Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the first early modern work to argue for the preeminence of fiction-making as an autonomous form of knowledge—a form of knowledge indispensable to the well-being of the public domain. At the core of its argument is Sidney’s assumption that “all government of action is to be gotten by knowledge, and knowledge best by gathering many knowledges, which is by reading.”1 Reading is intellectual travel. Knowledge is wide familiarity with those many serving sciences (“knowledges”) necessary for the government of self and society, and poetry, in turn, the superior human science, as the full scope of Sidney’s argument maintains, because of its zodiacal range, the cosmopolitanism of its studied inclusiveness.
Sidney’s travels on the Continent help to explain why and how he advances such an argument, as provocative and original then as it appears audacious now. Between 1572 and 1575—between his first-hand experience of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and his return to England to attempt a pubic career—Sidney’s education was entrusted to a group of so-called Philippists, the followers of Philip Melanchthon. The three central chapters of this book measure the impact of that education on the Defence’s poetics, piety, and politics. That impact, I will maintain from the start, was nothing short of determinative. It determined how Sidney came to conceive of government as indispensably allied both to knowledge and to reading, and how poetry—as the best of all forms of discourse—came to be conceived, in the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, as the urgently required means of securing the pious and political goals of his Philippist education.
This study begins not with an account of Sidney’s pious or political principles and their pre-history among the Philippists. It starts instead, appropriately for an examination of Sidney’s celebration of poetry as the preeminent vehicle of knowledge in the public domain, with an account of his hermeneutic concepts—with those operative principles about reading and writing that determine his understanding of fiction-making. Such an account is appropriate because competing vehicles of knowledge, the sciences of history or philosophy, physics or metaphysics, are conceived by Sidney as competing forms of discourse, and poetry achieves its preeminence ultimately and most importantly because it represents, within this war among the muses, discourse operating at the height of its potential. Poetics matters first because it is only by means of understanding Sidney’s claims for the value of fiction-making that it is possible to understand simultaneously his assertiveness about its agency in the public domain, and the weight of his consciousness about the crisis of public life in motivating those assertions.
A small exercise in critical archaeology affords a useful means of recovering Sidney’s hermeneutic principles and appreciating how those principles shape his representation of poetry as a form of knowledge. Sidney’s Defence organizes its central arguments by means of an oratorical term, the scopus dicendi, derived specifically from his Philippist mentors. (A writer’s “scope” is his main target, aim, or purpose.) However, the recourse to a technical vocabulary distinctive of Melanchthon’s widely disseminated rhetorical and dialectical handbooks has implications far more important than the determination of sources. Scholars have argued that Sidney’s success in creating the first definitive version of an English literary criticism derives mainly from his knowledge of Italian Renaissance poetics, especially from Julius Caesar Scaliger and Antonio Minturno. By contrast, I locate the distinctiveness of Sidney’s critical practice in his accommodation of Italian poetics to a new hermeneutic that he acquired during his many months of reading in Vienna among the Philippists.2 The “new hermeneutic” refers to those remarkable transformations during the sixteenth century in practices of reading and writing identified by contemporary scholars like Kees Meerhoff, Peter Mack, and Kathy Eden. Those transformations included a commitment to reading whole books to recover complete arguments; the need to consider intention, organization and context as guides to interpretation; the reevaluation of claritas; and the importance of accommodating texts to the reader’s experience. As Meerhoff, Mack and Eden clarify Melanchthon’s key role in the humanist renewal of this classical rhetorical legacy, so I demonstrate the impact of this legacy on Sidney’s fashioning of a new poetics for the English tradition.3
Recovering Sidney’s assumptions about reading and writing comprises a necessary challenge to increasingly familiar claims about the so-called “allegorical” character of his poetry and poetics.4 Addressing such claims matters because they bear directly upon Sidney’s understanding about how language exerts its power. If Gordon Teskey correctly identifies allegory as “an incoherent narrative,” which conventionally attends to “the difference between what it refers to and what it refers with” (as a fiction, that is, whose meaning depends on a strategic disjunction between signifier and signified in the manner of Spenser’s Faerie Queene), then Sidney’s commitment to the new hermeneutic argues for his participation in an alternative tradition of exemplary poetics.5 Meaning happens most importantly as an act of accommodation, as the quest to substantiate Ideas in words that exemplify their significance.6 The history of that tradition is provided by an examination of the lineage of Sidney’s key critical term, the scopus dicendi, its origin in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its employment in the anti-allegorical exegesis of the Antiochene fathers, its appearance in conjunction with the newly emergent concept of literary text as literary microcosm among the neoplatonists of the Hellenic age, and its purposeful redeployment in the pointedly non-allegorical hermeneutic of Melanchthon. By comparison with contemporary Spenser studies, Sidney studies is under-theorized and under-historicized, and the recovery of the history of hermeneutics to which his exemplary poetics belongs is critically overdue. Only in light of that recovery is it possible to understand Sidney’s account about how a poem—conceived as a particular kind of fictional world created by a particular kind of oratorical invention—achieves its power.
The “scope” of Sidney’s argument in the Defence—his main aim or target in identifying the source of poetry’s preeminence—appears most clearly in his description of the poet’s making of the golden world. As a reflection of his own assumptions about the world at large, the golden world is the methodically conceived imitation, counterfeit, and figuration of the Maker’s own prelapsarian creation, the world itself. Like the world, Sidney’s fiction has its own maker (an analogue to the divine Maker), its own laws (the logic internal to its organization), and its own natural power (as the representation of Ideas that speak clearly about human nature and human needs). Once more, it has its own purpose, aim, or scope—its cause for being (to have readers accommodate themselves to the maker’s intention). As the matter out of which Sidney forms his conception of fiction as a well-made world, these are key concepts that transform the Defence’s well-known engagement with Italian poetics into an argument with “scope.” Sidney’s ideas about poetic eloquence, including his several assumptions about reading—his concern with intentionality, clarity, coherence, and the all-important business of accommodation—share the optimism about eloquence that informs Melanchthon’s oratorical texts. They include Melanchthon’s regard for logic, his insistence that rhetoric be subjected to analysis of a rigorously dialectical kind. They depend, too, on a shared epistemology of innate ideas—the notitiae of Melanchthon’s philosophical works find their reflection in the notable images of virtue and vice of Sidneian poetics—as an explanation for the origin and inherent power of poetic images. In Melanchthon and his students, Sidney located an account of eloquence that bridges the gap between sacred and secular oratory, one that so completely naturalizes the operations of language as to explain how eloquence of all kinds potentially exerts its power over readers—and hence over the readership of that public domain so crucial to Sidney’s pious and political concerns.
Sidney’s piety forms the analytical core of the book’s second major section. The chastening of public discourse, freeing the body politic from the contaminations of tyrannical passion, is a pious as well as a political work. Lucretia—that classical exemplar of chastity’s triumph over Tarquin’s tyranny—affords Sidney’s first illustration of the chastening power of poetic imitation, and not accidentally so. In order to examine how and why the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi and the new hermeneutic associated with it acquired practical significance as a vehicle for intervening within (and chastening!) the confessional conflicts of sixteenth-century Europe, my argument moves immediately to the prose of another Philip, Sidney’s friend and model, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. It is one thing to recover the oratorical history of the scopus from Melanchthon’s corpus, as the first main portion of the argument sets out to do. It is quite another to examine that term mobilized for action within the public domain, as happens in this, the book’s second central section.
Both in his Treatise of the Church and his De veritate religionis christianae (the Latin translation of his own philosophical treatise, the Verité—a text partially translated, in turn, by Sidney), Mornay deploys the vocabulary of the scopus dicendi in support of the true religion.7 Mornay’s use of the new hermeneutic in philosophical literature affords a complement and an alternative to Sidney’s practice in the Defence, just as his uncompromising and strategically moderate Christianity provides a reflection of Sidney’s own. Dedicated to Hubert Languet (Mornay’s mentor and Sidney’s) and inspired by his piety, the De veritate had an enormous appeal to contemporary Philippists, as a refection of their ecumenical piety, their disdain for theological controversy, and their intellectual regard for the value of humanistic studies to advance the cause of true religion. For both Mornay and Sidney, the embrace of knowledge, secular and sacred, was urgently required in a contemporary culture imperilled, on the one hand, by atheists and epicureans—Cecropians all!—and, on the other, by confessional divisions threatening the church’s very survival. For both, the nightmare was the same. The term “Cecropian” was contemporary shorthand for “beastly enemy of Reformed culture.” Cecropia no longer lived in ancient Athens. She had metamorphosed into the monster next door, as they knew because of their readings. Both Mornay and Sidney had read George Buchanan (that tyrant-killer from the north), both knew the epigrams of Philip Melanchthon, and both found those epigrams recently edited by another mutual friend in Vienna, Johannes Crato Von Crafftheim.8 Belonging to the same republic of letters meant, in no small part, reading the same books, sharing the same intellectual travels with an eye to private and public government.
Mornay and Sidney are similar, too, because of the misapprehensions both have suffered inside a critical context within which Reformed theology has been mistakenly identified as dogma proceeding from the writings of a single person, John Calvin. In particular, while the anthropology of Sidney’s poetics is arguably specific to Reformed Christianity, the assumption that its pious principles are thereby determined by Calvin’s theology fundamentally mistakes the diversity of a Reformed tradition that discovered models for its religious thought among a vast range of sources.9 The moderate, ecumenically inclusive character of Sidney’s Philippist piety radiates throughout the Defence. Mediated by his mentor Languet, Melanchthon’s inspiration matters as it came to Sidney because of its carefully delimited optimism about human agency—its assertiveness about the strength of reason and the cooperative power of the will—and, most significantly, because of his celebration of that agency’s scope in securing freedom from the sovereignty of sin. It was Melanchthon, Professor of Greek at Wittenberg, who first fashioned Reformed Christianity’s defense of human culture in relation to faith, and Sidney’s Defence profits enormously from that legacy, in its assertiveness about poetry’s value to enhance self-knowledge—the individual’s enjoyment “of his own divine essence”—and in its chastely articulated, urgently maintained confidence about poetry’s power to liberate the public domain from the tyranny of confessional warfare.
Sidney’s Philippist piety is evidenced by crucial matters of argument, especially (as I plan to demonstrate) by his discussions about the two primary categories of poets at once distinguished and related over the Defence’s full purview, the vates (sacred and prophetic writers, whose scope is the praise of God) and the “right poets” (humane writers, whose scope is to instruct readers in self-knowledge and move them to virtuous action). For all of the distinctions made between them, Sidney’s argument consistently associates humane and sacred letters—Christ’s parables and Aesop’s fables, Plautus’s comedies and Buchanan’s tragedies—because the secular and the spiritual are so intimately associated in his thinking about human nature. Infused by confidence about the goodness of human nature created in imitation of God and the goodness of making in imitation of the Maker, the core concepts of the Defence challenge traditionally narrow views about the limits of Reformation belief.10
Piety gives way to politics in the book’s climactic argument about the importance of poetry to the public domain. Sidney’s poetics are informed by a Philippist-inspired search for liberation—a liberation from the sinfulness of tyranny, a variety of sovereignty whose shadow everywhere challenges the Defence’s own aggressively optimistic claims about the power of fiction-making. Sidney does not argue the case for tyrannicide. Instead, he assumes tyrannicide as a good. The question posed by the recurrent examples of tyrants cited as illustrations in the text—particularly by those historical tyrants who escaped punishment for their crimes, such as Cypselus, Periander, Dionysius, and (most importantly) Phalaris—is how best to counter tyranny in the world.11 Sidney supports his position about poetry’s power to undo the worst effects of tyranny with arguments that simultaneously draw upon and contest key intellectual assumptions of his friends, Languet and Mornay—and that contest forms an important, untold story behind the Defence.
Sidney shared with his friends an intellectual commitment to natural law. Or to clarify that point in more specific terms, Sidney was able to celebrate poetry as a vehicle for securing liberty from the sinfulness of sovereigns because of his employment of the natural law theory revived among that intellectual elite closely associated with Melanchthon, the proponents of tyrannomachist political philosophy. Resistance theory in the early modern era had its genesis in natural law arguments developed at Wittenberg to counter imperial tyranny during the Wars of the Schmalkaldan League. In a line of direct descent from Melanchthon’s moral philosophical texts of the 1530s to the anti-tyrannical tracts of John Ponet, George Buchanan and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, Sidney employs natural law arguments to strengthen his case for the importance of fiction-making to undo tyranny.
Once more, such arguments had considerable persuasive appeal for Sidney because the logic of natural law carried the promise of legitimating acts of human making as powerful vehicles for harnessing universal (because “natural”) authority.12 As such, the logic of natural law argument supplied in principle as well as in practice a rhetoric easily accommodated to the new hermeneutic, with its ambition to craft clear, energetic and logical discourse. (The polemical writings of Melanchthon, Ponet, Buchanan, and Mornay—as well as Sidney’s political tracts—illustrate that point well). In turn, once the “scope” of such discourse is informed by logic having the inherent forcefulness of nature, such arguments would compel (not merely gain) assent. Arguments from natural law appealed as a foundation for belief (beyond their power to topple unnatural tyrants!), because they promised a confessionally neutral and potentially unifying form of public discourse. As a result, such arguments supplied both a sword in the arsenal of the tyrannomachist and an olive branch in the hands of the anti-confessionalist, and were thereby all the more easily accommodated to Sidney’s full range of public commitments.
Sidney’s Philippist politics are evidenced by the location of his argument. The Vienna of its opening is a watchtower for tyranny—a prospect from which to recall the irenic, notably tolerant government of Maximilian II and a vantage toward the present-day reality of Tridentine tyranny, exemplified by Rudoph II, that new Holy Roman emperor so disastrously contaminated by Spain. Sidney’s Philippist politics are evidenced too by the exordium’s account of Pietro Pugliano. His folly, similar to the smugness of English literary provincialism, the arrogance of the historian and the philosopher, together with the brutal fanaticism of confessional warfare, exemplifies the tyranny of self-love as that chief violation of natural law from which poetry’s notable images of virtue and vice are intended to achieve freedom. Tyranny in the world is translated as tyranny in the mind, historical tyranny as monstrous tyranny, and against monsters in the world and monsters in the mind, Sidney sets the “notable” (innate and natural) power of poetic fictions as vehicles of liberation. The Defence contains not a single acknowledgment of the existence of rival Christian confessions, much less of warfare between them. As a tyrannomachist, Sidney permits himself a complaint about England’s “overfaint quietness”—alluding clearly to his hopes for Queen Elizabeth’s intervention against the tyranny of Tridentine Catholicism—but when he identifies that contemporary hero most worthy to advance poetry’s reputation, his selection of Michel de L’Hospital advances virtuous counselorship and ecumenical peace as equal, complementary, even ultimate goods inside the public domain (131).
Associations do not constitute identities, and however similar Sidney’s Ideas are to those of the natural law theorist—the historian like Languet and the philosopher like Mornay—crucial distinctions exist between their deployment. Sidney liberates the Idea from its purely conceptual status in philosophy (always too abstruse) and its merely conditional locus in history (always too imperfect) in order to return it to its true home in poetry (a syncresis of the philosophical and the historical). This is a liberation that he attempts to achieve without sacrificing Mornay’s conceptual finesse or the exemplary power of Languet’s old true tales, and without descending either into the opacity of philosophical abstraction or into history’s sad captivity to the brazen world of events. Neither philosophy nor history had the power to change the course of contemporary events, or so the Defence argues darkly. In some real measure, then, for that Sidney who suffered through St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, poetry’s emergence as the preeminent science of his culture is the product of a desperately determined and ironically self-aware idealism. Poetry must work to undo tyranny because history and philosophy cannot.
Tyranny cries out for heroism, and this study concludes with a summary chapter whose focus is Sidney’s unusual choice of Cyrus the Great as chief hero of the Defence. Why Cyrus? Who was Cyrus to Sidney? Not just a hero, Cyrus becomes the heroic exemplar of the Defence’s arguments on behalf of the preeminence of poetry. As a figure who challenges traditional boundaries between the secular and the sacred, between history and fiction, between the heroic value of military conquest and the contemplative quiet of garden-style reflection, Cyrus is just the right figure to study in relation to Sidney’s celebration of poetry’s value to the public domain. As a product of the book—the Bible and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Melanchthon’s Chronicon Carionis and the old philological commentary of Camerarius the Elder and the new historical analysis of Jean Bodin—Cyrus, too, was for Sidney a conspicuously bookish figure, and all the more meaningful to the politics of the public domain (a Cyrus to make many Cyruses), on account of his textual proclivity for production and reproduction.
In turn, while Cyrus seems like the ideal poetic figure with whom to end this study, Melanchthon is unquestionably the appropriate historical person with whom to begin, since it is from Melanchthon ultimately that so much of what matters to Sidney’s poetics, piety, and politics derives. My book’s first chapter is preoccupied with explaining that “ultimately,” since Melanchthon was a figure who came to Sidney not pure, but mediated—mediated by a like-minded community of intellectuals for whom his teachings still mattered. If the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572, posed the question about how Reformed Christianity was to insure its survival, then for contemporary Philippists like Hubert Languet, Melanchthon remained the answer. Chapter 1 will start with an introduction to Melanchthon in his later years, as he was represented by his followers at Wittenberg and beyond. It will conclude with Sidney’s own education in Philippism inside the correspondence with Languet.
A last (preparatory) word about reading and readership. As authors of our own critical texts, we earn or fail to earn the attention of readers on the basis of merit and grace, a good Philippist conjunction. While I hope to be graced by readers who will proceed start-to-finish through the volume as a whole, I plan to merit that attention by making each portion of the argument comprehensible by itself. This is a book written with contemporary readers in mind, with readers (that is) who instead of proceeding cover-to-cover, are likely to turn their attention either to individual chapters or even (with an eye to the index) to individual discussions within those chapters. For that reason, while the full argument of this study is designedly more meaningful than the sum of its parts, each chapter is planned to be intelligible on its own. Where that intelligibility seems especially difficult to achieve, footnotes point to clarifying discussions (of context, concept, or terminology) in other chapters. If my full “scope” consists, then, in making sense of Sidney’s claim for poetry’s preeminence in the public domain, individual discussions about his poetics, his piety, and his politics (while targeting that scope) are comprehensible as accounts about the impact of Philippism on distinguishable aspects of the Defence’s larger argument and purpose. As a real introduction to that scope, I turn now from the always inadequate reductions of a précis to a fuller consideration of Philip Sidney, age 17, reformed by a massacre.
1 An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Edinburgh: Nelson and Sons, 1965), p. 126–7. All further quotations from the Defence will be cited parenthetically in the text by page number.
2 Or that Sidney perhaps first learned in Vienna. My “perhaps” is explained by Sidney’s sojourn in the spring of 1573 with Johann Sturm, Rector of the famous Academy in Strasbourg, from whom he may well have acquired his first introduction to what I will term the new hermeneutic. Sturm’s textbook study of imitation offers one expression of those key rhetorical principles that inform Sidney’s argument in the Defence, especially his directions for the employment of Art, Imitation and Exercise, De imitatione oratoria libri tres (Strasbourg, 1574).
3 Kathy Eden’s Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 79–89; Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1993); and Kees Meerhoff, “The Significance of Melanchthon’s Rhetoric” in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Peter Mack (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 46–62.
4 “Allegory” is an especially misleading term partly because it obscures key differences between Sidney’s fictions and those of his contemporary and rival, that allegorical poet of the supreme fiction, Edmund Spenser; partly, too, because it diminishes Sidney’s importance to an English literary history in which, post-Spenser, allegory devolved into a literary mode bereft of distinguished practitioners (John Bunyan to the contrary); and most importantly, because it effaces the history of hermeneutics to which Sidney’s Defence demonstrably belongs. See Chapter 2 for an extended argument on this topic. For a splendid account of the literary history to which Sidney gives rise, see Gavin Alexander’s Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).
5 Allegory and Violence (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996), p. 5, 11.
6 I capitalize Sidney’s word “Idea[s],” here and elsewhere in relation to the Defence because it is a term of art, whose precise meaning is subject to definition as the argument proceeds. Ideas are exemplified—made substantial in poetry—as notable images of virtue and vice. For a full discussion, see especially Chapter 2, “The ‘noblest scope’.”
7 A notable treatise of the church in vvhich are handled all the principall questions, that have bene moved in our time concerning that matter. By Philip of Mornay, Lord of Plessis Marlyn, gentleman of Fraunce. And translated out of French into English by Io. Feilde (London: By Christopher Barker, printer to the Queenes Maiestie, 1579); and De veritate religionis Christianae liber … Gallice primum conscriptus, Latine versus, nunc autem ab eodem accuratissime correctus (Lugduni Batavorum: Christopher Plantin, 1587).
8 Epigrammatum Reverendi Viri Philippi Melanthonis Libri Sex, ed. Johannis Cratonis (Wittenberg, 1579). For an attack upon Cecropians, see p. O8 (verso), Epigrammata trium statuarum ad Strymonem fluvium positarum civibus Atticis, qui Medos represserant ex Aeschinis oratione. See too George Buchanan: Tragedies, ed. P. Sharratt and P. G. Walsh (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1983), Medea, l. 872, p. 193. What matters here is less the allusion itself, than the fact that Sidney’s choice of allusions is so often determined by his intellectual kinship with Languet’s extensive, international network of associates.
9 New historians of Reformed Christianity have copiously and convincingly demonstrated that diversity. See Richard A. Muller, “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’: Assessing Continuities and Discontinuities Between the Reformation and Orthodoxy, Part One,” Calvin Theological Journal 30 (1995), 345–75 and “Calvin and the ‘Calvinists’, Part Two,” Calvin Theological Journal 31 (1996), 125–60; and Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 2002), p. 50–52.
10 Similar to Melanchthon and to Mornay, Sidney consistently celebrates the full scope of cultural knowledge—the humane and the sacred—as instinct with pious purpose and value. For Melanchthon and the concept of a Reformed culture, see John Schneider’s essay, “Melanchthon’s Rhetoric As a Context for Understanding His Theology,” in Melanchthon in Europe: His Work and Its Influence Beyond Wittenberg, ed. Karin Maag (Cumbria and Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999), p. 141–60, and Chapter 3 below.
11 Phalaris is most important among these examples because Languet’s correspondence and Mornay’s polemical texts reveal that this tyrant—the paradigmatic, anti-poetic barbarian who roasted his victims alive in a brazen bull for the pleasure of hearing their screams—was a figure repeatedly cited by Sidney and his circle when considering how to counter tyranny in practice. See Chapter 4 for an elaboration of this point.
12 Before Calvin and Luther, Melanchthon developed arguments organized on grounds of natural law to legitimize the defense against tyranny, a point I will develop in Chapter 4.