Sir Philip Sidney Research Articles

Abuse of Criticism: T.S. Eliot and Northrop Frye’s Academic Ramp-up to “Fake News”

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” originates T.S. Eliot’s 1932 Harvard Norton Lecture on “taste” maligning “a marked swing in his feelings toward Shelley's verse from fervid imitation to contemptuous disdain.” Lowe, P.J., 2002. Eliot’s acolyte, Northrop Frye, in 1957 follows similar tautology to exclude Shelley’s straw-man agonist, Thomas Love Peacock, from Anatomy of Criticism commentary over Sir Philip Sidney’s “Apology for Poesy,” Shelley’s obvious rhetorical target. Here we treat Eliot and Frye’s methodologies as a Prigozhin troll factory authoritarian oligarchic academic coup that, “like the Internet Research Agency, engage in … ‘coordinated inauthentic activity, ranging from the use of false names and the creation of false audiences to the publication of false stories and the creation of divisive narratives.”

“Turning Others’ Leaves”: The Politics of National Literary Identity in Renaissance England

The origins of the sense in Renaissance England for a distinct English literary identity may be traced back to Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower in the fourteenth century. However, it was with the Elizabethan generation of writers and poets in the second half of the sixteenth century that this sense became a serious concern and constituted the essence of their literary politics at the time. In fact, at a time when political, ideological, cultural, economic, commercial, and colonialist nationalism was on the rise in Renaissance Europe, it would not be unusual for the Elizabethans to pursue radical policies of nationalism in every sphere, including most importantly the formation of a national literary identity. Accordingly, for the literati of the time, especially for the generation of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and their contemporaries, literary creativity and originality and, consequently, independence from foreign influence were to be prioritized and privileged over imitation and traditionality. Therefore, they increasingly turned away from the imitation of Continental literary norms and explicitly rejected Petrarchan populism; instead, they were involved in a deliberate and focused engagement in a process of theoretical and pragmatic politics for the creation of national literature. The new national literature they envisaged was not only to be authentic and native in identity but also to match up the intellectual standards of Renaissance humanism and literary performance at large. So this article is an analytical and argumentative attempt, with the main focus on Sidney and Spenser, to demonstrate in what ways and by what perceptions the Elizabethans were motivated for the formation of a national literary identity.

Ted Hughes, the Goddess and ‘An Alchemy’

Two of the books Ted Hughes took with him when he worked as a Royal Air Force (RAF) fighter plotter during his two years of compulsory national service, were Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Both, he read closely and often. He was already familiar, through his interest in the magical preoccupations of W. B. Yeats, with the philosophy of Hermetic Neoplatonism which had made its way to England during Shakespeare’s time and influenced the work of poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spencer. All of these poets believed in, and used, the alchemical power of poetry which, as Sidney wrote in his Defence of Poetry, could ‘hold children from play, and old men from the chimney corner. And pretending no more, doth intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue’. This, and his immersion in Shakespeare’s work (which as Sylvia Plath told her mother, he ‘knew by heart’) led Hughes to discern a developing pattern, based on the transformative powers of the Goddess, through which he believed Shakespeare was performing a complex alchemical process. He expounded this theory in detail in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, but almost twenty years earlier he had written the poem ‘An Alchemy’ for a limited edition anthology published in 1973 by the Globe Theatre Trust. ‘An Alchemy’ is a difficult and allusive poem in which nothing is spelled out. In this article, I look at just one section of the poem in which Hughes created his own alchemical matrix through which he sought to reveal the underlying alchemical theme that he saw as the ‘Gold’ in Shakespeare’s work.

Suspending ekphrasis: Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Brazen World’ in Part 2 of Tamburlaine the Great and its influence

I argue that Part 2 of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587; published 1590) upends the narrative operations of ekphrasis at work in Part 1 to expose Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘brazen world’ progressively. I track Part 2’s descent into this world through rhetorical insufficiencies that generate flawed ekphrases, which lack the requisite enargeia (vivid description) to be seen in the mind’s eye. Particular attention is paid to Zenocrate’s death scene as well as Tamburlaine’s preservation of her body in a gold-lined coffin. I argue that the coffin is a symbol of Tamburlaine’s rhetorical inadequacy and an aesthetic time capsule in which Marlowe suspends ekphrasis. This suspension complicates the ways in which audiences ‘see’, and is the site of a contest between ‘poetic’ (ekphrastic) and ‘dramatic’ (spectacular) ways of seeing. Through the ekphrastic interaction between the Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe challenges dramatists to revive the operations of ekphrasis in new ways. I examine William Shakespeare’s response to this challenge in The Winter’s Tale (1611; published 1623), arguing that he reconciles the poetic and dramatic ways of seeing to create a stage-picture of the revival of ekphrasis in the coming to life of Hermione’s statue.

Charles Dickens & Sir Philip Sidney: Hard Times , An Equine Defence for the Novel

Abstract: While critics have often read Hard Times as Dickens’s defense of imagination against utilitarianism, industrialism, and the fact-driven education of his time, the source of Dickens’s defensive theory and poetics has remained comparatively obscure. This article will argue that Dickens, in his attempt to defend imaginative literature, invokes Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century Defence of Poetry . More specifically, Dickens borrows from Sidney the trope of “Horsemanship” as a means to discuss the value of “Poetry.” Throughout the novel, Dickens turns to the image of the horse and the members of Sleary’s Horse-Riding as the catalysts for poetic powers, fancy, and imagination. Sleary’s troupe exposes the failure of the mechanical residents of Coketown, who insist on manufacturing passionless Bitzers rather than sensitive Sissys. The novel’s equine aesthetic repeatedly conjures the anxiety of the Gradgrindian School of “poesy,” where Dickens, through the equine invocation, carries out his apologetic debate.

Revision in Astrophel and Stella

In his edition of the Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, William Ringler proposed that all the known manuscripts and early printed editions of Astrophel and Stella descended from a single source that was subject to various states of textual corruption in their transmission. This article proposes that instead of a unitary source, Sidney worked through various states of the text as the sequence evolved, and that the textual history reflects the genesis and evolution of Sidney at work, dividing the z tradition into two distinct parts. Further, it examines in detail the nature and character of the adjustments made to the z2 tradition when the copy was prepared for the press, and what it might indicate about the third party that did this.

Daniel, Florio, and the Stationers

This essay is concerned with the printed texts of two of Sir Philip Sidney’s books: the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella,published by the stationer Thomas Newman in 1591, and An Apologie for Poetrie, published by the stationer Henry Olney in 1595. While the current scholarly consensus is that Newman’s Astrophel and Stella was a “pirated” text, “suppressed” when the social elite (headed by Lord Burghley) intervened to prevent the book’s being read, the present essay challenges this interpretation through a new reading of the material record that offers a fuller account of the publication histories of both sets of sonnets, and of the origins of Olney’s publication. 
 

The Popularity of Montemayor's Diana, from Spain to England: Bartholomew Yong's Literary and Political Leverage

Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana (c. 1559) provides an excellent example of the cultural interplay between tradition and originality in the Renaissance. Its immediate widespread popularity and subsequent influence are demonstrated by the vast number of editions and translations of Montemayor’s masterpiece, as well as the sequels by Alonso Pérez and Gaspar Gil Polo. By 1600, forty-three reprints had been published, in addition to eight editions in French and the English translation by Bartholomew Yong. Although written in the early 1580s, when Sir Philip Sidney penned the Arcadia, Yong’s version remained unpublished until 1598. The lavish folio, which also included the two sequels, was dedicated to Lady Penelope Rich, a most influential noblewoman and eminent patroness, also known for being the model of Sidney’s “Stella.” That very same year a new folio edition of the Arcadia was published together with Astrophil and Stella. Yong’s dedication to Lady Rich aimed at enhancing his translation by capitalising on the popular acclaim of Sidney’s works, as well as Lady Rich’s connection with the venerated poet. In addition, by choosing this dedicatee, Yong attempted to capture the attention of her brother, Robert Devereux, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite.

Keeping Faith with Literature

Keeping Faith with Literature

An Unpublished Autograph Letter from Sir Philip Sidney to Carolus Clusius, 21 April 1576

AbstractOnly a decade ago Roger Kuin's The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney (2012) offered scholars for the first time a complete edition of Sidney's correspondence. Kuin modestly allowed room for new discoveries, in the hope that additional letters might be identified. This article introduces a previously unpublished autograph letter by Sidney, written in French, addressed on 21 April 1576 to Carolus Clusius or Charles de l'Écluse, an associate of Hubert Languet and a noted botanist then active in Vienna at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II. After briefly discussing the provenance of the manuscript I turn to its contents, situating the letter within the wider corpus of Sidney's extant correspondence, with reference to letters to and from Clusius and Languet in Kuin's edition, and analysing it within this context. The newly discovered letter, transcribed and translated in an appendix, is shown to offer important new evidence for Sidney's relationships with Clusius and Languet as well as his place in European intellectual culture more generally.

Reading by Pieces: Heliodorus, Sir Philip Sidney, and the Model of Romance

Abstract In The Model of Poesy, William Scott asserts that Sir Philip Sidney ‘did imitate’ Heliodorus’s Aethiopika in ‘the general gate of conveyance’ when he wrote The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Sidney’s engagement with Heliodorus’s fourth-century prose fiction has long been recognized, especially in relation to the revised and composite versions of the Arcadia that appeared in print during the 1590s. Nevertheless, the close relationship between Heliodorus and Sidney’s text has rarely been viewed in the broader context of the Aethiopika’s sixteenth-century reception and has never been taken seriously as an instance of literary imitation. This essay returns to Renaissance debates over the propriety of prose epic to explore the background to Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Arcadia and examines neglected sources on the Aethiopika which shed new light on how Heliodorus was reconciled with existing systems of poetics. The discussion explores how Sidney’s education in European Protestant circles taught him to think about literary imitation in ways that made him especially receptive to other sixteenth-century approaches to the Aethiopika, and proposes that he saw imitatio and mimēsis as closely connected. In addition, it considers how Scott used Heliodorus’s text as a critical tool with which to read the Arcadia, and suggests that Martin Crusius may have exerted a subtle yet significant influence on the Model. Finally, in showing how the Arcadia adapts the narrative form of Heliodorus’s text, the essay assesses the intricacy of Sidney’s imitative technique.

Epistolary Compassion in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

Epistolary Compassion in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

Transatlantic Lifelines: Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”

The legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, the distinguished Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the subject of numerous claims to memorialization. On 17 October 1586 Sidney died in battle at Arnhem in the United Netherlands. Less than a week later, his corpse was transported to Flushing, of which Sidney had been Governor, and in the following year Sidney’s body was “interr’d in stately Pauls”, as recorded by Anne Dudley Bradstreet—the first known poet of the British North American colonies. While Bradstreet is omitted from most early modern and contemporary literary accounts of Sidney’s legacy, this article demonstrates that Bradstreet’s commemoration of Sidney from across the Atlantic presents new insights into his afterlife and the female poet’s formulations of early modern nationhood. Bradstreet’s first formal poem, “An Elegie upon that Honorable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (comp. 1637–8), was a tribute to Sidney as well as to her own Anglo-American literary heritage and England’s rolls. Bradstreet exhibits her complex relationship to Sidney along the same lines that she reconceives her English identity. A comparison of the two published seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s elegiac poem (1650, 1678) shows how she translates descent and lineage from kinship (and kingship) into poetic creation. In the process, Bradstreet takes her place not only as a “semi-Sidney”, as Josuah Sylvester characterized Sidney’s descendants, but also as a Sidneian Muse—in America.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Philosophy Can Be The Genuine Source Of Literature But Not Superior To Literature: A Study

After reading Sir Philip Sidney’s “ An Apology For Poetry” , I must say philosophy can be the format of writing literature but not superior to literature. In other words philosophy is theory , literature is practical. After World War –II , many great philosophers emerged with the high philosophical approach like Existentialism, Absurdist ,Surrealism etc. But all these thoughts got more vitality in the form of literature.

Sidney and Finch’s Nomotexnia (Art of Law): Religion, Politics, and Patronage?

Abstract This essay brings to light a little-known manuscript on law and religion dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney: the earliest version of Henry Finch’s Nomotexnia (Art of Law). The manuscript’s two-part structure provides ‘Nomotexnia’, a Ramist-style synopsis of certain topics in English common law pertaining to possessions and criminal offences, followed by a supplement entitled ‘A Conference and Reformation of the Same Law by the Law of God’. Later manuscripts and printed witnesses for Finch’s expansion of the ‘Nomotexnia’ section did not include religious commentary. Material evidence alone places the first manuscript’s production after 1583 but leaves unconfirmed whether or not Sidney commissioned either section of its contents. This study reassesses the manuscript text with an eye to Finch’s and Sidney’s legal interests, family concerns, and religious politics in the mid-1580s. Textual and biographical evidence, combined with reasonable conjecture, suggests that Sidney probably commissioned the ‘Nomotexnia’ section, motivated by a desire for legal knowledge on inheritance and land use, and that Finch probably supplied the ‘Conference and Reformation’ section by his own initiative, asserting a polemical stance on the English church that Sidney would not have adopted.

The Subaltern Speaks in Anna Weamys’ A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia: A Foucauldian Perspective

This paper examines how the servant Mopsa in Anna Weamys’ A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia provides a negative answer to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s question whether the subaltern can speak. In accordance with Michel Foucault’s thoughts on power and resistance, it intends to reveal that the subaltern, contrary to what Spivak proposes, is able to raise voice and demonstrate resistance. Mopsa has not been given the chance to speak among the royals in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, but Weamys deconstructs Sidney’s version and provides Mopsa the opportunity to transcend subalternity as she asserts her action and voice. Within this framework, Anna Weamys’ romance can be read, in the context of Foucault’s theory on power, as a challenge against Spivak’s assumption which contends that the subaltern is not recognizable.

Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell

Reviewed by: Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England by Scott A. Trudell Frank Swannack Trudell, Scott A., Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 272; R.R.P. £63.00; ISBN 9780198834663. Recent scholarship has focused on the disparity between what early modern texts signified at the time of composition and postmodern critical assumptions. These studies counter theoretical thinking that considers a progressive literary history at the expense of early modern innovation. Unwritten Poetry: Song, Performance, and Media in Early Modern England discovers critical oversights through privileging 'a bibliographic fantasy' (p. 210). The book reveals how the modern notion of multimedia is already prevalent in early modern England, as poets and playwrights combine music, song, poetry, and theatrical bodies to startling, often puzzling, effect. Trudell challenges critical thinking that regards early modern texts as preserving a rigid historical literary imagination. His book examines how early modern poets and playwrights not only considered different forms of communication, but also the lingering emotional effects of their work on their audience. Thus Trudell finds fresh insights in Sir Philip Sidney's The Defence of Poesy (1595). His argument highlights Sidney's practical approach to music. Trudell even speculates that Sidney may have been a musician himself, as Sidney conceived poetry by embracing all forms of musical composition and performance beyond a bibliographic circle. The appearance of songs in the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, Trudell asserts, indicates Sidney's notion of poetry that is not simply [End Page 265] to be read. With the emergence of printed songbooks, Trudell also entertains the intriguing notion of Sidney's poetry being experienced 'in domestic settings across England' (p. 29). He suggests the possibility of illiterate households enjoying Sidney's poetry through music and song. Another overlooked aspect of early modern life is the teaching of drama in English grammar schools. Trudell surmises that because Sidney was a student at Shrewsbury School, he would have been made aware of drama from a young age. The Elizabethan poet even performed in Accession Day tilts. The crux of Trudell's argument is how dramatic performance is ensconced in Sidney's poetic imagination to become fused with literary endeavours. Within the theatre, Trudell tackles pederasty surrounding boy actor-singers. His first important point is to differentiate early modern pederasty from the modern psychological disorder of pedophilia. Rather than being an aberration, pederasty refers to an established practice of eroticizing women, servants, and children. It is a practice, Trudell argues, the theatre uses to capture audiences in pederasty fantasies. The mediation of poetry through a boy's singing and sexualized body objectifies them, conversely, as monstrous receptacles encouraging abuse. Trudell also unearths a musical pederasty in Shakespeare's plays. With Twelfth Night, Trudell implies that the play's music functions like bawdy 'muzak'. Its miscellaneous frivolities create tension by often impinging on the play's action. Trudell's thesis finds a rich source in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The eroticized infantile musical fairies provide historical detail on how childhood could last into an actor's twenties. While contemporary media theory, particularly how information encodes messages deciphered by modern communication systems, is already present through how the disembodied changeling transmits sexual fantasies. A similar analysis of Hamlet's Ophelia leads Trudell to reconsider her mysterious feminized madness as an effervescing multimedia presence. In a fascinating discussion, Trudell asserts that her melancholic songs are derived from the popular anonymous ballad tradition. Her transformative singing and subsequent drowning combine the environment, the sexual violence of Ovid's Orpheus in the Metamorphoses, and music's lingering aftertaste to communicate emotive meaning. Finally, Trudell charts John Milton's love–hate relationship with song. Although present in Milton's work, singers haunt his texts as subdued voices. Ironically, Trudell also identifies Milton's removal from printed songbooks in the late seventeenth century. Milton's conspicuous absence from the period's musical community inspires Trudell's investigation of songbooks featuring the music of Milton's collaborator Henry Lawes. Trudell uncovers 'intriguing echoes' of Milton's A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (1637 and 1645) in Lawes's songbooks and in three editions...

Repeat Performance: Garcilaso de la Vega and Miguel de Cervantes on Common Maghribi Ground

Repeat Performance:Garcilaso de la Vega and Miguel de Cervantes on Common Maghribi Ground Robert ter Horst Critics, anglophone critics in particular, not in the field of Hispanic literature, have declined to reckon with the poetry of Garcilaso. Thomas M. Greene in The Light in Troy disingenuously pleads incapacity: “[Imitatio] needs to be seen as a European phenomenon making a markedly different imprint on each particular nation and vernacular it touched… In defense of the neglect of other literatures, most notably Hispanic, I can only say that my incompetence to deal with them has saved a long book from growing longer” (2). Paul Alpers in What is Pastoral?, a splendid study, is frankly dismissive: “Tasso’s Aminta and Garcilaso de la Vega’s eclogues are generally known, I fear, only to specialists in their respective national literatures, and their literary distinction (unlike that of Don Quixote) does not survive translation” (X). The subordination and neglect of Garcilaso by English-language scholars came to a halt in 2007 with the publication of a slender but highly significant volume by English professor Richard Helgerson, titled A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century Europe. The Spanish poet was to have figured in the first chapter of “… a large comparative study of the self-consciously ‘new poetry’ of sixteenth-century Europe”. Nor was the past to be neglected as classical antiquity and Petrarch and sixteenth-century Italy were, properly, also to be consulted. But the work proposed would expend “… its greatest energies on Spain, France, and England—the [End Page 441] Spain of Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega, the France of Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard, and the England of Sir Philip Sidney” (IX). Garcilaso’s prime position in this pantheon was a startling innovation but one which Helgerson considered fully justified for “… Garcilaso deserves far more than the pre-eminent position he securely holds in the literary history of Spain, deserves a more fully European reputation. Together with his friend Juan Boscán, he is every bit the Spanish counterpart of Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard in France and of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser in England. Indeed he and Boscan are the forerunners of those French and English poets …” (XIII). A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, which proved fatal, compelled Helgerson to compress his larger project into a single essay, mainly on a single poem of Garcilaso. But his abbreviated legacy has had a tremendous effect in advancing recognition of the major European stature of a major European poet. However, one need not look solely to European Renaissance lyric in the vernacular to gauge the standing of Garcilaso de la Vega. One other author of a value sufficient to survive the purgatory of translation and thus win the esteem of his readers in English guarantees the poet’s primacy by engaging him in a major contestation. This is of course Miguel de Cervantes. Alpers, while dismissing Garcilaso, nonetheless devotes a significant portion of What is Pastoral? to aspects of that mode in the works of Cervantes (360–374). His conclusion is that “… pastoral was an essential element and even, perhaps, the main single model for [Cervantes’s] exploring the uses of fiction and the life of books, which is the beginning and end of Don Quixote” (374). Here, the contribution of Garcilaso cries out for recognition for his poetry is the finest fount for pastoral in Castilian as well as European Renaissance literature and Cervantes was obsessed with the man and his works. No one understood this achievement better than Cervantes. But in the Spanish Golden Age the respective positions of these two authors were the inverse of that tacitly, by omission proposed by Alpers for them. There, Garcilaso occupies notably higher ground since in the sixteenth-century Spanish republic of letters poetry commanded the greatest prestige. An extremely ambitious and competitive contender for artistic renown like Cervantes would naturally turn to verse as his major field of endeavor, where Garcilaso offered himself as not only a most admirable model but also a formidable rival. In addition, Garcilaso’s social standing was unexceptionable. Though he and his...