Philip Sidney Research Articles

Writing as socio-political commitment. Sir Philip Sidney’s alternative

By drawing on a period of Sir Philip Sidney’s life, this article argues that the act of writing can become an alternative for political commitment. For that purpose, it investigates possible reasons for the important turn which took place in Sidney’s life roughly between 1578 and 1580. In accordance with his family’s social standing, Philip Sidney was educated to take on important political tasks in order to serve the state. But contrary to his high expectations and much to his chagrin, he remained unemployed for extended periods of time after he had finished his training. In order to nonetheless fulfil the conditions for the humanist ideal of the vita activa, the young courtier developed his own scope for virtuous action and relied increasingly on the production of literary texts to express his socio-political aims. This study also demonstrates how critical biographism is a necessary tool for a thorough understanding of Sidney’s works.

"This is above all strangeness": <i>King Lear</i>, Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Recognition

"This is above all strangeness":King Lear, Ethics, and the Phenomenology of Recognition James Kearney (bio) The title page of the 1608 quarto of King Lear informs its readers that the play they hold offers the "True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters. With the vnfortunate life of Edgar, sonne and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his sullen and assumed humor of TOM of Bedlam." Lear is an ostensibly historical figure from the chronicle tradition, of course, but Edgar is a character imported from romance, specifically from the tale of the Paphlagonian King in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. When discussing the suturing of the romance subplot onto the traditional story of Lear and his three daughters, most critics draw our attention to the ways in which the two fathers—Lear and Gloucester—mirror each other in their respective falls from grace. The title page of the 1608 quarto, however, neglects the father in favor of the son, drawing our attention to the potential centrality of Edgar's narrative, and particularly Edgar's stint as Poor Tom, to early modern readers and audiences. As a figure that seems to have wandered out of the romance tradition, Edgar-as-Tom carries with him certain generic expectations, most notably the expectation that the disguised son and heir will be revealed, recognized. This romance trope is evoked only to be frustrated, however, and this thwarted expectation creates a character who is always more than he seems, always pregnant with a meaning to which other characters—and, in particular, Lear and Gloucester—are blind. In this essay, I track the strange specter of Poor Tom as he wanders across the tragic landscape of Lear, upsetting audience expectation and triggering ethically charged theatrical moments. My argument is that Shakespeare deploys the romance figure of Poor Tom as a kind of ethical catalyst in the play, forcing Lear and Gloucester to wrestle both with the fact of human abjection and with the phenomenological opacity of the other person. Phenomenology famously struggles with the problem of the phenomenon of the other person.1 Here, I turn to Emmanuel Levinas's radical [End Page 455] reframing of this problem to attempt to make sense of Poor Tom's effect in Lear, the effect of the stranger who is all too familiar in his abjection.2 Broadly speaking, I am interested in the epistemological structure of recognition as a coming to knowledge, as a movement from the unknown to the known. More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which Shakespeare plays with the audience's expectations vis-à-vis this advent of knowledge in King Lear. By deferring and denying the coming into knowledge that generic cues promise, Shakespeare draws our attention to the ways in which his characters apprehend the unknown and, in particular, the other person, the stranger. In Lear, Shakespeare seems interested in deferring or denying recognition in order to create dramatically tense and highly fraught ethical encounters. And in those scenes in which characters engage with the problem of Poor Tom, Shakespeare does so, I argue, in order to stage the possibility—or impossibility—of an ethical relation to the stranger. Unaccommodated Man, Learned Theban The scene in King Lear in which a dispossessed Lear meets an abject Tom o'Bedlam has long been considered central to the play's reflections on deprivation and need, empathy and human fellow-feeling. It is much less frequently noted that the scene has all the markings of a recognition scene from the romance tradition. Trained to read such scenes, Shakespeare's audience might expect Tom o'Bedlam's unveiling; they might expect Lear to recognize Edgar not as abject and other but as the same, a figure of the same aristocratic class who has fallen as Lear has. In fact, however, Poor Tom is never unveiled on stage, and the audience never witnesses a scene in which either Lear or Gloucester recognizes Edgar once he adopts his disguise. That recognition and the failure to recognize feature heavily in King Lear has been noted by many observers. When discussing Lear, however, most critics tend to focus on one kind...

Philip Sidney in the Cloister: The Reading Habits of English Nuns in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

This essay's title pays playful tribute to Sasha Roberts's ground-breaking 1998 work on Shakespeare (who creepes into the womens closets about bedtime) in which she investigates the spaces where women read Venus and Adonis.1 Here, though, I focus on the reading conditions of English nuns living in enclosed convents in or near Antwerp during the period from 1619 until 1794 when they returned to England, considering what they read and where as well as the effects of those conditions on their reception of particular texts.From the nuns' accounts, I find no evidence of activity like that alleged in 1623 by Thomas Robinson in his supposed expose of the English Brigittine community in Lisbon into which he claimed the confessor introduced obscene literature: there are few idle Pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.2 This reading precisely located in the 'dark' privacy of the bedchamber late in the evening, after supper, behind closed doors (Roberts 39). In Antwerp, it mostly takes place within the community and follows prescribed book lists. If that sounds less potentially enticing, bedroom reading of a kind is mentioned. One asthmatic nun is said to have read saints' lives at night since she was unable to lie down without being ready to stifle with violen[t] oppression. Her lungs making a noise exactly lik[e] a pare of Bag Pipes (A2, 297).One particular book in the convent is especially intriguing in the context of Robinson's aspersions. The preface to a 1670 edition of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love asks the reader to afford Her a place in your Closet (Cressy, Dedicatory Letter). I wish to examine the implications of that request for our understanding of reading in a same-sex community, and by doing so I am able to draw some wider inferences about female religious closets in the early modern period, situating this understanding within the debate about Catholicism and nationhood.3 I also consider the reception of Philip Sidney's Arcadia by one nun who, having enjoyed the book as a young woman, later rejected it: I explore the consequences of sequential reading, the after-life of books as well as readers, to investigate why one book might be received into the convent while another was refused.First, we need to consider the kind of spaces available in the convent and the meaning of in such a setting. Cultural historians have long associated ideas of personal space, including that of the body itself, with subjectivity. Nascent interiority of the early modern period has often been linked with changes to domestic privacy, with the closet seen as a space of potential solitude and personal re-creation. Mary Thomas Crane has shown that, in fact, privacy was more often to be found outside the house, where an ecological selfhood was shaped within a larger physical environment. Such studies complicate assumptions about the gendering of separate spheres. An examination of the living conditions of English nuns also adds to the intricacy of interpretation. These were women who lived outside the home, in enclosures of a different kind, semi-autonomous, in exile from their homeland during periods of persecution, pursuing a communal, contemplative resolve. The way nuns are spatially envisaged is due in part to antagonistic polemic, Robinson's included, in which convents were represented as prisons where reluctantly encloistered women were in thrall to devious priests. Our understanding of privacy in such contexts needs to be extrapolated from this prevailing propaganda and from the nuns' own idealized accounts in which their convents are often represented as expatriate havens.Notwithstanding the complexity of interpreting competing views surrounding religious women, the nuns' records show their own clear experience of spaces, discernible beyond the more rhetorical tropisms. They also reveal evidence about the conception of their own bodies as both spaces in themselves and as experienced within their surroundings. …

Awakening Other Spirits: Dorothy Stanley's Arcadia and the Apparatus of Authorship

Dorothy Stanley's Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' Moderniz'd (1725) establishes ambivalent relationships with the text from which it takes its origins. While Stanley's prefatory material proclaims her adherence to Sidney's work, it also contains a defence of independent authorship, making claims for a writer's capacity to interpret and reproduce a text, which other features of her work uphold. Stanley's Arcadia was also involved in complex networks of relationships with readers, as the first edition of Arcadia to be a subscription text, and therefore partially dependent on the support of buyers. As a rewriting, inspired by Sidney's invitation to other spirits to take up his work, it is also a transitional text, indicating some of the possibilities for, and constraints on, women's writing towards the end of the early modern period.

"When Blood Is Their Argument": Shakespeare on War, Freedom, and the Nature of Man

When Blood Is Their Argument: Shakespeare on War, Freedom, and Nature of Man Greenblatt, Stephen. 2010. Shakespeare's Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $24.00 hc. $14.00 sc. xi + 144 pp.Pugliatti, Paola. 2010. Shakespeare and Just War Tradition. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate. $99.95 hc. x + 249 pp.Stewart, Stanley. 2010. Shakespeare and Philosophy. New York: Routledge. $125.00 hc. $39.95 sc. xvii + 225 pp.Suffering remains foreign to knowledge.Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970)More than a golden age topic, freedom from war, as opposed to freedom to wage it or freedom of action within it, understandably remains a grossly neglected topic in our war-filled times. In view of our current state of terror and multiple wars, we can take modest consolation from Shakespeare, our great forebearer in literature, in whose works warfare or strife-even in love-seem to characterize very nature of human (and divine) interactions. But what did Shakespeare think about war? Did he think mankind by nature bellicose, with the blast of war forever blowing not only in our ears but in our hearts (Henry V 3.1.5)? And what of alternate view of humanity that emerges for a moment in militant speech by Henry V just quoted, when he is rallying English troops to breech in France, recommending that they disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage? (emphasis added). Of course, to ask how Shakespeare thought 'about' a topic misleads, for he never stood outside impersonating fictions to offer a philosophical defense of art in own time, with its multiple wars declared and undeclared (against Spain, Irish, and Amerindians). Even if he had followed recent literary precedent and expressed a defense of art, as Sir Philip Sidney had in a formal treatise, Edmund Spenser in a letter, and Sir John Harrington in a preface, views he may have proposed would not necessarily have been fully supported by evidence of own literary works-as scholars of Sidney, Spenser, and Harrington can attest regarding polysemantic work of these Elizabethan poets. Thus, in order to grapple with how Shakespeare considered war, a question so urgently connected in time with tenets of religion and natural law on an international scale, we have to delineate and interpret pattern created in complex veil of imaginings. Yet, from perspective of 'inside' Shakespeare's works, we face a difficult prospect of translation if we acknowledge that actions do work of precepts, as Stanley Stewart remarks, summarizing Agnes Heller's approach to interpretation of plays as performance (Stewart 2010, 8). The authors of these three books attempt to help us chart a course towards something like man as a thinker 'behind' or 'inside' works, to let prepositions collide for a moment, as it were. In assessing these scholars' efforts to converge on Shakespeare, question now is what do we see?Specifically, to take up Stanley Stewart's book first, what have philosophers seen in or of Shakespeare? Stewart means in a normative sense; that is, as practiced by philosophers in universities and catalogued by librarians in section. After reading Stewart's useful study, one cannot help but feel confronted by that preposition 'behind,' which my prose attempted to leave behind a moment ago, and language-game it confronts us with. This is because time and again Stewart's chosen philosophers, from Herder to Nietzsche and beyond, in agile summaries of their views of Shakespeare appear to find their own image behind works of bard-or, I should say, an insight gleaned from Shakespeare proves anticipatory of their own views. Stewart sees this kind of confirming or fashioning of oneself out of Shakespeare as a common occurrence among even today's formal philosophers. This is why one must be alert to not only semantic force of propositions but also to prepositions, and Stewart specifies that his book is about Shakespeare in philosophy (21, emphasis added); that is, about references made to Shakespeare, sustained or incidental, in writings of philosophers. …

Robbing His Captive Shepherdess: Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the Memory of Charles I in the <i>Eikon Basilike</i> and <i>Eikonoklastes</i>

Robbing His Captive Shepherdess:Princess Elizabeth, John Milton, and the Memory of Charles I in the Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes Nicole A. Jacobs (bio) The contentious inclusion of an imprisoned princess's speech from Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1593) in the Eikon Basilike (1649) has long overshadowed the most significant contribution of a woman's voice to the "King's book." In three poignant passages of the Eikon Basilike, the purported book of Charles I's final prayers and meditations before his execution, Princess Elizabeth, Charles I's daughter, authorizes the account of her martyred father's final day. The critical neglect of Elizabeth's role in memorializing the executed king might at first seem surprising given that during Charles's life the young princess was beloved and respected by Royalists and Parliamentarians alike. After the regicide, however, Elizabeth's life and death as a Stuart princess registered varied reactions that fell along party lines. For Royalists, she became an emblem of the suffering Stuart monarchy; accordingly, they emphasized her misfortune in being held captive in a cold, remote castle by tyrants and refused permission to be reunited with her sister. They mourned Elizabeth's death of illness at Carisbrooke Castle on 8 September 1650 as a renewal of their grief for Charles. For Parliamentarians, by contrast, respecting her status as the sovereign's child would appear inconsistent with their decision to abolish the English monarchy on 7 February 1649.1 This political motivation also provides insight into John Milton's significant but previously overlooked suppression of the Lady Elizabeth passages of the Eikon in his own commissioned response in Eikonoklastes (1649).2 In the 1650s, in other words, Elizabeth's writing had a polarizing effect: Royalists used it as propaganda, whereas Milton and the Parliamentarians sought to silence her authorial voice to combat this Royalist strategy. In the Eikon Basilike, a supplementary section to the text called "A Perfect Copy of Prayers Used by His Majestie in the Time of His Sufferings Delivered to Dr. Juxon Bishop of London" contains the three Lady Elizabeth passages and a paraphrase of Pamela's prayer, "A Prayer in [End Page 227] Time of Captivitie," from Sidney's Arcadia. The first of several popular editions containing the supplementary section was printed by William Dugard on 15 March 1649.3 The first passage concerning Elizabeth, "A True Relation of the King[']s Speech to the Lady Elisabeth, and the Duke of Glo[u]cester, the Day before his Death," contains an observation of the royal family recorded by an anonymous observer.4 However, the next two passages, "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth[']s Own Hand" and "Another Relation from the Lady Elisabeth," are written from the princess's first-person perspective of "the last time I had the happiness to see [Charles I]" (281). In these three excerpts, the anonymous observer and Elizabeth herself firmly establish the young girl's authority as a witness to her father's grace under persecution. Although it may seem counterintuitive to view the words of a child as privileged speech, Elizabeth's age and social status actually made her uniquely equipped to move an audience sympathetic to the plight of the Stuarts and of the Episcopacy that they supported. As Michael Mascuch notes in his study of the young, seventeenth-century prophet Sarah Wight, "[T]he 'child' symbolizes not so much a body's physical immaturity as an intellectual disposition toward religious knowledge and authority."5 In the case of Elizabeth, her defense of Charles's martyrdom would bear a sincerity that accounts by Doctor Juxon or Charles's attendants might not; her words are not those of a politically motivated supporter or, from a Parliamentarian perspective, a sycophant, but rather those of a daughter determined to serve the memory of her father. What is at stake in the polemic between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes is the collective memory and popular perception of Charles I and the English monarchy. Is the Eikon, as his supporters would contend, a monument to Charles and a record of his martyrdom? Or is it, as Milton claims, "madness to mistake this Book for a monument...

"I Never Knew Him Other Than a Man": Masculinity as Ornament in Sir Philip Sidney's <i>Arcadia</i>

The present article aims at showing how Sir Philip Sidney’s two versions of the Arcadia deal with the issue of masculinity. Patricia Fumerton’s propositions about the parallels between Hilliard’s miniatures and Sidney’s sonnets are here confronted to the two pastoral romances, which seem to have retained a rather similar approach to the idea of ornament. The issue of disguises and ornamental attributes of one’s sex in the old and new Arcadia, compared with the limner’s vision of the same, thus turn to prove central in understanding the fascinating complexities of sex in Sidney’s original and revised works.

Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature

Reviewed by: Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature Greg Bentley (bio) Melissa E. Sanchez . Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 283 + xi pages. $74.00. Erotic Subjects is a welcome addition to the continuing scholarly discussion of the relationship between sexuality and politics in early modern English [End Page 153] literature. Melissa Sanchez's unique and imaginative contribution to this discussion lies in her reversal of the traditional order. Rather than focus on the politics of sexuality, she addresses the sexualization of politics, focusing especially on how the political discourses that extend from the Renaissance through the Reformation and into the Restoration are infused with the language of eroticism. From this novel perspective, Sanchez illustrates the anagogical relationship between the production of imaginative literature and the practice of material culture, and most particularly she looks at how the politics and law of the latter inflect the former. Sanchez begins her exploration of the personal and public relationships between the individual subject and sovereign authority, as well as the tensions between concepts of monarchy and republicanism, by closely examining works of two of the Tudors' most prominent male authors: Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. She initiates her discussion of Sidney by focusing on a historical event: Sidney's gift to Queen Elizabeth of a "' jewel of gold, being a whip garnished with small diamonds in four rows, and cords of small seed pearle'" (31). This gift, Sanchez argues, "neatly encompasses the complex relation of power and pleasure that Sidney explores in detail throughout The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia," a text, she claims, that "examines the possibility that martyrdom may be a powerful source of political, as well as religious, empowerment" (33). By illustrating how the relationship between Argalus and Parthenia functions as "a pattern for the romance's main plot of Pyrocles and Musidorus' courtship of Philoclea and Pamela," Sanchez demonstrates how Sidney's description of "political hagiography"—"tales of feminine suffering"—functions as a form of protest against conventionally masculinized tyranny (54). Turning from Sidney to Spenser, Sanchez argues that The Faerie Queene also "ponders the intricate relationship of authority and submission through images of assaulted female virtue," but she contends that "Spenser is less optimistic about the possibility of such principled resistance" (57). Sanchez asserts that "the martyrdom that Sidney saw as the source of both moral and political authority may give way to perverse pleasure" (57) Thus, as she writes, "Spenser tests the limits of the hagiographic politics that Sidney endorses" (57). By comparing the relationship between Sir Scudamore and the female characters in Books III and IV to Artegal's relationship with the female characters in Book V, Sanchez illustrates how "the elusiveness of chastity and friendship are closely tied to the ultimate failure of justice" (57). [End Page 154] Following her discussion of Sidney and Spenser, Sanchez takes up two works by Shakespeare: The Rape of Lucrece and Pericles. Working from contemporary legal cases that illustrate the fine line between rape and ravishment, Sanchez addresses Shakespeare's concept of personal and political agency to illustrate how "the gendered language of sexual assault provides Shakespeare a powerful idiom for analyzing political consent precisely because it depicts agency in . . . confused and paradoxical terms" (89). Rather than depict the limitations of individual choice that Sidney and Spenser portrayed, Shakespeare's texts, Sanchez claims, show how good subjects, like good women, cannot actively resist their superiors—even abusive ones—without raising the specter of anarchy. And if resistance is unthinkable, then consent is the only option, and so no longer a sign of the difference between prince and tyrant. (89) As Sanchez concludes, the struggle between will and law that these works address would have been all too familiar to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences. Sanchez shifts to the Stuart court and its sexualized politics by analyzing the works of two of the period's most prominent female authors: Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish. In contrast to recent criticism that has understood Wroth's Urania as a "mediation of the nature of governance," Sanchez writes, she depicts how "the extremity of submission in the romance...

“Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich”: Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as a Prototype for the Rewriting of the Odysseus Myth in Ulysses

“Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich”: Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as a Prototype for the Rewriting of the Odysseus Myth in Ulysses

The Politics of Election in Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

This essay suggests that the inward style of Wroth's sonnet sequence can be attributed to her reliance on a Protestant discourse of election that shares symbols commonly associated with Petrarchism, such as the tortured heart, the occluding dark, and the illuminating light. As I will further argue, the language of predestination had become an oppositional discourse by 1621, enabling Wroth's public self-identification with other militant Protestants such as William Herbert, who opposed the political and religious policies of James I.

Renaissance historical fiction: Sidney, Deloney, Nashe

Davis's study could scarcely be more timely or invigorating. SEAN KEILEN, College of William and Mary. Williamsburg VA A majority of the fiction composed in England in the second half of the sixteenth century was set in the past. All the major prose writers of the period (Thomas Lodge, Sir Philip Sidney, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, Robert Greene) produced historical fiction, with settings ranging from the ancient world (as in Sidney's Arcadia) to the time of Henry VIII (in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller). Yet while studies of the historical drama of the period abound, the historical bias of prose fiction has so far escaped any sort of sustained critical consideration. Renaissance Historical Fiction is the first book-length study of this important topic. It argues for the complex ways in which these prose fictions engage with an idea of the past, and of their power to destabilize some of our dominant models for understanding the period of 'the Renaissance'. The wide range of texts discussed includes Lodge's Robin the Devil; Greene's Ciceronis Amor; John Lyly's Euphues and his England; and the anonymous Famous History of Friar Bacon. In addition, a chapter apiece is devoted to three key authors (Sidney, Deloney and Nashe) whose work best represents the imaginative richness and thematic complexity of the historical fiction of the late sixteenth century. Alex Davis is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant EnglandLiturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

<i>Timothy Rosendale</i>, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England<i>Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England</i>. Timothy Rosendale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. x+237.

MATTHEW DIMMOCK and ANDREW HADFIELD (eds), Literature and Popular Culture in Early Modern England.

THE presence of Peter Burke’s influential Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978; rev. 1994) can be felt throughout this ostensibly more narrowly focused collection. Burke writes an approving afterword, and many of the contributors examine his notion that popular culture was everybody’s culture until a discernable rift gradually grows between the longstanding elite culture of the learned and more popular forms of expression. In the literature of Early Modern England Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (c.1580), with its dismissals of the ‘base men with servile wits’ who wrote for the press and the ‘mongrell Tragy-comedie’ of the theatre, is an apparent landmark in this emerging division between elite and popular.1 And yet, matters were not so simple. Sidney’s own works were soon to be popularized, both in print and on stage; his great protégé, Edmund Spenser, had a predilection for jest books (6–7). The terms ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ are shown to be as problematic in the period as they remain in our own time; but, as Burke notes, ‘we cannot easily speak about the interaction of elite culture and popular culture without first making the distinction’ (210). While no new, or refined, theoretical model is proposed, this volume does present a diverse and stimulating range of essays, which taken together illustrate the complex nature of assimilations and negotiations between popular and elite cultural forms.

Some Verses of Henry and Mary Dudley Sidney and Prince Edward's “Little School”

In a 1548 copy of Hall and Grafton's Chronicle in the Folger library, there are several holograph verses signed by Philip Sidney's parents, Mary (nee Dudley) and Henry (Hall and Grafton fols. 2R8r,...

‘A monster shapeless’: equivocation and the treasonous imagination

Dealing with the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot (1605), this article investigates the competing claims to truth of both terrorist plots and those narratives they seek to displace. Through a reading of Henry Garnet's ‘A Treatise of Equivocation’ (1595), I argue that it is in this attempted displacement of the truth that equivocation reveals its terrorist potential. Accordingly, late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century discourses on equivocation are read here in relation to early-modern literary theory to figure equivocation as an irruption of the poetic within the language of law. In making this argument, Garnet's Treatise and the literary-theoretical work of Francis Bacon, George Puttenham and Philip Sidney are read alongside the work of J. L. Austin, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant and Jean-François Lyotard in order to pursue a reading of lying, literature and metaphor that locates the challenge to authority posed by equivocation in its evocation of the performative aspect of truth-telling.

Christopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century LiteratureExile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

<i>Christopher D'Addario,</i> Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature<i>Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature</i>. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

“Fool … Look in Thy Heart and Write”: W. B. Yeats”s Return to English Renaissance Poetry in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in January 1939, the dominant critical interpretation ofW. B. Yeats's Circus Animals' Desertion has been tendentiously autobiographical. The story goes that this poem chronicles Yeats's struggle with his anguished perception of advancing poetic decrepitude. Witness the poem's very title and celebrated conclusion, in which the wretched speaker-Yeats-must he down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.1 Denis Donoghue's statement can stand as synecdoche for the sad consensus: the poem is not a willing commitment to life, but moral accountancy, balancing profit and loss.2 The circus animals have deserted Yeats; that is, he is bereft of poetic inspiration.But this and similar biographical readings overlook the extreme irony contained in Yeats's choice of vehicle for his statement about the Muses' purported desertion-a skilled and beautiful poem, that is, performative refutation of that very poem's ghastly confession. To heighten the irony, the scholarly biographers have overlooked singular biographical fact about the poet, his intellectual heritage from the English Renaissance. Circus Animals' Desertion is profound reworking, both as to form and substantive content, of Sir Philip Sidney's first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. The abiding cleverness ofthat sonnet resides in its permitting Sidney to rid himself of the encumbrance of earlier poetic tradition, even as he skillfully exploits it. Just so, I will argue, Yeats, too, looks in his heart and writes. But, significant as the Sidney link is, it hardly exhausts Yeats's ramified connections with Renaissance poetry, and Renaissance poetics. Y eats does not only use Sidney to explore his theme; he also gains secondary support from other English Renaissance writers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir John Davies; and, more significantly, from the Renaissance acceptance of the Delphic injunction, know thyself. Far from bewailing senescent impotence, Yeats is savoring the richness of tradition that has roots not only in his own poetic life, but also in revered poetic repository, one of formidable power. In exquisitely accomplished imitation of his Renaissance predecessors, in returning to his heart, Yeats demonstrates his poetic virtuosity even as he laments his lack, or loss, of poetic talent. This is the feint of magisterial involution.That Yeats had more than passing acquaintance with the material in question is hardly contentious. In Yeats and the English Renaissance, Wayne K. Chapman established the case for Yeats's abiding interest in and formative influence by English Renaissance poetry. Yeats was an expert on Shakespeare, to lesser extent on Spenser and the Elizabethans at very young age (emphasis added)/' In A General Introduction for My Work, Yeats ecstatically confessed that he owed his very soul to Shakespeare, to Spenser and to Blake . . . and to the English language (Chapman 7). His advice to the young Thomas MacDonagh is telling: read the great old masters of English, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Brown[e], perhaps Chaucer,-until you have gotten our feeble modern English out of your head.4 Yeats was, needless to say, not naive poet; he anticipated our awareness of the frighteningly charged and endlessly recessive dialectic between actual and ideal Irelands and Englands. Still and all, Yeats could unblushingly harbor ambitions for Irish Renaissance that in no way diminished his English affiliations.Renaissance influences are temporally Janus-faced, for Yeats: thus there is modernist component. Though he sometimes ostentatiously professed to esteem the poetry of Pound, Eliot, and Sitwell above his own, Yeats consistently claimed never to fully consider himself member of their assemblage. Nevertheless, in revealing rejection of the modern, Yeats claimed that he was unable to write free verse in the manner of Turner, Lawrence, and Pound because of uneasiness about losing himself in anything but (sometimes altered) traditional stanza. …

Syncretistic Religion in Shakespeare's Late Romances

By claiming that the recovery and translation of Greek texts and a renewed interest in Roman and Ancient culture defines the Renaissance, historians have insured that syncretism appears everywhere in Renaissance thought and art. Often syncretistic blends of Ancient and Christian ideas create memorable impasses, even contradictions. Sir Philip Sidney, in his Apology for Poetry (1579, publ. 1595), concluded that “our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching [enacting] it.” 1 In the first part of this assertion, Sidney taps into Christian Neo-Platonism. He has just argued that the inspired poet can deliver a “golden” world in his writing, better than the “brazen” nature in which we live, because he can intuit heavenly Ideas. Pico dell Mirandola, Baldassare Castiglione, and other Renaissance Humanists had given Neo-Platonism a Christian cast when they proclaimed that divine love could transform the soul “into an Aungell,” whereby “it understandeth all thinges that may be understoode: and without any veile or cloude, she seeth the meine sea of the pure heavenlye beawtye.” 2 Sir John Davies, in his late Elizabethan poem, Nosce Teipsum (1599), almost agrees: So, many stayres we must ascend vpright Ere wee attaine to Wisdom’s high degree; So doth this Earth eclipse our Reason’s light. Which else (in instants) would like angels see. 3

Revolution by Degrees: Philip Sidney and Gradatio

Revolution by Degrees: Philip Sidney and <i>Gradatio</i>

“Wonderfully Ravished”: Platonic Erotics and the Heroic Genre in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy

“Wonderfully Ravished”: Platonic Erotics and the Heroic Genre in Sir Philip Sidney's <i>Defence of Poesy</i>