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Sidney's Arcadia and the Conflicts of Virtue View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive The image of human condition: Sidney’s Arcadia and the Conflicts of Virtue WOOD, Richard Available from Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/6634/ This document is the author deposited version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. Published version WOOD, Richard (2012). The image of human condition: Sidney’s Arcadia and the Conflicts of Virtue. Doctoral, Sheffield Hallam University. Repository use policy Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in SHURA to facilitate their private study or for non- commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk ‘The image of human condition’: Sidney’s Arcadia and the Conflicts of Virtue Richard James Wood A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2012 Abstract I read Sidney’s romance, the New Arcadia, in the light of a particular ethos known as Philippism after the followers of Philip Melanchthon, the Protestant theologian. In doing so, I use a critical paradigm previously only used to discuss Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Thus, building on the work of Robert E. Stillman, I narrow the gap that critics, such as Gavin Alexander, have often found between Sidney’s theory and literary practice. Like the Philippists, peculiarly open to the ideas of humanist scholarship, Sidney draws his philosophical precepts from an eclectic mix of sources. These various strands of philosophical, political and theological thought are accommodated within the New Arcadia, which conforms to the kind of literature praised by Melanchthon for its life- like heterogeneity and its examples of virtue. Sidney’s characters have generally been thought to symbolize a passive form of Christian Stoicism. I contend that they, in fact, respond to their misfortunes in a way that demonstrates an active outlook. Employing the same philosophy, Sidney, both in his letter intervening in Queen Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations and in his politically-interested fiction, arrogates to himself the role of court counsellor. As such, he is a model for his sister and Fulke Greville in their later roles as literary patron and courtier, respectively. The primary inheritor of Sidney’s political and cultural legacy, Robert Devereux, despite being associated with court factionalism, also draws, I argue, on the optimistic and conciliatory philosophy signified by Sidney’s New Arcadia. Sidney’s romance affirms its author’s piety, in which human fallibility is recognized and tolerated. Amphialus represents Sidney’s ethos most poignantly. An epic, martial figure, Amphialus also participates in the most dishonourable activities in the romance. Through the representation of this apparently irredeemable character, who, nevertheless, will be saved, Sidney displays his faith in God’s Providence and his own salvation. ii di me tuentur, dis pietas mea et musa cordi est. (Hor. Carm. I. xvii) iii Table of Contents: List of Figures v Abbreviations and Procedures vi Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. ‘She made her courtiers learned’: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and His Step-dame, Elizabeth. 25 2. ‘Philip has the word and the substance’: a Philippist Reading of Sidney’s New Arcadia. 51 3. ‘If an excellent man should err’: Sir Philip Sidney and Stoical Virtue. 74 4. ‘I am a man; that is to say, a creature whose reason is often darkened with error’: Sir Philip Sidney, Humility and Revising the Arcadia. 95 5. ‘Think nature me a man of arms did make’?: Conflicted Conflicts in Astrophil and Stella and the New Arcadia. 119 6. ‘The representing of so strange a power in love’: Sir Philip Sidney’s Legacy of Anti-factionalism. 136 7. ‘Cleverly playing the stoic’: the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney and Surviving Elizabeth’s court. 157 Conclusion 184 Bibliography 186 iv List of Figures 1. The title page of Stanislaus Warschewiczki’s Latin edition of Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1552), unsigned leaf. 61 2. Foreword to Warschewiczki’s Latin edition of Heliodorus’s Aethiopian History, unsigned leaf. 62 3. A catoblepta, from the title page of Edward Topsell, The historie of foure-footed beastes (London, 1607). 152 v Abbreviations and Procedures Unless otherwise stated in the Bibliography, early modern printed texts are cited from facsimiles in the database Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com. These texts are cited in old-spelling and original typography except where the typographical use of vv for w is silently standardized. The archaic typography used in Steuart A. Pears’s The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet (1845) has been modernized. References to the Folger Digital Image Collection, to the Perseus Digital Library, to The Literary Encyclopedia, to the University of Basel Special Online Catalogue (Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen) and to Google Books are to those online resources as they stood in July 2012. References to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to the Oxford English Dictionary are to the online editions as they stood at the same date. Manuscript sources are cited using modern typographical conventions, silently standardizing the use of the long s, for example. The dating of events has been standardized to modern rather than early modern practice, taking the New Year to begin on 1 January rather than 25 March (the Feast of the Annunciation). vi Acknowledgements I am grateful for the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council whose full- time Doctoral Award enabled me to undertake this research. Many thanks are due to Matthew Steggle for his patient and knowledgeable supervision of this thesis; to Lisa Hopkins for her incalculable wisdom in her capacities as supervisor and editor; to the editors Mary Ellen Lamb, Annaliese Connolly, Karen Bamford and Naomi Miller for their helpful observations; to the very many staff and students in the Faculty of Development and Society at Sheffield Hallam University who have helped me along the way. The support services at Hallam have also been invaluable: Bev Chapman and her colleagues in the Development and Society Graduate School; Paul Stewart and his colleagues in Student and Learning Services; Kate Wilcox of Student Wellbeing; and Alan Pickersgill of Disabled Student Support. Thanks are also due to the staff of the university libraries at Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham and the Shakespeare Institute; and to the staff of the British Library. Particular thanks must also go to Sarah Armstrong for my grounding in Latin. The text itself would not be what it is without the aid of the compendious work of the late Victor Skretkowicz, editor of the Oxford New Arcadia, whom I was privileged to meet in Dundee at the conference in his honour. I am also grateful to Joel Davis for directing me towards the sources of Neostoicism, and to Roger Kuin for sending me a copy of the paper he gave at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Chicago, 2008). Material from ‘“She made her courtiers learned”: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia and His Step-dame, Elizabeth’, in Naomi Miller and Karen Bamford, eds., Maternity in Early Modern Romance (forthcoming) appears in Chapter One; similarly, material from ‘“If an excellent man should err”: Philip Sidney and Stoical Virtue’, Sidney Journal 26.2 (2008), pp. 33-48, appears in Chapter 3; vii material from ‘“The representing of so strange a power in love”: Philip Sidney’s Legacy of Anti-factionalism’, Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue 16 (October 2007), http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/si-16/woodsidn.htm, appears in Chapter Six; and material from ‘Cleverly playing the stoic’: the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney and Surviving Elizabeth’s Court’, in Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly, eds., Essex: The Cultural Impact of an Elizabethan Courtier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming), appears in Chapter Seven. Huge thanks are due to Kate for her unfailing confidence in my completing the task—‘thou wilt tread, / As with a pilgrim’s reverential thoughts, / The groves of Penshurst’ (Robert Southey). I am particularly grateful for the support of my family, especially my mother, whose love for Shakespeare we have all inherited. This thesis is dedicated to my grandparents, Barbara and Arthur, who always said, “Do your best”. viii Introduction This thesis seeks to interpret Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia as an articulation of a particular ethical outlook: that ethos which has been termed Philippist after the followers of Philip Melanchthon. Biographically speaking, it is well established that Sidney was familiar with the work of Melanchthon and the Philippists.1 The ethical viewpoint that, I argue, the Arcadia articulates, is, naturally, identified with the romance’s author, reflecting his political and religious philosophies, which are, understandably, often also discernible in his real-life public activities. However, unlike the method employed by Blair Worden in his book, The Sound of Virtue, I do not wish to draw direct parallels between the author’s political activities (informed by his religious allegiances) and the events and characterizations of his fiction. Rather, I shall endeavour to show how Sidney’s romance, as an example of a genre of literature that offers its authors a broad canvas on which to work, dramatizes the diverse and often contradictory implications of certain aspects of Elizabethan morality, puts that morality under stress, and fosters a moral viewpoint that is, in the end, moderate, inclusive and optimistic.
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