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Sir Philip Sidney, Cultural Icon Also by Richard Hillyer 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 Richard Hillyer SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, CULTURAL ICON Copyright © Richard Hillyer, 2010. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-10238-5 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States - a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. 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 Design by Integra Software Services First edition: April 2010 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 occu- pied 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 rela- tionship 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 polit- ical 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 per- haps 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 inter- esting 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 politi- cal 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 liter- ary 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 writ- ten 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 perspec- tive, 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 para- graph” 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 impor- tance 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.
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