Is not the Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, in his sweet Arcadia, the embrodery of finest Art, and daintiest Witt?
Gabriel Harvey (1593)
IT was an argument that was becoming common in the 1590s: English was now a vehicle for serious literary endeavour able to compete with ‘the most-floorishing Languages of Europe’. Having offered Sidney as the benchmark for modern prose, Harvey chooses another friend as the gold standard in verse: ‘is not the Verse of M. Spencer in his brave Faery Queene, the Virginall of the divinest Muses, and gentlest Graces? Both delicate Writers: alwayes gallant, often brave, continually delectable, somtimes admirable.’1 Spenser’s verse is a keyboard instrument—a virginals—on which the Muses might make music, and music without words at that; Sidney’s prose is embroidery, a highly valued visual art. Music and the visual arts were a rich source for analogical thinking about literary writing; in this case, the comparisons emphasize how literary language looks and sounds, rather than what it says. Sidney, Spenser, and Harvey were used to seeing narrative sequences of embroidered tapestries: this visual medium could, like Sidney, tell a story. But embroidery also had the sense of extraneous decoration. The ‘embrodery of finest Art, and daintiest Witt’ may, then, be ornament that does not create or supply sense, but merely embellishes it.
Harvey knew that Sidney preferred the analogy of the visual arts to that of music in his literary theory and practice.2 Perhaps the best-known instance is when, in The Defence of Poesy, Sidney discusses not style, but the creation of fictions, and his thoughts turn to embroidery: ‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.’3 And the analogy is central to his theory of poetry (by which he means fiction-making in prose or verse) as ‘an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimēsis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end: to teach and delight’ (10). There is something visual, then, about the fictional worlds writers create and about the means by which they entertain and edify us. Speaking pictures are not exactly the same thing as the ‘notable images of virtues, vices, or what else’ (12), which, according to Sidney, enshrine the writer’s moral lessons, but they are close. Both have a tendency, in Sidney’s theory, to coincide with individual characters, so that we get ‘the portraiture of a just empire … under the name of Cyrus’ in Xenophon’s account of the upbringing of the Persian king Cyrus the Great, or a ‘picture of love in Theagenes and Charikleia’ (12) in Heliodorus’s Aethiopika, a Greek romance from the late classical period. If Sidney’s prose in the Arcadia is embroidery, is it mere decorative ornamentation of visible lessons such as these, or is it what makes them visible to us in the first place? Sidney was acknowledged by his successors as a revolutionary prose stylist and author of prose fiction, as well as one of the most innovative and influential poets and theorists of the Elizabethan period. In this chapter I shall examine the relationship between the style of his prose and the stories and meanings it delivers.
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Sir Philip Sidney was born in 1554 and died, fighting the Spanish, in 1586. His rich literary output spans less than ten years and is often represented as occupying the margins of what was meant to be—but was failing quite to become—a significant political and military career. When Sidney describes the Arcadia it is ‘my toyful book’ (in a letter to his brother Robert)4 or ‘this idle work of mine’ (in the dedicatory epistle in which he offers it to his sister Mary).5 Working on it, we surmise, between 1577 and 1581, Sidney did much of the writing while staying with his sister at Wilton: ‘Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done’ (OA, 3). This representation of the writing of what is unquestionably the greatest work of early modern prose fiction as a casual matter is echoed by John Aubrey, with his tale of Sidney scribbling in his notebook while hunting, 6 and by an anecdote attributed (dubiously) to Fulke Greville, which describes Sidney working as he was being dressed: ‘he would call for his pages to write, and by reading the last line would remember where he was’.7
Did Sidney intend his work for a larger readership? Its title offers the work to the author’s sister—it is The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia—and the dedication insists that it is ‘only for you, only to you’. The earliest readerly encounters with the Arcadia were private affairs. An anecdote finds Sidney himself ‘impart[ing] it’ to the Earl of Angus in 1581 or 1582.8 The title of one of the early manuscript copies describes the work as ‘A treatis made by Sr Phillip Sydney Knyght of certeyn accidents in Arcadia, made in the yeer 1580 and emparted to some few of his frends. in his lyfe time and to more sence his vnfortunat deceasse’.9 Sidney’s father’s secretary, Edmund Molyneux, recalled in 1588 that ‘a special dear friend he should be that could have a sight, but much more dear that could once obtain a copy of it’.10 But these last two representations of the work show us that it was gaining momentum—more copies of the manuscript were being made after Sidney’s untimely death in 1586 and Molyneux was choosing to tell us all about it in Holinshed’s Chronicles. The work already had a reputation. The most important sign that the work was valued, however, was Sidney’s own decision to revise it. We have a less clear sense of the dating here, but in around 1583 Sidney moved from some patchwork revision of the later parts of the Arcadia to a complete rewrite, going back to its start and revising it page by page. The effect was to decentre the narrative by putting most of the material originally in the narrator’s voice into the mouths of his characters, and vastly to enlarge the work by introducing large amounts of new material, as well as by expanding an episode here and a sentence there. It was a job he never finished. The work had been complete in five books (what we now refer to as the ‘old’ Arcadia) and was now unfinished in three (the ‘new’), but it was in this expanded and incomplete form that it was first printed—in an edition overseen by Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville—in 1590.
Molyneux’s account of the Arcadia chimes with Sidney’s in seeing it as a product of (enforced) leisure; it also emphasizes what might seem the more decorative or artificial aspects of such a work:
at his vacant and spare times of leisure (for he could endure at no time to be idle and void of action) he made his book which he named Arcadia, a work (though a mere fancy, toy and fiction) showing such excellency of spirit, gallant invention, variety of matter, and orderly disposition, and couched in frame of such apt words without superfluity, eloquent phrase and fine conceit with interchange of device, so delightful to the reader, and pleasant to the hearer, as nothing could be taken out to amend it, or added to it that would not impair it … 11
The paradigms of classical rhetoric inform this passage: the stages of composition, from invention and arrangement (‘disposition’) to style and performance; the need for ‘variety’ and for decorum (‘apt words’); and the intimate and inextricable relationship between thought (‘conceit’) and expression (‘phrase’). Like Molyneux’s sentence, rhetorical theory in the sixteenth century tended to devote more time and energy to style than to matter; indeed, many rhetoric books treat only that third stage of composition: they are concerned, that is, not with the seeking out and arranging of the materials of an argument (or a narrative), but only with the setting of them ‘in frame of … apt words’. A case in point is The Arcadian Rhetorike of Abraham Fraunce, a detailed examination of the rhetorical figures printed in 1588 and taking its English examples exclusively from Sidney. Fraunce’s treatise is essentially a translation of a continental rhetoric by Talaeus, the collaborator of the French pedagogue Petrus Ramus, whose schematic reconception of the liberal arts had stripped rhetoric of invention and arrangement and assigned these to logic. These developments contribute to a tendency to admire Sidney’s stylistic brilliance in isolation, but we should not be misled into thinking that Sidney’s contemporaries could not attend to what he said because of their enthralment by how he said it.
One of our most important guides here is Sidney’s friend and editor Fulke Greville, who, in his account of Sidney’s life and writings, emphasizes a moral and political purposiveness to Sidney’s tales of shepherds, princes, and princesses in the Arcadia:
in all these creatures of his making his intent and scope was to turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life, and in them, first on the monarch’s part, lively to represent the growth, state and declination of princes, change of government and laws, vicissitudes of sedition, faction, succession, confederacies, plantations, with all other errors or alterations in public affairs; then again, in the subject’s case, the state of favour, disfavour, prosperity, adversity, emulation, quarrel, undertaking, retiring, hospitality, travel and all other moods of private fortunes or misfortunes.12
Greville’s certainty about how we should read the Arcadia has been especially influential on more recent readings of the work, suiting those critics who like their literature to have something to say about the real world, and even to attempt to intervene in it.13 But it has to some seemed (though this shouldn’t necessarily be the case) incompatible with Sidney’s representation of the work as written for a private circle of his sister and her female companions. These implied readers are less in evidence in the revised Arcadia, which cuts the fairly frequent narratorial asides addressed to the ‘fair ladies’. That may be a sign that Sidney was revising not only the work, but his sense of what and whom it was for. Nevertheless, the best way to approach the work is to keep all of its different aspects, priorities, and audiences in play, rather than to choose between them. For the Arcadia is nothing if not a coming together of many disparate things, as we shall see, and Sidney’s earliest readers did not find disunity, but rather showed a determination (misguided perhaps) to find in Sidney’s literary practice the perfect embodiment of his literary theory.
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We should consider carefully the possibility that in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy we might have a precise and apt theoretical model for reading the Arcadia. Sidney’s ‘notable images of virtues, vices, or what else’ are exemplary, which is to say that the images of virtue are meant to teach us about virtue and the images of vice will warn us against vice. For Sidney, poetry is able to improve on philosophy by embodying virtues and vices in lifelike people and on history by being able to idealize those people and render them perfect, instead of creating characters who—like the major figures of ancient history—are mixtures of the good and the bad. He was not obliged to take this theoretical turn: Aristotle in the Poetics had taught that the tragic hero should be neither wholly good nor wholly bad and Plutarch in an influential essay on how to teach young men to read poetry had stated that poetry represents people as they are in the world, mixtures of the good and the bad. But Sidney, ever the Neoplatonist, chose the idealizing route.
Sidney’s students repeated and refined this theory of exemplary characters and a number of early readers read the Arcadia in accordance with it. In a section of his Directions for Speech and Style (c. 1599) devoted to ‘Illustracion’, John Hoskyns gives us a long list of ‘what personages and affeccions are sett forth in Arcadia’, including ‘pleasant idle retirednes in kinge Basillius, & the dangerous end of it’, ‘The mirror of true courage & friendshipp in Pirocles & Musidorus, miserablenes & ingratitude in Chremes … fear & fatall subtiltie in Clinias’, ‘wise courage in Pamela, mylde discrecion in Philoclea’, and so on.14 Sir William Alexander, who wrote a wonderful bridging passage, first printed in around 1617, suturing the incomplete ‘new’ Arcadia to the last three books of the ‘old’, describes the Arcadia in his brief critical essay Anacrisis. For Alexander, Sidney creates characters who are not only beautiful on the outside, but virtuous on the inside:
affording many exquisite types of perfection for both the sexes, leaving the gifts of nature, whose value doth depend upon the beholders, wanting no virtue whereof a human mind could be capable, as, for men, magnanimity, carriage, courtesy, valour, judgement, discretion, and, in women, modesty, shamefastness, constancy, continency, still accompanied with a tender sense of honour; and his chief persons being eminent for some singular virtue, and yet all virtues being united in every one of them … 15
In a theory of notable images and speaking pictures, appearances must not be deceptive. Alexander attends to the distinction between mind and body in order to insist that in Sidney what you see is what you get, but that very attentiveness is something that the Arcadia requires, rewards, and indeed thematizes and problematizes.
It is, after all, a story about appearance and disguise. Basilius is living among shepherds, and some of those shepherds—Philisides (who represents Sidney), Strephon, Klaius—are well-born men doing the same. Musidorus dresses as a shepherd and his cousin Pyrocles as an Amazon so that the two princes can get near to the two princesses—Pamela and Philoclea—with whom they have fallen in love, in Pyrocles’s case after seeing a portrait of Philoclea. Basilius falls in love with the Amazon princess whom Pyrocles is pretending to be (Cleophila in the ‘old’ Arcadia, Zelmane in the ‘new’) and his wife Gynecia falls in love with the man she perceives beneath the mask. As Pyrocles complains, in one of Sidney’s characteristic paradoxical formulations, ‘To her whom I would be known to, I live in darkness; and to her am revealed from whom I would be most secret’ (OA, 85).16 The job for the two princes is to make their princesses see behind their disguises without directly revealing themselves, so they tell stories about themselves or perform songs and poems that say one thing to everyone else, but carry ‘a second meaning’ (OA, 87) to their beloveds. The princes hide under pseudonyms once they are found out and captured in the ‘old’ Arcadia, as they do in some of the extensive adventures added to the ‘new’. And we can understand the narrative more readily when we can unpick the names of its characters—the fire and glory in Pyrocles, the miserliness of Chremes, the ambivalences of Amphialus, and the star-lover (like Sidney’s sonneteer avatar Astrophil) in Phili-sides, whose name chimes with its author’s. Sound and etymology, then, frame words themselves as matters of surface and substance to be scrutinized rather like the visible surfaces of Sidney’s idealized characters.
Disguise and dissimulation are explicitly compared within the work to poesis, the poetic making of imitations: indeed, Sidney is forever making comparisons between the activities of his characters and the actions of the poet. When Musidorus pretends to be in love with the shepherdess who attends Pamela, ‘he began to counterfeit the extremest love towards Mopsa that might be; and as for the love, so lively indeed it was in him (although to another subject) that little he needed to counterfeit any notable demonstration of it’ (OA, 87, my emphasis; cf., transposed to the first person, NA, 129). Poets too, in Sidney’s theory, must ‘counterfeit’ ‘notable images’ that are ‘lively’ or lifelike.17 Again, when Pyrocles has to come up with the bed-trick to end all bed-tricks in order to get both of Philoclea’s parents out of the way for a night (each believing they have an assignation with Pyrocles), Sidney loads his description with contemporary terms used to theorize poetic and rhetorical composition: ‘invention’, ‘conceit’, ‘proportion’, ‘ground plot’, and ‘device’ (OA, 189).
By placing such an emphasis on the importance of creating and seeing behind verbal and visual disguises, Sidney’s fiction highlights an important point about notable images and speaking pictures: that they are superficial. When his two heroes think about their disguises, they—like Alexander—draw attention to the inner–outer binary. Pyrocles is spied on by Musidorus (who in the revised Arcadia does not know that he is ogling his transvestite cousin) as he sings a sonnet beginning ‘Transformed in show, but more transformed in mind’ (OA, 26; NA, 69). When Musidorus then adopts the guise of a shepherd he, in turn, sings ‘Come, shepherd’s weeds, become your master’s mind’ (OA, 36; NA, 105). The other side of Sidney’s theory of exemplary character requires that we as readers should ourselves be transformed—in mind and then in show, as it were—into living replicas of the virtues of an Aeneas or a Cyrus. That transformation is punningly problematized in Musidorus’s words. The imperative ‘Come’ personifies his shepherd’s clothes, both animating them and somehow setting them in motion (Come here!), so that when ‘Come’ moves along the line and turns into ‘become’ we are more likely to register a transformative movement punning below the surface of the more obvious reading: the clothes should accord with and suit the mind, should be becoming (a concern with decorum to which I shall return); but they may also turn into that mind, become it. Instead of outer expressing inner, inner is now being moulded by outer: the shell forms or turns into the substance. The Arcadia is full of such ironic versions (and reversals) of Sidney’s model of readerly response, whereby the Platonic idea of a virtue beneath the surface of the character is apprehended by the reader and s/he then becomes a living embodiment of it. Here, a character is in danger of finding that the pleasing surface of his appearance can shape his own identity just as much as it can transform the reader’s.
We have, then, seen some play in the space between verbal or visual surfaces and the identities, essences, and meanings that they hide, reveal, or construct. We have seen how the status of Sidney’s text as a font of moral or political instruction contrasted to its status as an exemplar of fine literary artifice. I am suggesting that these matters are not unrelated and before I go on to develop this thought it is right to say a little more about Sidney’s stylistic achievements.
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My first observation is that Sidney places a premium on mixing and mingling of various kinds and at various levels. This is most obviously the case in the Arcadia’s generic affiliations and principal influences, which include Virgilian epic, Greek romance (notably Heliodorus), medieval romance, Italian chivalric romance, the pastoral verse-and-prose fictions of Sannazaro in Italian and Montemayor in Spanish, as well as the work of the ancient and modern historians Sidney loved. Both Hoskyns and Gervase Markham—one of several writers to attempt a continuation of the Arcadia—make this observation, noting in particular the influence of Heliodorus, Montemayor, and (in Hoskyns’s case) Sannazaro.18 As Stephen Greenblatt has rightly noted, the Arcadia ‘is perhaps the supreme Elizabethan example’ of this kind of generic fusion, which he terms the ‘mixed mode’.19 The delightful complexity of the Arcadia’s plot is one result of this bringing together of different literary kinds and traditions and its romance habit of interlacing plot strands (in the manner of Ariosto) is emblematic of that harmony in variety. Another fundamental mixture is that of verse and prose. The narrative is almost entirely delivered in prose; however, not only do characters frequently use verse to express themselves and advance their causes, but the Arcadia’s five books are separated by four extended sequences of pastoral verses, the eclogues. The former use of verse borrows from Montemayor and the latter from Sannazaro, and the effect is to combine pastoral romance with something more like classical (and neoclassical) pastoral, with its formalized representations of shepherds competing and collaborating in verse. Sidney himself draws the connection between these mixtures of genre and of medium in the Defence:
Now in his parts, kinds, or species, as you list to term them, it is to be noted that some poesies have coupled together two or three kinds: as the tragical and comical, whereupon is risen the tragi-comical. Some, in the manner, have mingled prose and verse, as Sannazaro and Boethius. Some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral. But that cometh all to one in this question, for if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful. (Defence, 25)
English was—as Sidney put it—a ‘mingled language’, combining Germanic and Romance origins, strong Saxon monosyllables and sinuous Latin polysyllables: ‘And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other?’ (Defence, 51). This richness was also a strength for Richard Carew, who in a short manuscript essay on ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’ (1595–6?) sees the eclecticism of the language and its literary exponents as the driving force in the rapid advancement of English letters: ‘looke into our Imitacione of all sortes of verses affoorded by any other Language, and you shall finde that Sr. Phillip Sidney, Mr. Stanihurst, and diuers moe, haue made vse how farre wee are within compasse of a fore imagined impossibility’. Sidney’s experimentation with classical and modern European metres and verse forms here parallels an achieved copiousness in literary prose, the product of English’s own mixed origins, as well as of the deliberate imitation of classical and continental models. ‘Will yow haue all in all for prose and verse?’ Carew asks, at the end of a list of those modern English writers who match the achievements of the ancients, ‘take the miracle of our age Sir Philip Sydney’.20
A particular synecdochic badge of English’s happy syntheses was the compound noun, a feature of the language highlighted by Sidney in the Defence. Sidney’s most recently discovered—and most accomplished—student, William Scott, develops this point in his The Model of Poesy and ends a list of kinds of compound with these two examples, compounds ‘of two particles and a participle, as never-enough-praised; and … of the particle and noun, as between-kingdom, which Sir Philip Sidney presumes upon after the Latin interregnum’.21 Sidney haunts this discussion, as its source (for Scott is simply elaborating Sidney’s remarks in the Defence), exemplar (Scott appropriately enough conflates Sidney’s coinages ‘under-kingdoms’ and ‘between-times of reigning’), 22 and mascot, for Sidney’s coinage ‘never-enough-praised’ (NA, 84) was becoming his own epithet.
The ‘never-enough-praised’ Sidney was seen as the writer who had moved English forward after a phase when John Lyly’s Euphuistic style had been all the rage. Michael Drayton makes this point about prose and—in what is a recognizable feature of discussions of Sidney’s prose—links Sidney’s innovations here to his achievements as a verse metrician:
The noble Sidney …
That heroë for numbers and for prose,
That throughly paced our language, as to show
The plenteous English hand in hand might go
With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce
Our tongue from Lily’s writing, then in use:
Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies,
Playing with words, and idle similes … 23
Indeed, the prose-verse analogy may be one of our most useful tools as readers of Sidney’s verse-and-prose romance. If we are perplexed by the parallel trajectories of Books I and II, the first interrupted by a near-fatal attack from a lion and a bear, the second by an armed insurrection, we should step back from the precise plot actions and regard the plot shapes, which offer what Franco Marenco calls ‘a rhythm on the unfolding of events’.24 Sidney plots his fiction just as he creates the intricate verse forms for which he was celebrated: there is something, then, of the stanzaic poem about how the Arcadia works.
We have already seen how Sidney’s sophisticated use of the figures of classical rhetoric made him a sufficient source for the textbooks of Abraham Fraunce and John Hoskyns. Descriptions of the figures from Quintilian to Puttenham think of them as quasi-visible entities, ornaments, and arrangements of matter in space (the implication of the Greek term scheme and the Latin figura). But rhetoric also attended to the more musical and metrical aspects of the arrangement of words in prose, for the language of prose had also to be properly ‘paced’, in Drayton’s term. The theory of the classical period, with its subdivisions into cola and commata, recognized the need for units of prose sense to have a pleasing rhythm and shape, drawing meaning out with subclauses (suspended syntax) and describing a circle (the meaning of period) with an articulated symmetry of form which is best understood by analogy to musical structure—the balance one finds in any good tune. William Scott finds Sidney exemplary here too, offering an illustration from the scene in the Arcadia in which Zelmane begins to reveal to Philoclea that s/he is Pyrocles:
The incomparable excellencies of yourself (waited on by the greatness of your estate) and the importance of the thing (whereon my life consisteth) doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering, both bold and fearful
—there is much art in the contriving this insinuating conceit. Generally that phrase best maintains his dignity that is of somewhat a long return, where there is a kind of dependency of the sentences and clauses, one inferred upon the other and linked one unto the other. I think Sir Philip Sidney hath first attained the perfection of this grave form and I know not if any in any language be more than matchable to him.25
At the levels of word, sentence, episode, plot, mode, medium, and genre, then, we see intricate combination and mixture in Sidney’s Arcadia. What stops this variety from overwhelming the work and its readers is Sidney’s care to make the details appropriate, so that—to pick up again on what Molyneux says—we get ‘variety of matter, and orderly disposition, and couched in frame of such apt words without superfluity’. The key rhetorical principle of decorum governs the work. Decorum could be a principle of behaviour—morals—as it must have been in Puttenham’s lost treatise De decoro and as it was in the courtesy manuals of Castiglione and co. But in literature it required the author to take the responsibility for dressing, acting, and speaking appropriately that in real life was an individual’s. So Sidney, describing the ugly, splay-footed Miso, wife of the jumped-up shepherd Dametas, in whose charge Pamela is placed: ‘Neither inwardly nor outwardly was there anything good in her but that she observed decorum, having in a wretched body a froward [i.e. perverse] mind’ (OA, 27; cf. NA, 18). William Scott terms decorum proportion and makes it the key principle of successful poetic composition at all levels: ‘The proportionableness of the matter and conceit is two ways … in the agreeableness and conformity of the device with the thing, and in the correspondency of the parts among themselves to the framing of the convenient whole’ (19r). Put another way, the fiction must be believable, or true to life; and the details of its delivery—character, episode, description, word and phrase—must suit it. Proportion also means self-consistency, says Scott, giving examples from Virgil and Sidney:
You must make the device continually like itself, the persons one and the same; the describing notes or characters (as after Theophrastus they may be called) of every particular must be constant and answerable to the proposed form: Aeneas always devout, valiant, and wise, his Achates faithful; Pamela in all her behaviour, bearing, state, and majesty in a virtuous resolution, and so commanding an awed love and a reverent respect; Philoclea in all her carriage modestly mild and sweetly virtuous, so, as it were, wooing love and honourable regard; Anaxius proud in all his gestures, swelling in his terms, and evermore behaving himself as one that beholds everything under him. (20r)
When Scott returns to think about proportion or decorum at the level of style, he again shows that thinking about literary decorum touches on ethics:
First, then, we require a proportionableness in the style: that is when the words fit the subject … and circumstances, when the style is suitable to the particular kind or poem—as the heroic and tragic is suited with the high style, the comedy and lyric with the mean, the pastoral and satirical with the low or base. Likewise, the persons from whom and to whom, the time and place, as in the conceit so in the uttering and expressing the conceits must be especially regarded. Truth is always the mistress of imitation … We must observe with Tully every motion of the mind to have a proper and peculiar kind of utterance, as anger (saith he) inditeth eagerly, with contention, the phrase cutted and short; sorrow, contrary, hath a lowly, yielding phrase with some amplification and sometimes interrupted (saith he) … Examples of all these easily may be taken out of Virgil and the Arcadia, two absolute patterns of decorum. (33v–34r)
This contact between rhetorical poetics and ethics is hard-wired into the Aristotelian tradition (and Aristotle is the fons et origo of our paradigms in all three disciplines). Aristotle’s Rhetoric included detailed treatment of ethics in order that the orator might understand, and simulate, passions, states of mind, and moral positions. Hoskyns credits the Rhetoric as one of Sidney’s key sources in the representation of human virtues and vices, and—as Scott does with his quietly innovative use of the word ‘character’—mentions Aristotle’s successor Theophrastus as a model in the description of character types.26 Sidney, and his text, could so readily be seen as exemplary of morality as well as of style because of the bridge between the two that a basically Aristotelian model of decorum had already created.
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What we find when we start to look more closely at the Arcadia is that the analogy between style and morality is explored in ways of fundamental importance to our reading of the work. As I remarked in passing earlier, Sidney thinks about the exemplary plots and characters of fiction in Platonic terms:
any understanding knoweth the skill of each artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest by delivering them forth in such excellency as he had imagined them; which delivering forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air, but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him. (Defence, 9)
Plato’s ideas were quasi-geometric forms, which is one reason why the mathematical language of proportion (the word is used by Puttenham as his name for verse form) so readily allows us to recognize analogies between the form of an idealized character and the forms of language which express or surround that character. Sidney, the writer of perfectly balanced periods and the lover of artfully arranged rhetorical schemes, forces us to recognize in his writing a geometric or measured attitude to prose form which can relate the structure of a period to moral and psychological states and to other formal structures (such as plots or political systems or virtues), an attitude, that is to say, which can see an analogy between the parts and wholes of language and the component parts and wholes of other schemes of organization, psychological, societal, moral, and so forth.
Let us examine a period, let us see what ‘the embrodery of finest Art, and daintiest Witt’ looks like. Here, at the opening of Book III of the ‘old’ Arcadia, Sidney describes his two heroes coming together to compare notes:
There, sitting down among the sweet flowers (whereof that country was very plentiful) under the pleasant shade of a broad-leaved sycamore, they recounted one to another their strange pilgrimage of passions, omitting nothing which the open-hearted friendship is wont to lay forth, where there is cause to communicate both joys and sorrows—for, indeed, there is no sweeter taste of friendship than the coupling of their souls in this mutuality either of condoling or comforting, where the oppressed mind finds itself not altogether miserable, since it is sure of one which is feelingly sorry for his misery; and the joyful spends not his joy either alone or there where it may be envied, but may freely send it to such a well-grounded object, from whence he shall be sure to receive a sweet reflection of the same joy, and (as in a clear mirror of sincere goodwill) see a lively picture of his own gladness. (OA, 148)
The balance achieved here comes not only from a control of rhythm, but also from the subject matter—the perfect mutual sympathy of the two cousins. The suspended syntax, with its frequent harmonious subclauses, throws a burden of expectation on the period’s conclusion, which delivers us the lifelike, exemplary moral image (‘lively picture’) that is at the heart of Sidney’s literary theory. Looking back on the sentence, we experience its shape and structure as something seen, something substantial: not only do words deliver speaking pictures, but they achieve a solidity of their own in doing so. The sentence is like that, also, because it is about perfected communication: it is expressive because it represents an ideal model of satisfied expression, where something is said that needs saying, and that something is perfectly understood.
So often in Sidney that is not the case. The very tidiness of Gynecia’s periods (‘For nothing else did my husband take this strange resolution to live so solitary, for nothing else have the winds delivered this strange guest to my country, for nothing else have the destinies reserved my life to this time, but that only I, most wretched I, should become a plague to myself, and a shame to womankind’: OA, 81, NA, 120) is flawed by their failure to meet a basic condition of rhetorical success: for Gynecia is talking to herself and her admissions are hollow. Often, of course, the solitary monologue will be overheard and interrupted and Sidney makes most successful play with those moments where a character can’t quite get their words out, where meaning gets stuck between inside and outside and the speaking pictures are mute:
And here Pyrocles suddenly stopped, like a man unsatisfied in himself, though his wit might well have served to satisfy another. And so, looking with a countenance as though he desired [Musidorus] should know his mind without hearing him speak, and yet desirous to speak to breathe out some part of his inward evil, sending again new blood to his face, he continued in this manner … (OA, 14; NA, 50–1)
[Musidorus] might see in his countenance some great determination mixed with fear, and might perceive in him store of thoughts rather stirred than digested, his words interrupted continually with sighs which served as a burden to each sentence, and the tenor of his speech (though of his wonted phrase) not knit together to one constant end but rather dissolved in itself, as the vehemency of the inward passion prevailed. (OA, 15; NA, 51–2)
That last period elegantly describes a failure of periodicity, where the balanced pairs have become fractured paradoxes and the harmonious mixture of elements a dangerous jumble. At this stage, Pyrocles knows that his tale of how he has fallen in love will not be welcome to his cousin, and so he is talking around the issue, and failing to talk. He begins by wishing that his cousin might know his mind and when he speaks his syntax almost lacks a ‘constant end’ and is ‘dissolved in itself’. This way of representing mental torment and breakdown with syntactic disruption is pursued throughout the revised Arcadia especially, with its many broken sentences culminating in the unfinished sentence on which the work breaks off.27 We should note that Sidney at such moments always focuses on the need for understanding and interpretation, and their failure, so that each monologue and dialogue in the Arcadia figures the condition of the entire text in relation to its readers, of whom in Sidney’s theory so very much is expected.
There are other ways in which what we find in a single period and in the mind that it so successfully stands for will be figured on a larger scale. ‘Remember,’ counsels Musidorus later in this scene, ‘that, if we will be men, the reasonable part of our soul is to have absolute commandment, against which if any sensual weakness arise, we are to yield all our sound forces to the overthrowing of so unnatural a rebellion’ (OA, 17; NA, 70). This landscape of mental rule and rebellion surfaces in the rebellion against Basilius that the princes help to quash in Book II and in a dialogue poem performed in the second eclogues in which—taking the formalized exterior expression of interior states to an extreme—two groups of shepherds speak in the persons of Reason and Passion (OA, 119–20): ‘Thou rebel vile, come, to thy master yield’—‘No tyrant, no; mine, mine shall be the field.’ This balletic version of the pattern is given a rather tidy—and specious—ending (‘Then let us both to heav’nly rules give place, | Which Passions kill, and Reason do deface.’), and this is an option Sidney always reserves. It is how the ‘old’ Arcadia ends, after all. The two princes have been sentenced to death because Pyrocles has been found in Philoclea’s chamber, Musidorus has eloped with Pamela, and Basilius has been found dead. The sentence is confirmed even when it is discovered that their anonymous judge is Euarchus, Pyrocles’s father, but is then forgotten as Basilius wakes up magically from a drugged sleep and we get the happy, deus ex machina, ending we crave. We find the same pattern, then—the suspiciously tidy resolution of apparently irreconcilable conflict—in a mind, in a poem, in an episode, in a plot.
Sidney draws our attention to the analogy explicitly when he likens narratives to sentences. When Musidorus has forgiven Pyrocles for being in love, he asks for a narrative of events:
Let me therefore receive a clear understanding, which many times we miss while those things we account small, as a speech or a look, are omitted—like as a whole sentence may fail of his congruity by wanting one particle. (NA, 78)
And William Scott develops the point. At the level of plot, he says, we delight in surprising turns of events:
Such are those peripeteiae, as you would say indirect compassings of matters, when the strange, unexpected issue of things falls out otherwise than the direct tenor or purport of that went before and there is something properly and handsomely brought about contrary to the bent of the matter or expectation of the reader or beholder, as when friends by some unlooked-for accident fall from one another or enemies are reconciled, which is ordinarily by revealing of something which before was unknown or covered and disguised, as, when the two friends Daiphantus and Palladius combated one another, by the striking of Palladius his helmet from his head Daiphantus knew him to be his entire Musidorus – which accident, so to see friends meet, makes the readers, as they are said thereupon to be, full of wonder and yet fuller of joy than wonder. (22r–v)
(An episode in Sidney is of course the best example.) And at the level of sentence or period we appreciate the same thing:
Such are those pretty turnings of your sentences from the apparent bent of your phrase that are, as it were, models of the peripeteiae … In all things that discerning judgment of the poet must keep measure and decorum … (23r)
Again, we see that the theoretical approach which considers each of the levels of poetic creation in terms of measure and proportion is more apt to develop the analogy between those levels, to see how one set of proportions is interestingly like another.
An approach like Scott’s has been very successfully pursued by John Carey in a landmark article on ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’. ‘If we are to understand the work,’ Carey states, ‘we must regain a sense of its vital rhetorical operation—must see its rhetoric as part of its life’: ‘the prolific display of figuring in which Sidney’s narrative is embodied is not ornate but functional, a linguistic equivalent of a particular and tragic world view’.28 A ‘constant impulse towards deadlock in the rhetoric’ (247) is matched to what Carey sees as a mode of plotting derived from Aristotelian tragedy, whereby actions produce the opposite of their intended consequences, and to a ‘principle of conflict, of divided loyalties, of tension and struggle within the soul’ (250). These ‘two basic narrative principles of peripeteia (or reversal) and passion warring against reason’ (250) find their figural equivalents in the figures of synoeciosis (expanded oxymoron or paradox) and antimetabole (a conceptual or verbal chiasmus, a-b-b-a). So when Sidney’s narrator (to give an example chosen by Carey and Hoskyns) tells us that ‘one could not tell whether it were a mourning pleasure or a delightful sorrow’ (NA, 438), we are not only encountering a pleasing rhetorical decoration, but also a world-view. The peripeteias of Sidney’s plots and sentences (and we should note that Carey, in 1984, and William Scott, in 1599, coincide in identifying this Aristotelian term with both) are morally serious and purposive.
When towards the end of Book I the main characters head out to hear that book’s and day’s eclogues, Basilius stays behind, having ‘a sufficient eclogue in his own head betwixt honour … on the one side, and this new assault of Cleophila’s beauty on the other side’ (OA, 41). This ‘unquiet contention’ (OA, 41; cf. NA, 111) is interrupted a few lines down by those fleeing the lion and bear who have broken Book I’s peace, and as Sidney’s narrator backtracks to describe the scene from which they have fled, we find another image of balanced discord and a second ‘contention’: ‘It was, indeed, a place of great delight, for through the midst of it there ran a sweet brook which did both hold the eye open with her beautiful streams and close the eye with the sweet purling noise it made upon the pebble-stones it ran over; the meadow itself yielding so liberally all sorts of flowers that it seemed to nourish a contention betwixt the colour and the smell whether in his kind were the more delightful’ (OA, 41; cf. NA, 111). The sensory overload in this setting, which Sidney goes on to describe metaphorically as both a ‘theatre’ (the stage for action) and a ‘gallery’ (a space for exemplary images), seems likely to privilege pleasure over usefulness and we sense in its ability to make us close our eyes that an inattention bred by delight is somehow the cause of the dangerous interruption that follows. Always in Sidney a literary-theoretical model of poetic delight aiding poetic teaching is undermined by representations of delight being pursued for its own sake. We may argue that his rhetorical figuration is purposive and meaningful, but within his fiction he can represent the advantages of ignoring rhetoric, describing an ideal judge, Euarchus, who is able to listen impassively to the eloquent pleadings of the princes, ‘letting pass the flowers of rhetoric and only marking whither their reasons tended’ (OA, 348).
Sometimes all it takes is a pun to get us from one level or discourse to another. Bodily disguise and rhetoric are often yoked. Is it wrong to disguise oneself if one’s ends are virtuous? Is eloquence always liable to lead to the deceitful misuse of rhetoric? Philanax ably punctures Pyrocles’s eloquent arguments in his own defence in the trial scene of Book V by noting how the man impersonating the woman had lent his outer garment to Gynecia so that she might impersonate him: ‘How can you cloak the lending of your cloak unto her?’ (OA, 337). This example helps us to see that Sidney’s Arcadia is governed by a condition of metonymic connection between the various discrete and yet related aspects and levels of fictive prose composition, a ‘complex network of parallels and analogies through which the author discloses his purpose’.29 And it is only by being alert to the metonymic dance of Sidney’s prose that we see how best to approach the work as interpreters. We should not expect a relation between Sidney’s art and his world that is either straightforwardly mimetic (he is telling us about human nature) or straightforwardly allegorical (he is telling us about Elizabethan politics). Rather, the best way to think about the Arcadia’s relation to the particular discourses and contexts and literary traditions with which it makes contact is not mimetic or allegorical, but metonymic. This is not to say that you cannot find out something about human nature or Elizabethan politics from the Arcadia, but if you wish to do this you will need to disentangle it from the rhetorical and intellectual knot garden in which it is intricated and enwound. And that itself is perhaps the wrong metaphor. Rather, we can only touch (as metonyms do each other) such meanings because they are not separable from the whole complex system that is Sidney’s masterwork. There is no ethics without rhetoric, no politics without plot form and generic paradigm, no action without words, no idea without the physical and verbal matter which embodies it.
How, for example, are we to judge the moment in the ‘old’ Arcadia when Musidorus is overcome with desire for the sleeping Pamela and decides to rape her, when it seems to be created by a sequence of metaphors that present the itemized features of her beautiful face as an army first threatening to ambush Musidorus and then seeking a military league with him and against Pamela? Our ethical stance is further confused when Pamela’s beauty is described as seeming ‘the picture of some excellent artificer’ (177), a thing wrought by art, an object of aesthetic response and interpretive enquiry like the text itself. Is Musidorus to blame here, or his author, or the metaphors, which take on a life of their own? Sidney takes pains not to decide such questions, but to make them as involved and enjoyably intractable as possible.
The structures and forms whose metonymic and analogical resemblances are the basis of Sidney’s art are all defined by their conclusions. We can only judge the success of a tragic plot or a well-balanced period or a refrain poem when we have reached its end. And Sidney’s Arcadia has two endings: in its two versions it is perfectly wrapped up (the ‘old’ Arcadia) and fatally imperfect (the ‘new’). Sidney’s was an ends-oriented literary theory, life, and approach to plot and verse form, but what he knew of life and ethics, of ideas, of words, and of history told him that conclusion should always be provisional, or open-ended. As Greenblatt puts it, ‘in the mixed mode, to resolve is to lie’, 30 or as Sidney tell us early on in the Arcadia, ‘there is nothing so certain as our continual uncertainty’ (OA, 5).
Alexander, Gavin. Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
_____, ed. Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004).
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991).
Garrett, Martin, ed. Sidney: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1996).
Greville, Fulke. The Prose Works, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
Heninger, S. K., Jr. Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989).
Hoskyns, John. The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns, 1566–1638, ed. Louise Brown Osborn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937).
Kay, Dennis, ed. Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986).
Scott, William. The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
___ The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
___ The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).