Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon Also by Richard Hillyer

HOBBES AND HIS POETIC CONTEMPORARIES: Cultural Transmission in Early Modern England (2007) Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon

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ISBN 978-1-349-28670-6 ISBN 978-0-230-10631-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230106314

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hillyer, Richard. Sir Philip Sidney, cultural icon / Richard Hillyer. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10238–5 (alk. paper) 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586.—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Literature and society—England—History—16th century. I. Title. PR2343.H55 2010 821 .3—dc22 2009035739

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10987654321 Contents

Preface vii

1 “Yet Verses Are Not Vaine”: Sidney, Spenser, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum 1 2 “Equall Portions”: Sidney, Prince Henry, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity 23 3 “Intent, and Scope”: Sidney, Greville, and the Enforcement of “Protestant” Solidarity 41 4 “For Freedom’s Sake”: Sidney, Sidney, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association” 63 5 “All We Can”: Sidney, Waller, and the Courtly Love Tradition 83 6“Tam Marti, quam Mercurio”: Sidney, Lovelace, and the Poet-Soldier Conundrum 105 7 “Beyond Comparison”: Sidney, Lord Herbert, and the Problem of Scale 131 8 “The Revolution Then Effected”: Sidney, Bruno, and the Vogue for “Radicalism by Association” 159

Notes 183 Works Cited 195 Index 209 This page intentionally left blank Preface

A soldier at the end of his brief life (1554–86), Sir Philip Sidney had occupied other roles previously—author, courtier, diplomat, jouster, member of parliament, patron, scholar, and translator. John Buxton’s question remains the best summary of Sidney’s ﬁrst phase, as a European traveler whose charm and learning hypnotized all, wherever he went:

How did the boy of seventeen who set out ...in the spring of 1572 achieve, in three years’ residence on the Continent, a reputation from Italy to the Low Countries, from France to Poland, that no other Englishman would rival till the days when Marlborough went there to war, and that only Byron among the English poets has ever equalled?1

Neither soldier nor poet at so young an age, Sidney still achieved this impe- rious conquest. However personally gratifying (as when fostering his relationship with his mentor and frequent correspondent Hubert Languet), his eminently successful grand tour also makes perfect sense as the best preparation for his next phase, as a budding diplomat and statesman at the court of Elizabeth I. But here he had a hard time making himself useful. After much inaction, he clearly jumped at the chance to join Drake in a colonial expedition to the Caribbean. Nothing came of this quintessential odd-couple venture, however: probably with Drake’s connivance, Eliza- beth summoned Sidney to become instead the Governor of Flushing, a military-administrative position that gave him an opportunity to aid his Dutch co-religionists in their revolt against Philip II, his own godfather. “It is by the success of Axel that Sidney should be remembered as a soldier,” stresses Roger Howell: “It was here, rather than in the careless heroism of Zutphen, that he demonstrated his ability to plan and execute a military operation.”2 The bravado with which he perished in a mere skirmish at the age of just 31 nonetheless immortalized him on that account alone. James Osborn notes that this hero received “the most splendid funeral ever given to anyone below the rank of royalty, an occasion on such scale and accompanied by such a demonstration of national grief that it remained unrivalled for a commoner until the death of Sir Winston Churchill.”3 The same ﬁgure compared with Byron by Buxton and with two different Churchills by Buxton and Osborn struck Robert Kimbrough as resembling viii PREFACE

John F. Kennedy: “an ambitious, dedicated, and philosophically oriented public servant whose sudden death in mid-life shocked the Western world into a self-conscious moment of honest reflection.”4 But Alan Hager cites as an example of “the Machiavellianism that lay behind the artifice of Elizabeth’s court” the possibility that she artfully delayed Sidney’s lavish funeral until it could serve a “propagandistic” func- tion as a “smokescreen” deflecting attention from the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.5 “The charge at Zutfen which ended Philip Sid- ney’s career was the first step in Essex’s” remarks S. T. Bindoff, further diminishing Sidney.6 This sole reference to him in a book about the Tudor era also accords with Howell’s assessment: “One could not write a political narrative of Elizabethan England and leave out his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, or his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, but one could, without too many qualms, write that history and leave out Philip, or perhaps relegate him to a footnote” (6). Such a judgment recalls the fate of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart: “The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.”7 These words voice the reflections of the British Commissioner whose administration has replaced the self-rule of Okonkwo and his fellow Iboans and who now plans, as a consequence, to write a triumphalist account: “The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger” (215). Achebe’s own narrative ends with this title, underscoring how the winners of any conflict also prevail in establishing the terms of its commemoration. Though Howell exhibits no such cultural insensitivity as Achebe’s Commissioner, his Sid- ney resembles Okonkwo in achieving so slight a return on vast expectations generated from within and without. But whereas Okonkwo failed to realize his potential when a colonial invader’s insidious proselytizing and superior technology rendered him obsolete as an African Achilles, Sidney’s political impotence did not leave him without alternative means of fulfillment. Unlike Okonkwo, a larger-than-life figure who so fully embodies his cul- ture’s most prized traits that he despises anything but action and is fit for nothing else, Sidney could write. Though he routinely dismissed his works as trifles, his profound literary gifts will always serve as their own justification. Even so, writing did not represent his first choice. “There may be a relationship between Sid- ney’s engagement with literature and his political career,” Richard Dutton acknowledges, “but in many ways writing is on the margins of his central concerns as an aristocrat and courtier; it is likely that he would have written much less if his talents had been better appreciated by the queen or his uncle, Leicester.”8 Similarly, Osborn recounts how Sidney PREFACE ix

To relieve his enforced inactivity ...returned to the Arcadia, the continua- tion and completion of which occupied the winter months during his sister’s pregnancy. The study of poetry, especially poetic techniques, renewed its fascination. He and his friends Dyer and Spenser ...had begun to ask why English poetry could not be as fresh and various in rhythm and form as the verse written in Italian, French, and other Continental languages. They set out to free English poetry from its “balde Rymers” and succeeded in doing so. The golden phase of Elizabethan poetry grew out of these ses- sions, in which Philip Sidney was the leader. Seldom has political frustration yielded such a glorious harvest, one of the happiest paradoxes of cultural history. (504)

More simply, A. C. Hamilton remarks that Sidney “seems to have lived two separate lives: a known life as a Renaissance courtier seeking political office, and a private life as a poet.”9 All such comments nonetheless divorce literature from politics in a manner not inevitable in the context of Sidney’s own time and distinctly unfashionable today, when a major preoccupation in relation to all of the arts has been revealing their ideological content. In line with this perspective, many historians and literary critics writing during the four decades since Howell downplayed Sidney’s role in any “political narrative” have promoted his status from that of “footnote” at most to “reasonable paragraph” at least, if not “whole chapter” or even entire book. At the same time, a related paradigm shift has removed Sidney with his compatriots and contemporaries from a late chapter of Europe’s Renaissance to reinstall them in early modern England. Though proponents of this newer model have not denied the diversity of Sidney’s accomplishments, neither have they insisted that he embodied an early modern ideal instead of a Renais- sance one. “Our contemporary appellation for a polymath—‘Renaissance man’—resonates with both our temporal dissociation from this ideal, and its pre-eminence for the contemporaries of Sidney and Spenser,” notes Tom Parker. 10 But just as “our” age of specialization has not hindered the recent efflorescence of interdisciplinary studies, including versions of “political narrative” produced by literary critics assigning Sidney an importance denied him by Howell, so discussions of Sidney’s ideological impact in or on early modern England have augmented and diminished “temporal dissociation,” depending on whether early or modern receives the primary emphasis. Though the question of whether to accentuate Sidney’s pastness or pre- sentness becomes more acute with the passage of time, all retrospective assessments of his life and work belong to an age more modern than he lived to see. As a Janus-headed figure in a Janus-headed era that witnessed x PREFACE not only the Restoration of Charles II but also the founding of the Royal Society, the pioneering antiquary John Aubrey proved modern enough to engage in a self-conscious retrieval of knowledge and traditions rapidly disappearing, but early enough to be able in many cases to call on his own memory or that of other living witnesses, to visit crumbling but still extant archaeological sites, and to recognize which pieces of data eluded his grasp—and where, if at all, they might yet be found. The miscellaneous fragments he gathered during his most active years as a magpie encompass much of value, including material about Sidney. For instance, Aubrey recognized that jousting and its related pageantry played a larger role in English cultural life during the Elizabethan period than they would during the first two Stuart reigns, and far more so than they would after the Restoration:

Tilting was much used at Wilton in the times of Henry Earle of Pembroke, and Sir Philip Sydney. At the Solemnization of the great Wedding of William the 2d Earle of Pembroke to one of the Co-heires of the Earle of Shrewsbury, here was an extraordinary Shew: at which time a great many of the Nobility, and Gentry, exercised: and they had Shields of Past-board painted with their Devices, and Emblemes: which were very pretty and ingenious: and I believe they were most of them contrived by Sir Philip Sidney. There are some of them hanging in some houses at Wilton to this day; but I did remember many more.11

When he refers to “the 2d Earle of Pembroke,” he seems to mean the third such ﬁgure, another member of the Herbert dynasty, but in any case shows less concern with who married whom than with what sort of “Solemnization” could occur in such distant “times.” The rituals surrounding Sidney’s burial also appealed to Aubrey’s sensi- bility, and again gave him an opportunity to supply his own testimony as an attentive eyewitness:

His body was putt in a leaden coffin (which, after the firing of Paule’s, I myselfe sawe) and with wonderful greate state was carried to St Paules church, where he was buried in our Ladie’s Chapell. There solempnized this Funerall all the Nobility and great Officers of Court; all the Judges and Ser- jeants at Lawe; all the Soldiers and Commanders and Gentry that were in London; the Lord Mayer and Aldermen, and Liverymen. His body was borne on men’s shoulders (perhaps ’twas a false coffin). (338)

That closing speculation reveals the practical streak in Aubrey’s mind, which likewise emerges in his many admiring portraits of mathematicians and scientists. PREFACE xi

Both his love of pageantry and his practicality came together in a further Sidney-related reminiscence that Aubrey himself traces back to ca. 1635:

When I was a boy 9 yeares old, I was left with my father at one Mr Singleton’s an Alderman and Wollen-draper in Glocester, who had in his parlour over the Chimney, the whole description of the Funerall, engraved and printed on papers pasted together, which at length was, I beleeve, the length of the room at least; but he had contrived it to be turned upon two Pinnes, that turning one of them made the ﬁgures march all in order. It did make such a strong impression on my tender Phantasy that I remember it as if it were but yesterday. I could never see it elsewhere. The house is in the great long street, over against the high steeple, and ’tis likely it remaines there still. ’Tis pitty it is not re-donne. (338)

According to A. J. Colaianne and W. L. Godshalk, Aubrey “recalled see- ing” a series of engravings, based on sketches by Thomas Lant, “designed to be connected end to end so that one would have a complete represen- tation of the procession more than thirty-five feet in length.”12 Aubrey’s life’s work would involve sundry redoings of this ingenious contrivance, whereby he would honor any contemporary similarly capable of extracting value from “two Pinnes,” and with his own writing sought to reanimate past “figures” to “march” (even though “order” as such eluded him), for their world, which he could “remember” in part “as if it were yesterday,” was continually slipping away, even when not abruptly destroyed by such disasters as the Fire of London.13 Of those recent scholars formally or informally reevaluating Sidney as an early modern, only new historicists have shared Aubrey’s love of anec- dote and penchant for collapsing what might otherwise be conceived as foreground and background; but most have tended to make Sidney himself “march” to an ideological drumbeat too inaudible for that purpose, if heard at all. To that extent, they exhibit a general failing indirectly denounced by Gale Carrithers and James Hardy when establishing their own approach as both out of the mainstream and (for that reason) free of eccentricity: “We are not writing about modern politics using Renais- sance examples.”14 Such a statement nonetheless reasserts the very gulf that studies of early modern cultures seek to narrow or bridge. Not only they but also much additional scholarship about sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Britain recently produced by otherwise diverse literary critics and historians treat past, present, and future as a perpetual agon between agents or forces of suppression and subversion. Like Antaeus, this model draws strength from its chosen grounding: the British Civil Wars. The sheer number of studies devoted to these struggles gives some idea of their xii PREFACE complexity, as does Robert Ashton’s analysis of “conservatism and revolution” during this period not as embodied in the eventual opposition between two armed camps but as both fostering and complicating their initial formation, by grouping individuals equally prone to conservative and revolutionary impulses.15 But so many of the myriad narratives about the Civil Wars disdain such subtlety as mere sophistry: readers keep being taught what they are assumed already to know. Contrasting treatments of Sidney’s relationship with two key figures in his life well illustrate the distorting impact of a historical vision whereby he can only enforce or undermine the status quo. To all appearances, Sidney got on well with his father and badly with his queen. In recent scholarship, however, this dichotomy has yielded to another. Studies imparting the maximum possible weight to tensions between Sidney and Elizabeth evalu- ate him as alienated from her court, assigning him republican or otherwise antimonarchical views. Repeated frustration thus converts into an ideological program. This approach obviously risks exaggerating the significance of limited evidence and fails to explain how far Sidney resembled or dif- fered from other frustrated courtiers: the unspoken assumption seems to be that any participants in the intensely competitive arena of court life who found this experience unfulfilling might qualify as disenchanted, except that hardly any of a legion jaded courtiers transformed from foiled insid- ers into agents or theorists of constitutional change. Whereas portraits of Sidney as turning against the court he once sought to adorn make the most of his clashes with Elizabeth, they typically attach no equivalent emphasis to his support for her colonial administration of Ireland. Though Sidney’s outwardly harmonious relationship with his father might have played the leading role in his favorable evaluation of the same man’s conduct as Lord Deputy of Ireland, no hints have survived that he privately disagreed with his father on any point. In his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella (ca. 1582), Sidney portrays Astrophil in varying degrees of proximity to himself, but never aligns the two more closely than when including among “questions busie wits to me do frame” this example: “How Ulster likes of that same golden bit, / Wherewith my father once made it halfe tame.”16 Classing Sidney’s Discourse on Irish Affairs (ca. 1577) as “a clear, manly defence of his father’s record,” Malcolm William Wallace notes the imper- ceptiveness this required: “Sidney’s mind was untroubled by the idea that there was anything in the Irish obstinacy in papistry which was akin to the Dutch obstinacy in Protestantism.”17 “There are few Elizabethans whose career it is possible to review with greater satisfaction than that of Sir Henry Sidney,” Wallace nonetheless proposes of a figure “responsible for his full share of this wild work of ruthless injustice and bloodshed,” as “an enthu- siastic advocate of the solution of the Irish problem by means of colonists” PREFACE xiii

(361, 83). Whereas Wallace stresses that the son’s “share ...in these strenu- ous operations is not recorded” (168), Blair Worden claims that he “briefly served against the Irish rebels in 1576”; but Wallace admits that an incom- plete picture makes little difference, for “Philip had an opportunity to learn at first hand the terribly effective methods which his father employed against Irish rebels” (167).18 Inasmuch as Worden sufficiently embraces new historicism to charac- terize Sidney with some ambivalence as a harbinger of late seventeenth- century republicanism (278 n.65), he should be less clear eyed about the possibility that the son’s contribution to his father’s work encompassed not only words but also deeds. Inasmuch as Wallace published during World War I and with a much older conception of history than Worden’s as his guide, he should not have been as sentimental about those on the receiving end of “ruthless” treatment as he was about those perpetrating or justifying such “wild work.” This partial swapping of roles confirms that scholars capable of nuanced judgments cannot simply be tidied away under whichever label best seems overall to fit their outlook or approach. But it also suggests that sentimentality arises in different forms, as well as degrees. “He quickly became ‘a paragon of our time,’” Worden remarks of Sidney, quoting George Whetstone with this amplification: “He came to seem something more than he was. Quirks and faults of character—the tendencies to violence and impetuousness and intolerance, the nervous and often tense disposition—were ironed from the record” (68). Wallace does not simply erase all wrinkles when contemplating Sidney’s ideological ties with his father; Worden preserves rubs in the cloth, even as he traces a smooth continuity linking Sidney’s ideology with that of his great-nephew Algernon. Any impulse to renew “a paragon of our time” as belonging to a later one involves flattening as well as purging, and dramatizes the extent to which “our” functions as the most labile category of all. On both counts, Yeats offers an illuminating perspective through his poem “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” (1918). Grouping its subject among other companions whom Yeats has had to mourn, his elegy also acknowledges this difference:

I am accustomed to their lack of breath, But not that my dear friend’s dear son, Our Sidney and our perfect man, Could share in that discourtesy of death.19

Gregory stands out in Yeats’s mind as an all-rounder: “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he.” This line serves as a refrain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh stanzas of the poem: the first repetition adds, “And all he did done xiv PREFACE perfectly / As though he had but that one trade alone”; the second adds, “As ’twere all life’s epitome” (151). “He had periodically expressed impatience at the younger man’s casual and dilettante approach,” R. F. Foster nonetheless relates of Yeats’s prior feelings about Gregory, whom “In Memory” also depicts “mostly as artist,” according to George Bornstein, “particularly if we remember that the eighth stanza, on horsemanship, was added to the poem later at his widow’s request.”20 Yeats, however, proved quite insen- sitive in another way—as an Irish poet remembering a compatriot killed by friendly fire when fighting on behalf of the British empire. Yeats com- pounded this gesture with the pastoral elegy “Shepherd and Goatherd” (1919), again written on Gregory’s behalf, and according to Norman Jef- fares an avowed attempt at “a poem in manner like one that Spenser wrote for Sir Philip Sidney”: neither Elizabethan had been a friend to Ireland.21 If Yeats had written no more than these poems about Gregory, he would seem merely oblivious of the charged political climate in which that figure had died: “Since the executions of 1916, opposition to the British war effort had spread widely even among political moderates, while the tone of national- ist propaganda was vitriolic,” Foster explains (118). In “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” (1919), however, Yeats repudiates the English accul- turation of its Harrow-, New College-, and Slade-educated subject, though Foster sees little warrant for the poem’s endeavor to “posit Gregory’s com- mitment to fighting as purely existential, and even attribute to him an alienation from empire” (119). Noting how Gregory’s ghost also features in Yeats’s “Reprisals,” directed against the Black and Tans, Frank Tuohy points out that its author “left this poem unpublished, in order not to offend Gregory’s widow, who was English.”22 Both “In Memory” and “Shepherd and Goatherd” practice another kind of muting by avoiding altogether the topics of Sidney’s descent from and support of a Lord Deputy of Ireland “ruthless” enough to qualify as an efficient administrator in the eyes of his own government. In “No Better than a ‘Withered Daffodil’ ” (1959), by contrast, Marianne Moore could imagine herself “like Sidney, leaning in his striped jacket / against a lime— // a work of art” (referenced in her notes as “Sir Isaac Oliver’s miniature on ivory”): under the right circumstances she “too seemed to be / an insouciant rester by a tree.”23 Drawing on another version of Sidney to extol a dead friend caught up in a web of civil as well as global conflict, Yeats’s “In Memory” only feigns Moore’s level of detach- ment in contemplating so timelessly “perfect” an image; his poem invites a quarrel with others by imposing the consensus of “our” perspective to appraise it thus. Through eight chapters discussing him in tandem with other individuals, my book attempts to preserve Sidney’s autonomy while acknowledging his frequent subjection to tugs-of-war that began during his own lifetime. PREFACE xv

Of these variously linked foils, only Algernon Sidney and Edmund Spenser have featured thus far in this preface: I have not written chapters center- ing on Sidney’s father, Okonkwo, Kennedy, Byron, or either Churchill. An important point nonetheless emerges from adding these names to those focusing my six other chapters (Prince Henry; Sir Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke; Edmund Waller; Richard Lovelace; Edward, Lord Herbert of Cher- bury; and Giordano Bruno): the almost universal esteem for Sidney as a special or even unique case has repeatedly involved matching him with so many diverse others as to enshrine him collectively in a very capacious hall of differently distorting mirrors. This paradox houses another: through his versatility, he fulfilled an ideal expected of every gentleman both during the period in which he lived and for some time to come. He thus became special by embodying a norm more fully than any other “Renaissance man,” except in the dozens and dozens of instances in which just praise or hyperbole hails some different exemplar as no less complete on that very dimension. Each chapter pairing incorporates a related theme, also announced in its title. Chapter 1 thus links Sidney not only with Spenser but also with “the poet-soldier conundrum.” I identify Sidney’s dual status as both poet and soldier a “conundrum” because Spenser and other poets not also soldiers risked halving themselves when praising both parts of Sidney. To that extent, his identity has always involved some potential degree of “dissociation”: even those close to him in time had to figure out whether he put his gifts as “Renaissance man” to the best possible use, given the many choices he ended up making or deferring with nine jealous muses to serve but not the same number of lives. Modern scholars addressing Sidney’s reputation during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods often slight his significance as a literary figure, not only in absolute terms but also by doubling his impact as a soldier in assessing his views about both foreign and domes- tic policy as those of an activist or militant. Both at home and abroad, he thus espoused a specific brand of Protestantism having implications for the future, most notably in the Civil Wars. Though this version of Sid- ney and of Protestantism clearly entailed hostility to the military threat posed by the Counter-Reformation, it less clearly relates to parliamentar- ianism, patriotism, and Puritanism, as factors often invoked to explain how those internecine conflicts occurred. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 develop this theme of Sidney’s doubleness: as a literary figure significant for his contemporaries and near successors (but largely forgotten in that capacity by recent scholars) and as a literal or figurative soldier regarded by recent scholars as significant for his contemporaries and near successors (but little remembered in that capacity by them). Here, my focus shifts from “the enforcement of ‘Protestant’ solidarity” in relation to Sidney as linked with xvi PREFACE

Henry (2) and Greville (3) to “the vogue for ‘radicalism’ ” in relation to Sidney as linked with his great-nephew (4), a form of ideological bonding loosely sanctioned by a single “our” usage of Milton’s, but not otherwise justified by anything in the historical record. Chapter 5 resists Waller’s treatment as indirect evidence of Sidney’s twinship with his great-nephew, bringing out instead another kind of “our” usage involving Sidney’s con- tinuing importance as a literary figure a half-century and more after his death. Focusing on another cavalier poet, Chapter 6 returns to “the poet- soldier conundrum” as involving not only Sidney but also Lovelace and others who both wrote and bore arms before or during the Civil Wars—a period of conflict that on the military and literary dimensions alike tested many a “Renaissance man.” Chapter 7 addresses “the problem of scale” as it applies to Sidney from a number of perspectives, including that of Walpole, who mocked him as both producer and product of fantasy, in part by jux- taposing him with Lord Herbert. This mythical version of Sidney recurs in Chapter 8, as both the target of Hazlitt’s Walpole-like attacks and linked with Bruno by Swinburne and others. Here, I also bring my discussion full circle by returning to “the vogue for ‘radicalism’ ” and by concluding my demonstration of the overlap between nineteenth- and twentieth-century evaluations of Sidney. In these respects and others, my study of Sidney’s reputation differs from broadly comparable projects. Unlike John Gouws, who focuses an essay on Sidney’s profile during the nineteenth century, I devote portions of several chapters to that subject in a book-length survey extending from his own day.24 Unlike Martin Garrett, whose collection of verdicts on Sidney spans from the late sixteenth century to the mid-Victorian period, I cover not only that ground but also judgments voiced up to the present, and thus bring out more fully the implications of his phrase “radicalism by association.”25 Though Dennis Kay’s introduction to his own anthology of extracts about Sidney resembles my book on a smaller scale by summarizing an entire tradition to the point of its own publication, the material he reprints dates from the modern period alone.26 Most importantly, these forerunners give pride of place to literary criticism (as conventionally understood), whereas I have sought to present a greater variety of content, in recognition of the range of responses generated by Sidney’s versatility. Here, I owe a debt to the anthology of miscellaneous passages compiled by Thomas Zouch to buttress his hagiography of Sidney (1809).27 Whereas these quotations often strike predictable notes of praise about Sidney, some do little more than mention him, or have other axes to grind, so that their net effect disrupts the seamless panegyric incorporat- ing them. Partly through the stimulus afforded by Zouch’s precedent, then, I discuss perspectives on Sidney given by authors not typically considered PREFACE xvii major developers of his reputation within the evolution of literary studies generally. “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,” observes Edward Berry, noting this paradoxical out- come of a “single-minded pursuit of the perfect hero.”28 Insofar as such a verdict directs readers back to the works housing those “selves,” its value lies beyond dispute. But many retrospective assessments of Sidney produced before the twentieth century remain “interesting” by failing or not aspiring to be “single-minded.” Their testimony clashes with “the perfect hero” as reconstructed in modern scholarship often reading as if Sid- ney’s life and work would seem boring without the stimulus that only an overexcited conception of the Civil Wars can supply, thereby imposing a “single-minded” focus not apparent in the historical record. Though Mark Kishlansky passionately defends such a way of viewing the Civil Wars as essential for its capacity to inspire readers, he thereby proposes a model of history filling the role that Sidney assigned to fiction in his Defence of Poe- sie (1595), and precisely so as to stress its superiority to history, by contrast “captived to the trueth of a foolish world,” and hence “many times a terror from well-dooing, and an encouragement to unbrideled wickedness.”29 My pages therefore document older versions of Sidney that might lack merit as set beside his “fictional selves,” but have more of a historical grounding than fictionalized history, and thus deserve more attention than they have received, especially as supplanted by newer versions that I also discuss. I therefore focus on evidence and its too frequent absence in studies ignor- ing it, misrepresenting it, overlooking the need for it, or offering something else in its place. Overall, my book well complements Gavin Alexander’s recent analysis of “the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney,” which focuses on the years 1586–1640 and mainly offers close readings of texts by Sidney’s best friend (Greville); sister (Mary, countess of Pembroke); brother (Robert, first earl of Leicester); and niece (Lady Mary Wroth).30 Both aspects of cov- erage reflect Alexander’s hypothesis that “a response to Sidney seemed to require some personal relation to animate it, even if at one remove,” and hence “could last only a generation” (337). Subtly reexamining the writing of a coterie capable of engaging with Sidney’s works by forming intimate dialogues with them, Alexander offers a refreshing alternative to so much recent scholarship on chiefly ideological affiliations, but no direct challenge to that wholly different approach. Though he adopts a relatively unortho- dox position in even acknowledging the possibility that “Sidney’s literary and biological heirs” differ from and disagree with “his chivalric and political heirs,” and dares express some skepticism as to whether any point of xviii PREFACE contact with Sidney automatically entailed membership “in the network of international militant Protestantism,” these dissents from the mainstream occupy a marginal role in a narrative largely making its own case on its own terms (141, 105). But Alexander also achieves closure for his study and an added rationale for his choice of terminus ad quem with this explanation:

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. (336)

Here, the standard verities return with a vengeance, and Sidney’s most enduring significance once more proves ideological rather than literary. Given the wide range of material covered, I have needed to follow some principles of usage. Though many Sidneys exist just within Sir Philip’s own family, I usually point to him when writing of Sidney. His sister, Mary, figures as Pembroke (countess of). I have not imposed conformity on authors choosing not to identify Sidney as knighted, spelling his name Sydney, styling him Phillip rather than Philip, or referring to Astrophel rather than Astrophil. Nor have I attempted to bring any uniformity to the different ways in which various writers have invoked his Arcadia—often (perhaps suggestively) as if it were not the title of a book. In particular, I have not sought to define its genre exactly when referring to it indifferently as a work of pastoral or of romance, and have not differentiated its alternate versions except when quoting or paraphrasing scholars whose arguments rest on the distinctions involved. In addition, I have adopted these editorial policies. Firm dates for works establish year of first publication. Approximate dates (ca.) specify period of composition. Unless otherwise noted, dates given for texts echo the edition followed in each case. I have made these silent emendations: revers- ing italics presented as the norm rather than the exception; re-transposing swapped u and v, i and j; regularizing long s; dropping numbers preceding stanzas in short poems; suppressing indentations marking the beginning of paragraphs in both prose and verse; lowercasing all but the initial capital at the beginnings of poems; and modifying the capitalization of some titles. I only establish the provenance of square-bracketed content and italics in cases with some room for doubt. For their various kinds of help, I thank my editor, Brigitte Shull; her assistant, Lee Norton; and the anonymous reviewers they contacted on my behalf.