SOURCE: “Sir Philip Sidney and his Poetry,” in Elizabethan Poetry, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Edward Arnold Publishers, 1960, pp. 111–129.

[In the following essay, Robertson presents an overview of Sidney's poetry in relation to his life and his intentions.]

Nothing that happened later in his life meant so much to Fulke Greville as Sidney had done. In the long postscript he had to make do with his friend's literary remains. So Sidney's biography was written, and by emphasizing the preceptual value of the Arcadia, Greville tried to convey something of his ‘searching and judicious spirit’; but his dissatisfaction kept breaking through the praise. With one of the flashes of insight that light up his fuliginous prose, he throws out that, unlike many writers whose works are better than themselves, the Arcadia both in form and matter was inferior to Sidney's unbounded spirit. ‘His end was not writing even while he wrote’; his end was ‘virtuous action’. On the other side, nothing delighted Sidney more than to escape from business to his books, and his ‘idle times’ were filled with reading and writing; he avoided the company of noblemen who despised literature. It is this pull between the active and contemplative life which makes Sidney perennially attractive to statesmen and soldiers, to poets and scholars alike. Nowhere is he more eloquent in An Apology for Poetry than in his praise of poetry as the companion of camps.

There was a truly remarkable absence of hostile contemporary comment, and unparalleled mourning after his death. He was, of course, much nicer than most Elizabethans; but then his parents, to whom he owed a great deal, were unusually honest and intelligent people. As a young man, he perhaps expected too much of other people. Languet wrote a timely letter about the necessity of putting one's friends' faults out of sight: ‘unless you alter your opinion you will be always meeting with persons who will excite your wrath and give you cause for complaining’. This disillusioned French protestant thought it was much in the then troubled times if men did not actually betray their friends. He would not have approved of the furious letter Sidney wrote to his father's secretary, Molyneux, when he suspected that his private letters were being opened; nor did he approve of the quarrel with the Earl of Oxford. Sidney never became ‘politic’ in the sense that Burghley was; but he learned—at any rate in the last ten months of his life as Governor of Flushing—to manage and to work with men less idealistic than himself.

He was little more than a boy when he set off on his European travels, yet eminent statesmen and scholars immediately fell under his spell. The long score of works dedicated to him date from this time; on a later mission the leaders on opposite sides, Don John of Austria and William the Silent, were captivated—a marriage with the latter's sister was even mooted. These were personal triumphs and cannot be explained away as tributes to the nephew and heir of the Earl of Leicester and a very junior member of the English party which stood for a Protestant alliance with the German princes, sympathy for the Huguenots, intervention in the Netherlands against Spain coupled with an attack on the Spanish empire overseas, and an active colonization policy in the New World. These were the causes that Leicester, Walsingham, and Sir Henry Sidney urged on the Queen and Burghley, who cared little for the Protestant cause in Europe and had a deep distrust of the French and the Dutch: they were the causes with which Sidney identified himself on his return to England.

Languet had a more mature appreciation than Sidney of the many shifts in Burghley's foreign policy—even over the Queen's proposed marriage with Anjou, about which, probably at the instigation of Leicester, Sidney wrote a letter to the Queen urging the objections. Languet even understood the repeated delays in sending help to the Netherlands. It was scarcely necessary, though, to advise Sidney to be friendly to the Cecils. He had stayed with Burghley as a boy and won his friendship—though his father's suggestion of a match between him and Anne Cecil was not taken up. Sidney may have fretted at Elizabeth's vacillations, but he was never in doubt about her importance. She was, he wrote on 12 June 1575, shortly after his return home, a Meleager's brand to England, ‘when it perishes farewell to all our quietness’. She might not have relished the further comment of this young man that she was ‘somewhat advanced in years yet vigorous in health’. Sidney was not so fulsome as poets became in the 1590's in their flattery of the ageing Virgin Queen; but in contriving an entertainment like The Lady of May for her reception at Wanstead in 1578, and by taking part in the elaborate accession day tilts, he made his contribution to the cult. Moreover, his father, Sir Henry, served her well in Wales and Ireland, and was sometimes ill-rewarded for his faithfulness, and blunt in his criticisms of royal parsimony; and the beauty of his wife, Lady Mary, was destroyed by smallpox contracted through nursing the Queen. When the marriage between Sidney and Frances Walsingham was arranged without consulting her, Elizabeth went through the motions of displeasure with which she customarily greeted the marriages of her courtiers—but relented sufficiently to stand godmother to Sidney's daughter. Finally, she could not forgive him for being so careless as to get himself mortally wounded.

Sidney's letters of 1580–1 make it clear that it was not disgrace on account of his opposition to the Anjou match which kept him away from the Court, but poverty. What is the Queen going to do for him he asks Burghley (10 October 1581)? This and two further letters reveal that the money he so desperately needs is likely to come from impropriations of Papists' possessions. The scale of Sidney's requirements is indicated in the letter to Leicester of 28 December:

Without it bee 3000^li never to troble yowrself in it, for my cace is not so desperate, that I woold gett clamor for less. Truly I lyke not their persons and much worse their religions, but I think my fortune very hard that my reward must be built uppon other mens punishmentes.

Sidney and Leicester were granted £3,000 from this source; but by 1583 Sidney was again in debt. In view of the large sums he needed and the very small sums an author could hope to obtain from selling his works to the stationers, there is no need to invoke his amateur status or supposed distaste for print to account for the fact that all his works remained in manuscript during his lifetime. Astrophel and Stella was clearly too private at the time it was written. The dedication to the Countess of Pembroke printed with the 1590 new Arcadia, but written for the completed old Arcadia, is couched in terms that suggest a preface to a book rather than a private letter; but Sidney changed his mind and started to recast the work and to add a great deal of new material. The new Arcadia was left unfinished at his death—and was probably not touched after 1584 (the date on the manuscript copy in the Cambridge University Library) when affairs of state increasingly engaged his attention. Sidney's defence of his uncle in reply to the libels in Leicester's Commonwealth (1584) was intended for the press, with its rather ridiculous challenge to the anonymous author: ‘And from the date of this wryting, emprinted and published I will three monthes expect thyne answer’. But Sidney gave an excessive amount of space to his pride in being a Dudley, and a far more effective answer was provided by Gentili in his dedication of De Legationibus Libri Tres to Sidney. The only work which Sidney can be reproached for not having printed as it stood is An Apology for Poetry—the phraseology suggests that the author had readers in mind. He may have felt that he had been too slow in coming to the defence of poetry and that Lodge had adequately answered Gosson's attack in The School of Abuse in the year this work came out (1579); or, more likely, been too busy to arrange publication.

Enough has been said of Sidney's poverty to indicate that this ‘Generall Maecenas of Learning’ could not afford to support other poets. Patronage in this sense had to be left to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke; Sidney did pay for Abraham Fraunce's education at Cambridge and give four angels for a dedication to the translator, Richard Robinson, in 1570, but all he could usually offer was example and encouragement. Eleanor Rosenberg has suggested that Leicester delegated to Sidney the patronage of poetry; but this is to make patronage sound too organized. There was nothing tangible to delegate: Gosson's School of Abuse and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender were an unlucky and a lucky shot—not that Sidney seems to have taken great notice of The Shepheardes Calender. The letters of Harvey and Spenser written and published after it appeared have the rather unpleasant flavour of getting at Sidney.

The friendship of Sidney and Spenser is one of the might-have-beens of literary life. Spenser's long-delayed elegy Astrophel reveals that he was so out of touch as to suppose that the Stella of Sidney's poems was his wife. True, he speaks of his ‘entire love and humble affection’ to Sidney, but ‘Patron of my young Muses’ probably means no more than that he had chosen to dedicate The Shepheardes Calender to Sidney. The most that may be claimed is that W. L.'s commendatory verses to The Faerie Queene imply that Sidney encouraged him to write the poem. Dyer and Fulke Greville were Sidney's poet-friends; and it was to them that he bequeathed his books. Spenser's departure to Ireland in July 1580 may be the reason why the relationship never ripened; but a suspicion remains that a difference in social status, and perhaps the indiscretions of Gabriel Harvey, were factors. Whilst failing to mention specifically the poetry of his friends Dyer and Greville, at least Sidney put it on record in An Apology for Poetry that there was much poetry in The Shepheardes Calender—unless he was mistaken.

It is not clear when Sidney himself slipped into the name of poet. To read his correspondence with Languet is to follow the education of a statesman. He is to study enough astronomy to understand cosmography; but must not give too much time to it, nor to geometry (a noble study in itself) as he will so soon have to tear himself away from his literary labours. For the same reason, Greek had better be omitted. He must practise his Latin style for diplomatic correspondence; his French is nearly perfect and his Italian now sufficient; but it really was essential for an English diplomat to speak some German (Sidney promised to try though he thought it a beastly language). Next to the sacred scriptures, he should study the branch of moral philosophy which treats of justice and injustice; history he has made great progress with. Sidney replied regretfully that he would give up geometry, though he thought it would be of the greatest service in the art of war. He would content himself with only so much Greek as was necessary for the understanding of Aristotle, for, although translations appeared daily, the meaning was not declared plainly or aptly enough. If Sidney had started to write poetry, he kept remarkably quiet about it. Languet, with his hopes for the future of European protestantism centred on Sidney, might not have approved. Although the first version of the Arcadia was completed before Languet's death in 1581, Sidney does not once mention even the ‘Ister Bank’ poem in which he celebrated his old tutor. (It should be noted that not all of his letters have survived.)

Sannazaro and Montemayor had both used the pastoral as a vehicle for semi-fictional autobiography; so it should be no surprise to find Spenser and Harvey masquerading as Colin Clout and Hobbinol in The Shepheardes Calender, and among the shepherds in the old Arcadia the melancholy Philisides, the pupil of Languet.³ He is a stranger to Arcadia, and in response to earnest entreaty he describes his parentage, education, and travel abroad in words which offer an exact summary of Sidney's own career up to 1575. On his return, Philisides' ‘course of tranquillity’ was diverted by his falling in love with Mira, who rejected his suit.⁴ In the new Arcadia (1590) Philisides has disappeared from the Eclogues; the first poem is sung by Amphialus to Philoclea (I. 394 f.) and the second is sent by Dorus to Pamela (I. 357). Life had marched on and Philisides is no longer the melancholy lover of Mira, who may or may not have been the Mira of Fulke Greville's sonnets.⁵ Instead, Philisides appears at the annual joust held on the marriage anniversary of the Iberian Queen, running against an older man Lelius whilst the ladies watched from the windows—‘among them there was one (they say) that was the Star, wherby his course was only directed’. It has been shown beyond all reasonable doubt that this episode shadows an accession day tilt at which Sidney tilted against Sir Henry Lee, the Queen's champion.⁶ He did so in 1581, and a few months earlier in the same year Sidney was one of the challengers, and Lee appeared as an unknown knight, in a tournament called The Four Foster Children of Desire devised for the entertainment of the French commissioners who had come about the proposal for the Queen's marriage to Anjou. In “Sonnet 41” of Astrophel and Stella the poet records that he has won the prize at a tilt

Both by the judgement of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemie Fraunce;

not because of his skill in horsemanship, nor because both from his father's and his mother's side he had inherited prowess at arms, but because ‘Stella lookt on’—the Star who looked on in the Arcadia. Her presence had the opposite effect in the tilt described in “Sonnet 53.”

Fiction and reality mingled in the pageantry of the Elizabethan court where the deliberate revival of chivalry gave Sidney a chance to exercise his ingenuity in devising the fashionable imprese for the shields of the knights in the tiltyard.⁷ It was also part of this courtly life on the Italianate model that the knight should address sonnets to one of the ladies of the court, couched in emblematic language intended to be understood immediately by the lovers only, and to exercise the wit of others. Sidney chose Penelope Devereux, the wife of Lord Rich. In “Sonnet 13” he refers to the Devereux arms ‘argent a fesse gules in chief three torteaux’:

Cupid then smiles, for on his crest there lies
Stellas fair haire, her face he makes his shield,
Where roses gueuls are borne in silver field.

in “Sonnet 65,” to his own coat of arms ‘Or a Pheon Azure’:

Since in thine armes, if learned fame truth hath spread,
Thou [Cupid] bear'st the arrow, I the arrow head.

Half-seriously, Sidney argues in An Apology for Poetry that Plato cannot have banished poets from a republic in which community of women was allowed on account of their effeminate wantonness ‘sith little should poeticall sonnets be hurtfull when a man might have what woman he listed’. The true Petrarchan code demanded that the poet should address his sonnets to a virtuous lady who was unable to return his affections. Secure in the knowledge of her unassailability, he was free to assail her with all his might. Sir John Harington understood the position perfectly:

… To which purpose all that have written of this common place of love, and chiefly Petrake in his infinite sonets, in the midst of all his lamentation, still had this confort, that his love was placed on a worthie Ladie: and our English Petrake Sir Philip Sidney, or (as Sir Walter Rawlegh in his Epitaph worthely calleth him) the Scipio and the Petrake of our time, often conforteth him selfe in his sonets of Stella, though dispairing to attaine his desire, and (though that tyrant honor still refused) yet the nobilitie, the beautie, the worth, the graciousnesse, and those her other perfections, as made him both count her, and call her inestimably rich, makes him in the midst of those his mones, rejoyce even in his owne greatest losses.⁸

The epithet inestimably rich shows that Harington was in the secret; and this is confirmed by a copy in his own handwriting of the 1st Sonnet of Astrophel and Stella headed ‘Sonnettes of S^r Philip Sidney to y^e Lady Ritch’.

Before he died in August 1576, Walter Devereux had expressed the hope that his daughter Penelope would marry Philip Sidney; but, although there were some negotiations, Penelope's guardians, Burghley, Huntingdon, and Walsingham, evidently decided against the match. At any rate Penelope was married in late 1581—her subsequent lover and later husband, Mountjoy, afterwards declared that it was against her will—to the wealthy Lord Rich. Sidney provides the key to Astrophel and Stella in “Sonnet 37” (‘of my life I must a riddle tell’) where the last line asserts that Stella ‘Hath no misfortune, but that Rich she is’. This sonnet was not in the manuscript which Thomas Newman got hold of for printing the 1591 quarto; nor were eight stanzas of the 8th song (in which Stella seems to return Astrophel's love), stanzas 5–7 of the 10th song, nor the 11th song. If “Sonnet 37” was omitted from copies circulated at Court as being too revealing, it was careless to include the other ‘Rich’ sonnets, 24 and 35. In 1598 the Countess of Pembroke restored “Sonnet 37” and the missing songs.

If Penelope felt anything for Sidney, it was a passing episode. All that he permitted himself to say outside the sonnets was that ‘over-mastred by some thoughts, I yeelded an inckie tribute unto them.’ A letter from him to Walsingham dated 17 December 1581 (soon after Penelope's marriage to Lord Rich) implies that his marriage to Walsingham's daughter was already under discussion. The delay of the marriage to the spring of 1583 might have been occasioned by Sidney's passion for Penelope Rich or by his financial embarrassment; it could have been on the Walsingham side, for one John Wickerson wanted to marry Mistress Frances, and declared in February 1583 that the marriage had been consummated.⁹ However convenient the match, Walsingham had a real affection and admiration for Sidney dating from the time when as ambassador in Paris he acted as the young traveller's guardian, and extending to the defrayment of his funeral expenses. For Sidney, it was not a brilliant marriage, but Walsingham agreed to pay his debts up to £1,500, and to provide board and lodging for the couple and their servants in his house. After Sidney's death, his widow married Penelope's brother, the Earl of Essex, and Lady Rich and Mountjoy maintained close relations with the Sidney family. The Essex-Sidney group was a very small and much intermarried one, and it was Lord Rich's misfortune to be an outsider.

Sidney's identity with Astrophel is complete in “Sonnet 30” where one of the political questions concerns Sir Henry's Irish service:

How Ulster likes of that same
golden bit
Wherewith my father made it once half tame.

Theories which require four actors, Sidney and Penelope, Astrophel and Stella, in this admittedly dramatic sonnet sequence, and which suppose that the references to poems which do not imitate ‘Petrarchs long deceased woes’ are not to the sonnets before us, but to another imaginary set which Astrophel wrote, add unnecessary complication. The only poem in which the poet is a third person, the narrator of the dialogue of Astrophel with Stella, is the 8th song:

Therewithall away she went,
Leaving him so passion-rent
With what she had done and spoken
That therewith my song is broken.

In the Bodleian Library MS. Rawl. Poet. 85, f.36b, the last line reads ‘That therewith his harte was broken’. The 1591 quartos obscured the nature of Astrophel and Stella as the first English canzoniere by printing the songs at the end, instead of interspersed as in 1598, where the story is clearer as some of the songs advance the action (“Sonnet 73,” for example, comments on the kiss which takes place in the second song). For a sonnet sequence tells a story. Nashe saw this at once; in Astrophel and Stella ‘the tragicommody of love is performed by starlight … The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire’. This is the Petrarchan pattern, and Sidney embroiders it with all the conceits which were used by the Italian sonneteers and the Pléiade—the apostrophe to sleep, to lost liberty, to the sparrow and the lapdog allowed more favour than the poet by their mistress; the wind playing in her hair, the ‘baiser’, her resemblance to a house of splendour. Those who have studied Sidney's sources report that, though he may borrow an idea, a phrase, or a line, his development of it is nearly always original. He is creating within a living tradition rather than translating. Of course the sonnets claim that Astrophel does not ‘flaunt in phrases fine’ (3), does not employ stale Petrarchan antitheses (‘living deaths’, ‘freesing fires’ (6)), does not borrow from ‘poor Petrarchs long deceased woes’ for ‘And sure at length stolne goods do come to light’ (15), that he has foresworn the help of the muses (55), that he never had their help (74), that he has no wish to be considered a poet (90). All this is to convince Stella that his passion is real and he is obeying his muse's injunction to ‘looke in thy heart and write’ (1). Astrophel poses as a blunt, honest lover who can be trusted to mean what he says—also as a real man made of flesh and blood who is not going to be content to gaze at a woman on a pedestal for ever.¹⁰

Those who close their eyes to the fact that a story is being told and who persist in treating the sonnets as meditations on love or explorations of the lover's emotions not only ignore the nature of the sonnet cycle but also disregard the purpose of the Renaissance lyric—to persuade and to praise. The primary purpose of a sonnet was to ‘get favour’. Sidney is, of course, only half-serious when he criticizes lyrics for failing in this respect:

But truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a Mistress, would never perswade mee they were in love.

Stella was not his only audience; several sonnets glance at the other audience of court wits which he expected to appraise his performance as a sonneteer, to assess the effectiveness of his pleading and his blazons. Astrophel and Stella is a semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional story of human passion, and Sidney expressly warns off ‘curious’ allegorical interpretations:

When I say Stella, I do meane
the same.

(28)

Astrophel cannot be the human soul in search of God (represented by Stella) as some critics have suggested: Astrophel reproaches himself for his devotion to Stella with the old antithesis of Virtue/Reason versus Love (47, 52); and his friend tries to dissuade him from marring his mind with such a passion as love (14, 21). True, Bruno declared in the Dedication to Sidney of Gli Eroici Furori (1585) that the Petrarchan sonnets in his volume were to be interpreted allegorically: his lady's eyes were heavenly beauty, Cupid's arrows were the spiritual influences at work on the soul, and so on. This sort of use of Cupid imagery for devotional purposes became commonplace in the seventeenth century, but is quite foreign to Sidney's art. Bruno began his dedication with a tirade against the worship of some mistress instead of God; then he seems to have recollected, or someone reminded him, that he was addressing the author of Astrophel and Stella, and so he exempts from his censure Queen Elizabeth and the ladies of the English court who are ‘divine nymphs formed of celestial substance, like the divine Diana who reigns over them’. Bruno addresses a sonnet to these ladies

E siete in terra quel ch'in ciel le stelle.(11)

This was taken as an allusion to the sonnets addressed to Stella by Florio in his dedication of Part II of the Essays of Montaigne (1603) to the Countess of Rutland (Sidney's daughter) and Lady Rich. Bruno's dedication is only valuable for the interpretation of Astrophel and Stella in so far as it shows that Sidney's sonnets were circulating fairly freely in 1585. Both the nature of a Petrarchan sonnet cycle, and the fact that neither Newman nor the Countess of Pembroke included them, argue against concluding the cycle with the sonnet against desire, ‘Thou blindmans marke’, and the sonnet against earthly love, ‘Leave me, o Love which reachest but to dust’, first printed in the 1598 folio with Certain Sonnets.

Many of Sidney's arguments in An Apology for Poetry would be well known to his contemporaries, particularly to those who, like himself, had read the continental treatises by Scaliger, Minturno, and the rest. But Sidney's mixture of enthusiasm and urbanity, high seriousness and irony, has given us a host of fine quotable phrases from which a bright shadow falls over the shoulder of every Englishman who takes up his pen to write on the name and nature of poetry. Poetry for Sidney, as for many other writers starting with Plato, was the general term for the creative arts and literature: ‘It is that fayning notable images of vertues, vices or what els, with that delightful teaching’. And so, though both Xenophon and Heliodorus wrote in prose, Cyropaedia and Aethiopica were heroical poems to Sidney. But as Plato had noted, the word poetry was generally kept for ‘one species of poetry, that which has relation to music and rhythm’. Consequently, after the recognition that it is not rhyming and versing that makes a poet, for which Sidney could have cited Quintilian, Elyot, or Ronsard, he concedes that most poets have in fact chosen verse as their fittest raiment; and thereafter the discussion is confined to verse. Sidney substitutes the poet's own genius for Plato's divine inspiration. For him, the poet was both prophet and maker; no industry can make a poet, but the highest flying wit must have a Daedalus to guide him.

The three wings of his Daedalus are Art, Imitation, and Exercise: the rest of this chapter will be concerned with Sidney's attempts to become airborne. From that boyhood Sunday, 8 September 1566, when Master Philip ordered his servant William Marshall to give 12d. to a blind harper (perhaps the same one whose singing of the ballad of Percy and Douglas is praised so stirringly in An Apology), to the last gay gesture of having a poem he himself had composed called La Cuisse Rompue set to music and sung to him as he lay dying from his wound after Zutphen, Sidney delighted in music. He once wrote to his brother Robert ‘you will not believe what a want I finde of it in my melancholie times’—the words of a listener rather than a performer. The pastoral tradition rather than musical knowledge is responsible for the choice of instruments—lyre, rebeck, lute, cittern—with which the various characters accompany their songs in the Arcadia. In fact Sidney seldom provides his shepherds with the elaborate musical trappings used in the Diana—but then Montemayor really was a musician.

Some of the poems among the Certain Sonnets added to the 1598 edition of the Arcadia were written to be sung to extant tunes; and later some of Sidney's poems (whether or not they were written for the purpose) were set to music. Songs 2, 4, 8–11 of Astrophel and Stella are generally referred to as in trochaic metre. If these seven-syllable lines are read as a trochaic catalectic dimeter, one gets the sensation of rowing against the tide of the metre. But if the first syllable is taken as anacrusis or better still, as a foot which has lost its first syllable, the poems at once run more smoothly in accordance with the natural tendency of English towards iambic or rising metre. This is particularly clear in the exquisite 4th song where the refrain has four stresses and is obviously in rising metre, with inversion in the first foot of its first line:

‘One ❙ ly joy ❙ now here ❙ you are,
Fit ❙ to heare ❙ and ease ❙ my care.
Let ❙ my whispe ❙ ring voyce ❙ obtaine
Sweete ❙ reward ❙ for sharp ❙ est paine:
Take me ❙ to thee, ❙ and thee ❙ to me.’
‘No, no, ❙ no, no, ❙ my Deare, ❙ let be.’

King James VI warned poets to take heed that the number of feet in every line should be even, not odd.

In An Apology one of the arguments for the antiquity of poetry is that all ancient and primitive people had poets to make and sing songs. The modern poet, too, ‘commeth unto you with words set in delightfull proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well inchaunting skill of Musicke’. No doubt Sidney was influenced by Ronsard's dictum that the chief end of the poet was to make fitting verses for music when he praises poetry as ‘the onely fit speech for Musick (Musick I say, the most divine striker of the sences)’. The proper relation of words to music was manifest for Sidney in the psalms, which he recognized as songs written in metre. When Sternhold translated some of the psalms and had them published with the musical settings, he appears to have hoped that the courtiers of Edward VI would chant them instead of ‘fayned rymes of vanitie’. There seems to be an echo of this somewhat forlorn hope in Sidney's remark about ‘that Lyricall kind of Songs and Sonnets: which, Lord, if he gave us good mindes, how well it might be imployed, and with howe heavenly fruite, both private and publique, in singing the prayses of the immortall beauty, the immortall goodnes of that God who gyveth us hands to write and wits to conceive’. Whereas Sternhold, Hopkins, and most other English translators of the psalms had mainly used common or ballad metre (6/8 time), when Sidney made his translations he experimented with many different stanzaic forms, some of which are in direct imitation of metres in the Marot-Bèze psalter. It is reasonable to suppose that Sidney intended these psalms also to be sung to Claude Goudimel's musical settings. Both he and Sternhold may have been encouraged in their labours by the knowledge that Marot's psalms had once been the rage at the French court; but it is more likely that Sidney, being aware of the superiority of the French protestant psalter to the versions available for the reformed church in his own country, endeavoured to fill this want. Donne's poem Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sydney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister, which reads like a prefatory poem for a projected edition, claims that this is what the two authors had achieved.

We do not know whether Sidney met Ronsard in Paris in the summer of 1572; but he can hardly have avoided hearing something of de Baif's Academie de Poésie et de Musique founded in 1570 with the purpose of recapturing the divine effects the music of ancient Greece was purported to have had. The words for la musique mesurée à l'antique had in effect to be written in quantitative metres—a syllable of the same duration as each note. It is scarcely necessary to mention that no-one now takes the jesting allusion in the Spenser/Harvey letters to an ‘areopagus’ at Leicester House to imply that Sidney and Dyer were trying to found an English equivalent of the French academies. Nor does this correspondence suggest that any concern with the requirements of music was behind the experiments of either Sidney and Dyer or Spenser and Harvey in 1579. Yet Sidney used the musical argument in a cancelled passage at the end of the 1st Eclogues of the old Arcadia, which is found only in the Jesus and Queen's College Oxford MSS., where the shepherd Dicus defends quantitative and Lalus rhyming verse. The shepherds' arguments are summarized in An Apology, indicating that Sidney felt there was much to be said on either side—though he does not repeat Lalus's assertion (in flat contradiction of Ronsard) that music is the servant of poetry. Sidney, like Puttenham, though with some confusion of rhyme and rhythm, perceived that the choice was not between rhymed and quantitative verse, but between accentual-rhymed and quantitative-unrhymed verse. Having elected for quantitative verse, it became necessary to assign quantity to English syllables, some of which were seen to be long or short, but a great many more to be indifferent. Attempts to apply the Latin rule of position broke, as Harvey saw, on the chaotic state of contemporary spelling (Stanyhurst declared rather desperately that by spelling passadge so he had made the second syllable long). Harvey was somewhat sceptical about what Spenser told him in October 1579 of the ‘lawes and rules of Quantities of English sillables for English verse’ devised, as we learn later, by Mr. Drant, ‘but enlarged with M. Sidneys own judgement’; and opposed to any rules about position or diphthongs which would alter the quantity given to any English syllable by common speech and general received custom. If the short ‘Nota’ written in the margin of the poem ‘Fortune, Nature, Love’ in the St. John's College, Cambridge Manuscript of the old Arcadia is Sidney's version of Archdeacon Drant's rules, Harvey would neither have gained much enlightenment nor dissented, for the ‘rules’ amount to following the natural quantity of spoken English and ignoring misleading orthography.¹² This old Arcadia manuscript is the only one to give all the scansions for the eight quantitative poems. The markings were omitted in the printed editions of the revised Arcadia, and it is doubtful whether the reader who did not happen to be aware that ‘Phaleuciackes’ implied the scansion marked below would immediately recognize the pattern:

Reason, tell mee thy Mynde, yf here bee Reason

Presumably position between two consonants accounts for the second long syllable in the first Reason (Stanyhurst made himself miserable over seasons). Mee and bee are covered by the ‘Nota’ as short syllables disguised by false orthography; yf is presumably a particle ‘used nowe long nowe short’; but thy one would expect to be long by analogy with dye, hye which are said in the ‘Nota’ to seem to have a diphthong sound. Sidney's efforts to provide the correct syllables drive him to much repetition and reliance on sentences of line length. He is not able to convey much meaning, and the quantities marked in the scansion are constantly being defeated by the natural stresses. The promise of opening lines (‘My Muse what ailes this Ardoure?’, ‘O sweete woodes, the Delighte of Solitarynes’) is seldom fulfilled. Campian was more successful than Sidney in writing quantitative verse because he chose unmistakably long syllables, avoided words of indifferent quantity and dependence on the rule of quantity by position, and, finally, chose words in which quantity and accent coincide. This selectiveness did, of course, very much reduce the number of words available and in practice meant the avoidance of most polysyllables.

Only one-fifth of the poems in the Arcadia are written in quantitative measures—the rest offer a great variety of verse forms, mainly Italian in derivation—sonnets, madrigals, terza rima, sestine. Here the technical interests is in the different stanzas and rhyme-schemes, or in such things as the imperfectly sustained triple rhymes of the dialogue of Lalus and Dorus (IV. 54 f.). Sidney even attempted, and triumphantly succeeded in, that complicated form the double sestina; here he shows the controlled handling of words he demanded of the poet ‘not speaking … words as they chanceably fall from the mouth, but peyzing each sillable of each worde by just proportion according to the dignitie of the subject’:

You Gote-heard Gods, that love the grassie mountaines,
You Nimphes that haunt the springs in pleasant vallies,
You Satyrs joyde with free and quiet forrests,
Vouchsafe your silent eares to playning musique,
Which to my woes gives still an early morning:
And drawes the dolor on till wery evening.(13)

The line-end words, mountaines, vallies, forrests, musique, morning, evening, are used in all the subsequent stanzas, but in a revolving order so arranged that the word at the end of the last line of a stanza is always the same as the word at the end of the first line of the next stanza. The full pattern is: abcdef; faebdc; cfdabe; ecfbad; deacfb; bdfeca; then repeat the whole series, ending with a tercet, bdf. This reliance on the same end-words makes for monotony of sound and subject matter. The effect is cumulative, and in English literature the poem is an exotic without progeny.

If the erratic insetting of the lines in the 1591 edition of Astrophel and Stella be ignored, and the 1598 grouping of the fourteen lines, 4–4–3–3, accepted, then Sidney's conception of sonnet structure was of an octet followed by the Petrarchan break at the sestet. Yet in 82 of the 108 sonnets the rhyme-scheme cdc dee could just as well be arranged cdcd ee, giving for the whole sonnet the Shakespearian pattern first stabilized by Surrey of three quatrains and a couplet.¹⁴ But Sidney does not achieve the clarity or firmness of structure which is one of the pleasures of Shakespeare's sonnets—nor does he throw the weight on to the final couplet, but on to the final line. Even when a new sentence begins at the sestet, there is seldom a break or turn in the thought (often detectable in Spenser or Shakespeare where the sestet (or third quatrain) will begin with a ‘Yet’, ‘But’, ‘Now’). Most of Sidney's sonnets are single movement poems. This is true also of the six sonnets in alexandrines, which Sidney handles with surprising grace and strength.

Whereas, outside a small group of enthusiasts concerned with the poverty of English metres, prosody probably excited as little interest among Elizabethan readers as it does today, the art of rhetoric was another matter, of serious concern to the orator, the preacher, the politician, the lover—to any man at any time concerned to persuade his fellow men to do or to believe something. Both Puttenham and Sidney accepted the Renaissance conception of the purpose of the lyric as to praise, to celebrate, and to plead. From these aims it followed that the lyric poet required as thorough a mastery of rhetorical figures as did the orator or the preacher. The fullest Elizabethan treatment of these figures is to be found in Puttenham's The Art of English Poesy (1589). Sidney deplored the excessive use of ‘figures and flowers, extreamlie winter-starved’ by versifiers, prose-printers, scholars, and some preachers. Yet the Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella have provided the happiest hunting ground for ‘figures and flowers’, starting with Abraham Fraunce's The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) in which the English examples are taken from the unpublished old Arcadia and The Faerie Queene, and John Hoskins's Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1600), illustrated by reference to the Arcadia (1590). Sidney got the contemporary pleasure from recognizing figures; he praises Cicero's use of ‘that figure of repetition’ (though he warned his brother Robert against ‘great study in Ciceronianism, the chief abuse of Oxford’), and the notable prosopoeias in the Psalms, ‘the Beastes joyfulnes, and hills leaping’. “Sonnet 31,” with its transference of the poet's emotion to the moon, is largely carried by the personifications;¹⁵ though the spacious and melancholy reverberations of the first quatrain are achieved quite as much by the initial inversion and the felicitous alternation of open w and soft s sounds, followed by the evocation of Cupid without actually naming him:

With how sad steps, o Moone, thou climb'st the skies,
How silently, and with how wanne a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busie archer his sharpe arrowes tries?

This, rightly esteemed as one of Sidney's finest sonnets, is only marred by the distortion of the true meaning, ‘is ingratitude called virtue?’, arising from the exigency of rhyme in the last line

Doe they call Vertue there
ungratefulnesse?

(Muir, however, defends the meaning of the line as Sidney wrote it.)

Sidney's unremitting use of figures must have been deliberate, and we miss some of the pleasure his contemporary readers enjoyed if we fail to recognize them in our turn. E. K. was less fatuous in 1579 than he sounds today as he exclaims in his notes to The Shepheardes Calender ‘A pretye Epanorthosis or correction’, ‘A figure called Fictio’, ‘A patheticall parenthesis, to encrease a carefull Hyperbaton’. We can still recognize the linked chain of “Sonnet 1,” the antitheton of ‘Fleshly vaile consumes, but a Sowle hathe his lyfe’, oxymoron in ‘absent presence’, and even epanorthosis or aposiopesis in ‘O teares! no teares, but rain’. Sidney's favourite figures were, it seems, anadiplosis, anaphora, epizeuxis, ploce, prosonomasia, and traductio (the tranlacer), and to recognize them is a useful exercise in the ‘naming of parts’, so long as it is not mistaken for a description of the whole. It is a relief to find how many difficult words turn out to refer to what it is sufficient for most of us to call a play on words: ‘That all thy hurts in my harts wracke I reede’ is a prosonomasia; ‘Thus not ending the due prayse of her prayse’ is a synoeciosis; ‘My pype and songe made hym bothe song and Pipe forsweere’ features antimetabole or the counterchange. If one can recognize proverbs, it is an advantage to know that their use was a recognized figure of speech, and a superadded glory to know that this figure was called paroemia.

“Sonnet 27” can be analysed in terms of a differing or dissentary argument as defined in Ramist logic; but the poets did not need Ramus to tell them to put logic into their poetry. Thomas Wilson warned writers to have logic perfect before looking to profit from rhetoric. Sidney could truthfully claim to be ‘a peece of a logician’; he was, moreover, a fervent Aristotelian, and it is not likely that he was much impressed by the Ramist attempts to simplify the teaching of logic and rhetoric—despite the dedication to him of de Banos' Life of Ramus, and his patronage of Abraham Fraunce and William Temple. In Ramist treatises the function of figures of speech is relegated from persuasion or proof to decoration for delight. Sidney approaches this position in his treatment of one figure—the simile. He objected to the way Lyly used similes from ‘unnatural’ history as part of his argument:

Now for similitudes, in certaine printed discourses, I thinke all Herbarists, all stories of Beasts, Foules, and Fishes are rifled up, that they come in multitudes to waite upon any of our conceits; which certainly is as absurd a surfet to the eares as is possible: for the force of a similitude not being to proove anything to a contrary Disputer but onely to explane to a willing hearer.¹⁶

A rare instance of Sidney's ‘euphuing of similes’ may be found in An Apology where he reproaches the learned for attacking poetry:

and will they now play the Hedgehog that, being received into the den, drave out his host? or rather the Vipers, that with theyr birth kill their Parents.

There are fine similes in Astrophel and Stella, for example in “Sonnet 11” comparing love to a child playing with an illuminated book; but Sidney is happiest in metaphor where he can give the reader the pleasure of discovery and recognition: ‘Beware full sailes drowne not thy tottring barge’; ‘and that unbitted thought | Doth fall to stray’; ‘My mouth too tender is for thy hard bit’—or the elaborate horse and rider image of Sonnet 49. Even when, as in “Sonnet 8” and “Sonnet 17” (which starts from Pontano's De Venere et Amore or De Stella) the conceit is suggested by another poet, the Cupid imagery is handled freshly and with ingenuity.¹⁷ The most potent classical allusions are those in which the character alluded to is not named: ‘the busie archer’ of “Sonnet 31”; the unnamed presence of Orpheus in “Sonnet 36,” or of Narcissus in 82; the comparison of Astrophel to Prometheus in “Sonnet 14”:

Alas, have I not paine enough, my friend,
Upon whose breast a fiercer Gripe doth tire
Then did on him who first stale downe the fire,
While Love on me doth all his quiver
spend?

In contrast to the elaborate and almost continuous poetic figures, and to the tireless metrical experiments, is the simplicity of Sidney's diction. It is not that he was indifferent to words; but that he had a patriotic pride in the fitness of English words for poetry. When a gloss is needed, it is for words like myching or weltering, now obsolete. Not that Sidney affected the obsolete. His inability (apparently forgetful of the precedent afforded by Theocritus) to allow Spenser's ‘framing of his stile to an old rustick language’ in The Shepheardes Calender makes it surprising to find even one poem in the Arcadia in an archaic style—the ‘Ister Bank Song’ in celebration of Languet (IV. 237). Here are such words as couthe, yclipped, ne, thilke, won'de, stowers, foen, mickle. Sidney is credited by Hall with the introduction of the compound epithet:

                                                                                that new elegance
Which sweet Phillisides fetch't of late from France,
That well beseem'd his high-stil'd Arcady,
Tho others marre it with much liberty
In epithets to join two words in one.

(Satire VI. 255–8)

This was a French sixteenth-century import from Greece; compare sommeil charme-soucy, dieux chèvre-pieds, and Sidney's care-charming sleep and goat-herd Gods. James VI disliked compound epithets and Dryden thought it a mistake to attempt them in English; but Sidney found that in a short poem like a sonnet a portmanteau-word will carry the same amount of meaning as a longer phrase: wit-beaten, long-with-love-acquainted eyes, kiss-worthie face. He sometimes forges a verb out of a noun; for example, ‘How Holland hearts’, ‘Whom Love doth windlas so’. If he often preferred the colloquial and the direct, he was, like Daniel, ‘well-languaged’.

Sidney did more than any other writer to make the continental experience and practice of poetry and criticism accessible to his countrymen while at the same time speaking in his own voice as an English poet. Had he lived into the next decade, he would surely have recognized that the fine poetry being written, much of it inspired by his example, gave the lie to his earlier diagnosis of ‘want of merit’ as the reason for the poor esteem into which poetry had fallen. As it was, in An Apology he picked out the winners—Tottel's Miscellany (he mentions only the Earl of Surrey's lyrics, probably because of his prominence on the title-page), Gorbuduc (it would be nice to think that he included Sackville's Induction in the meet furnishings of the Mirror for Magistrates), and The Shepheardes Calender. Spenser alone was writing poetry as fine as Sidney's best before 1586, and we must refuse to respect Astrophel's wish that there should not be

Graved in mine Epitaph a Poets name.

Notes

1. He appears mainly in the Eclogues; see Sidney, The Complete Works (4 vols., 1912–26), edited by A. Feuillerat, IV, 67, 119, 151, 223, 229, 237, 312. Bryskett and Spenser both use this name for Sidney. Philisides became Astrophil (the correct form used by some contemporaries) under the influence of Stella.

2. Works, IV. 312.

3. Greville was referred to as Miraphilus by 1587; this, with the many verbal echoes of Astrophel and Stella in Caelica, suggests that his sonnets were written at the same time as Sidney's.

4. See Hanford and Watson; and Yates.

5. Sidney bought Ruscelli's Imprese in Venice; many devices will be found in the Arcadia.

6. Translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1591), Notes to Book XVI.

7. C Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham (1925), III. 423, n. 2.

8. Anti-Petrarchan sentiment had already appeared in the sonnets of Wyatt and the Pléiade.

9. And you are to the earth as the stars are to the heavens.

10. The discussion of Dicus and Lalus in the Jesus and Queen's College Oxford MSS., and the ‘Nota’ in the St. John's College Cambridge MS., are printed by Ringler in Philological Quarterly (1950).

11. Works, I. 141; the poem was also in the old Arcadia (IV. 307). A convenient reprint will be found in F. Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry (1952).

12. For a useful analysis of Sidney's rhyme-schemes see Poirier, ed., pp. 32–4.

13. Other examples of Sidney's use of personification will be found in Sonnets 39, 74, 98, 103; and there is the universally sympathetic nature in the Arcadia—the pathetic fallacy’ had, of course, been an ingredient of the pastoral since Theocritus.

14. Cf. Astrophel and Stella, “Sonnet 3.” Drayton Praised Sidney because he ‘did first reduce | Our tongue from Lillies writing then in use, | Telling of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, | Playing with words and idle similes’.

15. L. C. John, Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences (1938), credits du Bellay and Ronsard with introducing Alexandrian cupids from the Greek anthology; but they were commonplace in Italian Renaissance literature and art (see E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, 1958). Lever makes difficulties for himself and for Sidney's readers by insisting on treating Sidney's Love (Amor) and his Cupid as two different boys (pp. 68–9 and 85).