In his book "The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney," Fulke Greville depicts Sidney as a heroic aristocrat rather than a poet. Renaissance life-narratives were a form of propaganda designed to maintain the nobility.

Copyright Wayne State University Press Spring 1994

Philip Sidney was the first English poet to be widely associated with a life-narrative, from the spate of elegies and prose narratives following his death in 1586 to the posthumous publication of Fulke Greville's The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1652). It was not, however, the case that Greville's Life--or any other early prose narrative of Sidney's life--was written as a "life of the poet." Greville's Life was actually written as a dedication of his own literary texts to the memory of Sidney and it emphasizes Sidney's credentials as a warrior and a statesman rather than as a poet. The subordination of Sidney's poetry to his heroism reflects the social hierarchy of the absolutist state, which Perry Anderson has identified as "a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination."(1) The continuity of aristocratic domination ensured by the centralized state was reflected in the ideological prestige of the idealized representative of the nobility, the heroic warrior.(2) The new form of domination, however, also required of the nobility "a protracted and difficult process of adaptation and conversion" (LAS, 47). England's relative demobilization after Henry VIII's disastrous foreign engagements, moreover, highlighted the vocational crisis of its feudal nobility.(3) As a response to this crisis, the representation of Sidney's heroic death provided an increasingly non-military and proto-commercial nobility with a renewed certificate of the martial foundation of its pre-eminence.(4)

The insistence upon Sidney's masculinity and "virtue" (the quality appropriate to a vir, a man) in most of his early life-narratives reflected this heroic prestige. The Renaissance discourse of sexual difference was, as Thomas Laqueur has demonstrated, a "metaphysics of hierarchy" founded upon the biological homology of men and women.(5) Gender was thus available to other discourses as a principle of hierarchy. In the discursive field of life-writing, where the life-narratives of women were very few in number, gender articulated the distinction between narratable and unnarratable lives of men as the distinction between the "manly" and "unmanly." Even within a narratable life gender encoded the developmental narrative of childhood, youth, and adulthood as a progression toward an achieved goal of masculinity. Youth remained a period tinged by "effeminacy" until it was replaced by the qualities appropriate to manhood, and it was therefore a stage of indeterminate length in the Renaissance.(6) Youth, however, could also serve as a rubric for what were considered the secondary attributes of the absolutist aristocracy--learning, polish, wit--associated with its adaptation to the court society of the absolutist state. Poetry, for instance, emerged in aristocratic life-narratives as the avocation of youthful courtship and thus courtiership, provided of course that was superceded by the qualities of manhood.(7)

To the extent that it existed at all in the period, the life of the poet represented the threatening alternative of indefinite "youth" and thus "effeminate" baseness.(8) This rendered the life of the poet a narrative of youthful prodigality which Richard Helgerson has identified with certain Elizabethan poets.(9) The failure to convert "youthful" poetry into conquest or high administrative office produced a life considered fundamentally unnarratable. The early construction of Sidney's life-narrative as that of an aristocratic hero ruled out the association of his poetry with his manhood. England's early break with absolutist ideology, however, allowed for the almost complete demobilization of Sidney's reputation and his transformation into a lover and a poet less than a hundred years after his death.

ARISTOCRATIC LIFE-NARRATIVE

Renaissance life-narrative required a narratable transition from "youth" to masculine adulthood, and the most widely disseminated generic rules for aristocratic life-narrative, contained in Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (first published in 1553 and revised in 1560), provided the genre with readily recognizable developmental markers. The text was probably originally intended for the private use of gentlemen and noblemen studying law at the Inns of Court, and it subsequently became probably the most influential rhetorical handbook in the early years of Elizabeth's reign. Among other rhetorical innovations, Wilson reformulated Quintilian's rules for the panegyric into the generic rules for the "Oration demonstrative" which generally served as the model for aristocratic life-narrative in Elizabethan England. A vernacular model for noble encomium, of course, was potentially quite advantageous to the educated gentleman looking for advancement.(10)

Not surprisingly, the "Oration demonstrative" enumerated the repertoire of skills, schematized as "places," associated with the nobleman of the absolutist state. For my purposes, the most important "places" are those which constitute a life-narrative, those which are found "in a mans life": "the birthe and infancie, the childhood, the Strypling age, or Springtide, the mannes state, the olde age, the tyme of his departure, or death."(11) Wilson assigns the "gift of enditing" to "the Strypling age" in which one considers "what study he taketh himself unto, what company he useth, how he liveth." "Enditing" designates a general ability in composition (either written or spoken), a skill which could include poetry among other forms, but which, more crucially for Wilson, is essential for the future absolutist functionary: "By knowing what he taketh himselfe unto, and wherein hee most delighteth, I may commend him for his learning, for his skill in the French, or in the Italian, for his knowledge in Cosmographie: for his skill in the Lawes, in the histories of all Countries, and for his gift of enditing" (AR, 12). While Wilson's text marks these skills as essential to the preparation of the absolutist nobleman, they do not in themselves constitute accession to "the mannes state." "The mannes state" demands "prowesse done" or "wise counsaile" in the service of the monarch. Wilson's commentary, moreover, makes it plain that "prowesse done" simply retools the aristocrat's traditional vocation, war, as a function of state security while "wise counsaile" requires that the skills acquired in "the Strypling age" be deployed in high administrative office: "Prowesse done, declare his service to the King, and his Countrey, either in withstanding the outward enemie, or else in aswaging the rage of his own Countreymen at home. His wise counsaille, and good advise given, sets forth the goodnesse of his wit" (AR, 13). Wilson's generic rules, which allow for achieving "a mannes state" through both military service (including the suppression of peasant uprisings) and counsel, register the accommodation of the two forms of aristocratic service required by the absolutist state.

Only the prestige of Sidney's military death obtained for him the symbolic capital of "a mannes state." His career as a functionary and courtier had failed to gain him a position appropriate to aristocratic manhood, but his death cast the glow of his valor over his entire life. The earliest prose "life" of Sidney, Edmund Molyneux's contribution to the 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, reveals the seams in this construction of Sidney's life-narrative because the first part of it was written while Sidney was still alive. This part of Molyneux's narrative represents Sidney as a youth (now more than thirty years old) aspiring to a position appropriate to a man, and Molyneux's discussion of Sidney only appears as what a marginal note terms "a member of the discourse made of his father [Henry Sidney]."(12) Newly "made" by their association with and service to the Tudor monarchs, the Sidneys' prestige and honor remained entirely dependent upon the family's ability to produce courtiers and functionaries despite Henry Sidney's marriage to the aristocratic Mary Dudley and his attempt, characteristic of upwardly mobile Tudor families, to provide the family with a noble pedigree dating back to the fourteenth century.(13) The good hopes of the family rested, according to Molyneux's first contribution to the Chronicles, on the son's ability to duplicate or surpass the father's state service: "He may in time succeed him [Henry Sidney] in his offices, or if it please God in some better and greater" (HC, 4:880).

The appearance of the Arcadia in Molyneux's text, furthermore, does not function to establish Sidney as poet, but to ratify the qualities demonstrated by his embassy to Germany on behalf of Elizabeth. The "exquisit order" of Sidney's ceremonial performance as ambassador becomes the "orderlie disposition" of the Arcadia; "omitting nothing he should doo, nor supplieng anie thing he should not doo" on his embassy becomes "nothing could be taken out to amend [the Arcadia], or added to it that would not impaire it" (HC, 4:880). Moreover, the "closed circulation" of the manuscript of the Arcadia ("earnestlie sought, choislie kept ...") advertises Sidney's sufficiency to the secrecy (and thus secretaryship) of high office. The Arcadia, "a meere fansie, toie, and fiction" written during Sidney's "vacant and spare time of leisure," simply indicates Sidney's ability to handle "better jewels than that was" (HC, 4:880).(14) Molyneux's "chronicle" of the Sidney family indicates the extent to which Sidney's virtues, while he still lived, were simply the resume of a successful career as a "carpet knight," and the Arcadia appears as another example of his ability to win "great credit" as a courtier and functionary, his "sufficiencie for the publicke" (HC, 4:880).

The report of Sidney's death in the "additament" to the account of Henry Sidney, probably also written by Molyneux, betrays the haste with which Sidney's career as an ambitious "youth" is transformed into "the mannes state" appropriate to aristocratic life-narrative. He proved his "sufficiencie for the publicke" in the English expedition to Holland where his military counsel demonstrated his "excellent wit, policie, and ripe judgement" (HC, 4:880). On the battlefield, moreover, Molyneux indicates the pressure of Plutarch's "noble" lives upon Sidney's military heroism: "he bare the invincible mind of an ancient woorthie Romane, who ever where he came made account of victorie" (HC 4:880). This symbolic promotion of Sidney to the nobility of the sword facilitates Molyneux's subsequent description of the deaths of Sidney and his parents in terms of the questions of fundamental importance for an aristocratic pedigree, birth and property. Molyneux creates the impression that land, rather than state service, was the source of their prestige. He laments "that each died so far off by distance of place from one another, as where they died they were but strangers, where by birth and propertie they could pretend no interest" (HC, 4:881). Although Philip died in the Netherlands, both Henry and Mary Sidney's deaths as "strangers" occurred in England, Henry's at the bishop's palace in Worcester and Mary's probably at Elizabeth's court.(15)

If Molyneux's life-narrative incorporates the Arcadia into Sidney's resume for state service, Thomas Moffet's Latin life of Sidney, Nobilis (c. 1593), written for the young William Herbert upon his entrance to Oxford, represents perhaps the most aggressive dismissal of Sidney's poetry among the early life-narratives of Sidney. The recipient, rather than the subject, of Moffet's text makes this firm subordination of poetry possible. Heir to his father, the Earl of Pembroke, Herbert inherited a position near the apex of the absolutist state; Nobilis was apparently intended to provide Herbert with an appropriate model of aristocratic service to that state in the life of his uncle, Philip Sidney. Despite the Countess of Pembroke's extensive patronage of letters throughout the 1590s and her participation in the revision of the Arcadia, it was in no way considered appropriate for her aristocratic son to style himself a poet. Herbert had little need to seek out the courtly advancement associated with poetry although, like his mother, he acquired the greater prestige associated with patronage.(16) Once the sticky question of Sidney's poetry had been suitably consigned to his youth, therefore, Sidney's heroism could function as a model of nobility, shaping Herbert's "second self."(17) Because of the occasion of its production, Moffet's account is much concerned to emphasize the value of studies to its addressee, and Sidney provides Moffet with the model of heroic, but also educated, nobility. Nobilis, however, discusses the sonnets and the Arcadia in the context of Sidney's adolescence, in which vernacular poetry appears, not as an adjunct of Sidney's classical "literary studies," but alongside his physical, and even erotic, recreation:

[S]ince he craved to be wise rather than to be strong, he would almost have failed in both had he not given himself over, though unwillingly, to recreation, and mingled, by way of spice, certain sportive arts--poetic, comic, musical--with his more serious studies. He amused himself with them after the manner of youth, but within limits; he was somewhat wanton, indeed, but observed a measure and felt shame. On that account he first consigned his Stella (truly an elegant and pleasant work) to darkness and then favored giving it to the fire. Nay, more, he desired to smother the Arcadia (offspring of no ill pen) at the time of its birth. (N, 73-74)

Moffet's parenthetical asides register some discomfort with the generic requirements of aristocratic life-narrative (scruples perhaps connected to the poetic efforts of his patroness, particularly regarding the completion and publication of Sidney's texts) even while he rigidly enforces those requirements upon his narrative by conflating the contemporary story of Sidney's death-bed wish to destroy his poetry with an even earlier repudiation of poetry.

Moffet's pronounced distaste for vernacular poetry and his promotion of Sidney as a model of learning combine in an attempt to construct a model of nobility which allies the aristocracy and the pedagogical authority of the school against the perceived vices of life at court. Moffet's pedagogical Humanism inflects his excoriation of the courtly vices which "variously transform men into women, women into men, men into beasts, the scrupulous and devout into sodomites and gallants" (N, 78) and threaten a masculinity just emerging from the "wantonness" of youth. The widening breach between Elizabeth's court and Humanist scholars informs this hostility and its gendered terms.(18) Despite Sidney's overtures to Humanistic authority in the Apology, his own poetic texts conformed to the taste of the court society. The idealized representation of Sidney in Nobilis, however, scrupulously avoids his status as a carpet knight in order to provide young William Herbert with a transcendent model of aristocratic Humanism rising above the threat of courtly emasculation.

THE APOLOGY AND "MASTERLESS MEN"

Because the aristocratic domination of the Tudor state guaranteed the pre-eminence of aristocratic life-narrative, early lives of Sidney firmly subordinated his poetic production to that generic model. Sidney's own texts, written from a social position Alan Sinfield terms one of "structural confusion" in the Tudor state--a courtier with affiliations to both the landed peerage and the Humanist-trained administrative elite--betray an acute and anxious awareness of this ideological and discursive domination which retained the potential to register itself in gendered terms.(19) Until his military death retrospectively cast aristocratic glory upon his life, Sidney's status remained much closer to the "sodomites and gallants" at court than any of his life-narratives acknowledge.

Sidney's Apology for Poetry (c. 1582-83) produces an imagined resolution of his unclearly defined position within the framework of an aristocratic state, and the text nicely illustrates Sidney's own sense of the difficulties facing him as a courtier poet. The Apology defends the nobility of poetry even while Sidney represents himself, "having slipped into the title of a poet," as naturally entitled to a superior position.(20) The recent birth of Robert Dudley (c. 1580-81), the Earl of Leicester's only legitimate child to survive infancy, had dashed Sidney's hopes to inherit his uncle's position and estates. In acquiring the "title" of poet, Sidney had thus also "slipped" into the position of courtier, one completely reliant upon the Queen for his advancement; he completed Astrophil and Stella at about the same time as the Apology. Sidney's ironized defense of "the title of a poet" proceeds, then, by analogizing the skills of the poet to the skills of the courtier, Sidney's other vocation, which he might also be said to pursue in the text.(21) Sir John Pietro Pugliano, on the other hand, makes the case for the pre-eminence of the nobility of the sword, the estate from which Sidney had recently been excluded. Pugliano establishes the occasion for the Apology as a kind of debate between the skills of the nobility of the sword and the newer skills of aristocratic statesmanship by making the case for horsemanship in terms of the traditional aristocratic profession of warfare: "He said soldiers were the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers," Sidney notes. "Skill of government was but a pedanteria in comparison" (AP, 3-4).

The bulk of Sidney's text attempts to convert this derogation into the reconciliation of the traditional aristocracy with the literate skills of the court society, including, of course, poetry. This strategy establishes poetry (and the court) as the mediator of the aristocracy and the school. Sidney proposes an analogy between the role of horsemanship in aristocratic formation and poetry in elite education as his first defense of poetry. Poetry is that which "hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges" (AP, 5). The analogy relies upon the standard identification of poetry with youth, but converts that identification into a developmental narrative in which poetry serves as the underpinning of the pedagogical authority of the Humanists--and eventually triumphs as a master science over that authority. This narrative tracks poetry's ability to act as the "moderator" (AP, 26) averting a potential "civil war among the Muses" (AP, 5)--especially the Humanistic disciplines of philosophy and history--and thus highlights its ability to function like an absolutist monarch among a contentious aristocracy: "Now therein of all sciences...is our poet the monarch" (AP, 38). By crowning poetry, Sidney allocates to himself a majestic vantage point from which he can validate his own social position while simultaneously transcending it by placing himself in the magisterial position of judge: "I have found in divers smally learned courtiers a more sound style than in some professors of learning" (AP, 84). This triumph of the "servant" over the "master" (and of poetic youth over Humanist adulthood) recapitulates the triumph of the horse over the noble horseman in Pugliano: "Then would he add certain praises by telling what a peerless beast a horse was; the only serviceable courtier without flattery, the beast of most beauty, faithfulness, courage, and such more, that if I had not been a piece of a logician before I came to him, I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse" (AP, 4). Sidney's ironic treatment of Pugliano, however, also implicates his own discourse: "But thus much at least with his no few words he drave into me, that self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves are parties" (AP, 5). The text's awareness of "self-love" as the foundation of its own claims haunts the assertions for the magisterial impartiality of poetry.(22) Sidney was doubtless aware in writing the Apology that his own name, Philip, is etymologically "horse-lover."

The text's ironized awareness of its own usurping desires serves to underline the unrealized nature of the social space which it carves out for poetry. This becomes readily apparent when the text turns from poetry's domination of the school to its accommodation of the military. Sidney's lament for the current status of poetry in England turns upon a desired link of his own status as a courtier and poet with the prestige of the landed aristocracy and its traditional vocation, warfare. From the opening analogy to horsemanship, Sidney is careful to assert poetry's suitability for aristocratic forms of virtue. "[P]oetry is the companion of camps" (AP, 61), and "Alexander left his schoolmaster, living Aristotle, behind him, but took dead Homer with him" (AP, 62). Sidney's next step--equating the poet with the aristocrat--is considerably more treacherous because the usefulness of poetry to the aristocrat did not imply his identity as a poet. Sidney insists, however, that poetry is an art "not of effeminatenesse, but of notable stirring of courage" (AP, 68), rejecting the commonplace association of poetry and youth. Referring to Petrarch's coronation as poet laureate in 1341, Sidney asserts that "the laurel crown appointed for triumphing captains doth worthily (of all other learnings) honor the poet's triumph" (AP, 51).

The audacity of the attempt to align the poet with the aristocrat perhaps explains the fact that the Apology's most extended attempt to associate poetry with the aristocrat's military vocation proceeds negatively, aligning poetry's lack of a fully masculine identity with the vocational crisis of a demilitarized aristocracy, a crisis most immediately associated with Elizabeth's relatively pacific foreign policy. Once the "mother of excellent minds," England has become "so hard a stepmother to poets" (AP, 68), a reduction which suggests the figure of the Virgin Queen. This poetic decline, Sidney suggests, is intimately connected to England's "over-faint quietness" in military affairs:

For heretofore poets have in England also flourished, and, which is to be noted, even in those times when the trumpet of Mars did sound loudest. And now that an over-faint quietness should seem to strew the house for poets, they are almost in as good reputation as the mountebanks at Venice. Truly even that, as of the one side it giveth great praise to poesy, which like Venus (but to better purpose) had rather be troubled in the net with Mars than enjoy the homely quiet of Vulcan; so serves it for a piece of a reason why they are less grateful to idle England, which now can scarce endure the pain of a pen. Upon this necessarily followeth, that base men with servile wits undertake it, who think it enough if they can be rewarded of the printer. (AP, 70-71)

The England which "can scarce endure the pain of a pen" is the same England which has abandoned "the trumpet of Mars." This negative equation provides Sidney with the means of obviating the incompatibility of the "mannes state" of the aristocrat and poetic production. The common identification of poetry, especially courtly love poetry, with Venus and the sexual association of Venus and Mars allows Sidney to claim the affinity of poetry and warfare. Poetry even surreptitiously acquires the characteristics of an active and penetrating Mars, discomfiting "idle England" with a pen. The aristocracy, according to the Apology, thus possesses both a military and a poetic vocation, but England's idleness allows "bastard poets" who "without any commission...do post over the banks of Helicon' (AP, 71) to usurp those activities. The text, then, produces the illusion that both poets and aristocrats share the same vocational crisis and the same threat of usurpation by "base men."

Despite Sidney's own condemnation of "base men with servile wits," his heroic death was widely viewed in subaltern elements of Elizabethan society as the confirmation of the nobility of the poetry upon which many of them now relied for advancement or subsistence.(23) George Whetstone's elegy, Sir Philip Sidney, his honorable life, his valiant death, and true vertues (1587), offers the Arcadia as proof of Sidney's superiority to--and sovereignty over--a mere "carpet knight":

In Court he liv'de, not like a carpet knight, Whose glory is in garments and his tongue; If men but knew the half that he did write, Enough to tyre a memory so young; Needes must, they say, the muses in him sounge, His Arcadia, unmatcht for sweete devise, Where skill doth judge, is held in sovereign price."

Whetstone thus raises the Arcadia to one of Sidney's "true vertues" which, like his "valiant death," prove his superiority to an ordinary courtier.

Edmund Spenser's belated elegy, Astrophel (1595), moreover, subtly manipulates the conventions of aristocratic life-narrative in order to assert a form of "peerage" with Sidney. He calls attention, for instance, to Sidney's aristocratic pedigree inherited through his mother as a feminine version of the charisma of aristocratic domination:

In comely shape, like her that did him breed....

With gentle vsage and demeanure myld: That all mens hearts with secret ravishment He stole away and weetingly beguyld.(25)

This feminization of Sidney's aristocratic identity informs Spenser's interjection of himself into his description of the dead Astrophel and Stella:

Tho (as he wild) unto his loved lasse, His dearest love him dolefully did beare. The dolefulst beare that ever man did see, Was Astrophel, but dearest unto mee. (147-50)

Spenser's assertion of his priority among the mourners of Sidney claims Sidney's aristocratic patrimony, but it does so by placing Astrophel in the same position with regard to Spenser, "dearest unto mee," as Stella (his "dearest love") is to Astrophel. The homosocial bond between poets, then, displaces the love which Sidney's sonnets themselves celebrate. Spenser can thus emerge as a more than adequate replacement for Sidney's "shepheard peares" (127), the courtiers who, Astrophel complains, were absent at the death of the "wretched boy." Spenser's elegy allows him, then, to position himself in the aristocratic patron's "masculine" place, a reversal which his insistence upon the resemblance of Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke--whom he introduces in this poem as "most resembling both in shape and spright/Her brother deare" (213-14)--serves to reinforce.

Spenser's veiled aggressivity toward the practices of aristocratic culture was openly expressed in Thomas Nashe's preface celebrating Thomas Newman's unauthorized edition of Astrophil and Stella (1591), an edition which also pirated poems by "divers Noble men and Gentlemen" including Samuel Daniel, Thomas Campion, and Fulke Greville. Poetry, asserts Nashe, even that produced by aristocrats, is a prisoner of the aristocracy until it can disseminate itself: "[A]lthough it be oftentimes imprisoned in Ladyes casks, & the president bookes of such as cannot see without another mans spectacles, yet at length it breakes foorth in spight of his keepers, and useth some private penne (in steed of a picklock) to procure his violent enlargement."(26) The threat represented by Nashe's preface is no longer simply that of "base men with servile wits," but the appropriation of aristocratic texts by literary "masterless men" emerging along with an increasingly diffuse print culture.(27)

GREVILLE'S SIDNEY

Partly in response to such disturbances in the aristocratic character of Sidney's reputation, Fulke Greville's "life" of Sidney renews the insistence upon the subordination of Sidney's poetry to an aristocratic life-narrative. Greville's "life," however, itself represents a conjuncture of aristocratic and print culture. Greville apparently intended his manuscript, entitled A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1612), to dedicate the posthumous publication of Greville's own plays and the verse Treatise of Monarchy to the memory of Sidney. As such, the Dedication represents an aristocratic gift-exchange adapted to the increasing ideological importance of print culture.(28) As a result, while marginalizing Sidney's poetry in his life-narrative, Greville's text also inscribes a newer discursive ambivalence regarding the role of poetry in aristocratic life-narratives.

The Dedication is fundamentally the life-narrative of an aristocratic counsellor. Sidney's military heroism allows Greville to produce Sidney as the "true model of worth" (PW, 21) underwriting the text's ability to transmit principles concerning statecraft. Those principles revolve about the "active" policy which the text associates with Sidney: "[I]n the tribute I owe him our nation may see a sea-mark raised upon their native coast above the level of any private pharos abroad, and so, by a right meridian line of their own, learn to sail through the straits of true virtue into a calm and spacious ocean of human honour" (PW, 4). In order to transmit its representation of Sidney's principles of statecraft, the Dedication concerns itself with Sidney's aristocratic charisma and thus his ability to occupy the cynosure of Greville's elaboration of absolutist ideology.(29)

Since the Arcadia provides Sidney with insufficient aristocratic capital for this role, Greville's discussion situates it in the opening chapter's discussion of Sidney's birth, family, and other "youthful" activities. Nevertheless, although he places the Arcadia among Sidney's early exploits, Greville also asserts that Sidney actually possessed no youth: "[T]hough I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew him other than a man" (PW, 5). In order to support this apparently contradictory position, Greville offers the only recognizable early interpretation of Sidney's literary texts, one which treats the Arcadia as a political allegory recording the wisdom of Sidney's counsel--and thus Sidney's fitness for aristocratic service.(30) Fittingly, then, Greville ends his discussion of the Arcadia with a reminder of Sidney's superiority to his own text: "[T]hey that knew him well will truly confess this Arcadia of his to be...as much inferior to that unbounded spirit of his as the industry and images of other men's works are many times raised above the writers' capacities....[T]he truth is, his end was not writing even while he wrote" (PW, 11-12). Thus, the Arcadia is no longer a "toy," but it nonetheless remains marginal to the need to represent Sidney as possessing the aristocratic charisma of someone to be "beloved and obeyed" (PW, 12).

These contradictory postures regarding Sidney's poetry temporarily return to discomfit the final pages of the Dedication:

[H]is end in [the pastoral eclogues of the Arcadia] was not vanishing pleasure alone, but moral images and examples, as directing threads, to guide every man through the confused labyrinth of his own desires and life,...yet I do wish that work may be the last in this kind, presuming no man that follows can ever reach, much less go beyond, that excellent intended pattern of his. (PW, 134)

Although he insists that Sidney's poems provide moral guideposts, not unlike Sidney's status as the "model of true worth," they finally cannot be assimilated to the heroic example provided by Sidney's own life-narrative. They are finally only intended models--exemplary texts which, paradoxically, must not be imitated.

Greville, however, fails to take his own advice. Having completed Sidney's life-narrative, Greville opens the second half of the Dedication, which is largely a sympathetic examination of Elizabeth's statecraft, with a justification of his own poetic production. Elizabeth's disapproval of Greville's attempts at foreign adventuring eventually "called my second thoughts to counsel" (PW, 89), and Greville describes his own texts as an epiphenomenon of his role as counsellor:

In which retired view, Sir Philip Sidney, that exact image of quiet and action (happily united in him, and seldom well divided in any), being ever in my eyes, made me think it no small degree of honour to imitate or tread in the steps of such a leader; so that to sail by his compass was shortly...one of the principal reasons I can allege which persuaded me to steal minutes of time from my daily services, and employ them in this kind of writing. (PW, 89)

Greville's use of maritime imagery recalls Sidney's status as the "seamark" of honor, but his attitude toward his own texts reinscribes the vexed role of Sidney's poetry in the life-narrative. Sidney provides Greville with a poetic compass, but "after I had once ventured upon this spreading ocean of images, my apprehensive youth, for lack of a well-touched [properly magnetized] compass, did easily wander beyond proportion" (PW, 90). The text's ambivalence concerning the status of poetry conditions Greville's representation of himself as an Icarus who errs in his attempt to follow or exceed Sidney's "excellent intended pattern." Even Sidney's poetic compass only disorients Greville. Neither figure assumes the paternal role of Daedalus while remaining associated with poetic production.(31) Despite this impasse, Greville writes that he cannot bring himself to transform his verse tragedies into prose. Even when he does assume the position of Daedalus, looking back on the tragedies "with a father's eye," Greville "could not find in my heart to bestow cost or care in altering their light and limited apparel in verse" (PW, 90). While the Dedication must represent Sidney transcending his poetry in order to possess an aristocratic life-narrative, Greville himself adopts the characteristic pose of the nobleman reluctantly publishing the poetry of his prodigal youth. By the end of the Dedication, following his discussion of Sidney's eclogues, Greville's tragedies can appear as a guide "to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as, having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands" (PW, 134). Greville's poetic texts, that is, are allowed to maintain their utility for a specific group of the "weather-beaten," by whom Greville probably means elite functionaries. The modest utility of Greville's texts defers to Sidney's stature as an idealized representative of a new-model aristocracy.

Despite this deference to the example of Sidney, Greville's neoclassical tragedies inflect his narrative of Sidney's life. Greville adheres to the protocols of aristocratic life-narrative, but he also invests that narrative with the luster of tragedy, reflecting the occasion of the Dedication as the proposed publication of his "French Senecan" tragedies, Alaham and Mustapha, and verse "treatises" which constitute his political poetry. The theatricalization of the "too short scene" (PW, 3) of Sidney's life fuses the generic demands of aristocratic life-narrative with those of tragic and heroic drama, thus registering the pronounced neoclassical taste of Stuart high culture as well as the popularity of tragedy on the public stage.

The metaphor of the stage, however, also raises the largest problem faced by Greville's narrative. Sidney, Greville admits, was never "possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act upon" (PW, 24). Only his heroic death provides Greville's narrative with such a stage.(32) In order to supply this lack, the text devotes a great deal of energy to the task of discerning the "real lineaments--such as infancy is of a man's estate" (PW, 25) which indicate Sidney's qualifications for his heroic role. Although he inflates the achievements of the "young genius" (PW, 27) as a special ambassador to the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Greville appears to find himself with rather little to go on in the way of Sidney's deeds of "prowesse," at least before Leicester's military expedition to the Low Countries. Some of the early chapters, then, concern themselves with testimony of Sidney's worth given by his nominal superiors--testimony which repeatedly witnesses Sidney's aristocratic charisma exceeding his social status. The Earl of Leicester acknowledges, for instance, that in the Netherlands "he saw this sun [Sidney] so risen above his horizon that both he and all his stars were glad to fetch light from him" (PW, 18). That charisma also represents an imagined re-centering of aristocratic virtue from birth and property to Sidney's "true worth" just as the representation of Sidney as a "sea-mark" relocates the cynosure of absolutist ideology: "[T]he greatness which he affected was built upon true worth, esteeming fame more than riches, and noble actions far above nobility itself" (PW, 23).

The next "doubtful stage [Sidney] had to act upon" (PW, 28) after his service in Germany transforms his engagement against Elizabeth's proposed marriage to the Duke of Alencon into an episode of tragic dimensions, allowing Greville to demonstrate the "freedom" of Sidney's counsel at the highest possible level and to confront Sidney's lack of significant position within a fundamentally aristocratic state. Greville compensates that lack with the "tragic" heroism of Sidney's encounter with the Earl of Oxford. The famous tennis court quarrel between Sidney and Oxford demonstrates a form of heroism appropriate to the intertwined character of Sidney's "ingenuous spirit" and "the freedom of his thoughts" (PW, 38)--his essential nobility--regarding his escape from discipline following his Letter to Queen Elizabeth touching her marriage with Monsieur: "And in this freedom of heart, being one day at tennis, a peer of this realm, born great, greater by alliance, and superlative in the prince's favour, came abruptly into the tennis-court, and speaking out of these three paramount authorities he forgot to entreat that which he could not legally command" (PW, 38). Sidney's political freedom and noble spirit buttress a certain levelling of distinction between Oxford and himself, but it is the possibility of an exchange of honor with an earl, and one in which the superior, Oxford, fails to adequately respond, that enhances Sidney's "natural" superiority. "Those glorious inequalities of fortune in his lordship [Oxford] were put to a kind of pause by a precious inequality of nature in this gentleman..." (PW, 39). As Pierre Bourdieu has argued, the exchange of gifts, challenges or, indeed, an exchange of insults, all follow a similar pattern in which honor is called into question, requiring a counter-gift, retort, or riposte.(33)

Greville quickly transforms this scene into one of tragic dimensions played out upon a national stage before foreign dignitaries: "[T]hey both stood silent a while like a dumb show in a tragedy till Sir Philip, sensible of his own wrong, the foreign and factious spirits that attended, and yet--even in this question between him and his superior--tender of his country's honour, with some words of sharp accent led the way abruptly out of the tennis-court" (PW, 39-40). Katherine Duncan-Jones's recent biography of Sidney considers this a sign that "Oxford won the day" (SPS, 165), but Greville's theatrical metaphor transforms a private dispute into a tragedy acted out on a national stage in which Sidney's concern for his country's honor prevents the pressing of his advantage regarding his personal honor. When it later appears that the dispute might lead to a duel, Elizabeth herself, in what is, significantly, the only interview between Sidney and her recorded by Greville, reminds Sidney of the most fundamental concerns of the absolutist state:

The Queen...presently undertakes Sir Philip, and, like an excellent monarch, lays before him the difference in degree between earls and gentlemen; the respect inferiors ought to their superiors; and the necessity in princes to maintain their own creations, as degrees descending between the people's licentiousness and the anointed sovereignty of crowns; how the gentleman's neglect of nobility taught the peasant to insult upon both. (PW, 40)

Peasant unrest, which Perry Anderson terms "unspokenly constitutive of the Absolutist State" (LAS, 23), is, of course, spoken here as the final outcome of a conflict which threatened the hierarchical basis of the state, thus requiring the direct intervention of the monarch. Duelling, which had spread to England in the late sixteenth century, offered a demobilized military class a close approximation of military honor which nevertheless also posed a symbolic danger to its class prerogatives. "[T]hough Nobility makes a difference of persons, yet injury acknowledgeth none," observed Patrick Ruthven to Algernon Earl of Northumberland (CA, 245). Thus, it was always essential to the formulation of duelling that it take place between social equals, and it is this aspect of the potential duel which Greville highlights in order to establish Sidney's "inequality of nature" counterbalancing Oxford's "inequalities of fortune."(34) Greville is forced, however, to acknowledge the impossibility of such a levelling confrontation, which the absolutist state existed in order to prevent. Elizabeth intervenes, "like an excellent monarch," upon the delivery of a challenge to Oxford in order to avert a symbolic breach in the hierarchy of the state. The confrontation, then, between absolutist raison d'etat and Sidney's personal honor, and thus between the peerage preserved by the state and its own administrative elite, provides Greville's text with the tragic dilemma of Sidney's aristocratic "true worth."

This dilemma only fully resolves itself in another tragedy, but one which assumes suitably heroic dimensions. The heroic details of Sidney's death serve Greville's text as the confirmation of Sidney's symbolic capital, a line of credit appropriate to the aristocratic, and thus absolutist, economy of expenditure. Early episodes in Greville's description of the Dutch campaign provide him with evidence of Sidney's stature as someone to be "beloved and obeyed" by his soldiers, and he utilizes the greater prestige of Sidney's death to resolve the question of Sidney's nobility raised by the impasse with Oxford. He achieves this effect through a series of exchanges with Count Hollock (Count Philip of Hohenlohe Langenburg), a Dutch opponent of English involvement in the Netherlands. These exchanges both recapitulate and recuperate his earlier aborted duel with Oxford. Sidney, writes Greville, mediated a growing quarrel between Hollock and Leicester:

[Although] not fit for a supreme governor's place to ground a duel upon, [Sidney] brought those passionate charges which the Count Hollock addressed upwards to the Earl down, by degrees, upon himself, where that brave Count Hollock found Sir Philip so fortified with wisdom, courage and truth...as though sense of honour, and many things else equal and unequal between them, were in appearance provoked beyond possibility of peacing; yet this one inequality of right on Sir Philip's side made the propounder calm....(PW, 74)

Sidney functions essentially as a decoy for Hollock's aristocratic rage--a target sufficiently beneath Hollock's position to eliminate the question of duelling--but Hollock's recognition of Sidney's "wisdom, courage and truth" also validates Sidney's aristocratic honor.

The famous tale of Sidney's refusal of water upon returning injured from the battlefield at Zutphen depicts an act of selflessness appropriate to a Christian saint, but it also initiates a second--and successful--aristocratic exchange with Hollock which is of crucial importance to Greville's text:

[B]eing thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man with these words: "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." (PW, 77)

The interest of Greville's narrative, however, is grounded at least as much in heroic as religious life-narrative, and it is significant that Greville most likely borrowed the story, which is mentioned nowhere else in the early accounts of Sidney's death, from Plutarch's Life of Alexander, thus combining Sidney's saintliness with his credentials as an aristocrat to be "beloved and obeyed." Hereafter, Greville notes, reports of Sidney's recovery reached England "not as private, but public, good news" (PW, 78).

In terms of Bourdieu's economy of honor, Greville departs from Plutarch's example and poses the challenge of Sidney's self-expenditure not to his own soldiers, but to his fellow commanders and aristocrats--a gesture which indicates the distance of Greville's tragedy from the populism of the public theater. Only Hollock possesses sufficient stature to supply the appropriate "counter-gift"--his selflessness concerning his own health:

[A]lthough the Count himself lay at the same instant hurt in the throat with a musket-shot, yet did he neglect his own extremity to save his friend, and to that end had sent [his surgeon] to Sir Philip. This chirurgeon notwithstanding (out of love to his master) returning one day to dress his wound, the Count cheerfully asked him how Sir Philip did; and being answered with a heavy countenance that he was not well, at these words the worthy prince--as having more sense of his friend's wounds than his own--cries out: "Away villain, never see my face again till thou bring better news of that man's recovery, for whose redemption many such as I were happily lost." (PW, 79)

Sidney's gift and Count Hollock's counter-gift offer Greville's text a perspective upon Sidney's ability to build honor that reverses the aborted exchange of insult and retort between Sidney and the Earl of Oxford: "This honourable act I relate to give the world one modern example, first, that greatness of heart is not dead everywhere; and, then, that war is both a fitter mould to fashion it, and stage to act it on, than peace can be" (PW, 79). War, then, provides the only stage upon which Sidney demonstrates his essential equality to Oxford's inherited status. The metaphor of the stage appears central to Sidney's exchanges with both Oxford and Hollock, but in this second episode the tragedy is allowed to reach its conclusion and its fusion with an aristocratic heroic drama.

Sidney's tragic death, then, makes possible the representation of his life as an aristocratic and heroic narrative. Greville's Sidney can serve as a model for "those...that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world" because he both shares and transcends their dilemma. Greville's text thus offers the figure of Sidney as a model for the fusion of the nobility of the sword and state servants, and Sidney emerges as a utopian aristocrat organizing an idealized version of absolutism as the "standard" of its elites and their "common rendezvous of worth":

The universities abroad and at home accounted him a general Maecenas of learning, dedicated their books to him, and communicated every invention or improvement of knowledge with him. Soldiers honoured him, and were so honoured by him as no man thought he marched under the true banner of Mars that had not obtained Sir Philip Sidney's approbation. Men of affairs in most parts of Christendom entertained correspondency with him....[Sidney was] a reformed standard by which even the most humorous persons could not but have a reverent kind of ambition to be tried and approved current. (PW, 21)

As the aristocratic standard of absolutist currency, Sidney's life-narrative relies upon establishing his status as patron, warrior, and counsellor--not as poet. This is the ideological desire informing the construction of a "Renaissance man."

"ROMANTIC" SIDNEY

Greville's uneasiness concerning the exemplary quality of Sidney's own poetry is born out in the reception of Sidney's literary texts--especially the great popularity of the Arcadia--in the course of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the very popularity of the text among new kinds of readers, especially women, was the primary condition for the derogation of Sidney's reputation by the end of the century. "[R]eaders are travellers," remarks Michel de Certeau; "they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves."(35) Such "poaching" upon formerly noble domains was a result of the new readership created for print-capitalism which deeply unsettled the elite culture of the period.(36)

Fundamental to the ambivalence with which Sidney was treated by the literary culture of this period was the popularity of printed editions of the Arcadia, as well as its numerous imitations and "supplements," among women readers and its service as a model of female textual production which eventually extended well beyond the confines of noblewomen.(37) From the Countess of Pembroke's edition of the Arcadia in 1593, which became the standard for more than three centuries of readers, to Mrs. Stanley's Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia Moderniz'd (1725), the Arcadia itself was the site of women's literary efforts. Sidney's own niece, Mary Wroth, produced a prose romance in the style of the Arcadia, The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania, in 1621. In the year before the publication of Greville's Life, moreover, Anne Weames published her Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1651), and her publisher, Thomas Heath, celebrated "this Virago as "the lively Ghost of Sydney [who] by a happie transmigration, speaks through the organs of this inspired Minerva" (RI, 2:384). Much later, Samuel Richardson's Pamela ratified the connection between the prose romance and the emergence of the novel in England, its title registering, as Ian Watt has argued, the residual prestige of Sidney's romance among women readers.(38)

The "feminization" of the romance over the course of the seventeenth century ensured the Arcadia's rejection by a non-aristocratic literary elite anxious to establish the masculinity of its vocation. John Milton's Eikonoklastes (1649) is only the most famous example, condemning Charles II's Eikon Basilike for its appropriation of Pamela's prayer in captivity. Charles, writes Milton, uses "a Prayer stol'n word for word from the mouth of a Heathen fiction praying to a heathen God; & that in no serious Book, but the vain amatorious Poem of Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia."(39) Milton's derogation of Sidney's romance is the most militant version of an increasingly standard association of Sidney and his Arcadia with a fully demobilized aristocracy which Norbert Elias has traced as the "Sociogenesis of Aristocratic Romanticism" in the period.(40) Condemnations such as Milton's, however, represent only one side of the literary culture of the period. The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney, appended to the 1655 edition of the Arcadia and signed "Philophilippos," explicitly defends the Arcadia against "ill natur'd Criticks" (RI, 2:407) such as Milton. The Life and Death, furthermore, utilizes Sidney's affiliation with aristocratic romanticism to enhance his life-narrative. The text generally follows Greville's 1652 Life (itself, I would argue, published although not written as a life of the author of the Arcadia), but adds, significantly, an account of Sidney's popularity with courtly ladies: "Many Nobles of the female sex, ventring as far, as modestie would permit, to signifie their affections unto him. Sir Philip will not read the characters of their love, though obvious to every eye" (RI, 2:405). Because, furthermore, he married the daughter of Francis Walsingham, "who impoverish't himself to enrich the State," Sidney "received no considerable accrument of means by his match; Yet, accounting virtue a portion to it self, hee so affectionately loved her, that herein hee was exemplarie to all Gentlemen, not to carrie their love in their purses..." (RI, 2:405). In this fashion the Life and Death inscribes the popularity of the Arcadia among female readers into Sidney's own life-narrative, transforming Sidney himself into a romantic hero.

Sidney's status as a popular romantic hero, however, depended upon the popularity of the Arcadia itself, and, facing increased competition from the French nouvelles and their imitations, the book began a slow decline in popularity in the later part of the century.(41) Elite literary culture after the Restoration, meanwhile, was increasingly alienated from Sidney's romantic reputation, in part because the Arcadia's "amatorious" character appeared to threaten the construction of a properly regulated literary "patrimony." John Aubrey's "brief life" of Sidney (c. 1680) registers the concomitant disenchantment with Sidney's aristocratic life-narrative. Aubrey regards Sidney's face as "not masculine enough" while simultaneously insisting that "he was a person of great courage" (ABL, 278). He proceeds to demolish both the courtly romanticism of Sidney's life and the military heroism of his death. "Having received some shott or wound in the Warres in the Lowe-countreys...he would not...forbeare his carnall knowledge of [his wife], which cost him his life" (ABL, 280). This derogation of Sidney's reputation as an aristocrat determined the almost complete disappearance of his life-narrative in the eighteenth century. In the Biographia Britannica (1747-66) Sidney received no entry of his own, appearing instead in Spenser's entry as his patron and "friend."(42) From at least the Restoration until the end of the eighteenth century, Sidney's fame primarily rested upon a genre, the romance, which aristocratic life-narrative had represented as a "youthful toy" and from which elite literary culture attempted to disassociate itself.

McGill University

NOTES

1. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: NLB, 1974), 18, subsequently cited in the text as LAS.

2. "The nobility was a landowning class whose profession was war," Anderson writes. "The categorical object of noble rule was territory, regardless of the community inhabiting it....The Absolutist States reflect this archaic rationality in their inmost structure. They were machines built overwhelmingly for the battlefield" (LAS 31-32).

3. Anderson demonstrates "a progressive dissociation of the [English] nobility from the basic military function which defined it in the mediaeval social order, much earlier than anywhere else on the continent..." (LAS, 125). This dissociation was an important factor in the limited character of English absolutism, but it did not eliminate the prestige and political utility still attached to the idea of a nobility of the sword. The adaptation remained a difficult one, as Lawrence Stone's discussion of the problem of aristocratic military power in England suggests (The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965], 199-270, subsequently cited in the text as CA).

4. Aristocratic life-narrative in England did not fully emerge until the Tudors, perhaps in response to the sense of vocational crisis. Even then, lives of state servants still heavily inflected by religious models--William Roper's The Life of Sir Thomas More (c. 1535) and George Cavendish's The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (c. 1557) being the best-known--preceded the appearance of life-narratives of the nobility of the sword. This fact reflects the importance of Humanistic learning and its proximity to the power of the absolutist state in the formulation of aristocratic life-narrative in England. The appearance of English translations of Latin biographies in the late sixteenth century, most notably Thomas North's Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), disseminated the Humanists' models throughout the literate culture.

5. Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14 (1986): 1-41.

6. Georges Duby's work on the role of youth in medieval French nobility suggests some continuity between medieval and Renaissance society in their treatment of youth. A medieval knight, Duby writes, remained a youth until he became the head of a house and founded a family, and thus his youth might continue well into his forties (The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980], 112-22).

7. For the relationship between courtship and courtiership, see Arthur F. Marotti, "'Love is not love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396-428.

8. One of the first examples of the life-narrative of an Elizabethan poet to be published, George Whetstone's verse elegy of George Gascoigne spoken in the voice of Gascoigne himself, was really an extended complaint about the impossibility of finding "place" in the world. Poetry emerges as a kind of last resort, a regression to "youth" after Gascoigne's military service in Holland failed to win him either wealth or advancement:

Thus wore I time, the welthier not a whit, Yet awckward chance, lackt force, to beard my hope In peace (quod I) ile trust unto my wit, the widowes of my muse, then straight I ope And first I showe, travail of such time: as I in youth, imployed in looving rime.

A Remembraunce of the Wel Imployed Life, and Godly End of George Gaskoigne, Esquire. The report of Georg Whetstons, gent, and eye witnes of his godly and charitable end in this world...[1577] (Edinburgh: The Aungervyle Society, 1888), 10. The title itself indicates the extent to which religious life-narrative bolstered Gascoigne's prestige in the absence of sufficient secular achievements.

9. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), subsequently cited in the text as EP.

10. Like many other intellectuals of his generation, Wilson (c. 1525-81) successfully converted his pedagogical authority into the administration of the Elizabethan state, and aristocratic life-narrative helped to smooth his way. His first published text, produced in collaboration with Walter Haddon under the patronage of Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, was Vita et Obitus Duorum Fratrum Suffolciensum, Henrici et Caroli Brandoni...(1551), lives of Henry and Charles Brandon, successively Dukes of Suffolk, and he included an English adaptation of the text in the Arte as an example of a proper "Oration demonstrative."

11. Thomas Wilson, Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique (1560), ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909), 12, subsequently cited in the text as AR.

12. Holinshed's Chronicles, 6 vols. (London, 1808), 4:880, subsequently cited in the text as HC.

13. Molyneux represents Henry's rise in terms of his physical proximity to Edward VI. Henry "was from his infancie bred and brought up in the princes court, and in neerenesse to his person used familiarlie even as a companion, and manie times a bedfellow" (HC, 4:870). This relationship between prince and "chamber knight" appears to have been common among the Tudors. See Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 47-52.

14. "Toy" was, in fact, a commonplace term for poetry in the period, one which highlighted the connection between poetry and youth, and Sidney himself had termed the Arcadia an "ink-wasting toy" in sending it to his sister. Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," Proceedings of the British Academy 66 (1980): 161-78.

15. Molyneux also emphasizes the aristocratic largess of Philip's will. Sidney "had that great care and regard to the conservation of his fame and honour entire, when he was gone, that he made a most bountifull and liberall will" (HC, 4:882). Although Sidney's will was indeed a liberal one, he left behind even greater debts from his attempt to maintain the expenditures appropriate to an aristocrat. His father-in-law, Francis Walsingham, assumed those debts, which proved to be financially ruinous to him.

16. Herbert did, however, produce a limited amount of coterie poetry, and a volume purporting to offer a selection of his work, Poems, written by the Right Honorable William earl of Pembroke, lord steward of His Majesties houshold. Whereof many of which are answered by way of repartee, by sir Benjamin Ruddier, knight, appeared in 1660.

17. Thomas Moffet, Nobilis and Lessus Lugubris, ed. and trans. Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1940), 95, subsequently cited in the text as N.

18. The court, writes G. K. Hunter, "had established a mode of life which was able to use the Humanistic training without depending upon it." Humanists who wished to advance at the court had to abandon "their internationalist, pacific and misogynist impulses and become the encomiasts of tournaments, of hunting, and of amorous dalliance" (John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962], 30-31).

19. Alan Sinfield, "Power and Ideology: An Outline Theory and Sidney's Arcadia," ELH 52 (1985): 269. The Elizabethan elegies of Sidney often represented this structural confusion as the struggle between Mars and Mercury for the right to claim Sidney.

20. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), 5, subsequently cited in the text as AP.

21. Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that the Apology was at least partly intended to persuade his future father-in-law, Walsingham, "that the reading, writing and patronage of poetry were honourable and dignified pursuits, compatible with high office" (Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991], 233, subsequently cited in the text as SPS).

22. My argument here largely follows that of Margaret Ferguson, who notices the ambiguity in the master-servant relationship in both Pugliano's and Sidney's rhetoric (Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], 152-53).

23. Helgerson regards Sidney's transcendence of the fate of the prodigal as the result of his poetic insight: "Sidney found a way of reconciling those antipodes [virtue and wit] that resisted the best efforts of the Elizabethan prodigals" (EP, 124). It was, however, Sidney's heroic death--his virtue rather than his wit--which guaranteed his prestige among his Elizabethan contemporaries. The utopian quality of the Apology indicates that Sidney himself remained acutely aware that the threat of youthful prodigality applied to any poet without recourse to aristocratic, official, or religious position.

24. Elegies for Sir Philip Sidney (1587), A. J. Colaianne and W. L. Godshalk (Delmar, NY: Scholars' Facsimilies & Reprints, 1980), n. p. Because Whetstone produced several extended verse epitaphs of noblemen in the period between 1577 and 1587, probably under contract to their families, Donald A. Stauffer terms him "the first professional biographer in England" (English Biography before 1700 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930], 62).

25. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), lines 16, 20-22.

26. William Henry Bond, The Reputation and Influence of Sir Philip Sidney, 2 vols. (Harvard University dissertation, 1941), 2:69, subsequently cited in the text as RI.

27. Nashe himself boasts of his prose style in Strange News (1592) that "the vaine which I have (be it a median vaine, or a madde vaine) is of my own begetting, and cals no man in England father but my selfe" (Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. G. Gregory Smith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904], 2:243).

28. Greville "ingenuously confess[es]" Sidney's "actions, words and conversation" to be "the daintiest treasure my mind could then lay up" (The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 71, subsequently cited in the text as PW). This personal "treasure" was not without a material component. The intervention of the Sidney family was crucial in obtaining Greville's first sinecure, which served as the foundation of his considerable fortune.

29. Such estimates of Sidney's importance were common among Greville's noble contemporaries. Sir Robert Naunton's memoir of the reign of Elizabeth, Fragmenta Regalia (c. 1620), went so far as to report that Sidney had been "through the fame of his deserts...in the election for the kingdom of Pole," but Elizabeth, fearing the loss of "the jewel of her times," had prevented him from assuming the throne (Robert Cary and Robert Naunton, Memoirs of Robert Cary, Earl of Monmouth, written by himself, and Fragmenta Regalia; being a History of Queen Elizabeth's Favourites by Sir Robert Naunton [Edinburgh, 1808], 221).

30. Greville's reading allegorizes the vices represented in the Arcadia in terms which reflect his own (temporary) exile from the "effeminate" Stuart court. Greville reads the text as the condemnation of princes who "play with their own visions," "choose creatures out of Pandora's tun and so raise up worth and no worth, friends and enemies at adventure," and "unactively charge the managing of their greatest affairs upon the second-hand faith and diligence of deputies" (PW, 8)."[W]ho sees not," declares Greville, "that these dark webs of effeminate princes be dangerous fore-runners of innovation, even in a quiet and equally tempered people?" (PW, 9).

31. Greville may be thinking of Sidney's declaration in the Apology that "the highest-flying wit" must "have a Daedalus to guide him" (AP, 72). Carlo Ginzburg has shown that Icarus was being turned into an emblem of intellectual daring in the early seventeenth century ("High and Low: The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Past and Present 73 [1976]: 28-41).

32. Greville's final discussion of the relevance of his own tragedies retains the same insistence upon the theatricalization of state service: "But he that will behold these acts upon their true stage, let him look on that stage whereon himself is an actor, even the state he lives in, and for every part he may perchance find a player, and for every line (it may be) an instance of life beyond the author's intention or application" (PW, 135).

33. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 100.

34. Duncan-Jones suggests that the aborted encounter with Oxford may have been the event which provoked Henry Sidney to commission a family pedigree which "[w]ith the help of forged deeds...traced the Sidneys back to a supposed chamberlain of Henry II, William de Sidne. Oxford's hereditary position as Lord Chamberlain may have stimulated this exercise in creative genealogy" (SPS, 165).

35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 174.

36. John Stephens' Essayes and Characters (1615), for instance, includes a "character" of a "Lawyers Clarke" which lampoons its subject for his appropriation of the Arcadia: "Hee doth gladly imitate Gentlemen in their garments; they allure the Wenches, and may (perhaps) provoke his Mistresse....[B]ut if hee chooses worthily, hee feeles himself worthily contemned, because he woes with bawdery in text; and with Jests, or the common-helping Arcadia" (RI, 2:260). The adjective "common-helping" perhaps refers to the widespread dissemination of examples from the Arcadia in rhetorical handbooks of the period.

37. As early as 1631 Thomas Powell's Tom of All Trades, or the Plaine Path-way to Preferment complained about the popularity of the Arcadia among "private" gentlewomen:

Let them learne plaine workes of all kind, so they take heed of too open seaming. In stead of Song and Musicke, let them learne Cookery and Laundrie. And in stead of reading Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good huswifery. I like not a female Poetresse at any hand. Let greater personages glory of their skill in musicke, the posture of their bodies, their knowledge in languages, the greatnesse, and freedome of their spirits: and their arts in arreigning of mens affections, at their flattering faces. This is not the way to breed a private Gentlemans Daughter. (RI, 2:320)

38. Ian Watt, "The Naming of Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding," Review of English Studies 25 (1949): 322-38. It is significant, then, that the last major eighteenth-century edition of the Arcadia appeared in 1739, one year before the publication of Pamela.

39. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-1982), 3:362.

40. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 214-67.

41. Sidney's status as a "name" author and his affiliation with romance, however, remained strong enough that the English translation of Mlle. La Roche Guilhem's "nouvelle," Almanzdide, appeared as Almanzor and Almanzaide, A Novel. Written by Sir Philip Sidney, and found since his Death amongst his Papers (1678). The novel's surprise ending dissipates the threat that the love of Almanzor and Almanzaide is incestuous, but its flirtation with incest may have influenced John Aubrey's claim that Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke "lay together" (Aubrey's Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962], 139, subsequently cited in the text as ABL).

42. Horace Walpole's Royal & Noble Authors (1758), meanwhile, completely dismisses Sidney, both as a hero and as the author of the Arcadia: "When we, at this distance of time, inquire what prodigious merits excited such admiration, what do we find?--Great valour.--But it was an age of heroes.--In full of all other talents, we have a tedious, lamentable, pedantic, pastoral romance, which the patience of a young virgin in love cannot now wade through..." (A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 5 vols., ed. Thomas Park [London, 1806], 2:221).