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Heroic Poetry and Sidney's Two Arcadias
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Abstract
Both the old and the new Arcadias belong to a single literary genre, Elizabethan heroic poetry. Modern critics, by concentrating upon the theories of Sidney's Italian contemporaries, regularly distinguish generically between the two Arcadias, usually calling the new an (attempted) epic and the old “merely” a romance. But neither version responds well to a testing by Italian criteria, criteria whose essentials are structure and convention. However, an examination of representative Elizabethan writings on heroic poetry reveals that, although aware of Italian theories, such writers as Puttenham, Webbe, Harington, and particularly Sidney are concerned not with formal but with functional aspects of the genre. The peculiar function of heroic poetry is to teach and inspire to virtue the gentleman, the Prince, and the commonwealth. From the various episodes and incidents of the heroic poem, the reader learns how to respond actively to any situation, whether it affect the body politic or the body natural, the flesh or the spirit. Tested by Elizabethan criteria, both versions of the Arcadia are successful heroic poems.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968
References
1 Edwin A. Greenlaw, “Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory,” Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1913), pp. 327–337.
2 In a recent and often excellent analysis of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (A Map of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance and Its Tradition, published in one volume with Richard A. Lanham's TheOld “Arcadia”'asSidney“s Arcadia, New Haven, Conn., 1965), Walter R. Davis rejects the notion of Sidney's heroic pretensions: ”Arcadia is not an epic poem in prose at all, but merely a highly developed pastoral romance—and one that pushes the genre to its limits“ (p. 169).
3 “Sir Philip Sidney and the ‘Arcadia’,” Illinois Stud, in Lang, and Lit., xvii (1934), 151, 156, 158.
4 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1962), pp. xxxvii-xxxviii.
5 Poets on Fortune's Hill (London, 1952), pp. 53, 69, 71.
6 “Genre, Milieu, and the Epic Romance,” English Institute Essays, 1951, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York, 1952), p. 125.
7 See Rebecca W. Smith, “The Source of Milton's Pandemonium,” MP, xxix (1941), 187–198; and Marjorie Hope Nicolson, John Milton: A Reader's Guide to His Poetry (New York, 1963), pp. 196–198.
8 Greenlaw, p. 330. See also Kenneth Muir, Sir Philip Sidney (Writers and Their Work, 120), pp. 13–16; Tucker Brooke, The Renaissance (1500–1660), in A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948), pp. 474, 476; C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 333 (Lewis remarks, pp. 334–335: “The first thing we need to know about the Arcadia is that it is … not Arcadian idyll, not even Arcadian romance, but Arcadian epic.” The term “Arcadian epic” is perhaps the most satisfactory modern description of Sidney's work. But whereas Lewis makes it applicable to the new Arcadia alone, I prefer to apply it to both versions); E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (London, 1954), p. 297.
Tillyard's discussion of the A rcadia is the only account, so far as I can determine, that deliberately views the “heroic poem” in the light of the development of the English epic genre.
9 The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, Conn., 1963), p. 5.
10 The translation of Alessandro de' Pazzi. Giorgio Valla's translation, published in Venice in 1498, apparently went relatively unnoticed. See Greene, p. 179, ii. 7; Isidore Silver, Ronsard and the Hellenic Renaissance in France (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington Univ. Press, 1961), p. 146.
11 Madeleine Doran (Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama, Madison, Wis., 1954) notes (p. 51) that “one reason for the Renaissance critical preference for the epic over tragedy was that the former gave more opportunity for amplifying episodes and digressions,” the copious variety beloved of the age. Perhaps another reason was relatively lesser familiarity with Greek tragedy (despite numerous Latin translations) than with Homeric epic. And Seneca was clearly inferior to Virgil. But no doubt it is futile to seek reasons for what was perhaps simply a matter of taste.
12 This list of questions derives from two studies by Ralph Coplestone Williams, The Theory of the Heroic Epic in Italian Criticism of the Sixteenth Century (Baltimore, Md., 1921), p. 1; and “The Purpose of Poetry, and Particularly the Epic, as Discussed by Critical Writers of the Sixteenth Century in Italy,” RR, xii (1921), 17. A comprehensive account of Italian theories of the heroic poem and their place in the general context of Italian literary criticism can be found passim in Bernard Weinberg's monumental two volumes A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1961). Exceedingly helpful, too, are the two studies by Williams noted immediately above, and a third, “Methods of Treatment of the Epic, as Discussed by Sixteenth-Century Critics,” RR, xii (1921), 276–285.
13 Williams, “Methods of Treatment of the Epic,” passim; Weinberg, i, 75, and passim.
14 See, e.g., Bernardino Daniello, Delia poetica (Venice, 1536), p. 44; and Francesco Robertello, Paraphrasis in libellum Horatii, appended to his In Librum Aristotelis de Arte Poetica Explicationes (Florence, 1548), p. 4.
15 V. Madius, In Q. Horatii Flacci de arte poetica inlerprelatio (Venice, 1550), p. 346; noted in Williams, “Methods of Treatment,” p. 277.
16 G-Battista Pigna, I Romanzi (Venice, 1554), p. 36.
17 Giraldi Cinthio, Discorsi (Venice, 1554), pp. 24–25; trans, in Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (Detroit, Mich., 1962), pp. 262–263. Paolo Beni, too, does not object to a “natural” ordering of events; see Comparatione di Eomero, Virgilio, e Torquato (Padua, 1607), pp. 106–134.
18 Poelices libri seplem (Geneva, 1561), in, xcvi; cited in Williams, “Methods of Treatment,” pp. 280–281.
19 “Sidney and Other Men's Thoughts,” RES, xx (1944), 260–262.
20 R. W. Zandvoort, Sidney's Arcadia: A Comparison Between the Two Versions (Amsterdam, 1929); Kenneth O. Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Cambridge, Mass., 1935).
21 Madeleine Doran notes, p. 443, ii. 25: “Like the critics of Orlando Furioso, Professor Myrick and I would dispute what constitutes the central action of the ‘poem’; he would apparently make it the love stories of Pyrocles and Musidorus, I would make it the political action of King Basilius.” The tenor of my reading of the Arcadia inclines to the latter viewpoint.
22 Elizabethan Taste (London, 1963), p. 263. See also Myrick, p. 116.
23 Considerazione so-pra … Le ire sorellt (1568); cited and trans, by Weinberg, I, 184.
24 Weinberg, i, 262, and passim.
25 Myrick, pp. 114, 149–150.
26 In Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (New York, 1956), ii, 5.
27 In Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford, 1904), ii, 201–202. Thomas P. Roche's remark (The Kindly Flame, Princeton, N. J., 1964, p. 6) that Harington “is not talking about the enjoyment of poetry … unless we are to visualize the Elizabethans surrounded by empty nutshells or orange peels” is a trifle frivolous. A better metaphor, also provided by Harington, is that poetry can “with one kinde of meate and one dish … feed diverse tastes. For the weaker capacities will feede themselves with the pleasantness of the historié and sweetnes of the verse, some that have stronger stomackes will as it were take a further taste of the morall sence.” One might ask whether we are to visualize the Elizabethan reader who wished thoroughly to enjoy poetry digesting nutshells and orange peels.
28 The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York, 1963), pp. 127–128.
29 Thomas Wilson's definition serves as a typical example: “An Allégorie is none other thing, but a Métaphore, used throughout a whole sentence, or Oration. As in speaking of a wicked offendour, I might say thus. Oh Lord, his nature was so evil, and his witte so wickedly bent, that he meant to bouge the ship, where he himself sailed: meaning that he purposed the destruction of his own countrey.” The Arte of Rhétorique (London, 1560), p. 176.
30 Nelson, p. 130.
31 J. E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York, 1954), pp. 293, 332–333. The two volumes of G. Gregory Smith (ii. 27, above) offer a satisfyingly full anthology of sixteenth-century English literary criticism but no example of a fully-developed theory of heroic poetry.
32 Tillyard, p. 253.
33 88 Harington's Apologie.
34 “A Letter of the Authors,” iii The Poems, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1965), pp. 407–408.
35 The Prose Works, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, Eng., 1962), iii, 10.
36 In Smith, ii, 42–43.
37 The Prose Works, iii, 10.
38 In Smith, ii, 315–316.
39 Spenser, in the prefatory letter to Raleigh cited above, refers to The Faerie Queene as “my history,” but he does distinguish between the historiographer, who “discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne,” and the “Poet historical,” who plunges in médias res. But here the distinction is one of narrative structure, not of relative truth to historical fact.
40 In Smith, ii 26.
41 Smith, ii, 40, 41–42.
42 Smith, ii, 44.
43 The Prose Works, iii, 10, 27.
44 Eikonoklastes, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 793.
45 In Smith, ii, 317, 319. Meres is not always consistent:earlier we noted that he considered Sidney, the author of the Arcadia, “our rarest poet.”
46 The Prose Works, iii, 13–14.
47 The Prose Works, iii, 16.
48 The Prose Works, iii, 20.
49 Myrick, p. 231.
50 In Smith, i, 234.
51 In Smith, ii, 198.
52 In Smith, ii, 42.
53 The Prose Works, iii, 33.
54 The Prose Works, iii, IS. The words “what Philosophers counsaile can so readely direct a Prince” cut this passage off from immediately preceding references to other works in a variety of genres. The heroic is the “princely part” of poetry.
55 The Prose Works, iii, 10. One can state the argument in the simplest syllogistic terms: the A eneid is in the same genre as the Cyropaedia; the Cyropaedia is in the same genre as the Utopia; therefore the Utopia is in the same genre as the A eneid.
56 Tillyard, p. 258.
57 In Smith, ii, 210–211.
58 The Prose Works, iii, 25.
59 In Smith, i, 255, 234.
60 Samuel Daniel, “Musophilus,” in Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. A. C. Sprague (London, 1950), p. 84.
61 In Smith, ii, 319; cf. Sidney, The Prose Works, iii, 10.
62 Nelson, pp. 117, 237.
63 In Smith, ii, 217.
64 Myrick, pp. 134–135, 146.
65 For a fuller treatment of the public and private virtues and their relationship to the Renaissance heroic poem, see Alan D. Isler, “The Allegory of the Hero and Sidney's Two Arcadias,” forthcoming in SP.
66 The Prose Works, ra, 11.
67 Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford, 1907), p. 15.
68 Anachrisis, in J. E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1908),i, 187–188,
69 The Prose Works, iii, 25.
70 Walter R. Davis, who argues that the new Arcadia is a pastoral romance “pushed” to the limits of that genre, has to account for the presence of apparently irrelevant ingredients in Sidney's work:
If … Arcadia contains many elements that seem to us totally unlike other pastoral romances, we may do well to remember that this most hospitable of genres had opened its arms to epic games, dream vision, mystic love story, Platonic dialogue, autobiography, patriotic celebrations, courtly compliment, Ovidian myth, Greek romantic melodrama, tournaments, warfare, satire, theology, and sea fights before it ever reached Sidney's hands. It seems to me that the same claim of hospitality might with equal validity be made for simple romance, epic, and epic-romance.