SIR WALTER RALEGH, SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, MARY SIDNEY COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE, QUEEN ELIZABETH I
It’s chiefly Sir Walter Ralegh, whose year of birth is supposedly 1552 (like Spenser’s), who tempts us to hope that great poems may be rediscovered centuries after they vanish. Of all the sixteenth-century poets’ lives his is the most intriguing in its adventures and mishaps. If anyone understood the wheel of fortune, it was this Edmund Hillary of social and political climbing, this indomitable adventurer, lover and explorer.
“He was a tall, handsome and bold man; but his naeve [...] was that he was damnable proud,” Aubrey tells us. Later he embellishes “handsome” in ways that make us wonder at Queen Elizabeth’s taste: “He had a most remarkable aspect, an exceeding high forehead, long-faced and sour eie-lidded, a kind of pigge-eie. His Beard turned up naturally.” He kept his Devonshire burr and had a small voice. In his age the effortlessly aristocratic Sidney was loved and revered; Ralegh was feared and despised by all but his close circle. Both were legends alive—and dead. Sidney was born with the silver spoon, but Ralegh’s spoon was merely plated. He had to make his way by talent, wit, chicanery and strength.
Born in East Budleigh, Devon, Ralegh was the son of a not particularly distinguished gentleman. In his midteens he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, and then to the Middle Temple. Anthony à Wood reports that he was “worthily esteemed” there, and we know that Francis Bacon, his friend, walked arm in arm with him around the gardens of Gray’s Inn. By 1576 he was writing verse.
His life as a soldier included service with the Huguenots in the French wars of religion. He was active in Ireland and his name is associated particularly with Smerwick and Youghal and the suppression of Irish resistance. In 1582, an army officer aged thirty, he came home from Ireland. Already known at court, instantly he climbed the north face of royal favor. Sir John Harrington recalls Elizabeth in a letter: “When she smiled, it was pure sun-shine, that every one did choose to bask in, if they could; but anon came a storm from a sudden gathering of clouds, and the thunder fell in wondrous manner on all alike.” Ralegh experienced both weathers. Did he really spread a cloak over a puddle for her? He became her favorite because he exceeded all the other courtiers in the inventiveness and extravagance of his courtesies. He understood the codes of sentiment to which she responded and sported her favors in all the right ways. It cannot have been easy. Spenser in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe reflects on the hollowness of court love, so different from the courtly love of Chaucer:
For all the walls and windows there are writ,
All full of love, and love, and love my dear,
And all their talk and study is of it.
Ne any there doth brave or valiant seem,
Unless that some gay mistress’ badge he bears:
Ne any one himself doth aught esteem,
Unless he swim in love up to the ears.
Ralegh enjoyed such play, having the parts for it more than Spenser did. He became a knight in 1584, was appointed captain of the guard in 1587, and received other preferments. The queen granted him a monopoly in connection with wine trading and a patent to conquer and colonize in her name. For a decade he was generally in favor. Ralegh re-sealed her affection when he gave her Ocean’s Love to Cynthia, and when he presented to her Edmund Spenser with the first three books of The Faerie Queene. Ralegh wore Elizabeth’s favors ostentatiously and did not prepare for, though he prepared, his fall.
He fell because he got Elizabeth Throckmorton pregnant. She was the queen’s maid of honor. He married her secretly in 1592 and that was that. After a spell in the Tower he was released to live in Sherborne, Dorset. Aubrey, who knew the places Ralegh lived, evokes the splendors both of his London residence Durham House on the Thames and of Sherborne Castle. His provincial exile was not long. He served the queen again in naval action against Spain and later in his apparently unsuccessful voyage of exploration to Guiana. It did have some long-term consequences: the potato returned with him, and, Aubrey says, “Sir Walter was the first that brought Tobacco into England and into fashion.” This is another of Aubrey’s embroideries: it was John Hawkins (initiator of the slave trade between Sierra Leone and Hispaniola) who introduced tobacco into England in 1565, though Ralegh may have made it fashionable. As early as 6 December 1492 Europeans were raking their lungs with New World smoke: Columbus landed in Hispaniola (Quisqueya) and Luis de Torres y Rodrigo first records smoking tobacco (describing natives who “drink smoke”). Rodrigo de Jerez was the first European to take up the habit. More credible is Aubrey’s statement that Ralegh took a trunk of books on his travels to study and that he was a “chymist” (an alchemist). “He was no Slug; without doubt he had a wonderful waking spirit, and a great judgment to guide it.”
The queen—“a Lady whom Time had surprised”—died in 1603. The accession of James VI of Scotland (James I of England) did not enhance Ralegh’s fortunes. The poet made James “laugh so that he was ready to beshitt his Briggs” at some coarse verses, but the suspicious new monarch was not long beguiled. He worked quickly: Ralegh was tried for treason, condemned to death, reprieved and detained in the Tower for thirteen years. In 1615 the king released him unpardoned to pursue the royal interest in further exploration of Guiana, where Ralegh claimed to have discovered a gold mine. He went under impossible conditions and lost his son on the expedition. He returned broken and dying to a pitiless king, who—urged on by his relative the Spanish king, who “proved” the gold mine was a fabrication—in 1618 had him beheaded (ostensibly still on grounds of treason) for what he’d done long before in the struggle against Spain. On the scaffold Ralegh revealed his true colors. Aubrey is surely a dependable witness here. “He was an a-christ, not an atheist.” He spoke there of and to God, never mentioning Jesus. Even within the supposed symmetries of the Trinity he detected, and directly addressed, the angle at the top.
Ralegh did not entirely die. Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler recalls a wonderful moment some years after his death. In a field (like Wordsworth two centuries later) he beholds “a handsome milk-maid that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do: but she cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale: her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it: it was that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago: and the milk-maid’s mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Ralegh in his younger days.” Thus Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd” (“Come live with me and be my love”) receives a timeless rebuff, the commonplace wisdom of the flesh speaking:
But time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complain of cares to come...
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy bed of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
Thy belt of straw and ivy-buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy Love...
The lines “But Time drives the flocks from field to fold, / When rivers rage and rocks grow cold...” release literal weather on Marlowe’s ideal landscape and show the cast of Ralegh’s imagination. He writes not out of habit but necessity. Satire, parody, elegy, lament and lyric are the product of occasions or experiences that demand expression. He speaks for and as himself. At his trial in 1603 he declared he was “wholly gentleman, wholly soldier.” This man wrote the poems.
Gascoigne was his first poetic mentor. His tribute “In Commendation of George Gascoigne’s Steel Glass” reveals Ralegh’s preference for plain style and brusque, masculine utterance. Two sententious lines may have come back to him during his trials and imprisonment: “For whoso reaps renoun above the rest, / With heaps of hate shall surely be opprest.” Gascoigne literalizes convention, planting Petrarchan flowers in English soil. Ralegh, first by logic and later in a passion of disappointment, reduced the conventional to the absurd, as in the reply to Marlowe, or distorted and personalized it. His verse, fragmentary, formally flawed, bears the impress of an imagination more agitated and powerful than Gascoigne’s. Gascoigne took failure with wry grace. Ralegh had to swallow disappointment after success and endure the punishments of very different monarchs. He has no distinctive style: now he resembles Surrey, now Gascoigne, Sidney or Spenser. He succeeds on their terms, he has no poetic terms of his own. But he has a distinctive voice.
“Epitaph on Sir Philip Sidney” is his first reckonable work. The poem follows roughly the chronology of Sidney’s life; it informs, celebrates and laments all at once. It is superior to Surrey’s elegies to Wyatt, which, equally sincere, lack the courage to particularize.
Ralegh’s sonnet “Farewell to Court” prefigures in its three quatrains the verse form and tone of the Ocean to Cynthia. It must have been important to him since in the later “Conceit Begotten of the Eyes” he alludes back to it, and he quotes it outright in the Ocean. The original passage is among his best.
As in a country strange without companion,
I only wail the wrong of death’s delays,
Whose sweet spring spent, whose summer well nigh done;
Of all which past, the sorrow only stays.
In the Ocean to Cynthia he recalls:
Twelve years entire I wasted in this war;
Twelve years of my most happy younger days;
But I in them, and they, now wasted are:
“Of all which past, the sorrow only stays”—
So wrote I once, and my mishap foretold,
My mind still feeling sorrowful success,
Even as before a storm the marble cold
Doth by moist tears tempestuous times express.
The presence of transcending, spiritual love even in the frustration of worldly love raises some complaints to the level of devotional poetry. “True love” is not “white nor brown”; she is a form, angel and nymph. “As you came from the holy land / Of Walsingham,” about the Queen of England, includes the Queen of Heaven. The human queen “likes not the falling fruit / From the withered tree.” The pilgrim has seen her, the aging poet’s true love:
Such an one did I meet, good Sir,
Such an angelic face,
Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear
By her gait, by her grace
The poise of the last line, a semantic surprise anticipated by the repetitive construction Ralegh favors, places him not where C. S. Lewis does, in an archaic school, but in the company of his metaphysical successors. In another poem he writes, “She is gone, she is lost, she is found, she is ever fair”: the extra four syllables in his line are inevitable: pressure of experience overrides prescriptions of form.
But the pressure is not always high, and Ralegh can sometimes bind a poem together by a specious logic, using “or” and “but” to pretend connection. The underlying principle is contrast or juxtaposition. Discontinuity is only intellectual, since images develop consistently over gaps in argument. By sequential discontinuity and subversion—deliberate or inadvertent?—he sometimes defeats his great foe, time, and gains freedom within memory. But memory itself embitters the present, history offers frail consolation: “On Sestus’ shore, Leander’s late resort, / Hero hath left no lamp to guide her love.” Marlowe was a friend, and Marlowe’s poems were deep in his memory.
Among Ralegh’s poems are tributes to Spenser’s epic (he was dedicatee of the first three books). The sonnet appended to the first part of The Faerie Queene out-Spensers Spenser and strikes a beautifully Petrarchan note new to Ralegh, even as it sets Spenser as a “celestial thief” above Petrarch (and Homer).
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn, and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faerie Queene:
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept;
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen,
For they this Queen attended, in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura’s hearse.
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did pierce;
Where Homer’s spright did tremble all for grief,
And cursed th’ access of that celestial thief.
Spenser compliments Ralegh more modestly as “the summer’s Nightingale,” and in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe evokes Ralegh fallen from royal grace:
His song was all a lamentable lay,
Of great unkindness, and of usage hard,
Of Cynthia the lady of the sea,
Which from her presence faultless him debarr’d.
“A lamentable lay” describes those poems reflecting on fortune, ephemerality, fate. Resigned at last, he meditates on the pilgrimage through death toward judgment. “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,” said (doubtfully) to have been written by Ralegh while awaiting execution in the Tower, is penitence in a man so wedded to this world, finding religious hope. “Go, Soul, the body’s guest” is less resigned. From the point of death it turns and regards the world. A cumulative, incantatory indictment follows: not argument but an envenomed series of specific condemnations, with a modulated refrain. This is a poem after experience, not after thought.
Say to the court, it glows
And shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church, it shows
What’s good, and doth no good:
If church and court reply,
Then give them both the lie.
Tell potentates, they live
Acting by others’ action,
Not loved unless they give,
Not strong but by their faction:
If potentates reply,
Give potentates the lie.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Ralegh have much in common: great gifts, passionate disposition, impulsiveness, influence, great friends and foes. Each is undone in service of a queen.
Poetry was a small part of Ralegh’s activity. He took few precautions to preserve his poems. His principal literary undertaking was to write while in the Tower, with what books to hand we do not know, his vast digressive History of the World. Ironically, the prose he’s remembered for today is letters and miscellaneous works. Even in his own day he found it hard to interest people in his History, though it lived after him and touched later writers, most decisively Milton. Aubrey recalls the author’s frustration with his readership and his bookseller: “His Booke sold very slowly at first, and the Booke-seller complayned of it, and told him that he should be a loser by it, which put Sir W. into a passion, and sayd that since the world did not understand it, they should not have his second part, which he tooke and threw into the fire, and burnt before his face.” Volume one ends with the death of Prince Henry, who would have been his patron had he survived.
Also in the Tower, that gloomy incubator of poetry, he composed—or recomposed—his longest and most ambitious poem, of which “The 21st (and last) Book of the Ocean to Cynthia” survives, together with some twenty lines of the “22nd Book,” a fragment of what may have been an essentially autobiographical epic romance. The manuscript was lost until 1860, when it turned up among the Cecil papers at Hatfield House. It was first published in 1870. Apart from this large fragment, fifty-odd other poems survive, about a dozen more doubtfully attributed, and some sixty metrical translations of passages from Latin and Greek authors scattered through the History. Ralegh’s work, like Wyatt’s, was in no useful sense available until the later nineteenth century.
The Ocean to Cynthia is not the poem Ralegh presented to the queen: that went missing. Did the queen see through Ralegh’s attempt to curry favor, after the “betrayal” of his marriage to her lady-in-waiting, and destroy it? She released him from prison at the end of 1592 less because of a poem than because his expedition returned to England with a rich prize ship—one of the most bullioned of those brought into English ports—and he bought himself out. His restoration to favor was late and partial. Did James discard it when he swept out the palace on taking up residence in London? Our Ocean is a sequel of sorts.
Addressed by a lover to his mistress in the figure of the Ocean addressing the Moon, there can be no doubt of the relationship or its occasions. The Moon is the queen, the court, England, whose service commanded Ralegh’s entire commitment. Reason says his struggle isn’t worth the candle, but it is powerless against his fixed will to serve and “her” cyclic, irresistible influence.
To seek new worlds for gold, for Praise, for glory,
To try desire, to try love sever’d far,
When I was gone, she sent her memory,
More strong than were ten thousand ships of war.
To call me back...
The poem can be read as “modernist” avant la lettre; we’re tempted to suppose the discontinuities and gaps are deliberate, but the manuscript suggests it was a draft, or—what seems more likely to me—an attempt at recollection or reconstruction, made in prison, to reclaim from memory a text, with no copy taken, given to the queen and now, with the queen, lost.
Something odd is at work, beyond the problematic nature of the manuscript. It is the sounds the poem makes. Ralegh has moved beyond the aphoristic style, pithy and spare, to an elaboration brushed by the wings of Spenser and Petrarch, rich in verbal texture and in metaphor extended sometimes to “metaphysical” lengths. Like other longer poems, it mixes styles and, like some of his short poems, lacks progression. But the trajectory of this poem, and of the work as a whole, traces English poetry’s transition from plain to aureate style. When the ax was to fall on his nape, the plain style asserted itself in the most amazing confrontation with death in English verse:
And this is my eternal plea
To him that made heaven, earth, and sea:
Seeing my flesh must die so soon,
And want a head to dine next noon,
Just at the stroke, when my veins start and spread,
Set on my soul an everlasting head.
Then am I ready, like a palmer fit,
To tread those blest paths which before I writ.
Ralegh was flesh and blood, no doubt about it.
But Sir Philip Sidney, to judge from the purity of his diction, the conventionality of his writing, the elevation of his sentiment, was pure spirit. “Reason, look to thyself! I serve a goddess.” He is the first major English poet-critic, a model of correctness, clarity and measure. A man with enviable social advantages, he put them to full use and excelled in all he did. He has been portrayed as the most unambiguously attractive English writer, a Renaissance uomo universale without Surrey’s ambition or Ralegh’s hubris. He was all of a piece, a bit brittle, with a carefully acquired polish, but noble and consistent in thought and action. Fulke Greville—a lifelong friend, editor of the 1590 Arcadia, and his first biographer—called him “the wonder of our age” in his “Epitaph.”
Salute the stones, that keep the limbs, that held so good a mind.
Sidney, the hope and the patron of English poetry, died at the age of thirty-two, in 1586, of wounds received at Zutphen in the Netherlands campaign.
Most of his contemporaries elegized him. Ralegh retells the life:
A king gave thee thy name; a kingly mind,
That God thee gave, who found it now too dear
For this base world, and hath resumed it near,
To sit in skies, and sort with powers divine.
Kent thy birth-days, Oxford held thy youth;
The heavens made haste, and stay’d nor years nor time,
The fruits of age grew ripe in thy first prime;
Thy will, thy words; thy words the seals of truth.
Great gifts and wisdom rare employ’d thee thence,
To treat from kings with those more great than kings...
Ralegh’s first stanza calls Sidney “Scipio, Cicero, and Petrarch of our time.” On the tombstone of one of his contemporaries appear the words “friend of Sir Philip Sidney.” It was a sufficient distinction for the eternal record.
He was born in 1554 at Penshurst Place, Kent, the estate Ben Jonson celebrated in “To Penshurst.” The king who gave him a name was Philip of Spain, his godfather. He entered Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, on the same day as Fulke Greville. From there he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, but left on account of the plague. He spent time at Elizabeth’s court, writing a masque in her honor in 1578 to mark her visit to Wanstead—with modest music, recorders and cornets—and went on missions to the Continent. He spent time as well with his beloved sister Mary, later Countess of Pembroke, in Wiltshire. In every page of his life, he seems to have lived up to the prescriptions and advice of Castiglione’s influential textbook The Courtier, even down to the matter of writing verse—not in the expectation of becoming a great writer but because “at the least wise he shall receive so much profit, that by that exercise he shall be able to give his judgement on other men’s doings.” So too he should know music and painting.
His travels began early. At the age of eighteen he was in Paris during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. He traveled on to Germany and to Italy, where at Padua his portrait was painted by Veronese. He also visited Ireland and Wales with his father, deputy of Ireland and president of Wales, and ably defended his conduct of Irish policy. He received from Spenser the dedication of The Shepheardes Calender, and from Richard Hakluyt the dedication of the Voyages. In 1580 he briefly forfeited the queen’s favor by opposing her proposed marriage to the Duke of Anjou. That cloud past, he served as an MP, was knighted in 1582, and in 1583 married the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. He made preparations to accompany Ralegh and Drake to the West Indies in 1585, but he was sent instead to the Netherlands, where in 1586 he died. As he lay wounded he called for music, “especially that song which himself had entitled La cuisse rompue.” His was a musical family.
Another book dedicated to Sidney was Stephen Gosson’s famous attack on writers, The School of Abuse, Containing a Pleasant Invective against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth (1579). The young poet did not find it “pleasant” and in reply composed his Apology for (later Defence of) Poesy (probably 1581, published 1595). Sidney doesn’t refute Gosson with invective but writes an urbane, reasoned argument. Without originality of thought but with clarity he distills the literary criticism of the Italian Renaissance. In the words of J. E. Spingarn, “so thoroughly is it imbued with this spirit, that no other work, Italian, French, or English, can be said to give so complete and so noble a conception of the temper and principles of Renaissance criticism.” Sidney’s original sources were the critical treatises of Minturno and Scaliger. What his essay lacks in novelty it makes up for in conviction, unity of feeling and elegance of style.
For Sidney poetry is the first art, the light bearer. Following Aristotle (as mediated through his disciples) he defines art as imitation, mimesis: poetry is “a speaking picture” whose end is “to teach and delight.” Sidney’s aesthetic is inseparable from his general view of life. The idea of imitation was crucial. The artist is a second creator producing a second nature. He imitates the ideal, showing what may or should be rather than merely copying what is. This moral art frees the will from the trammels of nature, draws it to virtue. The astronomer looks for stars and sees only stars, the geometer and the arithmetician look for shapes and numbers and find shapes and numbers. Musicians, too, are constrained by their discipline and inclination. The natural philosopher and the moral philosopher teach according to their subjects, the lawyer follows his books and precedents and the historian is bound by what men have done. The grammarian “speaketh only of the rules of speech,” and the rhetorician and logician are similarly trammeled. The metaphysician too must “build upon the depth of nature.” Only the poet is free to marry precept and example, “disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention.” He “doth grow in effect another nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclopes, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely, ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.” Where philosopher, historian and the others address the learned, the poet addresses all men.
The liberality of Sidney’s sense of poetry emerges in passage after passage, but chiefly when he reflects on the purpose of the art: “this purifying of wit—this enriching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceit—which commonly we call learning... the final end is to draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” The poet is “the least liar” among writers: “He nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false.” The poet has thus a boundless freedom to invent and the sanction of inspiration.
The Defence remains a living text. It makes a case now seldom heard, and the more interesting for that reason. Sidney knows that the poetic art is unique, enfranchising, and at the same time limited if not limiting. Nature’s “world is brazen, the poet only delivers a golden.” So in Astrophel and Stella, when the Muse—echoing Petrarch—says, “Look in thy heart and write,” or when Sidney criticizes in other poets “a want of inward touch,” he is not after vulnerable candor or breaches of convention, but a creative power that animates an imaginative world, different from this world but consistent with it and, in that specialized Platonic sense, “real.” Why, one is tempted to ask, this insistence on a wholly autonomous world for poetry, a world parallel to the real world, with its own laws, patterns and values? The reply to Gosson is more than a justification of poetry. It is a justification of the freedom of language, exploration and concern that poetry might enable. The strategy Sidney adopts, which is not to answer the attack but to advocate “in parallel,” is a rhetorical approach rarely used. In recent years Eavan Boland, trying within Irish poetry to clear a female space, employs the same kind of unaggressive, reasonable and reasoned strategy. It is hard to answer because it adjusts the counters of argument in an unexpected way.
A century after Sidney’s death Aubrey apostrophizes him thus: “Sir Philip Sydney, Knight, whose Fame shall never dye, whilest Poetrie lives, was the most accomplished Cavalier of his time. He was not only an excellent witt, but extremely beautiful: he much resembled his sister, but his Haire was not red, but a little inclining, viz. a darke ambor colour. If I were to find a fault in it, methinkes ’tis not masculine enough; yett he was a person of great courage.” There is a hint of ambivalence in “not masculine enough.” Later in his brief life of Sir Philip’s sister Mary, the incomparable translator of the Psalms and (after Queen Elizabeth, who mastered four languages, translated Boethius, and passed her time in prison and in court with making verses) the first noticeable English woman poet, he lets certain real or tittle-tattle cats out of the bag. As John Lyly said in quite another context, “Appion, raising Homer from Hell, demanded only who was his father; we, calling Alexander from his grave, seek only who was his love.”
Certainly Sidney today attracts interest, not for what his poetry and fictional prose say, but for what they don’t quite say, what they imply, what they withhold even as they twitch the curtain over it. And for what his too-celebrated life does not disclose. We might do worse than start with his sister, whose saintly reputation as a translator of the Psalms is perhaps as partial as her brother’s knightly fame. Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1561–1621), was raised at Ludlow Castle, where Milton’s Comus was first performed a century later. Her father, Sir Henry Sidney, was president of Wales. She was well educated (Latin, Greek, Hebrew) and loved learning and learned people. Philip was her constant companion in her early years. Queen Elizabeth made her a member of the royal household in 1575 and she accompanied the sovereign on progresses. That same year she became the third wife of Henry, Earl of Pembroke. The Earl of Leicester (then in favor) advanced part of her dowry, since her father was not well heeled at the time. It was she who proposed The Old Arcadia to Philip, who then revised and added to it as the never completed Arcadia, instructing on his death—as Virgil did with the Aeneid—that his friends should destroy it. His friends were no more obedient than Virgil’s. In dedicating the first text to Mary he recalls how he wrote it at her house in Wilton, “in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, and the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done.” Not a collaboration, but a creative intimacy as close as that between Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Her annus horribilis was 1586: her mother, father and brother died in that year. Piously, she followed up Philip’s projects (including the psalter and Arcadia) and became, as he had been, patron of various poets, including Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Nicholas Breton, Thomas Nashe, Donne and Jonson. Her version of Psalm 57 begins:
Thy mercy, Lord, Lord now thy mercy show,
On thee I lie
To thee I fly;
Hide me, hive me as thine own,
Till these blasts be overblown,
Which now do fiercely blow.
The very movement of her Psalms can be heard in the mature work of George Herbert.
There is no reason to believe Aubrey, but it is hard to resist listening to him. When Mary was engaged to Pembroke, we’re told, the earl’s father feared she would “horne his sonne” and urged the earl to keep her in the country. Aubrey goes the full length of slander: it may be that Philip and Mary were closer than brother and sister ought to be and that “Philip Earle of Pembroke” was their issue. “She was a beautifull Ladie and had an excellent witt, and she had the best breeding that that age could afford. Shee had a pritty sharpe-ovall face. Her haire was of a reddish yellowe.” She liked in spring to watch the stallions mounting the mares (“She was very salacious”). Having watched the horses she would horse about herself. “One of her great Gallants was Crooke-back’t Cecill, Earl of Salisbury.”
“In her time, Wilton House was like a College, there were so many learned and ingeniose persons. She was the greatest Patronesse of witt and learning of any Lady in her time.” Alchemy was one of her enthusiasms: her resident adviser was Adrian Gilbert, Sir Walter Ralegh’s half-brother. It was a kind of proto-Bloomsbury.
In place of a saintly, noble brother and sister we have an image of talented individuals in love with life, with one another; people who under the excessive clothing of the day had bodies with the cravings and needs that all but saintly bodies can’t avoid. It is not hard to believe this of Skelton, or Wyatt, or Gascoigne, or Ralegh. But Sidney? Like Surrey before him, he seems above all that. The seeming comes from the hagiography—as patron and friend he was revered—and from the poems, which are fictions, in contrast to Ralegh’s, which wear historical occasions on their sleeves even when most conventional. The sentiments are not real, or are not necessarily those expressed. Something is missing in Sidney’s poems. Is this absence what the poems are about? Or are they politenesses, accomplishments like horsemanship or fencing or singing or playing the spinet? Or have they if not attestable occasions, then personal motives? The Old Arcadia exists, we suppose, to entertain: Mary proposed it and he wrote it. But what did he write? A complicated tale of strange ambivalences, sexual and emotional confusions, “happily” resolved but still puzzling. In this century, they caught the eye of Thom Gunn. Early in his career, fascinated by Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and not yet able to inscribe his homosexuality openly in his poetry, he begins to pick at the idyllic tapestry in “A Mirror for Poets,” its title echoing A Mirror for Magistrates, where against the sordid, violent reality of Elizabethan England he evokes “Arcadia, a fruitful permanent land”:
The faint and stumbling crowds were dim to sight
Who had no time for pity or for terror:
Here moved the Forms, flooding like moonlight,
In which the act or thought perceived its error.
The hustling details, calmed and relevant.
Here mankind might behold its whole extent.
Here in a cave the Paphlagonian King
Crouched, waiting for his greater counterpart
Who one remove from likelihood may seem,
But several closer to the human heart.
In exile from dimension, change by storm,
Here his huge magnanimity was born.
It’s only within the stabilities of a fiction, set apart from a world of political, religious and moral custom, that characters, themselves fictional, are free to enact instinctive relationships and desires. But even there constraints are beamed in from the social world. In Elizabethan times—how different the Jacobean age, before the theaters were closed!—fiction, whatever the complications of sexual desire and impulse, had to end by affirming the norm. If a man desires a youth, that youth must be a girl disguised or have a twin sister who elicits the same response from the man when she’s produced in the nick of time. We’re given complications—real complications traced through fiction—and we’re given a fictional resolution, real in terms of the environing culture.
It would be foolish to suggest that Sidney was homosexual: the category is only defined in the latter half of the nineteenth century. There were in Sidney’s time specific sexual acts proscribed, principally sodomy, and effeminacy was satirized, but close relations between men were commonplace, and it was not considered disreputable for a man to praise the physical charm of another or of a youth. A social stigma might attach to effeminacy and a moral and legal stigma to “disclosure,” and in the seventeenth century the stigmas became more acute. But Marlowe in his translations of Ovid, in Hero and Leander and the plays, Shakespeare in his Sonnets and some of the plays, Donne in his Holy Sonnets and other writers seem to accept (without in-your-face emphasis) elements in their nature or in the nature of their characters that were to become attenuated or inexpressible later on. They find ways of saying that are not confessional or penitential or hortatory. They weave the subject in among others, and they resolve it into an unexceptionable dominant narrative.
The love that dared not speak its name could only not speak it once it had been named. Unnamed it was ambiguously privileged. “The one salient fact about homosexuality in early modern England, as in early modern Europe generally, is the disparity that separates the extreme punishments prescribed by law and the apparent tolerance, even positive valuation, of homoerotic desire in the visual arts, in literature, and... in the political power structure,” states Bruce R. Smith, in Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. “What are we to make of a culture that could consume popular prints of Apollo embracing Hyacinth and yet could order hanging for men who acted on the very feelings that inspire that embrace?”
Weaving a subject in was perhaps a less compromising task for writers of the “newer” writing classes than for those who breathed the scented air of the court. A knight, still habituated to courtly convention and aspiring within its confines, would be less keen, one suspects, to write “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse” or others of Shakespeare’s vulnerable sonnets, assuming his desire inclined that way, than one of Sidney’s plaintive, almost bodiless poems of desire or rejection. The very position of Sidney in the public scheme of things checked his pen. No matter how private, how personal, a poem recited or written or printed is a public act. He could read the work of friends and protégés, talk and carouse, but his own written record was prepared with caution. However cautious he was, he was a man of integrity: his concerns emerge in prose as part of larger concerns, and can be sensed elsewhere in his writing.
If, in Ford’s Spacious Age, “The art of letters had become essentially a matter of movements rather than one of solitary literary figures,” excepting of course Shakespeare (though he too is a collaborator and in some of his works a collaboration), poets didn’t earn a living as poets, unless they had a patron. “There was as yet no publishing system to make this possible”—booksellers were working at it but needed a sufficient market before they could remunerate poets—“and when finally the stationer (a publisher-cum-bookseller) set up shop, no copyright law at first protected the author. A poem was not a physical object of agreed value, liable to be stolen in the usual sense. Unless the author could prove theft of a manuscript book of poems (an obvious felony, because vellum had value, and copyists’ fees were high), he had no cause for complaint if someone memorised and printed his poems.” Part of the importance of Elizabethan and Jacobean dedications to noble and powerful people resided in this: they were symbols of security, demonstrating endorsement and connection, proving the writer was not a hack and suggesting the possibility of protection.
Tottel set a fashion for anthologies. He was canny: he knew that the printer and bookseller, not the poet, could profit; after the Charter of 1566 to the Stationers’ Company (granted as a means for effecting censorship as dissent was spread by print), the bookseller, not the poet, held the copyright. When Thomas Thorpe got hold of Shakespeare’s sonnets from the mysterious Mr. W.H., and recorded them at Stationers’ Hall, Shakespeare could neither legally prevent their publication nor profit from their success. Nor indeed had he a right to correct the proofs, guard against deliberate corruption, or assert his moral right. It was fortunate that in Thomas Thorpe he had a responsible printer.
A few fine lyrics did not entitle a man to be called a poet. Nor did plays. Sonnet clusters and sequences, or epyllions, epistles and epics were necessary. Many men wrote a few fine poems and did not have the effrontery to regard themselves as poets. Many wrote bad long sequences, epyllions and epics and did. Sidney could regard himself as a poet. Astrophel and Stella (published first in 1591, six years after his death), the first major sonnet sequence in English and the model for later sequences, the poems from the Old Arcadia, and a few additional pieces constitute his oeuvre. Within a small body of work he proves himself as inventive in form and meter as Spenser. The sonnets have a linguistic and intellectual thrift and an emotional control that place them in a class of their own. Petrarchan in manner, but with an overall unity of theme and image and, though without plot, a progression of feeling, Astrophel and Stella, written between 1581 and 1582, the period of his courtship but not about his wife, is his masterpiece. Astrophel is lover, Stella the beloved. The names (“lover of stars” and “star”) correspond nicely to the theme, like Ralegh’s Oceanus and Cynthia. Astrophel both is and is not Philip, and Stella both is and is not Lady Penelope Rich, whom he met when she was a girl of fourteen and he a successful soldier of twenty-one. If only, he reflects, his heart had shown more foresight! There is no hint that the two ever had anything beyond social dalliance. Possibly later poems in the sequence are addressed to his wife-to-be, who as his widow married the legendary Earl of Essex, that other worshiped knight of his age.
When he sets a sonnet in time, it is usually night. Images of light and dark insistently remind us of the relationship. In the sequence the poet first labors to express his love, then to win its object. He gets her at last, then circumstances part them. There are 108 sonnets and eleven “songs” in the sequence. The tone changes from poem to poem: the reader must continually adjust expectation. We are not directly involved. We witness rather than participate in the emotion.
Many individual sonnets are dramatic in structure. “What, have I thus betray’d my liberty?” deriving from Catullus’s “Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire,” declares his liberty from Stella—and his thralldom:
I may, I must, I can, I will, I do
Leave following that which it is gain to miss.
Let her go! Soft, but here she comes...
Another sort of drama develops in “Be your words made, good Sir, of Indian ware,” in which he demands of his interlocutor “whether she did sit or walk; / How cloth’d; how waited on; sigh’d she or smil’d.” We’re put in mind of Cleopatra demanding news of Octavia. Sidney addresses his heart, desire, absence. He debates with a sage whose wisdom is powerless against love. Poems develop logically, but often a last line or couplet trips logic by declaring emotional fact. In more than one sonnet he debates with himself.
Come let me write. And to what end? To ease
A burthened heart. How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?
Oft cruel fights well pictured-forth do please.
Art not ashamed to publish thy disease?
Nay...
Passion can reduce the poet to a flow of sounds as near a cry as sense allows: “I. I. O I, may say that she is mine” is a line of astounding vocalic values. “No, no, no, no, my dear, let be.”
“Come, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace” made its impact on Shakespeare; “As good to write, as for to lie and groan. / O Stella dear”; “I am not I: pity the tale of me”; and Herbert’s line “Let me not love thee if I love thee not,” has a source in Sidney’s “That I love not without I leave to love”; and Herbert may have been touched by the line “But ah, Desire still cries: ‘Give me some food!’ ” The spell is often achieved by simple repetition: “Do thou then—for thou canst—do thou complain / For my poor soul.” The non-sonnets that punctuate Astrophel and Stella advance the narrative, relieve the tension, and have merit beyond smoothness. The first printer altered the interspersing of sonnets and songs, and in arranging a continuous sequence solely of sonnets, with the songs at the end, ruined the progression and set the trend for “pure” sonnet sequences, which was never Sidney’s intention. His aim was to invent a tale of love, clean of allegory; as Nashe said: “The argument cruel chastity, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue despair.” These are love poems in lieu of love. Giles Fletcher says in Licia—and we must agree with him if we are to read the Elizabethans at all—: “A man may write of Love and not be in love; as well as of husbandry and not go to the plough; or of witches and be none; or of holiness and be flat profane.”
Sidney wrote his Old Arcadia between 1578 and 1580. The first version was an “idle work” for Mary at eighteen, a young wife expecting her first child. He revised the first part radically, sending the revision to Greville. This became the basis of the first edition (1590), which Greville broke into shorter chapters within the larger books and provided with part titles. Incomplete as it was, readers and piety demanded that the revised part be wedded with the unrevised first version (the Old Arcadia) in 1593. This too proved unsatisfactory—as usual the printer was blamed—and a more cogent third version was published in 1613. It became the most popular English prose narrative of its period and for a long time after, finally displaced by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela a century and a half later. Arcadia after its two false beginnings substantially profited publishers. It also influenced poets and prose writers in Britain and on the Continent. Shakespeare and Milton made it a resource for their work. Lady Mary Wroth, the poet’s niece, wrote a romance inspired by it, and Anne Weamys composed a sequel. The Queen of France, Marie de Médicis, sent Jean Baudoin to England to translate it for her. Its fame comes down to our century, Virginia Woolf making use of it (“as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent”) in Orlando. Now it is less read even than The Faerie Queene, yet anyone wishing to get a purchase on the poetry of the time cannot afford to ignore it.
The first version was novelistic, while in revised form it is more in the spirit of Spenser, or Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a romance to be sure but always tending toward allegory. Sannazaro instructed Sidney in romance: from him he learned to alternate prose and verse. Prose supplies a context—plot and setting—for the verse. Despite pastoral trappings, Arcadia is a heroic romance.
Much of the metrical verse in Arcadia is smooth, oversmooth, the impulse diffuse, the content thin. There are lapses of taste. “The lively clusters of her breasts” recalls the sonnet where Sidney promises in future to kiss, rather than bite, Stella’s nipples. But there are triumphs: “Reason tell me thy mind, if there be reason,” “Phoebus, farewell... ,” “My true love hath my heart,” and the long invective “The lad Philisedes.” There are a few fine lyrics on age and love, including “My sheep are thoughts, which I both guide and serve.” One senses here and in the sonnets a religious spirit that, given time, might have written more than the one great religious poem “Leave me, O love, which reachest but to dust,” a resolution of carnal in metaphysical desire, of human in divine love.
Sidney’s brand of integrity is not fashionable. Nor does his verse appeal widely as it did in the past. “So good a mind,” Greville said, and so it is. Sidney’s verse, like his prose, like his official life, is exemplary, like a statue: handsome, evocative of an age, an intelligence, even if the stone is cold. Yet it is not so cold, or so white as it has come to seem. There is more of Ralegh, and perhaps of Marlowe, in Sidney than the record has admitted; and perhaps in Ralegh more of Sidney than his blustery history leads us at first to acknowledge. Yet on Elizabeth’s poems—she was after all an accomplished writer—his imprint is firm. Her poem “On Monsieur’s Departure” has some of her fallen knight’s nice delicacy:
Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me float or sink, be high or low
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love e’er meant.