Contents:
- Introduction
- Defence of Poesie
- Notes
- Bibliography
Introduction
Biographical Note
Born into great expectations at the estate of Penshurst, Kent, on 30
November 1554, Philip Sidney was educated at Shrewsbury Grammar School in
Shropshire, and entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1568. After
three years, he departed for the traditional
Grand Tour
of
continental Europe, arriving in Paris 1572, the year of the St.
Bartholomew's Day Massacre, of which he was an eyewitness. He became
friends with the noted humanist scholar Hubert Languet, and spent the
winter with him at Frankfort. In 1573 he passed through Hungary and Vienna
on his way to Venice, and the following winter visited Padua, Florence,
and Genoa. Sidney joined Edward Wotton for an embassy to the Imperial
Court at Vienna, 1574-5, and returned to England, after a visit to Poland,
in June 1575. In 1576 he became Queen Elizabeth's cupbearer and traveled
to Ireland to take part in the campaign with Essex. For several years, the
gallant, dashing, and well-traveled young Sidney, who was greatly admired
on the Continent and at home, waited for an opportunity to serve his Queen
in some capacity commensurate with his abilities, but no such opportunity
came— perhaps because his volatile temperament could not safely be
employed in the temporizing style of government she required to ensure
stability. It was probably in 1578 that Sidney's small pageant,
The Lady of
May, was presented before the Queen in vain hopes of persuading
her to look with more favor on his uncle Leicester (and by extension,
himself). At this time he also began work on the
Old Arcadia,
which he completed about 1581. Finding employment at Court virtually
denied him, Sidney at this time (1578-82) divided his time between visits
with his friends (including Edmund Spenser, who published
The Shepheardes
Calender in 1579) and his own writing, including
The
Defence of Poesie [1580-81],
Certaine Sonets [1581],
and
Astrophil and Stella [1581-2]. He also began, but did not
complete, a new version of the
Arcadia
Beginning about 1583, it seemed Sidney's fortunes might be about to
turn. He was knighted in that year, so that he could stand in for his
absent friend Prince Casimir of the Palatinate in installation as a Knight
of the Garter. An important appointment came to him soon after, assisting
the Earl of Warwick, Master of Ordinance, in preparing the defense of
England against possible invasion by the Spanish. In the fall, he married
Frances Walsingham.
It was Sidney's belief that the best way to slow the advance of the
Spanish empire on the Continent was to attack the colonies of Spain in the
New World. He arranged, in 1584, to sail with Sir Francis Drake on such an
expedition but was recalled by the Queen at the last moment and made
governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. Sidney took up the cause of the
overextended and unpaid garrison but discovered that his uncle, the Earl
of Leicester, had diverted the allocated funds to his own use. Sidney
nevertheless rallied the troops as best he could, and, going to the relief
of the garrison at Zutphen, 22 September 1586, was wounded in the thigh by
a musket ball. The wound festered, and he died, in great pain, at Arnheim,
17 October. All of Europe was stunned by the loss, and the body of Philip
Sidney was laid to rest with a lavish state funeral at St. Paul's
cathedral, London, 16 February 1587 (Kimbrough, unpaginated chronology,
Sir Philip Sidney).
The Defence of Poesie
Henry Olney produced a printing of An Apologie for Poetrie in
the spring of 1595; this edition proved to be unauthorized, as William
Ponsonby had entered the work in the Stationer's register on November 29,
1594. Olney was directed to halt sale and turn over his remaining copies
to Ponsonby, who replaced the title page with his own and sold the copies
along with his own printing. These combined copies, and those of
Ponsonby's own edition printed by Thomas Creede, are rare, whereas Olney's
exists in a number of copies. Four versions of the Defence
are known: The Penshurst manuscript, De L'Isle MS. no. 1226,; The Norwich
manuscript found in 1966 in a commonplace book of Francis Blomefield's;
An Apologie for Poetrie, Olney's printing of 1595, and
Ponsonby's The Defence of Poesie of the same year. An
examination of the paper used in the two manuscript versions, which was
done at the request of Mary Mohl, the discoverer of the Norfolk
maunuscript, suggested that the latter, though in some respects inferior,
is the older of the two (The Apology for Poetry xxiv). If
this is the case, a stemma of these documents might appear as follows:
- Fair Copy (no longer extant)
- |
- |
- Copy seen by both/ \Copy seen by both
- Ponsonby's compositor Norfolk scribe and
- |—Penshurst scribe Olney's compositor—|
- | (no longer extant) (no longer extant) |
- | | | |
- | | Norfolk, 1584-1555 (?) |
- | | |
- | Ponsonby, 1595 Olney, 1595
- |
- Penshurst (Robert Sidney's copy) ca. 1600
A definitive edition, collating all these, and recording all variants,
with excellent endnotes, may be found in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir
Philip Sidney [1973], edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van
Dorsten. See also Katherine Duncan-Jones' excellent contribution to the
Oxford Authors Series of Oxford University Press, Sir Philip
Sidney [1989]. The notes are, as is usual in the series,
outstanding, especially in tracing Sidney's reading in Scaliger and the
classical authors.
Many scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime with skill and
devotion to the task, have written on Sidney and on the
Defence, so a definitive general introduction will not be
attempted here. There is one aspect of the Defence, however,
that has been often noted only in passing, and often dismissively, and as
I feel it is Sidney's main point I will attempt to throw a little light on
it. Sidney is conscious throughout his defence that it is fiction
he is defending, and that his strength lies in attacking the privilege
generally accorded to
fact.
He says that
of all writers
under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer
; that is, the
practitioners of what we now call the academic disciplines are regularly
betrayed by their literalism, while the poet, who is under no illusions,
freely creates
fictional
statements as true as any other, and
the truer for not being asserted as literal. Sidney's approach is
characteristic of Renaissance humanism, and more closely akin to modern
semiotic theory than is generally appreciated.
Renaissance education came to specialize in rhetoric at a time in which
political and economic power came to be concentrated in the courts of
princes. This can hardly be a coincidence. Every courtier was trained to
the art of sprezzatura, of skill in seeming effortlessness in
horsemanship, swordplay, singing, dancing, speaking, and writing, so as to
catch the eye of those higher in the hierarchy, and especially that of the
prince. Self-presentation has always been and remains the first move in
the game of self-advancement, but for the Renaissance in general and
Elizabethans especially,
fashioning a self,
to echo Spenser,
was an obsession. Peter Ramus and the humanist rhetoricians provided a
timely operating environment for such pursuits, because their
foregrounding of the provisional status of any assertion helped the
courtiers to understand self-image as a work in progress rather than as a
cynical device.
The Defence of Poesie reflects the humanist education
which Shrewsbury and Oxford had given to Sidney, and reflects on the
rhetorical aims of self-presentation with which an underemployed
Elizabethan gentleman would undertake such a work. It follows the rules
and outline of a standard argument: exordium, proposition, division,
examination, refutation, digression, peroration; and does so with a spirit
and style that must have done its author great credit in the eyes of his
contemporaries. The Defence serves almost as a copia
of Renaissance theory, for Sidney brings every available gun to bear on
his objective: Pliny, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Linus, Amphion,
Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Gower, Chaucer,
Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Phocilydes, Herodotus, Virgil,
Xenophon, Tremellius, Junius, Tyrtaeus, Lucretius, Manilius, Pontanus,
Lucan, Cicero, Heliodorus, Plato, Aristotle, Cornelius Agrippa, Horace,
Terence, More, Erasmus,
Dares Phrygius,
Plautus, Euripides,
Phocion, Sannazaro, Boethius, Persius, Plutarch, Pindar, Tasso, Ovid, Dio
Cassius, Ariosto, Scaliger, Bembo, Bibbiena, Beze, Melancthon,
Fracastorio, Muret, Buchanan, Hurault, Juvenal, Surrey, Spenser,
Sackville, Norton, Apuleius, Demosthenes, Landino, and both Old and New
Testaments are all cited in support of his position, which as every critic
will tell you is that poetry is useful because it delights as it teaches,
a view that dates back to Horace and beyond.
The venerable tradition of didacticism, and Sidney's heavy reliance
upon it in the Defence, has sometimes led to a tendency to
dismiss the Defence as derivative:
not a very original
theorist,
says Hazard Adams in
Critical Theory Since
Plato (154). Adams himself, however, notices something that
sounds modern
in Sidney's argument that the poet
nothing
affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.
He perceptively compares
Sidney on this point to I.A. Richards, but concludes that the comparison
will go nowhere because
Sidney does not have a modern theory of
language
(154). While it is obvious that Sidney had not the
advantage, in his education, of having read Ferdinand de Saussure and his
successors, I believe it is a mistake, on the basis of our own historical
chauvinism, not to seek the implications of Sidney's argument, and to
callously assume that Sidney did not himself see some of those
implications. Nor was Sidney alone in so seeing; Renaissance humanists, of
whom Sidney was one, understood not merely formal rhetoric but
epistemology and even ontology in terms of appearances.
Throughout the period, diagrams appeared in books, such as Andrew
Borde's The First Book of the Introduction to Knowledge
[1542], or Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia [1616],
relating the Ptolemaic cosmology to the idea of a
great chain of
being
in which the cosmos is arranged as a hierarchy in which each
successive level downward in the hierarchy contains entities which are
analogies of entities in the preceding level; to begin to understand the
world view of those who produced these diagrams, it may help to visualize
ourselves not as
made in the image of God
in the sense that we
are independent objects that resemble God, but are actual depictions of
God, like paintings. In this view, nature is not divided from God in the
way in which we are accustomed, after Descartes, to think, but is
something more like a thought or imagination in the mind of God. As
imago dei, we reflect our Maker in all that we do, and most of all
in doing what our Maker does: to make, especially by imagining. To attempt
to improve one's image is then not the dishonest activity which an
Enlightenment materialist assumes it to be, but
in imitatio dei, is
to participate in the creative activity of the Cosmos. Such a world view
will hold that all epistemological practice will be mimetic in procedure,
and this is in fact what Sidney tells us early on:
There is no Art delivered unto mankind that hath
not the workes of nature for his principall object, without which they
could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become Actors
& Plaiers, as it were of what nature will have set forth. So doth the
Astronomer looke upon the starres, and by that he seeth set downe what
order nature hath taken therein. So doth the Geometritian &
Arithmetitian, in their divers sorts of quantities. So doth the Musitians
intimes tel you, which by nature agree, which not. The natural Philosopher
thereon hath his name, and the morall Philosopher standeth uppon the
naturall vertues, vices, or passions of man: and follow nature saith he
therein, and thou shalt not erre. The Lawier saith, what men have
determined. The Historian, what men have done. The Gramarian, speaketh
onely of the rules of speech, and the Rhetoritian and Logitian,
considering what in nature wil soonest proove, and perswade thereon, give
artificiall rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a
question, according to the proposed matter. The Phisitian wayeth the
nature of mans bodie, & the nature of things helpfull, or hurtfull
unto it. And the Metaphisicke though it be in the second & abstract
Notions, and therefore be counted supernaturall, yet doth hee indeed build
upon the depth of nature.
By that he seeth set down what order nature hath taken
therein.
The sciences
map the patterns of their objects
of inquiry. The poet has the advantage over these, says Sidney, in that he
creates a meta-map, or seeks to re-present the mind itself (
first
nature
) in which nature (
second nature
) is but a
thought. Poetic imagination brings forth a model on which readers or
audiences can build their own characters for the better: it
worketh, not onely to make a Cyrus, which had
bene but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow
a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyrusses, if they will learne aright,
why and how that maker made him.
It is this poetic mold from which so many Cyruses can be formed that
Sidney refers to as architectonike, the science of sciences. The
argument between the philosopher and the historian which Sidney vividly
describes is a battle for the honor of being taken for the prescribing
artist. The philosopher gives precepts but does not map them onto the
world; the historian gives a picture of the world, but cannot by mere
description point us to the precepts which would bring it into harmony
with the divine mind; the poet then takes away the honor from them both by
relating the precepts to the world, mapping
should
onto
is,
as it were:
Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both [the
work of the philosopher and the historian], for whatsoever the Philosopher
saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by
whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion
with the particuler example.
The poet's
presupposition
makes no assertion of fact, though
it is important to note that it does imply an assertion that the model
presented is, if
rightly
done, exemplary. Every practitioner
of an
art
or
science
proceeds by mimetic activity,
in observing and then in proceeding through metaphor to represent to
society what has been observed. Only the poet (here, creator of fiction,
or literary practitioner) trades in metaphor itself rather than in its
product. This is not strictly true, even for Sidney, for he admits that
the priest or preacher takes precedence in such trading. But he does not
admit that theologians work in anything
better
than metaphor;
instead, he refers to David and Jesus as poets, and suggests, albeit
obliquely, that all didacticism is dependent upon a merely posited and
purely metaphorical world view. A simpler way to put all this is that
there is unfortunately no alternative to simply taking our belief in God,
the cosmos, our earth as we perceive it, and our society as we experience
it, on faith and not as anything known directly in and of itself. The
lines drawn (
coupleth
) in mental space between
notion
and
example
are the very stuff of which
all knowledge, Sidney implies, is made.
Sidney hammers this point home by his argument on
lies.
Poets are accused of lying, since there is no necessary connection between
their models and observed phenomena. His reply is that in all the other
arts, the assumption is made that models re-present observations
accurately; but this is never so. Therefore he can assert
that of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet
is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarecely be a lyer.
The Astronomer with his cousin the Geometrician, can hardly escape, when
they take upon them to measure the height of the starres. How often thinke
you do the Phisitians lie, when they averre things good for sicknesses,
which afterwards send Charon a great number of soules drowned in a potion,
before they come to his Ferrie? And no lesse of the rest, which take upon
them to affirme. Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore
never lieth: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirme that to bee true,
which is false. So as the other Artistes, and especially the Historian,
affirming manie things, can in the clowdie knowledge of mankinde, hardly
escape from manie lies.
The argument is at first glance specious. Of course fictions are false;
that is what fiction means. Our common sense (empiricist) assumption,
which has gained ground greatly since the age of Hobbes and Newton, is
that while Sidney's point is well taken, in that our technicians have as
yet gotten the facts wrong, but he must be joking, for the facts are
nevertheless there, and they will get them right eventually. But I
believe Sidney is serious here. He says,
in the clowdy knowledge of
mankinde,
with no qualifiers. That he does so provides us with the
crux of his argument.
From Petrarch on, the assumption of scholars during the Renaissance
was that the centuries from the fall of Rome until their own time were a
dark age,
in which the great knowledge of the ancients fell
into disuse; it was their mission to recover something of the glory of
Greece and Rome by recovering and mastering their literature and
arts,
or, interchangeably,
sciences.
History,
Philosophy, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Medicine were among these, as were
painting and sculpture, music, and the production of literary works,
especially epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, lyric, pastoral, and other
forms, which some authorities gathered together under the heading of
poesie.
A student in England in the age of Ascham and Wilson
could expect to be exposed to a wide range of
arts
and
literary and historical works under the curriculum—an adaptation of the
medieval
trivium—by which means students had for centuries been
taught grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Although this curriculum was
often taught under the implicit assumption that it formed a seamless and
perfect whole, it contained a contradiction that produced (and still
produces today) considerable friction among thinkers and artists. Plato
had regarded rhetoric as a highly suspect art, productive of immorality.
He argued for dialectic to be used in its place, which he defined as the
science of understanding (
architectonike) as oppposed to merely
convincing; he desired that the conclusion of a syllogism be true of the
world to which it refers (
Theatetus,
Sophist,
Phaedrus,
Republic). Aristotle had made a place
for rhetoric
within dialectic by claiming that dialectic is simply
the use of complete syllogisms to understand truth while rhetoric is the
use of partial syllogisms to attain specific ends, such as convincing a
jury of one's innocence, regardless of one's actual guilt
(
Rhetoric).
But attacks against the primacy of dialectic had been made, notably by
Peter Ramus, whose doctoral dissertation was on the topic
everything
Aristotle said was wrong.
Ramus chose to invert Aristotle's position
and upheld that dialectic is but a part of rhetoric, thus re-privileging
rhetoric as the
architectonike, or science of sciences, as it had
been formerly held by the Sophists to be. Ramus' insight was that an
assumption generally made by dialecticians is that true premises can be
found upon which to base the complete syllogisms that are intended to lead
to true, that is, ontological, knowledge. Ramus's system of logic, unlike
that of Aristotle, assumes that
a premise is always only posited, and
any conclusions based on it are likewise only posited.
The empiricist view is that the senses report a
real
or
literal world that is like our conception of it. The empiricist view of
language is that words refer to objects in a
real
world, and
that metaphor is a distortion of reference, so that a word can be used out
of its proper context in order to make a useful statement about another
kind of object in another context. Thus, we can say of a wise prince:
behold Cyrus!
— transferring reference from the real Cyrus
who was wise onto someone who is not Cyrus, but whose wisdom we wish to
praise. Sidney calls our attention to the unsupportable assumption in the
phrase
real Cyrus.
What real Cyrus? Historians cannot show us
one; they are only repeating what they have heard. Their Cyrus is posited
only. This realization undermines the empiricist view of language and
suggests that contrary to what we expect, all reference is metaphorical.
It is our insistence on literality that is the distortion, for the literal
is only metaphor that we have agreed among ourselves to regard as somehow
non-metaphorical. This idea is is at the root both of the effectiveness
of the art of rhetoric and of our uneasy but continued acceptance of it.
Plato sought an immaterial reality, Aristotle a material one; Sidney
suspects that neither can be found by us, but at best a model of a posited
model, or copy of a posited copy (Plato's nightmare) can be fashioned and
tested. This utilitarian view is the basis of rhetorical theory, and can
be traced from the Sophists through Scaliger, Ramus, and the humanists, to
Sidney, to Milton, to the reaction to the Enlightenment in Coleridge's
criticism, and in our own time to suggestions made by C.S. Peirce, William
James, Karl Popper, Owen Barfield, W.V. Quine, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley
Fish, and many others.
Why, then, do critics feel that Sidney
does not have a modern
theory of language
? The answer is that he does not follow through on
his own insight but applies the very principle he has just refuted, that
of the common-sense privileging of literality, in his criticism of the
current drama; of it he complains that
Now you shall have three Ladies walke to
gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and
by we heare newes of shipwrack in the same place, then we are too blame if
we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the back of that, comes out a hidious
monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to
take it for a Cave: while in the meane time two Armies flie in,
represented with foure swords & bucklers, and then what hard hart wil
not receive it for a pitched field.
The complaint here is of the English habit of paying little or no
attention to
unity of place.
Sidney believed, along with
Lodovico Castelvetro and others, that Aristotle had proscribed dramatic
action beyond one circuit of the sun. The name of Aristotle as the
authority behind the notion of
unity of time
could hardly be
ignored. Greeks in the time of Aristotle regarded physical presentation
in drama (and dance) as a sacred activity, and it was as important not to
do confusing things with time as it would be not to get the words of a
spell out of sequence.
Literality mattered; one cannot move twenty
years in one's own body, so one's
stage
body ought not to do
this either; it is an insult to the
persona inhabited by the actor
to be treated quite so cavalierly. Renaissance critics sensed that jumping
the action from one location to another involved the same problem as
jumping it from one time to another; if we cannot get from the garden to
the battlefield in three minutes ourselves, we should not have our actors
do so. But in English drama, eighteen hundred years after the drama
described by Aristotle, the
tabu against representing a long story
as nimbly with one's body as Homer was free to do with his words has
largely disappeared. The actors engage our imaginations only, are visual
as well as auditory metaphors, and the audience can provide narrative
unity itself by the use of memory. Though Sidney does not see that his own
destruction of literality points to the success, rather than failure, of
the native theatrical tradition, he provides a glimpse of the solution
even as he argues mistakenly for the literalism of observing the unities:
...you shall have Asia of the one side, and
Affricke of the other, and so mannie other under Kingdomes, that the
Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else
the tale will not be conceived.
The players know what they are about. When they come in, they say:
Viola: What country, friends, is this?
Captain: Illyria, lady.
The tale is immediately conceived.
The charge that Sidney's theory of language is not modern is
misdirected. He is accurate in his assessment of language, and goes astray
only when adopting a poetics that runs counter to his own theory. In
Twelfth Night, which our unfortunate Sir Philip did not live
to witness, we have both the refutation of the literalist theory with
which he was saddled, and the confirmation of the metaphorical theory he
so brilliantly elucidated. In refutation, we easily conceive the three
months of the action, and its movement from seacoast to palace, street,
and garden; the work is unified by its being a kind of land voyage of
discovery, or rather recovery, of the losses that were sustained on the
high seas. In confirmation, the play is, as Sidney recommends, an
invention that is eikastike, and not phantastike, in that it
figures forth good things, showing its Viola as one who should be emulated
and its Malvolio as one who, perhaps, should not, though he never lacks
his humanity. And these are inventions all, the
lies
of the
poet. Yet if anyone should call Viola a lie, would we not give them the
lie-direct? She lives in our minds, and not necessarily in our minds
alone: so far substantially is she worked, not only to make a Viola,
which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but
to bestow a Viola upon the world, to make many Violas, if we will learn
aright why and how that maker made her!
We all use metaphors, says Sidney, for we cannot communicate our
various knowledges without them, literal reference being a prerogative of
a higher Nature than that we are born to. But to some of us it is given to
not merely use metaphors, but to create them. If, says he, we are so
blinded by our literality that we must condemn our metaphor-makers out of
hand, then we bring upon ourselves the curse of oblivion, for our
memorials are necessarily constructed entirely of metaphor:
...and when you die, your memorie die from the
earth for want of an Epitaphe.
The Defence of Poesie cannot be charged with lack of
modernity until its linguistic premise can be shown to have been
superseded. This has not yet occurred.
Richard Bear