Sidney the patron and critic
Sidney helped Camden, Hakluyt, Nashe, Harvey, Donne, Jonson and above all Spenser, who called him the hope of all scholars and patron of his young muse. It was therefore curious that Stephen Gosson dedicated to him a bad school book (1579) whose title was The School of Abuse, in full a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, jesters and other such caterpillars of the commonwealth. Sidney accepted the challenge and wrote the first critical work of the Elizabethan age, The Defence of Poesy.
Drawing on Aristotle and the Italian critics, Sidney held that poetry is an art of imitation, a speaking picture, whose purpose is to teach and to delight. Ranking morals far above art, he thought art meant teaching morals through vivid examples. The philosopher, he argued, gives the precept and the historian the example, but neither can do both. The philosopher's reasoning is so abstract and difficult that a man who has no other guide grows old before he can do an honorable deed; the historian is bound to what is, not what should be, and so his examples carry less fruit. The incomparable poet does both: what the philosopher says should be done, the poet shows in a perfect picture through one who has done it, giving a general idea in a particular case. The picture strikes the eye of the soul in a way that long explanation cannot. So poetry, for Sidney, includes all imaginative literature, drama, verse and invented prose, and it is not rhyme and meter that make it: a man may be a poet without writing verse, and write verse without being a poet.
Arcadia and the sonnets
In the same year as the Defence (1580), Sidney began the Arcadia for his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, born in 1561, seven years his junior, one of the famous women of the country, who had absorbed Latin, Greek and Hebrew as far as her time allowed, and was most admired for her beauty. She served in the queen's household, and her uncle Leicester helped provide her dowry, which smoothed her marriage to Henry, Earl of Pembroke. Sidney wrote for her willingly.
Imitating Sannazaro's Arcadia, he easily and at length created an imaginary world of valiant princes, beautiful princesses, tournaments, bewildering disguises and charming landscapes. The beauty of Urania, he writes, is the greatest thing the world can show but the least that can be praised; and Pallas had a penetrating, unaffected wit, lofty thoughts seated in courtesy and modesty, eloquent and sweet speech, and a bearing so noble that it lent greatness to misfortune. The style plainly imitates Euphues. The plot is intricate: Pyrocles, to be near Philoclea, dresses as a woman; she answers his love with sisterly affection; her father, thinking him a woman, falls in love with him, and her mother, on learning he is a man, falls for him; yet everything ends in due moral order. Sidney did not take the tale too seriously, did not revise the pages he sent his sister in haste, and, the book says, ordered them burned on his deathbed. They were kept and published in 1590, and for ten years counted among the best prose of Elizabethan England.
Amid the romance, the Defence and his political and military duties, Sidney wrote a sequence in verse that prepared the ground for Shakespeare's sonnets. For this he needed an unhappy love, and found it in Penelope, daughter of the first Earl of Essex. She liked his sighs and looks but married Lord Rich (1581), and Sidney went on sending her sonnets even after his own marriage to Frances Walsingham. Few were shocked by this poetic wandering, since nobody expected a man to write love sonnets for a wife whose generosity dried up the poetic gift. After his death the sequence was published as Astrophel and Stella. Its manner follows Petrarch, whose Laura matched Penelope in eyes, brow, cheeks, lips and hair. Sidney knew well that his ardor came from his poetic temperament; he wrote that if he were a woman, sonneteers could never persuade him they were in love. Even so, these sonnets are the finest verse before Shakespeare. In one, even the moon is sick with love: with what sad steps, he asks, does she climb the sky, and is constant love counted madness up there, and are the fair ones proud, and is faithlessness called virtue?
Zutphen
In 1585 Elizabeth sent Sidney to the Netherlands to help the rebels against Spain. Though not yet thirty-one, he was made governor of Flushing. But he demanded more munitions and better pay for soldiers who were paid in worthless coin, and the thrifty queen was angry. Sidney led his men at Axel (6 July 1586) and fought at the front. At Zutphen (22 September) he showed excess of courage: after his horse was killed in a charge he mounted another and rode into the enemy ranks. An arrow struck his thigh, and his horse bolted back to Leicester's camp. He was carried to a house in Arnhem, and for twenty-five days suffered under incompetent surgeons. The wound turned gangrenous and on 17 October he died, 'the wonder of the age' as Spenser called him. On his last day he is said to have remarked that he would not exchange his joy for the empire of the world. A legend of doubtful truth, from Greville's life of him, tells that when a bottle of water was brought to the wounded man, he gave it to a dying soldier beside him, saying that his need was greater. When his body was brought to London he was given a funeral such as England did not see again until Nelson's death.
Edmund Spenser, 1552 to 1599
On Sidney's death Spenser wrote: Sidney is dead, my friend is dead, the joy of the world is dead. It was Sidney who had encouraged him to be a poet. Spenser's beginnings were hard: he was the son of a journeyman cloth-weaver, and his kinship with the noble Spencer family was too remote to help. Edmund was sent as a charity boy to the Merchant Taylors' School and then to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he worked for his daily bread. At about seventeen he began to write and publish verse. Harvey tried to make him follow classical forms and subjects; Spenser humbly tried to please him, but soon rebelled against meters that suited him badly. In 1579 he showed Harvey the first part of The Faerie Queene. Harvey ignored its medieval allegory, disliked its fair lady and advised him to give it up, but Spenser went on.
Though a gloomy, quarrelsome man, Harvey found Spenser a place in the service of the Earl of Leicester. There the poet met Sidney, fell under his spell and dedicated to him The Shepheardes Calender (1579). Its form recalls Theocritus, yet it is like the popular almanacs which assign shepherds' duties by the seasons. Its theme is the love and frustration of a shepherd, Colin Clout, for the cruel Rosalind. We do not recommend reading it, but Sidney's praise made Spenser famous. To earn more, he agreed to become secretary to Arthur, Lord Grey of Wilton, the new Lord Deputy of Ireland (1580), and went with him to the war there, where he saw the harsh measures of that campaign at Smerwick (the book's account is softened here and continues in the next post).