth gaine. From so ungratefull fancie, From such a femall franzie, From them that use men thus, Good Lord deliver us. (CS 30.1–10) Heare my entreaty Lord, the suite, I send, with heed attend. and as my hope and trust is are discussed at any point. Attempts to restrict the meaning of ‘parody’ have a long history—cf. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 9.2.35. ⁹⁸ A sonnet in such a form had of course been dedicated by Spenser to Pembroke in the 1590 Faerie Queene, and another was written to her by Daniel as the dedication of the second edition of Delia (1594). However, she would also have encountered the form (Spenser cannot claim to have invented it) in its Scottish dress in James VI’s sonnet elegy for Sidney in Lachrymae, k1r, or in his The Essayes of a Prentise (1584). On the Scottish analogue see Maria R. Rohr Philmus, ‘The Case of the Spenserian Sonnet: A Curious Re-Creation’, Spenser Studies, 13 (1999), 125–37. ⁹⁹ For example, most of the early versions that were later rejected are amongst Psalms 44–89. Gary F. Waller, in ‘The Text and Manuscript Variants of the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalms’, RES, new ser. 26 (1975), 1–18, notices this (11) but prefers to deduce ‘a quite random order of proceeding’. For further speculation on the order of composition see my ‘Five Responses to Sir Philip Sidney’, 46–8, 197, and 201. ¹⁰⁰ See Frank J. Fabry, ‘Sidney’s Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs’, RQ, 23 (1970), 237–55, and ‘Sidney’s Poetry and Italian Song-Form’, ELR, 3 (1973), 232–48.

120

The Last Word reposed whole in thee: so in thy truth and justice yeeld audience to me. and make not least beginning to judge thy servants sinning: for lord what lyving wight lives synnlesse in thy sight? (PS 143.1–10)

An almost identical form is used for the song (AT 21) sung when Sidney as Philisides the shepherd knight entered the lists at an Accession Day tournament possibly of 1577.¹⁰¹ We have lost the music, but it is clear that both CS 30 and Psalm 143 are thus songs, and the one a sacred parody of the other, redeeming its form, its rhetoric, and its music and putting them to devotional use.¹⁰² This adoption of Sidney’s music also seems to be a way of addressing Sidney, almost of seeking his approval, for it is hard not to hear his memory in the embellishments of the third stanza:¹⁰³ The best I can is this, nay this is all; that I can call before my thoughts, survayeng tymes evidences old, all deedes with comfort waighing, that thy hand-writyng hold. soe hand and hart conspiring I lift, no lesse desiring thy grace I may obtayne, then drougth desireth raine.

As she works on her manuscript and continues to revise Sidney’s own draft of Psalms 1–43, Pembroke may be apt to merge the deeds of God’s ¹⁰¹ See Introduction, n. 2 and William A. Ringler, ‘The Text of The Poems of Sidney Twenty-five Years After’, in Achievements, 129–44. In the Ottley manuscript (text in Ringler’s appendix D, 142), AT 19 (‘Philisides the Shepherd good and true’) is followed by an explanation making clear that AT 19 was spoken and AT 21 sung: ‘This was to be said by one of the Plowmen after that I had passed the Tilt with my rusticall musick and this freemans songe [a villanella or other light song] that followeth.’ ¹⁰² Psalm 143 is one of the seven penitential psalms, and these tend to be circulated more than others; two of them (51 and 130) are the only of the Psalmes extant in musical settings; one (51) is in the Harington group of three psalms (see Chapter 4). PS 38 (also penitential) was written to the French tune. ¹⁰³ AV, vv. 5–6: ‘I remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands. I stretch forth my hands unto thee: my soul thirsteth after thee, as a thirsty land.’

The Last Word

121

hand that these verses should refer to with the creations of Sidney the poet-maker, written in his hand. Those ‘deedes’ become title-deeds or legacies endorsed with ‘thy hand-writyng’—an inheritance of property that is Pembroke’s ‘best’ and ‘all’. All this repetition of Sidneian form culminates in the last psalm of all, Psalm 150, and confirms that reference to Sidney is very much a part of Pembroke’s fore-conceit. Of 139 sonnets by Sidney (not counting three possibly by him), 60—almost half—are in his trademark form, the Petrarchan octave melded with the English sestet: abbaabba cdcdee. And, in the grandest of returns to Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke ends his psalter with his form: O laud the Lord, the God of hoasts commend, exault his pow’r, advaunce his holynesse: with all your might lift his allmightinesse: your greatest praise upon his greatnes spend. Make Trumpetts noise in shrillest notes ascend: make Lute and Lyre his loved fame expresse: him lett the pipe, hym lett the tabrett blesse, him Organs breath, that windes or waters lend. Lett ringing Timbrells soe his honor sound, lett sounding Cymballs so his glory ring, that in their tunes such mellody be found, As fitts the pompe of most triumphant king. conclud: by all that aire, or life enfold, lett high Jehova highly be extold.

The Countess of Pembroke enjoyed collaborative dialogue. We can see this in formal terms in her pastoral dialogue and in procedural terms in the pairing of her Antonius with Daniel’s Cleopatra.¹⁰⁴ Her most intense and focused poetry of dialogue is inspired by the dialogue on the brink of death that Garnier offers, and by the dialogue between the living and the dead that is Petrarch’s Trionfo della morte. Daniel learns from her and includes in Act IV of his Cleopatra a scene in which Cleopatra very deliberately turns to address Antony’s ghost (M2r-v)—the apostrophe ¹⁰⁴ Daniel picks up the dialogue in his preface where through metonymy and personification Pembroke’s Antony calls for ‘his Cleopatras company’ (Delia and Rosamond Augmented (1594), H5r) and in Act III, scene 1 (K4r–6v) where a dialogue between Philostratus and Arius quite deliberately engages the ideas in the Discourse of Life and Death.

122

The Last Word

as resurrection. And it is as a dialogue with the dead that she constructs the Psalmes, engaging Sidney’s example, learning from him, disagreeing with him over details, but building the whole sequence so that it comes into accord with him at its end, speaking the last psalm in his voice, a voice Pembroke has redeemed from secular verse and resurrected.

* * * Pembroke’s other ceremony of completing the Psalmes is presented in the two poems that head the Tixall manuscript (J ) and were perhaps also once found in the Penshurst manuscript. The dedication to Elizabeth comes first, but it is answered, and indeed undercut, by an address to Sidney’s soul. This conducts, as it were, the last conversation with Sidney, makes Pembroke’s last word as a poet a dialogic response to Sidney; if the poem is not one of Pembroke’s last,¹⁰⁵ it nevertheless stands as the last word on her completion of Sidney. Its first line entirely wrecks any attempts of the poem preceding it, ‘Even now that Care’, to make the Psalmes have a point for the Queen. It is hard to believe that this too was for Elizabeth’s eyes: To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney To thee pure sprite, to thee alone’s addres’t this coupled worke, by double int’rest thine: First rais’de by thy blest hand, and what is mine inspird by thee, thy secrett power imprest. So dar’d my Muse with thine it selfe combine, as mortall stuffe with that which is divine, Thy lightning beames give lustre to the rest … (1–7)

The strongest sounds in the stanza link ‘thine’, ‘mine’, and ‘combine’. The repetitions in ‘To thee … to thee alone’ have their source in Sidney’s dedication to the Arcadia: ‘most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady’; ‘Now, it is done onelie for you, onely to you’ (90, A3r–v). But where Sidney’s language was of having given birth to children, this takes things back a stage further. Pembroke is the mortal lover of the god, ‘imprest’ secretly in a sort of conception of the work, Sidney’s portion of which is already a ‘rais’de’ infant. The coupling of the work is a coupling of two muses to conceive it, and Pembroke is Semele ¹⁰⁵ See above, n. 47.

The Last Word

123

to Sidney’s ‘lightning beames’. The lines return the compliment of Sidney’s dedication: where the Arcadia was ‘onelie’ hers, the Psalmes are Sidney’s ‘alone’, but it is hard not to read the language as sexual. The form of course is deeply involved in the meaning. Beth Wynne Fisken sees the form of two couplets framed as ‘mirroring the joint undertaking’ of writing the Psalmes,¹⁰⁶ but one can see this seven-line stanza equally as a Sidneian octave fused in the middle, from abbaabba to abbabba: two separate quatrains are combined, impressed one into the other to become a rhyming beast with two backs. And this form, too, is in Puttenham.¹⁰⁷ Of course the link between Sidney’s abrupt life and unfinished works is on one level merely causal, but its symbolic power is played up here: Oh, had that soule which honor brought to rest too soone not left and reft the world of all what man could showe, which wee perfection call This halfe maim’d peece had sorted with the best. Deepe wounds enlarg’d, long festred in their gall fresh bleeding smart; not eie but hart teares fall. Ah memorie what needs this new arrest? (15–21)

Like Robert Sidney, Mary Sidney allows Sidney’s fatal leg wound to infect her own metaphors.¹⁰⁸ Here, the work is amputated, but the image spreads into the festering wound of ‘memorie’. In ‘Even now’ Pembroke describes the Psalmes as a single length of fabric: ‘but hee did warpe, I weav’d this webb to end’ (27). But a ‘halfe maim’d peece’ is cut cloth, in danger of unravelling: Yet here behold, (oh wert thou to behold!) this finish’t now, thy matchlesse Muse begunne, the rest but peec’t, as left by thee undone. (22–5)

Here we have not a single cloth but a patchwork, ‘peec’t’ together as a conclusion, not a perfection. It is perhaps difficult to admit that the labour is over (and, as we know, Pembroke did continue to introduce minor alterations to her texts). The gesture is not ended, because it is the ¹⁰⁶ ‘‘‘To the Angell Spirit …’’: Mary Sidney’s Entry into the ‘‘World of Words’’’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, Mass., 1990), 263–75 (270). ¹⁰⁷ Arte, M2r. ¹⁰⁸ See Duncan-Jones, 278 and Robert Sidney’s sonnet 26.

124

The Last Word

product of ‘Love which hath never done, | Nor can enough in world of words unfold’ [i.e. ‘enfold’] (27–8). Queen Elizabeth has already been effaced; next, it is God’s turn, for the Psalmes, she says, has ‘no further scope to goe’: nor other purpose but to honor thee, Thee in thy workes where all the Graces bee … (29–31)

This is too close to the grace of God’s works, a similarity reinforced in the image that follows, of the ‘little streames’ of Pembroke’s thoughts paying tribute to Sidney’s worth: As little streames with all their all doe flowe to their great sea, due tributes gratefull fee: so press my thoughts my burthened thoughtes in mee, To pay the debt of Infinits I owe To thy great worth … (32–6)

The flowing over the stanza here Fisken sees as the bridging of the gap between Pembroke and Sidney enacted in her completion of the Psalmes. The tributary streams pay tribute because what they flow into is also their source. This is the topos that David Quint has traced through the language of imitative debt;¹⁰⁹ Pembroke is ‘burthened’, overflowing, and can only render unto Sidney that which is Sidney’s. It is a powerful image for her return to Sidney. Sidney himself criticized his own failure to pay his debts, in this case ‘Nature’s rent’: With what sharpe checkes I in my selfe am shent, When into Reason’s audite I do go: And by just counts my selfe a banckrout know Of all those goods, which heav’n to me hath lent … (AS 18.1–4)

Astrophil tells us here that ‘My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes’ (l. 9), echoing Sidney’s frustration at his lack of political success. The desire to achieve something, to get somewhere, is obstructed by love—‘I see my course to lose my selfe doth bend’ (12)—but the twist is that Astrophil is sorry only ‘that I lose no more for Stella’s sake’ ¹⁰⁹ David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, Ct., 1983).

The Last Word

125

(14). The frustration for Mary Sidney is that she is inadequate to the task of getting back to Sidney, of praising him to the extent of his merit, of repaying the rent: Oh! when to this Accompt, this cast upp Summe, this Reckoning made, this Audit of my woe, I call my thoughts, whence so strange passions flowe; Howe workes my hart, my sences striken dumbe? that would thee more, then ever hart could showe, and all too short who knewe thee best doth knowe There lives no witt that may thy praise become. (43–9)

Her point is that nobody is up to this job, but that she is foremost in at least being able to see this. Gary Waller reads the ‘strange passions’ with the glasses of John Aubrey.¹¹⁰ The devotion at least seems to have been mutual, or remembered as such. In ‘Even now’ Pembroke suggests that Sidney ‘better might … | have giv’n for mee what I for him defraye’ (23–4). Moffett says as much in Nobilis: when Sidney believed Pembroke to be mortally ill, ‘For the sake of ransoming her life he would have subtracted part from his to add to hers!’ (86). But the part of her life she has subtracted for the sake of finishing his works is not joined seamlessly. There is some mystery; the ‘peece’ of cloth lacks its warp threads: the fore-conceit that implies an end in a beginning is not self-evident: Immortall Monuments of thy faire fame, though not compleat, nor in the reach of thought, howe on that passing peece time would have wrought Had Heav’n so spar’d the life of life to frame the rest? (71–5)

We have seen how Pembroke actually altered Sidney’s texts to conform to her aesthetic, to regularize their geometry. The licence for this is that she is only influenced by him, so the alteration is implicit in his works in the first place. ¹¹⁰ Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, 3rd edn. (London, 1958), 139; Waller, Mary Sidney: A Critical Study, 99–100. For a sophisticated account of the incestuous element in Pembroke’s memories see Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Literal Translation’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, 1996), 321–36, reprinted in Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, Calif., 1997), 114–31.

126

The Last Word Receive theise Hymnes, theise obsequies receive; if any marke of thy sweet sprite appeare, well are they borne, no title else shall beare. I can no more: Deare Soule I take my leave; Sorrowe still strives, would mount thy highest sphere presuming so just cause might meet thee there, Oh happie chaunge! could I so take my leave. By the Sister of that Incomporable Sidney (85–end)

The ‘Hymnes’ ought to be the Psalmes, but it seems strange to call hymns of praise ‘obsequies’. We cannot quite be sure if Pembroke is referring here to the present poem, or the larger work, or both (‘theise Hymnes’ the Psalms; ‘theise obsequies’ this poem); and this shows how the smaller work attempts to repeat the larger’s gesture in miniature. This is the meaning of its rhyme scheme. Addressed only to Sidney, the work is presented as a funeral monument, but the sense of ‘obsequies’ also shades into its literal meaning. The completed Psalmes is a dutiful, obsequious, following of Sidney’s lead, perhaps even of his ‘known determinations’, a compliance to the scope of his fore-conceit. If ‘any marke’ of him does appear, the work becomes his alone, and, as indeed happened in the majority of manuscript copies, ‘no title else shall beare’. This line in the variant version reads ‘Made only thine, and no name els must weare’, and makes even clearer the connection to Sidney’s ‘the bearing the liverye of your name’ in the dedication to the Arcadia (90, A4r).¹¹¹ Imitation of Sidney is returned to Sidney; so deviation from Sidney becomes Sidney’s deviation from himself. Pembroke has realized that her position as Sidney’s heir allows her most poetic originality when she is closest to Sidney’s models. And it perhaps explains the abruption here: ‘I can no more: Deare Soule I take my leave’. The repetition of ‘take my leave’ at the poem’s close is a failure of rhyme, but also the most certain rhyme one could have. It offers the consolation of the closed circle.¹¹² ¹¹¹ Hannay, in ‘‘‘Bearing the livery’’’ (8), makes the connection between Sidney’s phrase and Pembroke’s calling the Psalmes ‘A liverie robe to bee bestowed by thee’ (‘Even now that Care’, 34). ¹¹² Cf. Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 117: ‘This yearning for death is the fitting conclusion for her dedicatory poem, which constructs her translation of the Psalms, produced through Philip’s inspiration and addressed solely to his eyes, as a conversation with her deceased brother, as an intermediate stage of communion with the dead for which her own death represents the only wholly satisfactory fulfillment.’

The Last Word

127

* * * According to one account Mary Sidney’s name was the last word on her dying brother’s lips.¹¹³ She seems determined to return the compliment. Throughout her literary career she sings a swan song of and to her brother; and yet she never quite manages to say the final word on Sidney, on her loss, and on her relation to him. Sidney’s best poems about death, and his most complex, circular forms, come as a response to the death of Basilius in the ‘old’ Arcadia. That this is an entirely artificial death does not seem to matter, because such poems are selfcontained. Perfection is not here haunted by imperfection; maximum poetic closure does not depend on genuine emotion. But Sidney was still singing songs on his death-bed.¹¹⁴ And once that connection had been made, Sidneian poetic closure and incompletion became inseparable from Sidney’s life and death. For the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s endings are the focus of her grief, and both the beginning and the end of her art. ¹¹³ ‘tuoque | Quae fuit extremum nomen in ore, soror’: John Owen in Peplus, F1r. ¹¹⁴ Ringler, 351, citing Moffett and Greville. For more on this convention, and speculation as to what song ‘La cuisse rompue’ might be, see John Gouws, ‘Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville’s Account of Sidney’s Last Days’, in 1586, 62–82 (65–7) and Duncan-Jones, 298–9.

4 Families and Friends This chapter looks at the network of aristocratic men and women who had Philip Sidney in common. They were poets and patrons, and they were engaged in court politics; and they were observed and written about by those writers who lacked independent means and were after their money or help towards preferment. Those writers created an analogous network of more literary representations of these men and women, and in that heightened, literary, version of reality, the image of Sidney had far more importance and value. He might only serve as a gentle reminder of common ground in a letter. But in a poem or dedicatory epistle he was far larger than life. The Anglo-Dutch diplomat Daniel Rogers was one of the first to court the Sidneys in verse. He wrote numerous Latin poems to Sidney and to members of his family, including his father, uncle, brother, and sister.¹ He shows us the attractiveness of such an extensive yet close-knit family network to someone seeking influential friends or employment. The Sidneys always had this going for them—that any one of them might serve synecdochically as the sign of a large and powerful court tribe: Philip Sidney’s uncles included the Earls of Leicester, Warwick, and—through marriage—Sussex; his brother-in-law was the Earl of Pembroke. For a man like Spenser, employment with the Earl of Leicester had the added bonus of ‘some use of familiarity’ from Sidney and Dyer when they were at Leicester House.² His dedication of The Shepheardes Calender to Sidney in 1579 would have been a good way of pleasing his employer as well as a tribute to a potential or actual patron, and will have helped ¹ Those to Sidney and Robert Sidney are gathered and discussed in Jan van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden and London, 1962), and those to other family members in Roger Kuin and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Versifying Connections: Daniel Rogers and the Sidneys’, Sidney Journal, 18.2 (2000), 1–35. ² The phrase comes from the Spenser–Harvey correspondence, printed in 1580; text in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), 1.89.

Families and Friends

129

build the foundations of his career of state service in Ireland. The Sidneys seem to have understood the value of textual transactions to fostering networks, as the story of the manuscripts of Philip Sidney shows.³ Both a sign of their literary interests and a result of their valuing of manuscript circulation is that, as Steven May observes, ‘friends and kinsfolk’ of the Sidneys ‘account for most of the finest Elizabethan courtier verse as well as for the great majority of it on a line-by-line basis’.⁴ The Sidney literary network went into action in the late 1580s to see Sidney’s works from manuscript into print. It is to be imagined that at this early stage Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville did his work on the Arcadia with the approval and co-operation of Sidney’s sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke: this might explain the inclusion in the 1590 edition of Sidney’s dedicatory epistle to his sister (found in no extant manuscript), and the fact that the Earl of Pembroke, as Lord President of the Marches of Wales, was still happy to suggest Greville for membership of the Welsh Council in 1591, a year after Greville’s edition was published.⁵ But, as we have already seen, Greville and the Countess of Pembroke had two very different visions of the Arcadia, leading Pembroke to produce her own edition in 1593, and the two camps seem to have fallen out rather badly in the end.⁶ Where Sidney’s two other major works are concerned, though, the family was beaten into print by the pirates, with Astrophil and Stella being published in Newman’s rather poor edition of 1591 and The Defence of Poesy in Olney’s well-printed and reasonably sound text in 1595. There has been rather little interest in who might have given Olney his text, since there is nothing scandalous about the Defence. But Astrophil and Stella being a different matter, there has been quite a deal of speculation about how that text found its way to the print shop. Woudhuysen examines ‘The question of guilt’, and, discounting such suspects as Abraham Fraunce, points the finger of suspicion at Samuel Daniel and John Harington.⁷ ³ See Woudhuysen, passim. ⁴ May, 225. ⁵ He joined in 1593. See Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1971), 89–90. Greville’s association with the Welsh Council had begun in 1577 under Sir Henry Sidney’s patronage; his monopoly of its major administrative posts gave him financial security (Rebholz, 20–1). ⁶ On the editing of the Arcadia see Chapter 3, n. 36. For recent speculation on the two different views of the work see Joel Davis, ‘Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke’, SP, 101 (2004), 401–30. ⁷ Woudhuysen, 371–83. Earlier work includes Germaine Warkentin, ‘Patrons and Profiteers: Thomas Newman and the ‘‘Violent Enlargement’’ of Astrophil and Stella’, The Book Collector, 34 (1985), 461–87.

130


I do not intend to go over this ground here, but do want to look more closely at Harington’s dealings with the Sidneys and with their writings, for this case study will help us to see how writing after Sidney moved within the worlds of both manuscript and print, and to understand the roles of kinship and friendship in this story. Harington’s godfather was William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke (who died in 1570); his cousin James Harington of Exton had married Lucy Sidney, the aunt of Philip Sidney; Edward Dyer ‘acted as a kind of guardian while he was at Cambridge’.⁸ We do not know if these connections made him intimate with Philip Sidney. But it is very clear that by the 1590s he was on good terms with both Robert and Mary Sidney and that he became a keen collector of the works of the Sidneys in manuscript. In December of 1600 Harington received a letter from Robert Sidney, probably written from the Pembrokes’ London residence, Baynard’s Castle, and, on the 19th, sent one to his cousin Lucy, Countess of Bedford. The bearer of the first letter was the Countess of Pembroke.⁹ The contents of the second included copies of three of the Countess’s psalm metaphrases, and, in all probability, a copy of her translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte.¹⁰ This continued a custom of access to Sidney manuscripts and selective sharing. In Harington’s 1591 translation of Ariosto, he is at pains to show off his knowledge of manuscript works by Philip Sidney.¹¹ Some of his references to the Arcadia could be to the printed text of 1590, as when in the Preface he excuses Ariosto’s use of abrupt narrative transitions (or entrelacement) and his own use of triple rhymes by invoking Sidney’s example (¶7v, ¶8v). But when he gives the text of OA 65, from the third eclogues of the ‘old’ Arcadia, he calls it explicitly ‘that excellent verse of Sir Philip Sidney in his first Arcadia (which I know not by what ⁸ Duncan-Jones, 103; see further Woudhuysen, 345. ⁹ ‘My sister beareth this in privacy, and therefore so safe’: letter to Sir John Harington, 1600 (no more precise date given), surviving only as reprinted in Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington, 2 vols. (London, 1769–75), 1.120–3 (121). On Sidney’s movements in 1600 see Chronology, 168–9. On the date see Chapter 5 below, n. 98. ¹⁰ See Works, 2.315–16. The letter and its contents are preserved only in a later copy in Inner Temple, Petyt MS 538.43.14. Harington mentions the three Psalm metaphrases by Pembroke but not the Triumph, which follows on from them in the Petyt MS. For Harington and Robert Sidney see Michael G. Brennan, ‘Sir Robert Sidney and Sir John Harington of Kelston’, NQ, 232 (1987), 232–7. For the Petyt manuscript and Harington’s textual habits see further Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001), esp. 146–53. ¹¹ Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591). Cf. T. G. A. Nelson, ‘Sir John Harington as a Critic of Sir Philip Sidney’, SP, 67 (1970), 41–56 (55).


131

mishap is left out in the printed booke)’ (H3r); later, he paraphrases an episode from Book IV (2M1v = OA, 268) that was not to be printed until 1593. Again, and he is writing before the printing of Astrophel and Stella in the same year, he alludes to portions of Sidney’s sequence either not made available to Newman or censored by him (AS 37, the ‘Rich’ sonnet, and two lines from the second, omitted half of song viii), and quotes the whole of AS 18 (L4v). Ringler shows that his text of Astrophil and Stella is the (now lost) copy from which an extant manuscript that belonged to a neighbour in Kelston derived.¹² Harington was also to copy into his family miscellany (now known as the ‘Arundel Harington manuscript’) manuscript texts of OA 51 and 74; CS 1, 3, 27, and 30; and AS 1 and song x. Once again he shows that he knows more than many by heading AS 1 ‘Sonnetts of Sr Phillip Sydneys to the Lady Ritch’.¹³ Harington, with two scribes, made his own copy of the ‘old’ Arcadia, adding to its title page that it was ‘made in the yeer 1580 and emparted to some few of his frends. in his lyfe tyme and to more sence his unfortunat deceasse’.¹⁴ The manuscript shows a great deal of scribal sophistication, revealing Harington’s ‘lively and mischievous mind’, as Croft shows (63). Harington’s quotations of the Arcadia in the Orlando Furioso and the Arundel Harington manuscript are taken from a different manuscript.¹⁵ Harington also owned a manuscript of Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth.¹⁶ All this activity shows Harington keenly collecting and circulating Sidney’s manuscript writings, but also helping them to leak into print by quoting them in his own printed works. The most enjoyable instance of this is his use of the as yet unpublished Defence of Poesy in the ‘Apologie of Poetrie’ that forms the first part of his preface to the Orlando. ‘I will refer you to Sir Philip Sidneys Apologie’, he says at one point, to those few readers who might know the work in manuscript (¶3r). And although many of his echoes of Sidney’s work show that Harington is following the lines of Sidney’s argument and engaging with his views ¹² Ringler, 541 and 563. ¹³ Ringler, 553. Poems 191, 229; 176, 67, 192, 196; 223, 71, in The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. Ruth Hughey, 2 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1960). Only CS 3 and the two AS poems are ascribed to Sidney. ¹⁴ The identification was made by P. J. Croft, in ‘Sir John Harington’s Manuscript of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Stephen Parks and Croft, Literary Autographs (Los Angeles, 1983). See also Woudhuysen, 341–8. ¹⁵ Croft, 41. ¹⁶ See Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford, 1998), 122–5.

132


actively,¹⁷ at times the plagiarism is robustly brazen: ‘they present unto us a pretie tale, able to keepe a childe from play, and an old man from the chimnie corner’.¹⁸ Harington might have been happier for the Defence to remain in manuscript. The cheekiest imitation of all, though, is meant to be spotted. Sidney dedicates his Arcadia to the ‘most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady’ his sister (90, A3r), and Harington opens his dedication of the Orlando to the Queen: ‘Most Renowned (and most worthy to be most renowned) soveraigne Ladie … ’ (¶2r). In Harington’s manuscript Treatise on Play, he complained about the Sidney Psalms: ‘seing it is allredy prophecied those precious leaves (those hims that she doth consecrate to Heaven) shall owtlast Wilton walls, meethinke it is pitty they are unpublyshed, but lye still inclosed within those walls lyke prisoners, though many have made great suyt for theyr liberty’.¹⁹ And Harington did his bit to set the Psalmes free. A rather interesting cluster of partial texts of the Psalmes may stem back to Harington. The three psalms—51, 104, and 137—that Harington sent to Lucy, Countess of Bedford in 1600 are the only psalms found in two other manuscripts.²⁰ All three psalms—and only these three—are quoted once each in the commentary to Harington’s translation of Aeneid VI, dedicated to Prince Henry in 1604.²¹ And Psalm 137 is quoted in 1596, unattributed, in Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax.²² The same three psalms, plus Psalm 69, were printed in the eighteenthcentury edition of the Harington family papers, Nugae Antiquae, in all likelihood from a now lost section of the Arundel Harington manuscript.²³ All of these texts are closely related and share readings that set them apart from the other manuscripts of the Psalmes. They also share these readings with a manuscript (probably copied from an early working copy) that Harington owned, and that was used as copy ¹⁷ Cf. Nelson, ‘Harington as a Critic of Sidney’. ¹⁸ ¶5v; cf. Defence, 92. For the many borrowings and other points of contact see the notes to my edition of Harington in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London, 2004), 417–22. ¹⁹ Nugae Antiquae, 2.6, quoting Daniel, Delia and Rosamond Augmented. Cleopatra (1594), H4r. ²⁰ 137 in University of Nottingham MS Cl Lm 50; all three in All Souls, Oxford, MS 155. See Works, 1.48 and 2.343. ²¹ The Sixth Book of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, ed. Simon Cauchi (Oxford, 1991), 9 (PS 104), 90 (PS 51), 94 (PS 137). ²² A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1962), 151. ²³ In the order 51, 104, 137, 69. See Hughey, Arundel Harington Manuscript, 1.25.


133

for three other psalms when they were added to a later edition of Nugae Antiquae in 1779.²⁴ He perhaps only got his hands on this manuscript after 1604 or so. By 1610, Harington owned two manuscripts,²⁵ presumably this one and a superior, and complete one, also now in the British Library.²⁶ A likely explanation of all this circumstantial evidence is that by the mid-1590s Harington had persuaded Pembroke to let him have copies of three of her psalm translations, or had got hold of them from another source without her knowledge, and that he did as much as he could to refer to these and to circulate them, in manuscript and in print. Perhaps he did this to show off, or perhaps he did it out of a genuine conviction that the Psalmes should be printed. Harington is clearly at the centre of the early circulation of the Psalmes.²⁷ In the letter of December 1600 referred to above, Robert Sidney remarks: ‘I do read Ariosto, and commend the translator to all friends, which you mark as the best good will I can shew you. Now you have left the sword in Ireland, and taken to the plough in England, let me have proofs of your employ, and send me verses when you can’.²⁸ It is as if the best way to dissociate Harington from the disgrace of Essex, under whom Harington had just served in Ireland, was to remind everyone that he was a poet. Harington, we assume, obliged. He addressed a poem to the Countess, sending her a work that ‘as yet I wishe not seene of other, | But of your self and of your Noble Brother’,²⁹ and there is no sign that his speculations with his texts of the Psalmes affected his friendship with the Sidneys. The network of friends and family thrived on these textual exchanges. Lucy, Countess of Bedford’s young brother ²⁴ British Library, Add. MS 12047 (MS I ), used as copy for 112, 117, and 128 (misnumbered ‘120’). MS I is a selective miscellany in the order 1–26 (by Sidney), 51, 69, 104 … 137 (Works, 2.317). For report of collation of the related manuscripts (but not printed texts) see Works, 2.343 and note in addition the following significant readings: from the quotation in Ajax, ‘plaine’ in 137.32; and from the quotation in Aeneid, ‘to others’ in 137.36. ²⁵ Ringler, 552; Chronology, 197. ²⁶ British Library, Add. MS 46372 (MS K ). ²⁷ Margaret P. Hannay, ‘‘‘Bearing the livery of your name’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Publication’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 7–42 summarizes and discusses many of these references (38); repr. as ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture’ in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 17–49. ²⁸ Nugae Antiquae, 1.121 ²⁹ Arundel Harington Manuscript, poem 228. Robert Sidney was ennobled in May, 1603.

134


John was educated with Prince Henry, and Robert Sidney’s son William joined them, until he attacked his tutor with a knife.³⁰ Robert Sidney spent the Christmas before Queen Elizabeth died at Exton, home of the other Sir John Harington, father of Lucy and the young John, and first cousin of the Sidneys. The Haringtons and the Sidneys were part of a network that rapidly found favour under King James and Queen Anne. Like Mary Sidney, Harington was a poet happy to see some of his works printed and who had close dealings with printers and publishers.³¹ But he also enjoyed playing on the threshold between manuscript and print. His textual relationship with the Sidneys works best when their writings are in manuscript and he can copy and circulate them, adapt them, or even sneak them into print. Some of Sidney’s clients and protégés were handed down as living legacies—like the musician Daniel Bacheler, who came to Sidney with Frances Walsingham, rode his master’s horse in Sidney’s funeral procession,³² and followed Frances again when she married the Earl of Essex;³³ or Sidney’s secretary William Temple, who went on to serve as secretary to Sidney’s kinsman, the Queen’s secretary William Davison,³⁴ and later—and rather less fortunately in the end—to Essex. Abraham Fraunce was another. Fraunce had followed Sidney to Shrewsbury School, and then, with help from Sidney, studied at St John’s College, Cambridge.³⁵ Fraunce, like Temple, was a Ramist, but he also adapted himself to Sidney’s tastes by writing verses in classical metres. All of his works are dedicated to members of Sidney’s circle—Sidney, Robert Sidney, Edward Dyer, and the Earl of Pembroke.³⁶ But his principal muse after Sidney’s death was Mary Sidney, to whom he dedicated his (unacknowledged) translation of Watson, ³⁰ Chronology, 183 (August 1605). ³¹ For a study of the documents relating to the printing of Orlando Furioso see Philip Gaskell, From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford, 1978), 11–28. The Sidneys’ publisher, William Ponsonby, is to be found keeping his masters sweet with a gift of tobacco sent to Robert Sidney in Flushing (HMC, 2.182: 3 November 1595). ³² Thomas Lant, Sequitur celebritas et pompa funeris … (1587), plate 14. ³³ On Bacheler see Duncan-Jones, 279, 299, and 305, and Anne Batchelor, ‘Daniel Bacheler: The Right Perfect Musician’, The Lute, 28 (1988), 3–12. ³⁴ Sidney addresses Davison as ‘cousin’ in letters (see Feuillerat, 151, 162, 165, 169, 177), although the connection is in this case rather tenuous: Davison’s wife’s grandmother was Sidney’s great-aunt’s cousin. ³⁵ See Buxton, 46, on Sidney’s sponsorship of Fraunce’s education. ³⁶ See ODNB for references, plus Buxton for a manuscript comparison of Ramus and Aristotle dedicated to Sidney (147) and an excellent discussion of Fraunce and Sidney (147–50).


135

The Lamentations of Amyntas (1587); The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588); The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuel (1591); and then The Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1591) and The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1592). The Arcadian Rhetorike is clearly a key part of the story of the response to Sidney’s writings. The Yvychurch works take pastoral adapted from Tasso and Watson, move it to the Pembroke estates where Sidney himself had written his pastoral works, and insert a Pembroke figure (Pembrokiana) whose literary activities revolve around the annual mourning of Amyntas (or Sidney). The bid for patronage, the representation of literature as a social and communal activity, the tribute to and celebration of Sidney, and the depiction of the Countess of Pembroke as Sidney’s principal literary heir—all these come together in Fraunce’s writings.³⁷ It is hard to see who gets most from these relationships. Fraunce was obviously hoping for career advancement: a letter of 1590 from Mary Sidney’s husband, the Earl of Pembroke, to the Lord Treasurer is an (in the event unsuccessful) recommendation of Fraunce to act as the Queen’s solicitor in the Welsh Court where he practised.³⁸ And so his apparent devotion to Sidney’s memory is hard to separate from the wish of Mary Sidney to foster the literature of such devotion. Nicholas Breton is a comparable case, also addressing works to Pembroke and getting concrete support from her husband, although he later fell out with his patrons.³⁹ The courting of patrons within the Sidney network might require sides to be taken when the network itself was divided. Samuel Daniel was, with Spenser and Jonson, one of the most important writers to receive substantial patronage from the Sidneys. His is an interesting story that interweaves with the stories of other writers who bid for patronage from the Sidneys. His links to the network included Sir John Harington. It is Daniel’s verse that Harington echoes in his remark on the Psalmes in the Treatise on Play, quoted above, and the two men had other texts in common. An epigram by Harington ‘To my good friend Master Samuel Daniel’ finds a witty parallel between the two writers, and ³⁷ For Fraunce and Pembroke see Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, 1990), 32–47 and Hannay, esp. 110–12 and 135–6. ³⁸ The Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Yvychurch, ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge, Calif., 1975), ix. ³⁹ On Breton and Pembroke see Lamb, 47–52, Hannay, 13–39, Nicholas Breton: Poems not hitherto reprinted, ed. Jean Robertson (Liverpool, 1952; repr. 1967), xxv–xxx, Michael Brennan, ‘Nicholas Breton’s The Passions of the Spirit and the Countess of Pembroke’, RES, new ser., 38 (1987), 221–5, and Brennan’s ODNB article.

136


both men wrote poems on the same ‘question of love’ theme.⁴⁰ It may have been through Harington or through his first patron Sir Edward Dymoke that Daniel encountered Astrophil and Stella in manuscript.⁴¹ Whoever was responsible for its unauthorized printing, the inclusion (which Daniel also called unauthorized) of some of Daniel’s Delia sonnets enabled Daniel in 1592 to dedicate an authorized edition of Delia to Mary Sidney. A fruitful literary relationship followed, with Daniel perhaps coming to Wilton to teach Pembroke’s son William, and possibly even to help Hugh Sanford to edit the 1593 Arcadia,⁴² and being set the task of writing a companion play, Cleopatra (1594) for Pembroke’s Antonius (1592). Daniel had other points of contact with the extended Sidney network. At Oxford in the early 1580s he had befriended John Florio, and Florio seems to have married Daniel’s sister. Giordano Bruno, who pursued Sidney’s patronage assiduously, gives an account of a supper party hosted by Fulke Greville, a prelude to which was a night-time ride up the Thames in a boat with Florio and his friend Matthew Gwinne.⁴³ Florio had dedicated his Firste Frutes (1578) to Sidney’s uncle the Earl of Leicester and seems to have spied for Sidney’s father-in-law Walsingham. And the link of Gwinne and Florio to Greville was strengthened by their work on the 1590 Arcadia.⁴⁴ As Florio’s brother-in-law, Daniel had feet in both the Greville and Pembroke camps. Daniel called Wilton his ‘best Schoole’ and he reports the benefit he derived from conversations about metrics with Hugh Sanford,⁴⁵ conversations informed by the experience of preparing for printing in the 1593 Arcadia the many experimental poems not included in Greville’s 1590 edition. ⁴⁰ Poem 340 in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia, 1930); Works (1623), 2F2v. Daniel’s version was apparently set him by Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford—see John Pitcher, ‘Samuel Daniel, The Hertfords, and a Question of Love’, RES, new ser., 35 (1984), 449–62. ⁴¹ Daniel was with Dymoke in the late 1580s and went with him to Italy in 1590 (ODNB). On Dymoke’s manuscript of Astrophil and Stella (which later belonged to William Drummond) and his connections to the Sidney network see Woudhuysen, 356–62 and 376–81. ⁴² This suggestion is made by Woudhuysen in his ODNB article on Sidney, but not by Pitcher in his on Daniel. ⁴³ See The Ash Wednesday Supper [La cena de le ceneri (1584)], ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, Ct., 1977), 110–26. ⁴⁴ For a discussion of the involvement of both men, and the evidence, see Skretkowicz, lviii-ix. Other connections include Gwinne and Greville travelling abroad together in 1587–8. ⁴⁵ A Defence of Ryme, in Daniel, Poems, 127 and 156–7.


137

By 1595, when he published the first instalment of his Civil Wars, Daniel was turning to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, as the lover of Sidney’s Stella a Sidney heir of rather more questionable pedigree.⁴⁶ As we have seen, the dedication to Cleopatra put its debts to Mary Sidney from the present into the past tense in editions from 1601 onwards, and Daniel’s next address to her family was to her son, the new Earl of Pembroke, in A Defence of Ryme (1603). In these years, Daniel was looked after by Mountjoy and by Fulke Greville. This patronage took Daniel closer to court and closer to the Essex circle. Essex is therefore praised effusively, and with him Mountjoy, in some passages of the 1599 Civil Wars that had to be suppressed in later editions.⁴⁷ Daniel dedicated to Greville his Musophilus (1599), a brilliant and groundbreaking dialogue that sets the voice of the idealistic poet against the voice of activity and worldliness, and in a later dedicatory poem of 1611 Daniel talks revealingly about his problems at this time and Greville’s support.⁴⁸ Greville was also at odds with the Sidneys in the late 1590s.⁴⁹ Some rather tart reports from Robert Sidney’s London agent Rowland Whyte in 1597 show that in a time of faction and subterfuge Greville was not trusted to sponsor Sidney’s interests at court, and resented this; and things only got worse.⁵⁰ Absent in Flushing, Sidney relied on Essex or his female friends and relatives to push his case for leave, or a different job, or a peerage, and to report frankly to Whyte on the Queen’s disposition.⁵¹ In all cases, these were kinsfolk who had been brought closer to Sidney by marriage or by standing godparent to one of his many children: for example, shortly after Essex had married Philip Sidney’s widow, Robert Sidney’s younger brother Thomas had married the widow of Essex’s brother Walter Devereux;⁵² and Penelope Rich and Mountjoy

⁴⁶ The Civil Wars (1595) is not dedicated, but Mountjoy is thanked in its opening stanzas. ⁴⁷ The Poeticall Essayes (1599), M3r–v. ⁴⁸ Daniel, Poems, 203–4. ⁴⁹ On ‘Greville’s struggle [with Pembroke] to control Sidney’s reputation’ see Hannay, ‘ ‘‘Bearing the livery’’ ’, 26. ⁵⁰ HMC, 2.282 and 296 (19 May and 19 October 1597). Greville had earlier been helpful in helping represent Robert Sidney in his absence (HMC, 2.221–3), and he is a trusted adviser for Rowland Whyte in 1595 (2.190, 192). On Greville and Robert Sidney, including more open hostilities after this cooling, see Rebholz, Greville, 111–13. ⁵¹ Essex: HMC, 2.312, 317, 328; Mary Sidney: 2.310, 319, 328; the Countess of Essex: 2.314, 317, 329; Penelope Rich: 2.253; the dowager Countess of Warwick: 2.221, 391. ⁵² Duncan-Jones, 11.

138


stood as godparents to the younger Robert Sidney in December 1595.⁵³ These friends and family members were kept sweet with produce from Penshurst and gifts or bargains from the Low Countries: boar pies, fruit, and tobacco, dogs and horses, perfumed skins and gloves, tapestries, pictures, and books travelled between Flushing, Penshurst, and the court. At times Rowland Whyte’s patience was stretched as he tramped about London buying knick-knacks for his master: ‘This morning I will goe buy the best eringes I can fynd in London for Monsieur St Aldegonde, and sett in hand all these parfumed gloves you wryte for, which shalbe hastened unto you. And will seeke over all Cheapside for shag and taffeta answerable to this pattern you send me’ (HMC, 2.193). In 1595, as the Defence of Poesy was being printed, with the Persian hero Cyrus one of its ideal images of virtue, Robert Sidney was offering his friends a deal on Dutch tapestry hangings depicting scenes from Cyrus’ life, and Penelope Rich ordered some pieces.⁵⁴ Perhaps it was because he took such care that Robert Sidney was seen as a natural diplomat: ‘200 [Cecil] wold very gladly be reconciled to 1000 [Essex],’ reports Whyte, ‘and now doth want such a peace maker as you are’.⁵⁵ Robert Sidney could also steer a course between his sister’s husband and the Earl of Essex when they were fighting over power in Wales, and later between his sister and her son William when they fell out (in 1604).⁵⁶ Most crucially, he was given the job of negotiating the surrender of the Essex rebels when they barricaded themselves into Essex House in February 1601. But some of the Sidneys’ clients were not so diplomatic. Hugh Sanford, in his preface to the 1593 Arcadia (¶4r-v) and in its emblematic title page, is cryptically rude about the 1590 edition, implying that its editors are not capable of reading Arcadia properly.⁵⁷ His comments may also contain a particular insult to John Florio. It may be that Sanford was more explicitly rude about Florio in some text now lost, but what we do have is Florio’s lengthy and vituperative response, which forms the first half of the address ‘To the Reader’ in Florio’s Italian dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes (1598). This probably tells us that relations were not good between Greville and the Countess of Pembroke by this date; ⁵³ Chronology, 147. ⁵⁴ HMC, 2.173, 184, 185, 186. ⁵⁵ HMC, 2.222 (26 September 1596). ⁵⁶ On Essex and Pembroke see Hannay, 153–6. ⁵⁷ On the pig-and-marjoram emblem see Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London, 1979), 58–65.


139

Florio’s brother-in-law Samuel Daniel had left the orbit of Pembroke and so Florio could take the gloves off and settle an old score.⁵⁸ The volume as a whole turns towards the new generation, with a joint dedication to two men who would later join Essex’s rebellion, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Roger Manners, Earl of Rutland (who had married Philip Sidney’s daughter Elizabeth in 1598), and to Lucy, Countess of Bedford (the daughter of the Sidneys’ kinsman John Harington of Exton). When Florio produced his great translation of Montaigne in 1603, he dedicated it only to women, and to women who might take the dowager Countess of Pembroke’s place now that (after her husband’s death in 1601) she had lost her position and some of her wealth. Florio dedicates Book I to Lucy, Countess of Bedford and her mother, and Book II to the odd combination of Penelope Rich (Essex’s sister, Sidney’s Stella) and Sidney’s daughter Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland. The Sidneian credentials of the two women are advertised clearly both in Florio’s dedication and in the dedicatory sonnets by Gwinne that follow.⁵⁹ Gwinne uses a tissue of quotations from Astrophil and Stella to make his point that writing about Penelope is difficult since even Astrophil struggled. And he parallels Elizabeth Sidney with her father’s textual progeny: ‘As he in Arte divinest Poems framed … | So got in kind an of-spring no less famed, | His fame’s enheritrix to be proclaimed’.⁶⁰ But the most striking section of this dedicatory matter is the digression in Florio’s epistle in which he returns, more temperately, to the question of the two editions of the Arcadia: that perfect-unperfect Arcadia, which all our world yet weepes with you, that your all praise-exceeding father (his praise-succeeding Countesse) your worthy friend (friend worthiest Lady) lived not to mend or end-it: since this end wee see of it, though at first [in the 1590 edition? or the ending as it was in the ‘old’ Arcadia?] above all, now [in its 1593 form] is not answerable to the precedents: and though it were much easier to mend out of an originall and well corrected copie, than to make-up so much out of a most corrupt, yet see we more marring that was well, than mending what was amisse. (R3r)

One way of interpreting this last remark is that it was Florio’s belief that the 1590 team had at their disposal a more corrupt text than did the ⁵⁸ On this episode, including Nashe’s involvement, see Frances Yates, John Florio (Cambridge, 1934), 192–212. ⁵⁹ See also Buxton, 216–18 for other addresses to Penelope Rich that notice the Sidney connection. On the Essex connections of Florio’s patrons see Yates, 216. ⁶⁰ Essayes (1603), R3v.

140


1593 editors (that the 1590 editors had to ‘make-up so much out of a most corrupt’ text), and yet the 1593 team still produced an inferior edition.⁶¹ Even as he sets up Penelope Rich and Elizabeth Sidney as the most important vestiges of Sidney, Florio revisits the struggle over Sidney’s legacy between Greville and the Countess of Pembroke and again pushes Pembroke to the margins. It can be inferred that an attack on the 1593 edition is something Florio’s two addressees would not object to, and that they may not have been on good terms with Mary Sidney.⁶² Samuel Daniel looks on from the threshold of Florio’s work, contributing a long commendatory poem. In that same year, of course, Elizabeth died, and the turn to a new generation was in order at court too. Lucy, Countess of Bedford went to Scotland to secure her place with the new Queen, and as James and Anne made their way through England they stopped at the Rutland home of Lucy’s father. Here Daniel presented the King with A Panegyrike Congratulatory, printed soon after with a collection of verse epistles, and reprinted two more times that year with Daniel’s Defence of Ryme also added in. The epistles gather together some of Daniel’s favourite courtiers for presentation to the new King and Queen; there are no Sidneys or Herberts. But with Robert Sidney now almost permanently back in England, there was a shift of interest back to Penshurst. Sidney was made Queen Anne’s Lord Chamberlain, and was relieved to be able to spend most of his time in England after the years of exile in Flushing. Among those appointed as grooms of the Queen’s privy chamber in the early years of the reign were Daniel and Florio. Daniel was also made licenser of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but the most important sign of favour, with which Robert Sidney may well have been involved, was his commission to write the first masque of the new reign, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604). However, Ben Jonson soon gained preference as the writer of court masques, and it is Jonson also who became the most assiduous in courting the next generation of Sidneys and Herberts, as we shall see. It is interesting that when Daniel writes Arcadia Reformed (a pastoral tragicomedy performed at court in 1605 and printed as The Queenes Arcadia in 1606), it is not Sidney’s Arcadia he is reforming so much as the Italian pastoral of Tasso and Guarini.⁶³ He had aligned himself with what Pembroke would have seen as the ⁶¹ Cf. Yates, 203. ⁶² Yates, 199. ⁶³ Daniel and Sir Edward Dymoke had met with Guarini in 1590–1; Daniel contributes a commendatory sonnet to the anonymous English translation, Il Pastor


141

wrong side—not Sidney’s literary and biological heirs, but his chivalric and political heirs—Mountjoy, Greville, Essex. If Daniel had to make his way without the Sidneys and Herberts for a while, Florio seems to have been forgiven for his quarrels with Hugh Sanford: Robert Sidney used him as a messenger to Flushing and gave him money.⁶⁴ When in 1609 Daniel dedicates his completed Civile Wars to Pembroke (‘to have my last; | Who had the first of all my labours past’), and renews his dedication of Cleopatra to her in 1611, he is consciously seeking out someone who, like Daniel, is a ‘remnant of another time’, as he called himself in 1605.⁶⁵ Lucy, Countess of Bedford was seen by many as the new Countess of Pembroke. Harington had suggested the parallel in his letter in 1600: ‘whom, as you are neere unto in blood, of lyke degree in Honor; not unlyke in favore; so I suppose none coms more neere hir then your self in those, now rare, and admirable guifts of the mynde, that clothe Nobilitie with vertue’.⁶⁶ And when Gervase Markham stopped reminiscing about the glory days of Essex’s ascendancy and Penelope Rich’s patronage, it was Lucy Harington to whom he considered dedicating his nextgeneration continuation of Sidney, The English Arcadia: it was entered in the Stationers’ Register as ‘the Countesse of B Arcadia | begynnynge where the Countesse of P endes’.⁶⁷ But there were others who could fill the shoes of Philip and Mary Sidney from among those Joshua Sylvester addresses as ‘all the Noble S and -S’, such as the patrons of the first folio of Shakespeare, Mary Sidney’s sons William and Philip Herbert. Between them, the Sidneys and Herberts of the 1600s more than matched in range and imagination the support of artists, musicians, and writers that had been offered by Philip Sidney and his sister in the 1570s, 80s, and 90s.⁶⁸ Fido: or The Faithfull Shepheard (1602), dedicated by its publisher and Daniel’s friend Simon Waterson to Dymoke. ⁶⁴ HMC, 5.57; British Library, Add. MS 12066, 6r. ⁶⁵ In the epistle dedicating Philotas to Prince Henry, in Certaine Small Poems (1605), A5r (separate sequence of signatures). On Daniel and Pembroke see also Chapter 2 above. ⁶⁶ Letters and Epigrams, 87. ⁶⁷ 16 January 1606. See A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols. (London and Birmingham, 1875–94), 3.133. ⁶⁸ Dedications are listed under each year in the Sidney Chronology. On Herbert patronage see Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London, 1988). For the musical aspect of the Sidneys’ patronage see my ‘The Musical Sidneys’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 65–105.

142


Sylvester addresses this clan in his elegy in memory of Robert Sidney’s son William, who had died in late 1612, and writes in spite of the existence of more appropriate elegists: Although I knowe None, but a Sidney’s Muse, Worthy to sing a Sidney’s Worthyness: None but your Owne *A-, Sidneides, In whom, Her Uncle’s noble Veine renewes … ⁶⁹

But having mentioned ‘A-’ (an anagram for ‘L[dy]:W’ as the marginal note explains), Sylvester of course continues to speak. The manoeuvre is identical to Spenser’s in The Ruines of Time, when he promised to spend his days singing to and of Sidney: Then will I sing, but who can better sing, Than thine owne sister, peerles Ladie bright … Then will I sing, but who can better sing, Than thou thy selfe … (316–7, 323–4)

Both Sidney’s and Pembroke’s voices are heard by the poet but not by the reader—the poet’s own replaces theirs, as Sylvester’s replaces Wroth’s in the 1612 poem. These poets need patrons; and they need to find a way of positioning Sidney’s heirs as inheritors primarily of his abilities as a patron, in order that they are free to inherit the voice of Sidneian poetry. So when Thomas Moffett invokes a ‘Sydneian Muse’ at the start of The Silkewormes and their Flies (1599), it is a voice he wishes to borrow from his patrons—he does not need them to do their own writing (B1r; cf. A2r). The flesh and blood heirs of Philip Sidney are idealized by Spenser, Moffett, and Sylvester into a sort of pastoral half-life. Pastoral of course blurs social distinctions and allows the humble poet to rub shoulders with the lofty patron. But sometimes it is as if these writers would prefer the living Sidneys and semi-Sidneys to be the sort of absent presence within their pastoral world that the dead Sidney still was. We sense this when Sylvester imagines the Sidneys not as shepherds but as pastoral deities: A knowe no Other, for A, No other M (in Armes or Arts to followe ⁶⁹ An Elegie-and-Epistle Consolatorie, in Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613), a volume of elegies for Prince Henry, H2r.


143

As D-G, as well of Warre as Witt) Then S yerst, or S-S, yet. (Lachrymae Lachrymarum, H3r)

Moffett comes up with a revealing metaphor in Nobilis, the manuscript biography explicitly intended to form Mary Sidney’s young son William on the model of his uncle. Sidney’s sister, he says, is ‘the image and, as it were, the idea of both parents’ (‘utriusque parentis charecterem et quasi Idaeam’).⁷⁰ The ‘idea’ here is the same Neoplatonic form that lies behind any literary creation in Sidney’s literary theory. Renaissance Neoplatonic theory of art and literature sees the artwork as a ‘lively image’ or lifelike representation of an idea that may either be already actualized in a person or situation (as when a painter paints a portrait) or exist only in the mind of the artist.⁷¹ The language of images that imitate ideas crosses into the language of family resemblance, enabling the inheritance of facial or moral characteristics to be paralleled with artistic mimesis. So when the Sidney imitator Gervase Markham writes about the late Earl of Essex, he can exhort Essex’s son: ‘thou that art the Image of thy Fathers body, be the imitatour of his actions’.⁷² When written about, the Sidneys can all too easily turn into literary creations, into fictive legacies of Sidney’s writing rather than the actual heirs of his estate, into ideas.⁷³ The writer who most ably and benignly exploits these possibilities is Ben Jonson. Jonson was clearly on good terms with a number of Sidneys and Herberts.⁷⁴ Jonson dedicated The Alchemist to Mary Wroth and Catiline to William Herbert, and put the family at the centre of The Forrest, its fifteen poems including ‘To Penshurst’, ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, ‘To Elizabeth Countesse of Rutland’, and the ‘Ode to Sir William Sydney, on his Birth-day’, as well as ‘That Women are but Mens shaddowes’, which originated, Jonson told Drummond, in a dispute between ‘Pembroke and his lady’.⁷⁵ The sort of hospitable and enlightened patronage inscribed in ‘To Penshurst’ is evidenced in William Herbert’s yearly gift ⁷⁰ Nobilis, 86 and 32. ⁷¹ See Sidney’s Defence (79) and the opening of Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), C1r. Particularly relevant classical discussions are Cicero, Orator, 2.9–10, Plotinus, Enneads, 5.8.1, and Seneca, Epistulae morales, 65.7. For the visual arts cf. Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1962), 140–3. ⁷² Honour in his perfection (1624), F1r. ⁷³ For Robert Sidney as a ‘lively image’ of his brother see below, pp. 185–6. ⁷⁴ On Jonson and Robert Sidney see Chapter 5 below. ⁷⁵ Jonson, 1.142.

144


to Jonson of £20 to buy books. Other poems to Sidneys and Herberts include three to Mary Wroth, one to Pembroke, one to his sister-in-law the Countess of Montgomery, one to Robert Sidney’s daughter Philip, and two more to the Countess of Rutland.⁷⁶ The feeling that this family represented an ideal community of patron-friends is communicated in the striking grouping of poems in Epigrammes: from number 102 we have Pembroke followed by Mary Wroth, the Countess of Montgomery, Wroth again, and then their kinsman Edward Herbert; Epigrammes, printed in the 1616 folio with The Forrest following directly on from it, was dedicated to Pembroke. When Jonson tells Drummond about the cousins Mary Wroth and Elizabeth Sidney, he wants to show that he has a stake in their personal lives, and that he can write both to and about them. In one breath he turns from reporting that ‘my Lady wroth is unworthily maried on a Jealous husband’⁷⁷ to a story about a domestic row: ‘Ben one day being at table with my Lady Rutland, her husband comming in, accused her that she keept table to poets, of which she wrott a letter to him which he answered My Lord intercepted the letter, but never chalenged him.’ And he tells Drummond about the lost pastoral The May Lord, in which Jonson, Pembroke, Wroth, and Elizabeth Sidney figured under feigned names.⁷⁸ Jonson’s three poems to Wroth see her as a Sidney (Epigrammes 103), a masquer (105), and a writer of amorous poems (Under-wood 28). Jonson pays tribute to Wroth by writing this last poem as a sonnet, a discipline he did not like, and in a form that is, moreover, a Petrarchan variant Wroth uses a great deal. The poem, probably written after 1616, is important also in claiming that Jonson has been allowed to see her poems in manuscript.⁷⁹ Evidence of manuscript circulation of the poems of both Wroth and ⁷⁶ Epigrammes 103 and 105, Under-wood 28; Epigrammes 102; Epigrammes 104; Epigrammes 114; Epigrammes 79, Under-wood 50. On Jonson and the Sidneys and Herberts see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester, 1981), 166–72. On Sidney as Ben Jonson’s hero, as poet and man, see Richard C. Newton, ‘‘‘Ben./Jonson’’: The Poet in the Poems’, in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore and London, 1977), 165–95. ⁷⁷ Jonson would presumably have said ‘was’ in 1618–19: Robert Wroth died in 1614. ⁷⁸ Jonson, 1.142–3; for the lost play as a pastoral a` clef see Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), 341. ⁷⁹ For an account of Jonson and Wroth, see Wroth, Poems, 15–17 and 59–60 and Michael G. Brennan, ‘ ‘‘A SYDNEY, though un-named’’: Ben Jonson’s Influence in the Manuscript and Print Circulation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Writings’, Sidney Journal 17.1 (1999), 31–52, repr. as ‘Creating Female Authorship in the Early Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, 73–93.


145

her father Robert Sidney is slight, and in each case it points us to Ben Jonson as one of the few favoured with a glimpse of their writings.⁸⁰ The poem by Jonson that is inspired by Wroth’s masquing activities (Epigrammes 105) also sees her as a sort of direct link to the realms of poetic creation and Platonic ideas. If all history and literature were forgotten, and we had lost not only the knowledge but the names of ‘a Nymph, a Muse, a Grace’ (4), ‘Who could not but create them all, from you?’ (6). To see Wroth dressed as a goddess is to see that goddess: ‘So are you Natures Index, and restore, | I’your selfe, all treasure lost of th’age before’ (19–20). But Jonson plays more explicitly with the links between Sidneian literature and Sidneian lineage in his poems to Sidney’s daughter, Elizabeth, Countess of Rutland: That Poets are far rarer births then kings, Your noblest father prov’d: like whom, before, Or then, or since, about our Muses springs, Came not that soule exhausted so their store. Hence was it, that the destinies decreed (Save that most masculine issue of his braine) No male unto him: who could so exceed Nature, they thought, in all, that he would faine. At which, shee happily displeas’d, made you: On whom, if he were living now, to looke, He should those rare, and absolute numbers view, As he would burne, or better farre his booke. (Epigrammes 79)

This is a strange conceit. Because Sidney has exhausted the Muses’ springs, and can exceed Nature in his art, he is not granted a son. Either a son would be likely to be too good a poet, or Sidney’s mimesis is so like the workings of Nature, his ‘most masculine issue’ so like a child, that he is entitled to no more. Nature then makes Elizabeth Sidney, as a rebuke to the ‘destinies’ perhaps, but equally as a rebuke to Sidney, proving that she can exceed him still. That he is Elizabeth’s father is almost forgotten here; she becomes a work of poetry (‘those rare, and absolute numbers’), and he would burn his book out of pique, or better it in response. The poem invokes obvious and powerful analogies between Sidney’s literary and his biological issue, between his death and unfinished works and their retrieval and Elizabeth’s life, both figured as phoenixes rising from ⁸⁰ For a full exploration see my ‘The Musical Sidneys’, and below, Chapter 5.

146


Sidney’s ashes. Its last line plays with myths about Sidney’s desire to burn the Arcadia (reported both by Greville and by Elizabeth Sidney’s own mother, according to one epigrammatist)⁸¹ and the sense of the Arcadia as imperfect, as in need of mending or ending. What is odd about this is that Sidney’s only true heir, however Jonson strives to praise her, is rendered almost illegitimate by the strength of the metaphors of childbearing that Jonson retrieves from Sidney’s dedication to the Arcadia, ‘this child, which I am loath to father’ (Ringler, 9). In Jonson’s longest poem to Elizabeth Sidney, the epistle in The Forrest, she is not Sidney’s text but Jonson’s. Her hereditary ‘love unto the Muses’ (Forrest 12.33), he tells her, is more important than ‘Beautie’, ‘bloud’, or ‘Riches’ (37–8). But that love for the Muses is a matter not of writing, but of patronage: it is explicitly contrasted to Sidney’s ‘skill’ as a poet, which ‘Almost you have, or may have, when you will’ (33–4). Poetry can immortalize—there were heroes before Achilles who are forgotten for want of a Homer. And Jonson will do the same for his patron Elizabeth and for ‘that other starre’ (65) Lucy, Countess of Bedford. In this and the third poem to Elizabeth, her loss of a father she could not have remembered is strangely paralleled in the gaps in her own household. The Earl of Rutland’s travels leave her ‘a widow’d wife’ in the epigram in The Under-wood. She is figured as the patient wife, virtuous and constant like Penelope ‘Whilst your Ulisses hath ta’ne leave to goe, | Countries, and Climes, manners, and men to know’,⁸² a destiny Jonson also makes hereditary with the very quiet pun on Rutland’s surname, Manners, here. Elizabeth Sidney waits for the return of a husband, and for a son. Jonson’s epistle to her in The Forrest breaks off in its printed version with this same absence. The poet is promising to elevate his subject in verse; ‘not with tickling rimes … ’ (87): But high, and noble matter, such as flies From braines entranc’d, and fill’d with extasies; Moodes, which the god-like S oft did prove, And your brave friend, and mine so well did love. Who wheresoere he be . . . . . . . . The rest is lost. (89–93) ⁸¹ Greville, Dedication, 11; John Owen, Epigrammatum Libri Tres (1607), 2.67. Cf. Nobilis, 74 ⁸² Under-wood 50, ll. 2, 21–2. Cf. Gwinne’s poem to Manners in Florio’s Worlde of Wordes (1598), b2v.


147

Jonson’s judgements of Sidney again play against Elizabeth Sidney’s blood ties to him. And the very Sidneian interruption to this text is a further intrusion of the textual Philip Sidney. The manuscript version of this poem, a New Year’s gift for 1600, ends with a wish that the new year will bring a son. But the Countess of Rutland’s Ulysses proved impotent, and by 1616 both Elizabeth Sidney and Roger Manners were dead, so Jonson tactfully curtailed the printed poem before this point. Elizabeth Sidney’s inability to carry Sidney’s line into the new century is thus expressed in a proof of the success of Sidney’s literary progeny. She becomes another interrupted text, another imitation of the Arcadia, because she cannot create a lively image of her father in the flesh.⁸³ Hugh Sanford had helped Sidney’s textual progeny, the Arcadia, into its inheritance, ‘Whom albeit it doe not exactly and in every lineament represent; yet considering the fathers untimely death prevented the timely birth of the childe, it may happily seeme a thanke-worthy labour, that … the greatest unlikenes is rather in defect then in deformity’.⁸⁴ But he stood in the way of a later Sidney–Pembroke liaison. In June of 1604 he was busy about negotiations over the marriage of William Herbert to Mary Talbot, daughter of the Earl of Shrewsbury. This may not have been a good deal: Clarendon later remarked that Herbert ‘paid much too dear for his wife’s fortune, by taking her person into the bargain’ (Chronology, 181). In July Sanford was negotiating over another marriage that was far from a love-match—that of Mary Sidney to Sir Robert Wroth; William Herbert was to help with the dowry. In September, it becomes clear in the Sidney correspondence that William Herbert has fallen out with his mother, the Countess of Pembroke, and is avoiding her. On 27 September Mary Sidney became Mary Wroth, and two days later the Countess wrote to William Herbert’s prospective parents-in-law about her alienation from her son, blaming a ‘monster’ ⁸³ On this poem see Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 3. Dobranski argues that Jonson’s strategy is ‘to establish himself as Sidney’s poetic heir’ (97). Cf. Don E. Wayne’s examination of the privileging of intellectual genealogies over biological ones in ‘Jonson’s Sidney: Legacy and Legitimation in The Forrest’, in Achievements, 227–50. See also Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, Mass., 1994), ch. 3, esp. 130–1. In Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (London, 1984), Wayne argues that Jonson’s classicism is at odds with the idea of a vernacular tradition (140), and that his different social position means that he must establish an ‘independent poetic, psychological, and social identity’ (146); both factors complicate the idea of Jonson as Sidney’s heir. ⁸⁴ 93, ¶4v.

148


(Works, 1.297), possibly one of her servants. On 4 November William was married. One possible way of explaining all this is to take at face value Mary Wroth’s imaginative rewriting of her life in the Urania: Wroth and Pembroke were lovers and had even exchanged private vows; Hugh Sanford deceitfully drove a wedge between them, and they were tricked into loveless marriages.⁸⁵ When Wroth’s husband died in 1614, the two cousins resumed their affair, and the progeny was both textual and human. The relationship produced Wroth’s Urania, an extraordinary amalgam of the imitation both of literary precursors and of the lives of her friends and family. And it produced two children.⁸⁶ One of these became a poem in turn, when their kinsman Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury wrote a poem on the baby’s birth that jokes about Wroth’s ability to produce both poetic and human feet.⁸⁷ In this case, it is as if the metaphors and the actualities of being writers and patrons in the Sidney and Herbert families get ever so slightly muddled: as if Mary Wroth and William Herbert take back under family control the language of textual and real progeny, of ideas, images, and poetic children, that had been manipulated by Jonson and the rest. In Wroth’s work, as we shall see, the network within which Sidney’s texts circulated, the network that later writers sought to access by using the commemoration of Sidney as a passport, becomes the subject matter of fiction.⁸⁸ The response to Sidney in the 1590s and 1600s evolved into the writing and patronage of the next generation of Sidney’s family. As Sidney faded from recent memory into myth, the tropes of his commemoration and of his legacy developed into a literary space where poetic and genetic lineage are both foregrounded and at times indistinguishable. ⁸⁵ See U1, xcvi–viii. ⁸⁶ They may have been twins born in 1623. See U2, xxi–iii. ⁸⁷ The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1923), 42. ⁸⁸ Cf. Elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (New York, 2003), 79: ‘Wroth’s subject is the confines of the family’.

5 Finding and Making Robert Sidney Robert Sidney (1563–1626) was brought up in the bosom of his family. While his older brother was impressing his teachers at Oxford, he was still in skirts, with an older and a younger sister for playmates. While Philip Sidney was travelling Europe, Robert was being taught at home instead of following his brother to Shrewsbury School.¹ When Philip was warming up for a career of state service with his embassy of 1577, Robert was treading his brother’s footsteps at Christ Church, Oxford, with the same tutor, Robert Dorsett, who wrote regular progress reports to Philip.² Family accounts for these years lead us to emphasize certain aspects of Robert’s childhood. One is his music-making, and his sister Mary’s devotion to her lute-playing.³ Another is those glimpses he had of the grown-up world as his brother entered it: when the family followed the Queen’s progress in the summer of 1575, the year Philip returned from the continent, and Robert saw the Kenilworth entertainments put on by his uncle the Earl of Leicester;⁴ Christmas at court in 1576–7; and Mary Sidney’s marriage to the Earl of Pembroke in 1577 (on the latter two occasions Philip made sure Robert was dressed like a young dandy, and there are signs of protest from their father in the accounts).⁵ As ¹ Philip started at Shrewsbury just before his tenth birthday in October 1564 and at Oxford in February 1568; at an equivalent age Robert was still in the charge of the Mantells, with his sisters Mary (born 1561) and Ambrosia (c.1564–75). The Mantells’ accounts between 1572 and 1575 include clothing, books, writing lessons and materials, a bow and arrows, books for ‘Mr. Robert’s master’, and 3 shillings ‘To them that played Robin Hood’. See HMC, 1.267–8. Cf. Hannay, 27. ² Dorsett’s accounts are in HMC, 1.268–9; his letters are in Christ Church Library and eleven are quoted in English translation in James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577 (New Haven and London, 1972): see Index, s.v. ‘Dorsett, Robert’. ³ HMC, 1.269 (singing lessons at Christ Church from Richard Lant), 256 (a lute for Mary in 1571–2), 268 (strings in 1573 and 1573–4). ⁴ See Duncan-Jones, 90–9. ⁵ HMC, 1.270.

150

Finding and Making

Philip started to withdraw from court life and commit himself seriously to his ‘unelected vocation’ (Defence, 73), Robert, in 1579, was packed off for his European tour and put in Hubert Languet’s dependable hands. Letters to and fro show that Robert was comparatively behind in his education but worked hard, settled too easily for the company of fellow ex-patriots, and spent too much.⁶ But his brother indulged him, sending him extra cash, a copy of the Arcadia, and some good advice on studying history.⁷ Robert did develop a love of reading history (his commonplace books survive),⁸ and seems to have liked the idea of himself as a magnanimous Pyrocles: a worried letter of October 1581 from Johannes Lobbet at Strasbourg, one of the European intellectuals cultivated by Philip Sidney in whose charge Robert had been placed, tells Philip that at his departure the young man whose ‘pleasant nature and good manners make him worthy to be treated with courtesy and respect’ and whose ‘virtues have attached me to him in the strongest possible way’ presented Lobbet with ‘an exquisitely crafted ring adorned with various jewels’, which he accepted only with great reluctance.⁹ At some point in these years the first surviving portrait of Robert Sidney was painted. It shows a cautious young man in a rather nice suit, over whose head is suspended the arms and personal motto of his father, Sir Henry Sidney, with Garter insignia and motto: he is his father’s son and depends upon his status.¹⁰ The same parental arms appear on the title page of the first printed work to be dedicated to Robert, an Italian translation of Tacitus’ ‘Life of Agricola’, printed in London in 1585.¹¹ ⁶ Millicent V. Hay, The Life of Robert Sidney (Washington, 1984), 32–41; HMC, 2.94–6; Letters and Memorials of State, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. (London, 1746), 1.246–7 and 272–3 (hereafter ‘Collins’). ⁷ Feuillerat, 124–7 (letter from Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, c.1578) and 130–3 (letter from Philip Sidney to Robert Sidney, 18 October 1580), especially 132–3; modernized texts of the two letters are included in Major Works, 284–7 and 291–4. ⁸ HMC, 1.lix. See Robert Shephard, ‘The Political Commonplace Books of Sir Robert Sidney’, Sidney Journal, 21.1 (2003), 1–30. ⁹ Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, appendix 6, 541–2. For jewels used by Sidney’s princes as tokens of identity, currency, and gifts, see, e.g., OA, 26.15 and 122.5–6, and NA, 13.10–15 and 56.13–19. ¹⁰ Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, ed. Roy Strong, 2 vols. (London, 1969), 2, plate 390. The portrait is at New College, Oxford. This, or another copy of the same type, is probably ‘the Earl of Leicesters picture when he went to travell’ in the inventory of Penshurst of 1627 (HMC, 6.553). Philip Sidney also used his father’s motto at a similar age, inscribing it in an album amicorum in 1573: see George Gömöri, ‘Inscriptions by Philip and Robert Sidney in alba amicorum’, NQ, 51 (2004), 240–2. ¹¹ La vita di Giulio Agricola, trans. Giovanni Maria Manelli ( John Wolfe, 1585). The woodcut was first used by Wolfe in 1582 and was also used in 1585 for Scipio Gentile’s

Finding and Making

151

Its dedication, dated 10 July 1585, points out that the name of Sidney is famous throughout those European countries in which Philip Sidney has travelled. Perhaps Robert’s brother, approached by the translator, had suggested that it was time his brother had a book dedicated to him. (In a similar manner, Richard Robinson in 1579 dedicated a book to Philip Sidney and was paid both by the dedicatee and by his father.)¹² But 1585 was a year in which Robert had very quickly to grow up. He had married Barbara Gamage the year before, and at the end of the year was made a part of the English force sent to the Low Countries to protect the Protestant north from the Spanish. Philip Sidney was made Lord Governor of Flushing, one of the two ‘cautionary’ towns put in English hands as surety for repayment by the States General of England’s expenses. Robert was made captain of a company of 150 men in Flushing and a company of 100 horse; other young aristocrats being blooded in this way included the 19-year-old Earl of Essex.¹³ Things seemed to be going well for Robert Sidney. When Robert opened his new copy of the edition of Tacitus’ works edited by his brother’s friend Justus Lipsius on 20 January 1586, he wrote in it the date, his name, and the personal motto Fata viam invenient, ‘the Fates will find a way’, a line from Virgil that is as much a comment on his hopes for the Dutch campaign as on his sense of his own standing and future career.¹⁴ His uncle was running the show, his brother was an effective deputy, and he was expecting to be busy in the field; there were considerable tensions between Elizabeth and Leicester, and also between her and Philip Sidney, but Robert was in the thick of things and will have believed that his brother would prevail.¹⁵ Back home his Nereus, a poem on the birth of Philip Sidney’s daughter Elizabeth; it also appears on the title page of the 1590 Arcadia (see NA, lvii). Robert’s copy of Tacitus’ works is discussed below. Henry Saville, who translated Tacitus in 1591, went with Robert on his European tour as a travelling companion cum mathematics teacher. For Robert and Tacitism see Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), 182–200 (185–7). ¹² In Eupolemia (BL MS Royal 18 A.lxvi), 5v; see George McGill Vogt, ‘Richard Robinson’s Eupolemia (1603)’, SP, 21 (1924), 629–48 (632). The book, Melanchthon’s Godly Prayers, is STC 17790.5. ¹³ HMC, 3.xxxiii–v. ¹⁴ Sidney’s Tacitus is now British Library C 142.e.13 (Croft, 321). The phrase ‘Fata viam invenient’ is used twice in the Aeneid (3.395 and 10.111–13). In January 1602 Sidney’s deputy in Flushing, Sir William Browne, refers to ‘your Lordship’s old friend Lypsius’ (HMC, 2.562). ¹⁵ For the situation in January 1586 see Duncan-Jones, 284.

152

Finding and Making

sister was well placed as the wife of the Earl of Pembroke, his own Welsh wife had brought him lands worth £600 a year, his father remained a trusted servant of the Queen. And then came the peripeteia. Nine months later, his father, mother, and brother were dead, he had been knighted, and he was left waiting for his sister-in-law to give birth to discover if he was the Sidney heir or would see Penshurst go to a baby nephew. Frances Sidney miscarried in December, and as the clan waited to bury his brother (the funeral was on 16 February 1587, four months after Philip’s death) Robert’s wife conceived their first child, Mary, born a year and a day after Philip Sidney’s death. Was Sidney bereft and alone, or independent at last? For a younger brother, the death of an older brother was often the means of career advancement and financial security—it was not always a source of regret. But Philip Sidney had guided Robert for the last eleven years, and Robert had been enjoined by his father to ‘imytate hym’ in everything;¹⁶ he was a dependable figure. And this was a double loss, because what Robert Sidney inherited was the debts of his father and brother and a house emptied of any valuable contents. Under the terms of Philip’s will (Prose, 147–52) it fell to his widow Frances and her father, Sir Francis Walsingham, together with Robert Sidney, to make good his many bequests and settle his debts. The moveables in Penshurst went to Frances; the library was probably kept intact, if we assume that the bequest to Sidney’s best friends Dyer and Greville of ‘all my books’ (149) referred to a personal library, or his literary remains in manuscript, or perhaps those books he had at Flushing. But the house had to be despoiled, and other Sidney lands sold off, to pay the debts and bequests. Walsingham was bankrupted by his son-in-law’s will and the costs of his funeral. Robert played his part, though there may have been some legal wrangling, and a painful chunk of his income for the rest of his life was devoted to paying pensions to Sidney’s closest servants and a third of the income of the lands (including Penshurst) inherited from his brother to Sidney’s widow.¹⁷ ¹⁶ Sir Henry Sidney to Robert Sidney, in Collins, 1ii.246 and HMC, 2.95–6. See n. 58 below. ¹⁷ See the ‘declaracion of the estate left you, and which hath accrewed any way unto you since your Fathers death, and of your expences’ made c.1623 by Sidney’s servant Thomas Nevitt, now British Library, Add. MS 12066, 2r–3v. In 1603, Sidney’s income, including his and his wife’s lands and stipends and allowances associated with his post in Flushing, was £3390; the annuities willed by Philip Sidney totalled £454. Other costs included a £4000 portion for Sidney’s surviving daughter Elizabeth, costs of his

Finding and Making

153

On one view of the matter, then, Robert Sidney’s inheritance was an impoverishment as much as an enrichment: he was certainly indebted to his brother, but became his creditor, and he struggled financially for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, his own career benefited rapidly. In May of 1588 he may have been sent to represent the Queen at a meeting of Protestant princes in Strasbourg, a city he knew very well.¹⁸ That summer, as the Spanish Armada floundered and fled north round Scotland, Sidney was sent on a special embassy to the Scottish court to yoke James VI to England’s interests.¹⁹ He was called away from what proved a successful mission when his uncle Leicester died, and James wrote to Elizabeth expressing his appreciation of Sidney.²⁰ In August 1589, aged only 25, he was appointed Lord Governor of Flushing, the post his brother had held, and a position Sidney was to continue in until the cautionary towns were returned to the now independent United Provinces in 1616. Other paintings survive from these years,²¹ and one in particular demands attention. On canvas, and therefore probably painted in the Low Countries, it depicts Sidney splendidly attired, with ornate armour about him, and the rod of office in his hand (figure 2).²² It probably dates from around May 1590, when he arrived in Flushing to take up office. This was a new chapter in his life, and it was time to change his personal motto. The portrait features a device or impresa in the top left corner: a fire of green boughs and the motto inveniam embassies to Scotland and France (twice), and, later, dowries for his own daughters. On the legal action see Prose, 145. On Sidney’s finances see Germaine Warkentin, ‘Jonson’s Penshurst Reveal’d? A Penshurst Inventory of 1623’, Sidney Journal, 20.1 (2002), 1–25. ¹⁸ Calendar of State Papers Spanish, 8 May 1588 (Mendoza to King Philip). ¹⁹ Hay, 61–9. ²⁰ Hay, 68. ²¹ A painting of Sidney in melancholy pose, leaning with folded arms and legs crossed upon a halberd, dressed in black with his armour scattered about him and a besieged city in the background, was painted in 1588 and belonged to the Earl of Leicester. It stands in an interesting counterpoint to the impresa portrait discussed below, with mourning and melancholy irresolution countered by resolve. For the initial identification see F. M. Kelly, ‘A Portrait of a Warrior’, Connoisseur, 100 (1937), 25–8, and Roy Strong, ‘The Elizabethan Malady: Melancholy in Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture’, reprinted from Apollo Magazine, 79 (1964) in The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969), 352–4 (especially 354 n. 9). The attribution is difficult and complex and neither Strong nor Kelly fully investigated its basis. That work has now been expertly done by Elizabeth Goldring, in ‘ ‘‘So lively a portraiture of his miseries’’: Melancholy, Mourning and the Elizabethan Malady’, The British Art Journal, 6.2 (2005), 12–22, and the identification of the sitter as Sidney seems reasonably secure. Strong has identified a miniature of Sidney, c.1590, by Hilliard, in what was Sidney’s own collection: ‘The Leicester House Miniatures: Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester and his Circle’, Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), 694–701, no. 5 (fig. 51). ²² The painting is discussed in Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 1.197–8.

154

Finding and Making

Figure 2. Sir Robert Sidney, by unknown artist (c.1590). National Portrait Gallery, London.

Finding and Making

155

viam aut faciam, ‘I will find a way or make one’.²³ The background and implications of Sidney’s two mottoes are instructive and are worth dwelling on. In devising a new impresa, Sidney would not have been short of advice. His brother, celebrated for his own tournament imprese,²⁴ had owned Ruscelli’s treatise Le imprese illustri (1566),²⁵ and Samuel Daniel’s English translation of Giovio’s treatise of 1574 had been printed in 1585. Daniel reminds us that ‘Impreses are not Hereditarie, as are Armes’, and that the Italian word signifies ‘an enterprise, taken in hand with a firme and constant intent to bring the same to effect’; the ‘enterprise’, like Sidney’s in 1589–90, was most often military.²⁶ Most importantly, Abraham Fraunce, in the same year, 1588, that he dedicated his Arcadian Rhetorike to the Countess of Pembroke and his Lawiers Logike to the Earl of Pembroke, dedicated his Insignium, Armorum, Emblematum, Hieroglyphicorum, et Symbolorum, Explicatio to Robert Sidney.²⁷ He supplemented this with a manuscript treatise, also in Latin, Symbolicae philosophiae liber quartus et ultimus, a digest of Insignium ending with two of Philip Sidney’s devices and verse meditations on them; this was presented to Robert, probably in 1589 or 1590 as a prelude to his great enterprise in Flushing.²⁸ Fraunce had earlier dedicated a manuscript containing treatises on Ramistic logic and on imprese to Philip Sidney; this manuscript, with Fraunce’s own illustrations, had included an impresa ²³ For other impresa portraits of the 1580s and 90s see Alan R. Young, Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987), 140–3 and figures 69–72, and The English Tournament Imprese (New York, 1988), figures 7–10. ²⁴ On Sidney’s imprese see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney’s Personal Imprese’, JWCI, 32 (1970), 321–4, Alan R. Young, ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s Tournament Impresas’, Sidney Newsletter, 6.1 (1985), 6–24 and The English Tournament Imprese, and, on imprese in the Arcadia, Robert W. Parker, ‘The Art of Sidney’s Heroic Impresas’, ELR, 20 (1990), 408–30. ²⁵ Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 121; Sidney recommends it to Languet in 1573. ²⁶ The Worthy Tract of Paulus Giovius, A6v, A6r. ²⁷ On the sources of Daniel’s preface and Fraunce’s treatise, and their different emphases, see Denis L. Drysdall, ‘Samuel Daniel and Abraham Fraunce on the Device and the Emblem’, in The Art of the Emblem, ed. Michael Bath, John Manning, and Alan R. Young (New York, 1993), 143–60. ²⁸ In the De L’Isle papers (listed in HMC, 1.lviii), and edited by John Manning (New York, 1991). The three books of Insignium … printed in 1588 are described on their title page as Symbolicae philosophiae postrema pars, ‘the last part of the philosophy of imprese’, but the manuscript treatise seems a further postscript, ‘the fourth and last book of the philosophy of imprese’. Manning discusses evidence for a date between 1585 (the date of the paper) and 1590 (as it is listed in the catalogue of the De L’Isle papers) and prefers a later date (xix–xxvi). Fraunce finds that imprese really originate in English military practices, such as the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table (27).

156

Finding and Making

in which fire consumes green boughs with the motto in viridi teneras exurit flamma medullas, ‘signifying,’ as Daniel’s Giovio explains the same device, ‘that his enflamed affection, was the more vehement, for that the wood wherewith it burned, was yet greene’ (C8v).²⁹ That detail in Sidney’s portrait, then, is clearly borrowed, and brings to Sidney’s device the connotation of youthful zeal and energy. But what of the motto or word? For Daniel, it is good practice to take the motto from a famous author, as Sidney had done previously, ‘but not alwayes necessarie’ (A7r). For Fraunce, following Ruscelli, while ‘Emblems are open to all’, and can be used and adapted by anyone, ‘An impresa is the product of a single inventor [solius autoris] and of those who in the same way clearly possess a similar viewpoint to such an extent that they on their own authority have the power virtually to usurp what belongs to others, in such a way however that they assume a new appearance and new magnificence’.³⁰ An impresa is a sort of moral portrait of its deviser, a key to his philosophy and character.³¹ In the ‘Historical Remembrance of the Sidneys, the father and the son’ published in Holinshed in 1587, Sir Henry Sidney’s secretary Edmund Molyneux ended his account with a discussion of the personal motto of each man, because ‘their devices answered in a sort the state of both their fortunes’. Sir Henry’s device was quo [me] fata vocant, ‘whither the Fates call [me]’ (the me was sometimes omitted), ‘applying the same to his good hap in his younger years when fortune smiled, and time and friends flattered, and none more accounted of and esteemed than he’. What Molyneux calls ‘the last word and device’ of Philip Sidney was vix ea nostra voco (‘I scarcely call those things our own’), ‘signifying thereby, that he would not call those his own, which he knew not how worthy he was to bear, nor how long he should enjoy and keep them, sith that both states and persons are subject to time and mutation, as by his untimely death appeared’.³² Molyneux’ interpretation is apt, but very much in hindsight. The tag ²⁹ Bodleian Library MS Rawl. D. 345; the impresa is reproduced in Buxton, fig. 5. Buxton (149) notices these points of contact, while believing the portrait to be of Philip Sidney. ³⁰ Insignium, N3r, in the translation of the parallel passage in Symbolicae, 16–17 (and see Manning’s note, 122). On intention as particular to imprese see Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London, 1994), 19–20. ³¹ Symbolicae, xvi and 172, citing Daniel S. Russell, The Emblem and Device in France (Lexington, Ky., 1985), 63. Cf. Bath, 20, quoting Drummond on the impresa as ‘a form in which ‘‘the author represents himself ’’ ’. ³² Major Works, 314.

Finding and Making

157

comes from the scene in Ovid in which Ulysses and Ajax argue over the arms of Achilles, and Ulysses refutes Ajax’ argument based on genealogy with Nam genus et proavos et quae non fecimus ipsi, | vix ea nostra voco (‘For as to race and ancestry and what we have not done ourselves, I scarcely call those things our own’).³³ As a gesture, Sidney’s motto prefers a literary heritage to a family pedigree: he can depend on Ovid, but will not rely on the record and status of his father, grandfather, and uncles. The motto was to get an ironic ‘last word’ in precisely this way when it was displayed on a banner at the front of Sidney’s funeral procession: among the things scarcely his own that followed were sixty servants, sixty friends and relations, twelve knights related to him, pennants and accoutrements of his knightly status and family pedigree (the genus et proavos marshalled in a coat of arms), and his own body, carried in its coffin by his closest friends, and followed by Robert Sidney, the chief mourner, and scores more relatives, nobles, and interested parties, seven hundred in all.³⁴ Robert Sidney’s earlier motto is nicely poised. Fata viam invenient is lifted from the Aeneid but also echoes his father’s motto. It seems to express a faith in the destiny he is born to, the fata that Sir Henry Sidney has followed (quo me fata vocant), but at the same time its context in Virgil aligns it with the meritocratic claim in his brother’s Ovidian motto: ‘each man’s deeds will bring toil or fortune according to their beginnings. Jupiter is the same king to all. The Fates will find a way’.³⁵ Robert’s motto makes sense as long as his father and brother are there to steer him, to show him what to do to earn a good fate, a reliance shadowed in his dependence on Virgil. But the Fates had other ideas, as the voices of Robert and Thomas Sidney acknowledge in a prosopopoeia scripted by Charles Bill in the Cambridge memorial anthology for Philip Sidney: in their brother’s case, Fata viam lethi inveniunt, ‘the Fates find the way to death’.³⁶ We cannot know if this was a deliberate allusion to Robert’s motto,³⁷ but it shows why it no longer suited him after 1586. ³³ Metamorphoses, 13.140–1. ³⁴ See Lant’s famous depiction of Sidney’s funeral procession, Sequitur celebritas et pompa funeris … (1587); the statistics are given on its final page. ³⁵ Aeneid, 10.111–13. ³⁶ Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae (1587), B2r. The author is presumably Charles Bill, Fellow of King’s 1571–87: J. Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, Part I, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–7), 4.150. ³⁷ A number of other elegies allude playfully to the mottoes of Philip and Henry Sidney. See for example Lachrymae, k1v (‘genus, et proavos’) and F2r (‘Huc mea fata

158

Finding and Making

Imprese and mottoes were ‘the Invention or Conceit of the Bearer’.³⁸ The impresa or device was an art-form, and the language of its invention coincides with the theory of poetic and rhetorical composition—both the first rhetorical stage of inventio, in which matter for an oration or composition is sought out, and the poet’s need to begin with ‘some fine invention’ or ‘good and fine devise’,³⁹ what Philip Sidney calls a ‘foreconceit’ (Defence, 79). ‘Invention’ is a complex word; we have made it mean ‘creation’, but in early modern English its sense was close to the Latin, where invenio could mean to come upon, find, learn, discover, or contrive. Rhetorical or poetic invention was not creation ex nihilo but rather the manipulation of existing materials, the finding of appropriate arguments or conceits, the imitation of the successful strategies of others, the resort to common places. For Fraunce, we remember, to be the author of an impresa is either to make something new or to adapt or take over something old so that it is singularly appropriate to its inventor. In just this way, Robert Sidney’s impresa is a hybrid: the figure or illustration is found, borrowed from Fraunce or Daniel or a similar source, and the word or motto is made. And the motto itself juxtaposes these two modes of proceeding: ‘I will find a way, or make one’. Rather than relying on the Fates to find a way, Robert Sidney will now be the one either to find that way or to make it. Instead of taking a line from Virgil as his motto, he will be the author of his own.⁴⁰ This new motto is an attitude both to Sidney’s military role as Governor of Flushing, and to his career, the success of which depended on the favour of the Queen. As Camden explains a version of his motto, ‘He would either finde a way or make a way to his preferment, which caused to be pourtrayed, a hand working out a way in a craggie hill with a pickaxe, and this woord, INVENIT AUT FACIT.’⁴¹ It is vocant’); Exequiae (Oxford, 1587), D3v (Matthew Gwinne, one of the editors of the 1590 Arcadia) and L2v; and Peplus (Oxford, 1587), E1r and G3v (poems on vix ea nostra voco). ³⁸ John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie (1611), 2M1r. ³⁹ ‘Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse or ryme in English’, in The Posies of George Gascoigne Esquire (1575), T2r. ⁴⁰ The motto may have a source—a French jeton of 1562 with the legend Viam aut faciet aut inveniet (‘he will either find or make a way’)—but it would still have looked like Sidney’s own invention. See Emma Marshall Denkinger, ‘The Impresa Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney in the National Portrait Gallery’, PMLA, 47.1 (1932), 17–45, an excellent piece of research only spoilt by the belief that the portrait was of Philip Sidney. See further n. 107 below. ⁴¹ Remaines (1605), Y3r; that this motto is followed in Camden by one of Philip Sidney’s may indicate some association.

Finding and Making

159

also an attitude that we can find in Sidney’s poetry—an attitude that might prefer to do without help, without the guidance of ancestors, the example of fathers and brothers, et quae non fecimus ipsi, that will try to make (and here we can allow this word some contact with the ‘making’, poesis, that is the creative poetry theorized by Philip Sidney in the Defence), and if it must find will seek actively instead of accepting what is put into its hands.

* * * Throughout the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, Robert Sidney’s priority was to look forward, not back. Sons were named for living godparents, chosen to cement useful networks, and the only Philip Sidney he produced was his fourth daughter, born in 1594. Sidney was sent on two embassies to France in the early 1590s, and mastering his job in Flushing took time. But by the mid-1590s his letters show increasing evidence of frustration that his career had come to a standstill. His cause at court was taken up by the Earl of Essex, who at various times pushed unsuccessfully for Sidney to be appointed as Lord Chamberlain, Warden of the Cinque Ports, and Vice-Chamberlain. Sidney thus found himself on the wrong side of the factional infighting that dogged the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and whenever he might have done his cause some good by his presence at court he was kept away by a well-directed whisper to Elizabeth that the security of Flushing depended on his presence there. Flushing was so plague-ridden in the summer months that Sidney had for the most part to leave his family in England, and the post came to seem a sort of exile, both from domestic happiness and from preferment at court. His poetry came out of this experience.⁴² Sixty-seven poems by Robert Sidney survive in a single holograph copy identified by Peter Croft in 1973. The book is addressed ‘For the Countess of | Pembroke.’ on the first, otherwise blank, leaf. But if Sidney’s sister read his poems, it was probably not in this copy, which remained at Penshurst and is written in Sidney’s illegible scrawl, but in a copy made from it.⁴³ Sidney had no reputation as a poet in his lifetime, and it is only possible to say ⁴² As Steven May observes: ‘In contrast with Greville and the countess of Pembroke, Robert did not use poetry to express his political philosophy, nor did he dedicate his verse to any significant extension of Philip’s program for English poetry’ (May, 188). ⁴³ The making of such a copy is indicated by ticks against each poem. See Germaine Warkentin, ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’: The Making of a Late Tudor Manuscript Canzoniere’, Spenser Studies, 12 (1998 for 1992), 37–73 (54).

160

Finding and Making

with certainty that his daughter Mary Wroth read his poems, which she echoes quite frequently. Two references to Sidney seem to demonstrate knowledge that he wrote poetry, if not of the poetry itself. John Davies of Hereford, who was at Wilton transcribing the Sidney Psalms in around 1599–1600, tells Sidney that ‘Learning and Armes, together with the Muse … | Thy brother did into thy breast infuse’.⁴⁴ And Thomas Moffett, who lived at Wilton, invokes a ‘Sydneian Muse: if so thou yet remaine, | In brothers bowels, or in daughters breast, | Or art bequeath’d the Lady of the plaine’ to help him sing his The Silkewormes and their Flies (1599).⁴⁵ In each case it is clear that if Sidney is a poet, he will be compared to his brother, and expected to offer some sort of continuation of his work. The Countess of Pembroke was prepared to claim this role as poetic heir, and allowed her poetry to circulate and some of her work to be printed. But Robert Sidney was clearly more circumspect. As Michael Brennan puts it, ‘it seems likely that in order to escape the inevitable comparison with his more talented brother, Philip, Robert deliberately sought to keep his poetic effusions away from public gaze’.⁴⁶ It is hard to know how to read poems that may have had no readers, or how to contextualize works that we cannot date with much certainty. Sidney’s poems are written on paper with a single watermark, so it is likely that their transcription in this form began as a very deliberate act at a particular time, even if that transcription took some time and came to incorporate subsequent compositions.⁴⁷ Watermarks of the same, fairly common, type (found elsewhere in dateable documents from 1587 to 1614) are found in letters written from Flushing by Sidney in late 1596 and by his deputy in 1597–8, and, although he acknowledges that the paper used in the manuscript of poems and in the letters came from different moulds, Kelliher argues that 1596 seems a reasonable terminus a quo. Subsequent work on Sidney has tended to accept this ⁴⁴ The Scourge of Folly (1611), N6v. ⁴⁵ B1r. Two less certain references are George Chapman’s to ‘the most Learned and Noble Concluder of the Warres Arte, and the Muses’ in The Iliads of Homer (1609), 2E4r, and a poem by Bartholomew Kello addressing a calligraphic manuscript by Esther Inglis to Sidney in 1606, which imagines him singing like the prophet Jeremiah: see Warkentin, ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’’, 41. ⁴⁶ ‘Sir Robert Sidney and Sir John Harington of Kelston’, NQ, 232 (1987), 232–7 (233). ⁴⁷ For a description of the manuscript see Hilton Kelliher and Katherine DuncanJones, ‘A Manuscript of Poems by Robert Sidney: Some Early Impressions’, British Library Journal, 1 (1975), 107–44. The best subsequent account of the manuscript is Warkentin’s, in ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’ ’; also valuable is Kelliher’s review of Croft’s edition of the poems, The Library, 6th ser., 7 (1985), 372–7.

Finding and Making

161

dating, either narrowly or more generously;⁴⁸ it has seemed attractive to locate Sidney’s poetry in Flushing and in the period of one of his most extended absences from England, from August 1596 to March 1598. But whilst the themes and images of the poetry almost force the reader to associate them with Sidney’s periods in Flushing, the dating evidence does not exclude other periods when he was there (such as May 1590 to December 1592, or August 1599 to October 1600). (Pairs of paper moulds had a life-span of perhaps a year,⁴⁹ so if we assume the same manufacturer in each case, it could be argued that the period 1596–8, in which a similar but not identical mark is found in Sidney’s stocks at Flushing, should be removed from the reckoning.) Indeed, Sidney’s daughter Mary Wroth, twenty years later, used paper with the same type of watermark in the manuscript of her poems.⁵⁰ Moreover, it would be wrong to assume that no writing or transcription occupied Sidney when he was in England, either before or after 1603. Three locations concern Robert Sidney in his letters: Flushing, the court, and home. And a directly analogous triangle concerns him in his poetry—a place of absence and exile; the presence of the beloved; and, in Sidney’s longest poem (Song 6) and only there, Penshurst. It is tempting to go further, to associate particular poems with particular people—the Queen, or a mistress whose name might be deduced from internal evidence, or Philip Sidney—or with particular events in Sidney’s life.⁵¹ But this should never be our principal method of approach to poetry. The ‘distress’ Kelliher and Duncan-Jones describe may be ‘real enough’,⁵² but it may also be rhetorically simulated. Warkentin observes that all who have written about Sidney’s poems have shared certain preconceptions: ‘that a collection of lyrics is by definition a ‘‘sequence,’’ that the essential critical questions about it have to do with its biographical allusions and its ‘‘narrative’’ or lack of ⁴⁸ See Kelliher and Duncan-Jones, 112–13; Briquet dates the mark (his 2291) to 1587–1601, and Heawood (his 481) to 1594–1614; cf. Warkentin, 37, and May, 187. ⁴⁹ Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, corrected edn. (Oxford, 1974), 62–3. ⁵⁰ Folger Library, MS V.a.104. Other Sidneian manuscripts with the same watermark type include MSS C, H , K , and N of the Sidney Psalms (see Pembroke, Works, 2.322–8) and the Penshurst manuscript of Wroth’s Love’s Victory. Paper with the same mark is also used in the binding (early seventeenth-century) of the Cambridge University Library manuscript of the revised Arcadia: see Woudhuysen, 406. ⁵¹ Efforts in this direction include (i) on the identity of the supposed mistress: Kelliher and Duncan-Jones, 122–5, and May, 189–96 (Croft, 90–5, is more sceptical); (ii) on the Queen: May, 197; and (iii) on Sidney: Croft, 44–8. ⁵² Kelliher and Duncan-Jones, 117.

162

Finding and Making

one, and that any signs of revision in the manuscript are evidence of the ‘‘achievement’’ or ‘‘failure’’ of this scheme’.⁵³ Warkentin’s focus on how the activity of making the manuscript is an engagement on Sidney’s part with the tradition of the excluded lover is an exemplary corrective to this tendency. In my own attempt to skirt the biographical fallacy I will still depend on the images and dynamics that our highly mediated knowledge of Robert Sidney’s life throws up. We might say, in a rather circular way, that his poems are to be seen as an attempt to represent the sort of themes that would have been expected from the sort of poet he would have been assumed to be: that such poetry expects readers to project on to it their knowledge of the author. Lyric poetry may embed itself in occasions, allude to them, sublimate them, or flee them. It must seem to its readers—whether a coterie reading the work of a friend, or readers of manuscript or printed texts who have no personal knowledge of the author, or readers who encounter the verse without authorial attribution—to belong to but also to depart from whatever they know of its author’s situation. If they know what we know about Sidney, they will read the poems as we do; if they know more, or less, or different things, they will set a different ratio in each poem between autobiography, personation, and impersonality. The poems may provide Sidney with an opportunity to think about, fictionalize, fantasize about the problems of his political and personal life. He may also wish to indulge in art for art’s sake. We should assume both, and hope to glimpse moments where various non-poetic representations of Robert Sidney seem to intersect with these poetic representations by Robert Sidney. And we should also think about his audience. Warkentin observes that Sidney ‘focuses intensely on the ‘‘I–You’’ relationship of lover and beloved; we as readers are left unimagined by the poet, and thus not implicated in the experience the poet is undergoing’ (42). But the effect of such writing is very different if the poems were intended to be read, and that exclusive rhetoric interpreted. Sidney’s audience may have been only his sister, his daughter, and himself, but it may for certain poems on certain occasions have been rather broader. If we take this step of reading the poems as by a man to whom we reasonably attribute certain concerns and intentions, the particular nature of their ‘I’ demands explanation. As we read the sonnets and some of the songs, that ‘I’, the author’s lyric persona, can seem too close to the author. Sidney’s many dialogues and third person ⁵³ ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’ ’, 46 and n. 27.

Finding and Making

163

poems, on the other hand, seem to enjoy a marked freedom from his persona, as the author escapes from himself into fiction. Whereas Astrophil and Philisides are well-drawn characters, who come off the page and even take Philip Sidney over posthumously to some extent, the ‘I’ of Robert Sidney (and we see the same thing in Mary Wroth) can lack colour, as if he little thinks to distance it from himself. Where Philip Sidney’s personations project the characters towards the reader, Robert Sidney’s can look like they wish to keep themselves to themselves. The very one-sidedness of this lover’s rhetoric indicates a lack of sure connection to past, present, and future, and to elsewhere. A writer need not write for living or future readers in order to write not only for him- or herself: poems can be directed towards the dead. If Sidney does not seem to write, as his sister does, for and to Philip Sidney, then this is another significant choice. Writers who dedicate their works to Robert Sidney force him to consider his relation to his brother, and too often his own claims to attention are neglected. Even in 1613, it seems that George Wither’s main reason for addressing an epigram to Sidney is that he is ‘ali’de | To him whose matchlesse, rare, immortal pen; | Procur’d of fame to have him deifide, | And live for ever in the hearts of men … ’.⁵⁴ John Dickenson sets the balance more equally. Dedicating his translation of Aristotle’s Politics to Sidney in 1598, he remarks that Philip Sidney is one of the few moderns to combine learning and arms, and Robert Sidney is another: ‘so your selfe treading the same path of Vertue, have by like desert purchased to your name and house, a second eternitie’.⁵⁵ Dickenson’s reward seems to have been a job with Sidney’s friend and colleague George Gilpin, the English agent in The Hague; and Dickenson will not have needed to mention Philip Sidney again. Indeed, it is striking that Sidney’s regular correspondents across the Low Countries and France are uniformly silent about his brother, with little need or occasion to mention him. Only when a voice from a previous age addresses him more formally are the merits and memory of Philip Sidney a part of the transaction, as when Philippe Du Plessis Mornay writes to Sidney in 1621.⁵⁶ Literary writers cannot forget Philip Sidney or neglect to yoke him and his brother, because it is in literary writing that Sidney lived longest. ⁵⁴ Abuses Stript, and Whipt (1613), V1v. ⁵⁵ Aristotles politiques (1598); the work has previously been attributed only to ‘I.D.’, as the dedication is signed in all copies except the presentation copy, now in the library of Shrewsbury School and previously at Penshurst. On Dickenson see my article in ODNB. ⁵⁶ HMC, 5.422.

164

Finding and Making

This is one reason why Sidney must be a presence, however absent, in his brother’s own poetry. The discourse of literary imitation is always close in classical and Renaissance literary theory to that of moral imitation. In Sidney’s Defence of Poesy readers are encouraged to imitate poetry’s ideal images, and writers are encouraged to imitate good writing. From childhood Robert Sidney was instructed to use his brother as a model. Henry Sidney had written an eloquent letter to his first son when he was at school, telling him how to prepare for adulthood.⁵⁷ When it came to his second son, he seems early on to have handed responsibility for him over to Philip. Robert’s education at Oxford was monitored by his brother, and when he travelled in Europe his father made clear that his own advice was not worth much: But what do I blunder at thyes Thyngys, follo the Dyrectyon of your most lovyng Brother, who, in lovyng you, is comparable with me, or excedyth me. Imitate hys Vertues, Exercyses, Studyes, and Accyons; he ys a rare Ornament of thys Age, the very Formular, that all well dysposed young Gentylmen of ouer Court, do form allsoe thear Maners and Lyfe by. In Troth I speak yt wythout Flattery of hym, or of my self, he hathe the most rare Vertues that ever I found in any Man … Ons agayn I say imytate hym.⁵⁸

But their father was also prepared to acknowledge the differences between his two sons. Robert seems always to have overspent his allowance, but in part this was because he liked to send presents home: ‘I thank you my dear boy, for the Martern skynys, you write of. It ys more than ever your elder brother sent me; and I will thank you more if they cum, for yet I here not of them, nor ever saw Cassymyres picture’.⁵⁹ Whether Henry Sidney lacks confidence in his son or in the post is unclear, but his affection is to an extent conditional: ‘but if your tokens cum, I wyll send you sutch a sute of apparell, as shall beseme your father sonn to wear, in any court in Germany’.⁶⁰ But we should not overstate tensions and subtexts. While Henry Sidney is somewhat in awe of his older son, his letters show if anything more affection for his younger; and the less formal of the two surviving letters from Philip to Robert shows what Katherine Duncan-Jones has called a ‘warm complicity between the brothers’.⁶¹ ⁵⁷ Printed as A Very Godly Letter made, by the Right Honourable Sir Henry Sidney. Now XXV. Yeeres Past unto Phillip Sidney his Sonne then at Schoole at Shrowesbury (1591). ⁵⁸ Collins, 1ii.246. Also in HMC, 2.95–6. Collins dates the letter 25 March 1579, and HMC January 1581. The actual date is probably March 1579/80; see Hay, 48 n. 43 for an inconclusive discussion. ⁵⁹ HMC, 2.95, 28 October [1580]. ⁶⁰ Collins, 1ii.271–2, from the same letter. ⁶¹ Duncan-Jones, 170.

Finding and Making

165

A number of writers have assumed that sibling rivalry would have been intense and would have taken its toll on Robert,⁶² and we might use such assumptions to build an agonistic model of poetic relation to Philip’s writings. But what Henry Sidney instils in Robert is not the ‘emulation’ or rivalry that Francis Bacon criticizes parents and schoolmasters for fostering,⁶³ but a positive imitation of a worthy and dependable model. According to Angel Day and the anonymous author of ‘The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death’, Sidney was still teaching Robert lessons—of the path to honour or the vanity of life—on his deathbed.⁶⁴ Greville expands on this picture: ‘The last scene of this tragedy was the parting between the two brothers; the weaker showing infinite strength in suppressing sorrow, and the stronger infinite weakness in expressing of it: so far did invaluable worthiness in the dying brother enforce the living to descend beneath his own worth, and, by abundance of childish tears, bewail the public in his private loss.’ Philip responds by reproaching Robert and ‘to stop this natural torrent of affection in both, took his leave with these admonishing words: ‘‘Love my memory, cherish my friends: their faith to me may assure you they are honest; but above all govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator: in me beholding the end of this world with all her vanities’’’.⁶⁵ Greville’s periphrasis and implicit criticism of Robert does not alter the fact that he chooses the separation of the two brothers as his climax, and that sorrow on either side is not only about loss of life but about loss of each other. The question we must ask of his life as of his poetry is how Robert Sidney could be expected to manage without his brother.

* * * It is also worth asking if Robert wrote poetry because his brother did, as Kelliher and Duncan-Jones suggest: ‘Apart from wider genetic and social factors … the pressure on Robert Sidney to be exactly like his brother was so intense that it would be surprising if he had not made at least some attempt to echo his poetic achievement.’⁶⁶ His poetry is at first sight both conventional and not obviously in thrall to the style ⁶² See Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, N.C., 1966), 53 (and for an account of Robert’s education, 52–8), and Croft, 42–3; and cf. Hannay, 25, and Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism’, 185. ⁶³ ‘Of Parents and Children’, in The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 1985); cf. Esler, 54. ⁶⁴ Angel Day, Upon the Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney [1587], B2v; Prose, 171. ⁶⁵ Dedication, 82–3. ⁶⁶ Kelliher and Duncan-Jones, 115.

166

Finding and Making

of Philip Sidney. May argues that the courtly culture of autonomy and independence means that an aristocratic writer like Robert Sidney must assert difference,⁶⁷ but an assertion of difference from Sidney will still be a tribute of sorts. Various unconvincing attempts have been made to make the mathematics of Robert’s sequence signal connection to Astrophil and Stella,⁶⁸ and Croft finds verbal echoes that are for the most part either extremely faint or not there at all. Nevertheless, we can accept that a question hangs over Robert Sidney’s writings: are these poems dependent on Philip Sidney or not? And we can begin to look at them with that question in mind. Like his brother, in Astrophil and Stella and Certain Sonnets, Robert Sidney writes sonnets and songs (that is, strophic poems using shorter metres and apt for musical setting). He also writes a small number of single-stanza poems including some translations, as his brother does in Certain Sonnets. His metrical practice, like any other poet of his generation in the 1590s, learns the lessons of Sidney’s experimentation, using trochaic metres and mixed metres, and feminine endings in songs rather than sonnets.⁶⁹ He never repeats a verse form in the twenty-four numbered songs,⁷⁰ a practice aligned with that of his siblings in the Sidney Psalms. He always opts for an Italian octave and favours his brother’s preferred variant of sonnet form: abbaabba cdcdee.⁷¹ But in some respects his writing is strikingly different. As Duncan-Jones pointed out in the first article on Sidney’s poems, one of his most distinctive qualities is the use of visceral imagery that we can readily connect to his experience as a soldier abroad.⁷² And it is immediately apparent that his sonnets do not aim at the drama, immediacy, and intimacy of Astrophil and Stella, but offer instead a stark vision that owes something to Neoplatonic writing on love: as Warkentin puts it, ‘The lady he worships … is entirely subsumed in the image of a pair of eyes’.⁷³ We cannot avoid this impression: the first two poems, Sonnet 1 (‘Yow purest stars’) and Song 1 (‘O eyes, o lights devine’), are solely about these star- or sun-like ⁶⁷ May, 199. ⁶⁸ Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘ ‘‘Rosis and Lysa’’: Selections from the Poems of Sir Robert Sidney’, ELR, 9 (1979), 240–63 (242) and Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford, 1998), ch. 3. ⁶⁹ See Chapter 6 below. ⁷⁰ Croft, 17 and 104. ⁷¹ Croft, 17. ⁷² Kelliher and Duncan-Jones, 117–20. ⁷³ ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’ ’, 44. The imagery of course has Petrarchan affinities too: cf. ‘i begli occhi’ of Canzoniere, 75, 107, 151, etc. Croft makes an overstated case for Sidney as orthodox Neoplatonist (54–69) and this is countered by May (191), although he is himself in search of real-life mistresses, 193–6.

Finding and Making

167

eyes and the effect they have on the lover. Many of the sonnets seem hollow because of this self-inflicted poverty of imagery, but in the songs it often achieves a spare and compelling focus. This is the end of Song 4: O fayre eies, O deer lights O my delights hart and eies I doe turne and in yow and my fyres with pure desyres phenixlike joye and burne. (49–54)

The metre here must derive from a musical pattern, dimeter throughout, anapaestic in the longer lines, creating a sound and a syntax of pairings and to and fro. These pairs flow into and out of each other through rhyme and assonance—in this case the vowel of ‘eies’ is echoed in the a and c rhymes of ‘lights’ and ‘fyres’, and ‘deer lights’ is compressed into ‘delights’. The poem as a whole begins in Neoplatonism: ‘True pleasure is in love | onely to love | and not seeke to obtaine’ (4–6). But it starts to register a need for something in return, which is a look: ‘the lyfe of eyes | but the deathe of the harte’ (23–4). By the final stanza the binaries of heart and eyes have moved through Petrarchan oxymoron (‘Dearest wounds, sweetest bands’, 37) to the ‘phenixlike’ resolve familiar from Certain Sonnets 24. But in this poem the imagery is so pure, the plan so simple, the rhetoric so lean, that this movement is not a physical or emotional immolation but an apotheosis through metaphor: a good way of ending a piece of verbal music. When Sidney has space to say more, in the pentameter lines of his sonnets, his lyrics stumble into a more realistic and less poetic space where he must spell things out in human terms, and explain himself. His dependence on the same narrow stock of conceits can make the songs powerful allegories and the sonnets seem simply unrealistic: Heavy with greef til I mine eyes do heave unto her face, whence all joies I receave and thinck all nothing, that for her I prove (Sonnet 5.12–14)

We can see this problem in what looks at its start like a well-made sonnet on an unexpected theme. The beloved has written to the lover: Shee whome I serve to wryte did not despyse few words but which with wonder filde my spryte

168

Finding and Making how from darck incke as from springs of delight beawtie, sweetnes, grace, joye and love showld ryse (Sonnet 10.1–4)

The poem is animated by the animated page it describes, at second hand fulfilling the love poet’s fantasy of writing as a persuasive presence, a sort of prosopopoeia of its author. But this conceit turns out to be the end as well as the beginning of this sonnet, for the lines that follow simply explain, out of order, the presence of each of the qualities listed in the fourth line, by means of a catalogue of the beloved: Til I remembred, that those fairest eyes whose beames are joies and love did lend their light that happy hand, those blessed words did wryte which where it towcheth, marcks of beawtie ties Those ruby lips ful of Nectar divine a rosy breath did on the words bestowe that heavenly face did on the paper shine from whose least motion thowsand graces flowe And that faier minde the subject did approve which is it self, all other prais above (5–14)

Only in the final couplet does the poem produce anything not altogether implied at the outset. The ornaments and rhetorical effects of the writing—‘beawtie, sweetnes, grace, joye and love’—are now found to contain a ‘subject’ that is the beloved’s mind itself; they are merely ‘the outside of it, which is words’.⁷⁴ The sonnet ends, giving us no more of this ‘subject’, because it is ‘all other prais above’; it becomes an afterthought both as it is read by the poet-lover, and as it is rewritten by him. In a way the poem has caught itself out by labouring its conceit, and when it finds that this is not all, has no space to give more. All Sidney’s sonnets have Petrarchan octaves (abba abba); this one uses the English sestet pattern (cdcdee) used in almost half of Sidney’s sonnets, and preferred for the majority of the sonnets of his brother’s Astrophil and Stella. And yet it does not follow what Colin Williamson has observed to be Philip Sidney’s habit of tying the final couplet syntactically to the ⁷⁴ Defence, 117.

Finding and Making

169

rest of the sestet.⁷⁵ Sidney’s couplet stands apart, reverently, but also clumsily—an insufficient postscript. In both the book as it stands and an alternative sequence indicated by parallel numbering of thirteen of the first fifteen poems, the poem that follows next stands as a sort of response to this vision of a sonnet animated by the body and mind of the beloved. It is the first of ‘A Crown of sonnets, but unfinished’, four sonnets and the first quatrain of a fifth, linked as in Sidney’s dizain corona OA 72 or the seven sonnets of Donne’s ‘La Corona’ by carrying the last line of each sonnet forward as the first line of the next. Mary Wroth’s own corona gets the mathematics right: as OA 72 has ten stanzas of ten lines, she has fourteen sonnets. Robert Sidney’s Crown ends with ‘The rest of the 13 sonnets | doth want’, as if it was always intended to fall at least one sonnet short; its more obvious incompletion, if not designed, can therefore become a part of the plan. Hilton Kelliher notices that the different inks used show that Sidney ‘clearly … tried several times but was unable to complete it in the end’,⁷⁶ and the poems also give this impression. A successful corona will have no weak links, but after two fairly successful sonnets, the third and fourth read like increasingly desperate attempts to keep the juggler’s balls in the air; no amount of compensation can recover from an error early on. There is not enough content or rhetoric to keep the crown moving, so it just peters out. Successive last lines fail to give the following poem enough to go on. The last line of the fourth sonnet, ‘whoe for yow is unjust is just to yow’ is typical of Sidney’s love of the chiastic paradox, but it ties the next fourteen lines in a knot, and so the Crown collapses at line 4 of the fifth sonnet with a sudden burst of centrifugal energy in three abstract nouns (‘O yow to mee honor, wisdome, vertue.’) and the balls drop to the ground. What is interesting about this insufficiency is that it is itself the theme of the Crown: Thogh the most parfet stile kannot attaine the praise, to praise enowgh the meanest parte of yow, the ornament of natures arte worth of this worlde, of all joies the Souveraine

⁷⁵ ‘Structure and Syntax in Astrophil and Stella’, RES, new ser., 31 (1980), 271–84; reprinted in Kay, 227–42. ⁷⁶ Review of Croft, 375.

170

Finding and Making And thogh I know, I labour shall in vaine to painte in words, the deadly wounds, the darte of yowr faier eyes doth give, since mine own hart knowes not the measure, of my love and paine yet since yowr wil the charge on mee doth lay yowr wil the law I onely reverence Skilles, and praisles I doe yow obey Nor merit seeke, but pitty if thus I doe folly shew, to prove obedience who gives himself, may il his words deny (Sonnet 11 [Sonnet 1 of the Crown])

As has been said, this poem follows Sonnet 10, as if answering the beloved’s writing with the lover’s own attempt to portray the ‘subject’ of himself in verse. The poem is full of the language of the theory of poetry and painting—‘stile’, ‘ornament’, ‘arte’, ‘painte’, ‘measure’—and it ends with an echo of the legend inscribed on the portrait of their brother that the Countess of Pembroke kept at Wilton: ‘Who gives him selfe, may well his picture give | els weare it vayne since both short tyme doe lyve’.⁷⁷ But it is not sure if it is art. It starts well enough, like the first sonnet of Astrophil and Stella writing eloquently about the inability to write eloquently, and flowing confidently by deliberate use of enjambment. The second quatrain is even more fluent, whilst it tells us that an inability to gauge the ‘measure, of my love and paine’—which is also a prosodic deficiency (‘measure’), a failure of technique and resource—will cause a failure of representation, ‘to painte in words’. But already the poem has a flaw, the paratactic list that fills out the rhymes in lines 3 and 4, a technique typical of Sidney. And it is the failure of skill that then takes the poem over. The poet only writes because he is required to, stuttering out the monosyllables ‘yet since yowr wil the charge on mee doth lay | yowr wil the law … ’; he has no skill and will get no praise; he will make a fool of himself but hopes to be forgiven because he is not acting out of choice. The whole poem is built on a simple logical structure: ‘Thogh’, ‘And thogh’, ‘yet since’, [therefore, line 11], [because, line 14]. That last connective is most needed and its lack makes the last line an unsatisfactory explanation and conclusion, especially disjointed when we hear it as a line coming from ⁷⁷ See Introduction, p. xxxix.

Finding and Making

171

outside the poem, from Philip Sidney’s portrait. Reverent obedience to the will and law of a sovereign mistress takes this poem towards self-abnegation. The poet ‘gives himself ’ and so might as well give his words; but in the end they are not his to give. The presence of Philip Sidney, and the power of a ‘Souveraine’ both stand behind this poem. Sidney’s model of subjection, servitude, and poetic insufficiency is haunted by his brother and his Queen: the real power, the real reason for writing being difficult. Sidney only rarely echoes his brother, and on very few occasions does he engage him in dialogue. For the most part Sidney gives us not dialogue with Philip Sidney but a dialogue in parallel to his dialogues. But if Sidney’s words seem infrequently to be aimed at his brother or spoken by him, they are frequently taken beyond monologue in other ways. Sidney employs a great deal of citation, attributing his words to others; he also talks often of his own voice. The frequency of such effects gives the poems a distinctive texture.⁷⁸ Voices are framed by other voices, and the poet-lover can always think of himself, especially at climactic moments, as both speaking and spoken. The poet absents himself through these gestures, hiding behind quotation and personae. In Song 1, the poet says ‘Alas I live to say [‘‘]I doe depart[’’]’ (18) and at the poem’s end imagines the beloved’s response to his absence: ‘O heavenly eyes then say | [‘‘]Ah smokes of fained fyres | Hee is not heer, that burns in true desires[’’]’ (34–6). At the end of Sonnet 2 the poet addresses the lover and quotes his own voice: ‘No no most fayre, for yow I end and cry | [‘‘]Joyful I liv’d to yow, joyful I dy[’’]’ (13–14). In Sonnet 22 the self-citation introduces an ironic distance between the poet as writing and as observed: ‘whyle I ame saiing, [‘‘]thow lowe shady roome | straight shalt a match to highest spheares becoom.[’’] | Sad night to bee more darck yowr stay puts on … ’ (10–12). In Song 10 the poet addresses other lovers who have not yet been betrayed, offering the benefit of his wisdom as one who once ‘was parte of loves story’ (16). In the closing lines quotation is an instrument of generalization: ‘Shee that sayd, [‘‘]my chang Frend, never feare[’’] | to one hower bownd her [‘‘]Never[’’]’ (41–2). In Song 15 the poet contemplates the ‘Heaven if any heaven there is’ (1) that is, in three successive stanzas, in the beloved’s face, voice, and breast. He then turns in the second half of the six-stanza poem to himself: ‘I alas whoe ame as farr | from them ⁷⁸ Other examples not discussed here include Song 3.26; Sonnet 12.1–4; Song 6.70–104, 133–6; Sonnet 26.1–5; Pastoral 9; Sonnet 31; and ‘Once to my lips’.

172

Finding and Making

as from highest starr | the worms that creep’ (19–21). That pronoun ‘I’, subjected instantly to scrutiny (‘whoe ame’), governs the next two stanzas and is not repeated; these show a resolve that is insulated by further self-observation and by self-citation. It is a thought experiment, a depiction of address that stands in for a real attempt to approach the beloved. The poet is talking to himself: Unto yow lift up mine eyes on which my hart to yow flies hart full of fyre Fyre of Zeale, fyre of respect which hath onely one aspect to yowr presence to aspyre. And thus say, [‘]the tyme may bee when desyre shall shyne in mee in loves lights true when yowr justice satisfied with my faith as golde pure tryed yow will take mee unto yow.[’] (25–36)

To these effects we can add a number of poems in the third person and Sidney’s four dialogue poems. These poems take their action further from the basic amorous scenario that governs the sonnets, usually translating it into some pastoral setting. The effect can be comical but can also seem like a cruel self-parody, the poet-lover encouraging us to recognize him in the naive shepherd of the fiction and find him ridiculous. Pastoral 8 is especially stark, offering the most extreme version imaginable of scornful beloved and abject lover. To each of the nymph’s couplets, rhyming aa, the shepherd responds with incongruous devotion, isolated in a bccb envelope. As the stanzas pass, the nymph tries ever harder to shake off her absurdly constant lover: ‘Thow wearst as good to talk unto a stone | woords not beleeved, were better lett alone’ (13–14). But he persists: ‘love whome yow list: please yowr own choice, not mine | My sowl to love and looke: naught els affects’ (34–5). She finally tells him to go away, but he protests that ‘I cannot part from that, by which I ame’ (41). So, in the final stanza, she walks off: N. Then I will goe: Shepheard bee heer alone unlookt on love: unthowght on, make thy mone

Finding and Making

173

Sh: Till in the heavens, the Moon her face shews nue in theyr dead streames, the seas her absence mourn live fayrest still: (best Nymph) soon to retourn I colde and darck, will wast, till I see you. (43–8)

It is a painful comedy on which this poem depends: the shepherd simply does not get the point. If we realize that we can say the same of the lover in the other poems, he starts to look foolish. If we read behind the lover an aspiring courtier, he begins to look quite hopelessly trapped. Something like the shepherd’s attitude is found in other poems, like Song 5, in which ‘persecutions rage doth drive | faith thogh unchangd, unknown to live’ (5–6) and the poet ends by promising the scornful mistress to keep his feelings and words to himself: And now yowr cruel wil I know I silent doe darcke offrings give And doe shut up, but not orethrow the temple where yowr fyres doe live and til the truth yowr hart doe move unharde, unseen, wil pray and love (19–24)

It is hard not to read this as a fiction of Robert Sidney’s own decision to keep his poetry close.⁷⁹ And yet the poet still needs to be overheard, as we see in another poem. Pastoral 9 began as four stanzas, completed by Sidney’s usual paraph; he then added a fifth stanza, and another terminal flourish; and then a sixth.⁸⁰ The poem is of a similar type to Philip Sidney’s ‘The ladd Philisides’ (OP 5) but lacks an opening in which the narrator introduces the character. Philisides addresses the earth, a brook, some flowers, his pipe, his lamb, and a dove in successive stanzas; he then answers for them: they ‘Say all, and I with them, | ‘‘Absence is death, or worse, to them that love’’’ (93–4).⁸¹ Robert Sidney’s poem addresses Day, Air, Sea, Brook, Trees, and Fields in the first six lines, ending each line with a question mark though they are really exclamations: ‘Day which so bright didst shyne, how darck art thow?’ (1). He then completes the ottava rima stanza with their answer: ‘Day, ayre, sea, ⁷⁹ Cf. Warkentin’s ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’’, esp. 59–60. ⁸⁰ On the stages of transcription see Croft, 15–16, and Kelliher, Review of Croft, 375. ⁸¹ Sidney imitates these lines again in Sonnet 31.12.

174

Finding and Making

brooke, trees, feelds: say, vain’s all trust | The fayrest proves untrew, the best unjust’ (7–8). He then turns to six more interlocutors, inflictors of suffering like the beloved, and this time uses exclamation marks that do not pretend to invite a reply: ‘Frosts how you print the earth with witherd face!’ (9). But these apostrophized presences are still given a voice: ‘Frosts, storms, fluds, fyre, plague, dearth, answer with mee | Owr goods are ghests, owr losses homemates bee’ (15–16). The third stanza makes the connection between the state of the world and that of the lover, and the fourth sets the twelve in league with each other to destroy the world, and the mind of the lover. And there Sidney paused or finished before bringing his text into much closer contact with ‘The ladd Philisides’. That poem has a coda—‘This said, at length he ended … ’ (114)—as Philisides turns his attention back to his flock. Sidney’s afterthought begins in exact parallel: This sayd, the Shepheard, as now with new eyes lookd up and saw his flock which had not strayde his own which hee for unknown did despise whyle it stil kept his steps, his voice obeyde. Then in his sowl the images did ryse of due and unjust loves: and greeving sayde Ah Flock so loving, so regarded not: how my faults are yowr praise yowr wrongs my blott (33–40)

Because the poem has no narrative frame at its opening, it reads until this moment as a lyric in the voice of the poet. The dislocation as that voice is, in retrospect, attributed to a third person, is intense, and that moment is managed by acknowledging a debt to Philip Sidney; it is as if Robert’s voice is found to be a projection of Philip’s, as if Robert becomes a third person scripted by his brother. And the poem is not finished yet. Sidney adds a sixth stanza over his terminal paraph, and again it ends with the voice of the third person shepherd, coming to accept his amorous bondage, learning his lesson from the poem so that he ‘Now loves his wrongs: sais, [‘‘]under shame and sinn | I had bin lost, if lost I had not bin.[’’]’ (47–8). It is a halting final stanza, determined to build to a moment in which Sidney can quote his persona in the most obvious of all his echoes of his brother. Forced to leave, Astrophil in AS 87 sees that Stella is upset, joins her in tears, but also finds that the love she has shown is a cause of joy: ‘I had bene vext, if vext I had

Finding and Making

175

not beene’ (14). Robert Sidney’s version of this line takes the paradox far further than Astrophil would allow it to go. Astrophil has reason to keep loving because his love has been reciprocated. Sidney’s persona is simply lost from start to finish. His self-loss is caused by the mistress, but the effect of this poem is also to attribute it to Philip Sidney. By dramatizing the debt to his brother, by projecting it on to a voice that the poet frames in the third person, that debt is kept at arm’s length. Song 3, a poem that operates within a very similar framework, is one of Sidney’s best, and the reason for its success is that it makes the debt to Philip Sidney secondary to a more evident debt to another source.⁸² The poem is a parody, an inversion of the fourth-century Pervigilium Veneris (‘The Vigil of Venus’) attributed to Tiberianus and first printed at Paris in 1577. It is in a way both older and newer than anything Philip Sidney can offer his brother, dating from Robert’s own time in Europe. The Pervigilium is a hymn to spring and Venus: Let him love tomorrow who has never loved, and let him who has tomorrow love! Spring is young, spring now is singing, in the spring the world is reborn; in spring the loves make accord, in spring the birds mate, and the woodland unbinds her tresses as the result of the impregnating showers. Tomorrow the coupler of loves amid shadows of trees weaves verdurous bowers of myrtle-spray; tomorrow Venus enthroned on high declares her laws. Let him love tomorrow who has never loved, and let him who has tomorrow love! (1–8)

The hymn, in 93 lines, begins and ends with this refrain (Cras amet qui numquam amavit, quique amavit cras amet!) and is in trochaic tetrameter catalectic throughout, with sections of different lengths between each repetition of the refrain. Sidney does not pick up the verse form, perhaps because trochaic tetrameter is a sound created in English by Philip Sidney (for instance in songs ii, iv, viii, ix, x and xi of Astrophil and Stella) and already much imitated in the 1590s. Instead he produces an eight-line stanza of iambic trimeter, divided in two halves of cross ⁸² On the ‘leapfrog’ to a past authority ‘remote enough to be more manageable in the quest for your own identity’ see W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London, 1971), 21–2. Cf. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, ‘Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence and Intertextuality’, in Clayton and Rothstein, eds, Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison, Wis., 1991), 3–36 (8).

176

Finding and Making

rhyme and counter rhyme, ababcddc, with the d rhyme feminine, to give a subtle music of constancy (metre) and change (rhyme). At the start of the poem, and appended to each of the seven stanzas, is Sidney’s grim parody of the Pervigilium’s ‘Love-burden’:⁸³ Love not whoe have not lov’d and whoe doe love, love no more 1. Winter is kome at last cold winter, darck and sad and on the world, hath cast his mantle fowle and bad. Delights departed are labours doe onely tary Divorst from pleasures mary hencefourth wee doe with care Love not whoe have not lov’d and whoe doe love, love no more. (1–12)

That unrhymed refrain poses a metrical challenge not uncommon in Sidney’s verse. Because he is musical he stretches lines in ways mere metrics would question. We can scan the refrain as an odd coupling of iambic trimeter and trochaic tetrameter catalectic; but that is not quite how we will say it. It is shorter than the Pervigilium’s refrain, and more pointed, the subjunctives replaced by imperatives. With similar relish the first stanza inverts spring (ver novum, ver iam canorum) and gives us winter, both an end-point and something eagerly awaited (‘at last’). The mating and marriage that runs throughout the Pervigilium is twisted—and the enjambment shows some glee—into a horrible metaphor (‘Divorst from pleasures mary | hencefourth wee doe with care’). Where in Sidney’s source rebirth is a universal blessing, here change is a universal curse: ‘Nothing is as it was | what hath had birth doth change’ (13–14). Sidney’s poem attributes its vehemence to betrayal and loss in love (stanza 6); we might locate a part of it in the loss of a brother (intertexts ⁸³ Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), where epimone is both a device of versification in Book 2 (M3r–v) and a rhetorical figure—‘Epimone, or the Loveburden’—in Book 3 (2B4v).

Finding and Making

177

that the poem opposes would include Spenser’s myths of Philip Sidney’s immortality in the ‘Garden of Adonis’ episode of The Faerie Queene, 3.6, and in Astrophel). But the poetry of absolute loss is something Sidney manages with assurance and panache: The spring that promist, his delights showld ever last Shews in how few howers is owr Ever kome and past Where now of leaves thy store where is of flowers thy glory Ah thow art now a story of that which is no more. Love not whoe have and who doe etc (23–32)

Sidney has the confidence here to imitate and parody, and to cite (‘owr [‘‘]Ever[’’]’) argumentatively. The ease with which the ‘glory’ of spring becomes ‘a story | of that which is no more’, making compelling use of the enveloped couplet of lines 6–7 of the stanza, gives this poem an unanswerable power. In the sixth stanza comes the first unmasking of an interested voice (‘I now poor, sad, alone … ’) just as in the Pervigilium a poet’s voice emerges rather unexpectedly at the poem’s end to create distance between the celebrations he sings and his own situation: ‘[Philomela] sings, I am mute. When will my spring come? When shall I become like the swallow (quando fiam uti chelidon), that I may cease to be voiceless’ (89–90). It was from this moment that T. S. Eliot made the end of The Waste Land, and Sidney is also moved by it. But his ending returns us to ‘The ladd Philisides’, and improves on it: Thus sayd a shepheard, once with weights of change opprest For hee had lost atonce what ever hee lov’d best And saw whyle hee did mourn the worlds fayre lookes renewed whyle hee a state past rewed which never would retourn. Love not whoe have not lov’d and whoe doe love, love no more. (63–72)

178

Finding and Making

As in the Pervigilium, the refrain that finishes the poem now seems to speak itself; in this case we do not know if the voice is that of the shepherd or his narrator. The final stanza shows what precedes it to be a jaundiced fiction: the seasons will continue to revolve, spring will return, the earth will be reborn. But the love and life of the individual are not cyclical; loss is permanent. We have seen that at key points Sidney finds authority—in the shape of Queen and court or the poetry of his brother—closing in on him. In Song 3 his response is to carve out his own dark kingdom of loss, exile, and oblivion, and in poetic terms this is a success. By discovering an alternative source of ideas he is able to create a poetry that speaks for itself while it engages with convention: he is neither haunted nor silenced; he both finds and makes a way. Sidney may be at his best when making his poetry against something found, and against a model other than Philip Sidney, in parody, or (in no derogatory sense) counterfeit. Song 12 is in the strictest sense a counterfeit or contrafactum, a lyric that supplants the words of a French song and fits its music perfectly. And it is one of Sidney’s most impressive achievements.⁸⁴ Similarly, some of Sidney’s best moments are his translations, his two short imitations of Seneca (Croft, 270), and his translation of the last stanza of a song from Montemayor’s Diana (‘Shee whome I loved, and love shall still’), the whole of which his brother had translated as CS 28. Sidney was studying Spanish in 1599, getting his agent Rowland Whyte to send Minsheu’s dictionary and grammar as soon as it was printed in the autumn of that year, and asking for a Spanish Amadis to be retrieved from Wilton.⁸⁵ He only gives us eight lines of translation from the Spanish, but the short poem is still eloquent. Sidney cedes more authority to his original in terms of form, following Montemayor’s verse form exactly and catching his brother out in a lax use of poulter’s measure. But he alters the sense by shaping the stanza into a self-contained lyric, and adding images that give more colour to the picture. In miniature this poem repeats the gesture of Song 3: it contemplates the imitation of Philip Sidney by concentrating on the imitation of another; and he is displaced as a model and a debt.

⁸⁴ See my ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s ‘‘French Tune’’ Identified’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 378–402. ⁸⁵ HMC, 2.385, 392, 398, 399, 413, 422. He was also making great use of Spanish histories in his commonplace book—see Shephard, ‘The Political Commonplace Books of Sir Robert Sidney’.

Finding and Making

179

* * * In August 1599 the Dutch humanist Petrus Hondius was in Flushing. He asked the Governor, newly arrived for what would turn out to be his last extended stay, to sign his Album Amicorum, and Sidney obliged: Quicquid eris Robert Sydney Governor of Flushing and the Ramekins The 16 Augusti 1599⁸⁶

A motto just for the moment, perhaps, quicquid eris (‘whatever/whithersoever you will be’) is elliptical and ambiguous. Does it address its writer or another? It may imply some constant resolve or readiness whatever happens, a part of the meaning of Henry Sidney’s quo me fata vocant. But it seems more strongly to imply a lack of control, an inability to make or even find a way. There is no destiny here, and no choice, only the whim of a Queen who decides what Sidney will be, where he will be, and when. In 1597–8 Sidney had pushed for a barony, with Essex’s sponsorship. He believed his years of service and noble descent gave him a good case, but the Queen had become ever more reluctant to elevate her servants to the peerage.⁸⁷ Whyte reported back to Sidney: the Queen had no doubts about Sidney’s worth and ability, ‘But, sayd she, what shall I doe with all these that pretend to titles? I cold be willing to call hym and one or two more, but to call many I will not. And I am importuned by many of there frends to doe yt’.⁸⁸ As Sidney complained to Essex in 1597, ‘the longer I goe forwards the less cause to hope for any acknowledgment or requital’.⁸⁹ Rowland Whyte’s own commentary on Sidney’s prospects at court has a familiar ring: ‘You can best judge what good you may expect here where to be a nobleman born is more respected than to be virtuous and worthy’.⁹⁰ And in a letter to his wife Sidney seems resigned to being kept in Flushing and prevented from furthering his career: ‘If my fortune bee not good now, I hope it wil bee better one day. In the meane time wee must make the best of ⁸⁶ Brussels, Royal Library, MS II.2254, 176r. See W. Schrickx, ‘Letters in Belgian Archives of Two English Poets, Robert Sidney and Henry Wotton’, Revue des langues vivantes, 40 (1974), 483–8. ⁸⁷ Hay quotes from Sidney’s letter to Essex, as Earl Marshal (159). When Spanish plotters sound Sidney out they tempt him with the titles and wealth he would get from the King of Spain (see Hay, 125–6). ⁸⁸ HMC, 2.317. Hay gives an account of this episode, 157–9. ⁸⁹ Croft, 64. ⁹⁰ 7 March 1597, HMC, 2.246 (a paraphrase of the original letter).

180

Finding and Making

our own, and make much one of another, and care only for them that deserv wel of us; and God I trust one day wil send better fortune’.⁹¹ Instead of making a way, Sidney is already waiting for a new monarch. Song 17 is Sidney’s shortest strophic poem, and perhaps his best: The Sunn is set, and masked night vailes heavens fayer eyes. Ah what trust is there to a light that so swift flyes. A new world doth his flames enjoy New hartes rejoice. In other eyes is now his joye in other choice.

The imagery is familiar, and though on other occasions Sidney promises himself a new dawn (as in Sonnet 20), he does not here. This is not a poem about Philip Sidney, although Croft argues that it could be; and it is not simply an allegory of the absence of the beloved, although it is plainly possible to read it as such, as Croft does.⁹² Its simple surface flows over a dense structure, a mesh of all the images and ideas that are associated in Sidney’s poetry with mistresses, and Sidney, and the Queen. In only forty-eight syllables Sidney condenses a large amount of emotion, and he does this by concentrating on the music. The form may derive from a song, and is also found in Herbert’s ‘The Search’. Sidney adds some rules that are not instantly evident. In each stanza, a and b rhymes are joined by assonance; the shorter lines of the b rhymes end with a sibilant, and the sound is further drawn out by a spondaic weight, especially clear in line 2, that seems to give three or even four stressed syllables. In each pair of lines, therefore, the pace slows in the second to fill the silence and space left by the dimeter line (Sidney’s musical ear will have taught him that tetrameter tends to pull shorter line lengths towards it, giving an illusion of silent feet). That dilation is mimetic in line 2, and ironic in line 4, pensive in line 6, and bitter in line 8. The poem is ordered by sibilants, which fall on syllables stressed metrically or as the lines ask to be spoken. And the simplicity of what it has to say is enhanced by monosyllabic diction, simple verbs (‘is’ three times), and ⁹¹ 21 March 1597, HMC, 2.254. For a modernized edition see Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot, 2005), 99 (letter 121, dated 20 March). ⁹² See Croft, 44–5.

Finding and Making

181

the anaphora of lines 5–6 and 7–8. The poet has been left in darkness, struggling to see beyond the hemisphere that blots out his sun to a world of possibilities that others enjoy. His poem can barely imagine this, though, and the weight of its lament falls on the last word, ‘choice’. It is choice that the poet does not have, condemned or destined but in no way free. The poem has a fragile, angry beauty, but its emotion is not narcissistic. It achieves the impersonality Sidney sometimes fails to reach for and becomes something that other readers can share or singers perform. For the Sidney we imagine, or for us, that makes it strangely cathartic, the poem seeming to find a way not to indulge in feelings of loss and exile but to accept them and make something from them. Sidney came back from an extended stay in Flushing for the last time in Elizabeth’s reign in November 1600, after Cecil had assured the Queen that he was very ill.⁹³ He would probably have been back in time to watch that year’s Accession Day tournament, at which his young nephew William Herbert tilted for the first time. Whyte had written to Sidney in September asking that Sidney devise an impresa for him so that Herbert would not be stuck with some ‘pedantical Invention’ devised by Hugh Sanford, the editor of the 1593 Arcadia.⁹⁴ Sidney’s chivalric stock was relatively high. In January of 1597 he had played a decisive role in the routing of a large Spanish force at Turnhout, and in October of 1599 Rowland Whyte was able to watch a dramatic representation of this on the London stage, ‘and saw Sir Robert Sidney and Sir Francis Vere upon the stage, killing, slaying, and overthrowing the Spaniard’.⁹⁵ But in June 1600 it took a great deal of explaining to excuse Sidney’s departure from a sudden encounter between the Spanish and the army of Prince Maurice, whom Sidney was accompanying as an observer, unprepared for combat and without command of his own troop.⁹⁶ Sidney could be a good soldier but his military record shows a readiness to suspend doomed operations and a preference for careful planning—he lacked the recklessness of his chivalric contemporaries.⁹⁷ And chivalry and political good sense were about to clash decisively. When Essex’s rebellion of February 1601 failed, Sidney was one of those sent to negotiate with him—forcing him to take sides against his former patron. Just at the right time he had got into the Queen’s good books, for she had ‘done honour to my poor house’ by visiting his family at the ⁹³ HMC, 2.489 (30 October). ⁹⁴ Collins, 2.216; HMC, 2.484 and 489. ⁹⁵ HMC, 2.408 (cf. 406). ⁹⁶ See Hay, 106–8. ⁹⁷ Cf. Hay, 97–101 and 108–9.

182

Finding and Making

Pembrokes’ residence, Baynard’s Castle, in December of 1600.⁹⁸ He had brief stays at Flushing in the summers of 1601 and 1602,⁹⁹ but she never again made him stay there longer than he felt he needed to. Many of the poems examine the space between autonomy and servitude, between inveniam viam aut faciam and quicquid eris.¹⁰⁰ Sidney represents the sonneteer’s (political or personal) impotence with metaphors drawn from his own exile and experience in the Low Countries: as a failure in battle or at sea to find or make ‘a way’ (e.g. sonnet 7.7, sonnet 17.11). A key word in the poems is ‘choice’, which can lie behind love (often complemented or opposed by ‘destiny’, as in the first of the two poems called ‘Sonnet 32’) but can also be eroded by it (as in Song 17, discussed just above). An important paradox is stated in Sonnet 12, the second of the Crown: Long ere I was, I was by destiny unto yowr love ordained, a free bownd slave Destiny which mee to mine own chois drave and to my ends, made mee my wil apply (5–9)

The fates find him a way that he chooses to make.¹⁰¹ Here, and often in Sidney’s poems, autonomy is an illusion, an embracing of a grim fate. As Croft observes (110), three poems on absence give some structure to the second half of the collection: Sonnet 23, Sonnet 30, and the last poem of all, Song 24. It is hard not to read Sonnet 23 as an allegory of an unsuccessful return to court after a long exile in Flushing. The ship that sought out land is dashed to pieces on the shore; ⁹⁸ Letter to Sir John Harington, 1600, in Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington, 2 vols. (London, 1769–75), 1.120–3 (121). For date and discussion of place see my ‘The Triumph of Death: A Critical Edition in Modern Spelling of the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte’, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 2–18 (2 n. 1); Hannay shows that the Sidneys were staying at Baynard’s ‘in the winter of 1600/01’ from the castle account books (147). ⁹⁹ Chronology, 170, 172. ¹⁰⁰ Cf. Richard McCoy on Philip Sidney: ‘Sidney finally cannot make up his mind about the central issues of his life and art: obedience and autonomy’ (Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, 1979), 216). Cf. also David Norbrook on Greville and ‘voluntary servitude’ in ch. 6 of Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2002). ¹⁰¹ This conceit is also familiar in the imprese manuals. Fraunce’s manuscript for Philip Sidney includes a device (reproduced in Buxton, fig. 5) also discussed by Daniel; it has the motto fidem fati vertute sequemur: ‘To this sence I wil strive with mine owne vertue to atchive that, which the Horoscopus doth promise me’ (The Worthy Tract of Paulus Giovius, D3v).

183

Finding and Making

the imprisoned man is led from the dungeon only to be killed. And absence is found to be better than ‘my lifes Queen present’ (7): ‘when I see her, I see scorns banner spredd | each word refuses, each refuse gives death’ (11–12). But Sidney’s poems are not allegories, any more than they are the straight love poems Croft wants them to be. And we can add to the absent/present nexus the absent presence of Philip Sidney. Sonnet 30 reaches a paradoxical impasse: Absence I cannot say thow hyd’st my light not darckned, but for ay sett is my Sun No day sees mee, not when nights glass is run I present, absent ame; unseen in sight … Absence I usde to make my mone to thee when thy clowdes stayde my joies they did not shyne but now I may say joies: cannot say mine Absent I want all what I care to see present I see my cares availe mee not present not harckned to, absent forgot. (1–4; 9–14)

The darkness, typical of the 1590s, that runs through Sidney’s sequence has taken over his world. His sun will never rise, ‘Nothing but I doe paralele the night’ (l. 5), and, in a brilliant touch in line 11, he is no longer able to say ‘my joies’, first using the phrase (l. 10), then citing it in pieces, and finally surrendering it altogether (l. 11). The last three lines were revised to give them a chiastic pattern, wrapping the paradox up tightly where before there was a deadening to and fro from ‘Absent’ to ‘present’, with the last line reading ‘Absent I ame forgot: present not known’. In these closing lines the emphasis on sight (‘all what I care to see | present I see … ’) is picked up from lines 3–4, and a further attack on language (‘not harckned to’) follows the negative citations of line 11. The poem loses sight and sound and opts for oblivion; its last word is ‘forgot’. Sidney dramatizes an exclusion from the resources of language and memory, and from the autonomy of choice. He is not remembered, he ‘cannot say mine’, he is stuck making variations on the simplest of material found in his brother’s poetry (‘Whose presence, absence, absence presence is’, AS 60.13; ‘ ‘‘Absence is death, or worse, to them that love’’ ’, ‘The ladd Philisides’, OP 5.94); he makes no choice because it makes no difference.

184

Finding and Making

The last poem in the absence sequence is also the last poem of all. The song begins with two rapid and parallel crescendi from retreat to resolve, a movement mirrored in the poem as a whole: ‘Absence I fled to thee | as to a quiet shore’ (1–2), and yet he is bruised, his vessel holed; ‘Absence I fled to thee | as to a healthful shade’ (7–8), and yet he is already sunburnt and consumed with fever. These familiar images lead into a further angry regret that the armour offered by absence came too late to prevent the fatal injury inflicted by presence. But then comes a bold reversal, which braves authority, and confronts a subtext: I will then back againe where that high beawty lives which him, whoe in it joies, with sorrow Kils And this ods is in paine presence the green wounds gives: Absence uncured sores, with ulcers fils. There shall I feel the heate of pryde, and scorn and hate as heer the coles of greef, and foild desyres But where the sun rayes beate the fyres strength doth abate and greefs less burn, in sight of beawties fyres And if that dy I must fayrer on sworde to fall of Tyrant eyes, then pined in fetters sterve and when the time unjust my lyfes light put owt shall Shee of hate of faith I, shall name deserve (19–end)

The poem starts by making absence voluntary, a self-imposed exile, a dream of power in suffering. But it ends by turning this round and reclaiming an active autonomy. In his final statement, Sidney manages to regain the determination to ‘find a way, or make one’. And he also confronts the authority of Philip Sidney. The return to fire is bound to recall the Icarean assertion of CS 24 (discussed in the Introduction), and in imitating his brother’s obstinate aspiration Sidney is finally accepting the invitation to ‘Tread in my steppes’ (CS 24.18). But the poem is still haunted by citation and third persons—the final note is not of what

185

Finding and Making

the poet will be or what point he will prove, but of what ‘name’ he will be given. In its suicidal determination to return for a confrontation this poem stages a fantasy acted out in real life by Essex when in 1599 he returned from Ireland without leave, went straight to the Queen’s chamber, and ended up under house arrest. In a letter reflecting on this episode (‘the greatest downfall I have seen in my daies, which makes me see the vanity of the world’) Rowland Whyte refers to Sidney’s latest scheme, to replace his brother-in-law the Earl of Pembroke as President of the Marches of Wales, a post his father had held. Whyte voices a common opinion that Sidney is perhaps better off where he is: ‘The most part of our nobility doe thincke you a blessed man to have soe honorable a government free from all complaints and informacions; leave yt when you will, you part with your greatest honor; for here yt is hardly gotten, where many that thincke they deserve much, have long lived in expectacion of preferment’.¹⁰² In Flushing Sidney has autonomy and there are no rivals trying to undermine his government. But it is never quite enough, just as writing poems about exile, darkness, death, and loss, however perversely these are embraced and claimed as a source of power, cannot be sustained. Perhaps because in both cases Sidney could not escape the view that he was only following in his brother’s footsteps.¹⁰³

* * * The solution, when it came, was simple enough. Sidney carried on receiving the honour and—more importantly—the salary that came with the Governorship of Flushing. But after James came to the throne his work there was carried out entirely through his deputies. In one of the first works to be published after James’s accession, John Davies of Hereford addressed a long preface to the new king in which he points to the potential glories of the Jacobean age. Top of the list comes Robert Sidney: Thou lively Image of our Worldes perfection, Our little Worlds great Paragon of fame, Both taking beeing (by the Heav’ns direction) In one selfe wombe, that both should be the same In Spirite, in vertue, nature, and in name;

Sir Phil. Sidn.

¹⁰² 1 December 1599, HMC, 2.420–1. ¹⁰³ Cf. the brief account of Sidney’s poetry in Elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (New York, 2003), 50: ‘The solution Robert’s poetics repeatedly provides is a speaker who can only learn from his own example’.

186

Finding and Making

This World beginnes to cotton now for thee, For whom the World, sometimes, was much to blame: Vertue, deere Sidney, now advaunc’d shalbe Sith Vertue knowes no partialitee.¹⁰⁴

Sir R. Sidney

No longer the younger, lesser brother, Robert Sidney now matches Philip Sidney; he is his ‘lively Image’, a sort of ideal representation of him. Under Elizabeth, as Whyte had complained, ‘to be a nobleman born is more respected than to be virtuous and worthy’.¹⁰⁵ Under James, Sidney found himself rapidly elevated to the peerage and above the status of his brother and father: just fifty days after Elizabeth’s death, Sidney became Baron Sidney of Penshurst. Part of a clique that acted swiftly to endear itself to the new King and Queen, he was appointed in October as Queen Anne’s Lord High Chamberlain and Surveyor General, at her insistence and against the wishes of those close to James.¹⁰⁶ Two years later Sidney was made Viscount L’Isle, the title he had sought in 1597–8 because it belonged in his family. Sidney continued to use inveniam viam aut faciam as his motto,¹⁰⁷ perhaps, like Pyrocles and Musidorus, still ‘thinking it not so worthy, to be brought to heroycall effects by fortune, or necessitie (like Ulysses and Aeneas) as by ones owne choice, and working’ (90, T5v/NA, 179): it now seemed like a promise he had fulfilled. But he may also have found that his father’s motto suited him well, as an epigram by his wife’s kinsman William Gamage suggests: On the most ho: and worthy lo: Lord Viscount de Lisles Posie. Quo me fata vocant. Thy splendent Posie, well agrees with thee, Renowned Lord, bright Sydney’s shining Lampe: For where so e’re th’art call’d by Destenie, ¹⁰⁴ Microcosmos (1603), E1r. ¹⁰⁵ HMC, 2.246. ¹⁰⁶ Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia, 2001), 59–61. ¹⁰⁷ The motto was used by Sidney as late as 1616, when he was made KG (it appears on his stall plate). It was also adopted by his son, and was used in both England and France in the later seventeenth century. See Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, 1.197, and Denkinger, ‘The Impresa Portrait’, 25. Among the royalist civil war devices listed in The Art of Making Devices (1650) is ‘a hand with a sword, and this Motto, A I A F’ (L4v). In James Harington’s Oceana (1656) a version, ‘Aut viam inveniam aut faciam’, is described as ‘an adage of Caesar’ (H1r), and Edmund Waller uses it as proverbial in a parliamentary debate of 1672 (Debates of the House of Commons, from the year 1667 to the year 1694, 10 vols. (London, 1763), 2.113). It crops up frequently in writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as proverbial, with occasional attributions to Sidney, and the attribution to Caesar (for which I can find no earlier evidence) is not repeated.

Finding and Making

187

Thou ready art, for Court, or els for Campe. In one, or both thy praise doth most surpasse; Such ever, Sydneys Trophies noble, was.¹⁰⁸

Sidney had finally found a way to the fortune he had striven for; if we assume that most of his poems date from the 1590s, the tone of some may have soon seemed just a fashionably melancholic pose.¹⁰⁹ But it was in these years that some of his poems started to circulate. It is important that the evidence for such circulation is musical. The texts, dedications, and prefaces of Elizabethan and Jacobean songbooks give ample evidence that composers had better access than most professional poets and anthology editors to the households and poetry of courtiers. The only poems by Fulke Greville to be printed in his lifetime appeared as the words of songs.¹¹⁰ In a songbook dedicated to Sidney in 1600, Robert Jones acknowledges that he has set to music and therefore printed the lyrics of courtiers who wished to keep their verse close but are happy to see their lyrics printed in this form.¹¹¹ Queen Anne’s circle was a very musical one,¹¹² and was composed of people with very close connections of blood, marriage, or friendship to Sidney. Sidney had always enjoyed good relations with musicians: for example, the greatest lutenist composer John Dowland was given an M.A. from Sidney’s college Christ Church in 1588 and in around 1591 asked Sidney to be the godfather of his son Robert.¹¹³ And as Anne’s Lord Chamberlain Sidney was central to her musical and dramatic ¹⁰⁸ Linsi-woolsie. Or two centuries of epigrammes (1613), F6r. The quo fata vocant motto also figures in Simon van de Passe’s 1617 engraving of Sidney; see A. M. Hind, Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1952–64), 2.261 and plate 155. ¹⁰⁹ Brief mentions of Sidney’s poetry always focus on darkness and melancholy—see for example Norbrook, Poetry and Politics, 141, and Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603 (London, 2000), 309, both eloquently. We face the same choice in reading the ‘Halberd’ portrait (see n. 21 above): does it reflect a mournful reality, fashion a self by embracing melancholy, or simply present a posture for the nonce? ¹¹⁰ For Greville in print see my ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2000), 203–31 (212 n. 33). ¹¹¹ The First Booke of Songes or Ayres (1600); text in Lyrics from English Airs 1596–1622, ed. Edward Doughtie (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 115. ¹¹² See Lynn Hulse, ‘The Musical Patronage of the English Aristocracy, c.1590–1640’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1992), 225–7, and cf. Leeds Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), 191–208, and his Anna of Denmark. ¹¹³ See Diana Poulton, John Dowland, 2nd edn. (London, 1982), 28, and 42–3.

188

Finding and Making

activities,¹¹⁴ not least because his duties included approving payments: records survive of payments to the King’s instrument maker for repairing ‘a wind Instrument for her majesty’, and, in a fragmentary privy purse account for 1615–16, of payments to Queen Anne’s players, the King’s players, and some acrobats.¹¹⁵ Sidney was able to spend much of the year at Penshurst, but he was obliged to accompany the Queen on her summer progress, and to be in London for the Christmas season, often bringing his family up to London with him.¹¹⁶ We can place Sidney at most of Anne’s masques because of the testimony of Thomas Nevitt, a servant whose duties, besides trips to and from Flushing on the mail run, included looking after Sidney’s wardrobe, a job he claims to have held since 1590.¹¹⁷ In around 1623 Nevitt compiled a detailed account of all Sidney’s income and expenditure since 1586, and included careful descriptions of the suits Sidney had made for major events at court.¹¹⁸ Some of these events were ceremonies at which Sidney was honoured, made a Knight of the Bath, then of the Garter, promoted from Baron to Viscount to Earl. Many are weddings, and many are masques. So, for the Masque of Blackness (Twelfth Night, 1605), in which his daughter Mary Wroth performed, Sidney had made ‘a sute of Ashe coulor satten cutt with a peach coulor taffetie and laid on thick with silver lace this sute cost your honor 080 li’ (4v). From Nevitt and another source we know that Sidney participated in the first Jacobean masque, Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (Twelfth Night, 1604),¹¹⁹ and Nevitt confirms his attendance at many ¹¹⁴ There is only circumstantial evidence to substantiate this assumption, but it seems sound; see most recently Michael G. Brennan and Noel J. Kinnamon, ‘Robert Sidney, ‘‘Mr Johnson’’, and the Education of William Sidney at Penshurst’, NQ, 248 (2003), 430–7: ‘in this role he would have exerted ultimate control over the Queen’s dramatic entertainments’ (435). See also Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Control of English Renaissance Drama (London, 1991), 160 and 192. ¹¹⁵ Records of English Court Music, ed. A. Ashbee, 9 vols. (Snodland and Aldershot, 1986–96), 4.200; Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber 1558–1642, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson, Malone Society Collections, 6 (Oxford, 1961/62), appendix B, 144, and Introduction, xxv. ¹¹⁶ The yearly distribution of Sidney’s letters to his wife makes this pattern clear; for a reference to the debilitating cost of Christmas at court see HMC, 3.431 (10 November 1607). ¹¹⁷ Thomas Nevitt to Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, 10 October 1626, British Library, Add. MS 120662 , 1r. ¹¹⁸ British Library, Add. MS 12066; the account is edited in Sidneiana, ed. Samuel Butler (1837). ¹¹⁹ Nevitt, 4r; Sidney’s attendance and participation with other lords in the dancing of the ‘common measures’ at least is recorded by Dudley Carleton, cited by Peter Walls,

Finding and Making

189

other masques (and these are only the ones for which Sidney had a new suit made). Sidney knew the writers and composers of Anne’s masques. Samuel Daniel had lived at Wilton. Ben Jonson was to stay at Penshurst and work with Sidney’s somewhat delinquent son William.¹²⁰ Inigo Jones was to work at Wilton many years later. Alfonso Ferrabosco may have lodged at Baynard’s Castle.¹²¹ It may be that Sidney had mixed feelings about court life, or at least so he allowed his home-loving wife to believe, but if only duty kept him there it was a duty he took seriously and invested heavily in.¹²² What we can now begin to see is that Sidney used his poetry within this milieu, selectively and intimately. Late in 1609 he had settled a long-standing dispute with Lord Berkeley over lands Sidney had inherited from the Dudleys, and his finances were healthier than they had been for a long time.¹²³ In this and the following years, the Sidneys enjoyed a sudden surge in their prominence in the dedications of poets and musicians, and especially with Ben Jonson.¹²⁴ Sidney was already on good terms with Jonson. In a letter to the Earl of Shrewsbury of Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 325–6. For the politics of this occasion see Leeds Barroll, ‘Inventing the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge, 1998), 121–43 (130–1 and 141 n. 37). ¹²⁰ On Jonson as William Sidney’s tutor see J. C. A. Rathmell, ‘Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst’, ELR, 1 (1971), 250–60, and Brennan and Kinnamon, ‘Robert Sidney, ‘‘Mr Johnson’’, and the Education of William Sidney’. ¹²¹ See my ‘The Musical Sidneys’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 65–105. ¹²² Nevitt’s total for apparel is over £10, 000 (5v). For Rathmell Sidney was ‘no avid courtier’ (‘Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst’, 252). Worden sees him as divided: ‘With one half of his mind, he loved to dress in ‘‘the bravest cut and fashion’’, and thrilled to the merest hint of royal favour. The other half prompted him to retreat whenever possible to the estate and the library of Penshurst’ (‘Classical Republicanism’, 186–7). ¹²³ Hay, 191; see Sidney’s letter to his wife, 1 November 1609 and subsequent, short-lived efforts at more transparent accounting, HMC, 4.168, 169, 171, 175. ¹²⁴ See Michael G. Brennan, ‘‘‘A SYDNEY, though un-named’’: Ben Jonson’s Influence in the Manuscript and Print Circulation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Writings’, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 31–52, on Jonson’s interest in the Sidneys and Herberts in the period 1610–12 (35–6; repr. as ‘Creating Female Authorship in the Early Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 73–93); and Brennan and Kinnamon, ‘Robert Sidney, ‘‘Mr Johnson’’, and the Education of William Sidney’. Works by Jonson in this period include ‘To Penshurst’ and the ode on William Sidney’s birthday (1611), both included in the Sidney-dominated Forrest, Catiline (dedicated to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke in 1611), The Alchemist (dedicated to Mary Wroth in 1612), and the Epigrammes, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1612 but not printed until the 1616 folio, where they were dedicated to Herbert.

190

Finding and Making

29 January 1608 Sidney apologizes to his kinsman that he cannot get from Jonson a text of The Masque of Beauty, performed on 10 January, because Jonson is now busy writing the Haddington Masque, to be performed on 9 February, ‘so as till that has past I cannot have the first: but then for the interest and principal debt I will send your Lordship both’.¹²⁵ Sidney’s stake in Jonson’s Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly was much greater. Planned for December 1610 it was delayed until 3 February 1611. Sidney’s daughter Philip was, according to Nevitt, ‘one of the maskers’, and Sidney splashed out on a new suit for himself, a ‘ritch petticoat’ for Philip, and ‘a great many Jewells borrowed’.¹²⁶ He may have known what was coming, or it may have been a surprise. When it did come, he may have been the only person present to get the joke, or many others may have. Jonson seems to have given the opening stanza of Sidney’s Song 20 (‘Senses by unjust force banisht’) to the composer, Alfonso Ferrabosco, and Ferrabosco incorporated it in the masque as the middle strophe of a song in three sections. Sidney had written at least two lyrics to music, but this may have been the first time he had heard his poetry in a setting written especially for his words.¹²⁷ And it was not the last. Another music manuscript, from c.1609 and possibly representing the repertoire of the Children of the Chapel Royal (a company associated with Queen Anne), includes a setting of the first stanza of Sidney’s witty dialogue Pastoral 2.¹²⁸ The whole poem can be performed to the music, clearly strophic in design, and was probably intended to be (manuscripts of strophic songs often give the text of only the first stanza). We must wonder if Sidney’s words came to be performed not only within the court masque but on the public stage. This evidence may encourage us to think of Sidney’s poetry not only as a solitary fantasy of exclusion conducted in Flushing in the late years of Elizabeth’s reign but equally as an activity used (however covertly) to provide matter for social interactions with poets and musicians in the reign of James, and at the court of Queen Anne. ¹²⁵ Jonson, 10.459. ¹²⁶ Nevitt, 5r. ¹²⁷ See my ‘The Musical Sidneys’. The only evidence is the presence and layout of the three songs in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tenbury 1018, 36v–37v, but the interpretation can nevertheless be advanced with some confidence. ¹²⁸ On the date and contents of the manuscript (but not the Sidney ascription) see Mary Chan, ‘Cynthia’s Revels and Music for a Choir School: Christ Church Manuscript Mus 439’, Studies in the Renaissance, 18 (1971), 134–72; on Queen Anne and the Children of the Chapel Royal cf. Barroll, Anna of Denmark, 68. For an edition of this song and further discussion see ‘The Musical Sidneys’.

Finding and Making

191

In that light it may seem equally likely that any number of the poems in his manuscript might date either in composition or in transcription from the 1600s. And of course it is distinctly possible that other poems by Sidney exist unidentified in manuscript and printed songbooks of the early seventeenth century. This context confirms that while his sonnets, which can be rather staid, do not come close to those of his brother, his songs show an exceptional and recognizable lyric gift. When Robert Dowland dedicated his ground-breaking, polyglot musical miscellany, A Musicall Banquet, to his godfather in 1610, his father John Dowland contributed a solo lute piece, Sir Robert Sidney’s Galliard.¹²⁹ It offers an interesting emblem of its dedicatee (such pieces, like imprese, reflected and referred to the people they were written for). It is based on the opening motif of the most popular French chanson of the sixteenth century, Lassus’ ‘Susanne un jour’: it is made from found material. Two earlier versions of the piece survive, but this one has far subtler harmonies, tentative, haunting, deferring resolution. And this one is the only one to include divisions (whereby each of the three basic strains of the galliard is followed by a more intricate variation). The music thus moves back and forth in a dialogue between origin and analysis, statement and ornamented repetition, finding and making, just as the whole piece itself enters into conversation with Lassus. If the music can be seen as an emblem of Sidney’s own engagements with the past, it may tell us why Dowland breaks with his own practice and creates a unique fluidity in the piece’s structure. Where his normal practice is to mark the boundaries between each of the sections of a galliard fairly firmly—a sort of end-stopping—several of the strains here flow into the material that follows. This is guilelessly managed between the division of the second strain and the third strain, and again between that third strain and its division, but at the piece’s mid-point, where the second strain yields to its division, a rapid, dotted rhythm (first encountered in the division on the first strain) makes the running towards the end of the statement and then crosses dramatically in a descending phrase into the division. The simple back and forth dialogue between past and present is here brilliantly merged in a liminal voice. The piece becomes, by coincidence or design, a fitting badge of the ongoing creative dialogue with past and alien forms of Sidney the musical poet. The effect is as striking as that produced by Jonson in the Carey-Morison Ode, where ¹²⁹ For further discussion of A Musicall Banquet and of this galliard see my ‘The Musical Sidneys’.

192

Finding and Making

‘Ben | Jonson’ crosses and joins two strophes, straddles life and death, and mediates between the living Carey and the dead Morison.¹³⁰ When Henry Peacham, in The Compleat Gentleman (1622), explains that music, like poetry, can be understood as rhetoric he identifies the air or song squarely with the figure of prosopopoeia.¹³¹ A lyric creates a speaker, with a character and point of view; it is not simply the speaking voice of its author. When it is performed, the speaker is given a body. The singer of a text by Sidney finds him- or herself to be a creation of Sidney’s, a prosopopoeia conjured up by the poet–maker. But the singer is also conducting a prosopopoeia of Sidney’s lyric voice. If we identify that lyric voice in that poem, however cautiously and obliquely, with its author’s mind and character, then the performance manages a resurrection of Sidney—he is almost there, an absent presence. We may doubt that Sidney’s poems were ever read out. But we now know that they were performed as songs, and that on at least one occasion he was present. For a poet who struggled to find his own voice, and figured within his verse a resignation to speaking ‘unharde, unseen’ (Song 5.24), who quotes himself within a vacuum of his own making and perhaps thought little about how his poems might be read, to hear another voice performing his words must have been an odd sensation, shocking and also liberating. Words and meanings that had been private are suddenly opened up to other appropriations and explanations, the performer, ‘by delighting many, frees again | Griefe, which verse did restrain’.¹³² Sidney’s songs work because they can exist in other spaces than their original writing; whether or not Sidney intended this to be possible, his hand will have been led by lyric convention. That they can imagine and inhabit a future shows that Sidney’s poetry is not in the end to be circumscribed by that of his brother. ¹³⁰ Jonson, 8.242–7 (ll. 84–5). ¹³¹ Source Readings in Music History. Volume 3: The Renaissance, ed. Oliver Strunk, rev. edn. Gary Tomlinson (New York and London, 1998), 73. ¹³² John Donne, ‘The triple Foole’, ll. 15–16, in The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1985).

6 Lyric After Sidney When Henry Olney, ‘the first publique bewrayer of Poesies Messias’,¹ published his unauthorized edition of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, he prefaced the text with ‘Foure Sonnets written by Henrie Constable to Sir Phillip Sidneys soule’ (A3r). Constable addresses Sidney in Sidney’s voice, by using Sidney’s own favoured variant of sonnet form: the counter-rhymed Petrarchan octave paired with an English sestet of cross rhyme and couplet, cdcdee. But form is not content, and Constable struggles for a conceit that can connect Sidney the poet to the poems of his successors: Shall not all Poets praise thy memory? And to thy name shall not their works give fame, When as their works be sweetned by thy name? (Sonnet 2.12–14)

Not, we notice, Sidney teaching his successors how to write (as he surely did); but Sidney as matter for verse, his name flourishing ‘in the printers’ shops’ and, as here, in ‘many a poetical preface’ (Defence, 121). The problem, as Constable’s next sonnet shows, is that poets could not agree on what Sidney represented: Even as when great mens heires cannot agree: So ev’ry vertue now for part of thee doth sue, Courage prooves by thy death thy hart to be his due, Eloquence claimes thy tongue, and so doth courtesy, Invention knowledge sues, Judgment sues memory, Each saith thy head is his … (Sonnet 3.1–6, A3v)

Constable has learned this sonnet’s way with personification, and, after its irregular opening line, its alexandrines, from Astrophil and Stella, 1. ¹ An Apologie for Poetrie (1595), A4r.

194

Lyric After Sidney

But he knows that the very breadth of Sidney’s achievements stands in the way of fixing his status as the founding father of late-Elizabethan literary eloquence and lyric poetry. I want in this chapter to go back to the simple question of what the lyric poets of the 1590s and beyond found in Sidney and what they did with what they found; how he showed them the way and how they tried, some failing and some succeeding, to build on his poetry.

* * * Sidney dominates the lyric miscellanies, both in manuscript and in print, of the 1590s and early 1600s. He does so both as writer and as subject of writing. The Phoenix Nest (1593), we have seen, opens with elegies for Sidney, whereas Englands Helicon (1600) and A Poetical Rapsody (1602) use Sidney’s own works to open miscellanies that gauge the success of their contributors against the model they follow. Even the pirated Astrophil and Stella (1591) works in this way, setting out Sidney’s stall and then looking at the work of others, including an early form of Daniel’s Delia, in the supplement of ‘Poems and Sonets of sundrie other Noble men and Gentlemen’ (I3v). As such it was an important, early example of the ways in which Sidney’s verse might be represented in print producing its own legacy. Sidney’s status in the 1590s and 1600s as what one of Drayton’s shepherds calls ‘the God of Poesie’² is most evident in the manner in which he presides over the sonnet boom. The paradox that the gain of the sonnet form and genre was connected with the loss of Sidney (since only with his death could Astrophil and Stella be printed and launch dozens of other sonnet sequences) is condensed in those sonnets that are elegies for Sidney, including three by Edward Dymoke at the start of his manuscript of Sidney’s sequence, those of Henry Constable discussed above, one by Gorges, and the strange unrhymed sonnet by Edward Dyer that ends Byrd’s songbook and Sidney memorial Psalmes, Sonets, and songs (1588).³ But it was not only the sonnet that Sidney gave to his successors, and it is worth attempting some sort of summary of what else he left behind.⁴ ² Idea. The Shepheards Garland (1593), D2v. ³ Dymoke: Ringler, 539. Gorges: poem 97 (96 is another elegy) in The Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. H. E. Sandison (Oxford, 1953); Dyer: May, 311. ⁴ May, ch. 6, examines ‘The Sidney Legacy’, but he is interested only in Sidney’s influence on fellow courtier poets; he finds that ‘A number of courtier poets, including Ralegh, Gorges, and Harington, acknowledged Sidney’s achievement without permitting it to influence their own poetic careers’ and that ‘only his sister, the countess of Pembroke,

Lyric After Sidney

195

Ringler is right that Sidney ‘resolutely ignored the works of his contemporaries’ and drew very little from previous English writers (xxviii). His reform of English poetry was accomplished by looking to the Continent and to the classics.⁵ Sidney divided his criticisms of contemporary poetry into its ‘two principal parts, matter to be expressed by words and words to express the matter’ (Defence, 112), and we can divide our account of Sidney’s poetic legacy in the same way, taking ‘the outside of it, which is words’ (117) first. Sidney moved versification forward quite dramatically. Even Spenser’s verse, though the archaisms confuse any account of it, is inflected with the accents of the earlier Elizabethan poets, men like Gascoigne and Churchyard, with their syntactic clumsiness and metrical monotony. When Sidney began to write, English poetry was only beginning to be theorized. Gascoigne’s ‘Certain Notes of Instruction’, the first prosodic treatise in the vernacular, had been published in 1575 and Puttenham was also trying, with less success, to think of the newly recognized ‘iambic’ pattern in English verse, a pattern that had only recently displaced the four-stress line of Chaucer and Wyatt, in terms of feet.⁶ In this first generation of accentual-syllabic prosody, from Surrey and the regularizing of Wyatt by Tottel to Gascoigne and his contemporaries, the metre is too audible: it is the rhythm of the line as performed and not just the metre as scanned. Sidney brings a new flexibility into English metrical practice, and he does it, as John Thompson has convincingly his brother Robert, and his close friend Fulke Greville can be rightfully considered his literary heirs, and even their writings tend less toward imitation than toward the extension and fulfillment of Sidney’s ideals for English verse’ (166). Because courtiers lived an ethos of self-assertion, Sidney’s ‘closest imitators were professional, out-of-court writers, while the courtiers who followed his example in the writing of poetry consistently differentiated their work from his’ (199). ⁵ Cf. Ringler, lii, and xxxvi for a list of Sidney’s key (classical and continental) models. For an important reconsideration of Sidney’s relation to poets of the previous generation, however, see Germaine Warkentin, ‘The Meeting of the Muses: Sidney and the Mid-Tudor Poets’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London and Sydney, 1984), 17–33. For Sidney’s relation to Italian poetry, see David Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). Other important studies of Sidney’s poetry are Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) and Theodore Spencer’s seminal reconsideration, ‘The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, ELH, 12 (1945), 251–78. ⁶ Gascoigne’s treatise is the final item in The Posies (1575); Puttenham’s creeping realization that the iambic foot can be recognized in accentual-syllabic poetry is split between the (fundamentally syllabic) vernacular prosody offered in the first half of Book 2 of The Arte of English Poesie (1589) and the quantitative prosody of the second half of Book 2.

196

Lyric After Sidney

shown, by separating the metrical scheme from the verbal rhythm, by recognizing that metre need not be realized quite so definitely in each line as was Gascoigne’s habit, but could be treated as an abstract set of rules to which the line must conform.⁷ In addition, Sidney recognized that a small number of licences within the system were desirable, like reversed feet and a more flexible approach to the idea of caesura than Gascoigne and Puttenham could manage. Sidney also looked at classical metrics as a possible vehicle for English poetry, and it is likely that his work in this area was what taught him to view metre in the abstract, since, as Derek Attridge shows, Latin verse tended to be read out prosaically and not performed to reveal the metre.⁸ Sidney’s classical poems allow all sorts of new rhythms to pass the metrical test, and help him to find new rhythms within the accentual-syllabic system.⁹ Sidney also looked at continental practice, as his brief comments at the end of the Defence make clear. And in it he found systematic use of feminine endings, a practice he imported.¹⁰ Feminine endings are to be found everywhere in late-Elizabethan verse (in the opening lines of Daniel’s The Complaint of Rosamond, and of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; in Harington’s Orlando and the later books of The Faerie Queene),¹¹ and by 1603 Daniel thought the practice needed greater systematizing, editing his own Delia to reduce the number of feminine rhymes and ‘holding feminine Rymes to be fittest for Ditties, and either to be set certaine, or else by themselves’.¹² When Sidney looked at music and song, at how musical metre imposed itself on French, Italian, Spanish, and English verse, and used his knowledge of classical feet, he saw that there was no reason why poems in English might not be written in trochaic metres.¹³ A collection like Englands Helicon (1600) is good evidence of how quickly trochaic ⁷ See John Thompson, The Founding of English Metre (New York, 1989; originally published 1961), ch. 6 and passim; cf. Ringler, liv–vi, and Susanne Woods, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, 1984), ch. 5. ⁸ See Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), 30–40. ⁹ For further discussion see my Introduction to Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London, 2004), xlvii–lii. Ringler provides a good account of the classical experiments, 389–93. See also Seth Weiner, ‘The Quantitative Poems and the Psalm Translations: The Place of Sidney’s Experimental Verse in the Legend’, in 1586, 193–220, and Kristin Hanson, ‘Quantitative Meter in English: The Lesson of Sir Philip Sidney’, English Language and Linguistics, 5 (2000), 41–91. ¹⁰ Ringler, lvi. ¹¹ See Kay (15): ‘the practice in both writers had been authorized by Sidney.’ ¹² Daniel, Poems, 156–7. ¹³ On trochaics see Ringler, xliii.

Lyric After Sidney

197

tetrameter caught on after Sidney’s use of it in a majority of the songs of Astrophil and Stella (ii, iv, ix, x, xi, and most famously viii, ‘In a grove most rich of shade’). It opens with AS iv (‘Onely joy, now here you are’), adds AS viii, and among fourteen poems using trochaic tetrameter by such as Barnfield, Yong, and Lodge includes ‘In the merry moneth of May’, ascribed to Breton, Dickenson’s ‘Fields were overspread with flowers’, ‘On a goodly Sommers day’, probably by Munday, Shakespeare’s ‘On a day, (alack the day)’, and another poem from The Passionate Pilgrim, ‘As it fell upon a day’. Some of the period’s most celebrated lyrics learn their sound from this innovation, and as even this brief survey of first lines shows, a choice to imitate form tends to involve a decision to imitate content. When Sidney thinks of lyric poetry he thinks of song, not only when he is idealizing poetic performance in the Arcadia, but also when contemplating his own practice. He called his poems ‘songs’;¹⁴ he quite clearly wrote poems to fit the tunes of songs in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and even Dutch;¹⁵ and he equally clearly intended his own poems to be set to music, either in the quantitative fashion glanced at in Byrd’s own elegy for Sidney, ‘Come to me grief for ever’, and in the theory and very occasional practice of Thomas Campion; in the more complex madrigalian style (there are demonstrable connections between Sidney and the importers and translators of Italian madrigals); or in the simpler dance-related air music that Sidney preferred in his own borrowings and that in its English form became the English lute song. And so Sidney’s contrafacta could be sung, and his poems were set and sung by the English madrigalists and lute song composers: like the poet of the Defence, Sidney ‘cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music’ (Defence, 92).¹⁶ ¹⁴ Sidney to Edward Denny, 22 May 1580, in James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577 (New Haven and London, 1972), 540. ¹⁵ English: CS 24 and possibly CS 30 (see Chapter 3, p. 120); French: AS viii (see my ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s ‘‘French Tune’’ Identified’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 378–402 (382–4)) and perhaps some of the Psalms; Italian: CS 3, 4, 6, 26, 27; Spanish: CS 7; Dutch: CS 23 (though the tune of ‘Wilhelmus van Nassau’ was originally French). ¹⁶ Ringler provides a list of settings of Sidney, 566–8. See also my ‘The Musical Sidneys’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 65–105, and John Stevens, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and ‘‘Versified Music’’: Melodies for Courtly Songs’, in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford, 1990), 153–69.

198

Lyric After Sidney

Sidney experimented with different combinations of line length and rhyme scheme, as Puttenham was to recommend; this practice produced the Sidney Psalms and they influenced John Donne and, more centrally, George Herbert.¹⁷ In the long view, even the lyric fluency, grace, and economy of Jonson and Herrick owe much to Sidney’s example. He also imitated the more complex continental forms, the Petrarchan canzone and sestina, but, interestingly, Sidney used these forms only within the pastoral world into which Petrarch had been taken by his earlier sixteenth-century imitators, using simpler lyric forms to provide the variety in his own sonnet sequence. And of course Sidney wrote the first genuine sonnet sequence in English. Colin Williamson is quite right to stress the technical side of Sidney’s work with the sonnet: ‘Sidney’s aesthetic ideal … involved a perfect accommodation of form and function. And it was only by exploring the formal resources and limitations of the sonnet that he could realize for himself and make available to others its expressive possibilities.’¹⁸ The same can be said of all of his literary work: it is about exploring and extending formal and generic capabilities. But Sidney was not just the greatest versifier before Dryden. When he takes his contemporaries to task it is because their ‘matter is quodlibet’ (Defence, 112) instead of being based on sound rhetorical principles of invention, arrangement, and decorum, and because they lack ‘that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it)’ (117), because they do not show conviction and inspire belief. Poets, whether writing in their own voice or in that of a persona, had to perform their emotions convincingly; it was also necessary to depict things described in poetry in a compelling and ‘lively’ manner—what Quintilian calls enargeia.¹⁹ The lyric ‘I’ in Sidney is more lifelike, less stylized or mannered than its precursors; the pictures it paints compel belief. Or at least that is where he ended up. As Robert Montgomery has argued, the poetry of the Arcadia achieves its communication of emotion through more formalistic means; this was another option, taken up by fewer, that Sidney set out for his successors.²⁰ His sestinas are famous instances of ¹⁷ See the Postscript below. ¹⁸ ‘Structure and Syntax in Astrophil and Stella’, RES, new ser., 31 (1980), 271–84; repr. in Kay, 227–42 (234). ¹⁹ See Chapter 3 above, n. 85. ²⁰ Robert L. Montgomery, Jr, Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (New York, 1961). A transition, on the grandest of scales, from a concern with the symbolism of form to a concern with the representation of reality is the subject of S. K. Heninger, Jr, The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical

Lyric After Sidney

199

this approach, but perhaps the best example is the extraordinary lament for Basilius, ‘Since that to death is gone the shepheard hie’ (OA 75),²¹ which in its successive stanzas produces a crescendo of passion by careful incrementation from masculine to feminine to triple rhyme. Sidney intends a simple equation between formal complexity and strength of passion: form signifies emotion as much as it evokes or echoes it. Herbert (for example in ‘Denial’) was alive to the possibilities of form as signifier, but most other lyric poets preferred a less symbolic approach to form. What Sidney achieves in Astrophil and Stella is passionate verse of an entirely different kind. It would be good poetry if it were only the convincing representation of emotion; but it also introduces, in Aristotelian terms, a far more coherent characterization than had been seen before (ethos) and the compelling representation of intellect (dianoia), of thought.²² Like the Donne Empson admires, Sidney builds many of his poems on the appearance of argument, employing his mastery of logic and rhetoric to ‘argufy’.²³ But because he so thoroughly dramatizes his persona, this, often specious, argufying is made not an uneasy yoke-fellow of the lover’s passion but another symptom of the emotional and intellectual strain Astrophil suffers. Sidney quite brilliantly combines conceit and passion: he moves and he delights. In the second half of this chapter I want to look more closely at this side of Sidney’s lyric art and its legacy.

* * * Through fiction truth will neither ebb nor flow.

So Laura tells Petrarch, after her death, in the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte (2.147). It is her way of (University Park, Pa., 1994). The Sidney of Heninger’s chapter on the Defence in Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park, Pa., 1989) is one weary of lyric, prosody, and Neoplatonism (e.g. 223) who develops a ‘new poetics of image-making’ (380). On the symbolism of form see further Åke Bergvall, The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala, 1989), 57. Barnabe Barnes, in Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), is a rare example of a 1590s sonneteer who tries also to follow the Sidney of fixed forms (especially sestinas) and varied stanza forms. ²¹ The poem becomes a lament for Amphialus in Book III of the revised Arcadia. ²² See Poetics, 1450b. ²³ ‘Argufying in Poetry’, in William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London, 1988), 167–73.

200

Lyric After Sidney

telling him that though in life she hid her love from him, she loved him all the same. But to us it seems to say something else about the relations between truth and amorous fiction. We have already seen how love within Sidney’s fictions often functions as a substitute for the complex issues and motives of life. A Philisides or Astrophil will always have his promising political career interrupted by falling in love; whereas we know that in Sidney’s life things were more complicated. Or were they? This might seem an unimportant question: surely what counts is the poetry and not the biography. But identifying this question as important turns out to be central to an understanding of the subsequent history of English lyric, both in the short and in the long term. The easiest complaint to make about how modern readers misread earlier poetry is to point to the post-Romantic assumptions that inform our sense of what poetry is for. It takes an effort to appreciate that the subject of a Renaissance lyric might not be the poet, that its emotional content might be in some way impersonal, that the authority of the lyric voice, the source of its passion, might be shared, poised somewhere between literary tradition, the writer, and the reader. William Wordsworth in fact found it hard to believe that the sonnet, with its great freight of convention, could be self-expressive, but persuaded himself that ‘with this key | Shakespeare unlocked his heart’.²⁴ Wordsworth’s metaphor suggests the craft and precision that goes into making the sonnet, and how it may be that only such precision can open the doors to passion; that the heart would remain shut if a blunter instrument were used. And it suggests that for the reader to pick up a sonnet is to be given the key to its author’s heart. Nineteenth-century doubts about the efficacy or sincerity of the sonnet merely repeat earlier worries that the rule of fourteen lines functioned as a Procrustes’ bed to thoughts and feelings: those that were shorter were stretched, those that were longer were chopped down at their extremities.²⁵ Ben Jonson for one couldn’t see the point of writing sonnets, and the form fell out of use after Milton. So the challenge for the many readers and writers who fell in love with Shakespeare’s and Sidney’s sonnets in the nineteenth century, from Wordsworth and Lamb to Wilde

²⁴ ‘Scorn not the Sonnet’, published in 1827. ²⁵ See Campion’s Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), in The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 295–6, and Jonson in the Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden ( Jonson, 1.133–4). See also Daniel’s riposte in A Defence of Ryme (Daniel, Poems, 138).

Lyric After Sidney

201

and Swinburne,²⁶ was to believe that despite the highly mannered form in which these poets wrote of love, they were in love. That they managed to believe this to such an extent that a whole sub-species of biography, devoted to explaining the background to sonnet sequences, was created was perhaps as equal a betrayal of Elizabethan lyric as to believe it lacking in emotion. Perhaps the right thing to do is to believe that the poet may have been in love, but to register that such a belief must be a deliberate effect of the writing. We should read to decide not that the love is true, or that it is false, but whether or not it is convincing.²⁷ The question of form overlaps with another set of constraints under which sonneteers deliberately worked: the conventions of Petrarchan love poetry. Sidney is fond of dramatizing the problem of being a convincing lover when, real or feigned, the love must be framed in a rather tired lexicon. As Basilius complains when Cleophila teasingly remarks that ‘your words are too well couched to come out of a restless mind’: ‘If I speak nothing, I choke myself, and am in no way of relief; if simply, neglected; if confusedly, not understood; if by the bending together all my inward powers they bring forth any lively expressing of that they truly feel, that is a token forsooth the thoughts are at too much leisure.’ (OA, 219–20). We can recall a key passage in the Defence of Poesy: ‘But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love: so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings—and so caught up certain swelling phrases … than that in truth they feel those passions’ (Defence, 116–17). ‘If I were a mistress’, Sidney says. The assumption here is that sonnets are to be read by mistresses, and yet the fact is that they are being read by people like Sidney. Of course, the poet could be persuasive without actually being sincere. The measure of success for Sidney, it seems, is not whether someone is in love but whether he can persuade the reader that he is. As Jonson puts it: ‘No Poets verses yet did ever move, | Whose readers did not thinke he was in love.’²⁸ In this respect the sincerity of the lover is like ²⁶ For an interesting consideration of the later Victorian reception of Astrophil and Stella see John Holmes, ‘The Victorian Genetics of Astrophel and Stella’, Sidney Journal, 17.2 (1999), 41–51. ²⁷ Katherine Duncan-Jones rightly observes that ‘Our desire to know the truth behind Astrophil and Stella is ultimately a tribute to the energeia, or forcefulness, of Sidney’s rhetoric’: ‘Sidney, Stella, and Lady Rich’, in 1586, 170–92 (174). ²⁸ ‘An Elegie’, Jonson, 8.199, and quoted by Duncan-Jones (Sidney, 180); she goes on: ‘the reader of Sidney’s best love poetry is placed in a double bind. His poetic theory directs us to look for ‘‘forcibleness’’, or naturalism; yet the emotional naturalism frequently

202

Lyric After Sidney

that of the orator, a rhetorical performance necessary to achieve a goal.²⁹ As Ovid tells us explicitly, ‘the chief end of eloquence is love’; the lover should ‘write such things as present you would say; | Such words as from the heart may seem to move; | ’Tis wit enough, to make her think you love.’³⁰ Persuasive lovers in literary convention are so often insincere. In the Defence Sidney states that poetry is ‘an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mim¯esis —that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight’ (Defence, 79–80). The words most used by Sidney for poetical mimesis are forms of ‘feign’ (e.g. ‘feigning notable images of virtues, vices, or what else’, Defence, 81), which comes with ‘fiction’ from the Latin fingere, meaning to form, shape, or mould. Ben Jonson puts it clearly: ‘A poet is … a Maker, or a fainer: His Art, an Art of imitation, or faining’.³¹ If the poet’s feigning, like the lover’s, is also a sort of pretence, it is a very thorough one, with a resolutely didactic, rather than seductive, intent. But in the area of love poetry the two sorts of feigning overlap. So, in As You Like It: Audrey I do not know what ‘poetical’ is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing? Touchstone No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign.³²

In the revised Arcadia, Pyrocles is defending his lovelorn moping to an uncomprehending Musidorus; he praises the solitary life and Arcadia, and Musidorus scoffs: But I think you will make me see, that the vigor of your witte can shew it selfe in any subject: or els you feede sometimes your solitarines with the conceites of the Poets, whose liberall pennes can as easilie travaile over mountaines, as molehils: and so like wel disposed men, set up every thing to the highest note; especially, when they put such words in the mouths of one of these fantasticall mind-infected people, that children and Musitians cal Lovers. (F6v/53) achieved may testify only to Sidney’s brilliant mastery of the arts of persuasion, not to any real-life experience’ (181). On rhetoric and simulation in Astrophil and Stella cf. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995), esp. 102–4, and Jacqueline T. Miller, ‘The Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth’, Criticism, 43 (2001), 407–21. ²⁹ Sidney’s reference points here include Horace’s si vis me flere, Ars Poetica, 102–3, and Quintilian on ethos, Institutio oratoria, 6.2.27. ³⁰ Ars Amatoria, 1.459–68, in Dryden’s translation. ³¹ Discoveries, 2346–7, in Jonson, 8.635. ³² 3.3.17–22, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

Lyric After Sidney

203

Pyrocles is knocked sideways by this; his eyes plead guilty: ‘And alas, saide he, deare cosin, what if I be not so much the Poet (the freedome of whose penne canne exercise it selfe in any thing) as even that miserable subject of his conning, whereof you speake?’ (F7r/54). Pyrocles is saying that his emotions and speech may be not rhetorical, but the thing itself. To us, though, he seems to be saying: what if I am not real but scripted by Sidney? what if I am not writing but written? This is Astrophil’s dilemma too: for he is Sidney’s feigned image of a lover who claims not to be feigning. Sidney presents poetry in the Defence as the creating of another nature, whereas history and philosophy must copy only what exists in nature. Astrophil insists that he does not have to create but only has to copy, and yet he is copying Sidney’s creation: in Stella’s face I reed, What Love and Beautie be, then all my deed But Copying is, what in her Nature writes. (AS 3.12–14)

The sincerity of the lover will always be ambiguous because the words and gestures that prove love can be rhetorically simulated, because lovers and beloveds can be created in fiction, because the language of love is the language of poets. It might then seem impossible to persuade both within the fiction and with the fiction: a lover who attempts to prove his love may ring less true than one who acknowledges that his love may on some level be feigned.³³ These problems affect the feigned lovers Astrophil and Stella. Astrophil cannot be sure of Stella’s love in song ix: No, she hates me, wellaway, Faining love, somewhat to please me: For she knowes, if she display All her hate, death soon would seaze me, And of hideous torments ease me. (41–5)

And yet, in the very next sonnet, he believes what he sees and hears when he is forced to part from her: ³³ Michael R. G. Spiller in The Development of the Sonnet (London and New York, 1992) draws attention to the presence of this paradox in AS 1, where the opening line ‘Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show’ puns on ‘and feigning verse … ’ (116).

204

Lyric After Sidney Alas I found, that she with me did smart, I saw that teares did in her eyes appeare; I saw that sighes her sweetest lips did part, And her sad words my sadded sence did heare. For me, I wept to see pearles scattered so, I sighd her sighes, and wailed for her wo, Yet swam in joy, such love in her was seene. (87.5–11)

But even sighs and tears can be feigned, as Astrophil’s words acknowledge without him realizing it: Oft with true sighes, oft with uncalled teares, Now with slow words, now with dumbe eloquence I Stella’s eyes assayll, invade her eares … (61.1–3)

These sighs and tears seem to be a matter of choice, and even his silence is ‘eloquence’, is rhetorical. How, then, is Astrophil to interpret the signs of love that he sees? And how is he to prove that his emotions are real, to Stella, and to us?³⁴ One way in which Sidney plays with the possibilities of fiction within his fiction is by reference to Petrarchism. Sidney, ‘our English Petrarke’,³⁵ was one of the first English poets to read Petrarch and absorb him thoroughly.³⁶ Wyatt and Surrey had imitated Petrarch, and Surrey had stabilized an English sonnet form that was to be favoured by Daniel, Drayton, and Shakespeare. But Sidney saw that there was much more to learn from Petrarch and his continental imitators than that a poem could be 14 lines long and employ oxymoron and hyperbole. For a start, Petrarch writes a sequence of sonnets. They are not held within a tight narrative frame; in fact Petrarch talks of them as ‘scattered rhymes’ (‘rime sparse’, Canzoniere, 1.1). But they do sketch the history of his love for Laura, and clearly mark the time before and after her death. Sidney therefore gives his sequence a clear outline plot, from ³⁴ Cf. Anne Ferry, in The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago and London, 1983). Ferry shows how in Astrophil and Stella Sidney creates ‘new uses of language for portraying inward experience in a new kind of poetry’ (128) and that divisions ‘between inward states and their literary portrayal’ (135) are a major concern. ³⁵ Harington, Orlando Furioso (1591), L4v ³⁶ On Sidney and Petrarch see David Kalstone, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and ‘‘Poore Petrarchs Long Deceased Woes’’’, JEGP, 63 (1964), 21–32, and his Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations.

Lyric After Sidney

205

the one-sided love of Astrophil for Stella, via a stolen kiss, to mutual love, and finally to the resignation of that love. Second, Petrarch’s sequence of sonnets is interspersed with canzoni, songs in different forms and of different lengths, with their own register, tone, and linguistic conventions. Sidney follows this by interspersing eleven songs amongst his 108 sonnets. And the sequence was, like Petrarch’s, also marked by a numerical structure.³⁷ Third, Sidney experiments with the sonnet form itself, trying out different rhyme configurations, and longer lines. Fourth, he recognizes the value of Petrarch’s linguistic and rhetorical conventions, his lover’s lexicon. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he imitates Petrarch in giving his beloved a name, and in claiming that she is real.³⁸ The sonnet form offers a desired discipline that the poet needs, as if emotions contained tightly within form are more powerful than raw and untamed passion. Similarly, all that Sidney learns from Petrarch is held up both as an example and as a constraint to be kicked against. In Astrophil and Stella, the first sonnet sequence in English, Sidney behaves as though the genre is already tired. So even twenty years after it was printed, and after the sequences of Daniel, Drayton, Spenser, and Shakespeare had all appeared, Sidney’s still seemed in many ways the most modern. This effect is most evident in those sonnets about other sonnets: Some Lovers speake when they their Muses entertaine, Of hopes begot by feare, of wot not what desires: Of force of heav’nly beames, infusing hellish paine: Of loving deaths, deare wounds, faire stormes and freesing fires … To some a sweetest plaint, a sweetest stile affords, While teares powre out his inke, and sighs breathe out his words: ³⁷ Sidney’s 108 sonnets for Penelope’s 108 suitors; Petrarch’s 366 poems. On the structure of sequences see Carol Thomas Neely, ‘The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences’, ELH, 45 (1978), 359–89. On numerical structure and its numerological implications in Astrophil and Stella see Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970), 175–80, Thomas P. Roche, Jr, ‘Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), 139–91, and Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989), and Tom W. N. Parker, Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford, 1998). ³⁸ Petrarch and Petrarchan poetry were also mediated for Sidney and others through Italian, Spanish, and French imitators. One can, for instance, find many moments in Ronsard’s love sonnets that look like Sidney might have read them. On Sidney and French poetry see Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1978). On Sidney and continental Petrarchism see Ferry, 124–5.

206

Lyric After Sidney His paper, pale dispaire, and paine his pen doth move. I can speake what I feele, and feele as much as they, But thinke that all the Map of my state I display, When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love. (AS 6.1–4; 9–14)

Nashe, we recall, talked of Sidney’s work as a ‘paper stage’.³⁹ Astrophil does not want to sound like a standard Petrarchan lover, or to allow any metaphorical exchange between loving and writing, for this would make his emotions seem to be no more than pen and ink, a part acted on a paper stage (lines 10–11). But there is a quiet defeat in the failure to avoid metaphor in the penultimate line of this sonnet. In this poem and throughout the sequence we get so much more than the trembling voice declaring his love; and because this is a text, we do not even get that in a literal sense: Astrophil is terminally unable simply to ‘speake what I feele’. Astrophil tells us that the mere Englishing of ‘poore Petrarch’s long deceased woes, | With new-borne sighes and denisend wit’ (15.7–8) betrays ‘a want of inward tuch’ (l. 10), that it is not the way to seem genuine, either to Stella or to posterity. These moments are reminiscent of Sidney’s criticisms of love poetry in the Defence. The poet is trying to convince himself, and us, that his love exists; to do this he must reject Petrarchan convention; and yet it is all he has, and all we are given: he can only define Stella, and his love, in opposition to it. Astrophil therefore oscillates throughout the sequence between Petrarchan eloquence and a dumb ineloquence of rejecting Petrarchism.⁴⁰ In the act of saying that his love is different, that it is real and not fictive, that it is not created by the conventional language of love poetry, Astrophil creates his love in the conventional language of love poetry. Sidney’s great trick is to fictionalize not only his beloved, but himself.⁴¹ All who follow give the beloved a name like Stella: so we have sonnets to Delia, Idea, Cynthia, Diana, Caelica, and so on. The ³⁹ Astrophel and Stella (1591), A3r. ⁴⁰ Cf. Kalstone, Sidney’s Poetry, 107 and 130, and for a full treatment see Dubrow, Echoes of Desire, 95–119; cf. Ferry 127 and n. 27 for Sidney’s familiarity with the convention of anti-Petrarchism in continental Petrarchan poetry. ⁴¹ On persona in Astrophil and Stella see ch. 5 of Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney and Heninger, Sidney and Spenser, 467–87. For an important reading of the foundational significance of Astrophil and Stella as a ‘nominative’ sequence, that is, one that ‘posit[s] and name[s] selves’ (14), see Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, N.J., 1991), esp. 80–108. ‘Somewhere between the standard-issue personae of some late sixteenth-century sequences and the uniqueness of

Lyric After Sidney

207

exceptions are Spenser, who writes to his wife, and Shakespeare, who names nobody (though it may seem to have been done for him in the publisher’s dedication to Mr W.H.). But in Astrophil and Stella, ‘the most carefully plotted and the most overtly dramatized of all the English sonnet sequences’,⁴² Sidney also makes the lover of the beloved not himself as poet, but a poet figure called Astrophil, and in this most of his successors neglected to follow him, in part at least because they had come to see Astrophil and Sidney as one and the same, the composite Barnes calls ‘Th’arcadian shepheard Astrophill’.⁴³ But Sidney’s sequence is always testing the gaps between fiction and reality, between Astrophil and Sidney, so that when Astrophil says ‘I am not I, pitie the tale of me’ (45.14) we do not know quite what to think, either about who speaks that line—Astrophil or Sidney—or about who it is spoken to—Stella, Penelope Rich, or us. The songs that break up the sonnet sequence contribute to the dramatization of Astrophil and Stella, observing the lovers as flesh and blood, not just as Petrarchan postures in a vacuum. They give the sequence two levels, two paces, two lexicons. Because the love affair can be described by the conventions of song lyric as well as of sonnet, it unfolds into three dimensions; the songs seem, as Roland Greene puts it, ‘closer to an unedited record’.⁴⁴ All this is only to say that Sidney’s fiction is highly persuasive. But this fictive success is itself absorbed into the sequence’s anxieties. Significantly, in one song late in the sequence, Astrophil tries to narrate himself in the third person, but fails when the emotions he recounts overcome him: Therewithall away she went, Leaving him so passion rent, With what she had done and spoken, That therewith my song is broken. (AS viii.101–4)

In Astrophil’s terms his emotions are too complex, his passion too real, for himself and Stella to be objectified and held stably within fiction. But this scenario also offers a commentary on the extent to which Sidney is the Sonnets as a subjective record,’ Greene argues, ‘Sidney’s characterological achievement stands as the model of its moment’ (64). ⁴² Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 166. ⁴³ Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), sonnet 95.2. On Sidney and Astrophil cf. Dubrow, 101. ⁴⁴ Post-Petrarchism, 91.

208

Lyric After Sidney

represented by the persona of Astrophil. Is the love stable and fictional, or does it leak out of fiction into life? We are all familiar with the proverb ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, the idea that ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind; | And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind’.⁴⁵ The deeper truth this reaches to is that, since love sees what it wants to see, the beloved is always in some way created by the lover, is always a product of fiction. The Neoplatonic account of love developed by Ficino and Castiglione, whereby love of the individual leads to love of an idea of beauty and ultimately to the divine origin of that idea itself, actually helps poets to articulate just this paradox, for as Sidney had taught them, the idea is what the poet must create. The anxiety of the sonnet is that poetry, like love, is necessarily fictive, that any attempt to write about love makes that love unreal, makes it literary. It is likely that in most cases the love of the sonneteers was unreal. But by drawing attention to the generic constraints, to the anxieties and limitations of love and of love poetry, paradoxically, they succeeded in creating a more convincing representation of love. If being in love is all about doubts about fiction and reality, about whether the love is real or fake, then the way to write love poems for an audience is to fill them with such doubts. It is hard then to answer the question: was Sidney really in love?

* * * As soon as Astrophil and Stella started to be read, in manuscript at first by a very select few, and then in print from 1591, it spawned a host of imitators.⁴⁶ First off the mark was Samuel Daniel, who learns many of Sidney’s lessons in his Delia, a first version of which was appended to the pirated Astrophel and Stella in 1591. Daniel, like Sidney, makes part of his drama the struggle to see the beloved through the mists of Petrarchism, to describe love in a tired vocabulary. For Daniel things are almost reversed. Finding himself writing a sonnet sequence, he must ask if this means that he is in love: If this be love, to drawe a weary breath, Painte on flowdes, till the shore, crye to th’ayre: With downward lookes, still reading on the earth; ⁴⁵ A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.1.234–5, in The Riverside Shakespeare. ⁴⁶ Arthur F. Marotti considers the effect of ‘the increased social prestige with which [Sidney, by being printed] invested printed lyric poetry’ in Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995), 228–38 (234).

Lyric After Sidney

209

The sad memorials of my loves despaire. If this be love, to warre against my soule, Lye downe to waile, rise up to sigh and grieve me: The never-resting stone of care to roule, Still to complaine my greifes, and none releive me. If this be love, to cloath me with darke thoughts, Haunting untroden pathes to waile apart; My pleasures horror, Musique tragicke notes, Teares in my eyes, and sorrowe at my hart. If this be love, to live a living death; O then love I, and drawe this weary breath.⁴⁷

This topos is revisited in a direct allusion by one of the anonymous poets (they include the Sidney of the as yet unprinted Certain Sonnets) who supplement the second edition of Constable’s Diana in 1595 (decade 6, poem 2). And it is given its frankest treatment in the opening poem of Giles Fletcher’s Licia (1593), where the poet wishes to become not a lover but a poet, and since only Venus is prepared to help, the result is that ‘nowe of love, must needes be all my song’ (l. 14). Daniel reaches directly for the mythic archetype of love as art and fiction, Pygmalion. As Pygmalion works in stone, so Daniel works on the flint heart of his beloved, trying to make her correspond to ‘The fayrest forme’ that he has ‘figured on the table of my harte’: And still I toile, to chaunge the marble brest Of her, whose sweetest grace I doe adore: Yet cannot finde her breathe unto my rest, Hard is her hart and woe is me therefore. (13.9–12)

Whereas Pygmalion’s image came to life, Daniel’s will not. The poem should be an allegory about the beloved’s lack of interest, but it is hard not to think that Daniel is closer to Pygmalion than that—that his beloved is a fiction (Delia, it is often said, is an anagram of ideal and Delian of Daniel: Delia is Daniel’s idea). Others follow Daniel in this development of the painterly and writerly metaphors of Astrophil and Stella. Daniel’s passions are ‘limnd’, he ‘depaynt[s] my sorrowes’ (4.5–6), he has ‘a brow with cares caracters painted’ (15.5). Delia, and the reader, can therefore ‘Reade in my face, a volume of despayres’ (39.1). The leaves of Spenser’s poems enable his beloved to ‘reade the ⁴⁷ Sonnet 9 in the 1592 text presented by Sprague in Daniel, Poems. Daniel is perhaps revisiting Canzoniere, 212 and 224 here.

210

Lyric After Sidney

sorrowes of my dying spright, | written with tears in harts close bleeding book’;⁴⁸ no painterly art is able to express ‘the life … indeed’ of her face (17.14), and Spenser is a blacksmith trying to soften her hard heart (32). One anonymous poet ‘seeke[s] in verse to carve thee out’; another poet asks us to ‘Compare me to Pygmalion’, because ‘The shadow only is to me alotted’ and not the substance.⁴⁹ Drayton ‘can reade a story of my woe’ because his ‘Idea’ has taught him ‘the Alphabet of love’; but then it is ‘the story of my wo’ that he also wants ‘Idea’ to read in his poems.⁵⁰ An anonymous poet in Constable’s collection insists that he is not a type but the real thing, and yet the metaphors of writing connect him back to his textual condition: I am no modell figure, or signe of care, but his eternall harts consuming essence, in whom griefes comentaries written are, drawing grosse passion into pure quintessence. (Diana (1595), decade 5, poem 6.1–4)

To whom does the possessive pronoun refer? Is it ‘care’ personified? Or is it the ‘he’ that loves and writes? This poem starts to sound like the voice of the text in the hands of the beloved discussing the lover on whose behalf it acts: Within thine armes sad Eligies I sing, unto thine eyes a true hart love torne lay I, thou smell’st from me the savours sorrowes bring, my teares to tast[,] my trueth to touch display I. (9–12)

William Alexander writes about the Greek artist who in order to paint Venus formed an idea of beauty in his mind, and says that his own ‘Aurora’ would have excelled that idea, and turned the artist into another Pygmalion.⁵¹ Again, whereas some poets form ideas to fall in love with, Aurora is ‘more admir’d then all that Poets fain’d’ (70.8). We, of course, wonder if all this means that Aurora is an idea herself. The sonneteers can only make claims about the reality of their love and the existence of their beloved in relation to a tradition that is never ⁴⁸ Amoretti (1595), in Shorter Poems, 1.7–8. ⁴⁹ In Henry Constable, Diana (1595), decade 6, sonnet 3.9; Bartholomew Griffin, Fidessa (1596), 25.1–3. ⁵⁰ Michael Drayton, Ideas Mirrour (1594), 11.14, 1; 1.1. ⁵¹ Aurora (1604), 3.

Lyric After Sidney

211

clear on this count. Was even Petrarch’s Laura a phantasm? And what, then, does it mean to say ‘But though that Laura better limned bee, | Suffice, thou shalt be lov’d as well as shee’ (Daniel, Delia, 35.13–14). Constable defends his use of Petrarchan hyperbole; he was flattering the sun when he compared his mistress to it: ‘Witnes mine eies I saie the truth in this: | they have seene thee, and know that so it is’.⁵² We who have seen neither Diana nor Constable’s eyes, and are the real addressees of this poem, are not much helped to belief by it: claiming to be literal is just another trope. Drayton, similarly, responds to charges that ‘(as Poets doe) I use to fayne’ with circular logic: It pleaseth me if I my plaints rehearse, And in my lynes if shee my love may see. I prove my verse autentique still in thys, Who writes my Mistres praise, can never write amisse. (Ideas Mirrour, 28.11–14)

And Daniel rejects the fiction of painting ‘shadowes in imaginary lines’ (Delia, 46.3): But I must sing of thee[,] and those faire eyes, Autentique shall my verse in time to come, When yet th’unborne shall say, loe where she lyes, Whose beautie made him speake that els was dombe. (5–8)

Are the ‘faire eyes’ the subject of the verb ‘Autentique’? How does this work when the only evidence available for posterity is textual? Delia ‘lyes’ in Daniel’s verse, so its existence is the proof of hers, and her existence is the proof of its authenticity. Sidney’s heirs imitate particular moments in Astrophil and Stella: the night poem (AS 99) is one topos, revisited by Barnes (Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 83) and revised into a sort of wet dream by Griffin (Fidessa, 14);⁵³ another is the third person song of AS viii, which forms the basis of such poems as Barnes’s ode 8, ‘In a shadie grove of myrtle’ (given a happy ending that turns out to have been a dream). Drayton plays skilfully with Sidney’s poems about originality, quoting AS 74 with ironic approval in the last lines of his prefatory sonnet (‘Divine ⁵² Diana (1592), 13.13–14; poem 7 of decade 1 in the 1595 Diana. ⁵³ In some cases, of course, Sidney has his own models; e.g. here Canzoniere, 164 and 223.

212

Lyric After Sidney

Syr Phillip, I avouch thy writ, | I am no Pickpurse of anothers wit’), and retreading the poems about what other poets do (AS 6, 15, 74, etc.) only to remind us that the real love who makes fictionalizing and imitation of his precursors unnecessary is called ‘Idea’ (sonnet 18; cf. 20), and that she lives in a sequence with a beguiling Platonic puzzle for a title: Ideas Mirrour. Bartholomew Griffin obligingly provides a distillation of Astrophil’s problem that his language is never really his: for his poet-lover spouts Sidney at every turn. Sonnet 18 of Fidessa brings together the phraseology of absence from AS 60, 88, and 106. Sonnet 20 imitates AS 62 closely, but is so keen to patch together phrases from elsewhere in Sidney and others that it becomes almost incoherent. Sidney ends: Alas, if this the only mettall be Of Love, new-coin’d to helpe my beggery, Deare, love me not, that you may love me more. (AS 62.12–14)

Griffin gives the impression of ending with poise by borrowing a great punch-line, but really his poet-lover collapses in a breathless heap of quotations, from Daniel as well as Sidney: But what? this new coynd loue, love doth reprove. If this be love of which you make such store, Sweet, love me lesse, that you may love me more. (Fidessa, 20.12–14)

By the end of Griffin’s sequence this ontology of derivativeness is focused in an obsessive repetition of one phrase. AS 5 is cleverly built on the word ‘true’: ‘It is most true … ’ (1); ‘It is most true’ (5); ‘True, that true Beautie Vertue is indeed’ (9); ‘True’ (12); ‘True, and yet true that I must Stella love’ (14). Griffin’s final poem (62) strips Sidney’s poem down to a symbolic symploce, the trope of beginning and ending with repeated materials, because only with Sidney does Griffin’s love and Griffin’s song begin and end: Most true that I must faire Fidessa love, Most true that faire Fidessa cannot love. Most true that I doe feele the paines of love, Most true that I am captive unto love. Most true that I deluded am with love, Most true that I doe find the sleights of love. Most true that nothing can procure her love,

Lyric After Sidney

213

Most true that I must perish in my love. Most true that she contemnes the god of love, Most true that he is snared with her love. Most true that she would have me cease to love, Most true that she her selfe alone is Love. Most true that though she hated I would love, Most true that dearest life shall end with love.

And yet not true. Daniel also begins and ends with Sidney, in another way. His sequence might not have seen the light of day if Sidney’s had not been illicitly printed (and it is even suggested that Daniel may have been involved with that piracy).⁵⁴ And in its authorized form it ends with a Sidneian aposiopesis. ‘Beholde’, Daniel announces, ‘the message of my just complayning, | That shewes the world how much my griefe imported’ (50.3–4); but perhaps the world has heard more than is wise: ‘This is my state, and Delias hart is such; | I say no more, I feare I saide too much’ (13–14). Daniel’s sequence always belongs with the story of how what may have been Sidney’s private amours were betrayed into print. As Daniel complains to Sidney’s sister in the dedication to the authorized Delia of 1592: although I rather desired to keep in the private passions of my youth, from the multitude, as things utterd to my selfe, and consecrated to silence: yet seeing I was betraide by the indiscretion of a greedie Printer, and had some of my secrets bewraide to the world, uncorrected: doubting the like of the rest, I am forced to publish that which I never ment. (A2r)

And yet Daniel’s poems are always doubly addressed, sent to ‘Knock at that hard hart, beg till you have moov’d her; | And tell th’unkind, how deerely I have lov’d her’ (2.13–14) and yet ‘A Monument that whosoever reedes, | May justly praise, and blame my loveles Faire’ (2.7–8): his lover’s rhetoric, designed to move the beloved, is for another, more public audience, a sort of epideictic oratory, ‘praise’ and ‘blame’ of the beloved. Daniel repeatedly refers to the judgement of ‘the world’ (15.13) and yet includes in his poems a fiction of their private materiality; they are both printed and manuscript: O be not griev’d that these my papers should, Bewray unto the world howe faire thou art … Thou maist in after ages live esteem’d ⁵⁴ See Chapter 4, p. 129.

214

Lyric After Sidney Unburied in these lines reserv’d in purenes … Although my carefull accents never mov’d thee; Yet count it no disgrace that I have lov’d thee. (36.1–2, 9–10, 13–14)

The poems with this double address are there already in the unauthorized Astrophel and Stella of 1591; only Sonnet 36 is not, so its focusing of the question of the two audiences is a response to the awkward transition of Daniel’s Delia from manuscript to print. We note the echo of Daniel’s preface, and must wonder where it positions the poet–lover’s intentions in respect of his two audiences: outside the sequence his secrets are ‘bewraide to the world’ by the ‘greedie Printer’; inside the sequence the papers themselves ‘Bewray unto the world howe faire thou art’. Daniel’s aposiopetic sonnet 50 is in the 1591 text, but in a different position and a very different state, and lacking anything like the couplet that ends the sequence in 1592. Daniel shows us that questions about who is to read sonnets and be persuaded by them—a beloved, or a general readership—belong alongside questions about whether love sonnets are to be read in manuscript or in print. In Sidney’s case, as he knew, our belief in the reality of the love depicted is greatly affected by our judgement about the nature of the text—is it a manuscript? was it supposed to be printed? is illicit printing a necessary part of the illusion? Not all Elizabethan lyric was contained in sequences. Sidney’s Certain Sonnets offers a miscellany of different verses each with different occasions, different forms, and different ratios between fiction and actuality. That multiplicity in a collection by a single author relates itself to an earlier miscellany like ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’, or, as it was called when first printed in 1557, ‘Songes and Sonettes, written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other’. When we think about an Elizabethan lyric as the expression of an author, it is important to remember that it could be anthologized alongside the poems of others. And in such an anthology it might even be presented anonymously. Many of the poems of the Elizabethan and Jacobean sonneteers found their way into collections like Englands Helicon (1600), where they competed for attention with a large number of other voices. In the poetry of someone like Donne, whose Songs and Sonnets alludes to this tradition, the aim is to hide the poet amongst a stock of generic young male lovers, so that there are as many fictional voices as poems.⁵⁵ We are less tempted ⁵⁵ Both Astrophil and Stella and Certain Sonnets are referred to with ‘Songs and Sonnets’ style titles. The Bodleian manuscript of CS is titled ‘Certein lowse Sonnettes

Lyric After Sidney

215

to look to unlock the poet’s heart in such circumstances, but Donne is really on a continuum with the amorous sonneteers of the 1590s. Once Petrarchism has become common property, any lyric utterance becomes the sort of thing anyone else might say. As we have seen, Sidney makes this possibility, that self-expression is formulaic reiteration, an element from the start. Drayton plays with this element in perhaps the most self-conscious manner. Where the first printing of Ideas Mirrour had made the usual claims about the veracity of the love represented, the sequence, revised again and again, came in the end to be prefaced by a poem claiming that the sequence was not the conscientious and sincere adoration of the beloved it started as, but an ironic and modern medley of poses.⁵⁶ Even Spenser, whose sequence appears to ghost the successful wooing and wedding of a real-life woman, must struggle with the inherently fictionalizing force of amorous language: But when I pleade, she bids me play my part, and when I weep, she sayes teares are but water: and when I sigh, she sayes I know the art, and when I waile she turnes hir selfe to laughter. (Amoretti, 18.9–12)

He performs not on Nashe’s ‘paper stage’ but on the stage of the world: his theatre is supposed only to be metaphorical, a way of understanding life. But his mistress prefers not to see this: Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay, My love lyke the Spectator ydly sits beholding me that all the pageants play, disguysing diversly my troubled wits … Yet she beholding me with constant eye, delights not in my merth nor rues my smart: but when I laugh she mocks, and when I cry she laughes, and hardens evermore her hart. (54.1–4, 9–12)

His position as a lover forces him to seem like a performer. But only as long as his mistress hardens her heart. If she relents, as she will, the ‘tale and songes’, and Fraunce on the title page of The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) refers to AS as Sidney’s ‘Songs and Sonets’ (see Ringler, 135 and 163). ⁵⁶ Poems (1619), 2K2v.

216

Lyric After Sidney

of me’ can become life again, the performance can move the heart, and the need for verse and Petrarchan posturing will be gone. After all this we can ask again, was Sidney in love?⁵⁷ The poems that alluded to Penelope Rich’s name were omitted in editions before 1598. That is one reason why Spenser, in Astrophel, wrote as if Stella were Sidney’s wife. It is a fact that Sidney allowed his sonnet sequence to circulate far less widely in manuscript than he did the Arcadia. Perhaps he had no wish to be known as a writer of love poetry. Or perhaps it was because that love poetry was based in fact. The work may have been for Penelope Rich in some other way, a literary work for her, Sidney paying her the compliment of posing as a lover;⁵⁸ this is indeed how others wrote to their patronesses, including Sidney’s sister and Penelope herself. But the possibility that the reader might be persuaded that the poet of Astrophil and Stella is indeed in love finds some support from Spenser, who perhaps believes that he is following Sidney when he writes his sonnet sequence Amoretti as a tribute to his wife. Any and every sonnet sequence after Sidney is a reading of Sidney and a reading of love in the light of Sidney. Roland Barthes saw that the only way to write about love was to simulate the voice of a lover, and his account of the method of Fragments d’un discours amoureux takes us very close to the rationale of the sonnet sequence: ‘The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation, and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I , in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis. What is proposed, then, is a portrait—but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.’⁵⁹ Barthes’ work itself has the character of a sonnet sequence, a series of short chapters in an order that confuses narrative, representing any number of voices, and purporting to represent all voices. It is about the way lovers behave, the things they say, the psychological, linguistic, and explicitly literary conventions we all share ⁵⁷ Biographical evidence is surveyed in Jack Stillinger, ‘The Biographical Problem of Astrophel and Stella’, JEGP, 59 (1960), 617–39 and Ringler, 435–47. Contributions to the debate about the relevance of Sidney’s biography to his sonnet sequence are listed in Robert Montgomery, Symmetry and Sense, 2 n. 1. Some more recent views are summarized by Berry, 225 n. 7. ⁵⁸ This is suggested by Stillinger and taken up by Katherine Duncan-Jones in ‘Sidney, Stella, and Lady Rich’, 171 and Sidney, 246. See Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet, ch. 7, esp. 106–7 for a more traditionally biographical reading. ⁵⁹ A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1990), 3.

Lyric After Sidney

217

in. It meditates on the common experience that the only reality is not the beloved but the being in love. Because ‘A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world’ (131), any lover acts according to type, recognizes the loves about which he or she reads, and writes about love in a way that others will recognize. To love is to take a role, and there is nothing that can be done or said that has not been done or said many times before. The rhetoric of love controls the lover, and not the other way round: What obstructs amorous writing is the illusion of expressivity: as a writer, or assuming myself to be one, I continue to fool myself as to the effects of language: I do not know that the word ‘suffering’ expresses no suffering … Someone would have to teach me that one cannot write without burying ‘sincerity’ … To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not —this is the beginning of writing. (98; 100)

Sidney knows this and in Astrophil creates a persona who does not. Despite the skeleton of plot on which Sidney builds his sequence there is no way out for Astrophil because he is a fictional lover: ‘All the solutions I imagine are internal to the amorous system’ (Barthes, 143); ‘I myself cannot (as an enamoured subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative’ (101). That is what Sidney’s successors did. The end of Astrophil and Stella, in a subtler version of the impasse Griffin so paradigmatically defines, is suspended without possibility of resolution, stuck with an oxymoron that represents the larger synoeciosis or expanded paradox that contains the whole work: So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevaile, That in my woes for thee thou art my joy, And in my joyes for thee my only annoy. (108.12–14)⁶⁰

⁶⁰ Cf. Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979), 109: ‘Astrophil is firmly held by the inescapable bonds of oxymoronic anguish … The final note is one of complete submission to romantic convention.’

218

Lyric After Sidney

But by dying, Sidney released Astrophil into the hands of his readers and imitators, who made the imagined death of Astrophil the end of his love: he dies in love and for love. Time and again, the lyric poets of the 1590s create a pastoral and amorous space in which Astrophil’s death is commemorated and serves either implicitly, or explicitly (as in Barnes’s ‘Canzon 2’), to license the amorous writing of his successors. Sonneteers after Sidney grapple with the over-familiarity of the lover’s discourse by aiming first of all to embrace it, and then to try to find a personal voice in its limitations; they follow Astrophil in this. That is certainly Shakespeare’s approach (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? …’). The printed title of Shakespeare’s sonnets was Shake-speares Sonnets. This makes no pretence to veiling facts with fictions: there are no names for beloved and lover. And yet it is naïve to believe, as many have done, that the Sonnets are autobiographical. This does not mean that Shakespeare is not on some level unlocking his heart, but that for him the fiction is the fact, the sonnets are his love. To look at it this way retrieves emotional sincerity from the trap of fictionality. The poet’s job is to persuade us to believe in what he writes of. The test of the authenticity of the sonnet sequence is then not whether it is fact, but whether it is true. The language and the experience of sonnet sequences are intended to lie somewhere between the typical and the unique. The sonnets, and the personalities within them, are archetypes struggling to be individuals, and individuals struggling to be archetypes. Sidney said that poetry produced notable images of virtues and vices, living archetypes for the reader to learn from. Moral purpose is seemingly lost in the sonnet sequence, but the Sidneian condition of readerly identification with character is preserved. Insofar as the lover’s discourse is directed at the beloved but heard by the reader, the reader identifies with the beloved, observing the lover, pitying or disdaining him, even loving him in return. But insofar as the lover is talking only to himself, shaping his own fictions, painting his hell as Sidney says, the reader has no choice but to inhabit his mind, to speak and think for him. This is possible because the lover’s rhetoric does not bring anything to pass, because it is his own language, his own fiction. And it is possible because that language is common, shared, impersonal enough that it is the language of the rest of us.⁶¹ ⁶¹ Cf. Hamilton, 83: ‘In [Sidney] the activities of lover and poet are one, with the result that personal experience becomes impersonal: instead of treating his love, the

Lyric After Sidney

219

Anxieties about fiction, verisimilitude, the possibility of higher truths lying in the particular, are the stuff of love. So love poetry is the perfect medium to work through these anxieties as they relate to poetry more generally. The lessons that are learned from Sidney are about the limits of fiction and poetic language, and about the tendency of poetry not to express fact but to create it in such a way that it can be recognized as the reader’s experience. These are lessons of great importance to the subsequent history of lyric poetry and lyric utterance.⁶² sonnets treat love itself ’. But Hamilton clings on to the idea that Sidney loved Penelope Rich, even if ‘The experience of love recorded in the sonnets is found only there and not in any separate personal experience’. ⁶² Cf. Greene, 108: ‘the Canzoniere and Astrophil and Stella are the fictions that make modern innovations in the post-Petrarchan sequence possible’.

7 Life After Sidney Fulke Greville For a generation after Sidney’s death, visitors to St Paul’s in search of a monument to England’s hero would find only a brief epitaph on a board hung from a pillar by his grave.¹ A metrically clumsy imitation of an epitaph by Du Bellay, its conceit is that ‘the noble Sidney’ is divided in ‘six parts’: for none will suppose, That a small heape of stones can Sydney enclose. His body hath England, for she it bred, Netherland his blood, in her defence shed: The Heavens have his soule, the Arts have his fame, All Souldiors the greefe, the World his good name.²

There is something both poignant and appropriate about this temporary memorial. In both its meaning and its material form the epitaph refuses to ‘enclose’ Sidney in his grave. The epitaph is not engraved in stone (epi-taphos) but is something like a manuscript text, more connected to present textuality and life than to the past. (One imagines that the epitaph must have needed renewing and replacing from time to time.) It makes Sidney a living and evolving monument, his memory cultivated in the places and by the people he affected and his fame dependent not on the longevity of marble but on the results of his actions and the reading of his works. ¹ See W. H. Bond, ‘The Epitaph of Sir Philip Sidney’, MLN, 58 (1943), 253–7 and Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1978), 60–2 and 252 n. 40. ² Text from John Eliot, Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), quoted in Prescott, 61.

Life After Sidney

221

Fulke Greville (1554–1628) had an ambivalent attitude to fame. Its promise and example could, as ‘mans eccho, both of wrong and right’,³ encourage virtue, but if pursued for its own sake it became a type of idolatry (Fame and Honour, 86.1), a false substitute for devotion to God. Greville saw himself as having a unique role as the guardian of Sidney’s fame, and as he grew old turned his mind to the job of setting Sidney’s monument on a more permanent footing. In 1615 Greville included in a letter to his associate Sir John Coke a description of a tomb he was planning for St Paul’s. It would replace Sidney’s temporary memorial with a double monument to Sidney and Greville, made of ‘Two daynty large stones of touch delicately forbished, borne up, one above an other, by 4 pillars of brass 3 foot and a half high and double guylt; the uppermost worthily his, the other myne’.⁴ Sidney is borne up by Greville; without Greville’s support, Sidney’s profile would be lower. Despite symbolizing Greville’s subservience, the monument also represents what is clear enough to us now: that we cannot see Sidney without Greville.⁵ Inscribed on a pillar would be a Latin epitaph, and Greville’s English translation of it. The former was of four verses, the latter of about sixteen. Neither survives, although about half of Greville’s (apparently in pentameter couplets) can be reconstructed from Coke’s lengthy criticism of it. What is clear from this is that the one poem in which Greville attempts in some way both to mourn and to resurrect Sidney is both paradoxical and obscure.⁶ It begins with fame’s ability ‘from the grave’ to ‘Revive those that no other lyfe can have’ and to present the dead as guides for the living, and offers a contemplation of the past and of Sidney that can find (what Coke calls) ‘sympathies of pure sparcks … betwene the spirits of the living and the dead’. But this pragmatic approach to fame and past example is, as in Greville’s An ³ An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, 26.2, in Bullough, vol. 1. ⁴ Joan Rees, ‘Fulke Greville’s Epitaph on Sidney’, RES, new ser., 19 (1968), 47–51; Norman K. Farmer, Jr, ‘Fulke Greville and Sir John Coke: An Exchange of Letters on a History Lecture and Certain Latin Verses on Sir Philip Sidney’, HLQ, 33 (1969–70), 217–36. Farmer transcribes the letters in full, but does not see that the lines and phrases quoted by Coke are pentameter, and argues wrongly that what we have lost is a Latin composition by Greville. Also discussed in Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554–1628: A Critical Biography (London, 1971), 22–5. ⁵ In ‘Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’, ch. 2 of The Friend (Chicago and London, 2003), Alan Bray discusses the planned monument in the context of the public rhetoric of male friendship in the period, noting the marital connotations of placing one tomb over the other (43). ⁶ As Rees observes, it ‘epitomizes the dualism of [Greville’s] whole thought’: ‘Epitaph’, 49.

222

Life After Sidney

Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, replaced by a rejection of fame and worldly values: immortality is not achieved by monuments; it is folly ‘By stones to seeke aeternitie againe’.⁷ The monument was never built.⁸ But neither was it really needed. As ‘Philophilippos’ puts it at the end of his account of Sidney’s life at the start of the 1655 edition of the Arcadia: ‘hee is his own Monument, whose memorie is eternized in his writings’ (C1r). And as the great Latin epigrammatist John Owen wrote, ‘Sidney’s body, but not his life, lies in the grave’.⁹ We should remember that Greville had once before presided over a significant failure to supply a monument, in the 1590 Arcadia when the epitaph for Argalus and Parthenia was simply a Shandyesque blank space in a frame, occupying fully two-thirds of a page in that edition’s quarto format. As we have seen, such a space could not be left empty by the Countess of Pembroke, but Greville seems to have been better able to appreciate the eloquence of silence, lack, and imperfection. If the 1590 Arcadia is indeed Greville’s idea of a monument for Sidney, perhaps finishing it was the last thing he wanted to do. For the rest of his life he continued to think about Sidney, about his relation to him, and about how best to present his friend to posterity. He both responded to Sidney’s example in his own life and writings, and intervened crucially to determine how that example would be presented. This effort kept Sidney alive for Greville, and kept his texts open: ‘I do ingenuously confess that it delights me to keep company with him even after death, esteeming his actions, words and conversation the daintiest treasure my mind could then lay up, or can at this day impart with our posterity.’¹⁰ And it meant that the past to which Sidney belonged could enjoy a fruitful relationship with the present Greville occupied and the future he imagined: a relationship sometimes of dialogue and juxtaposition, and sometimes of a more intimate overlapping or fusion. ⁷ Quotations from Greville’s poem are pieced together from Coke’s comments, Farmer, 222. ⁸ The tomb Greville settled for, and had already built in St Mary’s, Warwick when he died, is more eloquent for the brevity of its famous inscription: ‘  |     |     |       |   [the trophy of sin]’. See Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1971), 316–18. Bray juxtaposes the planned and the actual tomb eloquently: ‘The one was a statement for his own time and place; the other, if I may put it this way, was for us’ (59). ⁹ ‘Sidneii, in tumulo est, corpus non vita’, Epigrammatum … Liber Singulus (1606), no. 142. ¹⁰ Dedication, 71. Other manuscripts have ‘… it delights me to keep company with him so long as I can, even after his death …’.

Life After Sidney

223

* * * Greville and Sidney were school friends, as their fathers must have intended when they enrolled their sons at Shrewsbury School on the same day in late 1564.¹¹ In the opening passage of Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, the extended essay in which Greville presents his works simultaneously to his dead friend and to his own posthumous readers,¹² he explains how a kind of nostalgia and uneasiness about the present ‘cause me to retire my thoughts from free traffic with the world and rather seek comfortable ease or employment in the safe memory of dead men than disquiet in a doubtful conversation among the living; which I ingenuously confess to be one chief motive of dedicating these exercises of my youth to that worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed.’ Lest this seem self-indulgent, Greville explains that he no longer has ambitions for the present and the future, and so has nothing to gain by dedicating his works to living patrons; moreover, ‘besides this self respect of dedication, the debt I acknowledge to that gentleman is far greater; as with whom I shall ever account it honour to have been brought up’ (Dedication, 3). Greville tells us that he started to write poetry because his efforts to live the active life were thwarted by the Queen. If he was failing to follow Sidney’s example as a man of action, he could at least follow him as a poet: In which retired view, Sir Philip Sidney, that exact image of quiet and action (happily united in him, and seldom well divided in any), being ever in my eyes, made me think it no small degree of honour to imitate or tread in the steps of such a leader; so that to sail by his compass was shortly (as I said) one of the principal reasons I can allege which persuaded me to steal minutes of time from my daily services, and employ them in this kind of writing. (89)

The only action lies in the metaphors here, of footstep-following and sailing. For the rest of his life Greville failed to act, and struggled to find ways of connecting his writing to action—if not his then the actions of his readers. The ideal was plain enough: ‘Doinge and writinge being to each other, | As bodies be of their owne shadowes mother.’¹³ But instead ¹¹ See Warren Boutcher, ‘‘‘Rationall Knowledges’’ and ‘‘Knowledges … drenched in flesh and blood’’: Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon, and Institutions of Humane Learning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sidney Journal, 19 (2001), 11–40 (16–20). ¹² For an examination of this paradox see my ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, HLQ, 62 (2000), 203–31. ¹³ A Treatise of Monarchy, 488.5–6, in Remains.

224

Life After Sidney

of a continuous circulation of energies, a uniting ‘of quiet and action’, in Greville’s case the relationship between writing and action was stretched and the shadows lengthened. The body of action was Sidney, casting his shadow forward over the writings that Greville worked on between Sidney’s death in 1586 and his own in 1628. And in turn the body of those writings came to be regarded by the author as shadowing and motivating the doings not of his contemporaries but of only posthumous readers. Greville had tried to connect writing and action, most conspicuously by his participation in the elaborate ‘Fortress of Perfect Beauty’ entertainment of 1581, in which he and Sidney made spectacular entries as two of the four foster children of Desire. A direct intervention on the question of Elizabeth’s projected marriage to the French Duke of Anjou, the allegory of this piece, though diluted by too many contributions, tells the French that no one is to marry Elizabeth, that perfect beauty is unassailable. Two sonnets from the printed text of the entertainment are probably by Sidney (PP 4 and 5) and we must assume that both he and Greville played a large part in devising the piece. But the other literary projects that Sidney and Greville shared were not political actions, even if some of the texts they wrote had political meanings. We have the witness of Sidney’s poems OP 6 and 7 that Greville, with Edward Dyer, was Sidney’s closest literary friend and colleague, and these poems represent this literary relationship as a happy relief from life at court. Greville’s Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes, printed in 1633, announce on their title page that they were ‘written in his youth, and familiar exercise with Sir Philip Sidney’. It was of course common to associate literary writing with the youth of great men, since it went without saying that they came to know better. So Moffett’s Sidney and Walton’s Donne also write poetry as young men and quickly move on.¹⁴ In fact, we can only with confidence ascribe some of the poems in Caelica to the period before 1586; the plays and treatises are likely to be later. But the association of Greville’s writings with Sidney’s lifetime makes an important point about where Greville belongs. One can only speculate about why that point was not reinforced in print by prefixing Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney to his works, as about why when Greville discusses his works in the Dedication he refers only to the plays and the treatises, and not to Caelica, the sequence of love and devotional poems that most clearly engages Sidney’s own writings ¹⁴ See Nobilis, 74; and Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670), E3r-v.

Life After Sidney

225

in dialogue. But it remains clear that Greville considers that he owes a debt to Sidney that can never be repaid, and that devotion to Sidney’s memory connects Greville’s editing of the 1590 Arcadia, the writing and rewriting of his own poems and plays, and the complex performance that is the Dedication. Greville is never an imitator of Sidney’s style. One of the ways in which he can keep going the dialogue that began in Sidney’s lifetime is to keep writing in the voice with which he started. We can hear that voice—argumentative, moralizing, and complicated—in the margins of Astrophil and Stella: as Joan Rees suggests, when Astrophil responds to ‘Your words my friend (right healthfull caustiks)’ (AS 21.1), the friend sounds like Greville.¹⁵ Rees also draws our attention to the way Greville’s writings, because he revised them so extensively and over so many years, can be said to belong to no more narrow period than that of his adult life.¹⁶ We cannot, therefore, hope to derive from Greville’s writings a chronological account of his literary relationship to Sidney. At some points Greville’s writing reaches out directly to Sidney’s, as in a number of poems in Caelica. But what Greville imitates is more general: an attitude that places great moral value on literary writing; a pressing need to connect writing to readerly education and praxis;¹⁷ and a commitment to the political life pursued either through or alongside writing. There are of course subtle differences between the Sidney Greville venerates and the Sidney who emerges from The Defence of Poesy, but the two are not far apart. Sidney would probably have thought that Greville had lost sight of ‘delighting’ and ‘moving’ in the wish to teach that he indulges in the verse treatises and in the plays. And he might have wished that Greville had moved on from his preference for the six-line stanza that Sidney himself used only in his very first poems.¹⁸ But Greville is still the right person to oversee the publication of the revised Arcadia and our best guide to its more serious side. ¹⁵ Rees, Greville, 102. Cf. also the ‘Rubarb words’ responded to in AS 14. ¹⁶ Rees, Greville, x–xi. Cf. G. A. Wilkes, ‘The Sequence of the Writings of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke’, SP, 56 (1959), 489–503; Rebholz, Appendix I, 325–40. See also Rees, 207–12, and The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford, 1986), xxi–iv, xxix–xxx. ¹⁷ See, e.g., A Treatie of Humane Learning, 122, in Bullough, vol. 1. ¹⁸ Sidney uses the stanza ababcc 10 in the poems in the Ottley manuscript (from ?1577), in The Lady of May (1578), in a number of poems in the ‘old’ Arcadia, and in CS 19. An exception may be the lyric ‘O Lord, how vain are all our frail delights’ (AT 18b), which may be later.

226

Life After Sidney

Greville makes clear the differences he perceives between himself and Sidney. One we have already seen: while Sidney unites the active and contemplative lives, Greville is not a man of action. The other is a paradoxical companion: while Sidney writes fiction, Greville is more comfortable with reality. ‘For my own part,’ Greville tells us, ‘I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit’ (Dedication, 134). Sidney, as one of the ‘right poets’ described in The Defence of Poesy (Defence, 80), uses fiction to distil types of character and situation from which the reader can learn; he copies not what he sees in the world (‘images of life’) but the ideas in his mind (‘images of wit’). Greville, in Sidney’s terms, ‘is of them that deal with matters philosophical’, both ‘moral’ and ‘historical’ (Defence, 80). He writes history plays (Mustapha, Alaham, and the lost Antony and Cleopatra), in which examples from recent Turkish and from classical history are reconfigured to offer both edifying lessons about power to future readers and the possibility of topical interpretation. Both, according to Greville’s discussion of how his works may be interpreted, depend on readerly agency: he that will behold these acts upon their true stage, let him look on that stage whereon himself is an actor, even the state he lives in, and for every part he may perchance find a player, and for every line (it may be) an instance of life beyond the author’s intention or application, the vices of former ages being so like to these of this age as it will be easy to find out some affinity or resemblance between them … (Dedication, 135)

This pragmatic approach to history was clearly a part of Sidney’s own intellectual make-up. He read history with Gabriel Harvey in a specific and goal-oriented manner, and his brother Robert followed his detailed recommendations on how to put history reading to use.¹⁹ Greville is also a versifier of philosophy, in the treatises on war, human learning, fame and honour, monarchy, and religion that, he tells us, grew out of the sort of general philosophical discussions that Greville liked to put as the choruses of his plays. As a poet, Greville chooses to bind himself to ¹⁹ See Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘‘‘Studied for Action’’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78, and Duncan-Jones, 117–20. For Sidney’s letter to his brother Robert on studying history see Feuillerat, 130–3 and Major Works, 291–4, and for Robert’s response see Robert Shephard, ‘The Political Commonplace Books of Sir Robert Sidney’, Sidney Journal, 21.1 (2003), 1–30. On Sidney and history see also F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967) and ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 26 (1964), 608–17.

Life After Sidney

227

the historian’s ‘bare Was’ (Defence, 89) and to the philosopher’s ‘precept’ (84). He does not present this as a challenge to Sidney’s poetic, but rather as a difference forced on him by the limitations of his ‘creeping genius’. But in the passage immediately before the distinction between images of life and images of wit is drawn, Greville does find it necessary to defend Sidney’s practice: ‘his end in them was not vanishing pleasure alone, but moral images and examples, as directing threads, to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life’ (Dedication, 134). That he feels he must spell out the serious purpose of Sidney’s writings suggests that he did believe that the greater delight of fiction did not necessarily lead to teaching, but could just get in the way: like Plutarch, he believes that good reading requires the help of a good teacher.²⁰ The passages just mentioned come right at the end of the Dedication, but the main discussion of the Arcadia comes in its first chapter; it shows Greville speaking confidently of what he knows Sidney’s intentions to have been. Sidney’s ‘Arcadian romances live after him’ and show ‘the judicious reader how he may be nourished in the delicacy of his own judgement’ (Dedication, 8). For Sidney, poetry (that is, fiction) is the ‘first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges’ (Defence, 74). Greville, though, finds nourishment not for the young but for the ‘judicious’. He proceeds to give examples of the lessons that can be taken from the Arcadia—for example, that monarchs who ‘put off public action’ will ruin themselves and their states (Dedication, 8)—but finesses the question, clearly addressed in Sidney, of whether poetry teaches such things to those who do not already know them or simply offers lifelike examples to those who already have a right view of things: ‘To be short, the like and finer moralities offer themselves throughout that various and dainty work of his for sounder judgements to exercise their spirits in’ (10). Greville apologizes for the Arcadia by highlighting its unfinished status, but this incompletion is not the one we are more familiar with (that the revised Arcadia breaks off in Book III), but that of the ‘old’ Arcadia (or the 1593 composite Arcadia), the ending to which Greville has already praised for the examples it affords, especially through Euarchus. Sidney had pointed to the incompletion of the ‘old’ Arcadia at its end, and the editors of the 1593 Arcadia had expanded his list ²⁰ See Plutarch’s ‘How the Young Man Should Study Poetry’ (Moralia, 14E–37B), an important source for Sidney’s Defence.

228

Life After Sidney

of loose ends to include the matter new to the revised version. This, surprisingly, seems to be Greville’s reference point: if the infancy of these ideas, determining in the first generation, yield the ingenious reader such pleasant and profitable diversity both of flowers and fruits, let him conceive, if this excellent image-maker had lived to finish and bring to perfection this extraordinary frame of his own commonwealth—I mean the return of Basilius from his dreams of humour to the honour of his former estate, the marriages of the two sisters with the two excellent princes, their issue, the wars stirred up by Amphialus, his marriage with Helen, their successions, together with the incident magnificences, pomps of state, providences of councils in treaties of peace or alliance, summons of wars and orderly executions of their disorders—I say, what a large field an active, able spirit should have had to walk in, let the advised reader conceive with grief, especially if he please to take knowledge that in all these creatures of his making his intent and scope was to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life, and in them, first on the monarch’s part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of princes, change of government and laws, vicissitudes of sedition, faction, succession, confederacies, plantations, with all other errors or alterations in public affairs; then again, in the subject’s case, the state of favour, disfavour, prosperity, adversity, emulation, quarrel, undertaking, retiring, hospitality, travel and all other moods of private fortunes or misfortunes. In which traverses I know his purpose was to limn out such exact pictures of every posture in the mind that any man, being forced in the strains of this life to pass through any straits or latitudes of good or ill fortune, might (as in a glass) see how to set a good countenance upon all the discountenances of adversity, and a stay upon the exorbitant smilings of chance. (Dedication, 10–11)

It is worth quoting this passage at length because it shows the sort of slippages of reference that Greville’s dense and fluent prose encourages. Is the ‘active, able spirit’ the ideal reader, the only person who ought to be allowed to read and interpret the work, or is it the ideal author, a Sidney completing the Arcadia after 1586 and able to make sure that its lessons were properly developed and effectively communicated? Is Greville recalling the end Sidney himself projected for the revised Arcadia (‘I mean the return of Basilius …’), or is he letting his imagination run away with him? The Sidneian wordplay in ‘orderly executions of their disorders’ suggests that Greville is trying to think like Sidney, but the emphasis on statecraft is hardly an objective account of the Arcadia’s strengths, and may cover a wish that Sidney had done more with the opportunities for political analysis that his representation of

Life After Sidney

229

different countries and types of government afforded.²¹ In spite of his confidence in speaking of Sidney’s ‘intent and scope’ and what ‘I know his purpose was’, Greville’s account of Sidney’s lessons, the ‘precepts’ turned into ‘images of life’, tells us more about Greville’s own concerns. Indeed, the list of aspects of statecraft addressed (‘on the monarch’s part …’) matches quite neatly the subheadings of Greville’s own Treatise of Monarchy; the list of private situations (‘in the subject’s case’) about which the reader can learn sounds closer to the plots of Mustapha and Alaham than to that of the Arcadia; and when Greville summarizes the usefulness of Sidney’s fiction, the emphasis is not on enabling virtuous action, as Sidney would have it in the Defence, but on developing the sort of stoical attitude to fortune and misfortune that Greville’s own career had forced him to acquire. The work as Greville describes it has fictionalized Greville’s own ‘philosophy precepts’ and taught Greville how to live. The question of whether Sidney can teach the ignorant or only those who already know the answers returns to confound our reading of this passage. Has Sidney taught Greville what the lessons are, or has Greville, in retrospect as it were, taught Sidney? If we take this passage as a guide to how to read the Arcadia, we may read as Greville intended, but we may be far from Sidney’s own ‘intent’. When we discuss Sidney’s aims in revising the Arcadia, we tend to do so through Greville’s eyes. Richard Helgerson discovers a ‘conflict in [Sidney’s] own experience between introspective, literary retirement and the active life of political well-doing’ and this ‘conflict’ is seen to split the ‘old’ Arcadia apart. On this view, Sidney’s second thoughts, drawing on the theories he had developed in the Defence, made him attempt a more morally edifying work in the revised Arcadia, and his own judgement that he had failed (in these very Grevillean terms) might have led to its abrupt abandonment.²² We cannot be sure that Sidney believed what he wrote in The Defence of Poesy: he may have been convinced of the rightness of his theory and have felt that even his second attempt at the Arcadia fell well short of its ideal; or he may have had no such doubts. But it is worth insisting positively that, in comparison to the ‘old’ Arcadia, the revised Arcadia is really just bigger, better, and more fun. It does not solve the problem of the gap between Sidney’s theory and Sidney’s practice. And it is far from clear that it ²¹ See Introduction, p. xxx. ²² The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), 134, 127, 147.

230

Life After Sidney

even attempts to do so. Both Arcadias need Greville to make their moral purpose clear.²³ It suits Greville to place a further limit on the Arcadia’s ability to function didactically without mediation. As Sidney lay dying, ‘he then discovered not only the imperfection, but vanity, of these shadows, how daintily soever limned: as seeing that even beauty itself, in all earthly complexions, was more apt to allure men to evil than to fashion any goodness in them’ (Dedication, 11).²⁴ For this reason, like Virgil with his Aeneid, ‘he bequeathed no other legacy but the fire to this unpolished embryo’ (11).²⁵ Sidney’s suppression of the Arcadia can be set alongside Greville’s suppression of Astrophil and Stella, unmentioned in the Dedication as is its companion and interlocutor Caelica. Even in late 1586, when Greville is writing to Walsingham about printing Sidney’s works, prompted by plans for an unauthorized printing of a manuscript of the original Arcadia, those other works he goes on to recommend for printing are only the religiously edifying ones: ‘among divers other notable works, Monsieur du Plessis’ book against atheism … many other works, as Bartas his Semaine, forty of the Psalms translated into metre, each which require the care of his friends: not to amend, for I think that falls within the reach of no man living, but only to see to the paper and other common errors of mercenary printing’.²⁶ Greville did manage to edit Sidney’s Arcadia without amending it, but it is as an editor of Sidney the man that his influence on our reading of the Arcadia and Sidney’s other works is most felt. And it is the slippage from the example provided in the works (as edited by Greville) to the example provided in the man (as represented by Greville) that characterizes Greville’s approach to questions of reading and writing generally as well as to the discussion of his friend’s writings. This slippage ends the Dedication’s opening chapter: But the truth is, his end was not writing even while he wrote, nor his knowledge moulded for tables or schools, but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great; in which architectonical art he was such a master, with so commanding and yet equal ways among men, that wheresoever he went he ²³ Garrett makes the interesting suggestion that the Dedication was in part a response to the evident lack of moral purpose in works derived from the Arcadia by the likes of Markham and Day (12). ²⁴ Cf. Nobilis, 74, explaining Sidney’s transition from secular to sacred themes. ²⁵ Cf. John Owen, Epigrammatum Libri Tres (1607), 2.67, and Nobilis, 74. ²⁶ Woudhuysen, 416–17.

Life After Sidney

231

was beloved and obeyed: yea, into what action soever he came last at the first, he became first at the last … (12)

Greville raises his game here, reinforcing his point by the power of his periodic style. The passage is memorable because its rhetoric is simple—a pattern of pairings and contrasts stemming from Sidney’s combination of writing and action and from the relationships between Sidney and others, and between Sidney and Greville. The doublets emphasize these combinations, of like with like and of complementary opposites: ‘wit and understanding … himself and others … words or opinion … life and action … good and great’. Here, again, Sidney’s figures of speech inflect Greville’s language, and Greville’s duplications are capped by a very Sidneian wordplay: ‘yea, into what action soever he came last at the first, he became first at the last’. Sidney, like his rhetoric, is able to haunt Greville’s endings: Greville keeps coming back to his friend, to his pre-eminence, and to the relationship between his writings and his actions. Even when he has moved from his representation of Sidney’s works (in which Sidney still gets to speak for himself) to his representation of Sidney’s character (where Sidney only speaks through Greville), Sidney can make a claim on his friend and get the final word: he will always be ‘first at the last’. Greville first took responsibility for editing Sidney’s Arcadia, and only later for editing his life. That 1590 edition tends to be characterized simplistically and the role of Greville’s collaborators (probably Matthew Gwinne and John Florio) downplayed.²⁷ But the edition nevertheless does a number of very clear things for which we can make Greville accountable. It decides to leave the Arcadia unfinished, breaking off midsentence. An ending might have been supplied from a manuscript of the ‘old’ Arcadia, or even, if we believe Skretkowicz’s textual hypothesis, from the working copy in which ‘old’ became ‘new’; but Greville preferred to leave the work as a fragment. The text was divided into chapters, and tidied accordingly (Sidney’s ‘And so …’ frequently becoming ‘So …’ at the start of chapters). In each chapter the editors placed numbers against new events or themes, and witty head-notes pointed the reader to what was to come. At some places in the text, inverted commas were used to mark sententiae. And the eclogues, only two sets for each complete book, were assembled in an order claimed to be editorial (‘chosen and disposed as the over-seer thought best’, A4v). ²⁷ On Florio and Gwinne see Chapter 4 above.

232

Life After Sidney

The ingenuous editorial note that makes this clear also tells us that ‘The division and summing of the Chapters was not of Sir Philip Sidneis dooing, but adventured by the over-seer of the print, for the more ease of the Readers’ (A4v). The head-notes are often described as if they moralize the text just as Greville does in the Dedication,²⁸ but in fact they only rarely point to the offering of ideal examples, more usually going no further than an epithet licensed by the text (e.g. ‘that vertuously loved a most vicious man’, Book 2, chapter 10). Sidney himself does more in the text to emphasize the moral;²⁹ the head-notes tend simply to emphasize plot. And they employ a lexicographer’s vocabulary that is not Greville’s, may be Gwinne’s, and is probably Florio’s,³⁰ using words like ‘historiologie’ for ‘story’ (2.6, 2.17), ‘discourting’ (1.4) for ‘leaving court’, ‘pathologies’ (1.5) for ‘pathetic speeches’, and ‘monomachie’ for ‘single combat’ (2.19, 3.18). The head-notes do their best not simply to list events but to weave those lists into pleasing rhetorical patterns (e.g. ‘The sourse and course of his deaths-doome’, 2.23; ‘Philocleas il-taking Amphialus wel-meaning’, 3.12), using alliteration, assonance, paronomasia, antimetabole, and other rhetorical schemes. And they have the most fun when they can pattern themselves not on Sidney’s morality or teleology, but on his interlacing, interruptions, and incompletions: Philocleas narration broken of by Miso. Her old-wives tale, and ballad against Cupid. Their drawing cuts for tales. Mopsas tale of the old cut: cut of by the Ladies to returne to their stories. (2.14)

This determination to have fun while representing the course of the upcoming chapter is fittingly resolved in the very last chapter heading of all: The Combattants first breathing, reencounter, and (3.29)

It may be true that Greville’s rather mechanistic and practicallyoriented approach to the text lies behind the chapter divisions, but their tone seems to have got beyond his control. Perhaps closer to the ²⁸ See e.g. Buxton, 134. ²⁹ e.g. ‘a rare example of friendshippe in Musidorus’ (S7v/171); and what the 1590 chapter heading calls ‘The pitifull state, and storie of the Paphlagonian unkinde King’ (2.10, T6r) and the text itself ‘an adventure … worthy to be remembered for the unused examples therein, as well of true natural goodnes, as of wretched ungratefulnesse’ (T5v/179). ³⁰ Cf. Frances Yates, John Florio (Cambridge, 1934), 204–5.

Life After Sidney

233

Greville we find in the Dedication and in his own works is the practice of marking passages as sententiae with marginal double inverted commas (e.g. 2B7v/249: ‘we might well see, an evill minde in authoritie, dooth not onely folow the sway of the desires alreadie within it, but frames to it selfe new desires, not before thought of’).³¹ Greville is indeed a highly aphoristic poet, as the printing of his own works and certain details of his limited circulation in manuscript demonstrate.³² It is likely that he would have wished readers to find the aphorisms in the Arcadia, and to copy them into their commonplace books. But it is in the eclogues that he seems to intervene most surely. The approach in 1593 is not to leave anything out, but in the 1590 edition the temptation to save more of Sidney’s pastoral verse is, oddly perhaps, resisted. Perhaps Greville was unmoved by much of it, even though a fair sample of dialogues, monologues, serious poems, and humorous pieces remains. He is not prepared to lose the dialogues between Strephon and Klaius from the fourth eclogues of the ‘old’ Arcadia; one (OA 71) goes in the first eclogues and the other (OA 72) in the second. But he is happy to suppress the contributions of Philisides, converted from a shepherd with a place in the action in the original Arcadia to a shepherd knight encountered in one retrospective tale in the revision. Philisides was likely to have lost his position in the eclogues at Sidney’s hand, but the other posthumous editors, the Countess of Pembroke’s team in 1593, could not resist bringing him back in an appropriate tribute to his alter ego Sidney. Most importantly, Greville promotes from the third eclogues the beast fable OA 66. Originally spoken by Philisides, it must here be performed by an unnamed young shepherd. Critics have pounced on this editorial attention to Sidney’s one political poem as evidence of Greville’s promotion of a political reading of the Arcadia. This may be correct, but perhaps Greville thought that Sidney’s eccentric tribute to his teacher, ‘that reverend Languet (mentioned for honour’s sake in Sir Philip’s Arcadia’ (Dedication, 5–6), could not, ‘for honour’s sake’, be left out.³³ ³¹ On this practice see G. K. Hunter, ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), 171–88. Hunter includes in his discussion editions of the Arcadia (sententiae are marked in 1590, most of the markings fall out in 1593 and the rest thereafter, and the 1655 edition marks afresh) and Greville’s Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633): 175–6 and 186–7. ³² See ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, 211–13. ³³ On the beast fable see Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1996), esp. 265–80 and 287–94.

234

Life After Sidney

When first printed in 1651, Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney was given the title The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney.³⁴ Between them the titles encapsulate Greville’s oscillation between past and present concerns. On the one hand he addresses himself to the past, offering to Sidney the writings ‘which I inscribe to his memory as monuments of true affection between us, whereof, you see, death hath no power’ (Dedication, 86). On the other hand he makes his debt to Sidney a reason for presenting Sidney to future readers, ‘to the end that in the tribute I owe him our nation may see a sea-mark raised upon their native coast above the level of any private pharos abroad, and so, by a right meridian line of their own, learn to sail through the straits of true virtue into a calm and spacious ocean of human honour’ (4). As we have seen, it is in the opening chapter of the Dedication that Greville’s account of what can be learned from Sidney’s Arcadia ends with Sidney’s deathbed rejection of the work and Greville’s insistence that ‘his end was not writing even while he wrote’. This representation of the limits of writing explicitly leads to Greville’s effort in what follows not to explicate the Arcadia further but to explicate the man: if we return to the contrast between ‘images of life’ and ‘images of wit’, we can say that Greville prefers to teach by writing from the life than by writing about fiction. The life of Sidney that Greville provides intends to continue the power Sidney had in his lifetime to make people better by setting in words an accurate model drawn from the life, even if it is only a sketch, ‘to give the learned a scantling for drawing out the rest of his dimensions by proportion’ (76). For Greville, though, this project poses the same problem as teaching with the Arcadia. Art can too easily become self-involved, and can fail in its duty, as defined by Sidney, to provoke good deeds. The problem lies at the heart of A Treatie of Humane Learning: What thing a right line is, the learned know; But how availes that him, who in the right Of life, and manners doth desire to grow? What then are all these humane Arts, and lights,

For an argument that the prose in the 1590 eclogues accords with Sidney’s method of adapting his own material, and that the arrangement may therefore be his, see Sukanta Chaudhuri, ‘The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 39 (1988), 199–216. ³⁴ The work was dated 1652 but appeared in November 1651. See ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, 218.

Life After Sidney

235

But Seas of errors? In whose depths who sound, Of truth finde onely shadowes, and no ground.³⁵

Only by directing the arts to practical wisdom and practical outcomes do they have a point: For thus, these Arts passe, whence they came, to life, Circle not round in selfe-imagination, Begetting Lines upon an abstract wife, As children borne for idle contemplation; But in the practise of mans wisedome give, Meanes, for the Worlds inhabitants to live. (122)

Images of circles and lines become central to Greville’s sense of, respectively, self-involved inaction, and purposeful action. At the start of the Dedication Greville makes Sidney ‘a right meridian line’ pointing the reader to the ‘calm and spacious ocean of human honour’ (4) that avoids what in Humane Learning he calls ‘Seas of errors’. Greville can extrapolate from Sidney’s short life: ‘yet are there (even from these little centres of his) lines to be drawn not astronomical or imaginary, but real lineaments—such as infancy is of man’s estate—out of which nature often sparkleth brighter rays in some than ordinarily appear in the ripeness of many others’ (Dedication, 25). As the man can retrospectively be seen in the child, so Greville’s Sidney can be found in the Sidney who died young. And it is that death in particular in which ‘he showed the world—in a short progress to a long home—passing fair and well-drawn lines by the guide of which all pilgrims of this life may conduct themselves humbly into the haven of everlasting rest’ (76). We see in that last example how Sidney as the artist of his own life merges inevitably with Greville as his biographer. It is Sidney who ‘left an authentical precedent to after ages …’ (41) and who ‘was a true model of worth’ (21), but it is Greville who copies the model and communicates the precedent. In one episode the gap between the life and the model is pointed out by Sidney himself: William of Orange’s praise of him must not be passed on to Elizabeth, since ‘the Queen had the life itself daily attending her’ but William’s praise ‘could be no more (at the best) than a lively picture of that life, and so of far less credit and estimation with her’ (17). Greville’s language of Sidney as ideal model is as Platonizing ³⁵ A Treatie of Humane Learning, 34. Cf. Defence, 82.31, 96.2–3, and their common source in Seneca, Epistulae morales, 88.13.

236

Life After Sidney

as Sidney’s Defence, and we learn from that text to ask whether the ideal is something instantiated in the world and copied by the writer, or something in that writer’s mind that is created by being written: For indeed, if the question were whether it were better to have a particular act truly or falsely set down, there is no doubt which is to be chosen, no more than whether you had rather have Vespasian’s picture right as he was, or, at the painter’s pleasure, nothing resembling. But if the question be for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable the feigned Cyrus in Xenophon than the true Cyrus in Justin, and the feigned Aeneas in Virgil than the right Aeneas in Dares Phrygius … (Defence, 88)

Greville would insist that ‘all my deed | But Copying is, what in [him] Nature writes’ (AS 3.13–14) but we know from Sidney that effective teaching requires poetic licence: If the poet do his part aright, he will show you in Tantalus, Atreus, and such like, nothing that is not to be shunned; in Cyrus, Aeneas, Ulysses, each thing to be followed; where the historian, bound to tell things as things were, cannot be liberal (without he will be poetical) of a perfect pattern, but, as in Alexander or Scipio himself, show doings, some to be liked, some to be misliked. And then how will you discern what to follow but by your own discretion, which you had without reading Quintus Curtius? (Defence, 88)

It is often observed that the views on politics attributed to Sidney are infected by hindsight, and that the account of Elizabeth’s rule is shaped to offer parallels to that of James.³⁶ Greville is a ‘poetical’ historian, and this is clearest in the extended passages of prosopopoeia in which Sidney is resurrected and given a voice with which to survey the map of European affairs and make predictions.³⁷ Greville thus follows Herodotus ‘and all the rest’ in inventing ‘long orations put in the mouths of great kings and captains, which it is certain they never pronounced’ (Defence, 75). Sidney has become an ‘idea or fore-conceit’ (79) in Greville’s mind, a ‘perfect pattern’ (88) designed to inspire to ‘well-doing’ (83) readers who could never have met the man, for, as Greville makes clear, his works will only be read after his death, when they have ‘slept out my own time’ (Dedication, 132) and the reader can ‘receive this answer from a dead man’ (130). But we cannot ³⁶ See for example Joan Rees, ‘Past and Present in the Sixteenth Century: Elizabethan Double Vision’, Trivium, 20 (1985), 97–112. ³⁷ See especially Dedication, 46–71, the extended analysis of ‘our unbelieved Cassandra’ (68), and 84–5, the death-bed prophecy of the future of Anglo-Dutch relations.

Life After Sidney

237

say that Greville believed that the picture of Sidney he drew was not authentic. We can compare the method of Thomas Moffett in Nobilis and Lessus Lugubris. As a physician, Moffett thinks about life and death in necessarily physical terms. Sidney, resurrected by Moffett to provide an example to his nephew William Herbert, ‘Lives, prospers, flourishes, is vigorous indeed, in the mouths of all men!’: Truly that which gave to Sidney the title and aspect of man will not be burned by flames, washed away by streams, or consumed by worms; it is not hidden in an urn or tomb, but will deliver him to us, not—as ghosts are wont to be—distant and hardly to be seen, but as another Hippolytus coming back after the last rites have been celebrated, and dwelling daily in the eyes of courtiers and of all companions. (94)

For Moffett, the book about Sidney is an authentic substitute for the living body: ‘Therefore do you embrace, cherish, and imitate him … restored to his own limbs by the healing art and brought back, along with Hippolytus’ (95). But Greville is writing not in 1593 but in around 1610–14, and polishing the work in subsequent years. The Sidney he resurrects has had a longer afterlife in the memories of Greville and his contemporaries, and he is of necessity a changed man.

* * * Whether Sidney’s image is authentic or idealized, its use as an example would seem threatened by Greville’s theories of knowledge: Example is corrupt, precepts are mixt: All fleshlie knowledge frayle, and never fixt.³⁸

Greville insists in the Treatise of Religion and the Treatie of Humane Learning on the impermanence of man-made knowledge; the only fixed knowledge is what God’s elect find in their hearts. What is learnt in this life is infected by mediation through the senses and minds of fallen men. The answer is both to concentrate on practice rather than theory, and to recognize that mortal life is ultimately of little significance. In 1637 Joseph Hall recorded that Greville had once responded impatiently to a clever discourse by saying, ‘What is that to the Infinite? as secretly implying, that all our thoughts and discourse must be reduced thither; and that they faile of their ends, if they be any other where terminated’.³⁹ ³⁸ A Treatise of Religion, 2.5–6, in Remains. ³⁹ Richard A. McCabe, ‘Fulke Greville and Joseph Hall’, NQ, 226 (1981), 45–6. For a view that the whole of Caelica enacts this proposition see Germaine Warkentin,

238

Life After Sidney

Greville offers precepts for the reader’s commonplace book; he presents Sidney and Elizabeth as examples to posterity; but when he conceives of monuments or epitaphs they must simultaneously present the dead as examples to the living, and tell the living that life is vanity: You that seeke what Life is in Death, Now find it aire that once was breath. New names unknowne, old names gone: Till time end bodies, but soules none. Reader! then make time, while you be, But steppes to your Eternitie.⁴⁰

This key paradox runs through Greville’s writings. Since ‘the wisdome of the world, and [God’s], are two’ (Religion, 98.2), and we cannot all live, like the elect, ‘in the world, not of it’ (Humane Learning, 129.1), we must learn from the past and offer lessons to the future. But since we must lay more store on the afterlife than on our mortal life, a devotion to worldly wisdom is wrong. Sidney is dead, and without question in heaven. Is Greville’s attention better focused on the world or on heaven, on Sidney as an example to the world or on Sidney as a temporary refuge from it while Greville waits to meet his maker? Certainly Greville’s whole style and thought relaxes and clears when he walks the steps to eternity, in the suddenly measured feet that supplant the metrical inversions and grammatical compressions in that brief epitaph, or in the beautiful devotional lyrics that end Caelica, with their patient repeated refrains (98, 99, 109).⁴¹ When both in the world and of it, Greville is a writer who works through examples and analogies, always striving to take one thing and connect it to another, typically past and present, or past and future, Sidney and Greville, or Sidney and the reader.⁴² Analogies always ‘Greville’s Caelica and the Fullness of Time’, English Studies in Canada, 6 (1980), 398–408. ⁴⁰ Caelica, 82, in Bullough, vol. 1. In the Warwick manuscript this is followed by a blank page; under it Greville has written ‘this to (come?) after with the rest’ (Bullough, 1.275); Rees (Greville, 24) believes this ‘may represent an attempt to revise’ the epitaph criticized by Coke; Hilton Kelliher also makes this connection (‘The Warwick Manuscripts of Fulke Greville’, British Museum Quarterly, 34 (1970), 107–21 (112)); but Rebholz (338–9 n. 60) finds it ‘tenuous’, as the two poems are metrically different. ⁴¹ The best recent account of Greville and religion is Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), 297–308. ⁴² Cf. Richard Waswo, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville, Va., 1972), 90–7 (on Greville’s use of, in Puttenham’s term, similitude).

Life After Sidney

239

function dialogically; there is no twisting of one matrix to fit another. The plays and the Treatise of Monarchy depend for their force on the reader’s ability to detect the implied analogy or to construct his or her own. The Letter to an Honourable Lady, a text offering counsel to an unhappy wife, takes its analogy of the household as monarchy so far that the work quite explicitly has much to say about political as well as domestic obedience. This example shows Greville so interested in the analogue that its analysis becomes meaningful in its own right. His analogies are too complex to be tidy. Caelica 30, to take another example, constructs an analogy between post-republican Rome (ll. 1–8) and a tyrannical Myra (9–16), concluding: ‘Thus Rome and Myra acting many parts, | By often changes lost commanding arts’ (17–18). The political historian in Greville is far more interested in the decline of the Roman Empire than in love. We should not, therefore, expect the analogy to present a tidy paradigm to which the poet’s love for Myra will conform. The two octaves are constructed in parallel by the exact repetition of words, phrases, and rhymes, as if the proof of the analogy’s force is in the ability of each half to be bound within the same syntactic grid. Overdetermined in this way by poetic form, the analogy itself is underdetermined in meaning. This is a frequent feature of Greville’s analogies, of his many proverbs and parables. In Caelica we can find instances of all the kinds of comparison examined by the rhetoricians.⁴³ Caelica 30 delivers its comparison by historical example. For fable we can take Caelica 37, which parallels its tale of the boy who tricks the thief (lines 1–20) with the analogy of Cupid and the poet-lover (lines 21–60) to deliver the lesson ‘hope is untrue’. For simile we can look at the brilliant Caelica 39, a sonnet that builds the tower of Babel and loses understanding in the octave and then in the sestet draws the comparison (‘So …’), with the poet building towers in Caelica’s heart only to find that in this instance ‘she understands all men but me’. For the comparison by example ex poetis fabulis we can take 42, which sets up the analogy of Peleus and the protean Thetis for the lover’s attempt to fasten hold of Caelica. Greville cannot rest with that, of course. As Thetis had changed form in Peleus’ grasp, so Caelica and the lover mutate from one metamorphic myth to the next: the lover’s Gorgon head turning her heart to stone; then she a cloud to his Ixion; then a pool to his Narcissus. The poet then delivers the allegory before the lover, defeated, lets go. In these poetic analogies ⁴³ See for instance the Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.46.59–49.62, and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 5.11 (examples from poetic fictions, 5.11.17).

240

Life After Sidney

syllogistic structure is always loose, tending not to a proof but to a demonstration of the integrity and intrinsic interest of each half of the comparison. Greville’s meanings reach towards interpretive licence. A related feature is seen in the development of his rhetoric in Caelica from a tight use of correlative structures in the early sonnets (gradatio in 1 and correlative verse in 8, for example) to a rhetoric that maps itself on to God and eternity, as in the celebrated lyrics 98 (‘Wrapt up, O Lord, in mans degeneration’) and 99 (‘Downe in the depth of mine iniquity’). Self-interpretation extends beyond itself, reaching for something more: ‘Even there appears this saving God of mine’ (99). It is usually assumed that the order of the poems in Caelica tells us the order in which they were written,⁴⁴ that the journey from love to devotion that the sequence describes, and its movement from worldliness to otherworldliness, reflects the course of Greville’s long life. It is just as likely that this critical insight is intended by Greville and that it is the sort of narrative that he might have decided his sequence ought to evoke before he had written any of its poems.⁴⁵ One Caelica poem, 66, seems to represent such a narrative as a habitual, and single, movement of thought: Caelica, you (whose requests commandments be) Advise me to delight my minde with books, The Glasse where Art doth to posterity, Shew nature naked unto him that looks, Enriching us, shortning the wayes of wit, Which with experience else deare buyeth it. (1–6)

No, says the poet-lover, ‘Books be of men, men but in clouds doe see, | Of whose embracements Centaures gotten be’ (11–12). The world around him teaches him more ‘than can dead Books or Arts; | Which at the second hand deliver forth, | Of few mens heads, strange rules for all mens worth’ (22–4). He then demonstrates a—for Greville—habitual movement to a demolition of the grounds of any knowledge: ‘For till the inward moulds be truly plac’d, | All is made crooked that in them we cast’ (35–6): What then need half-fast helps of erring wit, Methods, or books of vaine humanity? ⁴⁴ See Bullough, 1.35; Rebholz, 325; Rees, Greville, 79; and cf. Cummings, 301. ⁴⁵ Cf. Rees, Greville, 79, and May, 89; May quite convincingly disposes of the chronological theory (91).

Life After Sidney

241

Which dazell truth, by representing it, And so entayle clouds to posterity. Since outward wisdome springs from truth within, Which all men feele, or heare, before they sinne. (43–end)

The way the argument of this poem completely escapes its initial address to Caelica imitates the way Greville’s thought fractures his amorous sequence. The poem slides from love-dialogue to the world of practical wisdom of Greville’s treatises, but this world is shown, as it is in Humane Learning, as one in which Greville is in danger of arguing himself out of a job. There is some irony; the answer to Caelica is a distinctly bookish abjuration of books. But the poem is more troubled than that. If books only ‘dazell truth, by representing it, | And so entayle clouds to posterity’ why would Greville write? Caelica’s argument is of course one of Greville’s views, so this particular love poem mimics the dialogue that we see throughout Greville’s works, and between them—a dialogue between the positive, practical wisdom account, and the negative argument that traps knowledge in subjectivity and finds the only truth in the innate knowledge of God’s elect. The single poem enacts the journey of Greville’s writing. It is this quality of reaching forward that takes Greville’s mind both to the afterlife of eternity, and to the afterlife of posterity; a quality of reaching forward that makes Greville’s ideal reader someone he will never know and his best reader his dead friend. Because Greville is always looking towards an afterlife, the works as printed posthumously—and the meanings they were found to contain—do not cease to be expressions of his intention. His writings require that unknown reader both to interpret them and to find them recalcitrant. Entailing clouds to posterity may be the best way to be read. And because those writings are dedicated to Sidney, and Sidney lives on in Greville’s mind, they also remain to an extent unreadable to anyone else. It is in this context that Greville sets Sidney down on paper, isolates and purifies those ideal and exemplary aspects of his character and actions, and quietly enriches the connections between the political scene in the 1580s and that of the seventeenth century, thereby improving Sidney’s ability to speak meaningfully to later readers. And it is in this context that Greville keeps coming back to Sidney for his own sake, in a poetic time and space that the two friends will always share and to which no one else has access.

242

Life After Sidney

* * * When Greville engages Sidney in dialogue after his friend’s death, do we imagine that he talks to the man he knew, or to a character who has evolved in Greville’s mind? Can apostrophe address the dead or only their echo? Does prosopopoeia raise the dead or just a faint and distorted shadow? Does the act of remembering diminish or increase the space between the idea remembered and the actuality lost? Any response to Sidney changes him, but Greville’s responses have had an especially important impact, from the celebrated water bottle story to the moral and political account of the Arcadia. Are the ‘ideas’, or ideal models, of Sidney and his works authentic or misleading? We can offer two different explanations of what Greville does in the Dedication. The first goes like this. He puts on paper the Sidney he knew, objectively and accurately, giving the later reader an authentic likeness. Sidney’s opinions are made available to that later reader and the reader can ponder their relevance both to Greville’s present, and to his or her own present. The events Sidney lived through offer analogies to subsequent events; his character and actions offer a guide to how to live the virtuous life, and if approached with a historicist consciousness can be found relevant to any subsequent social framework; his writings, similarly, offer lessons grounded in a solid grasp of human nature and of social and political dynamics. This Sidney and his works thus presented may be engaged in an equal dialogue, by Greville and his readers; each interlocutor will necessarily be modified by such a dialogue to some extent, but will also maintain a kind of integrity and distance. We might call this a diachronic model of how Greville interacts with the dead Sidney. The second explanation we can call a synchronic model, and we might understand that term in relation to the use of the term ‘synchronism’ by art historians to describe the simultaneous appearance in one place (a picture) of events that belong to different times.⁴⁶ It goes like this. Sidney never dies for Greville, but lives on in his mind, evolving and mutating as Greville’s life and intellect move on and develop. The events of Sidney’s life are always present for Greville, overlaid on to his own present. This Sidney always stands for certain things, but will also adapt to the demands of Greville’s changing circumstances, precisely so that what he stands for can remain pertinent. As Greville mourns and ⁴⁶ OED2, ‘synchronism’, 2.c.(b). See, e.g., the famous funeral portrait of Sir Henry Unton.

Life After Sidney

243

apotheosizes Sidney he continues to work on his own literary writings, starting new projects and revising old works, so that by his death each work has accrued many layers of conception, composition, and multiple revision, and stands in a complex relation to the friend who inspired Greville’s writing in the first place. The Sidney to whom Greville offers these works and whom Greville resurrects in the Dedication is a constant presence and has been Greville’s constant companion. From Greville’s point of view, he has always been there and is always the same. From ours, his development has proceeded in tandem with Greville’s; he is not unrecognizable, but he is not the man who died in 1586. A dialogue between a later reader and this Sidney is also, therefore, a dialogue with Greville; a dialogue between Greville and this Sidney is a sort of monologue. It is useful to distinguish these two models, though aspects of both are always in evidence in Greville’s dealings with Sidney and his works. When Greville describes Sidney’s political environment and offers analogies for the present, his approach is of course diachronic, but insofar as that description is skewed so that it has more to say about the present, and those analogies are made more striking, his approach belongs to the synchronic end of the spectrum—it collapses differences of time in order to bring two things together in space. Again, when Greville writes more personally of himself or his friend his memories may be more genuine, but then their importance to Greville may mean that they cannot be left in the past but live in his present instead, subject to repeated slight modification. If we imagine how things would work in a poem that responds to Sidney’s example it will help clarify what all this means. The poem might be a Jacobean response to one of Sidney’s poems, or an Elizabethan work that Sidney might once have read in a previous draft. It would need to register its distance from Sidney in order to start meaning; in the first example that distance would be of space and time; in the second example it would be of space initially and then of time too as Greville kept the poem open and revised it, and as his interpretation of Sidney’s poem also evolved. That distance would remain unstable until the poem was finished and published. Until that point, in Greville’s case after his death, the judgement of wherein its difference to Sidney consisted would always be provisional, and so interpretation, Greville’s or a reader’s, would be in a state of constant flux. Greville’s writings are his own speech acts, not those of the pieces of paper that bear them; a text of the Dedication copied and read in 1614 might be read in one way, but Greville can still

244

Life After Sidney

make it be read in another way by revising it subsequently.⁴⁷ Put most plainly, Greville’s response to Sidney is a response to a Sidney of his own making. Logically, of course, this point can be made of any response to Sidney. But in Greville’s case the interplay between memory and fantasy is especially complex, the synchronizing instinct especially strong.

* * * The work that seems most clearly to straddle Sidney’s lifetime and Greville’s later years is Caelica. Some poems very clearly belong to the years in which Greville, Sidney, and Dyer wrote to, for, and in response to each other.⁴⁸ Some, indeed, seem to be exercises written in parallel to poems in Astrophil and Stella. Others seem later, either stylistically or because of their content. The whole sequence has a direction that takes it away from Sidney’s love poetry and Sidney’s lifetime to concerns and themes unique to Greville. And we know that the poems were repeatedly revised by Greville right into the 1620s.⁴⁹ Responses to Sidney’s content are often most focused when written in Sidney’s forms. Take OA 12, from the first eclogues of the original Arcadia. It is Sidney’s best poem in the quantitative sapphic stanza.⁵⁰ The Countess of Pembroke metaphrases Psalm 125 in an approximation of sapphics, and Mary Wroth imitates the stanza in ‘If a cleere fountaine’ (U49). Clearly, these poets saw sapphics as something they were obliged to try once: a question from Sidney they had to answer.⁵¹ And Greville was no different. Sidney’s poem is performed by Pyrocles/Cleophila, ‘desiring her voice should be accorded to nothing but Philocleas eares, ⁴⁷ On the different manuscript states of Greville’s text see the Textual Introduction to Prose Works, ed. Gouws, xxxvi–lxiv, Kelliher, ‘Warwick Manuscripts’, and Victor Skretkowicz, ‘Greville’s Life of Sidney: The Hertford Manuscript’, in English Manuscript Studies, 3 (1992), 102–36. ⁴⁸ The closest to Dyer is Caelica 83, modelled on Dyer’s ‘He that his mirth hath lost’ (in May, 290–4). May lists points of contact between Greville, Sidney, and Dyer, 89–92. Ringler sees the traffic as one way, from Sidney to Greville (xxx–i). ⁴⁹ See Kelliher, ‘Warwick Manuscripts’. Different states of Caelica poems are preserved in the 1591 Astrophel and Stella (Caelica 29); in printed lute song versions from 1597 (5 and 52, the latter then reprinted in Englands Helicon, 1600), 1598 (1), and 1600 (29); and in Peerson’s Mottects of 1630 (1, 3, 4, 9 (stanzas 1–2), 25, 85, 8 (stanza 1), 26, 103, 88, 5, 84, and 81); see ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, 212 n. 33, 217, and 228. ⁵⁰ The others are OA 59 (rhymed and accentual syllabic) and CS 5 (rhymed, and probably rejected from CS at an early stage—see Ringler, 423–5 and 427). ⁵¹ Cf. Derek Attridge, Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), 130 and 211–16.

Life After Sidney

245

laying fast holde on her face with her eyes, … speaking as it were to her own Hope’ (90, O1r):⁵² If mine eyes can speake to doo harty errand, Or mine eyes’ language she doo hap to judge of, So that eyes’ message be of her receaved, Hope we do live yet. But if eyes faile then, when I most doo need them, Or if eyes’ language be not unto her knowne, So that eyes’ message doo returne rejected, Hope we doo both dye.

The next three stanzas weave variations on ‘Yet dying, and dead, doo we sing her honour’ (l. 9) and the sixth stanza brings together death and the poem’s own ending characteristically: Thus not ending, endes the due praise of her praise; Fleshly vaile consumes; but a soule hath his life, Which is held in love, love it is, that hath joynde Life to this our soul.

As long as love has an object the soul and the song will not die. The poem then completes the circle by repeating the opening verse: ‘But if eyes can speake …’ And then the audience reacts: Basilius thinks it is addressed to him; Gynecia knows it is addressed to Philoclea; and Philoclea does not know what to think but is ‘sweetly ravished withal’.⁵³ The poem offers a tidy examination of ideas of sight and sound, intention and interpretation, and the rhetorical difference between elocutio and actio, or what Sidney in AS 58 calls ‘words’ and ‘pronouncing grace’ (5, 7). Pyrocles looks and sings, and sings about looking and singing. His ‘eyes’ language’ is direct, but his song’s language is oblique, purporting to have no chance of communicating (‘if eyes faile’ then he fails) even while it tries to prove the opposite in its very performance. Greville’s sonnet 6, a poem early in Caelica and perhaps written early in Greville’s career,⁵⁴ engages Sidney’s poem in a different dialogue: ⁵² The prose in 90 rather elegantly conflates the parallel passages from the first and second eclogues of the ‘old’ Arcadia (OA, 81 and 163) ⁵³ OA, 82; 90 works with other material at this point. ⁵⁴ The poem is not found in the Warwick manuscript (hereafter ‘W ’; c.1619), appearing only in the 1633 Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (hereafter ‘1633’), so it is perhaps either early or late, or both.

246

Life After Sidney Eyes, why did you bring unto me those graces, Grac’d to yeeld wonder out of her true measure, Measure of all joyes, stay to phansie-traces, Module of pleasure? Reason is now growne a disease in reason, Thoughts knit upon thoughts free alone to wonder, Sense is a spie, made to doe phansie treason, Love goe I under. Since then eyes pleasure to my thoughts betray me, And my thoughts reasons-levell have defaced, So that all my powers to be hers, obey me, Love be thou graced. Grac’d by me Love? no, by her that owes me. She that an Angells spirit hath retained In Cupids faire skie, which her beauty showes me, Thus have I gained.

Like Pembroke’s and Wroth’s, Greville’s sapphics are not purely either quantitative or accentual-syllabic. Like Sidney in OA 59, he introduces cross rhyme. And as Sidney does in other quantitative poems, he helps the reader through by using simple rhetorical schemes, in this case the gradatio of stanza 1 (‘graces | Grac’d … measure | Measure’). The poem is no closer to Sidney’s than the starting point of sapphics and eyes, and because it is by Greville it is hard to understand. We might say that this is because it has had a near-fifty-year gestation; or it may be that the voice of philosophical complexity and lexical obscurity was always Greville’s, that in his original dialogues with Sidney he was always cast in the role of the wise and paradoxical cynic who complicated or collapsed Sidney’s more naïve poetic visions. In either case, relating the poem productively to Sidney’s is not made easy. Where Sidney writes simply about how important it is to get the message across, Greville is several steps ahead, writing about the difficulties of interpretation and the operations of the mind. And where Sidney is speaking out and sending a message with his eyes, Greville is speaking to himself, and receiving such a message. The poem is also typical of Greville in only being in love under protest, and the sapphics, his duty to Sidney, are a part of that yoke: he writes as well as wonders ‘out of … true measure’. His eyes carry his beloved’s ‘graces’ into his mind,

Life After Sidney

247

yielding immoderate wonder. The gradatio between lines 2 and 3 turns out to be only a superficial connection, an appearance of order over considerable confusion. The ‘Measure of all ioyes’ is not the measure that wonder has exceeded, or even the wonder itself, but the ‘graces’ of line 1. These define joy, stop imagination from pleasing itself on its own paths (‘phansie-traces’), and establish pleasure (‘module’ meaning ‘mode’ and ‘model’ but also a base unit of architectural measurement). The second stanza continues the argument and continues to confuse, either strategically and mimetically, or simply because Greville knew no other way to write. The persona’s reason is now unreasonable (‘a disease in reason’), only new thoughts of love are allowed, and the imagination is betrayed by sense impressions—that is, the sight of the beloved stops the mind from getting on with its business. The poem then tries to complete a syllogism in stanza three, by binding the various ideas—eyes, pleasure, thoughts, reason—into a ‘since … then’ structure: he can only love, so he must wish for grace. A subtle echo of the initial gradatio ties the third and fourth stanzas (‘thoughts … | … thoughts’, ‘graced. | Grac’d’) and launches an internal dialogue of epanorthosis: Love (his love, but also the abstract Love) will not be graced by him (meaning this poem) but by the beloved. This is not quite the same as expecting that she will show him grace (that is, return his love), so that it is unclear at the end what he has ‘gained’. The poem tries to issue in a result, but its Grevillean dance of abstractions, duplications, and ellipses leaves us wondering if the representation of mental confusion was its only point, and what Sidney would have made of it. As dialogue with Sidney this surprises: it resolutely changes the subject and speaks its own language; it is all about what goes on in the mind, an interior monologue; instead of offering something that complements, mirrors, or answers Sidney’s poem it unbalances the two poems’ relationship by writing in a completely different vein. And yet its connection to OA 12 is not in doubt. The question is whether that connection works only in one direction: because of how minds work in Greville’s writings, and of how Greville’s mind works on Sidney’s writings and on his own, this poem has turned an idea taken from OA 12 into something unrecognizable through the force of its own subjective concerns, ‘so shadowed with selfe-application’ (Humane Learning, 10.7). It may in itself and for Greville have something to say about Sidney’s poem. But does it have anything to tell us about it? Many poems in Caelica can be connected to moments in Sidney by an image, phrase, or conceit, and this is clearest in some of the sonnets,

248

Life After Sidney

but few court comparison in this way by form. Indeed it is one of the oddities of Greville’s sequence that he attempts to refer to Sidney’s numeration (the 108 sonnets of Astrophil and Stella) by numbering 108 ‘sonnets’, most of which are not sonnets at all.⁵⁵ But at one point Greville makes awkward connection to Sidney a theme, and that connection is flagged up by form. The source is song viii from Astrophil and Stella, the trochaic tetrameter quatrains in which Astrophil and Stella are described in the third person, meeting, speaking, and parting. It is another muchimitated poem: the Countess of Pembroke produces a sacred parody of the form in Psalm 99; the anonymous poems in the Bright manuscript (plausibly associated with Robert Sidney’s young family) include a close imitation, ‘In a greene woode thicke of shade’;⁵⁶ and John Harington’s valuable miscellany includes a light-hearted dialogue between Coridon and Phillis in AS viii’s form, attributed to Sidney.⁵⁷ The beginning of Sidney’s poem is all about scene-setting: In a grove most rich of shade, Where birds wanton musicke made, May then yong his pide weeds showing, New perfumed with flowers fresh growing, Astrophil with Stella sweete, Did for mutuall comfort meete, Both within themselves oppressed, But each in the other blessed. Him great harmes had taught much care, Her fair necke a foule yoke bare, But her sight his cares did banish, In his sight her yoke did vanish … (1–12)

The poem begins in ‘mutuall comfort’ and this is inscribed in its formal and rhetorical balance. The form is tetrameter, filling the fourbeat grid of popular lyric with its sing-song rhythm of primary and ⁵⁵ Bullough numbers 1–109. There are ‘108’ (i.e. 107) poems in W , one (74) split in two. In 1633 there are 109, by having two ‘27’s and two poems not in W , and dividing 74 differently. ⁵⁶ British Library, Add. MS 15232, fol. 11. On provenance see Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, Wis., 1990), ch. 5, esp. 197–8. ⁵⁷ AT 14, ‘In a field full fayer of flowers’. Further imitations are listed in Chapter 6, p. 197.

Life After Sidney

249

secondary stress; each stanza is made up of two couplets, and those couplets alternate, following the French rule of Ronsard, the masculine and feminine endings that Sidney is the first to name in English (Defence, 120). The rhetoric too is about male and female in union, ‘Both … oppressed, | But each … blessed’, most evidently in the parallel structures (isocolon) of the third stanza. The stage directions continue: eyes and bodies mirror each other and they are silent ‘Till their harts had ended talking’ (24). Astrophil is the first to speak, unable quite to say what he wants: ‘‘Graunt, oˆ graunt, but speech alas, Failes me fearing on to passe, Graunt, oˆ me, what am I saying? But no fault there is in praying … (45–8)

And he follows this imperfect pronuntiatio with some plainer actio: There his hands in their speech, faine Would have made tongue’s language plaine; But her hands his hands repelling, Gave repulse all grace excelling. (65–8)

Stella speaks, pledges her love, and explains that only honour makes her deny him: ‘Stella’s selfe might not refuse thee’ (96). She asks him never to repeat his request and leaves abruptly: Therewithall away she went, Leaving him so passion rent, With what she had done and spoken, That therewith my song is broken. (101–4)

The elements that Greville knows he must imitate are: the form; the poem’s relative length; the use of form, rhetoric, and structure to symbolize the state of the lovers’ relationship; their dialogue; the displacement of the first-person sonnet-lover into the third person; and the poem’s abrupt ending. Duplications and dialogues cluster round Greville’s attempt to engage Sidney’s poem. Greville offers two poems that each try to imitate Sidney’s, one after the other (74 and 75).⁵⁸ The ⁵⁸ On these two songs cf. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989), 310–15.

250

Life After Sidney

first is split in the Warwick manuscript and the 1633 folio into two separate poems. Before them comes a striking sonnet exchange, as the poet-lover addresses Caelica (72), reproaching her for change, and she replies (73, ‘Myraphill, ’tis true, I lov’d, and you lov’d me’), giving the reasons for her inconstancy. Poem 74 begins with a very precise echo of song viii, its a rhymes assonant with Sidney’s, its b rhymes the same words in reverse. Thereafter the form deviates, including occasional iambic lines and no regular alternation between masculine and feminine couplets. And the location of Greville’s poem alludes to Sidney’s only to reject it: In the window of a Graunge, Whence mens prospects cannot range Over groves, and flowers growing, Natures wealth, and pleasure showing; But on graves where shepheards lye, That by love or sicknesse die; In that window saw I sit, Caelica adorning it … (1–8)

We almost ignore the paralepsis of lines 2–4: Sidney’s pleasing setting, complementing and encouraging human love with nature’s springtime fruitfulness, ‘cannot’ in fact be seen; instead we have a graveyard of lovelorn pastoral personae, of characters like Astrophil and Myraphil. And it is important that we are not even in that scene but looking at it through a window: by this trick the poem seems instantly dislocated, neither inhabiting Sidney’s setting nor its opposite but sitting on some sort of threshold, the window where the poem’s first-person speaker sees Caelica/Myra. Is the ‘I’ of line 7 a poet distinct from his persona? Or is it Philocel/Myraphil, who is only named at line 25, the point at which a new poem begins in the Warwick manuscript. This naming comes just two lines after the poem’s first use of third person pronouns, the first point at which we can clearly identify a character separate from the narrator: it is as if the ‘I’ has belatedly realized he must narrate himself in the third person. The lovers’ eyes meet, as in Sidney, but it is an uneasy union: Absence, that bred all this paine, Presence heal’d not straight againe … (15–16)

Life After Sidney

251

And there is caution and misunderstanding in the ballet of body language that Greville imitates from Sidney: So, first looks did looks beget, One sigh did another fet, Hearts within their breast did quake, While thoughts to each other spake. (21–4)

The next stage of the poem is not Philocel’s speech but his preparatory effort to read Caelica’s mind in her face. And this effort is doomed: Philocell entraunced stood, Rackt, and joyed with his good, His eyes on her eyes were fixed, Where both true Love and Shame were mixed: In her eyes he pittie saw, His Love did to Pittie draw: But Love found when it came there, Pitty was transform’d to Feare: Then he thought that in her face, He saw Love, and promis’d Grace. Love calls his Love to appeare, But as soone as it came neere, Her Love to her bosome fled, Under Honours burthens dead. (25–38)

The characters are made puppets of the personifications that animate the poem; they have only an uneasy life and will of their own. Philocel cannot find what he is looking for, some answering expression of mutual love and sympathy, so his interpretation is taken over by Desire, which is able to twist the meaning of what it sees: Desire looks, and in her eyes, The image of it selfe espies … (43–4)

His mind then experiments with an uncharitable interpretation: that ‘Feare is a lyar’ (47) and her looks are designed to encourage him. But he is unconvinced by this line of reasoning: So divers wayes his heart doth move, That his tongue cannot speake of love.

252

Life After Sidney Onely in himselfe he sayes, How fatall are blind Cupids waies … (51–4)

The only speech we get is therefore more interior monologue. And he has still not said a word out loud when he resolves, like Astrophil, to speak with actions. But Caelica/Myra is one step ahead, knowing what is coming even before he finishes saying it to himself: Boldnesse never yet was chidden, Till by Love it be forbidden, Myra leaves him, and knowes best, What shall become of all the rest. (59–end)

All the rest of his intentions, or of the poem? The poem is hopelessly abrupt, stopping short of dialogue, taking place only in the mind’s eye of the poet and in the mind of his persona, quite deliberately evoking and disappointing expectations of the kind of precise drama that Sidney enacts in song viii. Communication does not work; attempts to understand and interpret fail; mental processes are so complex and wilful that it is impossible for two people to reach any mutual understanding. It is enough for Sidney to represent a doomed love; but Greville is reluctant to let fiction get even that far. The poem is brilliantly secondary. As a response to Sidney it stumps itself. Where poem 74 falls short, poem 75 as clearly overshoots, giving us 228 lines that again begin in assonant recollection of the opening of song viii: In the time when herbs and flowers, Springing out of melting powers, Teach the earth that heate and raine Doe make Cupid live againe … Caelica with Philocell In fellowship together fell … (1–4; 7–8)

But this is a dialogue after the event. Philocel loves Caelica, but she has rejected him. The poem again focuses on what goes on in his mind, echoing the isocolon of Sidney’s third stanza not to replicate its mutuality but to bind Philocel in a self-thwarting paradox, between hope and fear:

Life After Sidney

253

Through enamel’d Meades they went, Quiet she, he passion rent. Her Worths to him hope did move; Her Worths made him feare to love. His heart sighs and faine would show, That which all the World did know: His heart sigh’d the sighs of feare, And durst not tell her love was there … (21–8)

These two poems operate on Sidney’s by combining memory and fantasy. They are dreams about his poetry rather than attentive imitations; they work by forgetting, by allowing the fore-conceit to blur and alter in the mind; that is why their setting and narrative logic is dreamlike, and it accounts for this poem’s most powerful representation of mental distress: But as Thoughts in troubled sleepe, Dreaming feare, and fearing weepe, When for helpe they faine would cry, Cannot speake, and helplesse lie: So while his heart, full of paine, Would it selfe in words complaine, Paine of all paines, Lovers feare, Makes his heart to silence sweare. (29–36)

But Philocel forces himself awake and begins to speak, at last: Strife at length those dreames doth breake, His despaire taught feare thus speake: ‘‘Caelica, what shall I say? … (37–9)

He begins his dialogue with a question that expects no answer and that points to his inability and unease. Does he even want to be in this poem? He then pleads with Caelica, and breaks off ‘like one opprest | With selfe-burthens’ (83–4). The narrator introduces what follows by pointing carefully to the necessary failure of Philocel’s rhetoric: Caelica’s cold answers show, That which fooles feele, wise men know: How self-pitties have reflexion, Backe into their owne infection:

254

Life After Sidney And that Passions onely move Strings tun’d to one note of Love … (87–92)

Her answer is met by another plea, and then she loses patience: Doe you thinke that I must live, Bound to that which you will give? Philocell, I say, depart, Blot my love out of thy heart, Cut my name out of the tree, Beare not memorie of me. (171–6)

The narrator increases the distance between himself and the action, where Sidney’s became implicated in it at song viii’s end. Having deliberately failed to frame dialogue in third-person narrative in poem 74, Greville now (as deliberately) loses Sidney’s precarious balance between the first-person persona and his projection of himself into the third person. He does this by creating an audience: Shepheardesses, if it prove, Philocell she once did love, Can kind doubt of true affection Merit such a sharpe correction? (181–4)

And he leaves his characters stuck in their nightmare, only drawing our attention to the moral. The coda that follows perhaps goes too far in insisting that the poem has no implications for its narrator and is a harmless conceit: Here my silly Song is ended, Faire Nymphs be not you offended … (219–20)

It is the strength of AS viii that it matters to its poet-narrator. Greville’s response is to represent self-thwarting ineloquence in poem 74 and a rather hollow confidence in poem 75, more than twice as long as Sidney’s poem, with two exchanges instead of one and the addition of apostrophe to an audience. The poems appear unsure of why they are written and haunted by Sidney’s precedent. Their representation of failed dialogue is also self-representation—of failed dialogue with Sidney. This pair of poems may have begun as a parallel exercise as

Life After Sidney

255

Sidney composed AS viii, not as an imitation. But as revised, copied, recopied, and finally printed in 1633 they become of necessity a parody, a measured riposte to Sidney’s poem that knows its model backwards and answers it at every step. And they become a many-layered allegory of the problem of responding to Sidney. Greville’s responses to the letter of Sidney are one thing. His responses to the spirit are another. Sidney, we remember, lies more generally behind all of Greville’s writing, regardless of whether particular lines, poems, or narratives fixate particular moments in Greville’s works. In the Dedication Greville manages to construct a useful distinction between his art and Sidney’s. But when he tries to treat in verse his sense of the difference between himself and his friend, he produces a poem that, as Hugh Maclean observes, wanders without clear direction:⁵⁹ Cleare spirits, which in Images set forth The wayes of Nature by fine imitation, Are oft forc’d to Hyperboles of worth, As oft againe to monstrous declination; So that their heads must lin’d be, like the Skie, For all Opinions arts to traffike by. Dull Spirits againe, which love all constant grounds, As comely veyles for their unactivenesse, Are oft forc’d to contract, or stretch their bounds, As active Power spreads her beames more, or lesse: For though in Natures waine these guests come forth; Can place, or stampe make currant ought but worth? (Caelica, 80)

Our first move as readers of this lyric is to treat it as a comparison of the poetic methods of Sidney—a clear spirit—and Greville—a dull spirit.⁶⁰ The comparison is encouraged by its isocolons, in the opening ⁵⁹ ‘Greville’s ‘‘Poetic’’’, SP, 61 (1964), 170–91 (173). The attempt to describe Greville’s ‘poetic’ or ‘aesthetic’ has, since Maclean’s article, become a commonplace of Greville criticism. See also David A. Roberts, ‘Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic Reconsidered’, SP, 74 (1977), 388–405, June Dwyer, ‘Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic: Another Perspective’, SP, 78 (1981), 255–74, and Maria R. Rohr Philmus, ‘Greville’s Poetic Revisited’, Neophilologus, 83.1 (1999), 145–67. Maclean’s observation that Sidney’s poems display a deductive logic and Greville’s an inductive logic remains invaluable: ‘One might say, in fact, that Sidney directs our attention to the poem; Greville away from it’ (172). ⁶⁰ A different reading is offered by Jeffrey A. Goodman, ‘Meaning in Context: Fulke Greville’s Sonnet LXXX’, ELR, 16 (1986), 360–72: ‘Greville was describing neither

256

Life After Sidney

lines of each stanza and in ‘Are oft forc’d’ in lines 3 and 9. But it demands some effort to see the second stanza as working within the same terms as the first. The initial argument seems to be that the clear spirit deals in ideal images; ‘imitation’ is thus used in the Aristotelian sense it acquires in Sidney’s Defence —the creation of something within the bounds of nature’s laws, but not taken literally from the life. This procedure, lines 3–4 argue, necessitates further departures from credibility in the shape of exaggeration (of moral ‘worth’) or distortion. Perhaps because such a poet, ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature’ (producing ‘images of wit’), the reader will find interpretation more difficult than when concerning familiar objects and ideas (‘images of life’). The couplet therefore uses an image related to astronomical charts: a map to the ‘zodiac of his own wit’ (Defence, 78) will be needed by the reader. Decisions will be taken, not necessarily by the poet, about intention, so that ‘Opinions arts’ have something to go on. However, the plurality of views inherent in ‘Opinions’ and ‘traffike’ would seem to imply that—in spite of, or perhaps because of, maps—interpretations of such authors will be various and indeterminate. The couplet is enriched if we recall other nautical images in Greville—of the ‘Seas of Error’ or the safe navigation following the line of Sidney’s example into the ‘oceans of human honour’. The second stanza we expect therefore to contain a contrast to this exposure to interpretation. A critical approach that makes Greville exemplary of the plain style would expect a recommendation of simplicity. But one might equally take from Greville’s writings the view that the representation of real and familiar objects (‘images of life’), far from imposing limits, actually allows greater obscurity, both intellectual complexity and poetic ambiguity.⁶¹ There is no positive comparison here, however, for Greville is intent on the bad points of his opposite position. What is more, the second stanza seems to draw much of its shape from the sense of Sidney that is behind the poem as a whole, but that has not been specifically invoked in the first stanza. The ‘unactiveness’ attributed himself nor his poetry. He was describing the effects of political pressure upon two kinds of courtier’ (363). The poem is also analysed in Roberts, ‘Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic Reconsidered’. ⁶¹ Joan Rees criticizes the erroneous critical fixation on Greville’s ‘plain style’: ‘That the remarkable individual quality of Caelica has not been fully appreciated is due not to ‘‘plainness’’ of style but rather to the fact that the poetry is so close-textured and so rich with interwoven strands of thought and experience that it does not yield much to impressionistic reading and may be quite misjudged because of this’ (Greville, 118).

Life After Sidney

257

to the dull spirit sounds, therefore, like self-reproach for lacking Sidney’s vitality in life, rather than in verse: Sidney is an ‘active spirit’ in the Dedication (46) while Greville, we recall, has a ‘creeping genius’ (134). It also, perhaps, includes a sense of failing in verse to address action, in the way Sidney aimed to do according both to the Defence and to the Dedication. The ‘constant grounds’ can be read as the way the world is, rather than the (Sidneian) way it might be; the original reading is indeed ‘reall grounds’.⁶² The echo in ‘Are oft forc’d’ would expect an identical compulsion to that in the first stanza, but the forcing here comes less obviously from methodology. There is surely a hint of political force in ‘active Power’ (originally ‘pow’r supreame’): the pronoun ‘her’ may be significant here.⁶³ The final couplet encapsulates the confusion. In the Warwick manuscript ‘waine’ originally read ‘wealth’. Its replacement, while carrying an opposing sense of ‘decline’, coming after Sidney’s golden age, also allows the sense of a wain (a cart), as though the subject matter of the dull spirit is at least the true harvest of nature and in no way an idealization. But the final line shifts away from such conclusions as we might expect—dealing perhaps with interpretative stability or praxis —and invokes an absolute scale of poetic value. Greville seems to be saying: set aside all the questions of poetics; I remain an inferior man to Sidney. Greville is famous for his obscurity.⁶⁴ And it is in darkness and what Greville, following Sidney (AS 61.7), calls ‘selfness’ that he finds the space for keeping Sidney alive through fantasy more than memory: Now in this twilight of Deliberation, Where Man is darke, because he will not see: Must he not trust to his selfe-constellation? Or else grow confident, he cannot be? Assuming this, hee makes himselfe his end, And what he understands, that takes to friend.⁶⁵

So often, dreams function as images for conscious mental processes—illogical, delusory, corrupted by the senses and twisted by ⁶² As many as six stages of emendation are distinguished in Bullough’s apparatus (1.273–5); there is a photographic reproduction of the Warwick version(s) between 112 and 113. ⁶³ Cf. Monarchy, 310.1, ‘actyve powre’. ⁶⁴ Hazlitt reports Charles Lamb’s wish to interrogate Greville’s ghost in ‘Of Persons one would wish to have Seen’ (January 1826), reprinted in Selected Essays of William Hazlitt, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1934), 523–39 (524–5). ⁶⁵ Fame and Honour, 11.

258

Life After Sidney

‘selfness’—and as unconscious echoes of the unreason of the conscious mind: Hence our desires, feares, hopes, love, hate, and sorrow, In fancy make us heare, feele, see impressions, Such as out of our sense they doe not borrow; And are the efficient cause, the true progression Of sleeping visions, idle phantasmes waking, Life, dreames; and knowledge, apparitions making.⁶⁶

In Greville’s finest poem, these many elements come together in an image that can be taken as the final word on his relation to Sidney. The concerns have some origin in the darkness that pervades the closing stages of Astrophil and Stella, but Greville chooses one particular version of Sidney’s night—Astrophil and Stella 99: When far spent night perswades each mortall eye, To whom nor art nor nature graunteth light, To lay his then marke wanting shafts of sight, Clos’d with their quivers in sleep’s armory; With windowes ope then most my mind doth lie, Viewing the shape of darknesse and delight, Takes in that sad hue, which with th’inward night Of his mazde powers keepes perfit harmony: But when birds charme, and that sweete aire, which is Morne’s messenger, with rose enameld skies Cals each wight to salute the floure of blisse; In tombe of lids then buried are mine eyes, Forst by their Lord, who is asham’d to find Such light in sense, with such a darkned mind.

The poem is in the end only a conceit, a paradox of finding what belongs to the day in the night, and vice versa. Night does not confuse the mind but instead complements it. The poem runs this paradox through its Italian–English sonnet structure with reassuring precision: for abba abba cdcdee we have ‘When …’ (4 lines), ‘then …’ (4 lines, completing the octave), ‘But when …’ (3 lines, dividing the sestet across the rhyming pattern), and ‘then …’ (3 lines). Greville is drawn to the darkest part of this poem, where Sidney has eschewed obscurity in favour of an accord promoted by the sonnet’s formal logic, where the mind, ‘Viewing the shape of darknesse and delight, | Takes in that sad ⁶⁶ Humane Learning, 13.

Life After Sidney

259

hue, which with th’inward night | Of his [the mind’s] mazde powers keepes perfit harmony’. Only in ‘mazde’ is there any space for mystery, doubt, or ambiguity. Greville opens up the dark mind in his own ninety-ninth poem, and turns the ‘perfit harmony’ of Sidney’s paradox into something much more serious:⁶⁷ In Night when colours all to blacke are cast, Distinction lost, or gone downe with the light; The eye a watch to inward senses plac’d, Not seeing, yet still having power of sight, Gives vaine Alarums to the inward sense, Where feare stirr’d up with witty tyranny, Confounds all powers, and thorough selfe-offence, Doth forge and raise impossibility: Such as in thicke depriving darkenesses, Proper reflections of the errour be, And images of selfe-confusednesses, Which hurt imaginations onely see; And from this nothing seene, tels newes of devils, Which but expressions be of inward evils.

This is not a poem about love, or about the world, or about God. It is about the mind, and about its mind. Its vocabulary is concrete and dynamic, anchored in the world of action (‘cast’, ‘Alarums’, ‘tyranny’, ‘forge and raise’); and it is full of the play of light. But every component is part of some paradox or contradiction: colours are black, distinction is lost, the eye sees and does not see, selfhood is confounded, and impossibility forged and raised. Within darkness error is nevertheless reflected, and the nothing, the image of confusion that can only be seen by the hurt imagination, looks like something from without but is in the end entirely produced from within. The last line was much worked on by Greville: ‘Expressions as I said of inward evils’ became ‘Often expressions are of inward evils’ became ‘Shadowed expressions are of inward evils’ became ‘Which but expressions be of inward evils’. There is a sort of bathos in each version, repetition in the first, hedging in the second, one optic image too many in the third. But it is best in ⁶⁷ Caelica 100 in Bullough. See B. J. Sokol, ‘Numerology in Fulke Greville’s Caelica’, NQ, 225 (1980), 327–9, for the importance of the manuscript numeration (not least in presenting 108 poems to Sidney’s 108 sonnets); the numbers from the Warwick manuscript are given in Bullough’s commentary.

260

Life After Sidney

the final version, with its quiet ‘but’ explaining away something quite horrendous, how nightmares are both an unavoidable by-product of the way the mind works and a consequence of the ethical stain left on the mind by original sin. The last line does not, as a consequence, end or finish the poem; it remains like a dark and pervasive cloud in the mind of its reader. The poem belongs at the religious end of Greville’s sequence, and as such might only be a nightmarish proof of the necessity of doom and gloom. But we must not ignore the fact that this is a powerful poem with considerable life. It shows, for one thing, that the two sorts of obscurity embraced by Greville are a considerable strength—he is a poet of mental confusion and darkness; he achieves things in his verse by suspending connection with life and action and by living in the mind. The mind of this poem, its selfness, is a hell of sorts, but it has a fearful kind of beauty. And it is in such a mind that Greville and Sidney meet, and the Sidney who lived and died becomes the Sidney presented to us by the power of Greville’s imagination. Greville’s poem, beginning with a moment in Astrophil and Stella, does not wish to wake up, but continues to dream of Sidney. F. J. Levy warns us against becoming dewy-eyed about Greville out of some affection for Sidney, and against privileging his claims for attention over those of his contemporaries. We ought to ‘see him as a representative of a group and his works as reflecting and commenting on the experience of all of them’.⁶⁸ But it must remain important to privilege Greville in some way. As soon as we grant that he is a poet, it becomes reductive to see him as only reflective of the external and the contemporary. To attempt to set him in relation to Sidney is not to make him interesting by association, but to enable the observation of how he became interesting because of what he did with that association. Sidney is at once a friend whom Greville presents responsibly to the world as editor and biographer and a phantasm or angel who becomes the source of all of Greville’s imaginings. Joan Rees gets Greville just right, describing his ‘selfe-constellation’ in terms he would understand: What Greville experienced acutely he took deep into his nature and there it acquired colour and shape from the tones and contours of his own mind. He probably brooded long before he wrote and he certainly held his works in mind long after he had first committed them to paper and constantly returned to them, thickening the web of meaning and reference as further thought and ⁶⁸ F. J. Levy, ‘Fulke Greville: The Courtier as Philosophic Poet’, MLQ, 33 (1972), 433–48 (446–7).

Life After Sidney

261

feeling accumulated round the subjects of his writing. His friendship with Sidney becomes the centre of some of the most powerful of this accretive activity, and what has its origins in a sequence of biographical facts acquires, especially after Sidney’s death, an area of associations and significances which reaches far into Greville’s political and also his religious experience.⁶⁹

To talk of Greville in this way is not to substitute biography for criticism or to avoid historical context. By writing A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney Greville shows us the way, shows us that the writers we discuss ask us to conjure them into dialogue, demand a readerly act of prosopopoeia. Greville shows the usefulness of our abiding metonymy: that Sidney is his works and his works are Sidney. And what he adds is that Sidney is seen through Greville’s lens, as his friend’s first editor and best biographer. We should not of course conflate the ideas that informed the editing of the 1590 Arcadia and those expressed in the Dedication: the Dedication’s intent is that we should read all texts of the Arcadia as politically and morally more purposive than we might intuitively find them to be; the 1590 text needs the help of this hindsight only slightly less than the other editions. But when we think about the relation between action and writing in Sidney and in his texts, when we ask difficult questions about what impact Sidney as man and writer wished to make on his contemporaries and on later readers, we are thinking along lines laid down for us by Greville. Our perception of Sidney as a dealer in paradoxes and polarities, as riven by contradictions, owes everything to Greville. It is Greville’s Sidney that is placed into the hands of his posthumous readership. ⁶⁹ Rees, Greville, 45.

8 Versions of Arcadia Virginia Woolf may have been right when she said that ‘In the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent’.¹ But what impact did Sidney’s great work really have? For much of the seventeenth century the Arcadia enjoyed a sort of unchallenged preeminence. The major literary figures wrote epic poems and plays, and not prose fiction. A large amount of somewhat dreary courtly romance writing took Sidney as its founding father at the same time as it avoided any meaningful engagement with his example; more popular romance admired or satirized him from afar. But it needed an odd coincidence for Sidney to stand godfather to the modern novel. Samuel Richardson was one of the printers of the 1724–5 Works; this was reprinted in the Dublin edition of 1739, which was to be the last edition of Sidney’s collected works until the twentieth century.² By that time Richardson was turning himself into a writer, and in 1740 he published his Pamela, a work that learns how to shape and describe its heroine’s spirited and virtuous response to adversity from her namesake, the Pamela of Book III of the revised Arcadia. Romance had given birth to the novel, and the Arcadia became a work that excited the admiration only of lexicographers.³ Did the Arcadia alter the course of earlier English prose fiction? It is hard to answer this question as positively as we might like. Certainly Sidney’s prose style had an impact on the way English was written. ¹ ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’, in The Common Reader, Second Series (London, 1932), 40–50 (49). ² NA, li; Dennis Kay, ‘Introduction: Sidney—A Critical Heritage’, in Kay, 32; Garrett, 47; William M. Sale, Jr, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950), 204. ³ Cf. Kay: ‘The transmission of genres could hardly be neater. Richardson and the novel took over from Sidney and romance, and many of the characteristics of responses to Sidney in the preceding generation were smoothly transferred to Richardson’ (32). Dr Johnson set Sidney’s language as the boundary further back than which he would not stray in his Dictionary. Among the harsh critics of the Arcadia were Walpole, William Godwin, in his The Enquirer (1797), and Hazlitt.

Versions of Arcadia

263

His contemporaries were already moving towards a prose far closer to modern syntax and cadence than the laboured periods of Puttenham or the pointless fussiness of Lyly. Drayton, writing in the 1620s, explicitly credited Sidney, ‘That Heroe for numbers, and for Prose’, with freeing English ‘from Lillies writing then in use’.⁴ But Sidney was not the only influential writer to raise the tone of English prose—Hooker, Bacon, Daniel, and others all took English forward, so that within only a generation even Sidney’s sparkling and elegant prose had begun to seem mannered, and any close imitation of it (as his continuators had to attempt) might sound only like anachronism or parody.⁵ As Kay puts it, ‘Sidney … appears to have created the taste by which he was enjoyed’ (14); but was his originality a bar to influence? Like other classics, Sidney was often found in pieces. Early modern reading practices, printed anthologies of commonplaces like Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedere (both 1600), and the use of the rhetorically exemplary quotation by Fraunce and Hoskyns, encouraged an approach to the Arcadia that admired its bons mots and ignored its plot.⁶ One work did the opposite—John Day’s play The Ile of Guls (1606), which offered a hilariously knowing travesty of the plot in the language of modern city comedy. But too often Sidney was invoked as a sort of patron saint of English letters and ignored as an influence. Whilst Sidney’s intervention in the development of English verse was badly needed, there was already a lively tradition of popular English prose fiction before Sidney wrote, and this could continue relatively unaffected after his death: that tradition included Painter, Gascoigne, Rich, Pettie, Whetstone, Lily, Munday, and, most importantly, Greene and Lodge. Sidney perhaps caused a few eddies and cross-currents in the flow of this tradition: certainly Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) reacts ironically to Sidney’s romance, and especially to the fictionalized tournament; other authors (for example Forde and Breton) show an even greater preference for stories about princes, though royal subject ⁴ ‘To my most dearely-loved friend Henery Reynolds Esquire, of Poets and Poesie’, 86 and 90, included in The Battaile of Agincourt (1627). The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel et al., 5 vols., corrected edn. (Oxford, 1961), 3.228. ⁵ It is nevertheless Sidney who appears with Bacon on the frontispiece of Thomas Blount’s Academy of Eloquence (1654) alongside Demosthenes and Cicero (Sylvia Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III, 1476–1776, ed. Roger Lass (Cambridge, 1999), 596). ⁶ Cf. Kay on Erasmian commonplacing reading practices (16–17), and Kay (17–18) and Garrett (16–17) on, e.g., Webster’s borrowings. On readers of the Arcadia see further Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 4.

264

Versions of Arcadia

matter was hardly new to romance. But Sidney has little to do with the cosmopolitan fictions of Greene and Deloney.⁷ The respect in which he was held was genuine, but many struggled to get on terms with him—he was too sophisticated a writer, and too much the courtier. Indeed, it was even seen as a kind of disrespect if the uncourtly professionals tried to make him their own. Harvey is indignant that ‘the Countesse of Pembrookes Arcadia is not greene inough for queasie stomackes, but they must have Greenes Arcadia’:⁸ by setting his Menaphon in Arcadia Greene courted comparison—his text even came after his death to be reprinted as Greenes Arcadia—but for Harvey this only cheapened Sidney.⁹ By the time Daniel wrote his pastoral drama The Queenes Arcadia (1606), with the barest hint of an allusion to Sidney in the form of its title, Sidney’s domain had been opened up to other influences, notably the pastoral tragicomedy of Tasso, and he could take an alternative route into Arcadia. But this was always possible. So many of the ‘seeds of English fiction’ in Sidney were garnered from other writers, both classical and continental. As Hoskyns observed, ‘for the webb (as it were) of his storie hee followed three[:] Heliodorus in greeke, Sanazarus Arcadia in Italian, and Diana de montemaior in spanish’.¹⁰ And those seeds were available for any other writers prepared to gather them. Because Sidney engages with literary examples—others include Amadis, Virgil, and Ariosto—over which he cannot claim a monopoly, deciding what in his fusion is unique to him is not an easy task; to expect things to be clearer would be to misunderstand Renaissance writing.¹¹ Works that might be claimed to show general signs of his influence (and most late-Elizabethan and seventeenth-century fiction falls into this category) ⁷ On the Arcadia’s influence see OA, xxxvii–xli and NA, xliii–lii. Woudhuysen surveys the possible contact of Greene and others with the ‘old’ Arcadia in manuscript (302–3). For fuller accounts of English prose fiction in relation to Sidney see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford, 1985) and Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, N.J., 1969). ⁸ Four Letters (1592) in Garrett, 130. ⁹ It may be that Harvey refers to a lost edition. The first edition of 1589 has the running header ‘The reports of the Shepheards’ and the work begins with the title ‘Arcadia. The reports of the Shepheards’ (B1r); the second edition of 1599 changes the running header to ‘Greenes Arcadia’; by 1610, the title page reads ‘Greenes Arcadia. Or Menaphon …’. ¹⁰ Directions for Speech and Style (c.1599) in The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638, ed. Louise Brown Osborn (New Haven, Ct., 1937), 155. ¹¹ Davis, in a coherent reading of Sidney’s importance to subsequent prose fiction, finds him adding an intellectual content and ethical drive absent from his continental precursors (Idea and Act, 70); for Davis, Sidney’s successors may not be as intellectual as he is, but they remain interested in ideas.

Versions of Arcadia

265

will tell us very little about the nature of that influence, especially when a detail or paradigm shared with Sidney may seem to have a common source. Where, however, we do learn something about Sidney is in those works that self-consciously write themselves into his fictional world. These include continuations of the Arcadia by Markham and Bellings and bridging passages, connecting the unfinished ‘new’ Arcadia to the ending supplied from the ‘old’, by Alexander and Johnstoun. These works pay tribute, of course, and are by definition derivative. But at the same time they each attempt an analysis of Sidney and his use of his sources, an analysis of what has been learned.

* * * I want to start by looking at an author who does not continue Sidney, but who tries to write himself into the fictive space he had created. The pastoral realm of English poetry and prose fiction of the 1580s and 1590s is not always even called Arcadia. Sometimes it cannot be, since the Thames runs through it.¹² But arguably it is always the same imaginative space, a space that can include England’s own Helicon and is haunted by the memories first of Astrophel and then of Amyntas; a space into which young shepherd-poets may wander and add to the echoes reverberating around it. Drayton writes his eclogues in this space, in his case a more Anglicized version where the shepherds have Spenserian names and Sidney is mourned as Elphin.¹³ It is perhaps as a comment on this hybridity that Markham can call his Sidney continuation The English Arcadia: Arcadia has been Englished, whether the shepherds have good Greek names like Strephon, stock names like Corydon, or bad English names like Gorbo, whether the setting is England, Arcadia, or even somewhere else in Greece (in Markham’s case Tempe).¹⁴ The young John Dickenson first enters this space in around 1592 or 1593. In The Shepheardes Complaint, he offers, the title page tells us, ‘A passionate Eclogue, written in English Hexameters: Whereunto are annexed other conceits’.¹⁵ His first aim is to continue the movement ¹² See for example the opening of Thomas Watson’s Amyntas (1585), translated by Abraham Fraunce as The Lamentations of Amyntas (1587). ¹³ See Chapter 2 above. ¹⁴ Cf. Davis, Idea and Act, on how the ideal and the actual are put side by side in ‘the setting of pastoral romance’ (56–60). ¹⁵ This undated work is often dated to 1596, but references to it in Arisbas (1594) suggest a date of 1592 or 1593.

266

Versions of Arcadia

for the writing of English verse in classical metres. In the first years after Sidney’s death only those with access to a manuscript copy of the ‘old’ Arcadia would see Sidney as the leader of this movement; in print it was driven by the florid hexameters of Sidney’s student Fraunce. Only three of Sidney’s quantitative poems found their way into the 1590 Arcadia, but the range of Sidney’s experiments became clearer with the inclusion in the 1593 eclogues of five more. Dickenson’s combination of pastoral and quantitative verse tells us that he is following the lead of Sidney and Fraunce. And that following is represented in a very deliberate fashion: the prose framework Dickenson creates for the complaint of his unnamed shepherd and for a number of other poems uses the old topos of the dream vision. His narrator thus dreams his way into Arcadia and thereafter works to confuse our ability to distinguish between the imagined and the overheard, the borrowed and the original. He records within a second framework, this time in rhyme royal, the tree poetry and hexameter complaint of the titular shepherd, who is disdained by Amaryllis, and ends this verse inset by both praising the shepherd’s style and imagining how much better it would have been if written up by the late author of ‘Amintas’ (B3v; he could mean either Watson or Fraunce).¹⁶ He next overhears a dialogue between a loving shepherd and shepherdess, and then imagines a further dialogue between this happy shepherd and the unloved author of the complaint. The work ends with a cautionary funeral procession for the disdainful Amaryllis. Dickenson teases at the idea of authorship. No other real-life authors are named, only personae: the narrator apostrophizes Amintas (‘if the heav’nly Pen | That wrote the loyall issue of thy love …’, B3v) and not his creator, who has been snatched away by ‘death that seasd on matchlesse Astrophel’. It is the place itself, suffused with the echoes of Sidney and the other pastoralists, that creates Dickenson’s work; dreaming stands not for writing but for being written. Dickenson returns to Arcadia with Arisbas (1594), but gives us a work of complex parentage. The subtitle of the work is ‘Euphues amidst his slumbers’, and the work melds Lyly, Sidney, Heliodorus, Apuleius, Ovid, the Hypnerotomachia, Montemayor, and many others. Dickenson dedicates the work to Sidney’s friend Edward Dyer, but does not mention Sidney. He then writes an epistle to his readers that is about nothing else, but will not name him: Sidney is ‘the whitest Swanne and ¹⁶ Watson died in 1592; Fraunce may have done so too, since, as Victor Skretkowicz shows, nothing is known of him after that year (‘Abraham Fraunce and Abraham Darcie’, The Library, 5th ser., 31 (1976), 239–42).

Versions of Arcadia

267

sweetest of Apolloes musicall birdes’ (A3v), now in heaven while his fame fills the world. ‘If you demand whom I meane’, Dickenson offers you not a name but a couplet naming ‘Sweet Astrophil the solace of my pen’ (A4r) and some eloquent variations on the topos of insufficiency. This builds up to an apology ‘that my blushing Muse reverencing the steps wherein he traced, and hovering aloofe with awe-full dread, doth yet at last warily approach, and carefully observe the directions of so worthie a guide, and in part, glance at the unmatchable height of his heroique humor’. Dickenson is happy enough to name his model for this topos: ‘Did not Statius charge his Thebaide to attend with like reverence, on the loftie foote-steps of the royall Aeneide?’ (A4r). But his conclusion is to escape into verse again to give Sidney a name, with a twenty-line Latin epigram that finds everything a reader might look for in Astrophil’s fruitful streams (‘Faecunda Astrophili … fluenta’, A4r–v). Sidney is only approached through persona, metaphor, and fiction, because Dickenson wants to be able to find and follow his traces in his own fiction. Arisbas is by no means an imitation of the Arcadia. Instead it follows Sidney into an Arcadia that has become an intertextual dream space, cluttered with the sources that Sidney had melded into a coherent whole. The work begins in mediis rebus, placing Sidney’s opening (coastal spring and dawn; dialogic lament) alongside analogues or sources—the openings of Heliodorus (coastal dawn) and Montemayor (solitary lament). Dickenson’s Arcadia is in a wintry hibernation, ‘a patterne of the auncient Chaos’ (B1r), and his hero, the disguised prince Arisbas, is wandering the world lovelorn. But when spring comes Arisbas can cross a textual threshold, enter ‘the frontiers of Arcadiaes maine continent’ (B1v), and begin his lament. He is befriended by a shepherd, Damon, and tells him the tale (closer here to Greek romance) of how he has been separated from Timoclea as they attempted to elope. The search for her has brought him by a circuitous route into Arcadia. Damon reciprocates with a parallel tale (beginning with a closer imitation of Sidney’s opening) of how two other shepherds, on an autumn evening at the coast, had come across a youth who will eventually turn out to be Timoclea disguised as a boy. Twice Dickenson works his way into Arcadia, following in Sidney’s footsteps only to deviate from them when he gets there. In this Arcadia, Damon tells Arisbas, the shepherds enjoy the expected leisure: they spend the time in discoursing on their owne or their fellowes fortunes, Shepheards I meane, men of their owne profession, whether native in Arcadia

268

Versions of Arcadia

or no: as in memorizing the worth of Astrophell, praising the perfections of Phillis, lamenting the losse, commending the loyaltie of Amyntas, mourning for the death, yet misliking the disdeine and pride of Amaryllis, pitying the distresse of the forlorne Shepheard, the unhappy admirer, though happy herauld of her worth. (E3r–v)

Astrophell is Sidney; Amyntas and Phillis are the creations of Watson (Englished and adapted by Fraunce); Amaryllis and ‘the forlorne Shepheard’ are Dickenson’s own creations, in The Shepheardes Complaint. Which are ‘native in Arcadia’ when to be born there may be about literary and not biological parentage? Both Sidney and his action are part of the history of Dickenson’s Arcadia—his Arisbas can make detailed reference in one of his poetic ‘fancies’ (F2r) to the scene in the Arcadia in which Pyrocles/Zelmane recites ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’ as Philoclea bathes (G1r). Dickenson has turned Arcadia into a place where texts meet, a place where authorial personae detach from their bodies, like the shadow in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, and develop a life of their own.

* * * Gervase Markham is the next writer into Arcadia. The English Arcadia, alluding his beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys ending was published in 1607, though Markham indicated in the preface that it had been written ten years earlier. It turns out to be only the first half of the first book of a continuation, continued but not concluded in 1613 with The second and last part of the first booke of the English Arcadia. Making a compleate end of the first History. Markham gives us a world built on memories and the practice of remembering, and he is guided in this by Sidney. His opening follows Sidney’s, pairing two shepherds, Credulo and Carino, on the coast of Laconia remembering Cinthia, and well aware that they have ‘succeeded both in our loves and admirations, the truely loving Strephon and Claius’ (B2v–3r). In Sidney, Strephon speaks after the brief scenesetting: ‘O my Claius, said he, hether we are now come to pay the rent, for which we are so called unto by over-busie Remembrance, Remembrance restlesse Remembrance, which claymes not onely this dutie of us, but for it will have us forget ourselves’ (90, B1v/3). His act of memory is also Sidney’s, of Montemayor’s Sirenus at the opening of the Diana, addressing his memory as it reminds him of his loss of Diana.¹⁷ After an ¹⁷ A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s ‘Diana’ and Gil Polo’s ‘Enamoured Diana’, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968), 12. The points of

Versions of Arcadia

269

opening that models itself on Sidney’s scenic description but multiplies its epithets, images, and figures at every turn, Markham discovers his two shepherds, who ‘began bitterly to complaine, that having over-laden hearts, broke and devided with complaints (which by incessant bemoanings they sought howerly to disburden) found neither ease not respet, but rather a more augmentation of their continuall child-bearing mischiefes’ (B1v). When Markham’s Credulo starts to speak (‘Ah Carino (said he) hither are we come …’, B1v) he looks set to repeat Sidney’s act of commemoration (‘O my Claius, said he, hether we are now come …’), but to our surprise it is not the past but the present that concerns them. They have come not to remember but to mourn proleptically for Sidney’s Helen of Corinth, about to be judged by the Laconians because their king, Sidney’s Amphialus, believes her to have been unfaithful to him. This ‘Tragedie’ (B1v), however, in turn serves to awake the shepherds’ ‘labouring remembrances, drawing in them and before them, the models of those mishappes where-with our owne soules are attainted’ (B2r) and their memories of Cinthia lead them on past the present to the hope that her ‘vertue succeeding all ages, may still ingraft (in remembrance) an induring and unblotted excellence’ (B2v). Carino replies and continues the praise of Cinthia before stopping abruptly: ‘But whether are we carried with the force of her remembrance … ? … we came as I remember, to remember’ to bemoan Helen (B3r). Markham’s shepherds are singularly pregnant—they have ‘child-bearing mischiefes’ and ‘labouring remembrances’ but are unable quite to deliver themselves, caught as they seem to be between copying Sidney by analogy and dealing with the problems of Sidney’s own characters, between past, present, and future. The shepherds, like Sidney’s, encounter a shipwrecked prince who has lost his friend in a sea battle. The prince, though he of course hides his identity from the shepherds, is one of Sidney’s own afterthoughts, ‘the sonne of Pyrocles named Pyrophilus’ (93, 2S3v; OA, 417); his friend is Thamastus, a prince such as one might find in Sidney, but unrelated to Sidney’s characters. Pyrophilus is thus the genetic progeny of Sidney’s Arcadia and Thamastus the generic, and the action of Markham’s work oscillates between these two ways of following. Pyrophilus enters his first adventure via a passage that closely imitates Musidorus’ encounter with Helen’s entourage in the Arcadia. In a way he is expecting this. The shepherds have just given him the background to Helen’s misfortunes, contact are well summarized by Skretkowicz (NA, xix). See also Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Sidney’s Urania’, RES, new ser., 17 (1966), 123–32.

270

Versions of Arcadia

avoiding overlap with Sidney, ‘sith it stands in a memoriall by the most memorable pen that ever recorded matter worthie of memorie’ (D1r). And these memories, stirred in reader and characters, interpret the fight round the approaching carriage that follows as a sign that Helen must be inside, as she was in the Arcadia (NA, 58–9); Pyrophilus therefore looks into the carriage and sees what he believes to be Helen twenty years on. Markham’s closely paralleled descriptions collude in this deception, and so does the lady, who allows Pyrophilus to praise her as Helen and pledge his allegiance before she reveals herself to be Helen’s friend, and Markham’s creation, Queen Euronusa. She needs him to be Helen’s champion in a fight to prove her chastity, and this plot device enables Markham to set a date for the fight and give his prince a year of unrelated adventures, exactly mimicking the function of the Erona subplot that stands as a barely remembered frame to the main action of the Arcadia. The after-effects of Sidney’s main action, that is to say, have receded suddenly into the background. And Pyrophilus finds himself leaving Laconia (which leads in Sidney to Arcadia) and ending up in Thessaly: not continuing Sidney’s action in Sidney’s locus, but paralleling it. That paralleling takes Markham back to Montemayor in search of other material, and much of the action in Tempe—narrated to Pyrophilus, who only steps in to intervene at the end—imitates not Sidney but the Diana.¹⁸ But it does so in a place ruled by Melidora, the daughter of Pamela and Musidorus (again, Sidney himself had referred forward to her at the close of the Arcadia). This place is a pastoral retreat built by Musidorus ‘in remembrance of his Shepheards life’, and used by him ‘as much to renewe his remembrance with his past knowledges as to better his instant knowledge with newe matter worthye of moste excellent remembrance’ (K3v). The site of Markham’s action is explicitly a place for remembering the Arcadia and for laying down new, and similar, memories. By revisiting Montemayor, one of Sidney’s sources and inspirations, Markham must be seen as having something to say about the Arcadia and about the job of imitating it, for this tallies with a point made and reiterated in his prefaces, when he defends his own imitation: ‘mine excuse must onely bee the worthinesse of former presidents, as Virgill from Homer, Ariosto from Baiardo, famous Spencer from renowned Chaucer, and I with as good priviledge, from the onely to be admired Sir Philip Sydney … who were our age but blest with his ¹⁸ See Diana, ed. Kennedy, xli–ii. Markham also draws on Ariosto and Tasso: see NA, xlvii.

Versions of Arcadia

271

living breath, he would himselfe confesse the honie hee drew both from Heliodorus, and Diana’ (1.A2r–v).¹⁹ By 1613, it would seem, Markham had been on the receiving end of quite an amount of flack. He points to three objections in the preface to his second part. The first is the name: ‘as if none should be cal’d Alexander that could not conquer the world, nor any Jacob that could not deceive his brother; nor this Arcadia, except by many degrees it could exceed the whole world both in words and inventions’. The second is his imitation of Sidney, ‘as if poore-men should not borrow from the rich, or that vertue should ever live so alone, that no man should dare to bee her imitator’. The third, ‘the great high-treason of all, is to make Noble Sir Phillip Sidney acquainted, either with Diana, or else Heliodorus, as if the excellency of his minde had disdained that which first brought it to perfection (Judiciall reading) oˆ no, were he on the earth, he would repine at their curiosity, and tell them, that his contemplative labour first brought him to active worthinesse’ (A4r–v). Markham wants to see Sidney not as an unapproachable monument, self-created and inimitable, but as a writer among writers, taking his place in a continuum of reading and writing and encouraging Markham to do the same. Tempe is given to Markham by Sidney, for the progeny of Sidney’s characters to live in. And there Melidora, the genetic offspring, and Thamastus, the generic, meet and fall in love. Markham’s arguments in that second preface remind us how close is the practice of literary imitation to the theory of imitative praxis that Sidney developed in the Defence of Poesy. His borrowing from Sidney is the imitation of ‘vertue’, Sidney’s own borrowing the ‘active’ praxis derived from the ‘contemplative’ gn¯osis of his own reading (cf. Defence, 91). Sidney had wanted literature to produce results, had wanted the Arcadia to impel its readers to imitate it; what it makes Markham do is not live the life of a virtuous hero, but create an imitative text that is very much a text about imitation. Markham has two purposes: to set up a world dependent on the memory of Sidney’s, a self-consciously secondary experience; and to offer more—if only quantitatively, with more corpses or antimetaboles—and ¹⁹ See Diana, ed. Kennedy for an intelligent essay on Sidney’s use of Montemayor, and of Montemayor’s continuator Gil Polo, and his contemporaries’ acknowledgement of it (xxxiii–ix). And cf. Hoskyns (quoted above). Kennedy observes that in Wroth’s case too ‘Sidney’s debt to Montemayor is acknowledged in renewed borrowings’ (xlii). For useful surveys of Sidney’s sources see OA, xix–xxix, Hamilton, 42–50, and NA, xvii–xxiv.

272

Versions of Arcadia

to overgo. An almost Cervantesian feel suffuses those moments where example is confronted and present follows past, and at many points Markham’s approach seems ironic.²⁰ Characters act with an instinct to conform to a pattern or archetype, as if they have a sense of what is expected of them, as if instead of morality they have a repertoire of literary commonplaces. They feel themselves to be secondary: they are the second generation in a second generation text, the heirs of Sidney’s characters as Markham is the heir of Sidney. Things are expected of them because of this double burden of genetic and literary parentage, and they find their way through a world of memories by playing with their own identities. Diatassan and Thirsis are both in disguise, and Thirsis must disguise himself as Diatassan and then an anonymous champion at the work’s climax. In order that she may bring Markham’s work into line with the plot of Book I of the Diana, Melidora disguises herself as Diatassan disguised as a nymph;²¹ the effect is that the plot becomes so confused that she must disguise herself as the wise man Eugenio just to find out what is going on, ‘not beeing what you are, but what you seeme to bee’ (1.T3r). In a text derivative in various ways, which uses disguise as a key plot device, things get complicated; and Markham embraces this complexity—it seems that he wants to produce an exceptionally self-conscious text. It is in their disguises that the characters come closest to their literary models, from Sidney, Montemayor, and wider myth. And it is with a multiple unmasking of these disguises that the work ends. Markham’s climax, in which all are revealed, couples paired off, and ill deeds forgiven, is precipitated by Pyrophilus’ intervention, in disguise, to fight the doubly disguised Thamastus as Thirsis as unknown shepherd. This revisits, and makes central, the moment in Book I of the ‘new’ Arcadia when Pyrocles and Musidorus are reunited after their own separation at sea. At the heads of the opposing Helot and Laconian armies, they fight unknowingly until Pyrocles strikes off Musidorus’ helmet and, recognizing his cousin, kneels and yields (NA, 37–8). Markham’s whole plot is built around this pattern, separating his princes at the work’s start and not reuniting them until its end; his revision of the topos becomes the climax of his work, and the reunion is emblematized into a symmetrical impasse. The princes fight as in Sidney, but here each strikes off the other’s headgear ²⁰ Kay draws attention to The English Arcadia’s ‘ironic attitude to the conventions it follows’ (22). ²¹ Cf. Diana, ed. Kennedy, 33f..

Versions of Arcadia

273

simultaneously: ‘and now beholding each others face, they suddainely fell downe upon both their knees, Pyrophilus offering to yeeld his weapon up to Thamastus, and Thamastus as earnest to resigne his to Pyrophilus, both, in this conquest, willing to be conquered, and neither content to rise as a victor … and then throwing the weapons from them, they ranne and embraced each other’ (2.P4v). This embrace is between Markham’s character and Sidney’s and represents a sort of return to Sidney’s text and a union of Markham’s text with it. In the Latin of the Church Fathers Pyrophilus’ alias of Adunatus (Greek: ‘impossible’) means ‘made one’. The urge for reunion that he represents is not quite satisfied, though, because Markham has built into his text a crucial asymmetry. Lurking behind Markham’s work is a perfect plot, in which four cousins, the children of Sidney’s four princes and princesses, replicate their parents’ stories and fall in love with each other; Wroth, as we shall see, would happily have invented such an endogamous plot. But Markham wants to introduce his own new blood, and so there is no princess for Pyrophilus, and his unrelated friend must be the one to get Melidora. A final deceit is therefore imposed on Markham’s plot by the plot at the end: Melidora cannot meet her cousin (and second cousin) Pyrophilus, and Thirsis cannot be unmasked, because princes are not allowed in Tempe. Markham cannot connect the two second generation characters created by Sidney, or resolve the love story involving one of them and the generic progeny created by Markham himself. Asked by Melidora to identify the stranger with whom he has fought and been reconciled, Thirsis/Thamastus produces a reply that is true in every way except the literal: shee enquired of Thirsis what that strange Sheepheard was, who had so vertuously entred into the Combate, and with such admiration left it most happily perfect, with a blest imperfection. And he declared unto her that he was his owne naturall brother, borne in Arcadia … (Q3r–v)

* * * Three works that had their Sidneian parentage legitimated are the continuation and two bridging passages that were incorporated into successive editions of the Arcadia in the 1620s and 1630s: Sir William Alexander’s ‘Supplement’, printed separately in around 1617, bound into unsold copies of the 1613 Arcadia, and incorporated in the 1621 and subsequent editions; Richard Bellings’s A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia, printed in Dublin in 1624 and incorporated in the 1627 and subsequent editions; and the ‘Supplement’ of James

274

Versions of Arcadia

Johnstoun, ‘Scoto-Brit.’ (as the title page calls him), which was dedicated to ‘James Sixt’ and must therefore have been written before 1625, although it was first printed only in the 1638 edition.²² It may be only coincidence, but it is notable that the Arcadia is taken up by two Scots and an Irishman. There had of course been an unauthorized Edinburgh edition of the Arcadia in 1599 and Bellings’s continuation may have been prompted by the 1621 Dublin edition.²³ Alexander was a future Secretary of State for Scotland and Bellings was to be a key royalist player in the confederate Catholic association in the 1640s. But these are Jacobean works, and the nascent potential of romance to allegorize royalist politics or to represent the problems of Britain are unforeseen.²⁴ They are interested in commemorating Sidney. Johnstoun makes this clearest, in his dedicatory epistle to King James: Having, Sir, at some idle houres, oft and oft evolved the worke of Sir Philip Sidney, intituled his Arcadia, I was carried with such pleasure in perusing the same, that I could never find an end of reading: while at length my braine transported with the Idea’s of his conceit, brought forth a little complement, of what was rather desired than wanting in him: desired, I say, because there is nothing missing but himselfe; and yet his person is so well represented in his worke, that if he any wayes could be absented from the assertion of the Ladies liberty, it was needfull, because he left in the midst; that by that want his want should be livelier deciphered.²⁵

Johnstoun’s rhetoric is full of slippages. He turns the lack of an ending into a matter of readerly practice (‘I could never find an end of reading’), ²² These three supplements to Sidney have been little studied, one exception being the work of A. G. D. Wiles: ‘The Continuations of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1933; revised 1973), ‘Sir William Alexander’s Continuation of the Revised Version of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1966), 221–9, ‘The Date of Publication and Composition of Sir William Alexander’s Supplement to Sidney’s Arcadia’, PBSA, 50 (1956), 387–92, and ‘James Johnstoun and the Arcadian Style’, Renaissance Papers (1957), 72–81. See also A. Mitchell and K. Foster, ‘Sir William Alexander’s Supplement to Book III of Sidney’s Arcadia’, The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 234–41. ²³ For the copyright wranglings over these editions see Bent Juel-Jensen, ‘Sir Philip Sidney, 1554–1586: A Check-list of Early Editions of his Works’, in Kay, 289–314 (293–4 and 297–8). ²⁴ ‘Royal romance’ is explored in ch. 4 of Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, 2nd edn. (Madison, Wis., 1984). See also Garrett, 23–4. For a study of Bellings’s continuation and its relation to his Irish politics see Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 5, esp. 195–204. ²⁵ A Supplement to the Third Booke of Arcadia, 2a1r, in The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1638).

Versions of Arcadia

275

this circularity hiding the revised Arcadia’s lack of a point. He speaks the language of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: for any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them. Which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him. (Defence, 79)

Sidney has not delivered forth his fore-conceit, at least not in its ‘imaginative’, fictive, form; but he has worked substantially to make Johnstoun capable of seeing it: it is not ‘wanting’ in Sidney, just ‘desired’, and because he is dead we do not have it. At this point Johnstoun remembers that though Sidney is dead he lives in his book and in his readers—‘his person is so well represented in his worke’. And from this he slips into that other sort of representing of persons—personation—by arguing that he has chosen to absent Philisides, Sidney’s persona, from his working out of Sidney’s fore-conceit, from the material that joins the revised Arcadia to the end of the ‘old’ Arcadia, as a way of representing Sidney’s own absence from that solution. What Johnstoun in fact does—brilliantly and also quite predictably—is confirm that Sidney’s Knight of the Pole (one of Musidorus’ two companions, slyly renamed the Knight of the Star) is Philisides (2b3r–v) and have him fatally wounded (‘stricken in the thigh, with a forked and empoisoned dart’, 2a3r) as the troops led by Musidorus break into Amphialus’ castle,²⁶ a clear tribute to the heroic death of Sidney, shot in the thigh at Zutphen. Philisides, in the tilts in which Sidney participated and in the elegy volumes that followed his death, was always Sidney’s persona, even though Sidney had altered and reduced his role in the revised Arcadia, from that of a stranger shepherd appearing frequently in the eclogues and in the main action of Book II to that of an Iberian shepherd knight appearing in a single retrospective narrative. But the two had been in effect united in the 1593 Arcadia, which returned as many as possible of Philisides’ poems to his own voice and kept the reference in Book V’s final sentence to ‘the poore hopes ²⁶ The attack is heralded by Sidney (NA, 459.1–3).

276

Versions of Arcadia

of the poore Philisides in the pursuite of his affections’ (93, 2S3v).²⁷ Johnstoun finds space for a retrospective account of Philisides’ deathbed scene. He is offered amputation, ‘but wishing rather to be altogether dissolved, than live in part, having the wound of his minde opened with the hurt of his body, and lamenting that the threed of his vertue, not the course of his life, should be cut, he was gathered to the noble number of Mars his children’ (2b1r). Various stories about Sidney’s deathbed scene are in play here—about his courageous attitude to his wound and his doctors (Greville, Dedication, 78–80) and his consigning the unfinished Arcadia to the fire (Dedication, 11)—and there is a measure of ‘if only’ about it: why was amputation apparently not considered? But the chief target of this passage is an equation between the whole and yet partial works and the whole and yet interrupted Sidney: he will not ‘live in part’ and so dies whole, before his time; his Arcadia lives ‘in part’ but should be viewed as a whole from which something is lacking rather than a fragment. Johnstoun’s supplement is designed to stitch the prosthetic ending from the ‘old’ Arcadia to the body of the ‘new’, using language ‘borrowed from himselfe’ and a plot ‘bound within the limits of his owne conceits’ (2a1v): what we get is a better reconstruction of Sidney’s whole. Bellings’s Sixth Booke continues the Arcadia as completed by Alexander.²⁸ It reconciles Helen and Amphialus, sees its princes and princesses married, and concludes the Plangus/Erona subplot with some Sidneian pathos: ‘But oˆ my Plangus, and at that word death clos’d up (in eternall silence) her tongue that yet stil mov’d, as loath to leave her speech imperfect’ (L4v). Bellings has clearly cottoned on to Sidney’s love of aposiopesis, and of mapping the grammar of actions on to sentence structure, as another scene, between Helen and Amphialus, shows: ‘O Amphialus, said she, and then kist him, as loath to leave so perfect a sentence without a comma; I wil not say you were unkind, but, and there with his lips (loath belike to accuse him) she clos’d up her speech’ (G4r). But these topoi now carry no implications about a whole that, as a result of Bellings’s tidying-up operation, is no longer riven by loose ends and conflicting interpretations.²⁹ Bellings places as an epigraph at his work’s end an adaptation of the lines of Statius alluded to by Dickenson: ²⁷ Alexander, discussed below, has Philisides himself, in a lengthy deathbed scene, explain how the two are one (and how his Mira is Philoclea): *2r–v. ²⁸ See, e.g., Bellings’s reference to Anaxius’ defeat by Pyrocles/Zelmane: A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (Dublin, 1624), F2r. ²⁹ Cf. Rankin, 203, on Bellings’s ‘politics as well as … poetics … of closure’.

Versions of Arcadia

277

‘Tu longe sequere et vestigia semper adora | Sidnei’ (‘Follow afar and still venerate Sidney’s footsteps’, O2v).³⁰ It is the very distance of the properly respectful imitator that renders his continuation rather inert: it neither ironizes its imitative predicament, as Markham so brilliantly does, nor insinuates itself into the body of Sidney’s work as Alexander’s and Johnstoun’s bridging passages do. Bellings’s friends talk up his achievement: in his commendatory verse, ‘W. Martyn’ reports that ‘I Read thy booke on[e] night late, and did feare | Still as I read, I saw appearing there | Sir Philip Sidney’s ghost’, asking ‘Where you two spake together’ that ‘matter, phrase, and language’ can be ‘so like in all’ (A4r). But in his preface Bellings confirms the impression that he does not really know how to talk to Sidney, that his work aims to be nothing more than an indifferent copy: ‘I have added a limme to Apelles picture; but my minde never entertain’d such vaine hopes, to thinke it of perfection sufficient to delude the eyes of the most vulgar, with the likenesse in the workmanship’; Sidney’s ‘Judgment was only able to finish, what his Invention was only worthy to undertake’ (A3r). When in 1593 Hugh Sanford had heralded ‘the conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia, and that no further then the Authours own writings, or knowen determinations could direct’ (¶4r), he had stressed ‘that Sir Philip Sidneies writings can no more be perfected without Sir Philip Sidney, then Apelles pictures without Apelles’ (¶4v). Bellings’s allusion to Sanford’s preface collapses the difference between the incompletion of the revised Arcadia and the open-endedness of the ‘old’ and 1593 Arcadias, which invite others to continue the story, as Markham was to do.³¹ Sidney had not wished to continue the Arcadia beyond Book V, and it was not on any view in need of a sixth book: Bellings is adding a limb to the wrong Apelles picture. I have saved till last what is the first addition to the Arcadia to be incorporated in the work itself. William Alexander had apparently listened to Drayton’s injunction to keep Sidney’s legacy alive.³² We do not know if his bridging passage was written before or after James Johnstoun’s, and the two find very similar solutions. But Alexander is a ³⁰ Cf. Thebaid, 12.816–17. ³¹ Cf. Greville, Dedication, 10, discussed in Chapter 6 above. ³² Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall, F2r, discussed in Chapter 2 above. For Alexander’s admiration of the Arcadia, ‘the most excellent Work that, in my Judgment, hath been written in any Language that I understand’ and his own version of a Sidneian poetics of exemplary characters, see his critical essay addressed to Drummond, Anacrisis (c.1635), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1908), 1.187.

278

Versions of Arcadia

much more sophisticated writer.³³ We can see this in the clever way he manages the transition back to the pastoral world of Basilius’ retreat. His princesses have passed the test of the captivity episode, but they remain under their parents’ authority, an authority Basilius and Gynecia move immediately to reassert.³⁴ Zelmane complains to Philoclea: ‘I see that this freedome will but bring us to a greater bondage: we are led from captivitie, onely to become captives’ (*5r). Most readers, impressed by the epic horizons into which the revised Arcadia expands, see no way back to the more limited scope of the pastoral setting of the ‘old’ Arcadia and of the conclusion of the composite Arcadia. Alexander shows the way. The princes and princesses have no choice but to return from the epic captivity to the captivity of and in pastoral romance. He may have been helped by Book VI of The Faerie Queene, where Calidore moves between the test of his public virtue in an epic setting to the test of his private virtue in a pastoral setting. On this interpretation Sidney would have made the dangerous sexual urges of the princes, to which they succumb in the ‘old’ Arcadia, a test of private virtue that they overcome, just as they have passed the test of epic heroism; his early alterations to the last three books, as represented in the 1593 text, in which Dorus does not wish to rape Pamela and Pyrocles does not sleep with Philoclea, show that he was moving in this direction. Alexander helps us to see the return to pastoral as having a point; he helps us to see the composite Arcadia as having more of a shape than many would allow it. Alexander’s sophistication is also a matter of language and structure. Like Markham he is a genuinely impressive prose stylist who can mimic Sidney without sounding clumsy. And like Markham he allows the derivative and, in his case, medial status of his work to spawn metaphors and dynamics that run through the text. I have already looked, in Chapter 1, at how Alexander’s opening paragraph answers Sidney’s climactic interruption with an interruption of his own. That Johnstoun does something very similar—having Anaxius distracted by the sounds of the invasion, wanting to delay the fight with Zelmane to attend to it, but then not being allowed to by Zelmane—suggests that both authors, whether or not one had read the other’s work, saw the necessity of responding to Sidney’s incompletion by playing ³³ According to Alexander he had intended to go further, ‘if I had not been otherways diverted … intending to have altered all that followed after my Addition, having conformed my self only to that which went before’ (ibid.). ³⁴ Alexander’s untitled ‘Supplement’ (c.1617), *4r–v.

Versions of Arcadia

279

with the idea of interruption. Alexander in fact builds his text on two key dynamics—interruption and anticipation. And he does so by repeated use of one key word and its derivatives: ‘prevent’.³⁵ It means ‘anticipate’ but also, literally, ‘come before’ (Latin prae + venire); it can also mean to precede, to forestall, to outstrip.³⁶ So in that opening paragraph, Anaxius’ ‘feet did so suddenly ravish away the rest of his body, that even his own thoughts (much more Zelmanes) were prevented by the suddennes of his flight’ (¶1r). The word has a clear set of rhetorical associations, with the trope prolepsis or procatalepsis (one of Puttenham’s names for the latter is the ‘preventer’). If, in a way, Sidney’s gap is a paralepsis (Greek ‘leaving aside’), something passed over, Alexander makes his filling of that gap a prolepsis (Greek ‘seizing in advance’). Fraunce, following Talaeus, classes prolepsis, in its Latin form of praeoccupatio, as one of his dialogic figures of asking: ‘Praeoccupation is when we prevent and meete with that which might bee objected, and doo also make aunswere to the same: of the first part it is called Praeoccupation, or the laying downe of the objection, of the second, subjection, or answering thereunto. So that commonlie it hath a kind of prosopopoia adjoyned unto it. This preventing therfore is either indirect, most fit for beginnings … Or ful and direct.’³⁷ It is interesting to find this word and its related figure, which are all about coming before, getting in early, and asking the question, in a text that so clearly comes after, is belated, and must find an answer. And it is interesting that Alexander’s strongest use of it is as his beginning, and has much of prosopopoeia about it. Anaxius, swept from his fight with Zelmane, enters the main battle. What he meets is almost too symbolic. First, an appropriately mute speaking picture of aposiopesis wrought by prolepsis: ‘The first whom he encountred, lifting his hand to strike, and withall opening his mouth, as if intending some speech: his proposition was prevented by an active answer; cutting him from the lips to the eares, so by

³⁵ In the whole of the composite Arcadia, Sidney uses related words 54 times; on a rough count Alexander uses related words proportionately about five times as often. ³⁶ Cf. Sanford: ‘considering the fathers untimely death prevented the timely birth of the childe’ (93, ¶4v). Only later in the seventeenth century did the word come to be used clearly as we now use it, to mean ‘to keep from happening’ or ‘to keep (a person or other agent) from doing something’ (OED, ‘prevent’, 7 and 8). ³⁷ The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), ch. 34, H3r–4r; the classification of the dialogic figures of asking is in ch. 32, G7r.

280

Versions of Arcadia

opening his mouth restraining his speech’ (¶1v).³⁸ After this speaker is interrupted by Anaxius’ ‘active’ prolepsis, ‘The Knight of the Sheepe succeeding in his place (a vindictive heire) was exchanging blows with Annaxius with no disadvantage: when suddenly a dart (none knew to whose hand the honour of it was due) did wound him in the thigh …’ (¶1v). Both Alexander and Johnstoun exploit the fact that Sidney had clearly planned for the siege to be lifted by Musidorus and his two companions, the Knight of the Pole [star] and the Knight of the Sheep. That they differ on which of the two to make into Philisides, the shepherd knight who loves a ‘star’ (2C4r/255), is in itself significant.³⁹ Alexander, the heir of Sidney and of his aposiopesis, with a quite extraordinary sense of symmetry makes Philisides/Sidney a ‘vindictive heire’ of the aposiopesis just wrought by Anaxius—someone who resents and punishes interruption, but is caught in the midst himself. Anaxius now finds himself ‘interrupted by a sudden tumult’ (¶1v) as Zelmane appears on the scene, and Anaxius’ response is proleptic: ‘though he hoped for no honour from her, yet to prevent dishonor from her’ (¶2r) he gestures to her to follow him for a last fight in an emptied courtyard. There are no more sudden interruptions, anticipatory or otherwise, until Pyrocles has killed Anaxius, ‘when suddenly hee encountered his other-selfe’ coming towards him. Alexander, like Markham, focuses on this moment of Pyrocles’ and Musidorus’ reunion because it is about bringing things back together, returning to origins, embracing Sidney, both for the writer writing after Sidney and for the reader reading him: As soone as the eyes of Pirocles, no, his soule, was ravished with the sight of Musidorus … hee threw away his swords (onely conquerable by kindnesse) and pulled out that which was in his body, that nothing might hinder him from embracing the Image of his soule, which reflected his owne thoughts. Their soules by a divine sympathie did first joyne, preventing the elementall masses of the bodies: but ah, whilest they were clasped in others armes (like two graffes graffed in one stocke) the high tide of over-flowing affection restraining their tongues with astonishment, as unable to expresse an unexpressable passion … (¶3r)

This impassioned reunion has a homoerotic charge—the Platonic image of the other-selves as reflections of each other, the recollection of the ³⁸ Alexander imitates the nonchalant and symbolic violence of Sidney’s battle descriptions in Book 3 of the revised Arcadia, and the more comic edge given to the fight with the rebels in Book 2. ³⁹ Cf. Chapter 1, p. 15.

Versions of Arcadia

281

reunion of Scudamore and Amoret at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene (‘like two senceles stocks in long embracement’, 3.12.45). But this charge comes not from a revisionist reading of Sidney’s two heroes but from the sense of loss and longing that the Sidney imitator comes to feel. Alexander has worked to balance the retrospective experience of interruption with the proleptic agency of anticipation—an active coming before (preventing) rather than a reactive coming (and writing) after. As a resolution to this patterned oscillation between narrative aposiopesis and narrative prolepsis it is not a breaking off but a coming together that is the object of ‘preventing’ when Pyrocles and Musidorus are reunited. On Alexander’s reading of Sidney, Musidorus is a force of conclusion, ‘who before had put a period to the victories of Amphialus’ (*4r): he had in Sidney already stopped Amphialus’ chivalric posturing from allowing the Arcadia to dilate endlessly by wounding him gravely, but he was too injured himself to finish Book III then; even in Sidney, we recall, he is clearly on the way for the second attempt at conclusion that Johnstoun and Alexander have only to see through. Alexander views his supplementing of Sidney as a very Sidneian falling in love with the virtue of the ideal characters, enabling him not to be a Cyrus but to create another Musidorus who can make good Sidney’s fore-conceit. Alexander works to foreground Sidney’s own theory of exemplary character and readerly praxis in The Defence of Poesy, and to connect this sort of imitation to his imitation of Sidney’s text. Pamela is made to call Pyrocles and Musidorus ‘those patterns of vertue, who in al their actions did but paint out the height of perfection, and encourage others to follow their foot-steps in the way of worth’ (*3v). That is all that Alexander is doing, and by some more sequences of interruptions and anticipations he works his way back to a point where the four central characters are ready to return to the ‘old’ Arcadia. In his final paragraph he quite deliberately brings us back in a beautifully condensed way to unresolved Sidneism, the world of love mediated by the language of ideation and representation (painting, memory, copying); the world of absent presence and self-loss; the world of impersonation and strategic ambiguity. The characters, all except Musidorus, are back in Basilius’ lodge, sitting down to a first supper: Philoclea, chained by thoughts to Zelmane, did imitate her being pensive, because shee was pensive: yet like a cunning Painter, who, having fully fed his eyes with the affected object, turnes backe within himself, that his imagination may engrave it the more exactly within his memory, she would sometimes with

282

Versions of Arcadia

a theevishly adventrous looke spie Zelmanes gesture, that she might the better counterfeit it in her countenance. As for Pamela, she kept her accustomed Majestie, being absent where she was, and present where she was not. Then, the Supper being ended, after some ambiguous speeches, which might (for feare of being mistaken) be taken in two senses, or else were altogether estranged from the speakers minde; speaking as in a dreame, not what they thought, but what they would bee thought to think: every one retired to the Lodge where they had used before to lie; Basilius having first invited them, the next morning to see a Pastorall represented by the ordinarie Shepheards, to congratulate their prosperous returne. (*6r)

* * * Sidney’s prose imitators find him in his works, as an idea they can follow and a persona they can meet, or remember, or watch die. They show us how to connect the shape of Sidney’s life to the shape of his work, how to read it as a text that anticipates and experiences interruption, and that expects and invites continuation, commemoration, and conclusion. Because writing is for them an act of tribute, they always return to their source: however far from him they go, he calls them back. There is therefore a circularity to all that we can say about their relation to Sidney, because these texts do not achieve much for themselves, and do not want to. The most they can do is record the gap between their generation and Sidney’s, at the same time as they try to bridge it.

9 The Constant Art Mary Wroth According to Sidney’s poetics, art teaches through delight and moves to virtuous action. In Sidney’s fictions, this model tends to be twisted. Astrophil tries in his opening sonnet to imagine how his words might teach through delight and move Stella to pity him and grant him ‘grace’ (AS 1.1–4): instead of virtue the lesson is love. In the revised Arcadia Philoclea designs and commissions a portrait of herself with her parents.¹ Intended to teach the viewer ‘the present condition of the young Ladie, who stood watched by an over-curious eye of her parents’ (C2v/15), this piece of ‘mute poesy’ teaches Pyrocles only to fall in love with the princess, since the portrait is one in which ‘beautie seemed to speake’ (C2r/15).² This is so often the problem for female eloquence. Spenser’s virginal Belphoebe finds that her rhetoric produces the wrong effect when she encounters the fake knight Braggadocchio and tries to explain why she prefers the woods to the court: In Princes court, The rest she would have said, But that the foolish man, fild with delight Of her sweet words, that all his sence dismaid, And with her wondrous beautie ravisht quight, Gan burne in filthy lust, and leaping light, Thought in his bastard armes her to embrace. (The Faerie Queene (1590), 2.3.42) ¹ NA, 15. The ambiguous phrase ‘made by Philoclea’ (C2v) may only mean ‘intended to represent Philoclea’. ² Sidney’s definition of poetry as ‘a speaking picture’ (Defence, 80) derives ultimately from an aphorism attributed by Plutarch to the Greek poet Simonides (Moralia, 346F; cf. 18A); it is elaborated by Puttenham as an illustration of antimetabole (following Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.28.39): ‘If Poesie be, as some have said, | A speaking picture to the eye: | Then is a picture not denaid, | To be a muet Poesie’ (The Arte of English Poesie (1589), 2A1v). Cf. Abraham Fraunce on ‘poetry, a speaking picture, and paynting, a dumbe poetry’ in The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch. Entitled Amintas Dale (1592), ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge, Calif., 1975), 9.

284

The Constant Art

Shakespeare’s Lucrece is another woman who finds that her mastery of the arts of language provokes not dialogue but sexual aggression, and, like Spenser, Shakespeare condenses this paradox with a sort of aposiopesis, the man breaking off the woman’s words in mid-sentence (The Rape of Lucrece, 666–7). Mary Wroth (1587–1651/3) is not silenced in the way Belphoebe and Lucrece are. But her readers do seem, with Tarquin and Braggadocchio, to concentrate on the woman behind the words. Ben Jonson writes frankly in a rare sonnet about reading and copying Wroth’s own sonnets—presumably some version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus —of how her verse has taught him to be ‘A better lover, and much better Poët’ (4).³ Her poetry is able to ‘charme the Senses’ and ‘over-come | Both braines and hearts’ (7–8), combining the violence of Cupid with the persuasiveness of the goddess of love, so that ‘readers take | For Venus Ceston, every line you make’ (13–14)—that is, they are made to fall in love. This is at least a wrong reading of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the rhetoric of which is arguably directed from one fictional (or semi-autobiographical) character to another, and if it is directed at another reader intends to witness to love and not to stir it (its key words, repeated throughout Wroth’s love poems, coalesce in the dense line ‘My sighs unfain’d can wittnes what my hart doth prove’, P58.10).⁴ An even more amorous tribute comes in two poems by the Scot to whom Jonson gossiped in 1617 about Wroth and her cousin Elizabeth Sidney—William Drummond of Hawthornden.⁵ Drummond, like his friend William Alexander, was a Sidney devotee,⁶ and this allegiance to the literary theory and practice of Wroth’s uncle prepares his heart in a way that seems to surprise him. He addresses her as a Sidney (‘Of men your uncle first, of woemen you’) and seems to have just read The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, Wroth’s romance printed in 1621 with Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as an appendix.⁷ He tells Wroth: ‘Your spacious thoughts with choice inventiones free, | ³ Jonson, 8.182; first published in The Under-wood in the 1640 Works. ⁴ All quotations of Wroth’s poems are from Poems, with reference to Roberts’s sigla: ‘P’ for Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, ‘U’ for poems from the 1621 Urania, ‘N’ for poems from the Newberry manuscript continuation of the Urania. ⁵ See Chapter 4, p. 144. ⁶ Drummond’s poetry counts Sidney among its principal influences. For Alexander and Sidney see Chapter 8 above. ⁷ Drummond’s poems are among the ‘Posthumous Poems’ gathered in Poetical Works, ed. L. E. Kastner, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1913), viii and xv (2.271 and 277). Drummond follows in both his poems the uncommon spelling of Wroth’s name from the title page

The Constant Art

285

Show passiones power, affectiones severall straines’. What is more, they make Drummond, whose heart is not to be won by a pretty face, ‘her captive whom I never knew’. Because souls can love at a distance, so Drummond can enjoy ‘Your speaking portrait drawn with living lines’, but this does not stop him in the end from wanting ‘to see (since so your spright excelles) | The Paradise where such an Angell dwelles’. It is perhaps Wroth’s most radical achievement as a writer that she accepts and embraces this sort of reading of female eloquence, and makes it impossible not to find her bodied forth by her fiction, whether to love her as Drummond did, or to hate her as Edward Denny did, because he found echoes of his own family’s scandals under Wroth’s fictional veil.⁸ It is difficult not to identify Wroth with Pamphilia, the heroine of her poems and prose fiction, or to see shadowed in the characters and narratives of the Urania people, events, dynamics, and moments from Wroth’s life. What Wroth calls ‘the constant art’ (P3.8) is the way of life of her amorous heroine-persona Pamphilia, constantly loving the inconstant Amphilanthus. That this semi-fictitious way of life is an ‘art’ is appropriate, since it is through the art that Wroth writes about Pamphilia, and has Pamphilia speak for her, that she shows us her own life, so that, like Drummond, we read her fictions as a speaking picture of herself.⁹ That picture is certainly a fascinating one. Wroth loved her cousin, William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, the son of her aunt Mary Sidney, and at some point after her husband’s death in 1614 she bore him two children.¹⁰ In her fiction he is Amphilanthus, the son of the poet Queen of Naples; Pamphilia is the daughter of that Queen’s brother, the King of Morea (shadowing Robert Sidney, as Pamphilia’s many siblings allude to Wroth’s); Pamphilia’s uncle (shadowing Philip Sidney) is barely present in the Urania, but is the reason Pamphilia is named for his kingdom, which she inherits. of the Urania, ‘Wroath’. I quote from the second (xv); the first, a sonnet (viii), presents similar material. ⁸ A full account of the Denny episode is given in Roberts’s introduction to Poems, 31–5, and correspondence related to the incident is presented in the Appendix (V–X). ⁹ On the status of Wroth’s persona cf. Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994), 159 (on its centrality compared to Philisides or Colin Clout), and Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, Wis., 1990), 142: ‘Wroth’s creation of herself as author was inextricably bound up with her creation of herself as lover’. ¹⁰ The fullest biographical accounts of Wroth are given in the introductions to Poems and U1, supplemented by the introduction to U2.

286

The Constant Art

Her fiction is thus intricately bound up with her place as the biological and literary offshoot of the previous generation of Sidneys—Philip, Mary, and Robert Sidney.¹¹ Dedicatory epistles and poems to Wroth of course emphasize this status: she is the ‘inheritrix of the Divine wit of her immortal uncle’ (Peacham), a poet ‘In whom, her Uncle’s noble Veine renewes’ (Sylvester).¹² For Jonson and others it is enough to say that she is a Sidney (‘the imprese of the great’);¹³ when Wroth goes as far as a woman can to give Denny the lie and challenge him, she tells him to ‘be assured you shall find mee; what my blood calls mee to be, and what my words have said mee to be’ (Poems, 240). Like her aunt, she has a strong sense of what it is to be a Sidney.¹⁴ Wroth was her parents’ first and favourite child, and she is mentioned more than her siblings in the Sidney correspondence. Robert Sidney’s agent Rowland Whyte reports frequently on her progress in the 1590s: ‘she is very forward in her learning, writing, and other excercises she is put to, as dawncing and the virginals’.¹⁵ Just before her eighth birthday her father writes to her mother from Flushing: ‘I thanck Malkin for her letter and ame ecceding glad to see shee writes so wel’. And when she is nearly ten Sidney must find time to ‘write to Mall, becaus you say shee would heare from me’.¹⁶ This literate daughter was not steered away from literature, or from seeing writing—as in these early signs of a love for pen and paper—as a family ¹¹ Cf. Elizabeth Mazzola, Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (New York, 2003), on the ‘extended universe of relatedness’ in the Urania (78). ¹² Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), Y1r; Joshua Sylvester, Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613), H2r. Many of these references are examined in Michael G. Brennan, ‘‘‘A SYDNEY, though un-named’’: Ben Jonson’s Influence in the Manuscript and Print Circulation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Writings’, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 31–52, repr. as ‘Creating Female Authorship in the Early Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 73–93. ¹³ Epigrams, 103.7, in Jonson, 8.66–7. ¹⁴ Cf. Pembroke to Sir Julius Caesar, 8 July 1603: ‘it is the Sister of Sir Philip Sidney who yow ar to right and who will worthely deserve the same’ (letter XII in Works, 1.294–5). ¹⁵ Rowland Whyte to Sir Robert Sidney, 23 October 1595, HMC, 2.176; for other references see 2.164, 321, 437. ¹⁶ HMC, 2.170 and 270. For a modernized edition see Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot, 2005), 76 (letter 87) and 101 (letter 124).

The Constant Art

287

business, a means of dialogue with absent father or uncle. The Bright manuscript may show us that members of Robert Sidney’s young family included imitations of Philip Sidney’s poetry among their ‘exercises’,¹⁷ and Wroth’s fiction hints that her aunt, the Countess of Pembroke, may have set her precocious goddaughter and namesake to learn how to write poetry from Hugh Sanford, the editor of the 1593 Arcadia, William Herbert’s tutor, and Samuel Daniel’s adviser on prosody.¹⁸ Wroth was bound to write from within her position in the Sidney family, but she had choices.¹⁹ She might have tried to write like her aunt, but she did not. Instead she imitated the Petrarchan poetry of her father and her uncle, and wrote works that superficially ask for comparison to Philip Sidney’s. The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania is very clearly labelled as a second-generation response to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, written by Sidney’s niece and named for the wife of the Countess of Pembroke’s son; Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is just as clearly labelled as a response to Astrophil and Stella, but with a world of difference in the crucial change of ‘and’ to ‘to’ in its title. Only Love’s Victory draws more evidently from a Jacobean fashion—for pastoral tragicomedy—and can be only vaguely related to Sidney’s short entertainment ‘The Lady of May’.²⁰ But it would be wrong to call Wroth’s works imitations. They use imitation intelligently at certain points and in certain ways. And they make much of kindred themes of memory, resemblance, repetition, and family. But Wroth, from the start, creates her own fictional world and her own style. ¹⁷ See Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘‘‘Nett which paultry prayes disdaines’’: Sidney’s Influence on Two Unattributed Poems in the Bright Manuscript’, Sidney Newsletter, 5.1 (1984), 3–14 and Gender and Authorship, ch. 5. ¹⁸ U1, 386–7 (a narrative about Bellamira reworked in Part 2 as that of Pamphilia, Amphilanthus, and their betrayal by Forsandurus—Hugh Sanford). For Daniel and Sanford see Chapter 4 above. ¹⁹ Cf. Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, 1993), 99. ²⁰ Edition in Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory: The Penshurst Manuscript, ed. Michael G. Brennan (London, 1988); the work also survives in incomplete form in a second holograph, Huntington HM 600. It is perhaps because this work seems to play with family narratives without a generic basis in the family’s writings that it is Wroth’s least successful piece. On the biographical element see, e.g., Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘‘‘So Much Worth’’: Autobiographical Narratives in the Work of Lady Mary Wroth’, in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Otway, and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke, 2000), 76–93.

288

The Constant Art FA M I L I A R I T Y

At Penshurst there is a portrait of a mother and her daughter (figure 3). Double portraits are sufficiently rare that it seems straightforward to identify it with the portrait listed in the inventories of 1623 and 1627 as ‘one picture of the Countesse of Leicester and my Lady Wroth in a frame’, hung together with a picture of Robert Sidney in the bed chamber to the parlour.²¹ The picture includes an ascription to Marcus Gheeraerts II and a date, 1612.²² Mother and daughter stand by a window, the curtain drawn to show a country landscape, with several men and women and two horses. Mary Wroth looks out of the picture and is its focus, dressed in a near-white dress with elaborate lace and jewellery; she has a blue bow at the waist, yellow beads on the left wrist, red on the right, above a red feather fan which hangs below her right hand; her eyes and mouth smile quietly and intelligently. Barbara Sidney stands behind her daughter and to the right, Wroth’s left, in a darker, blueish dress, with simpler lace, and in shadow; the colours—white pearls and lace, the blue dress, and a red bow at her waist, echo and highlight Wroth’s. Wroth’s mother looks not at the viewer but gently at her daughter; her cheeks are a little thinner, her eyelids a little heavier, her head tilts ever so slightly down, but nose and mouth are almost identical and the copy-cat dressing of each’s hair reinforces the parallel between the two faces: we are looking at the same face at two ages. The artist depicts the mother presenting her daughter to the viewer, retreating to the background in a supporting role: it is now Wroth’s turn. The picture tells us that for the Sidneys resemblance and sympathy between the generations were a matter of pride.

²¹ HMC, 6.552. For the 1627 inventory, based on that of 1623, see Germaine Warkentin, ‘Jonson’s Penshurst Reveal’d? A Penshurst Inventory of 1623’, Sidney Journal, 20.1 (2002), 1–25 (7). ²² Though the date is reasonable for the style and costumes this ascription may not be autograph, or even authoritative. On Gheeraerts and Queen Anne, whose Lord Chamberlain was Wroth’s father, see Karen Hearn, Marcus Gheeraerts II (London, 2002), 14. Hearn notes (29) that Robert Sidney may have sat for Gheeraerts in the 1610s (see Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, ed. Roy Strong, 2 vols. (London, 1969), 2, plate 392); Gheeraerts also painted the celebrated Penshurst portrait of Robert Sidney’s wife Barbara Sidney and their children, c.1596.

The Constant Art

289

Figure 3. Lady Mary Wroth and Lady Barbara Sidney, by Marcus Gheeraerts II (1612). Reproduced by kind permission of Viscount De L’Isle, from his private collection at Penshurst Place.

290

The Constant Art

This gesture of Wroth being pushed gently and proudly forward by the older generation is repeated on the title page of the Urania: ‘The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania. Written by the right honorable the Lady Mary Wroath. Daughter to the right Noble Robert Earle of Leicester. And Neece to the ever famous, and renowned Sir. Phillips Sidney knight. And to the most exelent Lady Mary Countesse of Pembroke late deceased.’ Wroth uses the opening of the Urania to address the reader’s assumption that this inheritance will be represented by textual imitation, for she takes us straight to the opening of the classic of English fiction written by her uncle and named for her aunt. Like Gervase Markham she finds at Sidney’s opening that the theme of memory is already integral and that this already plays against the use of literary sources, in Sidney’s case Montemayor and Heliodorus. Where Markham imitates by repetition and amplification Wroth is more revisionist. Sidney’s Strephon and Klaius commemorate their loss of Urania; Wroth starts by finding a Urania who doesn’t know who she is or where she is from, living in a place not named for many pages. The question of origins is immediately central: the derivation of this opening scene from Wroth’s literary and familial inheritance is juxtaposed to, and questioned by, Urania’s ‘ignorance’ of herself (B1r/1). From this point forward we do not know if the text itself is to be the offspring of the Sidneys or a foundling separated from its family. If we can say that Wroth begins with a strong tribute to the Arcadia, then it is striking that she also ends with one, with the broken sentence that I will discuss further below: align the two texts like sentences and we have symploce, beginning and ending in parallel but deviating in the middle. The Urania can in no way be described as an imitation of the Arcadia, popular though that view has been. As critics have come to recognize, Wroth’s sources are many, and most had by 1620 been translated into English—the Greek romances that Sidney read, Ariosto, the sophisticated pastoral romance of Montemayor and his imitators, Amadis and its many offshoots. But also to be found are the traces of more recent works, like D’Urfé’s Astrée and Cervantes, and more of the popular English prose fiction, from Malory to Greene, that Sidney might have felt inclined to ignore.²³ Roberts even suggests that the Urania is ‘a quixotic romance’ (U1, xxv), which goes too far and attributes more sophistication to Wroth than the text itself is able to sustain. But it helps us to see that there are voices in Wroth’s work that ²³ See Roberts’s discussion of ‘Literary Contexts’, U1, xviii–xxxix.

The Constant Art

291

were unknown to Sidney, and many other models for Wroth to engage in imitative dialogue than Sidney’s alone.²⁴ As a prose stylist, Wroth is no imitator of Sidney.²⁵ Textbook Sidneisms (e.g. antimetabole: ‘honest care and carefull honesty’, U1, 3R3r/593; ‘sweet bravness and bravest sweetnes’, U2, 2.3v/203’) are relatively rare, and tend to unbalance Wroth’s less carefully patterned syntax (far removed from Sidney’s poised periods). She picks up key phrases from the handbook of Sidney quotation but seems to adjust them to a more quotidian register, as if she is claiming that this is not literary imitation, but just her use of the language she has been brought up speaking: compare her treatment of ‘she, dear she’ from AS 1.1 (U1, 185.37 and 243.17; U2, 211.7), or, again, her downsizing of ‘most deare, and most worthy to be most deare Lady’ from Sidney’s dedication of the Arcadia to his sister (U1, 111.11; U2, 402.15–16). What she does do very successfully is respond on the larger scale: What, have I thus betrayed my libertie? Can those blacke beames such burning markes engrave In my free side? or am I borne a slave, Whose necke becomes such yoke of tyranny? Or want I sense to feele my miserie? Or sprite, disdaine of such disdaine to have? Who for long faith, tho dayly helpe I crave, May get no almes but scorne of beggerie? Vertue awake, Beautie but beautie is, I may, I must, I can, I will, I do Leave following that, which it is gaine to misse. Let her go. Soft, but here she comes. Go to, ²⁴ Cf. Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), 164 and 174, and Jennifer Lee Carrell, ‘A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance’, SEL, 34 (1994), 79–107 (100). Engagement with a broader range of poets (including Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and Donne) can also be found once it is looked for. For work that either sets Wroth in a broader literary context or engages her in dialogue with particular writers see for example Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995), 134–61 (relating Wroth to Shakespeare and a broad Petrarchan tradition); Maureen Quilligan, ‘Completing the Conversation’, in Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997), 42–9 (on Wroth and Donne); Naomi J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington, 1996), passim; and Amelia Zurcher, ‘Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth’s Urania’, SEL, 42 (2002), 103–19 and ‘Ethics and the Politic Agent of Early Seventeenth-Century Prose Romance’, ELR, 35 (2005), 73–101. ²⁵ For a useful account of Wroth’s prose style by Janel Mueller, see U2, xxxiv–ix.

292

The Constant Art Unkind, I love you not: O me, that eye Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie. (AS 47) Am I thus conquer’d? have I lost the powers That to withstand, which joy’s to ruin mee? Must I bee still while itt my strength devowres And captive leads mee prisoner, bound, unfree? Love first shall leave mens phant’sies to them free, Desire shall quench loves flames, spring hate sweet showres, Love shall loose all his darts, have sight, and see His shame, and wishings hinder happy howres; Why should wee nott loves purblind charmes resist? Must wee bee servile, doing what hee list? Noe, seeke some hoste to harbour thee: I fly Thy babish trickes, and freedome doe profess; ˆ my hurt, makes my lost hart confess Butt O I love, and must: So farwell liberty. (P16)

The shape of the response to Sidney is again that of symploce. What lies in the middle is more different, but Wroth begins by echoing Sidney’s questions, and ends by echoing his sudden reversal: Stella’s eye makes Astrophil’s heart contradict what he says; and Pamphilia’s hurt makes her heart confess to her love. Wroth’s ending is less punchy for a simple formal reason. Sidney uses the Petrarchan octave, abbaabba, and Wroth a symmetrical cross-rhymed variant, ababbaba. Sidney then uses his favoured English-patterned sestet, cdcdee, ending with a couplet that nicely frames the reversal in the final two lines. But Wroth’s sestet is top-loaded, ccdeed, with couplets on the c and e rhymes but not on the d rhyme of the final line, which must reach back to line 11 for its concord. It is a similar choice to set form against rhetoric that avoids Sidney’s neat patterning: an octave of questions, a sestet that begins with resolve, and a twist in the couplet. Instead Wroth has questions only in the first quatrain, and then begins her resolve to counter love at line 5, develops it at line 9, and then abandons it for the final line-and-a-half. Wroth does more than enough to establish Sidney’s sonnet as her inspiration—she even ends the poem with the word from which Sidney’s argument embarks at the end of his first line: ‘liberty’. But her poem has its own

The Constant Art

293

themes—it is about her ‘hurt’ and about Cupid, and not about the beauty of the beloved; as in so many of Wroth’s sonnets love afflicts lovers without ever being directed at beloveds. It must not stay too close to Sidney’s design because his sonnet is too good to imitate—no one else could manage the voice of thought in such a naturalistic way. If Wroth’s poem feels slightly flat this may be because it is not usually in Pamphilia’s nature even to think about resisting love. Such resistance, and final abandonment of liberty, plays interestingly against Wroth’s own decision to experiment with abandoning poetic liberty and show herself both following and resisting Sidney’s example. Pamphilia bids liberty farewell and Wroth regains it—she can return to writing her own kind of love poem. Some of Wroth’s most studious imitations are of moments in her father’s poems, even of whole poems.²⁶ The sixth song in the main sequence of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (P42) imitates the substance of Robert Sidney’s Song 1 very closely, matching it in length exactly but slightly altering the form so that it in fact copies the form of his Pastoral 7. Both poems are therefore present behind Wroth’s, an imitation by merger of both. The poem stays closer to Robert Sidney’s Song 1 than the sonnet discussed above does to Philip Sidney’s text, but it is still not a copy, for stanzas 3–6 go off in their own direction before the poem returns for its closing echo (a structure like symploce again). It may be easier for Wroth to engage with her father’s verse because it is less imposing than Sidney’s work. But it is also a matter of the difference between private and published work. It is not that Wroth is freer to borrow from family verse that has remained in manuscript, but that there is a clear difference in category between imitating the works of Philip Sidney, public property as they were, and imitating those of Robert Sidney, private and shared with only a few. By publishing her engagements with Philip Sidney’s example Wroth was performing a very public act of tribute, legible to the many able to recognize the model poem, phrase, or scene; she was also asking for comparisons to be made. By responding to her father’s verse Wroth was offering a private tribute to him, an act of commemoration within and for the circle of family and close friends.

* * * We have seen that Gervase Markham takes an approach to the Arcadia that learns from the many second-generation imitations of continental romances. Wroth does not write about the younger generation produced ²⁶ See Poems, 47–8 for references, and Croft, appendix C for a useful list.

294

The Constant Art

by Sidney’s characters: as we have seen, she instead begins with a genealogical crisis for the foundling Urania. But in the second part of the Urania she writes about the coming of age of the offspring of her own characters.²⁷ This change of emphasis is mirrored very clearly in the narrative method, with a shift between Part 1 and Part 2 in the ratio of primary to inset narrative. At the start of Part 1 so much is to be found out that the early pages are almost entirely given up to retrospective narration, as the many characters catch up on who they are and what they are doing by telling each other their tales. This in medias res habit is then sustained throughout the work: no character will be introduced without getting the chance to tell their story. The work is constantly looking backwards, filling in the gaps in its past. In Part 2 the practice is different: there are fewer retrospective digressions and there is far more primary narrative—most of the action happens to the main characters of Part 1 and to their children, and is reported directly by the narrator. Where Part 1 finds its way, conscious of generic example and genealogical origin, Part 2 seems more convinced of the reality of the world it has created—it is far less secondary, the product of Part 1 rather than of external forces.²⁸ The importance of genealogy and generation may stem in part from Wroth’s own family life: she writes her earlier works as daughter and niece, and Part 2 of the Urania as mother and aunt.²⁹ But it relates very directly to the theory of imitation, which figures the relation of imitator to model as a filial one. In a parallel topos, a work is the offspring of its author, or in Sidney’s case ‘this child, which I am loath to father’ (90, A3r–v).³⁰ And the two models can of course be combined—with ²⁷ Cf. U1, xxx and Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 165. ²⁸ This change also relates to a focusing of the autobiographical elements in Part 2 in the central narrative of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, where in Part 1 they are displaced on to minor characters and inset narratives. ²⁹ Part 2 (Newberry Library Case MS fY 1565.W 95) can be dated to between 1620 (it begins after the death of Philistella, who shadows Wroth’s sister Philip, who died in 1620) and 1630 (when William Herbert died); see further U2, xx–iii. The best recent exploration of the relations between romance and family genealogy in Urania is Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, ELR, 31 (2001), 107–30. ³⁰ Elaine Beilin sees Wroth’s writing ‘as an alternative to an unhappy, and for a long time childless marriage’ (Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 211). Lamb (Gender and Authorship, 147) also sees parallels between the concern with lost and found children in the continuation and Wroth’s parenthood, legitimate and illegitimate; on this see also ‘The Biopolitics of Romance’. The analogy of childbearing to textual production is explored by Naomi J. Miller, ‘Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s Plays’,

The Constant Art

295

the author impregnated by a model and giving birth to a child that resembles them both. Seneca puts this filial metaphor side by side with another model of resemblance—the portrait: ‘Even if there shall appear in you a likeness to him who, by reason of your admiration, has left a deep impress upon you, I would have you resemble him as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original (similem esse te volo quomodo filium, non quomodo imaginem); for a picture is a lifeless thing.’³¹ Wroth sees her relation to family members in terms of both kinds of resemblance, biological and imitative: we have only to set the Penshurst portrait alongside her writings to see this. And in those writings Wroth dwells deeply on the nature of resemblance. The many moments of the recognition of resemblance in the Urania figure Wroth’s sense of genetic and imitative relation. There are pictures in the Urania, real and metaphorical; but they tend either to figure problems of self-identity or to act as substitutes for the person they represent. And most of the resemblances in the Urania are of one person to another, and not of person to picture—they are organic and familial, not mimetic. In Part 1 these connections are horizontal: Urania is recognized as the lost daughter of the King of Naples because of her resemblance to his younger son, Amphilanthus’ brother Leonius (23.42–24.1); Antissia notices ‘the resemblance which [Pamphilia] had in her face of that famous Prince’, Pamphilia’s cousin Amphilanthus (L4r/97). The characters are linked by blood, by love, and by resemblance. In Part 2 the connections are vertical: characters recognize each other because of resemblance across the generations. Amphilanthus meets two young knights who turn out to be the sons of two of his peers and, ‘looking much upon them thought hee showld know ther faces, ore att least the structures of them’ (1.54r/145); the lost son of Parselius and Dalinea is recognized by a servant because ‘hee hath Dalineas face’ (2.6v/217).³² Facial resemblance serves as a cue for the resemblance in deed that connects sons to their fathers and daughters to their mothers, and that makes Part 2 both in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Miller and Gary F. Waller (Knoxville, Ky., 1991), 154–72; and by Nona Fienberg, ‘Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity’, in Reading Mary Wroth, 175–90. See also Katherine Eisaman Maus, ‘A Womb of his Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1993), 266–88. ³¹ Epistulae morales, 84.8. ³² Cf. also Pamphilia’s recognition of one of Urania’s sons, 351.32 and 353.12, and her perception of ‘the verie face, fashion, and shape of Amphilanthus’ in Amphilanthus’ nephew Amphilionius (1.39v/110).

296

The Constant Art

the generic and the genetic product of Part 1. The strongest hints that the mysterious Faire Designe is Amphilanthus’ natural son come in his peerless skill in arms and in a face in which Amphilanthus ‘beeleeved hee sawe more then civile cause to respect him for’ (2.29r/298); the connection is reinforced in the magical requirement that Amphilanthus must be the one to give Faire Designe his knighthood. The lack of such a pattern of resemblance between the generations in Part 1 is a part of its genealogical ambivalence: the parents, aunts, and uncles of the main characters have no names, only job titles (King of Morea, Queen of Naples); and we hear next to nothing about their youth. The younger generation of Part 2 tread in the footsteps of the older generation, their destinies often laid out for them in their complex birthmarks, but as often wished for because their situations seem to them to mirror those presented in Part 1. Floristello, Urania’s son, is in love with a shepherdess: ‘O why may she nott bee other … was nott my mother a sheapherdes … yett she proved a kings daughter, and sister to the most renowned Emperour’ (1.32r/92). And when we meet and overhear his beloved, Doriany, she also wants her life to conform to the patterns of Part 1’s art: ‘why may I nott bee a princess, and such a princess is lost, and why nott I the same … why Urania … was butt a sheapherdess as I ame in show when Steriamus first loved her, when Parselius first loved her’ (1.37r/103–4). Two duplications are quite deliberately put together here—the vertical imitations of Part 1 in the patterns of Part 2, and the horizontal duplications that made the plot of Part 1 so deliberately involuted. The plot alluded to here begins with the mutual love of Urania and Parselius and the one-sided love of Steriamus for Pamphilia; this is then complicated when Parselius meets Dalinea and ‘loves Urania, but for being somewhat like to Dalinea, but her, for her owne sake’ (U1, O3v/124); and it requires several cast members to be dipped in the magical waters at St Maura so that they forget past loves and embrace new ones, leaving Urania paired with Steriamus, who, it turns out, really loved her from before he ever met Pamphilia. Doriany’s words do not, fortunately for Floristello, invoke a dramatic irony that requires him to fall out of love with her. But they do mesh with another of Part 2’s duplications: Floristello’s friend Verolindo thinks Doriany must be his lost sister Lindavera, since ‘she resembled both Leonius his father soe much and the divine Urania’ (1.38r/106). But in fact, we find out much later, Doriany is Candiana, the lost daughter of Parselius, the cousin of Leonius and Urania.

The Constant Art

297

The young seek to imitate their parents’ generation, and the older generation recognize and enable that resemblance (typically by being sought out to confer knighthood). But they also recollect their own pasts. Steriamus is moved by absence and ‘the remembrance of former times’ to sing a poem to Urania, ‘speaking as if she had bin with him’ (1.55r–v/149): apostrophe and its ability to summon up a silent presence is here enabled by the conjunction of absence and memory, of separation in space and between the parts of the Urania. And memory also haunts him, since he cannot entirely forget that he once loved Pamphilia, ‘as hee was allmost like to have falen into a dangerous passion’ (1.56v/152). In ‘a prety little frency for the time of olde love, and memory’ (ibid.), Steriamus tries to order his thoughts in another poem, and finds that his mind wants to live in both the past and the present: Then grant my memery may with mee live, And darken nott my first, and deerest choise, From which though swervd, I in itt still rejoyse, Nor lett the fates from mee those phantsies drive, For though a secound love doth mee infolde, Non must the former from my soule unfolde. (ibid. = N17.9–14)

These moments of recollection are often cued by a return to the scene of the events recollected; the opening pages of Part 2 are especially rich in this sort of nostalgia. Many of the events of Part 1 take place in Pamphilia’s private gardens, laid out by her in an act of creation that is just an extension of her poetry. In Part 2 Wroth brings together many of her principal characters for a nostalgic sojourn at the Morean court; they revisit this scene and this ‘made many of that Company remember their Olde passions’. Rosindy tries to formalize what is going on: ‘Most deare sister sayd hee, since wee are heere, lett us remember some part of our olde passed times heere in this place’ (1.11r/32). His words do not make clear if it is the act of remembering or the event recalled that is ‘heere in this place’, but this is a functional ambiguity: place is able temporarily to elide distance in time and bring the past to life in the present. Though we learn this lesson most clearly in Part 2 it is there in a different form in Part 1, when Wroth follows Leonius (who has up to now played little part in the story) to Arcadia, for it is here that Wroth

298

The Constant Art

engages most closely and fruitfully with her uncle’s fiction. Because we are finally in the place of Sidney’s fiction, certain expectations arise in the reader’s mind; these are acknowledged in the smooth transition from description of Arcadia to Leonius’ encounter with an Arcadian beauty (Veralinda, we later learn): … yet when he had seene all the varieties encrease in varying to pleasure, he was yet set uppon by a more admirable sight which was the most delightfull object for man to like, and this as well to be liked as any, being a faire and daintie woman, appearing a Shepheardesse, but … so much surpassing description as conceit doth commonly excell expression. (2Y4v/423)

In love at first sight, he follows the shepherdess silently: ‘He durst not follow neere, yet did his eies kisse every step she took …’ (2Z1r/424). Wroth has quietly and belatedly followed Sidney’s footsteps back to Arcadia, for the image here is lifted from the opening page of the revised Arcadia, where ‘remembrance’ has cried to Strephon and Klaius not ‘to leave those steps unkissed wherein Urania printed the farewell of all beautie’ (B1v/3). Wroth’s echo makes this scene a new beginning, an imitative counterpoint to Wroth’s engagement with Sidney’s opening at her own work’s start. In both cases the following and kissing of footsteps evokes a literary topos (and one that is itself, by virtue of its spatial metaphor, peculiarly adapted to being overlaid on narrative topography). Lucretius had followed in Epicurus’ footsteps (De Rerum Natura, 3.3–6), and Statius in Virgil’s (Thebaid, 12.816–17). This example was itself followed by John Dickenson, who set a precedent for the writer who would tread uncritically in Sidney’s steps, ‘my blushing Muse reverencing the steps wherein he traced, and hovering aloofe with awe-full dread’.³³ What Strephon and Klaius follow is an ideal (Urania) but also a literary source—the opening of Montemayor’s Diana. There, in Bartholomew Yong’s 1598 translation, ‘forgotten Syrenus’ enters a scene that both Sidney and Markham echo, and engages in dialogue with his memory: ‘What saiest thou memorie? That in this medow I beheld my Lady Diana, that in the same I began to feele that, which I shal never ³³ Arisbas (1594), A4r. Cf. The Faerie Queene, 4.2.34, where Spenser follows Chaucer; AS 1.11; Defence, 73.33, 84.10–11, 112.19. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer tells his ‘litel book’ to ‘kis the steppes, wer-as thou seest pace | Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace’ (1790–2). In the Epilogue to The Shepheardes Calender Spenser also casts the net of the topos more widely to take in both Chaucer and the author of Piers Plowman: ‘followe them farre off, and their high steppes adore’ (11). On the vestigia topos see further G. W. Pigman III, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ, 33 (1980), 1–32 (19–22).

The Constant Art

299

leave of to lament, That neere to that cleere fountaine …’.³⁴ The efforts of memory to ‘put before mine eies’ (12) all the torments of his love for Diana he complements with a song to a lock of her hair that remembers the sight of her fatefully writing ‘Rather dead then changed be’ on the sand ‘by yon river bright’ (13), and with the recitation of a letter from her to him: ‘Is this a letter … to make one thinke, that oblivion could enter into that hart, from whence such wordes came foorth? And are these wordes to be passed so slightly out of memorie?’ (14). Sidney translates the whole of the song (CS 28), and Robert Sidney imitates its end (Croft, 268); Wroth is aware of both in her imitation, discussed below. Klaius’ words had acknowledged the connection between narrative place and the places of the art of memory: ‘truely no more, but as this place served us to thinke of those thinges, so those thinges serve as places to call to memorie more excellent matters’ (B2v/4). Sidney’s rewriting of Montemayor—followed by Markham—makes memory a figure for literary derivation, aligning his revisiting of a literary topos with the way place serves as a cue for memory in Montemayor. Wroth’s return with Leonius to the topoi of Sidney’s opening and to the place of his fiction is a prelude to a very deliberate memorial. Leonius has strayed into an Arcadian theme park. Within a few pages he has saved his beloved from a rampaging bear and disguised himself as a shepherdess to woo her. In both cases he is a suspiciously passive agent, following events with his eyes but hardly needing to move to kill the bear and receive his beloved’s thanks; donning his disguise at the instigation of a knowing shepherd who takes him under his wing. Wroth’s approach is markedly ironic, holding the Sidneian topoi at an amused distance, building their details into the memories of her characters: Leonius’ lengthy vacillations over which bit of the bear to give Veralinda and what to say to her is an especially telling instance of this imitative surplus (427–9). The whole episode treads a fine line between a straightforward romance treatment of what Aristotle critically calls ‘unconvincing possibilities’ (Poetics, 1460a) and a pervasive and ironic knowingness that compresses a deal of Sidney into a few pages. It is interesting that this knowingness is available to a male character and not to a female one: Leonius chooses to disguise himself as a shepherdess; Veralinda does not know that she is a princess in disguise. Leonius enjoys what ought to be Wroth’s apprenticeship, a movement ³⁴ A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s ‘Diana’ and Gil Polo’s ‘Enamoured Diana’, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968), 10, 12.

300

The Constant Art

from being a passive viewer of a generic highlights show to absolute control of the manipulation of familiar dynamics to get what he wants. This is almost to recognize his identity as a fictional character in a world of models and precedents. But it is also, and more subtly, to use the knowledge of how such stories work to take advantage of Veralinda’s desire to recognize herself in the events and fictions she encounters. That is a desire that motivates all of Wroth’s self-consciously secondary characters. And it is a desire that motivates Wroth. D I A LO G U E A N D A P O S T RO PH E For whom does Wroth write? And why does she write? The texts themselves invite us to look for answers in the representations of loving and writing within their fictions, and especially at the central character of Pamphilia. It is wrong to treat Pamphilia to Amphilanthus as if it is written in the person of the character developed in the Urania; it is likely to have come first and to have been a less fully conceived piece of personation on Wroth’s part.³⁵ But it is appended to the 1621 Urania, and readers can if they wish identify it with the poems given by Pamphilia to Amphilanthus within that story.³⁶ In any case, the two perspectives—of the sonneteer and of the romance heroine—are identical. Pamphilia loves constantly but her beloved is inconstant. The only choice she allows herself is to carry on loving, whether or not her love is reciprocated. Both fictions show her shaping her identity as the constant lover, solitary, understood by few, living as much in her imagination as in the world about her, and placing value on poetry and stories as means of self-expression and of consolation. Pamphilia’s story mirrors Wroth’s, most clearly in their family structures and their love for their cousins. But it is not the only story within the Urania that has such a function. ³⁵ The state of the text in the Folger manuscript of Wroth’s poems, all or only the first part of which might be construed as Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appears to predate that in the 1621 printing. The general assumption is that Wroth was writing poetry from about the time when other poets start referring to her as Sidney’s heir or to her literary interests, that is in around 1611–12; and that the Urania followed later. See the introductions to Poems, U1, and U2, and Brennan, ‘‘‘A SYDNEY, though un-named’’’. On the Folger manuscript (MS V.a.104) see my ‘Constant Works: A Framework for Reading Mary Wroth’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 14.2 (1996/97), 5–32, and Heather Dubrow, ‘‘‘And Thus Leave Off’’: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22 (2003), 273–91. ³⁶ Cf. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 252.

The Constant Art

301

Many of the sub-narratives offer similar scenarios to Pamphilia’s, and several are especially close to what we know of Wroth’s life.³⁷ Bellamira tells Amphilanthus a tale that in many details looks forward to the narrative in Part 2 of how Pamphilia and Amphilanthus are tricked into separate marriages by Forsandurus (Hugh Sanford).³⁸ Pamphilia tells Dorolina a tale of Lindamira, ‘faigning it to be written in a French story’ (3G3r/499), which ends with a complaint versified by Pamphilia as seven sonnets, a miniature sequence that—typographically distinct and at the end of Book III—reminds the reader of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. Dorolina recognizes that the tale of Lindamira (which is based on Wroth’s biography more than on Pamphilia’s) ‘was some thing more exactly related then a fixion, yet her discretion taught her to be no Inquisitor’ (3H1v/505). The roman a` clef was clearly an influence on Wroth: where Sidney will only introduce an authorial persona into his Arcadia, Wroth gives us clues that many of her central characters can be identified with real people, and that a number of her inset narratives too (as Denny recognized) are drawn from the life.³⁹ Later readers, it is true, tried to discover a key to the Arcadia, whereby Pyrocles would be Sidney, and Philoclea Penelope Rich, but such efforts tell us more about seventeenth-century romance than about Sidney.⁴⁰ In the same period a kinsman wrote to Wroth asking for a key to the Urania, ‘that I may read with more delight’; it was a simplistic response to the text, but not in this case unwarranted.⁴¹ Pamphilia is a Sidneian poet–lover. As a poet she is as anachronistic and unfashionable as her author (‘I seldome make any but Sonnets’) and is more interested in text than in performance (‘and they are not so ³⁷ On biographical and topical allusion see especially Lamb, ‘Biopolitics’ and Carrell, ‘A Pack of Lies’; Wroth’s references to her own biography are summarized in U1, lxxi–iii. ³⁸ See Chapter 4, pp. 147–8. ³⁹ If anything, Astrophil and Stella is the more pertinent precedent for Wroth’s interplay between biography and fiction. Cf. Garrett, 33. ⁴⁰ On seventeenth-century keys see William Dean, ‘Henry Oxinden’s Key (1628) to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: Some Facts and Conjectures’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 12.2 (1993), 14–21; and U1, xlvii–viii on the roman a` clef precedent of Barclay’s Latin Argenis (1621), which in its second English translation (1628) includes a key; Roberts also draws attention to Kenelme Digby’s Loose Fantasies (lxx). W. H. Bond reports that the William Andrews Clark Library has William Herbert’s copy of the 1593 Arcadia, with a key (‘The Reputation and Influence of Sir Philip Sidney’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1941), 1.93–5). ‘Philophilippos’ does not offer a key in the 1655 Arcadia because ‘the wards of this lock are grown so rustie with time, that a modern key will scarce unlock it’ (Garrett, 258–9). ⁴¹ Poems, 244–5 (Appendix, letter 14): George Manners, Earl of Rutland to Wroth, 31 May 1640.

302

The Constant Art

sweet in rehearsing as others that come more roundly off’, 3C3v/460). She writes for herself, and the extensive lover’s rhetoric of her many speeches, a language of prose complaint rich with echoes of the sonnets of Philip and Robert Sidney, is always performed to an empty room.⁴² And just as Wroth situates her at the centre of her fictions, so Pamphilia tries to situate herself at the centre of the story-telling that makes up so much of the Urania’s action: speake then of love, and speake to me, who love that sweete discourse, (next to my love) above all other things, if that you cannot say more of your selfe … tell of some others … let me but understand the choice varieties of Love, and the mistakings, the changes, the crosses; if none of these you know, yet tell me some such fiction, it may be I shall be as lucklesse as the most unfortunate; shew me examples, for I am so void of hope, much lesse of true assurance, as I am already at the height of all my joy. (2B2v–2B3r/225)

It is as if Wroth and her characters must satisfy Pamphilia’s demand to live at the heart of a collection of love stories—true or fictional, she doesn’t care which—and to use those stories to learn about herself.⁴³ She does not always like what she hears, however: ‘why … should all chuse: these or such like wofull histories, of purpose to torment me with feare, that I may live to see like woes?’ (2B4r–v/229). This richly self-conscious moment focuses our attention on the repetitiveness of the Urania’s sub-narratives and shows us that it has to do with Pamphilia and with the shape of Wroth’s own biography. But while Wroth projects herself into her fiction, Pamphilia retreats from view: These thoughts so inwardly afflicted her, as she sat still, her colour not changing, nor any motion in her outward part, while the soule onely wrought in her, and yet, not to let the world be ignorant of her operation, sent teares from out her eyes, to witnesse the affliction that she felt … her heart did beate with paine, and I thinke greefe, that her eyes should be more happy in ability to demonstrate her paine, then that which best knowing her mind could attaine unto; I feele said it the torment, they shew it, like players of an others part. (2B4v/229)

Only what others cannot see is real for Pamphilia; anything she does or shows is a sort of performance and partakes of fiction. This scene ⁴² Compare, for example, her apostrophe to night at 466.11–19 with such night poems as Robert Sidney’s Sonnet 6. ⁴³ Carrell’s idea of the ‘ghostly ur-tale’ behind the many similar sub-narratives in Part 1 is useful: ‘Wroth takes an unsatisfying situation from her own life and creates a fantasia of endless variations upon her basic factual story; weaving fact and fantasy into an inseparable web …’ (‘A Pack of Lies’, 94, 89). Cf. Waller, Sidney Family Romance, 250.

The Constant Art

303

demonstrates the will to an inscrutable inner self that makes Pamphilia tick, makes her the still point around which Wroth’s narratives turn, and makes her a disturbing figure for an author who appears to show so much of herself through this character.⁴⁴ It is her constancy that puts Pamphilia firmly at the centre of Wroth’s world: ‘still without speech, and as (if one would say) fix’d like the heaven, while the world of her thoughts had motion in her griefe’ (X4v/190). There is a richly patterned, almost geometric, logic to this arrangement, a matter of centre and circumference that draws on the use in the emblem tradition of the compasses to figure constancy:⁴⁵ ‘for so stilly did she moove, as if the motion had not been in her, but that the earth did goe her course, and stirre’ (2A1r/212). Pamphilia prays to Love to ‘let me be ordaind, or licensed to be the true patterne of true constancy, and let my love be loyall to me’ (2D2r/244). Already in the Throne of Love enchantment of Book I she has been identified as the epitome of constancy, but as the work goes on, she must learn to separate her constancy from any hope of Amphilanthus’ loyalty, as she explains to Urania: To leave him for being false, would shew my love was not for his sake, but mine owne, that because he loved me, I therefore loved him, but when hee leaves I can doe so to. O no deere Cousen I loved him for himselfe, and would have loved him had hee not loved mee, and will love though he dispise me; this is true love … Pamphilia must be of a new composition before she can let such thoughts fall into her constant breast, which is a Sanctuary of zealous affection, and so well hath love instructed me, as I can never leave my master nor his precepts, but still maintaine a vertuous constancy. Tis pittie said Urania, that ever that fruitlesse thing Constancy was taught you as a vertue … (3D3v/470)

This is one reason why the work does not end. Amphilanthus’ centrifugal restlessness cannot be reconciled to Pamphilia’s centripetal constancy; the plot conspires to prevent any lasting union and break up any temporary accord. Left alone again after an interruption, ‘she thus began, or rather continued her complaints which could have no new ⁴⁴ See Lamb, Gender and Authorship, 178–81, for a useful discussion of the relation between the performance of emotion and the audience in Wroth. ⁴⁵ See for example George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635), X1r (Labore et Constantia). Cf. Zelmane’s misery in captivity in the revised Arcadia: ‘solitarie Sorrowe, with a continuall circle in her selfe, going out at her owne mouth, to come in againe at her own eares’ (2Q6v/387). See further my ‘Constant Works’, 18–19.

304

The Constant Art

beginning never having end’ (3D2r/467). The structure of Wroth’s constant work requires this circular logic of endless repetition. The logic of constancy is not Wroth’s invention. In its philosophical guise it is a stoic position, most familiar to Wroth’s contemporaries from Justus Lipsius’ De constantia (1584; trans. John Stradling, 1594). In its artistic and poetic form it is an Elizabethan topos, part of the repertoire of the constant Queen whose motto was semper eadem, ‘always the same’. The Phoenix Nest (1593), one of the printed miscellanies that builds itself around the commemoration of Sidney, includes a prose dialogue between Constancy and Inconstancy performed to Elizabeth at the house of her retired champion, Sir Henry Lee. The dialogue works over many of the images used by Wroth. Constancy tells Inconstancy that ‘When you have once chosen, you must turne your eies inward, to looke onelie on him whom you have placed in your hart’ and that compared to this cherished image, other people in the world outside ‘are all as dead pictures unto me’.⁴⁶ Inconstancy offers the Queen a loose girdle, and Constancy a buckle to bind it, and these circular tokens feed the transformative ending that follows, as Inconstancy feels that ‘a greater power worketh in me, than your or my reason, which draweth me from the circle of my fancies, to the center of constant love … ’(D2v/28). Wroth bases both her poems and her prose on such powerful images and models, creating fictions that are not linear and teleological but circular and that find their truth in a core of selfhood and not in a shell of deeds. If we accept that Wroth has personal as well as artistic reasons for this method, we can see her fictions as a sort of alternative inner self, a turning of the eyes inward. Amphilanthus accepts that constancy rules the Urania’s world. As an uneasy mouthpiece for his author in Book I of Part 1 he is made to admit that ‘Constancy I see, is the onely perfect vertue, and the contrary, the truest fault’ (P4r/135) but it is with much more accomplished irony that the Amphilanthus of Part 2 undertakes at its start to make himself the model of constancy: ‘well I fear onely that I shall sett you all such a patterne of Constancy, as the wourke will bee soe hard noe woeman can learne itt, pick itt out … what a miraculous wourke I shall finish when I shall apeere soe cleerly shining in constancy’ (1.9v/28). Works are always to be finished in the Urania, whether the tapestries of love lived and narrated by women (‘We are all picturd in that piece, said she, a large cloth, and full of much worke’, U1, ⁴⁶ The Phoenix Nest [1593], ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), D1v/26, D2r/27.

The Constant Art

305

3Z2r/650) or the enchantments and adventures to be ended by force by the men. Amphilanthus’ work of constancy cannot be finished because inconstancy always gets the better of him. And Wroth’s own work can never be finished because Pamphilia’s constancy can never be matched by Amphilanthus’, because the work is stuck on the Renaissance paradox of constant inconstancy.

* * * I seeke for some smale ease by lines, which bought Increase the paine; griefe is nott cur’d by art (P9.3–4)

Pamphilia is most often represented as writing for and to herself; this is in part a way of representing Wroth’s own authorship as a suitably private and silent activity.⁴⁷ And yet Pamphilia’s poems are ‘to’ Amphilanthus, and Wroth has them printed along with her own Urania. The question of audience and address is highlighted in Wroth’s representations of amorous women, and it is for us to highlight it in Wroth’s own case. Alarina is a minor character who has lived the life of constant love and betrayal by the beloved that most of the women of Part 1 have in common. Resolving to ‘speak or write’ to him, and able to frame speeches in her mind, she finds herself unable to speak when she sees him, because of the cruel way he looks at her: Then did I silently lament this harme, and mournefully bewaile my misery, speaking unto my selfe, as if to him, and frame his answers like unto his lookes, then weepe, and spend whole nights in this distresse, my heart almost unable to sustaine so curst a Dialogue, as I had framd millions of times to vexe my soule withal, at last I writ a letter … (2B1r/220–1)

Dialogue retreats inwards and becomes text—first the letter and then a poem, which fares no better. Alarina becomes virtually incapacitated, ⁴⁷ Privacy, secrecy, withdrawal, subjectivity—these are all rightly popular themes in Wroth criticism: see, e.g., Jeff Masten, ‘‘‘Shall I turne blabb?’’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’, in Reading Mary Wroth, 67–87, Fienberg, ‘Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity’, and a more recent article, ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self’, SEL 42 (2002), 121–36, Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 72, and Miller, Changing the Subject. See also Rosalind Smith, ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal’, ELR, 30 (2000), 408–31, arguing that withdrawal in Wroth represents the political retreat of a disenfranchised generation.

306

The Constant Art

and must listen to others’ opinions of her: ‘some said, my prose was gone, and that I onely could expresse my selfe in verse’ (2B1v/223). She ends in the world of Philisides and Petrarchan pastoral: ‘With my poore sheepe I did discourse, and of their lives make my descipherd life: rockes were my objects, and my daily visits’ (ibid.). Wroth is careful to plot Alarina’s decline in terms of her access to the resources of language, and of a movement from spoken communication to text, verse, and solitary apostrophe, addressing animals, framing dialogues with the absent. Apostrophe is the mode that characterizes Pamphilia’s rhetoric. It is not monologue, but rather dialogic address to those who cannot answer because they are not there. It is in this mode, perhaps, that Pamphilia writes her sonnets to Amphilanthus. Pamphilia is often depicted writing (e.g. U1, 62, 216) but does not at first expect an audience. But as her friends start to understand her and to accept her as a constant lover (though most of them do not know of whom), they gain access to her cabinet (as at U1, 260) and her poems, and in Meriana’s case to the promise of her own copies (461), despite Pamphilia’s reluctance to share what is ‘onely fit for me to heare, and keepe’ (3C3v/460). In one episode Pamphilia is part of a select group including Amphilanthus’ mother (who, as a noted poet, is clearly the Countess of Pembroke), and Perissus and Limena. They wander through the woods at leisure, ‘telling stories of themselves, and others, mixed many times with pretty fine fictions’ (3F3r/489); that is, telling stories that mingle fiction and autobiography. We already know that Pamphilia has tended to engrave things on the trees in these woods, sonnets, and ciphers, or decorative anagrams of her name and Amphilanthus’ (325). So the group ‘found many knots, and names ingraven upon the trees, which they understood not perfectly, because when they had decipher’d some of them, they then found they were names fained and so knew them not. But Perissus remembred one of the Ciphers, yet because it was Pamphilias hee would not knowe it’ (3F3v/490). This is the same discretion as Dorolina shows about Pamphilia’s feigned tale of Lindamira, a sort of tact, where the feigning is seen through but not mentioned, that is common in the Urania, and reflects obliquely the status Wroth’s fictions could be accorded in her life.⁴⁸ We have only to imagine a friend recognizing the letters of the ‘fained’ names Pamphilia and Amphilanthus in the cipher tooled on the boards of Wroth’s fair copy of her play Love’s Victory to recreate in the world outside her fictions a moment where tact at the ⁴⁸ On this tact cf. Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 161.

The Constant Art

307

recognition of the meaning of a fiction is required.⁴⁹ Wroth’s writings, like Pamphilia’s, are apostrophes overheard. Pamphilia’s most significant reader is Amphilanthus, and Wroth makes an extended scene out of his access to her verse, and thereby to an admission of love. We find Pamphilia reading from a book that offers another veiled account of her love: the subject was Love, and the story she then was reading, the affection of a Lady to a brave Gentleman, who equally loved, but being a man, it was necessary for him to exceede a woman in all things, so much as inconstancie was found fit for him to excell her in, hee left her for a new. (2L4v/317)

Amphilanthus arrives, and, before leaving again, ‘hee spake to Pamphilia for some Verses of hers, which he had heard of’. She grants this request, ‘and going into her Cabinet to fetch them, he would needs accompany her … When they were there, she tooke a deske, wherein her papers lay, and kissing them, delivered all shee had saved from the fire, being in her owne hand unto him, yet blushing told him, she was ashamed, so much of her folly should present her selfe unto his eyes’ (2M1v/320). It is important that Amphilanthus requests the poems; it saves Pamphilia from choosing to address them to him, from deciding to publish. And yet they are ‘in her owne hand unto him’,⁵⁰ they are addressed, and autograph, like the Folger manuscript of Wroth’s poems, a manuscript with a later binding but the same watermark and format as the Penshurst Love’s Victory, and that was probably originally its twin, with the cipher of Pamphilia’s and Amphilanthus’ names tooled on its covers. Amphilanthus praises the poems: but one thing (said he) I must find fault with, that you counterfeit loving so well, as if you were a lover, and as we are, yet you are free; pitie it is you suffer not, that can faigne so well. She smild, and blusht, and softly said (fearing that he or her selfe should heare her say so much) Alas my Lord, you are deceived in this for I doe love. He caught her in his armes, she chid him not, nor did so much as frowne, which shewed she was betrayd. (ibid.)

⁴⁹ Lamb discusses Wroth’s ciphers and ‘the invitation to decipher’ (128) in ‘Biopolitics’, 125–8. The decorative cover of the Penshurst manuscript is reproduced in Josephine Roberts, ‘Deciphering Women’s Pastoral: Coded Language in Love’s Victory’, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 163–74 (166). ⁵⁰ There may be a deliberate ambiguity; with different punctuation the sentence could imply only that she delivers ‘unto him’ autograph poems.

308

The Constant Art

He then notices a miniature of Pamphilia and insists on having this too.⁵¹ Characters who are already in part at least fictional representations of Wroth and Pembroke seem to evidence this secondariness by finding the truth of each other in image, verse, and picture, in figurative representations. But then this manoeuvre is Wroth’s too. In a scene that follows from this, Pamphilia has received the absent Amphilanthus’ miniature in return. She can never in Wroth’s fiction address him as her lover, but—in the same way that her poetry can address the imaginary or the absent—she finds herself talking passionately to the picture: My deare selfe (would shee say) what happinesse find I in thee? how am I blessed alone in thee? and above all by thee? Deerer part of my soule, take the other to thee, pure love calles thee to acceptance, and thou doest, I hope, take what I so firmely give thee. What shall I say? thou sayst thou wilt not bee ungratefull, I assure my selfe of that, and blame my selfe extremely, if I said any thing might make thee thinke I doubted thee … but those deare eyes assure mee, those lippes swell in anger I should thus dispute then, and now dearest, take mine unto thine, which with whispering let my breath say, I doe long onely to see them move againe, and tell mee of thy love, soules comfort; how I see in my soule spirit-like cleare, and bodilesse from corruption, governe and command like loue; a thing adored and reverenced, but not seene, except to lovers: so art thou to me, my spirit, and my All. (2R1r–v/365–6)

She almost conjures the picture to life so that she can kiss it, and so that she can anticipate what it might say and engage it in a sort of dialogue. This scene is a dramatization of a metaphor that Wroth uses often, familiar enough to the sonneteers, whereby the beloved is held in the lover’s heart like a picture: ‘for though the sight which she desired, was hid from her, she might yet by the light of her imaginations (as in a picture) behold, and make those lights serve in his absence’ (L1r/90; cf. 580.30–2). The topos gets an extended treatment later in Part 1 (329.34–330.14), where Urania uses apostrophe and the metaphor of the beloved as image to cope with the absence of Steriamus. But one of the most interesting versions is found in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: When last I saw thee, I did nott thee see, Itt was thine Image, which in my thoughts lay ⁵¹ For this scenario, cf. Patricia Fumerton, ‘‘‘Secret Arts’’: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations, 15 (1986), 57–97, reprinted in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991).

The Constant Art

309

Soe lively figur’d, as noe times delay Could suffer mee in hart to parted bee; And sleepe soe favorable is to mee, As nott to lett thy lov’d remembrance stray, Least that I waking might have cause to say Ther was one minute found to forgett thee; Then since my faith is such, soe kind my sleepe That gladly thee presents into my thought: And still true lover like thy face doth keepe Soe as some pleasure shadowe-like is wrought. Pitty my loving, nay of conscience give Reward to mee in whom thy self doth live. (P24)

The breakdowns in logic represent faithfully the difficulty of bridging between apostrophe and direct address, between absence and presence. Pamphilia sees Amphilanthus and does not see him (the mirrored chiasmus of ‘saw thee … thee see’ nicely takes us through the looking glass). Rather she sees his lively image, which is so realistic that ‘noe times delay | Could suffer mee in hart to parted bee’. This is the first moment of logical strain: the lines appear to mean that she cannot bear to be apart from her beloved; but is not her resort to the not-seeing of imagination predicated on being apart? Already she is substituting the image for the real thing: it is the image from which she cannot bear to be apart.⁵² The second quatrain prefers to live in sleep (which equates with the waking fancy of poet–lovers too), where Amphilanthus is never forgotten, even for a moment. The sestet starts to build an argument: since she is so attached to his image and when seen in sleep that image is ‘true lover like’ (whereas in reality Amphilanthus might present a less constant face) … . We would expect the final couplet to complete the logic—‘then let me ever sleep’. We are expecting the poem to accept that its amorous and fictive ability to conjure up a perfect image of the beloved is more satisfying than the real failure to be with the beloved to which it is a response. But instead Pamphilia addresses the very beloved who may or may not be imagined, asking for pity and ‘Reward to mee in whom thy selfe doth live’. Wroth alludes to the exchange of hearts topos that frequently accompanies the topos of the beloved as image in ⁵² Helen Hackett notices that Pamphilia’s ‘image of her absent beloved … seems almost preferable to the real, faithless man’ (Women and Romance Fiction, 73).

310

The Constant Art

the lover’s heart: the heart of each lives in the other. But this last line may also be read solely in terms of the poem’s main conceit—that the beloved who lives in the lover is just an image, ‘lively figur’d’ of course, but an image all the same. Our confusion about what is at stake here is key: this may be apostrophe to a phantasm, or it may be direct address, just as the sequence as a whole is ambiguously ‘to Amphilanthus’. And in the end we may not be able to tell the difference, if apostrophe manages to create the imagined beloved whom we in any case only encounter in fiction and in verse.⁵³ These moments of imagining Amphilanthus tend in this way to lead into moments of address to him (cf. U1, 580–1), and a habit of apostrophe becomes characteristic of Pamphilia: ‘for Pamphilia was in company, and alone much one, shee could be in greatest assemblies as private with her own thoughts, as if in her Cabinet, and there have as much discourse with her imagination and cruell memory, as if in the presence (3C3r/459)’. This echo of Sidney’s Astrophil (who seems ‘most alone in greatest company’ in AS 27.2) is repeated in another scene of soliloquy. For Pamphilia, separated from Amphilanthus, ‘a poore weake shadow of my selfe remaines, but I am other where’. She imagines that Amphilanthus may be echoing her apostrophes, ‘speaking with thy selfe, as I discourse to him, his time employd in thoughts of love like mine, and so he thinking of me, brings us together in absence, present when distance is, and absent oft in greatest companies. But dost thou thinke on me deare love?’ (2M1r/318). The Sidneian tag licenses this conceit, but also shows us that it belongs to fiction, and that the Amphilanthus addressed in Pamphilia’s apostrophe (and perhaps answering in an absent dialogue) is doubly imagined, by Pamphilia and by Wroth. Because these apostrophes can only receive some response if Wroth brings Amphilanthus on to the scene (as she does tellingly in this last instance, leading to Amphilanthus’ access to Pamphilia’s verse and the revelation of her love), they inevitably seek dialogue elsewhere. That last soliloquy finds the pronouns dancing from person to person as Pamphilia fixes on one addressee after another—her heart, her people, herself, Amphilanthus, and then ‘memory’ (318.18–319.12). A similar effect operates in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, where, for example, two ⁵³ A reading of this poem is central to Helen Hackett’s excellent essay ‘‘‘A book, and solitariness’’: Melancholia, Gender and Literary Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (London, 1998), 64–85 (70–1).

The Constant Art

311

rare poems addressed to Amphilanthus (P28, the song ‘Sweetest love returne againe’ and P30) are followed by poems addressing Hope (P31), Grief (P32), Joy (P33), shades (P34), and Time (P35). Like Sidney’s Philisides, Wroth’s Pamphilia seeks consolation in imaginary dialogue.⁵⁴ There are other ways in which Amphilanthus is made to listen to Pamphilia’s concerns, and these can point us towards a possibility of finding Pembroke as an addressee. It is significant that it is Amphilanthus who is selected as the audience for the lengthy narrative of Bellamira, with its many points of contact with Wroth’s biography. At its end he asks to hear some of the verses she has mentioned, and is obliged: we then watch Bellamira performing to Amphilanthus/Pembroke a poem addressed in apostrophe to her ‘Deerest’ and written, as we cannot fail to recall, by Wroth. On several levels the poem can be felt to be addressed to Pembroke, but never directly. The build-up to this performance offers an interesting perspective on the autobiographical hall of mirrors: You did (said Amphilanthus) in your discourse touch upon a quality rare in women, and yet I have seene some excellent things of their writings, let me be so much bound to you, as to heare some of your Verses. Truely Sir said she, so long it is since I made any, and the subject growne so strange, as I can hardly cal them to memory which I made, having desired to forget all things but my love, fearing that the sight, or thought of them, would bring on the joyes then felt, the sorrowes soone succeeding. (2T3v/390)

Amphilanthus’ appreciation of Pamphilia’s poems (acquired a little before this scene) is implicit here, and can be seen as a wished-for attitude of Pembroke to Wroth’s writings, including this one. Bellamira’s excuses emphasize the ability of art to represent and reawaken emotion; Amphilanthus’ response, on the other hand, praises her artistry and ignores her emotional investment: ‘And perfect are you sweet Bellamira, said the King in this Art, pittie it is, that you should hide, or darken so rare a gift’ (2T4r/391). For all the ways in which Wroth addresses her amorous art to Pembroke and his shadow, she avoids representing a moment in which he listens to what she says to him, understands what it means, and responds. Wroth treats Amphilanthus’ voice with unique care. His deeds of romance heroism may be conventional, but his speech is among the more naturalistically represented, with a gift for irony, self-mockery, ⁵⁴ Cf. Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 163.

312

The Constant Art

and teasing his nearest and dearest. It seems close to life, and we assume that the life is Pembroke’s. A different kind of care is taken on the many occasions when Amphilanthus’ verse is referred to, and passed over. Where other characters perform their poems or have them delivered by the narrator, Amphilanthus’ art is repeatedly brought to our attention and suppressed (e.g. U1, 136, 269, 295, 497). The performance by a lover of the beloved’s poetry is an important dynamic for Wroth;⁵⁵ where love is mutual, lovers can exchange verses, as the shepherd who befriends Leonius in Arcadia describes: ‘she takes my Songs, and sings them, happy lines that ever gaind such blisse, to kisse those sweet lippes passing into ayre … she sometimes likewise will give mee some of her making, and commends my voice, makes me sing to her, which I doe, and yeeld her owne words to her best knowing judgement. She requites mee presently, and sings mine unto me; then I say they are only good, when she doth grace them so; she answers best our songs befits our mouthes, and eares, these are not onely signes, but I doe thinke, or much doe flatter my poore selfe, they are assurances’ (2Z1v/426). Wroth could have Amphilanthus perform, as if they were his, poems written by Wroth; she could have Amphilanthus or Pamphilia perform or read verse written by Pembroke and ascribed to Amphilanthus.⁵⁶ It is as if she is reluctant to do either because of what it ought to signify—a lover’s right, not only a sign but an assurance. Again, when Amphilanthus tells ‘the whole story of his affection, onely keeping her name secret’ (2I1v/291), we are not allowed to hear what he says, as if the representation of Pembroke’s shadow talking of his love is something Wroth cannot presume to deliver.⁵⁷ ⁵⁵ Cf. the moments where this goes wrong for Astrophil (AS 57, 58, 59) and Laura’s insistence to Petrarch that her singing of his song meant that she loved him, in the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of The Triumph of Death (2.148–50). ⁵⁶ For discussion of William Herbert’s verse, see Waller, The Sidney Family Romance and William J. Kennedy, The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore and London, 2003), 194–7 and 236–8. Waller admits that it tells us ‘frustratingly very little’ about Herbert’s relations with Wroth (176). Attempts to find poetic dialogue between Wroth and Pembroke are not as convincing as might be hoped—see for example Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘‘‘For Worth, Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One’’: Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family’, in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke, 2000), 164–84. Individual poems can be put in dialogue with poems by Wroth, but only because Herbert runs through most of the conventional topoi, including constancy and the exchange of hearts. See Poems [1660], facsimile, ed. Gaby E. Onderwyzer (Los Angeles, 1959). ⁵⁷ Cf. the suppression of the contents of the book and scroll magically delivered to Pamphilia in front of Urania in Part 2: ‘Pamphilia tooke them bothe, read the scrole,

The Constant Art

313

Wroth represents such performances as having significance: ‘This she sange, and even ware it out of breath with singing, kis’d the originall Coppy because in his owne hand, and never thought it neere enough, nor ever deerer was a paper to a Lover’ (3S4v/606). And it is only in Part 2 that she represents Amphilanthus performing, and Pamphilia performing Amphilanthus’ verse. The latter is the climax of a scene in which Urania, Pamphilia, Amphilanthus, the King of Morea, and other members of their family talk about music and engage in banter.⁵⁸ Pamphilia performs a song by Amphilanthus, written originally as a piece of artful indirection, ‘when hee made a shew of love to Antissia [early in Part 1], and had given itt her though ment to a higher beauty [Pamphilia]’ (1.10r/30). The song (N2) is attributed in other manuscript copies to Pembroke; through many layers of indirect performance and address, Wroth is finally showing Pembroke addressing her, and her right as his lover to perform his verse back to him. But the scene can have no private consummation or acknowledgement, and instead ends in a lengthy exchange in which Amphilanthus will only, conventionally, praise Pamphilia’s voice, and ignores the meaning and context of the song and its performance; Pamphilia responds in courtly kind and Amphilanthus sees that she is gently ridiculing him (31–2), initiating a strong thread that runs through the early pages of Part 2 in which lexical bare sufficiency and what Wroth calls ‘realness’ is juxtaposed to courtly indirection and circumlocution (cf. 33, 43, 52, 58–9). Wroth is trying to be plain, but circumstances continue to make this difficult. This scene is answered when Amphilanthus is discovered by Urania (his sister, and a figure for the work’s dedicatee, the Countess of Montgomery) coming to terms with his latest betrayal of Pamphilia. Urania overhears him performing a poem, one of Wroth’s most beautiful ones, on the sands by a river. The poem (N14) accuses the beloved of responding to genuine love with deceit, and of pretending to love after leaving the lover. To us it reads like a poem by Wroth about the predicament of her constant female lovers, about Pamphilia, about herself.⁵⁹ Amphilanthus’ reversal of the roles only serves to reproach him the more—it is as if he is not addressing Pamphilia but speaking opened the booke, read itt, blusht till teares came in her eyes, then closed them both, putt them up, sighed, and soe they satt downe together againe’ (2.31v/307). ⁵⁸ On this scene see my ‘The Musical Sidneys’, in John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 65–105. ⁵⁹ For further discussion of this poem, in relation to a setting by Ferrabosco, see ‘The Musical Sidneys’.

314

The Constant Art

her address to him. He sees this to some extent when he picks up on the poem’s last word as he ends: ‘Staind, noe, that worthy creature must nott have that word, noe, nott the thought of that word spoken, wher her rarest, sweetest vertus ly, I ame the shameles creature, the monster of sacred vowes, I ame that thing which ought with greatest contempt to be looked on …’ (1.51r/137–8). And so he continues, until Urania approaches and reveals herself to him. We notice that Wroth subtly aligns the place of this scene with that of Montemayor’s opening poem, in which Syrenus addresses a lock of Diana’s hair and recalls the sight of her: On the sand her did I see Sitting by yon river bright, Where her finger this did wright Rather dead then changed be. See how love beares us in hand, Making us beleeve the wordes, That a womans wit affordes, And recorded in the sand.⁶⁰

Topographical cues are again used to take us into the literary topos. This scene, to which Wroth was pointed by her father’s and her uncle’s imitations of Montemayor’s poem, gives Wroth a model for the emotive significance of tokens—hair and text in Montemayor; image and text in Wroth. But Wroth must also answer Montemayor. Within a few pages, Amphilanthus’ mistake in presenting himself as the faithful lover and Pamphilia as the inconstant beloved is addressed by a poem magically presented to him (N15). It narrates a lady’s lament ‘on the sands’, performed with a lock of her lover’s hair. The poem answers both Montemayor’s Syrenus and Amphilanthus: women are the constant ones. That poem also reworks the dynamic of overhearing that is so skilfully developed by Philip Sidney and Robert Sidney. Sidney’s ‘The ladd Philisides’ has the most lucid structure—a narrative frame that introduces Philisides at the start and adds a coda at the end. Robert Sidney in Song 3 and Pastoral 9 cleverly suppresses the opening, so that only at each poem’s end is the poem found to be spoken by a persona ⁶⁰ Yong’s … ‘Diana’, ed. Kennedy, 13. The riverside locus is also familiar from ‘The Lover’s Complaint’, printed with Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609, and from other works in the complaint tradition, extending back ultimately to Psalm 137, Super flumina. Shakespeare’s lover also plays with the tokens that stand for memories (36–56).

The Constant Art

315

observed by a narrator, and not by the poet himself. Wroth learns from this in P60, a simple lament discovered at its end to be in the voice of a shepherd ‘Who lov’d well butt was nott lov’d’ (18). But she applies what she has learned in Song 1 in the main sequence of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (P7). It begins in parody of Robert Sidney’s Song 3, with its beginning of ‘Winter is kome at last | cold winter, darck and sad …’: The spring now come att last To trees, fields, to flowers, And medowes makes to tast His pride, while sad showers Which from mine eyes do flow Makes knowne with cruell paines Colde winter yett remaines Noe signe of spring wee know. (1–8)

Wroth likes to open her works with the seasons. Part 1 of the Urania opens ‘When the Spring began to appeare like the welcome messenger of Summer’ (B1r/1) and Part 2 opens with metaphorical late summer: ‘And thus they with Joyes plenty, like the richest harvest after a longe time of dearthe …’ (1.1r/1). There are structural reasons here: spring as the world of the Urania is born and discovered, summer as it bears fruit, the shadow of winter as its characters age and die. But the yearly cycle is also exploited by Wroth to figure the birth and death of love and hope, and that generative aspect—she realizes—belongs with a female voice: the fourth sonnet of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, for example, merges seasonal and diurnal births and deaths with imagery of human pregnancy to meditate on joy, grief, and memory;⁶¹even more memorably, a song later in the sequence begins and ends with the natural cycle, and uses it to form a refrain: The springing time of my first loving Finds yett noe winter of removing Nor frosts to make my hopes decrease Butt with the sommer still increase. (P73.1–4)

The seasonal cycles cooperate with the cycles of Pamphilia’s constancy and Wroth’s circular poetic forms—the numerical patterning of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and the crown of sonnets.⁶² ⁶¹ See my ‘Constant Works’, 29–31.

⁶² See ‘Constant Works’, 5–15.

316

The Constant Art

But in Song 1 the poetic voice is at odds with the seasons, stuck in the winter of Robert Sidney’s poem, itself, we recall, a parody of the opulent and amorous springtime of the Pervigilium Veneris: ‘Colde winter yett remaines | Noe signe of spring wee know’ (P7.7–8). After two stanzas, we find that the voice is overheard: A sheapherdess thus sayd Who was with griefe oprest For truest love beetraid Bard her from quiett rest And weeping thus sayd she My end aprocheth neere Now willow must I weare My fortune soe will bee. (17–24)

The rest of the poem then continues her lament. Wroth varies to great effect the pattern of her father’s and uncle’s poems: instead of opening and/or closing the poem, here the narrative voice stands as a central fulcrum around which the shepherdess’s lament flows; the effect is also a deliberate one of interruption and recommencement—the second half of the poem is a sort of continuation. This dialogue of the linear and the cyclical mirrors the larger one of the two-part Urania itself, and it is beautifully modulated in this poem by the subtle variation of the basic trimeter form: cross rhyme reaching forward in the first four lines of the stanza; then counter rhyme reflecting and encircling in the last four lines. That effect of form, imitated directly from Robert Sidney’s Song 3, helps that third, central, stanza to manage its two voices both discretely and seamlessly. Wroth continues to reach out to other poems: the shepherdess will wear willow as her garland, like the lover in the popular song, a version of which is sung by Desdemona.⁶³ And her shepherdess reaches out to textuality: The barck my booke shall bee Wher dayly I will wright This tale of haples mee True slave to fortunes spight; The roote shall bee my bed ⁶³ Othello, 4.3, picked up by Emilia in the Folio addition at 5.2.246–8; line references to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974). On the Willow song see Winifred Maynard, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and its Music (Oxford, 1986), 38, 161–4.

The Constant Art

317

Wher nightly I will lye, Wayling inconstancy Since all true love is dead. (33–40)

Writing is always there; it is not simply displaced on to performance. Even when a poem is recited or sung, writing is there as metaphor (‘When in my hart each teare did write a line’, N14.6) or as the pastoral practice of aristocratic shepherds, in Wroth as in Sidney. On another occasion where Wroth glances at Montemayor’s opening, embedded in her longest poem, the brilliant pastoral ballad U52, the shepherdess is seen not with a lock of hair and the memory of a pledge of constancy written on the sand, but holding the very papers on which that pledge is written, and which she then reads out (U52.121–52). With ‘This tale of haples mee’ we hear the echo of Astrophil’s ‘pitie the tale of me’ (AS 45.14), and with ‘all true love is dead’ we are close to the opening refrain of Sidney’s CS 30, ‘Ring out your belles, let mourning shewes be spread, | For love is dead’. The place of pastoral (female) complaint is crowdedly intertextual for Wroth, and like her father she manages to witness this pressure by ending not only with singing or writing, but with citation and (here) transcription: And thes lines I will leave If some such lover come Who may them right conseave, And place them on my tombe: She who still constant lov’d Now dead with cruell care Kil’d with unkind dispaire, And change, her end heere prov’d. (41–8)

It is proving that is always the end for Wroth. The last poem of the main, first, sequence in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus ends ‘Yett love I will till I butt ashes prove’ (P55.14). The very last poem of all ends: ‘And thus leave off, what’s past showes you can love, | Now lett your constancy your honor prove’ (P103.13–14). And this pastoral lament ends with a suppressed pun—despair and change prove to be the end of the shepherdess; and her end proves her constancy. Proving, witnessing, and showing (the words run through the sequence like a refrain) depend on an audience, and this focuses the question of how we as readers of works in print and in manuscript imagine them as addressed—privately

318

The Constant Art

in manuscript (in the Folger manuscript and Part 2 of the Urania, both before and after 1621) and publicly in the 1621 printing—to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. We have seen how Sidney imagines an audience for his amorous verse in the phoenix immolation of the constant lover of CS 24. Robert Sidney ends his book imagining a confrontation with the beloved (and the source of political power) that is also a braving of the flames. P103 ends the overall sequence by implying the existence of an audience to read what is proved, but Wroth ends the main sequence of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus by turning the meaning of ‘prove’ rather differently. Here, instead of immolation attending expression, the poet–lover is self-consumed, burnt to ashes not by her beloved’s eyes but by the furnace of her own heart, and left silent: Mine eyes can scarce sustaine the flames my hart Doth trust in them my passions to impart, And languishingly strive to show my love; My breath nott able is to breathe least part Of that increasing fuell of my smart; Yett love I will till I butt ashes prove. (P55.9–14)

Throughout the Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Wroth treads the fine line between expressing and suppressing, publishing and keeping writings and passions close, between revealing and concealing herself, between addressing an audience impersonally and addressing Pembroke through her persona. We are left with a paradox that belongs with early modern female authorship—a paradox of silence and speech.⁶⁴ It is this paradox that enables Wroth’s most striking and brilliant response to Sidney, as we shall see in the next section. ENDLESSNESS AND INCOMPLETION Both parts of the Urania end in mid-sentence, Part 1 with the word ‘And’, Part 2 with the word ‘extreamly’. The broken sentence of Part ⁶⁴ Surveying Wroth scholarship in Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (Basingstoke, 2002), Paul Salzman notes the disagreement between those who stress privacy and withdrawal and those who stress ‘political power and intervention’ (70). Salzman rightly seeks to move beyond ‘a critical debate couched in either/or terms’ to see the Urania ‘as a deliberately unsettled and unsettling strategy concerned to question the power of such categories’ (71).

The Constant Art

319

1 is picked up at the start of Part 2; that which ends Part 2 seems to have been the last of the Urania that Wroth was to write. It is possible to argue that these two broken sentences are accidental or insignificant, simply moments when Wroth paused or reached the end of a day or a page.⁶⁵ But I prefer to think the opposite, for several reasons. The first is that both parts of the Urania are especially concerned with ideas of completion and endlessness. The many enchantments must always be ended, and a lexicon of ending what are often called ‘works’ runs through the continuation in particular (e.g. U2, 141.25). Set against the usual male imperative to finish things is Pamphilia’s own constancy, a circular condition of never-ending love that can never be satisfied because Amphilanthus stands for inconstancy. Pamphilia’s thoughts and lamentations are always ‘endless’ (e.g. U1, 215.29, 467.20–1; P12.1), her constancy and the plots around her often ‘fruitless’ (U1, 470.29; U2, 379.31). In the continuation the narrator can even exclaim: ‘heere indeed is the true parfection of love, endles, fruictles, and above all most vaine’ (U2, 1.27r/81). As a writer endlessness is something Wroth embraces. Like the traditional romance writer she is, she allows her narrative to generate episodes infinitely, and to turn endings into new beginnings.⁶⁶ It is not her habit to punctuate her narrative with well-worked pauses in the plot; the ends of her books are far more arbitrary junctions than are those of Sidney, who shapes narrative in a much more end-oriented fashion. This pattern of narrative circularity being weighed against narrative teleology throws a greater burden on the very ends of both parts of the Urania; their incompletion becomes highly significant. ⁶⁵ Intentional incompletion at the end of Part 1 was suggested by Graham Parry in ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section), 21.4 (1975), 51–60 (57) and reiterated by Roberts (Poems, 69–70). Margaret Witten-Hannah, in ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: The Work and the Tradition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland, 1978), argued that the break is pure accident, the end of a page of copy. It should be observed that the lack of fluency between the two halves of this sentence in Part 1 and Part 2 suggests that Wroth wrote ‘And’ without knowing what was to follow. It is also notable that none of the poems in U2 are in the Folger manuscript, whereas U1 makes use of 9, not including Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. This suggests a break in time between the conclusion of U1 and the commencement of U2. Roberts (Poems, 36–7; U1, cx–i) inclines to the view that the ‘And’ was a catchword in Wroth’s manuscript copy. Lamb is sure of intention in the case of both mid-sentence endings (Gender and Authorship, 148). ⁶⁶ On Wroth’s ambivalence to closure see also Dubrow, ‘ ‘‘And Thus Leave Off’’ ’. On romance endlessness see Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J., 1979).

320

The Constant Art

The second, and most obvious, reason for treating Wroth’s aposiopetic texts as intentionally so is the precedent of Sidney’s revised Arcadia, especially as presented in the 1590 printing.⁶⁷ The broken sentence ending to the unfinished text was sufficiently celebrated that any reader in 1621 would have been impelled to wonder if Wroth’s gesture was not a deliberate tribute to her uncle, bringing the Urania back to the Arcadia as it had begun in parallel to it. That Part 2 also ends mid-sentence seems to confirm this reading; it is otherwise too great a coincidence. Either the playful 1590 chapter heading (90, 2Z7v), or the only surviving manuscript of the revised Arcadia, both of which end with the word ‘and’,⁶⁸ might have shown Wroth how effective was the conjunction ‘and’ in signalling disjunction. The third reason depends on a recognition of Wroth’s own sophisticated grasp of the rhetoric of incompletion and of her ability to play with its paradigms and codes. It is clear from her poetry and prose that she has as well-developed an understanding of rhetoric as most of her male contemporaries: gradatio is just one of the elaborate rhetorical schemes she employs (e.g. U1, 125.25–8) and on occasion she can combine it with other patterns of repetition and wordplay in a properly Sidneian fashion (e.g. U1, 93.30–5). We can only suppose that Wroth’s grasp of rhetorical figuration was theoretical as well as practical. Sidney, after all, offers an ample training in schemes and tropes without the aid of such theoretical supplements as the rhetorics of Fraunce and Hoskyns. But the large number of moments in Wroth’s writing where the theoretical baggage of a figure seems to be in play may encourage us to think that her nature as a writer was disciplined by art. Moreover, Wroth’s own practice helps us to push further the idea of a text being built on a structure of incompletion modelled on the figure of aposiopesis. That practice shows us that she recognizes an analogy between formal linguistic structures (sentence, stanza, poem) and represented time and space; and that she exploits this alignment. The celebrated ‘Crowne of Sonetts dedicated to Love’ (P77–90), a perfect, circular structure in which each of fourteen sonnets begins with the last line of the previous sonnet, begins and ends with such an alignment: ‘In this strang labourinth how ⁶⁷ It remains an inexplicable yet delightful fact that both the 1590 Arcadia and the 1621 Urania end at the end of the alphabet of signatures, on 2Z8v (4◦ in 8s) and 3Z6v ◦ (2 usually in 4s) respectively. ⁶⁸ Cambridge University Library, MS Kk.1.52 , 210v (= NA, 452.10).

The Constant Art

321

shall I turne?’ (P77.1; P90.14).⁶⁹ Would she not have seen that the two parts of an endless plot needed to end mid-sentence, that incompletion should be experienced by both her characters and her readers? It helps to isolate the different kinds of interruption and incompletion that are focused by Wroth on a broken sentence; some of them are familiar from the wider romance tradition. Speech may be interrupted by events and the actions of others (e.g. U1, 43.33; U2, 332.4), and this is the most familiar topos for readers of Ariosto, Spenser, and (as Harington reminds us) Sidney.⁷⁰ The ultimate instance of this is where the broken sentence comes at the moment of death, a trick Wroth could have picked up from Sidney or Shakespeare. Myra, in true Arcadian style, is fooled into thinking that her beloved Alarinus is dead when she sees a stuffed dummy fall from the tower opposite hers, where he is imprisoned. She breaks her heart and dies: her last words being, yet though honour, and life bee lost, I dye just, and truely thine, my onely deare Ala-: and this Ala: was all, for all my name shee spake, death either then wholly possessing her, or shee desirous still to hold mee neere her, kept that last part in her, for her to ende with, and mee to live by (3R3v–3R4r/595–6)

The interrupted text here straddles life and death, mimetically crossing a threshold with much the same ambiguity of conclusion or continuation that we see in the ‘And’ with which Part 1 of the Urania ends. Speech may also be interrupted by others’ words. This may be to stop someone from saying anything further (e.g. U1, 641.4; U2, 118.20, 336.10). An interesting example is the cruel account in the continuation of the now mad Antissia’s grand-style prolixity. Urania interrupts Rosindy’s report of Antissia’s fulsome greeting to him because she can’t bear to hear any more. He then tells her that Antissia herself had been interrupted at exactly this point by the arrival of her husband (U2, 35). This pattern, where interruption within one level of the narrative is replicated in, or extended into, another, will be seen operating on a larger scale later. Alternatively, the interruption of another’s speech in mid-sentence may be to anticipate what would have been said (e.g. U1, ⁶⁹ On the Crown see further Mary Moore, ‘The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, SEL, 38 (1998), 109–25, and ch. 5, ‘The Labyrinth of Style’, in her Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2000). ⁷⁰ Orlando Furioso (1591), ¶7v.

322

The Constant Art

353), or to replace it preemptively (e.g. U1, 242.33–4; U2, 105.11–12, 337.32–3); in this case, involuntary aposiopesis dramatizes the basic hermeneutic pattern implicit in the figure—that the auditor must complete the sense. In using broken sentences Wroth does even more than Sidney to motivate or associate interruption with the emotions connected to aposiopesis in rhetorical theory. Indeed she embeds her text in an ethos drawn from the pattern of emotional incompletion—the key emotions of the four distinguished in the textbooks being not the anger that clusters around many of Sidney’s interruptions, or the sorrow of an aposiopesis that hopes for no redemption, but fear and a very feminine shame, or what the English rhetoricians call bashfulness (as opposed to the masculine wrathful shame with which Sidney ends the revised Arcadia). One instance in Part 1 gives our best evidence that Wroth’s understanding of the figure conforms in detail to the theoretical conventions outlined in my first chapter. It is part of the artful rhetoric of Lucenia, introduced towards the end of Book I trying to ensnare Amphilanthus, and returning in Book IV as one of the chief agents of delaying its conclusion by keeping Pamphilia and Amphilanthus physically apart (in the ‘Hell of Deceit’ episode). In Book I, Amphilanthus has just revealed his identity to her: ‘Pardon mee my Lord, (said shee) that I have been thus bold with you, which was caused by (with that shee blushing held her peace, desiring to bee thought bashfull, but more longing to bee intreated for the rest)’ (S4v/163). Wroth likes to populate her story with anti-types, women who break the decorums of constant loving and modest behaviour established by Pamphilia; these anti-types can at times seem like projections of an author Wroth does not wish to be seen as, most clearly in the episode concerning Antissia’s madness and poetasting in Part 2. Also in Part 2, Leonius is ensnared by a woman who seems like an allegorical figure of deceit, ‘soe busy, soe full of taulke, and in such a sett formality, with soe many framed lookes, fained smiles, and nods, with a deceiptfull downecast looke, insteed of pure modesty and bashfullnes … Som times a little (and that while painfull) silence, as wishing, and with gestures, as longing to bee moved to speake againe …’ (1.58v/160). The illicit manipulation of aposiopesis by women who are too artificially rhetorical is the worrying obverse of the wholesome, bashful aposiopesis that Wroth associates with her constant heroines and, as we shall see, with her own authorship. Moments involving broken sentences are often manipulated into the foreground (e.g. U1, 248.30–7; U2, 258.22–5, 375.8–15). One of

The Constant Art

323

the most engaging of such moments finds Urania telling a story to an audience that includes her brother Amphilanthus and their cousin Pamphilia. One detail convinces Amphilanthus that she has not entirely lost the memory of her love for Parselius (which the waters of St Maura were supposed to have washed away), and he interrupts the narrative to tell her so (2E2r/254). Urania denies this, and herself breaks off as she seems about to qualify that denial: ‘all those thoughts are cleane droun’d; but yet; I will goe on with my story’ (2E2r-v/254). Amphilanthus’ retort cleverly hints that her denial is the ‘story’: ‘Doe deare Sister (said he), and begin againe at (But yet)’ (2E2v/254). Interruptions and broken sentences cluster round moments where fiction slides into fact, and where an auditor senses the slippage. A similar point might be made about the Urania’s two final broken sentences and what we make of them. In another such example, Curardinus (a minor character) reaches a point in his narrative to Leonius beyond which he cannot go: ‘what blessing can any on Earth wish to equall such a blisse? and this I injoyed, and might have done, but; With that he sigh’d, and look’d so deadly pale, as if that But had beene the Axe to take away his life. Leonius desired him to proceede.’ Curardinus cannot: ‘Oh my Lord said he, be contented with this you have.’ Veralinda and the lady Curardinus loves interrupt them, ‘so as they were now brought to a conclusion, and for that night parted’ (U1, 3N4r/557). The next day the sentence can be continued: ‘Leonius longing for the end, sought him out, and finding him, would needes haue him goe on. Then Sir said he, I must beginne againe with But such was my misery …’ (3N4r/557–8) and the story is continued. It cannot in fact be finished because the problems of Curardinus and his lady remain unresolved (as so often in Part 1, they have been kept apart by their marriage to others, and while the lady is widowed Curardinus remains married). So the story ends with Curardinus explaining how he is obliged to hide his love and promising to come to Leonius’ court to report the happy conclusion if and when he can. Leonius wishes both that Curardinus ‘should be freed from sorrow, and himselfe made happy with the story’es end, which he much, and infinitly desired the knowledge of’ (3N4v/559). This is just the clearest example of a set of equations that run right through the Urania and govern its two incompletions. If a story is based on fact, it must run in parallel to the life, and cannot be concluded apart from by death or marriage. The broken sentence signifies this condition and is used to structure its narration. Stories break off when their recollection causes too much pain and when their conclusion lies in the narrator’s future. They can

324

The Constant Art

then be picked up from the very word at which they were broken off. Auditors and readers desire conclusion. This set of equations gives us a way of reading even the missing bifolium, at the most fraught part of Part 2, where through guile or self-censorship Wroth interrupts her narrative at a moment of intense misery for Pamphilia, and dangerous biographical resonance for Wroth.⁷¹ And it gives us a way of accounting for the broken sentences at the ends of both parts of the Urania. When Pamphilia falls asleep after a night of soliloquy and apostrophe, she has a prophetic dream of the separation from Amphilanthus that follows the next day: and so she slept, but not long before she started, cryed out, O stay, and live with me, follow not her, that loves thee not like me, forsake me not againe; Oh stay; with that she stayd her speech, for then she came out of her dreame, and seeing it was but a dreame, was a little better satisfied, yet so it stuck in her, as the abiding of it so fresh in her thoughts, foretold an extraordinary matter in it. Shee dreamt, that shee had him in her armes, discoursing with him; but hee sad, and not speaking, of a sudden rose, and went to the doore, where shee thought shee saw Lucenia calling to him, to whom hee went, and downe the staires with her, then tooke Coach and fled away with her, which made her crie with that haste and loudnesse, but hee went still with Lucenia, never looking towards her, and so she lost sight of them, Coach and all; an odde Omen, considering all that happned afterwards. (U1, 3Q1v/581)

The disorder of Wroth’s narration (putting Pamphilia’s exclamation before its cause) puts the emphasis on the broken sentence, as does Wroth’s trick of punning on its last word: ‘Oh stay, with that she stayd her speech’. The last, aposiopetic, word is transferred from the mouth of the speaker to that of the narrator. We can find a similar effect at the end of Part 1, as the narrator’s last word, ‘And’, becomes our first word of response: ‘And what?’⁷² Aposiopesis is most often associated with the bashfulness of lovers. Parselius and Dalinea are beating about the bush. He breaks the deadlock (‘I see … that this bashfulnesse is neither profitable nor commendable’), ⁷¹ See U2, xxv–vi. ⁷² Two copies of the 1621 Urania have interesting manuscript additions at this point, in each case finishing the broken sentence and in one case tying up loose ends and ending with a significant grasp of what is at issue: ‘… Where those two Lovers enjoyed a perfect harmony in each others vertues and Constancy and blessed with sons and Daughters, being rightly possessed of their parents vertues, which have since shone in their illustrious progeny. So my history has an End. | Finis.’. See Renée Pigeon, ‘Manuscript Notations in an Unrecorded Copy of Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania’, NQ, 236 (1991), 81–2.

The Constant Art

325

embraces ‘honest plainnesse’ and tries ‘Not then to colour that which is most cleare, and perfect in it selfe, with fine and delicate Phrases’ (U1, O4v/126). By rejecting rhetorical decorum he can declare his love. Dalinea however must still be decorously bashful: ‘Then did you take it right, said shee, for I confesse; with that shee blush’d so prettily, and look’d so modestly amorous, as shee neede have said no more, to make him know she lov’d him: Yet he covetous to have the word spoken, taking her in his armes, be not so cruell my onely life said he, to barre me from the hearing of my blisse; Why then, said shee, I must confesse I love you.’ (O4v/127). Quite explicitly it is aposiopesis caused by bashfulness that stands between her love and its expression. And she needs Parselius’ help to show her the way and then nudge her over the threshold. Less than half a page later, their marriage has been consummated. The Urania is full of examples of women unable to declare their love and depending upon the interpretation of bashfulness and aposiopesis (e.g. U1, 205.3–8, 218.33–40, 294.3–13, 342.29–35) Pamphilia is always associated with the bashfulness and blushing that accompany Wroth’s broken sentences, even when loving Amphilanthus is not the issue (e.g. U1, 149.25–8). ‘Am I the first unfortunate Woman that bashfulnesse hath undone?’ she asks (L2r/92). The wise seer Melissea (who steps in periodically to hold the plot together) explicitly sees Pamphilia thwarting her own happiness: ‘you might be happy, had you power to wedd, but daintinesse and feare will hinder you’ (U1, X4v/190). When Melissea tries to tell Amphilanthus his destiny, it is he who causes her aposiopesis: ‘For his Love, she did assure him hee was bless’d in that, if being certaine of her heart, could bring it him; but yet said she; Nay, say no more, cry’d he, this is enough, and let me this enjoy, Ile feare no ills that Prophesies can tell’ (ibid.). Pamphilia’s happiness depends on what he refuses to hear; he does not want to be hampered by fear, so to keep his own relentless and unabashed forward movement he forces aposiopesis on Melissea. Pamphilia can only interrupt Amphilanthus in Amphilanthus’ own waking dream: ‘Alas my deere cryde hee, stay butt and heere mee speake, and if I doe nott cleere my self, and satisfy you, why then; O me cryde she never seeke by more wiles to ruin mee …’ (U2, 1.50r/134).⁷³ Outside of dream, the incompletion of the Urania and its ⁷³ As here, Wroth tends to use the semi-colon to mark interruptions, as well as changes of speaker. The printed Urania is influenced by this habit, as the examples above show. Anne Henry observes that although recognisable marks of ellipsis start to appear in late sixteenth-century printed drama, they are not used in manuscript until later. Her

326

The Constant Art

broken sentences are due to Amphilanthus’ inconstancy, and that is why each text ends at a moment when he and Pamphilia seem reconciled, but might have cause to worry about the future. Wroth gives us one scene in which Amphilanthus causes Pamphilia’s aposiopesis in the right way, but it is at a moment of narrative interruption, as he is about to leave her. He kisses her eyes as she cries, ‘then her lips saying hee hoped hee offended nott since hee kissed butt his owne; Itt is true my lord sayd she, and you might if you had binn just, still freely have commaunded, butt now; with that, hee kissed her most affectionately, and with deepe groanes stoped her mouth with kisses, and soe departed …’ (U2, 2.25r/283). This is an important model of momentary union at a moment of interruption and broken off by it; again, the end of each part of the Urania must be read in the light of these patterns. In the continuation both Pamphilia and Amphilanthus have been manipulated into marriage by the deceit of Forsandurus. Instead of talking about what has gone on, Pamphilia feels so betrayed that she undertakes a vow of silence toward Amphilanthus, retreating even from the half-saying of broken sentences and eloquent blushes (U2, 199).⁷⁴ The conclusion of this thread is carefully worked through. First we follow Amphilanthus, alone and lamenting, in apostrophe first to the cypress tree, then to the absent Pamphilia: ‘O deere Pamphilia, can nott, ore may nott my true felt passions move thee, butt shall I dy, I meritt noe other I confess itt, yett O pitty mee, I will make amends for all; How canst thou, wretch, thou canst nott …’ (2.50r/377). Apostrophe turns into a dialogue with himself, and this is interrupted by Pamphilia’s approach to talk to a water nymph who has become her confidante. Amphilanthus hides and overhears their discussion. The nymph advises: ‘what a fruictles busines is this your wailings, your sufferings to death, when as itt is but fond vaine folly of mistaken sence’ (2.50v/379). Pamphilia resolves to turn over a new leaf, but not to abandon her earliest example is Middleton’s use of dashes in his 1624 manuscript of A Game at Chesse (‘In Ellipsis … The History of Suspension Marks in British Literature with Particular Reference to the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999), ch. 2, esp. 58–9 and fig. 7). ⁷⁴ On silence as rhetorical power, cutting Amphilanthus off from dialogue with Pamphilia and forcing him into what had been her position of ‘speaking into a void’ see Hackett, ‘ ‘‘A book, and solitariness’’ ’, 80. She concludes: ‘Pamphilia’s chosen linguistic reticence and reserve becomes a form of authority because it realises the dominance usually attributed to a mistress merely as compliment’ (83). Reticentia is one of the Latin terms for aposiopesis. Hackett’s approach complements my own emphasis on the connections between that figure, dialogue, and apostrophe.

The Constant Art

327

silence immediately: ‘all is forgott; and I wilbee an new woeman, yett the same constant lover still … butt yett you will bee silent to him still, a while sayd Pamphilia till I see how hee can digest the sweete silent injoying in an others sight’ (2.50v/380). They are then interrupted by Amphilanthus. The vow of silence means that eye and body language is foregrounded (the rhetorical remnant that aposiopesis leaves behind). In Amphilanthus’ next soliloquy he vows as Pamphilia has done: ‘I will bee a new man as new borne, new fram’d, and noe thing as I was beefore, and yett the very same in deere affection, as when wee first loved’ (2.52r/384). Things are coming full circle—Pamphilia has remained constant, Amphilanthus is returning to his first love. And this means renewal even as the work nears its end. The pattern is completed by Forsandurus’ deathbed account of how he kept them apart and Pamphilia is able to speak to Amphilanthus once more. The promise is there of a time when Pamphilia will be so sure of her love that she can set aside bashfulness and fictions. But we never quite get there. The printed Urania likewise ends with the reconciliation of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus, the union of constancy and inconstancy. Wroth shifts significantly into the present tense at this point: ‘now all is finished, Pamphilia blessed as her thoughts, heart, and soule wished: Amphilanthus expreslesly contented …’ (3Z6v/661). All is indeed finished. Events rush to meet the narrative present; if the characters have a future it is in our future too: Amphilanthus must goe, but intreates Pamphilia to goe as far as Italy with him, to visit the matchles Queene his mother, she consents, for what can she denye him? all things are prepared for the journey, all now merry, contented, nothing amisse; greife forsaken, sadnes cast off, Pamphilia is the Queene of all content; Amphilanthus joying worthily in her; And (ibid.)

And here the work ends, its last verb a present participle, its last word a conjunction.⁷⁵ Wroth has given indications in the last book that we are heading for an ending: Steriamus and Urania ‘lived the rest of their dayes in all happinesse and joy: the like did Selarinus and Philistella’ (3I1v/512); Philarchos and Orilena ‘lived ever, till their ends happily’ (3M1v/541). But she cannot bring herself to leave Amphilanthus and Pamphilia permanently and perfectly happy. The simplest explanation is that the pattern of her own biography prevents it: she cannot join fiction back to life. ⁷⁵ ‘But that tantalizing last word breaks the closure, denying us a sentimental ‘‘happily ever after’’ romance ending’: Lewalski, Writing Women, 274.

328

The Constant Art

Part 2 gives us an ending equally rich in matter for interpretation. Again Pamphilia and Amphilanthus are reconciled; again that is not the end of it: And Sir your faire designe hath now left all things (beeing certainly informed by severall wisards, especially the sage Melissea that the great Inchantment will nott bee concluded thes many yeeres, nay never if you live nott to assiste in the concluding[)], soe his search is for you, resolving nott to leave you if once found, till that hapy hower come, and in this Island hee is seeking adventur; the best, and hapiest I assure my self wilbee in finding you; Amphilanthus was extreamly (2.62r/418)

It is interesting to see how Wroth prepares for this moment, for the closing pages do give the impression that the broken sentence is very much a target. We find ourselves back in Cyprus, the scene of the central episode of Book I of Part 1. Andromarko (the illegitimate son of Amphilanthus’ friend Polarchos, himself the illegitimate son of the King of Cyprus) and a lady have fallen in love with each other’s pictures, without knowing anything about each other. The lady tells her tale to Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. She had written a song (N18) scorning Cupid but it was snatched by the wind and taken up by Andromarko. (If this were Spenser such an event would squarely signify unauthorized publication, such as Wroth claimed for the Urania.)⁷⁶ She had followed the paper and found it and Andromarko. When she gets to the part of his address to her where he had said ‘Fairest of Ladys’ (2.60r/412) she interrupts her own narration to protest her shame at her lack of desert of such a title. Pamphilia nudges her on—‘deprive us nott the hapines to heere all the story’ (2.60r/413)—but then Pamphilia’s mention of Andromarko gives the lady another cause to stall: ‘Itt seemes then his honor and fame flyes farr, butt wowld I cowld have heard any thing of his constancie or returne’ (2.60v/413). A little banter between Pamphilia and Amphilanthus follows, as they draw our attention to the parallels they recognize between this story and their own. The lady then picks up her thread, drops it again, and is again pushed on by her audience: ‘Fairest of Ladys, ore what other Celestiall creature you may bee (O) this relation beeseemes nott mee beefor such excellencies, On with your discourse’ (2.60v/414). It is hard not to relate this gentle comedy of the audience desiring the narrator to complete both the broken sentence and the unfinished ⁷⁶ In the letter to Buckingham (Poems, 236, letter 5).

The Constant Art

329

story to our own situation as readers just a few pages later. The lady continues: ‘butt I dare nott adventure to beeginn againe, least I fall on the same stop, yett I feare I shall goe to high if butt in relating his owne phrases, yett rather then offend in foulish bashfulnes … hee proceeded thus; Ore what devine part of Venus traine you are …’ (ibid.). In her confusion she had run off, and she rues this behaviour right up to the time of narrating, because she now does not know if Andromarko still loves her: ‘and thus I linger, pine, and shortly shalbee like my lost picture, and a wurse coppy I feare of my self then that was … In this strange labourinth help, and aide poore afflicted mee most excellent Princes’ (2.61r/416). The idea of self as representation (the picture) is followed immediately by a quotation of the opening of Wroth’s Crown of Sonnets (‘In this strange labourinth …’). The episode continues to reach out for connections—to Wroth’s other works, to their paradigms of autobiography and fiction, and to the end over the page. When the lady realizes she has been talking to Pamphilia and Amphilanthus she falls on her knees, and a bystander reminds her that ‘heere have you the Mirours of this world, and thos that sett this Country in peace, and quiett, from that tirible yett sweet inchantment the throne of love’ (2.61v/417), to make sure that we realize that Wroth has taken care to plot a return at her work’s end to the scene of the first central episode of her romance, and of the youthful love of her hero and heroine. Pamphilia and Amphilanthus move on, he performs some more verses to her that Wroth only tells us of and does not let us hear, and then they encounter Andromarko performing a sacred parody of the lady’s song—a version that is properly reverent of Cupid. His report, that the central enchantment of Part 2 will not be concluded for many years, and never without Amphilanthus’ help, follows, and Amphilanthus’ reaction ends the work. So many different elements are in play here, not perhaps schematically arranged so that we can say that Wroth is meaning something clearly, but nevertheless in such a way as to gesture at some key patterns. Publication or circulation of sorts (the song taken by the wind) leads to dialogue. There are indications in versions of Wroth’s poems, and echoes of other poems, that she may have engaged in poetic dialogue;⁷⁷ and one other poem in the Urania presents itself as a dialogic reply (U28). But Wroth’s ⁷⁷ For the fragmentary evidence that P14 (‘All night I weepe, all day I cry, Ay me’), which is in the Folger manuscript, may have escaped in musical form prior to its printing in 1621 and spawned or interacted with a sub-genre of ‘Ay me’ refrain songs see ‘The

330

The Constant Art

experience of dialogue is dominated by the exchange with Denny that followed the Urania’s publication in 1621, when she responded to his vicious poem to her line for line and rhyme by rhyme.⁷⁸ After so many unfulfilled fantasies of dialogue and unheard apostrophes, it is intriguing that Wroth ends her work with her only poetic dialogue between lovers, first the poem of one, then the answer from the other. Other moments connect the lady casually to Wroth’s own writing—especially the quotation from the Crown—and the episode as a whole advertises its affinity to the story of Pamphilia and Amphilanthus. Most importantly, all these dynamics are presented along with a very knowing treatment of the place of the broken sentence in relation to stories that cannot be completed because they have an unknown future, and in relation to the wish for completion of a tantalized audience. That ending itself is doubly knowing. The word ‘extremely’ is one Wroth likes. Related words can be found at key moments. Wroth puns on the stem when Pamphilia and Amphilanthus end the Throne of Love enchantment at the end of the first book of Part 1: ‘Both then at once extremely loving, and love in extremity in them, made the Gate flee open to them, who passed to the last Tower, where Constancy stood holding the keyes, which Pamphilia tooke; at which instant Constancy vanished, as metamorphosing her self into her breast’ (U1, T3r/169). Again, when Pamphilia and Amphilanthus finally have their reconciliation confirmed by Forsandurus’ deathbed confession, Amphilanthus is so overjoyed that he faints: ‘Strange accidents that love produseth, that beeing the killingest, and speediest death, yet will rather then faile in loving take many shewes of death, yett still will revive to more loving, as loving for loves sake loves to the extreamitie of death itt self; she brought him againe to lyfe …’ (U2, 2.53v/389). In the first instance, the idea of extremity accompanies the establishment of Pamphilia as an embodiment of constancy—the narrative limit and the narrative circle are brought together. In the second instance, extremity leads over a threshold and to a sort of amorous resurrection. The word ‘extreamly’ belongs at the Urania’s end simply because it is a word concerned with limits, ends, and thresholds, and with death. If the ‘And’ of Part 1 promised more, this aposiopesis is in a way conclusive: the plot is not complete, and

Musical Sidneys’. P28 (‘Sweetest love returne againe’) reads like an answer to Donne’s Song ‘Sweetest love, I do not goe’, to take one other example. ⁷⁸ See Poems, 32–5.

The Constant Art

331

Wroth’s own life has not organized itself to provide a pattern that could fulfil Pamphilia’s hopes; but there is nothing more to say.

* * * That ending brings together the three key elements of Wroth’s writing—the endlessness associated with Pamphilia’s constancy; the making of connections between fiction and biography (in this case, the need for Amphilanthus and Faire Designe to come together perhaps shadowing Wroth’s desire for Pembroke to acknowledge their son); and the imitation of Sidney’s example. The broken sentence here offers a fitting emblem for that endlessness and for the impossibility of making life imitate art. I have tried to show that certain dynamics run through Wroth’s writings, that they are related to each other, but that they do not point us to any final meaning or solution, and that this impasse is in the nature of Wroth’s works: intrigued by fictive subjectivity, dizzyingly syncretic, endless, constant. The relation of fiction to life is one such dynamic, and in particular the status of Wroth’s stories and personae in relation to her love for William Herbert. The relation of writing to family is another, as both origin and aim, inspiration and audience, model and meaning. The use of incompletion is another, Wroth’s most impressive response to Sidney. Paul Salzman connects the unfinished state of both parts of the Urania to a schematic deferral of resolution of the conflict between the values of the chivalric and pastoral modes. Wroth’s romance, he argues, ‘has both an investment in heroism and an investment in its decline; … a sense of fulfilment within female containment as well as a sense of frustration; and … a sense of female engagement (political and otherwise) as well as female detachment’.⁷⁹ Wroth learns how to pattern these ambivalences, paradoxes, and impasses from her uncle’s own schematically ambiguous writings. And she learns how to leave them open. The unfinished sentence and all it can do is a topos recognized by Wroth and exploited programmatically, and it is also a badge of derivation from Sidney. Dialogue with Amphilanthus is always problematic for Wroth and for Pamphilia, and so apostrophe must create illusions of presence and audience. The most certain and secure dialogue is one that no act of apostrophe has to begin, one that Wroth will have been taught it was her birthright simply to join: a dialogue with Astrophil and Stella, and with the Arcadia—a dialogue with Sidney. ⁷⁹ Literary Culture in Jacobean England, 74–5.

Postscript Clerimont Dauphine

… A knight live by his verses? he did not make ’hem to that ende, I hope. And yet the noble Sidney lives by his, and the noble family not asham’d.¹

Sidney’s aristocratic social status had always inflected his status as literary model. He looked very different in comparison to Spenser, or Shakespeare, or Jonson, and the budding professional writer might pause before selecting him as a role model. Jonson had found that the way to construct his own relationship with Sidney was to make a place for himself in the life of Sidney’s family. When he wrote his ode for the birthday of Sir William Sidney, Robert Sidney’s oldest son, he created a poem heavily freighted with literary conventions,² because the way forward for both Jonson and the young Sidney was by building on tradition: Your blood So good And great, must seeke for new, And studie more: Not weary, rest On what’s deceast. For they, that swell With dust of ancestors, in graves but dwell.³

These lines repeat the sentiment of Philip Sidney’s meritocratic motto, vix ea nostra voco (‘I scarcely call those things [race and ancestry and what ¹ Ben Jonson, Epicoene, 2.3.117–18. ² See Anthony Miller, ‘ ‘‘These forc’d ioyes’’: Imitation, Celebration, and Exhortation in Ben Jonson’s Ode to Sir William Sidney’, SP, 86 (1989), 42–68. ³ ‘Ode. To Sir William Sidney, on his Birth-day’, 33–40, in Jonson, 8.120–21

Postscript

333

we have not done ourselves] our own’).⁴ Jonson leans on Sidney’s own ambivalence about inheritance in his effort, which a number of critics sense in Jonson’s poems to the Sidneys, to disentangle familial from literary inheritance, and find that it is he, and not Sidney’s daughter or brother or niece, who is Sidney’s rightful heir.⁵ Jonson owes a great deal to Sidney the theoretician and lyric poet, but any debt to the Arcadia is harder to see. Not that Jonson did not try to look for one. A copy of the 1627 Arcadia has recently been identified as Jonson’s.⁶ Perhaps an earlier copy had been lost, or sold to make ends meet. But it is notable that late in life, writing plays suffused with what Anne Barton has identified as nostalgia for the Elizabethan period,⁷ Jonson should take another look at Sidney. Nostalgia is the sign that a dead end has been reached. Sidney was ever popular in the Caroline period, with editions of his works coming out in 1627, 1633, and 1638. Playwrights and poets ransacked, adapted, or travestied his plots, and the Caroline court enjoyed a fashion for pastoral.⁸ In the troubled years that followed, the Arcadia offered a model for those royalists who wanted to use romance to tell stories about contemporary political crises.⁹ Sidney also had his admirers on the other side of the developing political divide, including Milton.¹⁰ But these new responses to Sidney were also the signs of the end of a tradition traced in this book. The beginning of the great cultural watershed of the civil war years, which caused so many traditions to be interrupted, and which entailed and required so much forgetting, is the point at which my story necessarily ends. What is lost after the 1630s is the possibility of relating to Sidney as Daniel, Jonson, Alexander, or Shakespeare could. They were the second generation, beginning their literary careers in the twenty-five or so years after 1586. They knew people who had known Sidney; their patrons were his siblings, nephews, and nieces. Relating ⁴ See Chapter 5 above. ⁵ See Chapter 4 above, n. 83. ⁶ The copy, in the library of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, is the subject of forthcoming work by Joseph Black and myself. ⁷ ‘Harking back to Elizabeth: Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, ch. 14 of Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984). ⁸ For good summaries see the introduction to Kay, esp. 22–23, Garrett, 23, and the headnotes to his items 43 (the manuscript play Love’s Changelings’ Change), 49 (Francis Quarles’s Argalus and Parthenia, 1629), 53 (Henry Glapthorne’s play Argalus and Parthenia, 1639), and 56 ( James Shirley’s play Arcadia, 1640) ⁹ See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, 2nd edn. (Madison, Wis., 1984), esp. chs. 1 and 4. ¹⁰ See Kay, 28–9, and E. G. Fogel, ‘Milton and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, NQ, 196 (1951), 115–17.

334

Postscript

to Sidney seemed to require some personal connection, for reasons that have emerged in this study—reasons to do with the way Sidney wrote his own works and the audience he imagined, and reasons to do with the strong authorial presence his works project. Of the generation of writers who could connect themselves in this way, Jonson was one of the last to die, in 1637, after Daniel (1619), Donne and Drayton (1631), and Herbert (1633). The 1620s and 30s saw the publication of the collected works of these and other writers—including The Temple, Greville’s Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes, and Donne’s poems all in 1633. Each of those volumes offers a belated glimpse of a waning influence. George Herbert was indeed one of the last major writers who in any significant sense learned his art from Sidney. His voice and the poetic forms in which it is expressed owe a great deal to the Sidney Psalms,¹¹ which, as Herbert does, managed to translate the psalmist’s voice into one that shares a language with the Petrarchan lover. Herbert’s struggles for self-expression likewise learn their pattern from Sidney’s secular love poetry. ‘Why are not Sonnets made of thee?’ Herbert asks God in one of the two sonnets that, according to Walton, he sent to his mother in 1610.¹² The rewriting of Sidney is perhaps most evident in the fourteen or so sonnets in The Temple, but Petrarchan and Sidneian tropes are converted to devotional ends throughout the collection, as when Herbert ends ‘Affliction (I)’ with a paradox modelled on the final lines of AS 61 and 62: ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’.¹³ We can find Herbert learning from Sidney and the lyric tradition he had started in the vividly dramatic voice of poems like ‘The Collar’ (compare this, for example, to the voice of AS 47 and Shakespeare’s sonnet 90). But the feeling that Herbert is a careful student is strongest in the ‘Jordan’ poems, with ‘Jordan (II)’ a confident sacred reworking of the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella:¹⁴ But while I bustled, I might heare a friend Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence! ¹¹ See Helen Wilcox in ODNB and Coburn Freer, Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore, Md., 1972). ¹² The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), 206 and 549. All quotations are from this edition. ¹³ See Colin Williamson, ‘Structure and Syntax in Astrophil and Stella’, RES, new ser., 31 (1980), 271–84; reprinted in Kay, 227–42 (241). ¹⁴ Cf. Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Ct., 1954), 261.

Postscript

335

There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d: Copie out onely that, and save expense. (15–18)

Herbert was another writer whose links to Sidney were not only intellectual. His family was related to the Herbert earls of Pembroke, and he lived his last few years close to their Wilton house, at Bemerton. Even before this time he had engaged in poetic dialogue with William Herbert, writing ‘A Parodie’ as a sacred parody (that is, a contrafactum, in the same verse form) of Herbert’s ‘Soules joy, now I am gone’,¹⁵ and by 1631 he had become a ‘friend and spiritual advisor’ (ODNB) to Lady Anne Clifford, the pupil of Samuel Daniel, wife of Sidney’s nephew Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke, and a careful reader of Sidney’s works.¹⁶ One copy of the Sidney Psalms may bear the name of Herbert’s step-father, Sir John Danvers, whom Herbert’s mother (and Donne’s friend) Magdalene Herbert had married in 1608.¹⁷ Perhaps both Donne (whose poem on the Sidney Psalms, first printed in the revised 1635 edition of his poems, is one of the most intelligent responses to the translation one can imagine) and Herbert studied the same copy of the Psalmes.¹⁸ Edmund Waller was one writer who even after 1640 tried to keep alive the tradition of representing Sidney’s literary legacy by addressing his biological heirs. In the second of two poems called ‘At Pens-hurst’ he contemplates the same tree, ‘which stands the sacred marke | Of noble Sidneys birth’, that Jonson had written of in ‘To Penshurst’ (ll. 13–14).¹⁹ In his Poems he is the courtly lover of ‘Sacharissa’—Lady Dorothy Sidney, Robert Sidney’s granddaughter. Her picture makes Waller think that she unites the idea of beauty Sidney shared between Philoclea and Pamela: ¹⁵ See Rosemond Tuve, ‘Sacred ‘‘Parody’’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert’, Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 249–90. ¹⁶ Her copy, in the collection of Dr Bent Juel-Jensen, is described in Sir Philip Sidney: Life, Death and Legend: An Exhibition to Commemorate the 400th Anniversary of the Death of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1986), item 69 (35–6); it records a reading in 1651, and her diary one in 1617 (see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 156). ¹⁷ British Library, Add. MS 46372, 43v, ‘John Danvers his hande’. This has not previously been suggested: the reading hazarded in Works, 2.320 is ‘Davies’ (i.e. the scribe of the Penshurst manuscript). ¹⁸ On Donne and the Sidney Psalms cf. Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1978), 75. ¹⁹ Poems (1645), D5r.

336

Postscript Just nature first instructed by his thought In his owne house thus practis’d what hee taught. This glorious piece transcends what he could think: So much his blood is nobler then his Ink. (D1r–v)

But Waller’s real model and point of origin is of course Jonson. Just as this poem retreads the conceit of Jonson’s poem to Sidney’s daughter (discussed in Chapter 4 above), Waller’s collection as a whole, with poems to Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester and his other daughter Lady Lucy Sidney, mimics Jonson’s Forrest. The legacy is now only a bloodline, for there are other literary traditions to follow, most obviously that of the Tribe of Ben. Members of the Sidney family continued to offer a link to the past, as when the publisher Henry Seile dedicated the printed edition of Greville’s Dedication, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (‘1652’, actually 1651) to Dorothy Sidney, now Countess of Sunderland. But by the second half of the seventeenth century, with Mary Wroth dying in around 1653, the strongest Sidney tradition was not literary but political. A continuous vein of political thought can be traced, running from Philip Sidney through the commonplace books of the Robert Sidneys father and son to the writings and career of the extraordinary son of the second Robert Sidney, the republican hero Algernon Sidney, beheaded for treason in 1677.²⁰ In these years Sidney’s literary status had become that of a revered monument rather than a living presence in contemporary letters.²¹ In the works absurdly and anachronistically foisted on Sidney²² and in the chapbook versions of his narrative of Argalus and Parthenia, descending from Francis Quarles’s poetic version ²⁰ See Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), 182–200, and Victor Skretkowicz, ‘Algernon Sidney and Philip Sidney: A Continuity of Rebellion’, Sidney Journal, 17.2 (1999), 3–18. ²¹ Dennis Kay describes Fuller’s ‘muted enthusiasm’ when he writes about Sidney in 1662. It indicates ‘Sidney’s diminished status. He has shrivelled to a virtuoso from being an example. His mastery is somehow remote from the immediate concerns of his readers: there is no suggestion that they can either learn from him or be moved by him’ (30); cf. Garrett, 43. ²² ‘Valour anatomized in a fancie. By Sir Philip Sidney, 1581’, in Cottoni Posthuma (1651), really Donne’s ‘Essay of Valour’; Alamanzor and Almanzaida. A novel. Written by Sir Philip Sidney, and found since his death amongst his papers (1678), really by Mlle de La Roche-Guilhelm.

Postscript

337

rather than from the Arcadia itself,²³ we see the end of a tradition in a generation that can no longer really see the point of the works themselves. It is Greville’s voice, even in his prosopopoeias of Sidney, that rings through the political crises of the 1650s, 70s, and 80s.²⁴ Thomas Moffett had tried to resurrect Sidney as Aesculapius did Hippolytus, in his manuscript Nobilis (1593),²⁵ but it is Ben Jonson’s more substantial corpus that the writers of the 1630s want to keep alive in Jonsonus Virbius [= Hippolytus]: or, the Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived by the Friends of the Muses (1638). As I have suggested, it was perhaps because a response to Sidney seemed to require some personal relation to animate it, even if at one remove, that the sort of response traced in this book could last only a generation. The job of responding to Sidney in the period 1586–1640 had been almost too well managed. We might say that it was the extraordinary openness of his texts, posthumous, unfinished, radically new, that ennabled their completion to be so elegant, the answers to their questions to be so articulate, the dialogues they began to be so productive. But Sidney’s own works as published in 1638, with bridging passages by Alexander and (for the first time) Johnstoun as well as Bellings’s conclusion, declared that nothing else needed to be done, and the next printing, in 1655, was far more antiquarian in its approach, adding a portrait, an eleven-page biography, and fifteen pages of previously printed epigrams and judicious evaluations. Sidney’s works had become a museum, commanding veneration but not demanding dialogue. Nevertheless, Sidney’s example had haunted and inspired one of the most brilliant periods of English literary history, showing the way to a generation of writers who developed his legacy to a point where, to the subsequent tastes they constructed, they seemed to have eclipsed their master. It is not in fact in the broad outlines of that developing tradition but in its local details that Sidney’s presence is most engaging and engaged. Just as Sidney offers us a means of approach to later literature, that later literature can show us how to approach Sidney. That literature, those details, can enable us to ‘learn aright why and how that maker’ ²³ See B. S. Field, Jr, ‘Sidney’s Influence: The Evidence of the Publication of the History of Argalus and Parthenia’, ELN, 17 (1979), 98–102. ²⁴ See my ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, HLQ, 62 (2000), 203–31. ²⁵ Nobilis, 94–5.

338

Postscript

wrote, and to find the shape and the terms of a response to Sidney already framed in Sidney’s own writings. When we look at writing after Sidney we are able to hear again a dialogue begun by Sidney, and to turn that dialogue into a critical conversation that we can join. We are taught how to read him.

Bibliography P R I M A RY S O U RC E S Manuscripts London, British Library, Add. MS 12047 (Sidney Psalms, MS I ) Add. MS 12066 (Nevitt’s account of Robert Sidney’s estate and expenses) Add. MS 15232 (Bright MS) Add. MS 46372 (Sidney Psalms, MS K ) Add. MS 58435 (Robert Sidney’s autograph poems) Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.52 (the revised Arcadia) Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Tenbury 1018 (musical setting of Robert Sidney, Song 20) Oxford, Christ Church College, MS Mus. 439 (musical setting of Robert Sidney, Pastoral 2) Penshurst Place, Viscount De L’Isle, MS of Sidney Psalms (MS A) Penshurst Place, Viscount De L’Isle, autograph MS of Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory Chicago, Newberry Library, Case MS fY 1565. W 95 (Wroth’s autograph of Urania, Part 2) Washington DC, Folger Library, MS V.a.104 (Wroth’s autograph poems) Printed Books The place of publication of early printed books is London unless otherwise stated. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols. (London and Birmingham, 1875–94) Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae (1587) Alexander, William, Aurora (1604) supplement to the Arcadia [1617?] Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford, 1972) Aubrey, John, Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, 3rd edn. (London, 1958)

340

Bibliography

Bacon, Francis, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford, 1985) Barnes, Barnabe, Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593) Barnfield, Richard, The Encomion of Lady Pecunia (1598) Baxter, Nathaniel, Sir Philip Sydneys Ouránia (1606) Bellings, Richard, A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (Dublin, 1624) Bodenham, John (ed.), Bel-vedere (1600) Breton, Nicholas, Brittons Bowre (1591) Poems not hitherto reprinted, ed. Jean Robertson (Liverpool, 1952; repr. 1967) Bruno, Giordano, The Ash Wednesday Supper [La cena de le ceneri (1584)], ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Hamden, Ct., 1977) Bryskett, Lodowyck, A Discourse of Civill Life (1606) Camden, William, Remaines (1605) Campion, Thomas, The Works, ed. Walter R. Davis (Garden City, N.Y., 1967) Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby, ed. Virginia Cox (London, 1994) Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford, 1988) Churchyard, Thomas, The Epitaph of Sir Phillip Sidney Knight (1587) A Musical Consort (1595) Constable, Henry, Diana (1592; 1595) Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1908) D., R. [Robert Dallington?] (trans.), Hypnerotomachia (1592) D[ay]., A[ngel]., Upon the Life and Death of … Sir Phillip Sidney [1587] Daniel, Samuel (trans.), The Worthy Tract of Paulus Giovius (1585) Daniel, Samuel, Delia and Rosamond Augmented. Cleopatra (1594) The Civil Wars (1595) The Poeticall Essayes (1599) The Works (1601) A Panegyrike with a Defence of Ryme (1603) The Civile Wares (1609) Certaine Small Workes (1611) The Whole Workes of Samuel Daniel esquire in Poetrie (1623) Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. A. C. Sprague (Cambridge, Mass., 1930; repr. Chicago, 1965) Davies of Hereford, John, Microcosmos (1603) The Scourge of Folly (1611) The Muses Sacrifice (1612) Davison, Francis (ed.), A Poetical Rapsody (1602) Day, John, The Ile of Guls (1606)

Bibliography

341

Dickenson, John (trans.), Aristotles politiques (1598) Dickenson, John, The Shepheardes Complaint [1592/3?] Arisbas (1594) Donne, John, The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1985) Dramatic Records in the Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber 1558–1642, ed. David Cook and F. P. Wilson, Malone Society Collections, 6 (Oxford, 1961/62) Drayton, Michael, Idea. The Shepheards Garland (1593) Ideas Mirrour (1594) Poemes Lyrick and Pastorall (1606) Poems (1619) The Battaile of Agincourt (1627) The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. W. Hebel et al., 5 vols., corrected edn. (Oxford, 1961) Drummond of Hawthornden, William, Poetical Works, ed. L. E. Kastner, 2 vols. (Manchester, 1913) Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste, The Divine Weeks and Works … translated by Josuah Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979) Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney (1587), facsimile, ed. A. J. Colaianne and W. J. Godshalk (Delmar, N.Y., 1980) Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904) Englands Helicon (1600) Englands Parnassus (1600) English Madrigal Verse 1588–1632, ed. E. H. Fellowes (3rd edn., ed. Frederick W. Sternfeld and David Greer, Oxford, 1967) English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford, 1999) Epitaphia in Mortem … Philippi Sidneii (Leiden, 1587) Exequiae … (Oxford, 1587) Ficino, Marsilio, Commentary on Plato’s ‘Symposium’ on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Woodstock, Ct., 1985) Fletcher, Giles, Licia (1593) Florio, John, A Worlde of Wordes (1598) Fraunce, Abraham, The Lamentations of Amyntas (1587) Insignium, Armorum, Emblematum, Hieroglyphicorum, et Symbolorum, Explicatio (1588) The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) The Countesse of Pembrokes Emanuel (1591) The Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (1591) The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch. Entitled Amintas Dale (1592), ed. Gerald Snare (Northridge, Calif., 1975) The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Ethel Seaton (Oxford, 1950) Symbolicae philosophiae liber quartus et ultimus, ed. John Manning (New York, 1991)

342

Bibliography

Gamage, William, Linsi-woolsie. Or two centuries of epigrammes (1613) Garnier, Robert, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Lucien Pinvert, 2 vols. (Paris, 1923) Gascoigne, George, The Posies (1575) Gorges, Sir Arthur, The Poems, ed. H. E. Sandison (Oxford, 1953) Greene, Robert, Menaphon (1589) Greville, Fulke, Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633) Poems and Dramas, 2 vols., ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh and London, 1939) The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G. A. Wilkes (Oxford, 1965) The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford, 1986) Griffin, Bartholomew, Fidessa (1596) Guarini, Battista, Il Pastor Fido: or The Faithfull Shepheard, trans. anon. (1602) Guillim, John, A Display of Heraldrie (1611) Harington, John, Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591) The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia, 1930) A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London, 1962) The Sixth Book of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’, ed. Simon Cauchi (Oxford, 1991) Herbert, Edward, The Poems English and Latin of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford, 1923) Herbert, George, The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941) Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke, Poems [1660], facsimile, ed. Gaby E. Onderwyzer (Los Angeles, 1959) Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle and Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, 6 vols. (London, 1925–66) Hoskyns, John, The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638, ed. Louise Brown Osborn (New Haven, Ct., 1937) Jonson, Ben, Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925–52) Lant, Thomas (engraved by de Brij), Sequitur celebritas et pompa funeris … (1587) Lanyer, Aemilia, The Poems, ed. Susanne Woods (New York and Oxford, 1993) Letters and Memorials of State, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. (London, 1746) Lyrics from English Airs 1596–1622, ed. Edward Doughtie (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) Markham, Gervase, The English Arcadia, Alluding his Beginning from Sir Philip Sydneys Ending (1607) The Second and Last Part of the First Booke of the English Arcadia (1613) Honour in his Perfection (1624) Moffett, Thomas, The Silkewormes and their Flies (1599)

Bibliography

343

Nobilis … and Lessus Lugubris, ed. and trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, 1940) Montaigne, Michel de, The Essayes, trans. John Florio (1603) The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London, 1991) Montemayor, Jorge de, A Critical Edition of Yong’s Translation of George of Montemayor’s ‘Diana’ and Gil Polo’s ‘Enamoured Diana’, ed. Judith M. Kennedy (Oxford, 1968) Nugae Antiquae, ed. Henry Harington, 2 vols. (London, 1769–75) Owen, John, Epigrammatum … Liber Singulus (1606) Epigrammatum Libri Tres (1607) Peacham, Henry, The Garden of Eloquence (1593) Peacham, Henry (Jr), The Compleat Gentleman (1622) Peele, George, An Eglogue Gratulatorie (1589) Polyhymnia (1590) Peplus (Oxford, 1587) Petrarca, Francesco, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976) Philip, John, The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney (1587) Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, 1997) Pope, Alexander, Selected Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Paul Hammond (Cambridge, 1987) [Puttenham, George,] The Arte of English Poesie (1589) Records of English Court Music, ed. A. Ashbee, 9 vols. (Snodland and Aldershot, 1986–96) Shakespeare, William, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974) Sidneiana, ed. Samuel Butler (1837) Sidney, Henry, A Very Godly Letter made, by the Right Honourable Sir Henry Sidney. Now XXV. Yeeres Past unto Phillip Sidney his Sonne then at Schoole at Shrowesbury (1591) Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, A Discourse of Life and Death … Antonius (1592) The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, 2 vols., ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford, 1998) ‘The Triumph of Death: A Critical Edition in Modern Spelling of the Countess of Pembroke’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte’, ed. Gavin Alexander, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 2–18 Sidney, Mary and Philip, The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J. C. A. Rathmell (Garden City, N.Y., 1963) [Sidney, Philip?], A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. Begunne to be Translated by Sir P. Sidney and Finished by A. Golding (1587) Sidney, Philip, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia [1590], facsimile (Kent, Ohio, 1970)

344

Bibliography

Sidney, Philip, Syr P.S. his Astrophel and Stella (1591) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593) An Apologie for Poetrie (1595) The Defence of Poesie (1595) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1598) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1613) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia … with … a supplement of a defect in the third part of this history. By Sir W. Alexander (Dublin, 1621) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia … with … a supplement of a defect in the third part of this historie. By Sir W. Alexander. (1627) [also includes Bellings’s Book 6] The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia … with a twofold supplement of a defect in the third book: the one by Sir W.A. Knight; the other, by Mr Ja. Johnstoun … a sixth booke, by R.B. of Lincolnes Inne, Esq. (1638) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1655) The Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1962) The Poems, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford, 1962) An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London, 1965; repr. Manchester, 1973) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford, 1973) Miscellaneous Prose, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford, 1987) The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford, 2002) [reissue of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, The Oxford Authors (Oxford, 1989)] Sidney, Philip, and Hubert Languet, The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. Steuart A. Pears (London, 1845) Sidney, Philip, et al., Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander (London, 2004) Sidney, Robert, The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft (Oxford, 1984) Domestic Politics and Family Absence: The Correspondence (1588–1621) of Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of Leicester, ed. Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Aldershot, 2005) Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene (1590; 1596; 1609) Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (London, 1999) Strunk, Oliver (ed.), Source Readings in Music History. Volume 3: The Renaissance, rev. edn. Gary Tomlinson (New York and London, 1998) Sylvester, Joshua, Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613)

Bibliography

345

Tacitus, La vita di Giulio Agricola, trans. Giovanni Maria Manelli (1585) Talaeus, Audomarus, Audomari Talaei Rhetorica, e Patri Rami Regii Professoris Praelectionibus Observata (Paris, 1577) Temple, William, William Temple’s ‘Analysis’ of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Apology for Poetry’, ed. John Webster (Binghamton, N.Y., 1984) The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, ed. Ruth Hughey, 2 vols. (Columbus, Ohio, 1960) The Phoenix Nest [1593], ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1931) Tottel, Richard (ed.), Songes and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other (1557) Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, ed. Roy Strong, 2 vols. (London, 1969) Waller, Edmund, Poems (1645) Walton, Izaak, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert (1670) Watson, Thomas, Italian Madrigals Englished (1590) Watson, Thomas, and Abraham Fraunce, Thomas Watson’s Latin ‘Amyntas’ (1585) and Abraham Fraunce’s Translation ‘The Lamentations of Amyntas’ (1587), ed. Walter F. Staton, Jr, and Franklin M. Dickey (Chicago, 1967) Whetstone, George, Sir Phillip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true vertues [1587] Wither, George, Abuses Stript, and Whipt (1613) A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635) Wroth, Mary, The Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621) Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory: The Penshurst Manuscript, ed. Michael G. Brennan (London, 1988) The Poems, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, 2nd edn. (Baton Rouge, La., 1992) The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, N.Y., 1995) The Second Part of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts and completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller (Tempe, Ariz., 1999)

S E C O N D A RY S O U RC E S Unpublished Dissertations Andrews, M. C., ‘Sidney’s Arcadia on the English Stage’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Duke University, 1966) Bond, W. H., ‘The Reputation and Influence of Sir Philip Sidney’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1941) Esplin, R. S., ‘The Emerging Legend of Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1652’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Utah, 1970)

346

Bibliography

Henry, Anne, ‘In Ellipsis … The History of Suspension Marks in British Literature with Particular Reference to the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999) Hulse, Lynn, ‘The Musical Patronage of the English Aristocracy, c.1590–1640’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 1992) Wiles, A. G. D., ‘The Continuations of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1933; revised 1973) Witten-Hannah, Margaret, ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania: The Work and the Tradition’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Auckland, 1978) Printed Books and Articles Alexander, Gavin, ‘Constant Works: A Framework for Reading Mary Wroth’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 14.2 (1996/97), 5–32 ‘Mary Sidney Herbert: the Psalmes, the Triumph, and the Scribes’, Sidney Journal, 16.2 (1998), 16–30 ‘A New Manuscript of the Sidney Psalms: A Preliminary Report’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 43–56 ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (2000), 203–31 ‘The Elizabethan Lyric as Contrafactum: Robert Sidney’s ‘‘French Tune’’ Identified’, Music and Letters, 84 (2003), 378–402 ‘The Musical Sidneys’, John Donne Journal, 25 (2006), 65–105 Allen, M. J. B., Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds.), Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements (New York, 1990) Attridge, Derek, Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974) Baker-Smith, Dominic, ‘Great Expectation: Sidney’s Death and the Poets’, in 1586, 83–103 Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Tex., 1981) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin, Tex., 1986) Barroll, Leeds, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), 191–208 ‘Inventing the Stuart Masque’, in The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque, ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook (Cambridge, 1998), 121–43 Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia, 2001) Barthes, Roland, A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London, 1990) Barton, Anne, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984) Batchelor, Anne, ‘Daniel Bacheler: The Right Perfect Musician’, The Lute, 28 (1988), 3–12 Bate, W. Jackson, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London, 1971)

Bibliography

347

Bath, Michael, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London, 1994) Beal, Peter, ‘Poems by Sir Philip Sidney: The Ottley Manuscript’, The Library, 5th ser., 33 (1978), 284–95 Index of English Literary Manuscripts Volume I: 1450–1625, 2 parts (London, 1980) In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998) ‘Philip Sidney’s Letter to Queen Elizabeth and that ‘‘False Knave’’ Alexander Dicsone’, English Manuscript Studies, 11 (2002), 1–51 Beilin, Elaine, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, N.J., 1987) Bergvall, Åke, ‘The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’: An Old Reading of the New Arcadia’, SP, 85 (1988), 471–88 The ‘‘Enabling of Judgement’’: Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader (Uppsala, 1989) Berry, Edward, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto, 1998) Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1962) Bond, W. H., ‘The Epitaph of Sir Philip Sidney’, MLN, 58 (1943), 253–7 Bos, Sander et al., ‘Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed’, in 1586, 38–61 Boswell, Jackson and Henry Woudhuysen, ‘Some Unfamiliar Sidney Allusions’, in 1586, 221–37 Boutcher, Warren, ‘ ‘‘Rationall Knowledges’’ and ‘‘Knowledges … drenched in flesh and blood’’: Fulke Greville, Francis Bacon, and Institutions of Humane Learning in Tudor and Stuart England’, Sidney Journal, 19 (2001), 11–40 Bray, Alan, The Friend (Chicago and London, 2003) Brennan, Michael G., ‘The Date of the Countess of Pembroke’s Translation of the Psalms’, RES, new ser., 33 (1982), 434–6 ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer’, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, 7 (1983), 91–110 ‘Nicholas Breton’s The Passions of the Spirit and the Countess of Pembroke’, RES, new ser., 38 (1987), 221–5 ‘Sir Robert Sidney and Sir John Harington of Kelston’, NQ, 232 (1987), 232–7 Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London, 1988) ‘ ‘‘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’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 14.1 (1996), 37–44 ‘ ‘‘A SYDNEY, though un-named’’: Ben Jonson’s Influence in the Manuscript and Print Circulation of Lady Mary Wroth’s Writings’, Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 31–52; repr. as ‘Creating Female Authorship in the Early Seventeenth Century: Ben Jonson and Lady Mary Wroth’, in Women’s

348

Bibliography

Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 73–93 Brennan, Michael G.,‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘‘Sidney Psalms’’ ’, Sidney Journal, 20.1 (2002), 27–53 Brennan, Michael G. and Noel J. Kinnamon, ‘Robert Sidney, ‘‘Mr Johnson’’, and the Education of William Sidney at Penshurst’, NQ, 248 (2003), 430–7 A Sidney Chronology, 1554–1654 (Basingstoke, 2003) Brigden, Susan, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485–1603 (London, 2000) Burrow, Colin, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993) Buxton, John, Elizabethan Taste (New Jersey and Sussex, 1963) Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (London, 1964) ‘The Mourning for Sidney’, Renaissance Studies, 3 (1989), 46–56 Carey, John, ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Kay, 245–64 Carrell, Jennifer Lee, ‘A Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass: Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania and the Magic Mirror of Romance’, SEL, 34 (1994), 79–107 Chambers, E. K., Sir Henry Lee (Oxford, 1936) Chan, Mary, ‘Cynthia’s Revels and Music for a Choir School: Christ Church Manuscript Mus 439’, Studies in the Renaissance, 18 (1971), 134–72 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, ‘The Eclogues in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 35 (1984), 185–202 Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments (Oxford, 1989) Clarke, Danielle, ‘The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997), 149–66 Clayton, Jay and Eric Rothstein (ed.), Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History (Madison, Wis., 1991) Corbett, Margery and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London, 1979) Coren, Pamela, ‘Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney and the ‘‘Dolefull Lay’’ ’, SEL, 42 (2002), 25–41 Cox, Virginia, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge, 1992) Croft, Peter J., Autograph Poetry in the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1973) Cummings, Brian, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002) Davis, Joel, ‘Multiple Arcadias and the Literary Quarrel between Fulke Greville and the Countess of Pembroke’, SP, 101 (2004), 401–30 Davis, Walter R., Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, N.J., 1969) Day, J. F. R., ‘Death be very proud: Sidney, Subversion, and Elizabethan Heraldic Funerals’, in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), 179–203 Dean, William, ‘Henry Oxinden’s Key (1628) to The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: Some Facts and Conjectures’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 12.2 (1993), 14–21

Bibliography

349

Denkinger, Emma Marshall, ‘The Impresa Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney in the National Portrait Gallery’, PMLA, 47.1 (1932), 17–45 Dobranski, Stephen B., Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2005) Drysdall, Denis L., ‘Samuel Daniel and Abraham Fraunce on the Device and the Emblem’, in The Art of the Emblem, ed. Michael Bath, John Manning, and Alan R. Young (New York, 1993), 143–60 Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995) ‘ ‘‘And Thus Leave Off’’: Reevaluating Mary Wroth’s Folger Manuscript, V.a.104’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22 (2003), 273–91 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ‘Sidney’s Urania’, RES, new ser., 17 (1966), 123–32 ‘Sidney’s Personal Imprese’, JWCI, 32 (1970), 321–4 ‘ ‘‘Rosis and Lysa’’: Selections from the Poems of Sir Robert Sidney’, ELR, 9 (1979), 240–63 ‘Sidney, Stella, and Lady Rich’, in 1586, 170–92 Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London, 1991) Dutton, Richard, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Control of English Renaissance Drama (London, 1991) Dwyer, June, ‘Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic: Another Perspective’, SP, 78 (1981), 255–74 Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930) Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London, 1988) Esler, Anthony, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, N.C., 1966) Fabry, Frank J., ‘Sidney’s Verse Adaptations to Two Sixteenth-Century Italian Art Songs’, RQ, 23 (1970), 237–55 ‘Sidney’s Poetry and Italian Song-Form’, ELR, 3 (1973), 232–48 Falck, Robert, ‘Parody and Contrafactum: A Terminological Clarification’, The Musical Quarterly, 65 (1979), 1–21 Falco, Raphael, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England (Amherst, Mass., 1994) Farmer, Norman K., Jr, ‘Fulke Greville and Sir John Coke: An Exchange of Letters on a History Lecture and Certain Latin Verses on Sir Philip Sidney’, HLQ, 33 (1969–70), 217–36 Ferry, Anne, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago and London, 1983) Field, B. S., Jr, ‘Sidney’s Influence: The Evidence of the Publication of the History of Argalus and Parthenia’, ELN, 17 (1979), 98–102 Fienberg, Nona, ‘Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 175–90 ‘Mary Wroth’s Poetics of the Self’, SEL, 42 (2002), 121–36

350

Bibliography

Fisken, Beth Wynne, ‘Mary Sidney’s Psalmes: Education and Wisdom’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 166–83 ‘ ‘‘The Art of Sacred Parody’’ in Mary Sidney’s Psalmes’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 8 (1989), 223–39 ‘ ‘‘To the Angell Spirit …’’: Mary Sidney’s Entry into the ‘‘World of Words’’ ’ , in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, Mass., 1990), 263–75 Fogel, E. G., ‘Milton and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, NQ, 196 (1951), 115–17 Fowler, Alastair, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970) Freer, Coburn, Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms (Baltimore, 1972) Fumerton, Patricia, ‘ ‘‘Secret Arts’’: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’, Representations, 15 (1986), 57–97, repr. in Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago, 1991) Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd edn. (London, 1989) Garrett, Martin (ed.), Sidney: The Critical Heritage (London and New York, 1996) Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography, corrected edn. (Oxford, 1974) From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford, 1978) Gibson, Jonathan, ‘Sidney’s Arcadias and Elizabethan Courtiership’, Essays in Criticism, 52 (2002), 36–55 Goldberg, Jonathan, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Literal Translation’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, 1996), 321–36 Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, Calif., 1997) Goldring, Elizabeth, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Politics of Elizabethan Festival’, in Court Festivals of the European Renaissance, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Elizabeth Goldring (Aldershot, 2002), 199–224 ‘ ‘‘So lively a portraiture of his miseries’’: Melancholy, Mourning and the Elizabethan Malady’, The British Art Journal, 6.2 (2005), 12–22 Gömöri, George, ‘Inscriptions by Philip and Robert Sidney in alba amicorum’, NQ, 51 (2004), 240–2 Goodman, Jeffrey A., ‘Meaning in Context: Fulke Greville’s Sonnet LXXX’, ELR, 16 (1986), 360–72 Gouws, John, ‘Fact and Anecdote in Fulke Greville’s Account of Sidney’s Last Days’, in 1586, 62–82 Greene, Roland, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, N.J., 1991)

Bibliography

351

Greene, Thomas M., The Light In Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, Ct., 1982) Grundy, Joan, The Spenserian Poets (London, 1969) Hackel, Heidi Brayman, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005) Hackett, Helen, ‘ ‘‘A book, and solitariness’’: Melancholia, Gender and Literary Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580–1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (London, 1998), 64–85 Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000) Hager, Alan, ‘The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader’, ELH, 48 (1981), 1–16 Hamilton, A. C. (ed.), The Spenser Encyclopedia (Toronto, 1990) Hamilton, A. C., Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge, 1977) ‘Problems in Reconstructing an Elizabethan Text: The Example of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘‘Triumph’’ ’ , ELR, 26 (1996), 451–81 Hammer, Paul E. J., The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999) Hannay, Margaret P., ‘ ‘‘Doo What Men May Sing’’: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 149–65 ‘ ‘‘Princes you as men must dy’’: Genevan Advice to Monarchs in the Psalmes of Mary Sidney’, ELR, 19 (1989), 22–41 ‘ ‘‘This Moses and This Miriam’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Role in the Legend of Sir Philip Sidney’, in Achievements, 217–26 Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York and Oxford, 1990) ‘ ‘‘House-confinèd maids’’: The Presentation of Woman’s Role in the Psalmes of the Countess of Pembroke’, ELR, 24 (1994), 44–71 ‘The Countess of Pembroke as a Spenserian Poet’, in Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts (Tempe, Ariz., 1999), 41–62 ‘ ‘‘When riches growe’’: Class Perspective in the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes’, in Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain, ed. Mary Burke et al. (Syracuse, N.Y., 2000), 77–97 ‘ ‘‘Bearing the livery of your name’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Publication’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 7–42; repr. as ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture’ in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 17–49

352

Bibliography

Hanson, Kristin, ‘Quantitative Meter in English: The Lesson of Sir Philip Sidney’, English Language and Linguistics, 5 (2000), 41–91 Hardin, Richard F., Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence, Kans., 1973) Häublein, Ernst, Strophe und Struktur in der Lyrik Sir Philip Sidneys (Bern and Frankfurt, 1971) The Stanza, The Critical Idiom, 38 (London, 1978) Hay, Millicent V., The Life of Robert Sidney (Washington, D.C., 1984) Hazlitt, William, Selected Essays, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London, 1934) Hearn, Karen, Marcus Gheeraerts II (London, 2002) Helgerson, Richard, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976) Heninger, S. K., Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park, Pa., 1989) The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical (University Park, Pa., 1994) Hind, A. M., Engraving in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1952–64) Hinds, Stephen, Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry (Cambridge, 2002) Holmes, John, ‘The Victorian Genetics of Astrophel and Stella’, Sidney Journal, 17.2 (1999), 41–51 Holquist, Michael, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London and New York, 1990) Howell, W. S., Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York, 1961) Hunter, G. K., ‘The Marking of Sententiae in Elizabethan Printed Plays, Poems, and Romances’, The Library, 5th ser., 6 (1951), 171–88 Iser, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading (Baltimore, Md., 1980) James, Mervyn, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986) Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton, ‘ ‘‘Studied for Action’’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 30–78 Juel-Jensen, Bent, ‘Sir Philip Sidney, 1554–1586: A Check-list of Early Editions of his Works’, in Kay, 289–314 Kalstone, David, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and ‘‘Poore Petrarchs Long Deceased Woes’’’ , JEGP, 63 (1964), 21–32 Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (Cambridge, Mass., 1965) Kay, Dennis (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford, 1987) Kay, Dennis, ‘Introduction: Sidney—A Critical Heritage’, in Kay, 3–41 Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford, 1990) Kelliher, Hilton, ‘The Warwick Manuscripts of Fulke Greville’, British Museum Quarterly, 34 (1970), 107–21

Bibliography

353

Review of The Poems of Robert Sidney, The Library, 6th ser., 7 (1985), 372–7 Kelliher, Hilton and Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘A Manuscript of Poems by Robert Sidney: Some Early Impressions’, British Library Journal, 1 (1975), 107–44 Kelly, F. M., ‘A Portrait of a Warrior’, Connoisseur, 100 (1937), 25–8 Kennedy, William J., The Site of Petrarchism (Baltimore, Md., and London, 2003) Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1968) Kerrigan, John, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford, 2001) Kinnamon, Noel J., ‘A Note on Herbert’s ‘‘Easter’’ and the Sidneian Psalms’, George Herbert Journal, 1.2 (1978), 44–8 ‘The Sidney Psalms: The Penshurst and Tixall Manuscripts’, in English Manuscript Studies, 2 (1990), 139–61 ‘God’s ‘‘Scholler’’: The Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes and Beza’s Psalmorum Davidis … Libri Quinque’, NQ, 242 (1997), 85–8 Kinney, Arthur F., ‘Rhetoric and Fiction in Elizabethan England’, in Renaissance Eloquence, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983) Kinney, Arthur F. (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, Conn., 1986) Sidney in Retrospect (Amherst, Mass., 1988) Klein, Lisa M., ‘Spenser’s Astrophel and the Sidney Legend’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 12.2 (1993), 42–55 The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark and London, 1998) Kuin, Roger, ‘New Light on the Veronese Portrait of Sir Philip Sidney’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 15.1 (1997), 19–47 Kuin, Roger and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Versifying Connections: Daniel Rogers and the Sidneys’, Sidney Journal, 18.2 (2000), 1–35 Lamb, Mary Ellen, ‘The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke: The Dramatic Circle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 11 (1981), 194–202 ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Patronage’, ELR, 12 (1982), 162–79 ‘ ‘‘Nett which paultry prayes disdaines’’: Sidney’s Influence on Two Unattributed Poems in the Bright Manuscript’, Sidney Newsletter, 5.1 (1984), 3–14 Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison, Wis., 1990) ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’, ELR, 31 (2001), 107–30 Lanham, Richard A., Sidney’s Arcadia: The Old Arcadia (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1965) Lass, Roger (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III, 1476–1776 (Cambridge, 1999)

354

Bibliography

Levy, F. J., ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 26 (1964), 608–17 Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967) ‘Fulke Greville: The Courtier as Philosophic Poet’, MLQ, 33 (1972), 433–48 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge, Mass., 1993) Lewis, C. S., English Literature of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954) Lindheim, Nancy, ‘Vision, Revision, and the 1593 Arcadia’, ELR, 2.1 (1972), 136–47 Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1993) Low, Anthony, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1978) McCabe, Richard A., ‘Fulke Greville and Joseph Hall’, NQ, 226 (1981), 45–6 McCoy, Richard C., Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979) The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989) Maclean, Hugh, ‘Greville’s ‘‘Poetic’’’ , SP, 61 (1964), 170–91 Marotti, Arthur F., Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1995) Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, Ct., 1954) Masten, Jeff, ‘ ‘‘Shall I turne blabb?’’: Circulation, Gender, and Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Sonnets’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 67–87 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, ‘A Womb of his Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1993), 266–88 May, Steven W., The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts, 2nd edn. (Asheville, N.C., 1999) ‘Two Unpublished Letters by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke’, in English Manuscript Studies, 9 (2000), 88–97 Maynard, Winifred, Elizabethan Lyric Poetry and its Music (Oxford, 1986) Mazzola, Elizabeth, ‘Spenser, Sidney, and Second Thoughts: Mythology and Misgiving in Muiopotmos’, Sidney Journal, 18.1 (2000), 57–81 Favorite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (New York, 2003) Mentz, Steven, ‘Selling Sidney: William Ponsonby, Thomas Nashe, and the Boundaries of Elizabethan Print and Manuscript Cultures’, Text, 13 (2000), 151–71 Miller, Anthony, ‘ ‘‘These forc’d ioyes’’: Imitation, Celebration, and Exhortation in Ben Jonson’s Ode to Sir William Sidney’, SP, 86 (1989), 42–68

Bibliography

355

Miller, Jacqueline T., ‘ ‘‘What may words say’’: The Limits of Language in Astrophil and Stella’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London and Sydney, 1984), 95–109 ‘The Passion Signified: Imitation and the Construction of Emotions in Sidney and Wroth’, Criticism, 43 (2001), 407–21 Miller, Naomi J., ‘Engendering Discourse: Women’s Voices in Wroth’s Urania and Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Reading Mary Wroth, ed. Miller and Waller, 154–72 Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington, 1996) Miller, Naomi J. and Gary F. Waller (eds.), Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England (Knoxville, Ky., 1991) Mitchell, A. and K. Foster, ‘Sir William Alexander’s Supplement to Book III of Sidney’s Arcadia’, The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 234–41 Montgomery, Robert L., Jr, Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (New York, 1961) Moore, Mary, ‘The Labyrinth as Style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’, SEL, 38 (1998), 109–25 Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism (Carbondale, Ill., and Edwardsville, Ill., 2000) Mowl, Timothy, Elizabethan and Jacobean Style (London, 1993) Myrick, Kenneth, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman, 2nd edn. (Lincoln, Neb., 1965) Neely, Carol Thomas, ‘The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences’, ELH, 45 (1978), 359–89 Neill, Michael, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, 1997) Nelson, T. G. A., ‘Sir John Harington as a Critic of Sir Philip Sidney’, SP, 67 (1970), 41–56 Newton, Richard C., ‘ ‘‘Ben./Jonson’’: The Poet in the Poems’, in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore, Md., and London, 1977), 165–95 Norbrook, David, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2002) Norton, Glyn P. (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1999) O’Connell, Michael, ‘Astrophel: Spenser’s Double Elegy’, SEL, 11 (1971), 27–35 Orgel, Stephen, ‘ ‘‘Not on his picture but his book’’: What the Elizabethans Wanted Their Poets to Look Like’, TLS, 22 August 2003, 9–10 Osborn, James M., Young Philip Sidney, 1572–1577 (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1972)

356

Bibliography

Parker, Patricia, Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton, N.J., 1979) Parker, Robert W., ‘The Art of Sidney’s Heroic Impresas’, ELR, 20 (1990), 408–30 Parker, Tom W. N., Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle: Loving in Truth (Oxford, 1998) Parks, Stephen and Peter Croft, Literary Autographs (Los Angeles, 1983) Parry, Graham, ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society (Literary and Historical Section), 21.4 (1975), 51–60 The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42 (Manchester, 1981) Patterson, Annabel, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England, 2nd edn. (Madison, Wis., 1984) Philmus, Maria R. Rohr, ‘Greville’s Poetic Revisited’, Neophilologus, 83.1 (1999), 145–67 ‘The Case of the Spenserian Sonnet: A Curious Re-Creation’, Spenser Studies, 13 (1999), 125–37 Pigeon, Renée, ‘Manuscript Notations in an Unrecorded Copy of Lady Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Mountgomeries Urania’, NQ, 236 (1991), 81–2 Pigman III, G. W., ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, RQ, 33 (1980), 1–32 Pitcher, John, ‘Samuel Daniel, The Hertfords, and a Question of Love’, RES, new ser., 35 (1984), 449–62 Pollard, A. W. and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd edn., rev. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London, 1976–91) Poulton, Diana, John Dowland, 2nd edn. (London, 1982) Preminger, Alex and T. V. F. Brogan (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton, N.J., 1993) Prescott, Anne Lake, French Poets and the English Renaissance (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1978) Quilligan, Maureen, ‘Completing the Conversation’, in Shakespeare Studies, 25 (1997), 42–9 Quint, David, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven, Ct., 1983) Quitslund, Jon, ‘The Work of Mourning in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis’, Renaissance Papers (1997), 23–31 Rankin, Deana, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in SeventeenthCentury Ireland (Cambridge, 2005) Rathmell, J. C. A., ‘Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst’, ELR, 1 (1971), 250–60 Rebholz, Ronald A., The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1971)

Bibliography

357

Rees, Joan, ‘Fulke Greville and the Revisions of Arcadia’, RES, new ser., 17 (1966), 54–7 ‘Fulke Greville’s Epitaph on Sidney’, RES, new ser., 19 (1968), 47–51 Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554–1628: A Critical Biography (London, 1971) ‘Past and Present in the Sixteenth Century: Elizabethan Double Vision’, Trivium, 20 (1985), 97–112 Ricks, Christopher, Allusion to the Poets (Oxford, 2002) Rienstra, Debra and Noel Kinnamon, ‘Revisioning the Sacred Text’, in Sidney Journal, 17.1 (1999), 53–77; repr. as ‘Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, ed. George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, 2002), 50–72 Ringler, William A., ‘The Text of The Poems of Sidney Twenty-five Years After’, in Achievements, 129–44 Roberts, David A., ‘Fulke Greville’s Aesthetic Reconsidered’, SP, 74 (1977), 388–405 Roberts, Josephine A., ‘The Imaginary Epistles of Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Rich’, ELR, 15 (1985), 59–77 ‘Deciphering Women’s Pastoral: Coded Language in Love’s Victory’, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, Mo., 1997), 163–74 Roche, Thomas P., Jr, ‘Astrophil and Stella: A Radical Reading’, Spenser Studies, 3 (1982), 139–91 ‘Ending the New Arcadia: Virgil and Ariosto’, Sidney Newsletter, 10.1 (1989), 3–12 Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York, 1989) Rudenstine, Neil L., Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1967) Sale, William M., Jr, Samuel Richardson: Master Printer (Ithaca, N.Y., 1950) Salzman, Paul, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford, 1985) Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (Basingstoke, 2002) Schleiner, Louise, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1994) Schrickx, W., ‘Letters in Belgian Archives of Two English Poets, Robert Sidney and Henry Wotton’, Revue des langues vivantes, 40 (1974), 483–8 Scott-Warren, Jason, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford, 2001) Shephard, Robert, ‘The Political Commonplace Books of Sir Robert Sidney’, Sidney Journal, 21.1 (2003), 1–30 Siebeck, Berta, Das Bild Sir Philip Sidneys in der Englischen Renaissance (Weimar, 1939) Sir Philip Sidney: Life, Death and Legend: An Exhibition to Commemorate the 400th Anniversary of the Death of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1986)

358

Bibliography

Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996) Skretkowicz, Victor, ‘Abraham Fraunce and Abraham Darcie’, The Library, 5th ser., 31 (1976), 239–42 ‘Building Sidney’s Reputation: Texts and Editions of the Arcadia’, in 1586, 111–24 ‘ ‘‘A More Lively Monument’’: Philisides in Arcadia’, in Achievements, 194–200 ‘Greville’s Life of Sidney: The Hertford Manuscript’, in English Manuscript Studies, 3 (1992), 102–36 ‘Algernon Sidney and Philip Sidney: A Continuity of Rebellion’, Sidney Journal, 17.2 (1999), 3–18 ‘Textual Criticism and the 1593 ‘‘Complete’’ Arcadia’, Sidney Journal, 18.2 (2000), 37–70 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago, 1968) Smith, Rosalind, ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: The Politics of Withdrawal’, ELR, 30 (2000), 408–31 Snyder, Jon R., Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1989) Sokol, B. J., ‘Numerology in Fulke Greville’s Caelica’, NQ, 225 (1980), 327–9 Sonnino, Lee A., A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London, 1968) Spencer, Theodore, ‘The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, ELH, 12 (1945), 251–78 Spiller, Michael R. G., The Development of the Sonnet (London and New York, 1992) Steinberg, Theodore L., ‘Spenser, Sidney, and the Myth of Astrophel’, Spenser Studies, 11 (1990), 187–201 ‘Weeping for Sidney’, Sidney Newsletter and Journal, 11.2 (1991), 3–15 ‘The Sidneys and the Psalms’, SP, 92 (1995), 1–17 Stevens, John, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and ‘‘Versified Music’’: Melodies for Courtly Songs’, in The Well Enchanting Skill: Music, Poetry, and Drama in the Culture of the Renaissance, ed. John Caldwell, Edward Olleson, and Susan Wollenberg (Oxford, 1990), 153–69 Stewart, Alan, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London, 2000) Stillinger, Jack, ‘The Biographical Problem of Astrophel and Stella’, JEGP, 59 (1960), 617–39 Stillman, Robert E., ‘The Scope of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics’, ELR, 32 (2002), 355–85 Strickland, Ronald, ‘Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity in Sir Philip Sidney’s Funeral’, ELH, 57 (1990), 19–36 Strong, Roy, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969) The Cult of Elizabeth (London, 1977)

Bibliography

359

‘The Leicester House Miniatures: Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester and his Circle’, Burlington Magazine, 127 (1985), 694–701 ‘Sidney’s Appearance Reconsidered’, in Achievements, 3–31 Stump, Donald V., Jerome S. Dees, and C. Stuart Hunter (eds.), Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism (1554–1984) (New York, 1994) The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols., ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, 2004) Thompson, John, The Founding of English Metre (New York, 1989; originally published 1961) Todd, Richard, ‘Humanist Prosodic Theory, Dutch Synods, and the Poetics of the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter’, HLQ, 52 (1989), 273–93 Tuve, Rosemond, ‘Sacred ‘‘Parody’’ of Love Poetry, and Herbert’, Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), 249–90 Ulreich, John C., Jr, ‘ ‘‘The Poets Only Deliver’’: Sidney’s Conception of Mimesis’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 15.1 (1982), 67–84 Upton, Christopher A., ‘ ‘‘Speaking Sorrow’’: The English University Anthologies of 1587 on the Death of Sir Philip Sidney in the Low Countries’, in Academic Relations between the Low Countries and the British Isles, 1450–1700, ed. H. de Ridder-Symoens and J. M. Fletcher (Ghent, 1989), 131–41 van Dorsten, Jan, Poets, Patrons, and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers, and the Leiden Humanists (Leiden and London, 1962) van Dorsten, Jan, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds.), Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (Leiden, 1986) Venn, J. and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis, Part I, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–7) Vickers, Brian, In Defence of Rhetoric, corrected edn. (Oxford, 1989) Vogt, George McGill, ‘Richard Robinson’s Eupolemia (1603)’, SP, 21 (1924), 629–48 Waller, Gary F., ‘The Text and Manuscript Variants of the Countess of Pembroke’s Psalms’, RES, new ser., 26 (1975), 1–18 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg, 1979) The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and the Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit, 1993) Walls, Peter, Music in the English Courtly Masque 1604–1640 (Oxford, 1996) Warkentin, Germaine, ‘Greville’s Caelica and the Fullness of Time’, English Studies in Canada, 6 (1980), 398–408 ‘Sidney’s Certain Sonnets: Speculations on the Evolution of the Text’, The Library, 6th ser., 2 (1980), 430–44 ‘The Meeting of the Muses: Sidney and the Mid-Tudor Poets’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London and Sydney, 1984), 17–33

360

Bibliography

Warkentin, Germaine, ‘Patrons and Profiteers: Thomas Newman and the ‘‘Violent Enlargement’’ of Astrophil and Stella’, The Book Collector, 34 (1985), 461–87 ‘Robert Sidney’s ‘‘Darcke Offrings’’: The Making of a Late Tudor Manuscript Canzoniere’, Spenser Studies, 12 (1998 for 1992), 37–73 ‘Jonson’s Penshurst Reveal’d? A Penshurst Inventory of 1623’, Sidney Journal, 20.1 (2002), 1–25 Waswo, Richard, The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville (Charlottesville, Va., 1972) Wayne, Don E., Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (London, 1984) ‘Jonson’s Sidney: Legacy and Legitimation in The Forrest’, in Achievements, 227–50 Weiner, Seth, ‘The Quantitative Poems and the Psalm Translations: The Place of Sidney’s Experimental Verse in the Legend’, in 1586, 193–220 Wilde, Oscar, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellman (London, 1970) Wiles, A. G. D., ‘The Date of Publication and Composition of Sir William Alexander’s Supplement to Sidney’s Arcadia’, PBSA, 50 (1956), 387–92 ‘James Johnstoun and the Arcadian Style’, Renaissance Papers (1957), 72–81 ‘Sir William Alexander’s Continuation of the Revised Version of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 3 (1966), 221–9 Wilkes, G. A., ‘The Sequence of the Writings of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke’, SP, 56 (1959), 489–503 Williamson, Colin, ‘Structure and Syntax in Astrophil and Stella’, RES, new ser., 31 (1980), 271–84; reprinted in Kay, 227–42 Wilson, K. J., Incomplete Fictions: The Formation of English Renaissance Dialogue (Washington, D.C., 1985) Woods, Susanne, Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden (San Marino, Calif., 1984) Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader, Second Series (London, 1932) Worden, Blair, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl, and Blair Worden (London, 1981), 182–200 The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, Ct., and London, 1996) Woudhuysen, Henry, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996) ‘A New Manuscript Fragment of Sidney’s Old Arcadia: The Huddleston Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies, 11 (2002), 52–69 Wynne-Davies, Marion, ‘ ‘‘For Worth, Not Weakness, Makes in Use but One’’: Literary Dialogues in an English Renaissance Family’, in ‘This Double Voice’:

Bibliography

361

Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke, 2000), 164–84 ‘ ‘‘So Much Worth’’: Autobiographical Narratives in the Work of Lady Mary Wroth’, in Betraying Our Selves: Forms of Self-Representation in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Henk Dragstra, Sheila Otway, and Helen Wilcox (Basingstoke, 2000), 76–93 Yates, Frances A., John Florio (Cambridge, 1934) Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964) Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975) Lull and Bruno: Collected Essays Volume I (London, 1982) Young, Alan R., ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s Tournament Impresas’, Sidney Newsletter, 6.1 (1985), 6–24 Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London, 1987) The English Tournament Imprese (New York, 1988) Zim, Rivkah, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–1601 (Cambridge, 1987) Zurcher, Amelia, ‘Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth’s Urania’, SEL, 42 (2002), 103–19 ‘Ethics and the Politic Agent of Early Seventeenth-Century Prose Romance’, ELR, 35 (2005), 73–101


Index Italic numbers refer to illustrations Accession Day tilts 60–3, 120, 181 actio, see rhetoric (five parts) Adonis 70 Aeneas 236 Ajax 70, 157 Alcibiades 43–4 Alençon, Duke of, see Anjou, Duke of Alexander, Gavin 86 n.35, 101 n.63, 190 n.127, 313 n.59, 329 n.77 Alexander, Sir William 42–3, 73–4, 277–82, 284 Arcadia bridging passage 42–3, 51, 55, 273, 276 n.27, 277–82, 337 Aurora 210 Amadis 178, 264, 290 Amintas, see Amyntas Amphialus (Arcadia) xxiv, xxv n.16, 15, 25, 48–50, 199 n.21, 281 in continuations of the Arcadia 269, 276, 281 Amyntas 98, 135, 265, 266, 268 anaphora 97, 181 Anaxius (Arcadia) xxv n.16, 42–3, 48, 50–1, 278–80 Andersen, Hans Christian 268 Anjou, François-Hercule, Duke of 224 Anne of Denmark 134, 140, 186, 187–8, 190, 288 n.22 antimetabole 3, 33, 41 n.81, 47, 232, 283 n.2, 291 see also chiasmus Antony 96, 99–100, 103 Apelles 277 aposiopesis: in other authors 39, 49, 283–4 in response to Sidney 55, 95–7, 213, 276, 279–81, 318–31 in Sidney 37, 39, 41 n.81, 42–3, 45–6, 47–8, 49–55, 88–9, 95 theory 28, 37, 39–40, 43–4, 47 see also incompletion apostrophe: in response to Sidney 121–2, 171–2, 173–4, 242, 254, 297,

306–7, 308–11, 313, 326, 330, 331 in Sidney xl, xli, xlii, 5, 15–17, 19, 21, 22, 27–8 to Sidney xxxviii, 1, 31, 33, 73, 122, 193 see also dialogue; prosopopoeia Arcadia xli, 61, 140, 264, 265, 266, 267–8, 297–9 for Sidney’s Arcadia see The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia Argalus (Arcadia) xxv n.16, 25–7, 49–50 Ariosto, Ludovico 130, 264, 270, 290, 321 Aristotle 6, 134 n.36, 163 Poetics xxviii, 18, 113, 199, 299 Rhetoric xxi n.6, 6, 27, 41 Astrophil and Stella xxx, 17–22, 199, 201 n., 203–8, 216, 217 1591 edition xxii, 85, 129, 136, 213–14 text and presentation xxii, 17–18, 131 appendix 194, 208 dating of xx, xxi dialogue in 17–22, 35 individual poems: AS 1: 21, 131, 170, 193, 203 n.33, 283, 298 n.33, 334 AS 3: 203, 236 AS 5: 118 n.97, 212 AS 6: 20, 205–6 AS 14: 225 n.15 AS 15: 31 n.65, 206 AS 18: 124, 131 AS 21: xxxviii, 225 AS 23: 21 AS 27: 310 AS 34: 18–19, 35 AS 37: 131 AS 45: 207, 317 AS 47: 291–3, 334 AS 54: 21, 54, 79

364

Index

Astrophil and Stella (cont.) AS 55: 19–20 AS 57: 22, 312 n.55 AS 58: 22, 83 n.19, 245, 312 n.55 AS 59: 312 n.55 AS 60: 183 AS 61: 54, 204, 257, 334 AS 62: 212, 334 song i 90 AS 74: 21, 211 song iv 17, 19, 32, 197 song v 119 song vi 20 song vii 20 song viii 17, 32, 68, 91, 118–9, 131, 197, 207, 211, 248–9, 254–5 song ix 32, 203 AS 87: 174–5, 204 song x 131 AS 99: 211, 258–9 song xi 17–18, 19 AS 108: 22, 217 manuscripts of 17, 136, 194, 216 numerical structure 91 n.39, 205 n.37 response to 32, 33, 101, 139, 166, 193–4, 208–16, 217–19, 244, 247–55, 258–60, 287, 291–3 role of songs 207 trochaic metre in 175, 197 Astrophil: Astrophil or Astrophel? xx n.3 in Astrophil and Stella xxx, xxxviii, 17–22, 53–4, 199, 203–4, 206–8, 217–18, 249, 312 n.55 as Sidney xxi, xxx, xxxviii, 32, 207–8 in writings of others 1 n.3, 67–8, 70, 139, 207, 218, 265–8 Attridge, Derek 196 Aubrey, John 125 Babington, Gervase 118 n.96 Bacheler, Daniel 134 Bacon, Francis, Viscount St Alban 65, 263 Baker-Smith, Dominic 57 Bakhtin, M. M. 3, 4 n.9, 21 n.52 Barnes, Barnabe 97, 98, 199 n.20, 207, 211, 218 Barnfield, Richard 79, 197 Barthes, Roland 216–17

Barton, Anne 333 Basilius (Arcadia) xxiii-iv, xxx, 3, 12, 24, 25, 201, 245 in Alexander’s bridging passage 278, 281–2 Bastard, Thomas 79 n.7 Bate, W. Jackson 175 n.82 Baxter, Nathaniel 1 Baynard’s Castle 130, 182, 189 Bedford, Countess of, see Russell, Lucy (Harington) Beilin, Elaine 294 n.30 Bellingham, Henry 79 n.7 Bellings, Richard 273, 274, 276–7, 337 Bergvall, Åke xliv n.58, 3 n.5, 3 n.8, 30 n.63 Berry, Edward xxxviii n.47 Bertie, Peregrine, Lord Willoughby 31 Bèze, Théodore de 86 Bill, Charles 157 Blount, Charles, Lord Mountjoy 63, 70, 137, 141 Bolton, Edmund 32 Borges, Jorge Luis 52–3 n.110 Bray, Alan 221 n.5, 222 n.8 Brennan, Michael G. 82, 85, 100, 160, 188 n.114 Breton, Nicholas 59, 66, 67, 82, 83–4 n.22, 135, 197, 263 Bright manuscript 248, 286–7 Browne, Clare 78 n.6 Browne, Sir William 151 n.14 Bruno, Giordano 8, 136 Bryskett, Lodowyck 8–9, 69, 71 Burrow, Colin 51 n.107 Butcher, Richard 58 n.11 Butler, Sir Philip 63 Buxton, John xxxi, 11 n.37, 57, 60, 88 n.36, 134 n.36 Byrd, William 57, 59, 60 n.19, 66, 194, 197 Caesar 186 n.107 Cambridge, University of: elegies for Sidney 57–8, 78–9, 157 n.37 Camden, William 158 Campion, Thomas 197, 200 n.25 Carew, Richard 6 Carey, John 29, 41 n.81 Carleton, Dudley 188 n.119

Index Carleton, George 58 n.11 Carrell, Jennifer Lee 302 n.43 Castelvetro, Ludovico 100 Castiglione, Baldessare 7, 208 Cecil, Sir Robert 138, 181 Cecropia (Arcadia) xxiv, 47–8, 48–9, 50 Cervantes, Miguel de 52, 290 Chapman, George 160 n.45 Chaucer, Geoffrey xxxiii, 45, 195, 298 n.33 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 10 n.32, 71 n.56, 88 n.36, 234 n.33 chiasmus 116, 118, 309 see also antimetabole Christ Church, Oxford 149, 187 Churchyard, Thomas 57, 58, 64, 195 Cicero xxxiii, 7, 31, 44 Clarke, Danielle 106 n.69 Cleopatra (Garnier/Pembroke, Daniel) 82, 95, 98–9, 103–4, 121 Cleophila (Arcadia), see Pyrocles Clifford, Lady Anne 335 Clifford, George, Earl of Cumberland 62–3 Clitophon (Arcadia) 15, 24 Coke, Sir John 221 Constable, Henry 1, 193–4, 209, 210, 211 constancy xlii-iii, 303–5, 319, 330 contrafactum, see parody The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania 287, 290–91, 293–300, 300–308, 310–15, 318–31 and the Arcadia 290–1, 293–4, 297–300, 320 copies of 324 n.72 episodes: opening 290, 294 Leonius in Arcadia 297–300 endings 290, 318–21, 327–8, 330 family resemblance in 294–7 memory in 297–300 narrative style 293–4, 304–5, 316, 319, 325–6, 330 Part I and Part II compared 294 poems in: U28: 329 U49: 244 U52: 317 N2: 313

365 N14: 313–314, 317 N15: 299, 314 N17: 297 N18: 328 prose style 291 publication of 328, 329–30 sources 271 n.19, 290–1 title page 78 see also Wroth, Lady Mary (Sidney) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: dedication to Mary Sidney 86–8, 294 echoed by Mary Sidney 122–3, 126 imitated by Harington 132 and The Defence of Poesy 229–30 dialogue in 2–3, 6–7, 10–15, 22–7, 35 see also dialogue incompletion in 36, 38–9, 42–3, 45–55, 222, 227–8, 320 see also aposiopesis; incompletion ‘old’ and ‘new’? xiii-iv ‘old’ Arcadia episodes discussed: Pyrocles encounters Musidorus in disguise xl Musidorus and Philisides 13–14 princes exchange news 12–13 Musidorus and Pamela elope 13 Basilius and Cleophila 201 death of Basilius 45, 127 Philisides’ story xxxvi-vii, 15, 24 princes discuss death xliii end 30, 45 eclogues 10–12, 22–3 plot xxiii-v poetry 127, 198–9 OA 7: 11, 21 OA 9: 11 OA 12: 59 n.18, 79, 244–5 OA 13: 12 OA 23/24: 13, 15 OA 68: 11 OA 29: 88–9 OA 30: 12, 24 OA 31: 14 OA 32: 14, 35 OA 36/37: 13 OA 47: 13 OA 49: 13 OA 50: 133 OA 51: 131 OA 59: 244 n.50, 246

366 The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: (cont.) OA 62: 268 OA 63: 119 OA 65: 130 OA 66: 233 OA 71: 12, 23–4, 79, 233 OA 72: 12, 23–4, 90, 169, 233 OA 73: xxxvii, 15 OA 74: 15, 24, 131 OA 75: 199 OP 2: 11 n.34 OP 3: 26 reception 89 n.37, 262–82 continuations of xxv, 30, 42–3, 89 n.37, 265, 268–82, 337 Greville’s discussion of 227–30 Harington’s quotations from 130–1 Molyneux’s discussion of 59 roman a` clef readings 301 Robert Sidney as reader 150 revised Arcadia episodes discussed: opening xliii, 47, 268–9, 290, 298–9 portrait of Philoclea 283 reunion of princes in battle 272, 280 Pyrocles and Musidorus talk about love 202–3 Musidorus and Helen of Corinth 269–70 Pyrocles fights with Anaxius 50–1 Musidorus’ letter to Pamela 24–5 captivity episode 275, 278, 280 Argalus and Parthenia 25–7, 49–50, 88, 89 n.37, 222, 333 n.8, 336–7 end 42–3 eclogues 22–4 and Mary Sidney 81 sources 51 n.107, 264, 265, 267, 270–1, 290 textual questions xxii-vii composition and revision xx, xxii, xxiv-v manuscripts xxii, 130–1, 150, 161 n.50, 320 publication xxii-iii, xxv-vii relations between ‘old’ and ‘new’ xxv-vii, 46–7, 229 1590 edition xxii, 84, 129, 136, 222, 231–3, 320

Index 1590 typography, punctuation, and layout xxxviii, 26, 50, 52, 231–3 1593 edition xxiii, xli, 14–15, 84, 100, 129, 136, 138, 227–8, 275–6 1593 typography and layout 26, 52 n.109 1590 and 1593 editions compared xxii-iii, 15, 22–4, 26, 88–9, 129, 138–40, 233, 266 1590 and 1593 eclogues 22–4, 233 arguments between editorial teams 87, 129, 138–40 1598 edition xxii, xli, 84 1613 edition xxvi-vii n.22, 10 1655 edition 337 1725 edition xli, 262 Cox, Virginia 5 n.12 Croft, Peter xxii n.10, 131, 159, 166, 180, 182, 183 Cyrus 30, 138, 236, 275, 281 Dallington, Robert 1, 62 Dametas (Arcadia) xxiii, 11 n.34, 23 Damon (Arcadia) 23–4 Daniel, Samuel 64–6, 135–7, 140–1, 204, 263, 334 and the 1591 Astrophel and Stella 129, 136, 194, 213–14 and authorship of OP 3 27 n.56 Civil Wars 137, 141 Cleopatra 82, 98, 103, 121, 136, 141 and Lady Anne Clifford 335 A Defence of Ryme 91, 136, 137, 140, 196, 200 n.25 Delia 136, 194, 196, 208–9, 211, 212, 213–14 and Drayton 73–4 and Florio 136, 139, 140 and Greville 136, 137 and Harington 135–6 and the Jacobean court 140 masques 140, 188–9 Musophilus 137 A Panegyrike Congratulatory 140 Philotas 141 The Queenes Arcadia 140, 264 and Mary Sidney 64, 66, 82, 95, 119 n.98, 121 n.104, 136, 137, 141, 213 on Sidney 64–6

Index and the Sidney Psalms 84, 107, 132 n.19 at Wilton 82, 136, 189, 287 The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius 7, 155, 156, 182 n.101 Danvers, Sir John 335 David 106 n.70, 110 Davies, John of Hereford 83–4 n.22, 85 n.28, 113, 160, 185–6 Davis, Walter R. 264–5 n.11, 265 n.14 Davison, Francis 32–3, 34, 85 n.28 A Poetical Rapsody 13, 32–5, 67, 68 n.49, 71, 194 Davison, Walter 32–3 Davison, William 32, 134 Day, Angel 57 n.9, 58, 165 Day, J. F. R. 57 n.4 Day, John 230 n.23, 263 The Defence of Poesy xxvii-viii, xxix, xxx-i, 9, 225 1595 editions xx, 84, 129, 138, 193 and the Arcadia 46, 229–30, 283 Churchyard’s verse paraphrase 64 date of xx definition of poetry xxviii, 202 and dialogue 27–8, 29–30 drama 82 energeia 198 on the genres xxviii, 10 n.30 and Greville 225–7 Harington’s borrowings 131–2 idea or fore-conceit 38, 113, 143, 236, 275 images of virtue xxvii, 27, 138 imitation and footstep-following xxxiii, 164, 298 n.33 kinds of poet 226 love poetry 201 mimesis 18, 20, 27, 159, 202, 203, 226, 236, 256 praxis xxvii, 25, 46, 271, 283 prosopopoeia 27–8, 236 and the reader xxviii, xxxi, 29–30, 164, 271 rhetoric 5, 6, 113 on Sidney as poet 150 speaking picture xxviii, 283 n.2 on Spenser 69 song 197 teaching xxvii-viii, xlii, 29–30, 46, 164, 226–7, 236, 271, 283 versification, Hebrew 118

367 versification, English and continental 11 n.36, 196, 249 words and matter 195, 198 see also idea or fore-conceit; imitation; speaking picture Deloney, Thomas 264 Demetrius 41, 44 Denkinger, Emma Marshall 158 n.40 Denny, Sir Edward xxi n.7 Denny, Edward, Baron 285, 286, 301, 330 Devereux, Lady Penelope, see Rich, Lady Penelope Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 61–3, 133, 134, 137, 141, 143, 151, 185 and Robert Sidney 137, 138, 159, 179 see also Essex rebellion Devereux, Robert, 3rd Earl of Essex 143 dialogue 2–36 and aposiopesis 40, 47 as hermeneutic metaphor xxxii, 2–5, 29–30, 31, 55, 261, 338 kinds of 5–10 rhetoric of 27–9, 33–4 with Sidney 31–5, 42, 55, 122, 171, 225, 242–3, 247, 254, 286, 331, 338 see also apostrophe; prosopopoeia Dickenson, John 163, 197, 265–8 on Sidney in preface to Arisbas 42, 79, 266–7, 276, 298 Dido (Arcadia) 51 dispositio, see rhetoric (five parts) Dobell, Bertram xxv n.19 Dobranski, Stephen B. 55 n.113, 147 n.83 Donne, John 8, 81, 169, 192, 199, 214–15, 224, 334, 336 n.22 and the Sidney Psalms 107, 118, 198, 335 and Wroth 291 n.24, 330 n.77 Dorsett, Robert 149 Dorus (Arcadia), see Musidorus Dow, Robert 58 n.11 Dowland, John 187, 191 Dowland, Robert 187, 191 Drayton, Michael 32, 71–5, 265, 334 critical appraisal of Sidney 74, 263 elegies for Sidney 72–4, 80, 194, 265, 277

368 Drayton, Michael (cont.) and Mary Sidney 71–2, 79 n.9, 97 sonnets 204, 210, 211–12, 215 Drummond of Hawthornden, William 136 n.41, 156 n.31, 277 n.32, 284–5 Jonson’s Conversations 107, 143, 144, 200 n.25 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste xxi, 37, 79 n.9, 230 Du Bellay, Joachim 220 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester 67, 105, 149, 151 death 81, 153 ownership of portrait of Robert Sidney 153 n.21 patronage 128, 136 Sidney’s Defence of Leicester xxix, 67 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 42 n.84, 68, 161, 164, 165, 166, 201 n.27, 201–2 n.28 Dyer, Edward 67, 128, 130 elegy for Sidney 59–60, 194, friendship and poetic exchange with Sidney and Greville 13, 34–5, 60, 128, 152, 224, 244 works dedicated to 134, 266 Dymoke, Sir Edward 136, 140–1 n.63, 194 Echo 14, 98 n.58 eclogue 9–10 see also pastoral Edes, Richard 79 n.7 Eliot, John 220 Eliot, T. S. 177 Elizabeth I 62, 140, 149, 151, 159 and constancy 304 and Essex 61–2, 185 French marriage 224 and Greville 223, 236, 238 and Sidney xx, xxix, xxxvii, 10, 45, 62, 151, 235 and Robert Sidney 137, 153, 161, 171, 178, 179, 181–2, 186 and the Sidney Psalms 85, 106, 108–11, 122, 124 works for/to xx, 104–5, 132, 304 see also Accession Day tilts elocutio, see rhetoric (five parts) Empson, William 12, 199 enargeia 112–13, 198

Index energeia 198 Englands Helicon 32, 33, 67, 194, 196–7, 244 n.49 enthymeme 6 epanorthosis 28, 46–7, 48, 247 epic xxviii, xxxvii, 88 n.36, 278 Erona (Arcadia) 270, 276 Essex 10 Essex, Countess of, see Sidney, Lady Frances (Walsingham) Essex, Earls of, see Devereux Essex rebellion 138, 139, 181 Euarchus (Arcadia) xxiii-iv, xxx, 7, 48, 227 Falco, Raphael xxxi, 64 Farmer, Norman K. 221 n.4 feminine endings 11, 33, 166, 196, 199, 249 Ferrabosco, Alfonso 189, 190, 313 n.59 Ferry, Anne 204 n.34 Ficino, Marsilio xliii n.56, xliv n.58, 14 n.42, 208 Fisken, Beth Wynne 118 n.97, 123, 124 Fletcher, Giles 209 Florio, John 38 n.74, 136, 138–40, 141, 231–2 Flushing 60, 151, 153, 159, 185 see also Sidney, Sir Robert footsteps xxxiii, xliii-iv, 223, 277, 298 Forde, Emanuel 263 Fowler, Alastair 91 n.39 France 159 Fraunce, Abraham 129, 134–5, 265 n.12, 266, 268, 283 n.2 The Arcadian Rhetorike xxxix-xl, 28–9, 40–1, 44 n.88, 46–7, 50, 88–9, 135, 263, 279 and the Herbert family 82, 155 imprese, treatises on 7 n.19, 155–6, 158, 182 n.101 and Mary Sidney 81, 82, 84 n.26, 134–5 and Sidney 6, 70 n.53, 82, 98, 155–6 use of Sidney’s texts xxvi n.20, 59, 215 n.55 Freer, Coburn 86, 112 Fuller, Thomas 336 n.21

Index Gadamer, Hans-Georg xxxii, 3 n.7, 4, 7 Gager, William 79 n.7 Gamage, Barbara, see Sidney, Barbara, Countess of Leicester Gamage, William 186 Garnier, Robert 82, 96, 99, 100, 106 Garrett, Martin 41 n.81, 49 n.104, 58, 230 n.23 Gascoigne, George 158, 195–6 Gentile, Scipio 150–1 n.11 Gheeraerts, Marcus 288–9 Gibson, Jonathan 51 n.107 Gilpin, George 163 Gil Polo, Gaspar 271 n.19 Giovio, Paulo 7, 155, 156 Glapthorne, Henry 333 n.8 Godwin, William 262 n.3 Golding, Arthur xxi n.6 Goldring, Elizabeth 153 n.21 Goldwell, Henry xx n.4 Goodman, Jeffrey A. 255–6 n.60 Gorges, Sir Arthur 194 gradatio 115, 240, 246–7, 320 Greene, Robert xxvi n.20, 264 Greene, Roland 21 n.52, 206 n.41, 207, 219 n.62 Greene, Thomas M. xxxvi, 9 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke xxxvi, 182 n.100, 221–61 and active life 223–4, 225, 226, 234–5 and analogies 238–40 and the Arcadia 46, 227–30, 261 as editor of 1590 Arcadia xxii, xxv, 23, 87, 88–9, 129, 136, 222, 225, 231–3, 261 and Astrophil and Stella 230, 244, 248–55, 258–9 Greville represented in Astrophil and Stella xxxviii, 225 attribution of Sidney elegy 67 and Bruno 8, 136 Caelica 224, 225, 230, 238, 239–41, 244–60 order of sequence 240 poem 6: 245–7 poem 30: 239 poem 37: 239 poem 39: 239 poem 42: 239 poem 66: 240–1 poem 72: 250 poem 73: 250

369 poem 74: 249–52, 254–5 poem 75: 249, 252–5 poem 80: 255–7 poem 82: 238 poem 83: 67 n.48 poem 98: 240 poem 99: 240 poem 100: 259–60 and Daniel 136, 137 dating of works 224, 225, 240, 244 A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (The Life of Sidney) 1, 109 n.76, 226, 227–31, 233, 236–7, 242–3, 255, 256, 257, 261 on Sidney 30, 37, 222, 223, 230–1, 234, 235, 236–7, 242, 257 Sidney’s deathbed scene xliii, 37, 127, 146, 165, 230, 276 on the Arcadia xxx, xxxviii, 38, 146, 227–9, 230, 234, 261, 277 n.31 The Defence of Poesy, related to 225–7, 236, 256 and dialogue 233, 241, 242–3, 245–6, 247, 249–54 and Elizabeth 223, 224, 236, 238 epistemology 234–5, 237–41, 255–7 ‘The Four Foster Children of Desire’ 224 friendship with Sidney and Dyer 34, 60, 152, 224, 244 and incompletion 55, 222 An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour 221, 257 Letter to an Honourable Lady 55 n.111, 239 monument for Sidney 221–2 plays 226, 229, 239 political career 129, 223 political meanings 226, 228–9, 236, 239 and printing of Sidney’s works xxi n.6, 46, 84, 230 sententiae, marking of 232–3 and Mary Sidney 129, 137, 138, 140 and Sidney xxxviii, 152, 221, 222–38, 241–61, 337 and Robert Sidney 137, 165 in tilts after Sidney’s death 60, 63 tomb 222 n.8

370 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke (cont.) A Treatie of Humane Learning 234–5, 237, 238, 241, 247, 258 Treatise of Monarchy 229, 239, 257 n.63 Treatise of Religion 237, 238 versification 67, 225 Warwick manuscript 238 n.40, 245 n.54, 250 works in print 187, 224, 234, 244 n.49, 250, 334, 336 Grey, Lady Jane 99 Griffin, Bartholomew 210, 211, 212–13, 217 Guarini, Battista 140 Guillim, John 158 Gwinne, Matthew 58 n.15, 136, 139, 146 n.82, 158 n.37, 231–2 Gynecia (Arcadia) xxiii, 45, 47, 50, 245, 278 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 89 n.37 Hackett, Helen 309 n.52, 326 n.74 Hall, Joseph 237 Hamilton, A. C. xxxi, 51 n.107, 80 n.11, 218–19 n.61 Hannay, Margaret P. 60, 82, 100, 105–6, 126 n.111, 182 n.98 Harington, James 186 n.107 Harington, Sir John 129–34, 141 and Arcadia xxvi n.21, 48 n.103, 130–1, 132, 321 Arundel Harington manuscript 131, 132, 248 and Astrophil and Stella 131 and Daniel 135–6 and The Defence of Poesy 131–2 Orlando Furioso 130–2, 133, 196 and Sidney 64, 204 Sidney texts from manuscript 130–2, 134 and the Sidneys 130, 133–4 and the Sidney Psalms 84, 85 n.28, 132–3 Harington, Lucy, see Russell, Lucy (Harington), Countess of Bedford Harvey, Gabriel xlii, 7–8, 58, 64, 226, 264 Hazlitt, William 257 n.64, 262 n.3 Hearn, Karen 288 n.22

Index Hebel, J. W. 74 n.61 Helen of Corinth (Arcadia) xxiv-v, 49, 269–70, 276 Helgerson, Richard 36–7 n.70, 229 Heliodorus 264, 267, 290 Heninger, S. K. 198–9 n.20 Henry, Prince of Wales 132, 134, 141 n.65, 142 n.69 Henry, Anne 325–6 n.73 Herbert, Lord of Cherbury, Edward 56, 144, 148 Herbert, George 107, 180, 198, 199, 334–5 Herbert, Henry, 2nd Earl of Pembroke xxi, xxvi, 76, 149 patronage 134, 155 and Welsh administration 129, 135, 138, 185 Herbert, Magdalene 335 Herbert, Mary (Sidney), Countess of Pembroke, see Sidney, Mary Herbert, Mary (Talbot), Countess of Pembroke 76, 147 Herbert, Philip, Earl of Montgomery, 4th Earl of Pembroke 141, 335 Herbert, Susan, Countess of Montgomery 144, 313 Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke 136, 181, 287, 294 n.29, 301 n.40 marriage 147–8 and Moffett’s Nobilis 31, 79, 143, 237 patronage 32, 137, 141, 143–4, 189 n.124 poetry 312–13, 335 and Wroth 147–8, 285, 311–13, 318, 331 heroic poetry, see epic Herrick, Robert 198 Hippolytus 237, 337 Histor (Arcadia) 23–4 Holinshed, Raphael 38 n.73, 57, 58, 83 n.20, 156 Holquist, Michael 31 n.67 Hondius, Petrus 179 Hooker, Richard 263 Horace 113 n.85, 202 n.29 Hoskyns, John 27–8, 29, 30–1, 41 n.81, 46, 47 n.99, 263 on Sidney’s sources 264 on Sidney’s translation of Aristotle xxi n.6

Index use of 1590 Arcadia xxvi n.20 Houghton House 76 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 195, 204 Howell, Thomas 58 humanism 2, 8 Hunter, G. K. 233 n.31 idea or fore-conceit xxvii, xxxix, xlii, 20, 38, 53, 113, 143, 158, 208 of Sidney and his works: in Greville 37, 38, 235–6 in other writers 275, 281 in Mary Sidney 89–90, 102, 126 imitation xxxii-iii, xxxvi, 9, 30–1, 32, 143, 178, 263, 271, 287 mimesis xxviii, 20, 143, 145, 202, 256 related to moral imitation/familial resemblance 30–1, 147, 148, 164–5, 271, 281, 294–5 imprese 7 n.19, 61 n.22, 153–6, 158, 181, 182 n.101, 191 in the Arcadia 11 n.34, 89 n.37 incompletion 35–55, 102–3, 318–31 in response to Sidney 68, 95, 97, 100, 102–3, 117, 126, 232, 278–80, 318–31 in Sidney 2 n.4, 27, 36–55, 88–9, 102–3, 227, 277 see also aposiopesis Inglis, Esther 160 n.45 inventio, see rhetoric (five parts) Ireland 8, 129, 133, 185, 274 isocolon 33, 249, 252, 255–6 Italian literature 66, 195 n.5 see also Guarini; Petrarch; Sannazaro; Tasso Italy 136 n.41 Ivychurch 81 James VI and I 119 n.98, 134, 140, 153, 185–6, 236, 274 Johnson, Samuel 262 n.3 Johnstoun, James 15 n.44, 273–6, 277, 278, 280, 281, 337 Jones, Inigo 189 Jones, Robert 187 Jonson, Ben 143–7, 191–2, 200, 201, 202, 332–3, 334, 337 copy of the Arcadia 333

371 The Forrest 143, 146–7, 336 masques 140, 190 The May Lord 144 and Elizabeth Sidney 55, 144, 145–7, 284 and Sidney xxxv, 145–6, 147, 198, 332–3 and Robert Sidney 189–90 and the Sidneys xxxv, 140, 143–4, 189, 332–3, 335–6 and the Sidney Psalms 107 and Wroth 143, 144–5, 284, 286, 291 n.24 Kalstone, David 12 Kay, Dennis 57 n.9, 75, 196 n.11, 262 n.3, 263, 272 n.20, 336 n.21 Kelliher, Hilton 160, 161, 165, 169 Kello, Bartholomew 160 n.45 Kenilworth 149 Kennedy, Judith M. 271 n.19 Kermode, Frank 40 Kerrigan, John 18 n.49 Ketel, Cornelius xxxix Kinnamon, Noel J. 82, 100, 188 n.114 Klaius (Arcadia) xliii, 12, 23–4, 33–4, 90, 233, 268, 298–9 Klein, Lisa M. xxxi Lalus (Arcadia) 11 Lamb, Charles 257 n.64 Lamb, Mary Ellen 82 n.17, 83, 97, 126 n.112, 285 n.9, 294 n.30, 307 n.49, 319 n.65 Lamon (Arcadia) 23 Languet, Hubert xxxvi-vii, 8, 150, 233 Lanham, Richard 41 n.81 Lant, Thomas 56–7, 157 n.34 Lanyer, Aemilia 98 Lassus, Orlande de 191 Latewar, Richard 78–9 Laura 82, 101–2, 199–200, 204, 211, 312 n.55 Lee, Sir Henry 60, 62–3, 304 Leiden, University of: elegies for Sidney 57 Levy, F. J. 260 Lewis, C. S. xxv Lipsius, Justus 151, 304 Lobbet, Johannes 150 Lodge, Thomas 67, 197 Love, Harold 92

372 Low, Anthony 112 n.80 Low Countries 56, 58, 70, 138, 151, 153 Lucan 52 Lucretius 298 Lyly, John 263 lyric poetry xxviii, 33, 161–2, 192, 193–219, 248–9 sincerity and persuasion in 198, 199–204, 206, 207–8, 215–19 McCabe, Richard A. 17 n.47 McCoy, Richard C. 2 n.4, 3 n.6, 3–4 n.8, 46 n.94, 51 n.107, 63, 182 n.100, 217 n.60 Maclean, Hugh 255 ‘The Manner of Sir Philip Sidney’s Death’ 41–2, 165 Manners, Elizabeth (Sidney), Countess of Rutland 139, 144, 145–7, 151 n.11, 152 n.17 Manners, George, 7th Earl of Rutland 301 Manners, Roger, 5th Earl of Rutland 139, 144, 146–7 Manning, John 155 n.28 Mantell, Anne and Robert 149 Markham, Gervase 55, 141, 143, 230 n.23, 265, 268–73, 277, 278, 290, 293, 298–9 Marot, Clement 86 Marotti, Arthur F. 208 n.46 Martz, Louis L. 118 n.97 masques 140, 188–9, 190 Maurice of Nassau, Prince 181 May, Steven W. 62, 76 n.1, 96 n.51, 111 n.78, 129, 159 n.42, 166, 194–5 n.4 Mazzola, Elizabeth 70 n.52, 148 n.88, 185 n.103, 286 n.11 memory xliii-iv, 268–9, 270, 290, 297–300 Meres, Francis 64 metonymy xxxix-xl, 1, 29, 261 metre, classical, see quantitative verse Milton, John 333 mimesis, see The Defence of Poesy; imitation Mira (Arcadia) xxxvii, 16, 276 n.27 Miriam 117–18 Moffett, Thomas 82, 85, 107, 142, 160

Index Lessus Lugubris 31, 55, 237 Nobilis 31, 37, 55, 79, 125, 143, 224, 230 n.24, 237, 337 Molyneux, Edmund 38 n.73, 58–9, 156 Montaigne, Michel de 14 n.43, 139 Montemayor, Jorge de: and Markham 267, 268, 270–1, 298–9 and Sidney 10, 12, 178, 264, 268, 270–1, 290, 298–9, 314 and Robert Sidney 178, 299, 314 and Wroth 271 n., 290, 298–9, 313–4, 317 Montgomery, Countess of, see Herbert, Susan, Countess of Montgomery Montgomery, Robert 198 Morley, Thomas 7 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis xxi, 99, 100, 102, 105–6, 163 Moses 117–18 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 81 Munday, Anthony 32, 197 music 117–20, 187–92, 196–7, 316 contrafacta xliii, 118–20, 178 and manuscript circulation 187, 313 n.59, 329 n.77 and Sidney: musical elegies for Sidney 59 n.18, 66–7, 197 verse for music xliii, 59 n.18, 119–20, 166, 196–7 Robert Sidney and verse for music 166, 176, 178, 180, 190–1 Sidneys as musicians and musical patrons 66–7, 141 n.68, 149, 187–8, 191–2, 313 song settings 190–1, 313 n.59 Musidorus (Arcadia) xxiii-v, xl, 79, 272, 278 and aposiopesis 47, 51–2, 53 in continuations of the Arcadia 270, 275, 280–1 in dialogue with other characters 12–15, 24–5, 202–3 in eclogues 10–11, 23 and ending 50, 281 and narrative 38–9, 47, 51–2 Myrick, Kenneth 48 n.103

Index Narcissus 14 Nashe, Thomas 19, 64, 139 n.58, 206, 215, 263 Neill, Michael 49 n.105 Neoplatonism xliv n.58, 14, 143, 166, 208 see also Platonism Nevitt, Thomas 152 n.17, 188, 189 n.122, 190 Newman, Thomas, see Astrophil and Stella (1591 edition) Newton, Thomas 95 O’Connell, Michael 83 n.22 Olney, Henry 193 see also The Defence of Poesy (1595 editions) Orgel, Stephen xxxix n.50 Ovid 157, 202 Owen, John 58 n.11, 127, 146, 222, 230 n.25 Oxford, University of 6 elegies for Sidney 57–8, 78–9, 157–8 n.37 oxymoron 22, 29, 167, 204, 217 Pamela (Arcadia) xxiii-iv, 262, 278, 335 and aposiopesis 47, 51–2 in continuations of the Arcadia 281, 282 in dialogue with Musidorus 13, 14, 24–5, 47 paralepsis 110, 250, 279 parody 118–20, 175–6, 178, 255, 315–16 sacred parody 105, 118–20, 248, 329, 335 see also music (contrafacta) Parry, Graham 319 n.65 Parry, Henry 84, 111 n.78 Parthenia (Arcadia) 25–7, 50 Passe, Simon van de 77–8, 187 n.108 pastoral xxix, 9–10, 69, 71, 74–5, 198, 278 in commemoration of Sidney xli, 32, 33, 35, 69, 71, 218 in other responses 61, 135, 140, 142, 264, 265–6, 306, 317 pastoral space in responses to Sidney xli, 71, 74–5, 142, 218, 265–6 Peacham, Henry 40 n.77, 44 n.90

373 Peacham, Henry, Jr 76, 117–18, 192, 286 Peele, George 61–3 Pembroke, Countess of, see Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke Pembroke, Earls and Countess of, see Herbert Penshurst Place 138, 143, 152, 161, 189 books at 159, 163 n.55 pictures at 150 n.10, 288 Pervigilium Veneris 175–8, 316 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 8, 100, 114 and other writers 166 n.73, 209 n.47, 291 n.24, 306 and Sidney xxxiii, 10 n.33, 12, 16, 198, 204–6, Trionfo della Morte 82, 96, 100, 101, 102, 121, 199–200 Petrarchism 101, 198, 201, 204–7, 215, 334 Philanax (Arcadia) 24, 45–6 Philip, John 1 n.3, 57 n.9, 61 Philisides (Arcadia; Sidney’s persona) xxxvi-viii, 13–17 in continuations of the Arcadia 275–6, 280 and dialogue 13–17 in different texts of the Arcadia xxxviii, 25, 233, 275–6 in eclogues 11 as Sidney xxxvi-viii, 61, 74, 120, 164, 275–6 see also Sidney, Sir Philip (other poems, OP 5) Philoclea (Arcadia) xxiii-iv, 14, 244–5, 283, 335 and aposiopesis 47, 49, 50, 53, 54, in continuations of the Arcadia 276 n.27, 278, 281 as Penelope Rich 301 ‘Philophilippos’ 222, 301 n.40 Philoxenus (Arcadia) 49, 50 The Phoenix Nest 67–8, 69, 194, 304 Pigman III, G. W. 9 n.28 Plangus (Arcadia) 24, 276 Plato xliii-iv, 5, 9, 14 n.42, 35 Platonism xliv n.58, 14, 235–6, 280 see also Neoplatonism Playfair, Thomas 78 Plexirtus (Arcadia) 48 Plutarch 43–4, 227, 283 n.2

374 Ponsonby, William xxi n.6, 84, 85, 134 n.31 Pope, Alexander 95 Portugal 61 prolepsis 28, 29, 104, 279–81 pronuntiatio, see rhetoric (five parts) prosopographia xxxv-vi, xl, 17 prosopopoeia: of other authors 83, 157, 192, 261 in response to Sidney 31, 168, 279 in Sidney xl, 16, 20–1 of Sidney xli, 61, 236, 242, 261, 337 theory xl, 27–9, 192, 279 see also apostrophe; dialogue; prosopographia Pugliano, John Pietro 6 Puttenham 263 on poetry 10, 143 n.71, 283 n.2 on rhetoric and figures of speech 28, 37 n.71, 176 n.83, 279 on versification and poetic form 26, 113–5, 123, 176 n.83, 195–6, 198 Pygmalion 209, 210 Pyrocles (Arcadia) xxiii-v, xl, 79, 150, 272, 283, 303 n.45 and aposiopesis 38–9, 42–3, 47, 48, 50–1, 53, 54 in continuations of the Arcadia 42–3, 276 n.28, 278–82 in dialogue with other characters 12–13, 14, 15, 24, 35, 201, 202–3, 244–5 in eclogues 10–11, 23 as Sidney 301 quantitative verse xliii, 11, 59 n.18, 196, 197, 244, 266 in response to Sidney 33, 59, 82, 134, 244, 246, 265–6 Quarles, Francis 333 n.8, 336 Quint, David 124 Quintilian: on aposiopesis 39 n.76, 44 on enargeia 112–13, 198 on ethos 202 n.29 on imitation xxxiii on parody 119 n.97 on philosophy and rhetoric 5 n.10 on rhetorical figures 39 n.76, 40 Quitslund, Jon 70 n.53, 98 n.58

Index Ralegh, Sir Walter 32, 67 Ramism 6, 28–9, 134 Ramsbury 84 Ramus, Petrus 6, 134 n.36 Rathmell, J. C. A. 189 n.122 Rebholz, Ronald A. 238 n.40 Rees, Joan 221 n.6, 225, 238 n.40, 256 n.61, 260–1 response xxxii-vi rhetoric 5–6, 27–9, 39–40, 52, 239, 320 female 82–3, 283–4, 322 five parts 22, 25, 43–4, 53, 113, 158, 245, 249 inventio 158 dispositio 113 elocutio 245 actio/pronuntiatio 25, 50, 245, 249 and love 201–4, 213, 217 and philosophy 5 rhetorical figures 3, 27–9, 33, 39, 41 n.81, 232 figures of speech/figures of thought 39 see also anaphora, antimetabole; aposiopesis; apostrophe; chiasmus; enargeia; energeia; epanorthosis; gradatio; isocolon; oxymoron; paralepsis; prolepsis; prosopographia; prosopopoeia; symploce; synoeciosis; zeugma Rich, Lady Penelope (Devereux) 1 n.3, 63, 70, 137, 138, 301 patronage 139–40, 141 and Robert Sidney 137, 138 as Stella xxi, 70, 83, 131, 139, 207, 216 Richardson, Samuel 262 Ringler, William A. xxviii-ix, 9 n.29, 11, 13, 20, 81, 195 presentation of Astrophil and Stella 19 and the Sidney canon xx and texts of Sidney’s works xxv, 131 Roberts, Josephine A. 290, 319 n.65 Robertson, Jean xxv, xxvii n.23 Robinson, Richard 151 Roche, Thomas P. 51 n.107 Rogers, Daniel xxxix n.50, 128 Rollins, Hyder Edward 67 romance 48, 88 n.36, 262, 274, 299, 319, 333

Index Ronsard, Pierre de 205 n.38, 249 Roydon, Matthew 67–8, 71 Rudenstine, Neil L. 207 Ruscelli, Girolamo 155, 156 Russell, Lucy (Harington), Countess of Bedford 130, 132, 133–4, 139, 140, 141, 146 Rutland, Earls and Countess of, see Manners St Paul’s Cathedral 56 n.1, 220, 221 Salzman, Paul 318 n.64, 331 Sanford, Hugh xxvi, 138, 147–8, 181 and Daniel 136, 287 as editor of 1593 Arcadia xxvi, xli, 86–8, 136, 138, 277, 279 n.36 and Wroth 147–8, 287, 301 Sannazaro, Jacopo 10, 12, 16, 264 Saville, Sir Henry 151 n.11 Schleiner, Louise 106 n.68 Scotland 140, 153, 274 Segar, William 62 Seile, Henry 336 Seneca 8, 95, 97, 178, 235 n.35, 295 sestina 10, 12, 45, 198, 199 n.20 Shakespeare, William xxxv, 141, 197, 291 n.24 Antony and Cleopatra 49, 95 As You Like It 202 Hamlet 49 n.105 King Lear xxxv The Lover’s Complaint 314 n. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 208 Othello 316 The Rape of Lucrece 284 Sonnets xxxv, 200, 204, 207, 218 The Tempest xxxv The Winter’s Tale xxxv Shirley, James 333 n.8 Shrewsbury School 134, 149, 163 n.55, 223 Sidney, Algernon 336 Sidney, Barbara (Gamage), Countess of Leicester 151, 152, 179–80, 189, 286, 288, 289 Sidney, Lady Dorothy, see Spencer, Dorothy (Sidney), Countess of Sunderland Sidney, Elizabeth, see Manners, Elizabeth (Sidney), Countess of Rutland

375 Sidney, Lady Frances (Walsingham); subsequently Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex 61, 62, 69, 70, 134, 137, 146, 152 Sidney, Sir Henry 58, 129 n.5, 150, 152, 156, 157, 164–5 Sidney, Lady Lucy 336 Sidney, Lady Mary (Dudley) 83, 152 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke xxxv, 76–127, 147–8 Antonius 82, 84, 96–7, 98–100, 103–4, 106, 107, 121, 136 and aposiopesis 55, 95–7 Arcadia, editor of 1593 text xxiii, xxvi, 84–5, 88–9, 100, 129, 222 correspondence 76, 110 n.77, 113 n.88, 286 n.14 and Daniel 64, 66, 82, 95, 119 n.98, 121, 136, 137, 141, 213 and death 81, 83, 97–104, 127 her device 76 and dialogue 101, 121–2 ‘A Dialogue betweene two shepheards’ 33, 104–5 A Discourse of Life and Death 84, 97, 99, 102, 106, 107, 121 n.104 ‘The dolefull lay of Clorinda’ 69, 71, 83 and ending 89, 92–105, 117 ‘Even now that Care’ 106–7, 108–11, 122, 123 and Fraunce 81, 82, 84 n.26, 134–5 handwriting 81 and Harington 84, 130, 132–3 and incompletion 95–7, 100, 102–3, 117, 123, 126, 127 lexicon 98 marriage 149 and music 120, 149 and OP 3: 26, 222 patronage 81–2, 135, 139 poems to 64–6, 68, 71–2, 83–4 n.22, 119 n.98 political meanings 105–7, 112 portrait 77, 78 Psalmes 93–4, 104, 126, 119 n.99 revision of PS 23: 93–4 revision of PS 42: 94 PS 51: 99–100, 132 PS 55: 114–17 PS 57: 118 PS 69: 132

376 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke (cont.) PS 73: 118 n.97 PS 96: 112 PS 99: 118, 248 PS 100: 119 PS 102: 102 PS 104: 132 PS 111: 104 PS 125: 244 PS 137: 132 PS 141: 119 PS 142: 119 PS 143: 119–21 PS 146: 119 PS 150: 105, 121 see also Sidney Psalms and Sidney 60, 81, 82, 118, 122–7, 160 and Robert Sidney 130, 138, 159 and Spenser 65, 68–9, 81, 83, 119 n.98, 142 ‘To the Angell spirit of … Sidney’ 1, 89–90, 95–6, 101, 113, 122–6 The Triumph of Death 96, 97, 100–2, 104, 121, 130, 199–200, 312 n.55 versification 92–4, 96, 105, 114–15, 118 and Wroth 287 in Wroth’s Urania 285, 306 Sidney, Sir Philip xix-xliv, 1–55 see separate index entries for Astrophil and Stella, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, and The Defence of Poesy attributions to 248, 336 biography, relations between writings and xxviii-xxx, 200, 216 Certain Sonnets xx, xxi, xxii, 32, 33, 166, 209, 214 poems written to tunes 197 CS 1: 131 CS 3: 119, 131 CS 4: 119 CS 5: 59 n.18, 244 n.50 CS 6: xxii CS 7: 79–80 CS 16: 13, 32, 34 CS 17: 92 CS 19: 225 n.18 CS 23: 92 CS 24: xli-iv, 167, 184, 318

Index CS 27: 131 CS 28: 178, 299, 314 CS 30: xxii,119–20, 131, 317 correspondence xxi, xxix, xxxvi-vii, 31 n.65, 134 n.34, 150, 164, 197, 226 n.19 last letter 38, 95 death 37–8, 56, 60, 63, 79–81, 127, 152, 165, 275, 280 Defence of the Earl of Leicester xxix, 67 and dialogue 2–3, 8–31, 34–6 see also dialogue ‘Discourse on Irish Affairs’ xxix and drama xxxiv, xxxv, 82, 333 education 5–6 elegies for xli, 31, 57–60, 66–75, 78–9, 80–1, 83, 119 n.98, 194, 197 epitaphs for 56, 57, 66 n.45, 67, 79, 220, 221–2 in Europe xxxvi, 8, 149 ‘The Four Foster Children of Desire’ xx, 224 funeral 56, 134, 152, 157 and history 150, 226 and imprese 7 n.19, 155 see also imprese and incompletion 35–55 see also aposiopesis; incompletion influence xxxi-vi, 64–7, 74–5, 193–4, 196–8, 206–7, 208–19, 262–5, 332–8 The Lady of May xx, xxxvii, 6 n.15, 9, 10, 32, 45, 225 n.18, 287 Letter to Queen Elizabeth xxix, 131 Lord Governor of Flushing 151 lost translations xxi, 6 n.15, 105–6 mottoes 58, 150 n.10, 156–7, 158 n.41, 332–3 and music 120, 141, 196–7 other poems OP 4: 23, 26, 88 OP 5: 14–17, 26, 88, 173–4, 177, 183, 314 OP 6: 33, 34, 60, 224 OP 7: 33, 34–5, 224 AT 18b 225 n.18 AT 19: xx, 13, 120 n.101 AT 21: xx,120 PP 1: xx,10 PP 3: xxxix, 170 PP 4: xx n.4, 224

Index PP 5: xx n.4, 224 ‘Waynd from the hope’ xx Ottley manuscript xx n.2, xxii, 120 n.101, 225 n.18 patronage xxxi, xxxiv, 57, 60, 65, 66–7, 128–9, 134, 136, 141, 142, 151 personae xx n.3, xxxvi-ix, 13–14, 32, 74, 163, 200, 206–8, 301 see also Astrophil; Philisides and poetic closure 90–4, 127 and politics xxviii-xxxi, 63, 105, 236, 336 portraits xxxviii-ix, 170 printing of works xix n.1, xxxiv, 64 Psalmes xxi, 85, 92, 107 PS 23: 92–3 PS 33: 112 see also Sidney, Mary (Psalmes); Sidney Psalms unfinished works xxi, 36, 85, 89–90, 97, 102 versification 11, 166, 168–9, 175, 195–8, 225, 265–6 see also The Defence of Poesy; music; quantitative verse vocation as poet xxxvi-viii will 37–8, 60 n.19, 61, 152 in Wroth’s Urania 285 Sidney, Philip (daughter of Robert Sidney) 144, 159, 190, 294 n.29 Sidney, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester xxxvi, 137–8, 149–92 biographical readings of poetry 161–2 career under Elizabeth 137, 159, 179–80, 181–2, 186 career under King James and Queen Anne 134, 140, 185–6, 187–8 circle 134, 137–8 circulation of poetry in manuscript 144–5, 159–60, 189–91 commonplace books 150, 178 n.85, 336 dating of poetry 160–1, 191 and dialogue 171–5 see also apostrophe; prosopopoeia diplomatic missions 153, 159 education 149–50, 164 and Elizabeth 171, 178, 179, 180, 181–2 in Europe 150, 151 n.11

377 finances 152–3, 188, 189 and Harington 130, 133 and history 150, 226 imprese 153–6, 158–9, 181 and incompletion 55, 169–71 and Jonson 145, 189–90, 332 as Lord Governor of Flushing 60, 137, 138, 140, 141, 152 n.17, 153, 158, 159, 161, 179, 181, 182, 185, 190 manuscript of poems 159, 160–1, 169, 173 marriage 151 and masques 188–9, 190 military experience 151, 181 mottoes 150, 151, 153, 157–9, 179, 182, 186 and music 149, 187, 190–1 patronage and commendatory poems 134, 141, 150–1, 155, 163, 185–6, 187 peerages 76, 186, 188 poetry 159–63, 165–78, 180–5, 190–1, 192 ordering and numbering 169 Sonnet 1: 166 Song 1: 166, 171, 293 Sonnet 2: 171 Pastoral 2: 190 Song 3: 175–8, 314–16 Sonnet 5: 167 Sonnet 7: 182 Song 4: 167 Sonnet 10: 167–8 ‘A Crown of sonnets’ 169–71 Sonnet 11: 169–70 Sonnet 12: 182 Sonnet 14: 169 Song 5: 173, 192 Song 6: 161, 302 n.42 Pastoral 7: 293 Sonnet 17: 182 Pastoral 8: 172–3 Sonnet 20: 180 Sonnet 22: 171 Sonnet 23: 182–3 Pastoral 9: 173–5, 318 Song 10: 171 Song 12: 178 Sonnet 30: 182, 183 Sonnet 32: 182 ‘Shee whome I loved’ (from Montemayor) 178, 299, 314

378 Sidney, Robert, 1st Earl of Leicester (cont.) translations from Seneca 178 Song 15: 171–2 Song 17: 180–1 Song 20: 190 Song 24: 182, 184–5, 318 portraits 150, 153–5, 154, 187 n.108, 288 n.22 and Philip Sidney 123, 149–50, 152–3, 157, 163–6, 180, 183, 185–6 and Philip Sidney’s poetry 166, 170–1, 173–5, 178, 183, 184–5, 192 and Spanish 178 versification 166, 168–9, 175–6, 180 and Wroth 160, 286 in Wroth’s Urania 285 Sidney, Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester 186 n.107, 336 Sidney, Thomas 63, 137, 157 Sidney, Sir William 134, 142, 189, 332 Sidney Psalms 78, 84, 85–6, 105 endings 92–4 influence 107, 198, 334 manuscripts 86, 94, 106–7, 108, 113, 122, 132–3, 160, 161 n.50, 335 printing of 85 readership 107–8, 335 versification 111–12, 114–15 see also Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke (Psalmes); Sidney, Sir Philip (Psalmes) Simonides 283 n.2 Skretkowicz, Victor xxv n.16, 26 n.56, 48 n.103, 89 n.37, 136 n.44, 266 n.16 and textual theory of Arcadia xxv, xxvii n.23, 231 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 91 Socrates, see Plato Sokol, B. J. 259 n.67 sonnet form 13, 33, 60, 105, 118 n.97, 119 n.98, 121, 144, 166, 168–9, 193, 194, 200–1, 204, 258, 292 see also lyric poetry speaking picture xxviii, 27, 37, 112–13, 283 Spencer, Dorothy (Sidney), Countess of Sunderland 335, 336

Index Spenser, Edmund 8, 33, 66, 68–71, 128–9, 291 n.24, 321, 328 Amoretti 207, 209–10, 215–16 Astrophel xli, 32, 65, 67, 68–71, 75, 83, 177, 216 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 69 correspondence with Harvey 7–8, 58, 128 ‘The dolefull lay of Clorinda’ 69, 71, 83 The Faerie Queene 39, 55, 65, 70 n.53, 177, 278, 281, 283, 298 n.33 The Ruines of Time 1, 68, 80–1, 84 n.26, 142 The Shepheardes Calender 9, 17 n.47, 61, 69, 72, 79, 128, 298 n.33 and Sidney xxxv, 61, 65, 71, 128, 142 and Mary Sidney 65, 68–9, 81, 83, 119 n.98, 142 versification 108, 119, 195 Spiller, Michael R. G. 21 n.52, 203 n.33 Statius 267, 276–7, 298 Steinberg, Theodore L. 70 n.55, 106 n.70 Stella 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 203–4, 206, 248–9 in writings of others 67, 70, 83, 98 n.58, 216 Stillinger, Jack 216 n.58 Stillman, Robert E. xxx-i Strasbourg 150, 153 Strephon (Arcadia) xliii, 12, 23–4, 33–4, 47, 79, 90, 233, 268, 298 Strong, Roy xxxviii-ix, 153 n.21 Surrey, Earl of, see Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey swan 78–81 syllogism 6, 247 Sylvester, Joshua xxi n.6, 141–3, 286 symploce 212, 290, 292, 293 synoeciosis 3, 29, 33, 41 n.81, 217 Tacitus 150–1 Talaeus, Audomarus 28–9, 46, 279 Talbot, Gilbert, Earl of Shrewsbury 189–90 Talbot, Mary, see Herbert, Mary (Talbot), Countess of Pembroke Tasso, Torquato 135, 140, 264

Index Temple, William xxii, 6, 58 n.15, 134 Theocritus 9 Thompson, John 195–6 Tiberianus 175 Timotheus (Arcadia) 49 ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’ 32, 195, 214 trochaic metre 166, 175, 196–7 Turnhout 181 Ulysses 146–7, 157 Urania (muse) 110 Urania (Arcadia) xliii, 23, 33, 290 Veronese, Paolo xxxix Vespasian 236 Vickers, Brian 6 n.16 Virgil 9, 11, 55, 151, 157, 230, 264 visual arts, poetry and 112–14, 283 see also enargeia; speaking picture Wales 129, 135, 138, 185 Waller, Edmund 186 n.107, 335–6 Waller, Gary 119 n.99, 125, 312 n.56 Walpole, Horatio, Earl of Orford 262 n.3 Walsingham, Frances, see Sidney, Lady Frances (Walsingham) Walsingham, Sir Francis xxi n.6, 46, 81, 136, 152, 230 Walton, Izaac 81, 224, 334 Warkentin, Germaine 161–2, 166, 195 n.5 Watson, Thomas 66, 84 n.26, 134–5, 265 n.12, 266, 268 Webster, John 263 n.6 Weyer, Johan 38 Whetstone, George 57 n.9, 58 Whyte, Rowland 137, 138, 178, 179, 181, 185, 186, 286 Wilde, Oscar 36 William of Orange 235 Williamson, Colin 168–9, 198 Willoughby, Lord, see Bertie, Peregrine, Lord Willoughby Wilton xxi, 81, 82, 84, 106 n.71, 136, 160, 170, 178, 189, 335 Wither, George 163, 303 n.45 Witten-Hannah, Margaret 319 n.65 Wolfe, John 150 n.11 Woodford, Samuel 86 Woolf, Virginia 262 Worden, Blair xxx n.29, 63, 189 n.122

379 Wordsworth, William 200 Wotton, Sir Henry xxi n.6, 113 n.86 Woudhuysen, Henry xxii n.12, 63, 129, 136 n.42 Wroth, Lady Mary (Sidney) xxxvi, 76, 147–8, 152, 284–331, 336 see separate index entry for The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania Amphilanthus 285, 295–6, 303, 304–5, 307–14, 319, 322, 324, 325–31 and aposiopesis 55, 318–31 and apostrophe 297, 306–7, 308–11, 317–18, 324, 326, 331 autobiographical elements in the Urania 148, 273, 285, 301, 302–3, 313, 324, 327, 331 and ciphers 306 circulation of works in manuscript 144–5 and constancy 303–5, 319, 325–6, 327, 330 dating of works 294 n.29, 300 n.35 Denny episode 285, 286, 330 and dialogue 286, 290–1, 305–6, 308, 310–11, 312 n.56, 326 n.74, 329–330 and Donne 291 n.24, 330 n.77 and Drummond of Hawthornden 284–5 education 286–7 and William Herbert 147–8, 285, 311–13, 318, 331 and incompletion 55, 290, 318–31 and Jonson 143–5, 189 n.124, 284 Love’s Victory 287, 306, 307 manuscripts of works 161, 294 n.29, 300 n.35, 306, 307, 317–318, 319 n.65 marriage 147–8 and masques 188 Pamphilia 295, 297, 300–4, 305, 306–11, 312–14, 319, 322, 324, 325–31 as Pamphilia 285, 300, 305 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 163, 284, 287, 300–1, 315, 317–318 P3: 285 P4: 315 P7: 315–17 P9: 305

380 Wroth, Lady Mary (Sidney) (cont.) P12: 319 P14: 329 n.77 P16: 292–3 P24: 308–10 P28: 310–311, 330 n.77 P30 –35: 311 P42: 293 P55: 317–18 P58: 284 P60: 315 P73: 315 P77–90 (‘Crowne of Sonetts’) 169, 315, 320–1, 329 P103: 317–18 performance of poetry 311–14 poems to 142, 284–5, 286 portrait of 288, 289, 295 and rhetoric 320, 322 and Sanford 147–8, 287, 301

Index seasonal imagery 315–16 and Philip Sidney 287, 290–93, 298–9, 302, 303 n.45, 314, 316–17, 320, 321, 330–31 and Robert Sidney’s poetry 160, 293, 302, 314–17 and Sidney family 286, 287, 288–90 Wroth, Sir Robert 76, 144, 147, 148 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 195, 204 Yates, Frances 63 Yong, Bartholomew 32, 197, 298 see also Montemayor Young, Alan 62 Zelmane (Arcadia), see Pyrocles zeugma 97 Zutphen 31, 61, 275

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

Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon

Sidney: The Critical Heritage

Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

Los Poemas de Sidney West

Sidney in retrospect: selections from English literary renaissance

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism

Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game

Sir Philip Ashton's Eyes

Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

To Sir Philip With Love (Epilogue)

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

A Sidney Chronology: 1551-1654 (Author Chronologies)

Williams, Sidney - The Handbook for Urban Terror and Retribution

Ace of Spies- The True Story of Sidney Reilly

Chalk Up Another One: The Best of Sidney Harris

Ace of Spies- The True Story of Sidney Reilly

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

Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon's After the Darkness

Sidney Sheldon

Sidney: The Critical Heritage

Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism

Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph

Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon

Los Poemas de Sidney West

Sidney in retrospect: selections from English literary renaissance

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

To Sir Philip with Love

To Sir Philip With Love

Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism

Sidney Sheldon's Mistress of the Game

Sir Philip Ashton's Eyes

Sidney Hook: Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

To Sir Philip With Love (Epilogue)

To Sir Philip With Love Ep II

A Sidney Chronology: 1551-1654 (Author Chronologies)

Williams, Sidney - The Handbook for Urban Terror and Retribution

Ace of Spies- The True Story of Sidney Reilly

Chalk Up Another One: The Best of Sidney Harris

Ace of Spies- The True Story of Sidney Reilly

Recommend Documents