Author Feature: Sir Philip Sidney
The finest incarnation of humanistic virtues in his times was Sir Philip Sidney. He was born in 1554. On both sides he was an aristocrat. His mother came of the exalted house of Lisle and Dudley. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, was her brother. Philip’s father, Sir Henry Sidney, was utterly uncorrupted by the vices of the time, and the Queen had no servant more wise, energetic, faithful, honest, and unrewarded than he.
Philip was destined to be spoiled if any boy ever was, by rank, looks, and easy success. As Spenser says, doubtless with him in mind,
Some so goodly gratious are by kind,
That every action doth them much commend,
And in the eyes of men great liking find.
(Faery Queen, 6.2.2)
To this irresistible grace was added mind, aspiration, and a measure of genius. He had, however, to struggle with straitened means, ill health, and, like many of his time, an unruly temper.
At Shrewsbury School he was a comrade of Fulke Greville, who in aftertimes wrote a fine Life of Sidney. At Oxford for three years he was at Christ Church, where he found illustrious friends–Camden the antiquary, and Richard Hakluyt editor of the famous Voyages.
He was groomed for the Court under Leicester and the favoring eye of the great Cecil, and sent, like all young bloods, to travel for three years among the courts and humanistic elite of Paris, Vienna, Venice, Padua, Poland, and Germany. In Paris he saw the horrors of the St. Bartholomew massacre, the memory of which surely entered into his passionate devotion to the Protestant cause. He made his closest friend of the scholar-diplomatist, Languet, thirty-five years his elder; but Sidney’s precocity overcame these differences of age. The letters between them show whence Sidney’s chief humanistic and spiritual inspiration came, and make one of the most fascinating books of the Renaissance. Languet must have seen in Sidney’s ardent temper reasons to be worried about his moral dangers while in Italy. But he, or the boy’s natural high seriousness, steered him safely through them, and at twenty-one he reached home and the world of the Court again.
The remaining eleven years of his life were crowded full. Young as he was, he was almost overwhelmed with popularity, responsibilities, and honors. Men looked to him wistfully as the hoped-for leader of the Protestant cause in Europe. He was the Queen’s messenger to the Low Countries, and joined his uncle Leicester in urging Elizabeth to help them in their struggle with Catholic Spain.
He may have been twenty-three when he met the eccentric Cambridge pundit, Gabriel Harvey, and through him Edmund Spenser. Spenser was two years older, of far humbler social rank, raw from the university, and not yet known for a poet. Sidney was ever aware of his own rank. Yet some intimacy seems to have developed, if not a close friendship, and for two years a lively traffic in literary ideas went on in their coterie, which included Dyer, Harvey, and perhaps Greville. Some one in joke called it an Areopagus, but it never assumed the significance of the French Pleiade, though it sympathized no doubt with the doctrines of that group.
In their enthusiasm for the classics and their youthful passion for reform in English poetry, these young sophisticates experimented in English quantitative verse on the principles of Latin metre, in preference to native stresses and rhyme; but Spenser’s truer instinct readily discerned the absurdity of it. “Why, a God’s name,” he asked, “may we not have the kingdom of our language?” The permanent fruits of their thought are probably embodied in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, written down later and not published till nine years after he died.
In despair at the low condition of English poetry, having himself “slipped into the title of a poet,” he would defend poetry in general against its enemies. There is no proof that he here had especially in mind Gosson’s School of Abuse, an attack on the stage which had been inscribed to him. In effect poetry is not a matter of metre and rhyme, but of inventive imagination, idealizing and transforming this world of ours, thereby subtly and profoundly making us all better men without our conscious knowledge. His ideas derive mainly from Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics, and Horace’s Art of Poetry, but also include a large heritage of medieval theory and thought transmitted through Boccaccio. The great merit of Sidney’s essay lies partly in the high enthusiasm and charm of the man, partly in its authority as the honest utterance of a practising poet.
