[In the following essay, Orgel finds that Sidney's mixed-mode court masque about the contemplative life, The Lady of May, provides us with a “brief and excellent example of the way his mind worked.”]

Sidney's The Lady of May has gone largely unnoticed since its inclusion—apparently at the last moment, and in the interests of completeness—in the 1598 folio of his works. It had been commissioned by Leicester as an entertainment for Queen Elizabeth, and was presented before her at Wanstead, probably in 1578. It merits attention on a number of grounds, not the least of which is its obvious interest as a dramatic piece by the author of Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella. It is characteristic of Sidney in its treatment of literary convention, its concern with examining and reassessing the underlying assumptions of pastoral; in the unique way, in short, that its creator thinks about literature. Every new form posed a set of new problems for Sidney: although he employed conventional modes, he took nothing for granted, and The Lady of May provides us with a brief and excellent example of the way his mind worked. In this entertainment, Sidney used the monarch in a functional way in the action of his drama. This device, which had been the central characteristic of the English court masque after 1513,¹ serves to define the genre even more than the formal dances, which were often but not inevitably present. Sidney, as usual, adds a new depth to the old device, but his use of it at all in such a context links him with Jonson and the Milton of Comus in treating the masque as primarily a literary form. The work has an additional point of interest which has also gone unnoticed for almost four centuries. It provides us, as we shall see, with an account of what must have been for Sidney and a few other alert observers (among whom no subsequent commentator may be numbered), a surprising fiasco.

“Her most excellent Majestie walking in Wansteed Garden, as she passed downe into the grove, there came suddenly among the traine, one apparelled like an honest mans wife of the countrey, where crying out for justice, and desiring all the Lords and Gentlemen to speake a good word for her, she was brought to the presence of her Majestie, to whom upon her knees she offred a supplication, and used this speech.”²

So begins The Lady of May in the 1598 folio, the basis of all our texts. The title is a modern invention appearing in none of the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century editions. Though running heads are used throughout the 1598 volume, there are none for this work, which concludes the book. And though the work starts on the verso of the last page of Astrophel and Stella, there is no catchword for it on the recto. Typographically, in fact, it accosts us with the same abruptness which must have characterized the performance itself. What we possess is a text which is intended as a description of the actual production: no rewriting seems to have been done, and it remains as a unique record of an audacious experiment which went wrong.

From the outset, Sidney insists that the action of his drama has the same kind of reality as everything else at Wanstead. We are turned without warning from a country garden to the world of pastoral; turned, as it were, on a pivot; for, as in the masque, the centre is constant, the Queen cannot change. But deliberately, there is no artifice; no frame for the drama; no theatre; the actors bring their world with them and transform ours; they deny that they are “characters”, treating their audience exactly as they treat each other; and we, as spectators, find we cannot tell them apart from ourselves. We need look no further than this to realize the extent to which The Lady of May is conceived in terms of the masque.

So the distraught suppliant makes her entreaty directly to the monarch standing before her. The catastrophe is a nuptial; the country-woman's daughter, the May Lady, has two suitors, a shepherd and a woodsman; and she cannot decide between them. The country people have taken sides, and the Lady's choice now has the aspect of a judgment on the relative merits of two ways of life, the contemplative and the active. It is the Queen who must settle the controversy, and the woman urges her to continue her walk; for “your owne way guides you to the place where they encomber her”.

“And with that”, the text continues, “she went away a good pace”, leaving with the Queen a formal supplication. The ensuing poem is a traditional invocation with this difference: the muse, the inspiration of the work, is literally present. The poem must have been written out and handed to Elizabeth; presumably it was also read aloud for the benefit of the other spectators. In invokes and defines the monarch by first adducing a set of conventional attributes for her, and then qualifying these with another set. The Queen is, it says, exalted beyond the reach of ordinary people, but her greatness is also their comfort and protection. Though her countenance may be dangerous to look at,³ it is also beautiful. Her mind is matchless in argument, but also wise and understanding. The point to be stressed here is that both sets of tropes, both the initial descriptions and what subsequently qualifies them, represent traditional attitudes toward the sovereign. The qualification does not weaken or deny the original metaphor, it only shows us another aspect of it; and the conventions, therefore, remain intact. The poem, in fact, examining a number of commonplaces about royalty, speaks wholly in terms of literary conventions, of stock tropes. It is an apt introduction to the work, in that its rhetorical method, a kind of dialectic of metaphor, is to be repeated in each of the several debates around which the drama is built; but we might also note that the masque itself is conceived as an examination of literary convention—of one of the basic assumptions of the traditional pastoral.

And yet the work is a pastoral. Let us remark from the outset, then, how characteristic it is of its author. Here, as everywhere in his writings, Sidney is above all a critic, and so we find this masque returning constantly to basic questions of its own form. The Lady of May is concerned with only a single aspect of the pastoral mode, the assumption that the contemplative life is intrinsically more virtuous than the active life. We may see the critique extended and deepened in the larger pastoral world of Arcadia, that wild country where the retired life of the contemplative man is full of deception and misery, and the innocent lover, that indispensable figure of pastoral, is met with sudden and violent death. Arcadia is about what happens if we consider the real implications of pastoral romance, about the abrogation of responsibility in a world where nature is not friendly nor chance benign. Similarly, Sidney creates, in a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, a beloved who is literally unattainable, and a lover for whom the sense of loss and separation approaches the Calvinist sense of original sin. Both Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella are, obviously, serious in a way in which the Queen's entertainment at Wanstead cannot be. Nevertheless, the same intelligence is at work, the same sorts of questions are being asked; and the solutions, when they come, are arrived at only after all the traditional assumptions have been discarded. In The Lady of May, the validity of the conventional antithesis of pastoral—contemplation versus action—is to be questioned, thought through again from the beginning, debated and judged.

As the action proceeds now, the antithesis appears dramatically before us. Immediately after the supplication, “there was heard in the woods a confused noyse, and forthwith there came out six sheapheards with as many fosters haling and pulling, to whether side they should draw the Lady of May, who seemed to encline neither to the one nor the other side”. We may wish to call this entry of rough country folk, juxtaposed with the rigid decorum of the opening poem, a dramatic antimasque; and certainly we can hardly imagine a more striking representation of the central conflict of the drama than a tug-of-war with the prize in the middle. We become aware at once, however, of the efficacy of the royal presence:

“But the Queene comming to the place where she was seene of them, though they knew not her estate, yet something there was which made them startle aside and gaze at her.”

Let us beware of calling this flattery: its name is convention. There is, simply, that in her countenance which they would fain call master. The validity of the debate—and indeed, the whole drama—here hinges on Authority, inherent in the nature of the monarch.

Two of the country people now attempt to explain the problem to the Queen, Lalus, “one of the substantiallest shepheards”, and Maister Rombus, a pedant schoolmaster. Shepherds are traditionally the heroes of pastoral, and Lalus has been a successful enough shepherd to grow rich at the work. What enlightenment we may justly expect from him, however, is lost in the pretentious ignorance of his euphuism, and he soon yields his place to Rombus, who, he says, “can better disnounce the whole foundation of the matter”.

Rombus is a scholar. If the shepherd is a conventional exemplar of the contemplative life, Rombus is the contemplative man in person. And yet, far from expounding the basic issues of the masque, his “learned Oration” only succeeds in adding burlesque Latinisms and bombast to the shepherd's periphrases. He barely reaches his subject, taken as he is with both his rhetoric and his accomplishments; and the true and tedious burden of his address turns out to be the local contempt for “the pulcritude of my virtues”. If the contemplative man is without honour in his own country, then this pastoral land of Sidney's is a most unfamiliar one. In any traditional pastoral, Lalus and Rombus would in some way at least be at the centre of their world, would express at least some truth, embody some virtue which the work may ultimately assert. Here, on the contrary, we find that they cannot even express what the masque is about.

Both are dismissed by the clear, balanced, characteristically Sidneian prose of the May Lady, who proceeds to describe her two suitors, “the one a forrester named Therion, the other Espilus a shepheard”. Espilus is rich, but Therion is lively; Therion “doth me many pleasures”, but has a nasty temper, whereas Espilus, “though of a mild disposition”, has done her neither any great service nor any wrong. “Now the question I am to ask you”, she concludes, “is whether the many deserts and many faults of Therion, or the very small deserts and no faults of Espilus are to be preferred.”

The Lady's prose is superseded by a more formal rhetoric as the two adversaries enter to speak for themselves. Therion challenges Espilus to a singing contest, the staple controversy of this most artificial form. The ideological conflict is now presented as verbal and musical as well. Since the argument must be discussed in some detail, I quote the poem in full:

Espilus
Tune up my voice, a higher note I yeeld,
To high conceipts the song must needes be high
More high then stars, more firme then flintie field
Are all my thoughts, on which I live or die:
                    Sweete soul, to whom I vowed am a slave,
                    Let not wild woods so great a treasure have.
Therion
The highest note comes oft from basest mind,
As shallow brookes do yeeld the greatest sound,
Seeke other thoughts thy life or death to find;
Thy stars be fal'n, plowed is thy flintie ground:
                    Sweete soule let not a wretch that serveth sheepe,
                    Among his flocke so sweete a treasure keepe.
Espilus
Two thousand sheepe I have as white as milke,
Though not so white as is thy lovely face,
The pasture rich, the wooll as soft as silke,
All this I give, let me possesse thy grace,
                    But still take heede least thou thy selfe submit
                    To one that hath no wealth, and wants his wit.
Therion
Two thousand deere in wildest woods I have,
Them I can take, but you I cannot hold:
He is not poore who can his freedome save,
Bound but to you, no wealth but you I would:
                    But take this beast, if beasts you feare to misse,
                    For of his beasts the greatest beast he is.

The singing match is also a formal debate. Therion, the man of action, has issued the challenge. Espilus begins, “as if he had been inspired with the muses”, but the rebuttal always offers the stronger position in a debate, and Therion clearly knows what he is about. Rhetorically, this duet is set up in the same way as the earlier supplication: Espilus states his case through a series of metaphors; Therion shows that any trope is only a partial truth.

The shepherd opens in the Petrarchan manner: his love is higher than stars, firmer than earth; he is a slave to his mistress; she is a treasure. The world he adduces is severely limited, and “my thoughts, on which I live or die” turn out to be a set of perfectly conventional conceits. It is precisely the limitations of these metaphors—of this view of the world—that Therion, in his reply, exposes. High notes do not imply high thoughts, and neither are the stars so immutable nor the earth so solid as Espilus imagines. The forester has from the outset a much firmer grasp on the physical facts of this pastoral world than the shepherd has: Therion's conceits are related directly to apprehensible phenomena—the noise brooks make, falling stars, ploughed fields. Indeed, he even has a deeper understanding of the realities of Espilus' life than the shepherd appears to have. Therion uses Espilus' own characterization of himself as a “slave” to point out that his bondage is more real than he thinks: he is bound to his wealth, his flock. This is Espilus' “treasure”, and his metaphor, says Therion, has thus equated his lady with his sheep.

And in his second turn, the shepherd goes on to make the comparison perfectly explicit:

“Two thousand sheep I have as white as milke,
Though not so white as is thy lovely face …”

The simile, happily, works out to the detriment of the sheep. But the limitations of Espilus' apprehension are now apparent. He boasts of his possessions and conceives of his mistress as one of them; “thy grace” is something he will add to his treasure. Finally we find that it is no longer the lover but the lady who is a slave, for he warns her against submitting to the wrong master, “one that hath no wealth”.

To Therion, however, possession is a denial of humanity, and his reply, “Two thousand deere in wildest woods I have”, is a statement not of his riches, but of his potentialities as a man. Instead of Espilus' wealth, he offers his own freedom and hers; one may keep beasts, “but you I cannot hold.” His description of their marriage (“Bound but to you …”) implies not her submission, but their mutual union; and the apostle of wealth, the shepherd, is ultimately seen as only a beast of the higher orders.

Throughout this exchange, the forester has continually undercut what is for the shepherd his only mode of thought, and hence of expression. It is clear that in every way Therion has the better of it. The argument, in fact, progresses with such ease that we may tend to credit the forester with an easy victory, and overlook its significance in the work as a whole. Surely it is unusual to find Espilus, the contemplative man, preaching the virtues of worldly wealth; we had thought it was only in the forest of Arden that shepherds were concerned with economics. But Sidney, like Shakespeare, is redefining the convention behind his work, examining and judging the values it implies. Therion has charged Espilus with using conventions he does not understand, with being unaware of the implications of his own metaphors. And the charge is directed as well at the audience at Wanstead, and at us. Essentially, this is the warning of a first-rate critic against abstracting literary devices from their contexts; and it is to become a warning against the dangers of asserting the traditional advantages of the contemplative life, without understanding the function the assertion served in the individual pastorals from which the tradition grew.

The case is discussed more fully in the debate which follows, a prose parallel to the singing match; “the speakers were Dorcas an olde shepheard, and Rixus a young foster, betweene whom the schoole-maister Rombus came in as moderator.” Dorcas speaks for the contemplative view. He cites the legal profession—“the Templars”—as evidence that “templation” is “the most excellent”, and sees in the shepherd the man best fitted to a life of contemplation. So, he continues, courtiers leave the court to sit in the country and write pastoral complaints about their mistresses. And here, for the first time, we see that the shepherd need not be a literal one: “So that with long lost labour finding their thoughts bare no other wooll but despaire, of yong courtiers they grew old shepheards.” Their thoughts—contemplation—are their sheep; but in this work, even Dorcas is wary of metaphor. Unlike real sheep, he points out, these are unproductive.⁴ And finally, the best Dorcas can say for them is that they are utterly harmless; his case rests on sentiment: “he that can open his mouth against such innocent soules, let him be hated as much as a filthy fox …”

This is not, even in itself, a very strong argument. But Rixus's rebuttal goes far beyond answering the shepherd's meagre claim. Dorcas's life has, he says,

“some goodnesse in it, because it borrowed of the countrey quitenesse something like ours, but that is not all, for ours besides that quiet part, doth both strengthen the body, and raise up the mind with this gallant sort of activity. O sweet contentation to see the long life of the hurtlesse trees, to see how in streight growing up, though never so high, they hinder not their fellowes, they only enviously trouble, which are crookedly bent. What life is to be compared to ours where the very growing things are ensamples of goodnesse? we have no hopes, but we may quickly go about them, and going about them, we soone obtaine them …”

Again, simply by his position in the debate, the foster has the advantage. But more than that, we are aware that no case at all has been presented for the shepherd, and that it is Rixus, who, in this speech about the virtues of a life of action, is the one really concerned with the life of the mind. “This gallant sort of activity,” he says, asserting its inherent nobility, “doth both strengthen the body and raise up the mind”; and his “ensamples of goodnesse” are drawn, like Therion's in the earlier debate, from the observable facts of the pastoral world. One would, I suppose, be hard put to find a less active “ensample” of the active life than “the hurtlesse trees”, but the point is that the man of action is receptive to all experience; he is living as a part of nature, and everything in nature offers him an exemplary lesson; and consequently he, and only he, possesses the contemplative virtues as well. Indeed, we find that for Sidney there can be no dichotomy between contemplation and action: the one necessarily leads to the other. So, what we may call “original sin” in Arcadia is the renunciation of an active political life for a pastoral dream—which ultimately cannot be realized. We may compare with this the Elizabethan version of a classic invitation to give up the world, couched in the language of Espilus and rejected by the Renaissance prototype of wisdom:

“Come, worthy Greek, Ulysses come.
Possess these shores with me …”(5)

There can by this time, I take it, be no question about where the choice between Espilus and Therion must lie. The time for the judgment has come, and the May Lady submits her fate to the Queen, reminding her and us explicitly “that in judging me, you judge more than me in it”. The answer should, then, be a statement about the nature of a whole convention, an apprehension of the kinds of values pastoral may validly assert. And since the case is so clear, we will find it amusing enough that Elizabeth should have picked wrongly, but astonishing that no one since then should have noticed the error.

“It pleased her Majesty to judge that Espilus did the better diserve her: but what words, what reasons she used for it, this paper, which carrieth so base names, is not worthy to containe.”

The omission of the reasoning is perhaps fortunate. Elizabeth, versed in the convention, picked Espilus because shepherds are the heroes of pastoral. But this is a most unconventional pastoral, and how wrong the Queen's choice was is apparent from the song of triumph which follows:

“Silvanus long in love,
and long in vaine,
At length obtained the point of his desire,
When being askt, now that he did obtaine
His wished weale, what more he could require:
                    Nothing sayd he, for most I joy in this,
                    That Goddesse mine, my blessed being sees.
When Wanton Pan deceiv'd
with Lions skin,
Came to the bed, where wound for kisse he got,
To wo and shame the wretch did enter in,
Till this he tooke for comfort of his lot,
                    Poore Pan (he
sayd) although thou beaten be,
                    It is no shame, since Hercules was he.
Thus joyfully in chosen tunes rejoyce,
That such a one is witnesse of my hart,
Whose cleerest eyes I blisse, and sweetest voyce,
That see my good, and judgeth my desert:
                    Thus wofully I in wo this salve do find,
                    My foule mishap came yet from fairest mind.”

“Espilus”, we learn, “sang this song, tending to the greatnesse of his owne joy, and yet to the comfort of the other side, since they were overthrowne by a most worthy adversarie.” But the song recounts how Silvanus, the archetypal fo(re)ster, won his love, and Pan, the archetypal shepherd, lost his, defeated moreover by Hercules, the archetypal man of action. Only the final couplet properly belongs to Espilus, who is clearly the loser.

We may muse a little on the mechanics of this fiasco. The judgment was obviously left entirely in the Queen's hands, and it is certainly possible that she was asked to deliver it on the spot. If she saw a text of the work beforehand and prepared her reply, it must have seemed somewhat impolitic for Sidney to tell the learned Eliza that she had missed the point. But why at least was the final song not revised?—or did the queen withhold her decision even from the author until the performance? And if so, did Espilus know Therion's victory song? Or—one final speculation—is the text we have, which was presumably owned by the Countess of Pembroke, simply an original script of the masque, with the Queen's decision indicated, but not including any alterations made for the actual performance?

At last, with a brief valediction, the masquers depart. No curtain closes, there is no theatre to leave; nothing has changed, and the Queen continues her walk through Wanstead garden. Sidney's problem had been to make a queen who was not a masquer the centre of his masque. His solution was to conceive his work as a series of addresses to the monarch, and its resolution as her reply—which is also her critique of the work. So rhetoric, not the traditional dance and spectacle, is the vehicle for the action of the drama; and the masque, then, is conceived entirely in literary terms. This looks forward to what Jonson tried to do with the form, to the assertion that if the masque was a spectacle, it was also a poem. Milton's Comus is even more obviously literary, and like The Lady of May it is highly rhetorical, centres around a debate and assumes—perhaps equally rashly—that its audience is capable of making the right choice between the contestants. Sidney's essay in the form is a worthy step on the way toward these. If it was a fiasco in production, its success, for those who care to look, is apparent on the page.

Notes

1. See Paul Reyher, Les Masques Anglais, Paris, 1909, pp. 18–28, 491–94.

2. The work is reprinted by Albert Feuillerat in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Cambridge, II, 1922, pp. 329–38. Quotations in my text are from this edition.

3. Cf. p. 329: “I dare stay here no longer, for our men say in the countrey, the sight of you is infectious.”

4. The disguised Musidorus, in Arcadia, II. 3, embodies the identical conceit in verse: “My sheepe are thoughts, which I both guide and serve …” Feuillerat, Sidney, I, 1912, pp. 163–64.

5. Samuel Daniel, Ulysses and the Siren.