Sidney’s first piece of writing was a dramatic trifle called the Lady of May, performed for Elizabeth at Wanstead in 1578, and now only remembered because it may have suggested to Shakespeare the character of Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Though this drama was only a small achievement and Sidney was the youngest of the group, he was looked on as the moving spirit; his reputation had gone before him, and older men gladly acknowledged his qualities. When Spenser published his Shepherd’s Calendar in 1579 he dedicated it to ‘the noble and virtuous gentleman and worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry, Mr Philip Sidney’. Sidney beat the critical hares out of the tangle of English poetic practice, and led his companions in pursuit; he knew, said Nashe, ‘what belonged to a scholar’, and knew ‘what pains, what toils, what travail conduct to perfection’.
The investigations of Sidney and his friends were carried on with more energy than success. They recognized problems but their theories provided few answers. Noting the uncertainty of English metrics, they tried to discipline English verse to classical measures, and they experimented with hexameters, sapphics and other awkward, un-English shapes. Sidney was no pedantic classicist—he called ‘Ciceronianism’ the ‘chief abuse’ at Oxford—but the Renaissance mind, when it was puzzled, loved to start at classical principles. Whatever his debt to the classics, Sidney was never one to doubt his own language. At a time when many were gloomy about the chances of English as a literary language, unfavourably contrasting its rugged changeability with the chaste permanence of Greek and Latin, he insisted on its eloquence and power. Bacon might write that ‘these modern languages will play the bankrupt with books’ and put his major works of philosophy into Latin; but Sidney agreed with Richard Mulcaster, the old master of his friend Spenser, who boldly stated ‘I love Rome, but London better; I favour Italy, but England more; I honour the Latin, but I worship the English.’ And Mulcaster would not admit that Latin, though a fine and elegant tongue, was in any way superior to English for any kind of writing. ‘But why not all in English,’ he wrote in his Elementary, published in 1582, ‘a tongue of itself both deep in conceit, and frank in delivery? I do not think that any language, be it whatsoever, is better able to utter all arguments, either with more pith, or greater plainness than our English tongue is.’ The writings of Sidney and his friends, especially Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar and Sidney’s own Arcadia, were in part attempts to vindicate the opinion of Mulcaster and demonstrate the various and eloquent resources of English. And the virtues of the language appeared not only in the careful rhetoric of an elevated style; Sidney also recognized the glory of traditional forms. He wrote on the old ballads: ‘I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet, and yet it is sung by some blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude style.’
In his own tongue Sidney saw a true language of poetry worthy of the best writers; and the purpose of his studies and his practice was always to prove to his countrymen the true dignity of poetry. Only the poet perfects nature: ‘her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.’ The poet’s power to catch, hold and fire the imagination is worth all the wearisome logic of the philosophers. The poet ‘cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music; and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’. When the Puritan critic Stephen Gosson wrote an attack on poetry called The School of Abuse, and had the gall to dedicate it to Sidney—relying on Sidney’s well-known Protestant sympathies—he found that he had badly misjudged his man; Sidney was quickly in the field with a resounding defence.
The Defence of Poesie was possibly written about 1580 though not published until fifteen years later. It is a curious work of criticism in that it is more notable as an affirmation of the poet’s dignity than as an example of critical acuteness. Gosson had particularly attacked the theatre and Sidney had, on the whole, agreed with him. In a lengthy consideration of his contemporary drama Sidney quite failed to see that, even though in many ways preposterous, it still contained vigorous elements which in a few short years would lead to the overwhelming triumph of English letters—the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare and their many followers. But the Defence of Poesie deserves its fame, for in the characteristic manner of Sidney its clarity and charm more than make up for the fallibility of the criticism.
It was a strange and fortunate case with Sidney and his friends that the actual practice of their writing proved what their theories could not. The arguments and theoretical attempts to reform English prosody on classical principles failed; but what did that matter when the actual poems scattered through Arcadia successfully demonstrated a wonderful variety of English verse forms? Arcadia was written at Wilton for the entertainment of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, ‘at his vacant and spare times of leisure (for he could endure at no time to be idle and void of action)’. It was written on odd sheets which were taken to his sister as they were done, one by one, for her to keep or to show ‘to such friends as will weigh errors in the balance of good will’. The first version was finished by 1580, but a year or two later Sidney began to recast it. It was not published at all until after his death; a small part was published in 1590, and an amplified version in 1593. Arcadia was a startling light piercing clear through the general artistic muddle of the time. It reconciled in an English book various Renaissance and medieval influences and devised a golden prose to celebrate the reconciliation. Arcadia is often called a romance, but it is a work that does not fall easily into any class. Sidney took the romance of Amadis de Gaul, the pastoral of Sannazaro, the prose epic of Heliodorus and combined them in a work where narrative, moral lesson and poetry are nicely blended. It is certainly not a novel in the modern sense (though perhaps a forebear of the novel); it is rather the expression in art of Sidney’s courtly ideal, a picture of virtuous living. The style of Arcadia is no longer to the taste of many readers; it is too high-flown, too rhetorical, too mellifluous. But in its day the style was no less remarkable than the matter of the book. It was an appropriate and disciplined prose, clear in syntax and vivid in language; it was a style that for elegance and ease surpassed what had been written before in English, a prose that caused Ben Jonson to name Sidney, together with Richard Hooker, the masters of good writing.
To be an historical master of prose would be enough for any man; but Sidney also became an historical master of English poetry. He had first met Penelope Devereux, daughter of the Earl of Essex, when he was twenty and she a girl of twelve. Sidney had been with Essex in Ireland and the earl formed such a good opinion of the young man that he wished on his death bed to give Sidney his daughter in marriage. Philip was serious and high-minded; Penelope much younger, wayward and something of a coquette. There is no knowing what was between the two: true friendship, passion, or merely an expectation of marrying? It never came to that, for Penelope’s family did not favour Sidney (possibly on account of his poverty) and hurried Penelope in 1581, at the age of eighteen, into a marriage with a wealthy and well-named Lord Rich. Sidney, however, immortalized her as the ‘Stella’ of his Astrophel and Stella, the first English sonnet sequence.
For the purpose of the poems the true relationship between the young people does not matter. The sonnet sequence is not a narrative history of an affair, but a long lyrical reflection, chiefly on the nature of love. Astrophel and Stella was written at about the same time as Arcadia, and like Arcadia was not published till after the poet’s death. The sonnet sequence was imported from Italy and Sidney stayed very close both to the Italian form of the sonnet and to the Italian idea of the sonnet. Some of the poems are carelessly written and the quality is uneven; but the whole was an extraordinary achievement which impressed his contemporaries more than any other poetry of the century. Sidney gave to Stella the same unearthly fame that Petrarch, his Italian master, had given to Laura. The sequence w
as an inspiration to later Elizabethans and brought forth in time Spenser’s Amoretti and Shakespeare’s own sonnet sequence. The form was wonderfully suited to the Elizabethan sensibility—a lyrical outpouring that permitted passion, reflection and criticism of life in a form that tightly curbed the notorious rambling exuberance which Elizabethan writing was prone to. It would be hard to say which aspect of Astrophel and Stella was the more valuable for English letters: the regularity of the metrics and the precision of the form which helped to tame the wilderness of English prosody; or the beauty of the expression which encouraged the lyricism that is now, and always has been, the particular excellence of English poetry.
The contemplative life was never the aim of Sidney’s courtly ideal; ‘for as Aristotle sayeth, it is not Gnosis, but Praxis must be the fruit’. The retirement to Wilton was but a pleasant episode in a life devoted to service. And for Sidney, service of the arts demanded that he become an active patron, a helper not only of the great poet Edmund Spenser, whom he guided to a post in Ireland, but also of modest scholars like William Temple, who became his secretary, and Abraham Fraunce, who was directed by Sidney to study Ramus and Aristotle and who replied with an endearing dedication ‘to the right Worshipful his very good Mr and Patron, Mr P Sidney’. The correspondence with the learned men of the continent continued. His old mentor Languet died in 1581, but other famous scholars, French, Italian, German and Dutch, were anxious to share their thoughts with the Englishman. They were captivated by the qualities which Giordano Bruno perceived. ‘The poetry in the book’, he wrote in the dedication to his De gli Eroici Furori, ‘is under the criticism and protection of a poet; the philosophy is nakedly revealed to so clear an intellect as yours; and the heroic matters are directed to a heroic and noble mind, with which you have shown yourself to be endowed.’
Service to the arts and service to the State were but two kinds of action, different expressions of the whole man. By the spring of 1581 Sidney was back in London. He sat in Parliament and took his place on two committees for the suppression of papists and for the control of sedition against the crown. He attended once agan at court and indulged his love of ceremony at the royal entertainments. In April, at a show for the French ambassador, he appeared in ‘armour part blue and the rest gilt and engraven, with four spare horses having caparisons and furniture very rich and costly, as some of cloth of gold embroidered with pearl, and some embroidered with gold and silver feathers very richly and cunningly wrought’. He was attended by four pages, thirty gentlemen and four trumpeters. This extravagance, in a sense the natural outpouring of a generous mind, was extremly unwise, for Sidney was not rich; and all his life his striving towards a noble and grand ideal was checked by the crude realities of finance. His father, Sir Henry, had nearly ruined the family by his efforts on the Queen’s behalf in Ireland. Sidney had returned to court partly in an attempt to find employment, and therefore income. At this time he was reduced to some undignified shifts in his search for money. Elizabeth had promised to do something for him but, as usual, was slow in keeping her word. Sidney wrote several times to Hatton begging him to give the Queen a tactful reminder, or he would have to petition Elizabeth directly, for ‘need obeys no laws and forgets blushing’. At last Elizabeth, with what seems like cynical ingenuity, offered Sidney a sum taken from recusant fines and from the sale of forfeited Catholic goods. Sidney had scruples about accepting—‘I like not their persons and much worse their religions, but I think my fortunes very hard that my reward must be built upon other men’s punishments’—nonetheless to his discredit he did accept and received £3,000. His poverty was also eased by the sprinkling of official positions that at last began to come his way. He was Steward to the Bishop of Winchester, joint Master of the Ordnance with his uncle Warwick, and in 1583 General of Horse. In the same year he was knighted so that he could represent John Casimir at the installation of the German prince as a Knight of the Garter. And in the same year again his financial problems were finally solved by marriage to the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. The Queen’s secretary agreed to pay the debts of his son-in-law to the extent of £1,500, and to lodge the young couple in his house at his expense. The acquisition of such a brilliant son-in-law was an expensive honour for Walsingham. When Sidney was killed three years later, Walsingham very honourably cleared up the huge debts left behind.
Perhaps it was the need for money that first turned Sidney’s eyes toward maritime exploration; for nearly every Elizabethan of rank at one time or another looked on England’s sea voyages as a means to riches. He had contributed £25 to Frobisher’s first journey in 1576, £50 to the second voyage and £67 10s. to the third. The money was all wasted, for Frobisher made no profit. But the search for wealth was not his only interest in exploration. Drake’s circumnavigation had caught his imagination, as it had that of all England; in 1580 he wrote to his brother Robert that the return of Drake was the only talk of the town. The success of Drake altered the balance of sea power in the Americas and Sidney, like his political tutors Leicester and Walsingham, was quick to see the favourable implications for England and for the Protestant alliance against Spain. Walsingham and Sidney were the chief promoters of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s plans for colonization, attracted especially by the proposal to encourage English Catholics to emigrate, thus ridding the country of their objectionable influence. Sidney purchased from Gilbert the rights to three million acres of land which he then assigned to the Catholic Sir George Peckham. These plans foundered and sank on 9th September 1583, when the Squirrel carried its bold captain Sir Humphrey Gilbert beneath the ocean.
The failure of Gilbert did not end Sidney’s interest in the New World. When Parliament met in November 1584, Sir Philip served with Drake on the committee which confirmed the grant of lands in what became Virginia to Sir Walter Raleigh. With Drake, he also planned an expedition to the West Indies, which came to nothing, and then another expedition to join Ralph Lane in Virginia. Sidney and Fulke Greville were eager for the voyage. In August 1585 they arrived at Plymouth with high hopes and were received ‘with a great deal of outward pomp and compliment’. But the Queen’s permission had not been obtained. To Sidney’s great disappointment he was summoned back to London, and his discontent was only eased by the thought that at last Elizabeth had a task for him worthy of his powers: he was appointed Governor of Flushing.
For the last act in this short life Sir Philip Sydney returned to the Netherlands where some years before he had been acclaimed by William the Silent, and where his reputation for Protestant chivalry stood as high as anywhere in Europe. Sidney’s heart was entirely with the Dutch in the fight against their Spanish overlords, but the signs were ominous when he entered his new command. He took the oath at Flushing on 21st November 1585. ‘I find the people very glad of me’, he immediately wrote to his uncle Leicester, but ‘the garrison is far too weak to command by authority.’ Elizabeth in her usual way had failed to make proper provision for the garrison; the numbers were too few and two hundred of them were sick; they were ill paid, ill housed, ill fed, and the fortifications of the town were in disrepair. Sidney was forced to do what his father had done in Ireland—find his own money to finance the Queen’s campaign. He borrowed £300 at high rate of interest for the poor soldiers who were ‘scarce able to keep life with their entire pay’. This debt was one of many which his father-in-law inherited. Leicester was the aggresive voice that had persuaded the Queen to wage a limited war in the Low Countries, and he was given command of all the English forces. But matters did not improve when he arrived in the Netherlands. He was a poor general and Elizabeth distrusted his ambition; the suspicion of the Queen naturally undermined Leicester’s influence with the Dutch.
Some of the displeasure with Leicester fell also on the head of Sidney, his nephew, especially as Sir Philip was outspoken against the Queen’s meanness: ‘If the Queen pay not her soldiers’, he wrote, ‘she must lose her garrisons, there is no doubt thereof.’ The fighting in the Netherlands, being
in the cause of both religion and nationalism, was notoriously brutal and Sidney could find no honour in the exchange of atrocities. Long ago Languet had written to him of the ferocious madness in the Low Countries, and condemned those who looked for reputation in bloodshed. He begged Sidney to use his humanity ‘for the preservation and not the destruction of man’. Now that he was drawn into the terrible affair, with his usual high purpose he determined to look beyond the slaughter, the misery and Elizabeth’s mean calculations, to see the task as God’s holy work in the Protestant cause which could go on despite the Queen. ‘For methinks I see’, he wrote to Walsingham in March 1586, ‘the great work indeed in hand against the abusers of the world.’ And he continued: ‘I know there is a higher power that must uphold me or else I shall fall.’
He was trying to reconcile himself to the pain of being there, to the pain of seeing men die miserably neglected in a squalid war. He was anxious to bear his part in the fighting. When Leicester finally decided to face the Spanish at Zutphen, having spent the summer avoiding them, Sidney left his own troops safely at Deventer and joined Leicester. When the attack of the Spaniards came on 22nd September, Sydney with the same intrepidity went out without the thigh-pieces of his armour; for he had seen his colleague Sir William Pelham go out without his, and he would not take the advantage over an old man. One horse was shot under him. He mounted again and at the second charge a shot penetrated his unprotected thigh, smashing the bone. He was carried off bleeding profusely and called for a drink; then, in the famous scene made immortal by Greville’s account, ‘as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words, “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine”.’ For twenty-five days he endured, but mortification had set in; he died in his thirty-first year on 17th October 1586.
Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age Page 22