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The Hidden Persuader: The Complex Speaking Voice of Sidney's Defence of Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Catherine Barnes
Catherine Barnes*
Affiliation:
New York University, New York
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Abstract

Despite the well-established critical opinion that the Defence is a polite, straightforward manifesto of a literary theory with little apparent value as literature, Sidney's treatise is a complexly imaginative work, informed with the same dramatic conflicts between author, persona, and subject matter that characterize Astrophil and Stella. The persona exonerates poetry and energizes his oration by creating two “dramas” : he persuades his listeners to live up to certain expectations by playing the carefully defined role of his confidantes, and, at the same time, speaker-as-energetic-defender distances himself from the process of persuasion through irony and self-mockery. Thus, the speaker “beguiles” his listeners through audience psychology, rich imagery, and rhythmic prose while simultaneously warning sensitive auditors to beware of his fervor and seeming guilelessness.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 86 , Issue 3 , May 1971 , pp. 422 - 427
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1971

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References

Notes

1 Sidney's Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), p. 51. With the exception of Kenneth O. Myrick's Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), criticism has generally neglected the rich textural and imaginative quality of the Defence as a literary work. Instead, emphasis has been placed on the sources of its theory, and its place in the history of literary criticism. See, e.g., the introductions by Albert S. Cook, The Defense of Poetry (Boston: Ginn, 1890), and Geoffrey Shepherd, An Apology for Poetry (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), as well as Irene Samuels, “The Influence of Plato on Sidney's Defense of Poesy” MQ, 1 (1940), 383–91 ; F. M. Krouse, “Plato and Sidney,” Comparative Literature, 6 (1954), 138–47; and J. P. Thorne, “A Ramistical Commentary on Sidney's An Apologie for Poetrie,” MP, 54 (1957), 158–64.

2 Sidney's intellectual arguments on behalf of his defendant, Poetry, were neither startlingly cogent nor new. As J. A. Van Dorsten, ed., A Defence of Poetry (London: Oxford, 1966), p. 10, comments: “Most of the ideas expressed in it [the Defence] are not original thoughts, but represent Sidney's selections from the countless theories and literary commonplaces with which any self-respecting sixteenth-century humanist was familiar. Thus they are the summary of what his milieu believed poetry to be.”

3 All references to the Defence are from Van Dorsten.

4 Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, 1924), p. 273.

5 See Lawrence Lipking, “The Dialectic of Il Cortegiano,” PMLA, 81 (1966), 355–62.

6 Myrick, p. 53.

7 Myrick, p. 54. Although Sidney's inventiveness and ironic detachment make traditional formal classifications precarious and perhaps even deceptive, I have utilized Myrick's structural divisions both because they facilitate reference to different “moments” of the argument, and because they call attention to Sidney's concern with developing a personal idiom and perspective within the confines of a tradition. Cf. Rudenstine, p. 140.

8 Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (London : Macmillan, 1954), p. 23.

9 Myrick, p. 78.

10 Cook, p. 61. Cook, who notes Sidney's later condemnation of these metaphors, suggests that the author “is perhaps only employing them here for an [sic] humorous purpose, and in allusion to the excessive use of them by Gosson, who, in fact, introduces the adder in his School of Abuse” (p. 46).

11 Rudenstine, p. 48.

12 Myrick, p. 67.

13 See Rudenstine, pp. 204 ff., as well as David Kalstone, Sidney's Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), and Richard B. Young, “English Petrake: A Study of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella,” in Three Renaissance Studies, Yale Studies in English, No. 138 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ Press, 1958).

14 Van Dorsten, p. 605.

15 Myrick, p. 55.

16 Van Dorsten, p. 106. This has also been noted by Shepherd, p. 235, n. 33.

17 Shepherd, p. 235.

18 Cook, p. xxvi.