Week 05, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Elizabeth I, Sir Philip Sidney

General Notes on Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder.

Renaissance humanism tends to treat the individual as a type, a collection of virtues, after the manner of Aristotle. Our own modern sense of the individual as unique and autonomous would be somewhat foreign to them, even though it’s fair to say that the Renaissance has long fascinated people because of the strong personalities we find during that era—it’s an age of worldly popes and even worldlier rulers. Consider Machiavelli’s Cesare Borgia, Benevenuto Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and other remarkable individuals.

Wyatt will probably seem to most readers very modern in his sensibilities—he is a Renaissance political figure trying to deal with his own emotions, states of mind, and confusions about his position in the court of Henry VIII. His lyric speaker is often fragile, confused, or threatened. A courtier must behave in an exemplary way, but what are the rules? There are some, but they appear to change based on powerful players’ individual desires. You can read Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier for an idealized version of the court, but Wyatt is in the thick of the real thing. He focuses on personal events—on his thoughts and emotions, and his relationships with women.

“If you would seem honest, be honest” is his advice to his son in a letter. But the court of Henry VIII is all about artifice. Sidney the courtier-poet will later define the literary arts as “feigning notable images” of moral virtue and vice to move readers towards virtuous action. But the Court’s artifice is about more immediate political objectives. It’s hard to maintain a position when one lives in a world that places a premium on the competitive manipulation of appearances, right down to the things one says about oneself, one’s sovereign, and others as well as the clothing one wears and the manners one exhibits. In Castiglione/Hoby’s The Courtier, the point of being a courtier is to embody, and to body forth, the goodness and grace of the sovereign. Outward appearances, as any good Neo-Platonist would say, mirror the inward goodness of a person’s soul, and the courtier is the king’s outward appearance, somewhat as Christ is God’s Word made Flesh and (a phrase from Milton) his “Effectual Might.” The Renaissance in both England and on the Continent is a materialistic, competitive age that still convincingly speaks the language of a profoundly Christian ethical and symbolic universe. It would be a mistake to think of someone like Niccolo Machiavelli as an atheist (though we can’t be so sure about his hero Cesare Borgia). The period is rife with conflict between the spiritual and the worldly, but it dismisses neither dimension and in fact blends them in fascinating ways. Victorian poet Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues may be eccentric renditions of Renaissance voices, but all the same they don’t seem far off the mark.

Henry VIII was the Sun around which his officials and courtiers revolved. To work for Henry was mainly to exalt his rule, and secondarily to do his bidding in official and unofficial affairs. It wasn’t that anyone considered Henry illegitimate or unworthy to rule, but rather that centralization of power increasingly required exalted claims about how the ruler came by his right to rule. By James I’s time in the early C17, the full divine right theory of rulership would supplement dynastic birth as the justification for sovereignty. That same theory would prove to be partly responsible for the troubles of James’ son Charles I with the Puritan faction that eventually executed him during the Civil War of the 1640’s.

Many courtiers came from aristocratic backgrounds, but did not have the liquid wealth to maintain themselves in such lordly status, so as the age of absolutism moved along, once-independent courtiers gravitated towards a place at court. With Henry VIII, the movement to centralism in government approached completion; he reigned from 1509-47, and 1534 saw him copy Martin Luther’s Reformation, except that in Henry’s case, splitting off from the Catholic Church had more to do with marital troubles and with a desire to avoid sharing power and revenue with the Church than with deeply-rooted spiritual conflicts.

Thomas Wyatt’s biography is quite interesting. In 1520, as a young man of 17, he married Elizabeth Brooke. She apparently turned out to be unfaithful, and of course Wyatt anguishes much in his poetry over this problem. At 23, he went to Italy and France as a diplomat. He got into trouble with Henry in 1536 over Anne Boleyn and was sent to the Tower of London , but was subsequently pardoned and became ambassador to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s Court on the Continent. He got into trouble again in 1538 on a treason charge, and was later arrested on the charge in 1541, but was let off again so long as he agreed to reinstate his wife (he had a mistress named Elizabeth Darrell from 1536 to his death, and had become estranged from his wife), but he died in 1542, so he didn’t live long enough to enjoy his return to favor.

With a biography like that, a man may be forgiven his desperate search for constancy, honesty, and truth as opposed to self-interested manipulation and sham in the name of religion and political authority. Wyatt sought fidelity in love and friendship, but fidelity wasn’t easy to find. He never says it was, either—that’s one of the beauties of his poetry, isn’t it? It rings true to Wyatt’s own struggles, and doesn’t whitewash his complicity in courtly and romantic intrigue. Erotic pursuits of the sort in which Wyatt may have become entangled and about which he wrote poetry were part of the political and courtly scene, part of what it meant to be a courtier. Orwell’s 1984 characterizes sex as inherently political, but it’s hardly the first instance of such a notion: sex has had a political dimension at least since the days of Antony and Cleopatra, and no doubt the same was true long before their time, too.

What is the value of lyric poetry for Wyatt? Lyric poetry allows him to assume and explore an honest role, a way to be honest and not just to seem that way. The hope is that by taking on a lyric voice, the poet can attain clarity about the erotic, spiritual and political matters that trouble him. It’s customary for us as descendants of the romantics to consider lyric poetry both expressive and cathartic: the soul escaping on the wings of language, as it were. In a Wordsworthian ode such as “Tintern Abbey,” we expect that our speaker will eventually arrive at what has been called an “affective resolution” to the problems that plague him—the loss of creative power, of a once-sustaining connection to nature and other human beings, etc. The best romantic poetry never oversimplifies such problems or claims that imagination conquers all or that language is a transparent medium of expression. Nonetheless, it is generally optimistic about expression’s capacity to deal with the problems of the autonomous self. But in Wyatt’s case, although there may be an initial hope that a hard-won clarity of mind and perception will allow the speaker to solve his troubles in real life, or at least to set up a kind of pastoral refuge from the maelstrom of court life, that hope is likely to be frustrated, and the poem is likely to register such frustration and reflect upon it. Metapoetically, Wyatt tends to admit the failure of his lyric utterances to set him free—free, that is, from complicity in the treacherous and hostile world that he describes. Art may be wish-fulfillment, as Freud claims in his essay “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” but sometimes artists are well aware that fulfillment of their wishes isn’t possible, even in fiction or poetry. To attain clarity on some dilemma, or to rehearse one’s difficulties in dramatic or poetical fashion, is not necessarily to slip out of them.

The meter of Wyatt’s poetry is purposefully rough, not smooth the way his later editors in Tottel’s Miscellany make it. He’s trying to capture difficult turns of intellect and emotion, so perfectly smooth verse might work against the psychological realism many readers find attractive about Wyatt’s poetry. The same is partly true of John Donne, whose phrases are often elegant and memorable, but whose meter isn’t always uncomplicated or regular.

Life of Sir Thomas Wyatt

1503—Born at Allington Castle in Kent
1509—Accession of Henry VIII
1516—Probably entered Saint John’s College , Cambridge University
1516—Served as “Sewer Extraordinary”
1520—Married Elizabeth Brooke
1521—Son born
1524—Made Clerk of the King’s Jewels
1525—Made an esquire of the royal body
1525—Estranged from wife
1526—Brief embassy to France
1527—Brief embassy to Venice
1528-1530—Served as the high marshal of Calais
1530—Returned to court to resume his place as esquire of the royal body
1532—Became commissioner of the peace in Essex
1532—Came under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell
1534—Involved in a “great affray” with the sergeants of London and briefly imprisoned
1534—Henry VIII acknowledged “Supreme Head on Earth” of the English church
1536—Formed an attachment to Elizabeth Darrell, his lifelong mistress
1536—Fall of Anne Boleyn
1536—Imprisoned in Tower with 5 other suspected lovers of Anne, but released and rusticated, and then a few months afterward, was made Sheriff of Kent and led soldiers to quell an uprising.
1537—Made ambassador at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V
1538—Returned to England
1538—Charged with treason but cleared
1539—Another diplomatic mission to Charles V’s court
1540—His patron, Cromwell, was executed
1541—Arrested and imprisoned on the 1538’s charges of treason
1541—Pardoned under conditions of his wife’s reinstatement
1542—11 October, died of fever on his way to meet and escort to London the Spanish envoy

Notes on Thomas Wyatt’s Poems.

“The long love…” (594); “Whoso list to hunt” (595); “My galley” (597); “Divers doth use” (598); “Madam, withouten many words” (599); “They flee from me,” both versions (599-600); “My lute, awake!” (600-01); “Forget not yet” (601-02); “Blame not my lute” (602-03); “Who list his wealth and ease retain” (603-04); “Mine Own John Poins” (604-06).

“The long love that in my thought doth harbor.”

A “conceit” is a sustained metaphor. In this poem, Love is said to be a warrior, and the metaphor extends throughout the sonnet. The “banner” is the poet’s blush, and so forth. The contradiction is that soldiers are supposed to be strong, aggressive, and disciplined, but the speaker here is shy and in a weakened position thanks to his lady’s displeasure. The final line “Good is the life ending faithfully” simply asserts an ideal about fidelity as a virtue, but it doesn’t rescue the speaker from his dilemma. It isn’t a bold Petrarchan declaration. Body and soul are at war in this poem—the lover’s physical advances, though they are natural enough, have not been kindly received. The speaker is a fellow soldier serving his commanding officer, Love. He can’t abandon him, and so is left in a muddled state since Love is in retreat. The poem as a whole is a reflection upon “courtly love” within courtly politics; there are rules of engagement in courtly love, and in fact the whole medieval code of eroticism seems to offer a way of containing and directing an otherwise chaotic, powerful passion towards spiritual ends. Courtly love idealizes eroticism, but such gestures invite critical reflection because lovers know instinctively that erotic impulses are not easily blended with spiritual ideals or the conflicting imperatives of courtly place and politics.

“Whoso list to hunt.”

Love here is a dangerous erotic pursuit, as in Ovid and the real court. The deer in Wyatt’s poem is not mild and meek; she (if, as the editors suggest, “she” is Anne Boleyn) belongs to someone else (Henry VIII). There is something of Ovid in Wyatt’s love poetry, even though the Renaissance man seems not to approve of Ovid’s frank characterization of sex as a competition in which both men and women may participate, if not necessarily on the same level. Generally, (Ovid’s women can escape the clutches of divine or human males only by metamorphosing into permanently unattainable objects in the natural world.)

The difficulty in defining or pinning down a slippery love object shows in the conflicting references Wyatt makes. Consider the line “touch me not.” The Norton editors point out that Wyatt has followed Petrarch’s poem “Una candida cerva” and that the line refers to the inscription around the neck of Caesar’s deer. But it also refers to The Gospel According to John, 20:15-17: “Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” In the Vulgate Bible of Jerome, the key line runs “ noli me tangere nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum.”

Wyatt is responding to John 20:17 , Petrarch, and the expectations of the times for love poetry. He cannot disregard these things. Does he give us a half-beatified lady such as Dante’s beloved Beatrice or Petrarch’s Laura? Wyatt’s deer wears diamonds, which may signify some trace of heaven and purity. She is untouchable, rather like Christ is to Mary Magdalene. Wyatt’s speaker may be acknowledging the potential for a spiritualized reading of his erotic pursuit, but for the most part that pursuit seems frankly sexual, and the poem has a bitter, exhausted quality.

Petrarch’s sonnets are a model for those of Wyatt, but the two poets differ markedly. Petrarch’s poems are self-conscious and announce metaphor as metaphor. His poet-speakers live in the land of symbols. He often uses the laurel tree in this respect, and makes an absolute distinction between the heavenly and the earthly. The allusion to John in “Una candida cerva” refers to Christ at a halfway point between death and transfiguration. When Petrarch’s speaker tries to follow, he falls into a river. In his version of the poem, Wyatt emphasizes instead the speaker’s bitterness at failing to attain his material object. The poem is partially secular, and the idea of transcendence does not figure as heavily as it does in Petrarch’s sonnet. The reader, however, may not fully agree with the male speaker’s frustrated point of view since the “hind” has not done anything to deserve condemnation. The male speaker has simply “come in last” in the race or hunt for her affection. We should not suppose that the hind would be indignant about being hunted—indeed, the diamonds she wears may suggest that she is well paid for her role in the hunt. In sum, while Petrarch, almost like a medieval allegorist, dramatizes the agonizing gap between the human and the divine, Wyatt evidently prefers to focus on the wildness of the love pursuit even when it takes place in the labyrinthine environment of Henry VIII’s court. Well, the body of Anne Boleyn is real and attractive, but the speaker “seeks to hold the wind” thereby, and seems frustrated because he has been captured by her power as an object of the court.

“My galley.”

I would suggest reading also Spenser’s “Sonnet 34” from Amoretti, which, like Wyatt’s poem (as the editors say), translates Petrarch’s Rima 189. Wyatt’s effort seems more self-accusatory and tortured than Spenser’s rendition. Wyatt’s poem apparently aims to capture the anguish of Petrarch’s sonnet very closely. The meter seems deliberately rough, and suits the subject.

“Divers doth use.”

The speaker contextualizes his situation (he’s lost his lover to fickleness) by referring to the mistaken strategies of other men. His resolution is as follows: “I will not wail, lament, nor yet be sad, / Nor call her false that falsely did me feed, / But let it pass . . . .” He apparently wants to make a distinction between calling his lady “false” and claiming that it is women’s nature to be pleased by frequent “change.” It’s hard to miss the bitterness here, but the point seems to be that the speaker means to rehearse it and let it go, contenting himself with a judgment that more or less takes the moral sting out of what has happened between him and his ex-lover.

“Madame, Withouten Many Words.”

Language is an important part of courtly love games, which depend upon deflection and deception concerning the erotic instinct. Love is dangerous, especially for a woman, who stands to lose much by giving in to her suitors. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril, as Oscar Wilde would say; he also says it is dangerous to remain at the surface. That is a very apt way to describe the courts of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. So the speaker says the woman should leave aside her jests and use her mind, her “wit.” In the manuscript version, odd punctuation marks—“&, {.}”—indicate a nod or shake of the head, things outside the immediate scope of words. In the madrigal by Dragonetto Bonifacio upon which Wyatt has based his poem, the speaker says “un bel si” (that is, perhaps, a nod) will earn a poem, while “un bel no” (a simple “no”) will grant both parties their freedom. Originality of expression, incidentally, was not a primary concern during the Renaissance any more than it ever had been before. Invention and personal detail certainly come into play, and a poet like Philip Sidney may “swear by the blackest brook of hell” that he is “no pickpurse of another’s wit” in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, but romantic-style uniqueness and inward essence are not imperatives in this age. For a Renaissance poet, the self is represented as conforming to a publicly understood pattern.

Stylistically, this poem turns on emphatic, counterpointing phrases—read it with feeling, as something like a one-sided dialog, and it’s easy to see what I mean. Shakespeare’s verse has the same emphatic quality; his style may be “sugared,” but his lines often turn on sharp contrast between word and word, idea and idea. In the present poem, the idea seems to be, as we would say in our coarse manner, “Cut the bull—are you going to give me what I want or not? If so, great—if not, we’re both free spirits.” Speech and action are in conflict in this battle with a courtly lady that doth protest and jest too much and too long. The speaker seems tired of the rituals of pursuit and courtship. They’re dangerous anyhow—as with his interest in Boleyn. Even the “cruel mistress” in Petrarch is an ideal, and the speaker isn’t pursuing an airy ideal at this point in the conversation with a potential lover.

“They Flee from Me.”

The pattern of the stanzas is rhyme royal, ABAB BCC. The speaker has had many affairs, and now finds that the tables have been turned on him. The lady also is free to “use new-fangleness.” The speaker is baffled; he suffers from moral confusion over the rules of love and finds the situation strange. People who step outside this game tend to be losers—i.e. while they sit around reflecting on things, the next round has already begun. The word “kindely” may be ironic—it means both “rudely” and “in kind.” In any case, the male figure in this poem deserves such rude treatment. Rather like Ovid, Wyatt here represents the male and the female alike as devious. The sonnet is full of tonal complexities, and its irregular lines and double stresses make it subtler still. Wyatt often uses conversational rhythm, as we can tell from intimate phrases like “dear heart.” The speaker’s idealistic expectations cause him to become disillusioned. He is forced to recognize the distinction between the tameness of court life and the animality of love. The need for secrecy is great, and makes things all the better when he is ensnared in love. The point is not even to achieve clarity about his passion, perhaps, but to “set it out there” in all its rawness. He’s exploring an emotional state. This poem is also about power relations—about sex and the court. Chivalric relations are imaged partly in terms of wildness and animal behavior. The theme of hunting applies to the realm of lust, which involves a degree of violence. In this poem, we find role reversal because the woman seems to be in charge. She says, “how do you like it?” We know that Wyatt sought constancy underneath fine courtly appearances, the enforced civility, the rules and roles of courtly life. But love leads only to “newfangleness.” As in King Lear later on, when chivalry and whatever extends beyond need are stripped away, human beings consider themselves nothing more than “poor, bare, forked animal[s].” Shakespeare makes clear that it is not satisfying to return to that level, at least not for long. One must come in from the storm.

“My lute, awake!”

The speaker—or rather the singer in this case—commands his lute to accompany him one last time, not to woo the intransigent Petrarchan lady but rather to announce that the quest has ended. Stanza 6 seems important in that it threatens the lady with a refusal of expression in her old age, just as she has refused to acknowledge the singer’s own earnest expressions to win her heart. He projects his bitterness far into the future, while claiming his present heartaches have come to an end. The verb tenses seem rather playful here, in that the singer keeps uttering the present perfect “I have done” in various senses while the song continues. But I think the general effect is to suggest that he really is done, at least by the final stanza: “My lute be still, for I have done.”

“Forget Not Yet.”

The main device in the poem is to be found in the final line, “Forget not this,” which differs from the final line of the other stanzas, “Forget not yet.” The “this” would be the poem itself, I believe. It is nicely rhythmic, and not among the poems by Wyatt that capture an anguished or confused mind: the speaker’s aim is clear: to remind the lady of his steadfastness in the face of long adversity.

“Blame Not My Lute.”

The lute is the speaker’s lyric voice, and the question here is, “why not just be honest in matters of love? Circulate the truth and let the chips fall where they may.” The speaker draws sustenance, if not comfort, from his own experiences with courtly women, and finds new “strings” with which to make his honest music. Well, in a broader context, anyone who does that risks offending others, and consequences might ensue. The same seems true of Wyatt’s courtly reflections more generally—circulating them amongst his fellow courtiers was a point of honor and built up his reputation, but it probably entailed some risk, too. “Freedom of the Press” wasn’t the reigning idea about literature or indeed about non-fiction prose in Tudor times. What if Henry read what you wrote and didn’t like it, or considered it insulting or threatening? Sometimes, as in this poem, Wyatt’s structured verse plays against the psychological realism and freedom of thought he aims for, which creates a worthwhile tension between the two imperatives (freedom and structure or formal correctness). Lyric has always been at least partly a vehicle for self-expression, for exploring moods and states of mind. Sappho is exemplary in this regard—she is a social poet, a public voice, but that lyric voice is also exploratory and expressive. Well, Wyatt is suggesting that the function of courtly poetry is not simply to pander to the regime in power or bolster one’s standing. He seems really to believe in the ideals of honesty and fidelity, though he’s painfully aware of being compromised by his function in life. How he responds to that dilemma says much about him.

“Whoso list his wealth and ease retain.”

The allusion to Seneca says much—the Greek and Roman gods are all power; they just do what they want. Henry VIII is the “god” who sends thunder out from his throne, striking down those closest to him and those at a distance. As Anne Boleyn is, so might we be.

“Mine Own John Poins.”

This poem examines the respective merits of the active and the contemplative life. The Renaissance felt the pull of both the Platonic philosophy urging withdrawal and the Aristotelian view urging engagement. Here, though, the speaker’s idleness and reflectiveness are enforced: in 1536 Wyatt was imprisoned in the Tower with five other suspected lovers of Anne Boleyn, but then he was released and rusticated, and a few months afterward was made Sheriff of Kent and led soldiers to quell an uprising. Now he is at home and has time to reflect and to offer some honest criticism of life at court. The most frustrating contrast in such a setting is the one between seeming and being: everyone is acting a part People go around pretending to be good, wise, holy, concerned for the realm’s welfare, and so forth, while in fact their activities revolve around self-aggrandizement, the satisfaction of lust, and other unworthy things. Worse yet, the players know what’s going on, but are compelled to cover up the sham with pretty lies. See also William Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s fine poem “So cruel prison how could betide” (610-11). The two poems would make for a good comparative paper.

Notes on Queen Elizabeth I.

From “The Passage of Our Most Dread Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth through the City of London . . .”

688-90. Elizabeth became queen when she was 25 years old, in 1558, and reigned for 45 momentous years. It is always difficult to get a sense of the real person behind all the pageantry of rulership, but in this ceremonious description of Elizabeth’s coronation day some flashes of her personality seem to shine through: from the outset, the Queen was possessed of a strong will and a sharp intellect. She was erudite and clear-headed, and had a superb sense of the showmanship necessary to the maintenance of power. Her reported conduct on this important first day of her reign shows a keen understanding of the need to express thanks and loyalty to English commoners, a graceful manner in all public actions, and piety without ostentation in religion. This last-mentioned item was all the more necessary because of Mary’s strict rule from 1553-58—Elizabeth’s predecessor was determined to return England to the Catholic fold, and spared no severity in trying to achieve her goal. Elizabeth was a solid Protestant, but she tried to avoid the worst kinds of persecution against those who held to the Catholic faith, and seemed more or less satisfied to keep the lid on England’s simmering religious disagreements. Most of Elizabeth’s subjects no doubt were pleased with her ascension to the throne, as if a current of fresh air had just swept into the land.

From “A speech to a Joint Delegation of Lords and Commons, November 5, 1566.”

692-94. This excerpt is evidence of a remarkable will and intellect. Elizabeth, now around 33 years old, was under great pressure to marry and bear children, and thereby settle the difficult issue of who would succeed to the throne after her. But Elizabeth didn’t relish giving any of her power to a man, and never married as she said she would. Her words are indomitable, acerbic, and forbidding: she reminds those who would now advise her that some of them once took the side of Jane Grey’s faction against her and Mary, placing them both in great peril. The bottom line, Elizabeth says, is that she “will never be by violence constrained to do anything” and that she is no sheltered weakling but rather a shrewd and practical individual: “I thank God I am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place of Christendom” (694). When a prince speaks with such force and clarity, her subjects had best just pipe down and leave the matter of the succession to her.

“A Letter to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, February 10, 1586.”

696. Elizabeth is clearly enraged at her close companion Dudley, with whom she seems to have had a stormy relationship until his death from an illness in 1588 (the year in which England fended off the Spanish Armada that had been sent to invade the country). I recall watching the meticulous 1971 British miniseries Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson as the Queen, and being struck by the paradox of Elizabeth’s reign: on the one hand, she laid claim to nearly absolute power and implied that she owed allegiance to none but God, but on the other, she found herself having to remind even her basest servants of the fact almost constantly. It must have been extremely difficult for her to keep her more aristocratic subjects and ministers in line, with so many of them trading on their relationship with her and jockeying for ever greater influence in her name.

“A Letter to Sir Amyas Paulet, August 1586” and “A Letter to King James VI of Scotland, Feb. 14, 1587.)

697-98. These two letters make for an interesting story: it’s entirely clear that Elizabeth had to have Mary executed; her royal counterpart in Scotland had apparently been conspiring to replace her on the throne of England, and she had become a rallying point for Elizabeth’s enemies. The only way to deal with such a threat is to remove the person who serves as its focus and its cause. And Elizabeth did order Mary executed—she signed the warrant herself. Now in a letter to James we find her denying that she gave the order, and even professing to be shocked at the outcome of the whole affair. As the editors point out, perhaps Elizabeth was so deeply troubled by having to execute a fellow queen that she washed her hands of the deed, and placed responsibility for it on others.

“Speech to the Troops at Tilbury.”

699-700. This speech was given at a critical period in English history, with Philip II of Spain’s great fleet of warships preparing to crush Elizabeth’s forces. She shows great courage in appearing on the site of the anticipated battle to cheer the people and soldiers. By this time, Elizabeth would have been in her mid-fifties and the “cult of the virgin Queen” was well established. It’s clear that as a ruler, she was still in her prime.

“The Golden Speech,” 1601.

701-03. This speech occurs towards the end of a long and eventful reign, and sums up Elizabeth’s time and the impression she made on her contemporaries. For the most part, we remember Elizabeth the way she wanted to be known and remembered, and this fact is a testament to her skills as a “public relations” expert in an age of treacherous power politics. Without the aid of modern communications technology, Elizabeth managed to craft and maintain the image of a strong, upright sovereign whose loyalty to England and its people was beyond doubt. No doubt she made her share of mistakes as a ruler, as anyone who governs for four and a half decades would, but I don’t think her image permanently suffered for them. “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare says, and nobody was more aware of it than Queen Elizabeth I: she knew that she needed to be more than competent, and that the people (and her counselors) must see her being supremely competent and strong in state matters. What shines through this letter is Elizabeth’s desire to be known as a populist in the truest sense of the word. But part of the speech involves a significant concession to the Parliament: it seems that Elizabeth’s granting of monopolies had been much abused by powerful grantees to the detriment of the people. This is probably not something Elizabeth would have been eager to deal with, money politics being the complicated affair that they are at all times. But Elizabeth was a wise Machiavel and seems to have known where to draw the line: she would not risk the permanent anger and dislike of her own people, so she accepted Parliament’s advice to do something about the matter.

General Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

Sidney was the kind of courtier of whom Baldesar Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier (1528), would have approved. Castiglione’s conduct book says that courtiers should serve as the visible symbol of their prince’s fitness to rule. If the king or queen is the “soul,” courtiers are the “body” that indicates the soul’s goodness. Courtiers behave and speak elegantly and gracefully; their manners are fine but not exaggerated; their words—and poems—are appropriate to the occasion; they make it obvious that the court is all about harmony. Sprezzatura, “easy grace of manner,” is the operative term in Castiglione’s book: the courtier must be able to do the most artful things in the most artless manner. This ideal does not amount to what we post-Romantics would call “originality.” Sidney’s own poetry is typical in that it accepts the conventions earlier poets have established. Take, for example, this sonnet from Astrophil and Stella:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win; and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”

There is nothing original about this poem—the pain-wracked lover, his unapproachable love object, his poring over the tropes and inventions of earlier authors, and his pose of “looking into the heart” to write are all conventional. Nonetheless, the sonnet makes for a virtuoso performance that must have delighted the courtly “friends of Philip” who read it. Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” is another such performance. It is a racy, conversational piece much like the dialogues between the courtly figures in Castiglione’s book, which, incidentally, was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Still, Sidney must have labored intensely over his excellent critical treatise. He may be laughing when he enlists Aristotle and Plato in the pragmatic task of bolstering his own status as a courtier, poet, and critic. Even so, the “Apology” is a serious reply to a serious attack on the arts. Its author has been careful enough to follow the classical model for an oration: exordium (catchy beginning), narratio (setting forth of the issue), confirmatio (exploring arguments and solutions), refutatio (dealing with counter-arguments), and peroratio (stimulating conclusion). (See the guide entitled Renaissance Rhetoric in my Wiki Resource Gallery.) Moreover, behind the studied flippancy of Sidney’s piece lies the Renaissance man’s fusion of classical humanism and Christian theology, all to mount what we might call a “literacy campaign” for narrow-minded detractors of poetry.

Sidney’s essay is a response to the condemnation of art leveled by the Puritan (radical Protestant) author Stephen Gosson in his tract “The School of Abuse.” According to him and others of like mind, poetry is the work of the devil: it is not only a waste of time but the “mother of lies,” “nurse of abuse,” and altogether worthy of being banished, just as Plato said it should be. As Sidney says, “this is indeed much, if there be much truth in it.” Sidney’s task then, is to demolish Gosson’s claims by enlisting his own peculiar version of Aristotle and Plato and, what is more, the authority of the same Bible that Puritans themselves use to denigrate poetry.

In order to undermine the old Christian insistence that all pleasure is harmful, Sidney invokes an equally powerful reading of men’s duty in light of their own fallenness. It is true, says Sidney, that the faculties of the mind have grown dim and disorderly since Adam and Eve’s first sin. The senses, the will, and the intellect or “reason” no longer work in harmony as God intended them to. Man’s “erected wit” is no longer quite a match for his “infected will.” The Puritan charge is that pleasure of any kind, and especially the kind that poetry sanctions, is apt to minister to already deranged human faculties and lead men still further astray from God. One way to oppose this notion, of course, would be to invoke the authority of Augustinian and Aquinian sign theory. Sidney himself does not quite do this, but because he pursues a line of defense analogous to it, we should introduce a basic Christian theory of the sign. (Medieval speculation about the workings of language are more complex than any brief essay could begin to deal with, but a brief explanation should prove helpful.) In The Confessions, Chapter 5, Saint Augustine says that his religious struggles were partially resolved when he heard the eloquent words of Saint Ambrose. Augustine had long been trying to dissolve the remnants of Manicheanism in his intellect when he heard this orator speak in defense of Christianity. In the passage below, Augustine explains—somewhat uneasily, perhaps—that what first caught his attention (aside from Ambrose’s kindness toward him) was not so much the matter of the man’s speech as the fineness of his words. For one trained in classical rhetoric as Augustine was, such eloquence must have been a powerful attracting force:

To Milan I came, to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world as among the best of men. . . . And I listened diligently to him preaching to the people, not with that intent I ought, but, as it were, trying his eloquence, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed fuller or lower than was reported; and I hung on his words attentively; but of the matter I was as a careless and scornful looker-on; and I was delighted with the sweetness of his discourse, more recondite, yet in manner less winning and harmonious, than that of Faustus. Of the matter, however, there was no comparison; for the one was wandering amid Manichean delusions, the other teaching salvation most soundly. But salvation is far from sinners, such as I then stood before him; and yet was I drawing nearer by little and little, and unconsciously. // For though I took no pains to learn what he spake, but only to hear how he spake . . . yet together with the words which I would choose, came also into my mind the things which I would refuse; for I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to admit “how eloquently he spake,” there also entered “how truly he spake”; but this by degrees. (The Confessions. Trans. Edward Pusey. London: Macmillan, 1961. 76-77.)

Saint Augustine does not say that Ambrose’s fine speaking directly converted him. Rather, he says that his eloquence set him on the path towards full conversion to Christianity. The final turn was to come later when, in a spiritual crisis, Augustine heard a voice from heaven, opened up the Scriptures, and was converted. The point for us, however, is that “mere words”—words which he was not yet able fully to understand in their spiritual dimension—had the power to lead Augustine some way towards God, towards a truth higher than any obtainable by the Manichees’ sophistical arguments. In a very practical way, then, Augustine is illustrating for us the basic Christian idea of the sign’s power: “material” words do not in themselves arrive at or constitute truth, but with God’s grace, they have the power, if we read them rightly (and sometimes, apparently, even if we don’t), to lead us upward to spiritual truth. Signs point fallen humanity beyond the fallen material world, beyond the literal events and earthly conceptions they signify. This notion is so strongly held by later Christian theologians that they insist upon paying strict attention to the Bible’s literal, material statements. In the Summa Theologica, while defending the use of metaphor in the bible, Thomas Aquinas explains the need for such close attention succinctly: “[I]t is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense” (Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism 244; hereafter NATC). To pretend otherwise would be prideful. This is the insight that seems to underlie Christian typology, too: the notion that concrete personages and real events in the Hebrew Scriptures prefigure the life and mission of Christ.

Sidney is a graceful courtier, poet, and critic, not a philosopher or theologian, so we need not go any farther with such theories. We can see his practicality as a defender of poetry by examining one of the best known passages in his essay. In the following selection, Sidney makes far-reaching claims about the poet’s power to imitate God’s original creative act, and promptly lowers his sights to a more pragmatic argument about the poet’s ability to produce “speaking pictures” both delightful and instructive to the reader:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [as nature], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . . . . so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done—neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. . . .

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erect wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. (957, 330 NATC).

Sidney begins by asserting the mind’s power to complete nature. In itself, this claim amounts to little more than a glorification of what any Elizabethan familiar with faculty psychology would have said about human “wit.” “Imagination,” one of the five inner wits (along with the common sense, or faculty of unifying data received from the external world; the fantasy, or faculty of apprehending objects of perception present to the senses; judgment, or the faculty of apprehending the relation between two objects of thought; and memory), has the capacity to form images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. This is the faculty that can produce the wonderful images of “Demigods, Cyclopes, Furies, and such like” (957) that Sidney praises in poetry. From this relatively humble point about wit, Sidney moves to a more important one: when the poet creates a Cyrus that never was in history, he demonstrates the truth of Aristotle’s claim about poets’ ability to portray the universal in human action. Cyrus the man was an imperfect mortal, but the poet makes a universal Cyrus, an image that shapes many men’s lives. In Christian terms, we might infer that the poet grasps to some extent the principle whereby God made all that was good in Cyrus, and can repeat it, at least in his own limited way. From this claim it is not far to Sidney’s ultimate argument that the poet is divinely inspired, for “with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing . . . [nature’s] doings” (957). So inspired is this poet, claims Sidney, that his utterances almost (though not quite, obviously) put us in mind of the perfection that Adam and Eve must have known before they fell.

Immediately below this passage, however, Sidney says dismissively, “But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted” (957). This statement hardly amounts to a true dismissal—it is a rhetorical ploy designed to highlight the very thing one alleges is being passing over (as when a classical orator says, “I shall not mention my opponent’s many treasons”). Even so, Sidney’s turn of phrase is important—he is announcing that while his largest claims for the poet are true, his real aim is to advance something even the Puritans cannot deny without appearing arrogant: the idea that “Poesy therefore is . . . a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (958). Like Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier, Sidney wants to make his audience comfortable again after having entertained a thesis too otherworldly for their sensibilities. Just as the courtiers of Urbino see no need for Bembo to argue his way from earth-bound love to the realm of pure spirit, Sidney’s own audience may have exerted its pressure on him a priori to make his case for poetry within the context of moral utility.

Most of Sidney’s argument fits very well within this moral context. Poets must excel in “feigning notable images of virtues, vices, and what else” (959). They must imitate the images of virtue that their “wit” is able to apprehend, and the result will be a “speaking picture” that delights viewers in order to move them to emulate the virtues presented. The idea behind this doctrine that we are moved to virtuous action by pleasurable images is something like this argument: virtue is self-evident; God has in fact planted in all of us the capacity to understand what virtue is. The problem is that thanks to our own willful destruction through “original sin” of the harmony between our faculties and of our relation to god and nature, we no longer want to behave virtuously. We post-lapsarians must, therefore, be treated somewhat like children who need a few lumps of sugar to sweeten what has become to us the bitter medicine of virtue.

Against the narrow-minded Puritanism of Stephen Gosson and his followers, Sidney argues that we must involve the senses and the “infected will” (957) if we are to lead a life of virtuous action. The very things that are most corrupted by the fall must be constantly and carefully exercised if imperfect humans are to keep to the path of right doing. Because the senses are apt to lead Christians astray, poets must present them with images of virtue. If they portray evil now and then, they must do so with a view toward delighting us by the spectacle of seeing it punished. The truth that Christ brought, Sidney might say, is within every human breast, but still, people must be moved to do what they know is right.

As for the craftsman best fitted to affect human passions, the poet, says Sidney, is our only choice. Historians cannot hope to succeed in convincing the fallen to reform their ways, since they are bound by the rules of the profession to portray a great number of proofs that God does not always reward virtue with earthly happiness. Likewise, the philosopher can do no more than speak to people’s clouded intellects in the cloudiest of terms; he offers merely “precepts,” the vain abstractions and word-juggling of the Medieval Schoolmen. Philosophers may teach us what virtue is, says Sidney, but they can’t inspire us to act on our knowledge. They can’t move our wills to perform good deeds. That capacity of the poet’s to move us is vital to Sidney’s whole defense of art: the aim of life is morally right action, and it seems that delightful poetry is the very best means of moving us to act rightly. The poet moderates between philosophy and history by combining both abstract precept and concrete example into one delightful, powerful image. This is the argument Sidney makes from pages 961-63 (339-42 NATC).

Before he gets halfway through his essay, Sidney has already made a good case for the pragmatic, moral value of poetry. But what about Gosson’s condemnation of poetry and the theater? Might there be something to it after all? Surely any Elizabethan audience could cite instances of plays in which blood flows freely and wicked deeds are rewarded. (Our modern reverence for Shakespeare makes us forget that Elizabethan plays contained their share of senseless violence.) Gosson’s argument is a classic example of the “contagion theory of art” that we find as early as Plato: bad art corrupts the spectator or reader. Sidney’s way of dealing with such diseases in the body of art is to argue that “man’s wit abuseth poetry” and not the other way around. (omitted in our selection, would be on 968) A man may just as easily kill his father with a sword, says Sidney, as defend his country with it. The fault, therefore, lies not in the instrument but in the agent who uses it. As for the potentially bad effects of immoral art, those occasional effects, if indeed any can be cited, only show how powerful a means of influencing people art is. The point is not to banish poetry from Christian society but rather to use it carefully and to moral ends. Besides, says Sidney, Plato banished Greek poetry for the most part because it told lies about the gods. But that isn’t much of a problem in Renaissance England—the false gods in whose name Plato banished poets have themselves given way to the Christian God. One further thought: sometimes modern critics react to crude, Gosson-like attempts to censor the arts with an equally extreme formalist claim that engaging with art has (and can have) absolutely no effect on how people conduct themselves. Sidney’s moralist argument actually does a better job of throttling Gossonism than such defensiveness: to say that art can never have much of an effect on how we live our lives is to suggest that it is little more than frivolous entertainment. Surely the best art is much more than that!

In his “Apology” Sidney tries to destroy his political and artistic enemies by playing one strain of Christianity against another. He opposes the tendency in Christian thought to claim that all pleasure is harmful with the notion that since men cannot be trusted to use their reasoning faculty in the right way, they have to be lulled into it, moved to want to know and act on their knowledge, by delightful images. The Puritans, besides their unreasonable opposition to the Queen, are so sure about the means to morality that they don’t know their place as fallen humans. They think that everything—and especially art—has to be held to strictly literal standards of truth. As Sidney sees them, Puritans are literal readers and bad Christian psychologists. The problem with the view of strict moralists like Gosson, implies Sidney, is that humans first fell by misusing their will and their senses. In their arrogant righteousness, Gosson’s partisans have forgotten that they are fallen and in need of constant correction and spiritual exercise. Their narrow-mindedness makes them lazy, and their distrust of pleasure cuts them off from the best source of virtuous teaching. It simply is not in the office of fallen humanity to be so certain about its capacity to arrive at spiritual truth by direct, rational means, whether we are speaking of art or any other human endeavor. When Puritan readers forget this fact, they become like the critic who is outraged at the mention of Aesop’s talking animals: “well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of” (968, 349 NATC). So Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” is in part a literacy campaign for Puritans. English history suggests that his supporters did not always manage to keep the upper hand in defending poetry from Gossonite do-goodism. When the middle-class Puritans came to power under Cromwell, they went so far as to close the theaters down and, if I recall correctly, to prevent poor citizens from playing at nine-pins on Sundays. The Puritan-tending Milton’s authorship of the great defense of an English free press, “Areopagitica,” may mitigate this severity for us, but it did not prevent the beleaguered British from toppling the Cromwellians in favor of Charles II in the Restoration of 1660.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

956/330-31 NATC. Sidney follows Aristotle on imitation, with nature as the source. But while other disciplines are limited by their subject matter and must work with what already is, for better or for worse, the poet’s intellect escapes such narrow ties. The poet conjures for us our Golden World beginnings; he is the “Wizard of Ought.” This emphasis on the poet’s creative power is pre-Romantic: Sidney is not saying that the poet’s mind takes on godlike powers to create an independent reality. Rather, he’s using faculty psychology to argue that the poet’s wit has a freer range than other people’s, so the poet can go beyond imitating nature. And by “wit” he refers mainly to the imagination, fantasy, and memory. Those are three of the inner wits, and their function is to process and recall sensory data. (The other two are judgment and sensus communis.) This is a much more mechanical and passive idea about imagination than we will find in Romantic poetics, where the mind is more original and creative than combinatory and receptive.

957/331 NATC. Sidney also follows Aristotle in saying that poetry gives access to universal patterns: the poet makes not a particular Cyrus but a universal Cyrus, a “speaking picture” of a virtuous king. The poet grasps the principle by which nature made the original Cyrus, so he can complete Nature’s work by recognizing the eternal Form immanent in that material Cyrus, giving us a pattern of moral conduct to imitate. Sidney says that our faculties encompass nature’s workings, and the poet’s work therefore honors God the first “maker” of the original Cyrus.

957/331 NATC. Erected Wit / Infected Will. Here is the faculty psychology behind Sidney’s defense. The point is simple: when humankind fell, the will, appetite, and reason went out of sync, so that we are constantly being pulled away from virtuous conduct by our lowest appetites. In order for virtuous behavior to reign, our will must be properly aligned with God’s plan for us. Since we are “misaligned” in these latter days, we need pleasing patterns to realign our will so that it can let reason work as it should, and action happen as it ought.

958-59/331-32 NATC. The three kinds of poet: David, philosophical poets such as Lucretius, and poets who “imitate” only “what may be and should be.” These latter are the ones we need today. Sidney says that what constitutes a poet is moral purpose—the poet imitates in order to deliver universal moral lessons. Verse form helps us remember poetry, enhancing its effect. Sidney begins making distinctions between the poet, the philosopher, and historian by reminding us of the following moral purpose: “the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” And he further describes the body as a dungeon imprisoning the mind. In sum, a medium that appeals to the senses leads us beyond the senses; this accords with Augustine and Aquinas.

959-63/334-40 NATC. Only the poet teaches in a sufficiently concrete and delightful manner. Historians remain tied to things as they really happen in an unjust world, so imitating a corrupt world’s ways may further corrupt us. Philosophers teach abstractly, and cannot move us to virtuous action. Poetry moves us to learn and to behave well, so we will put our learning to good use. Poetry mediates between abstraction and materiality, sense and understanding; it is medicine for the fallen, taking us back to first principles and possibilities, and to causal patterns.

967-68/348-51 NATC. The charges laid at poetry’s door: 1) there are better uses of time; 2) poets lie; 3) poetry is morally corruptive; 4) Plato banished poets. As for 2, the poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Besides, people don’t take what they see on a stage or read in a fable as literally true. We know how to keep our distance from make-believe and yet take it seriously enough to profit by it morally, while truth-narratives like history may mislead us. Sidney may recognize here what Aristotle doesn’t in The Poetics: history requires invention and emplotment. Poetry, at least, doesn’t make false promises or bogus systems of abstraction. It mediates between sense and spirit for fallen humanity. As for the third charge, says Sidney, any instrument can be dangerous if misused—if it couldn’t hurt someone, it wouldn’t be worth much. So “man’s wit abuseth poetry,” and not the other way around.

Editions: Abrams, M. H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 1 (Vols. ABC) ISBN 0-393-92833-0. The selection is from Vol. B. Also: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.