Examples Of Poesie In The Arcadia

How consistent is Sidney’s practice of ‘poesie’ in the Arcadia(s) with the theory outlined in the Defense?

Since Plato, the social costs and benefits of poetry have been hotly debated. Although Plato chose to banish poets from his Republic for being a corrupting influence in an orderly and just society, he is well known as a great lover of Homer, and indeed consistently uses examples from Homer to illuminate arguments in the dialogues. The debate was similarly double-edged and ambivalent in the English Renaissance. In his tract on education The Schoolmaster (1570), Roger Ascham complained of the corruption of the youth of England by Continental literary imports. He famously maintained that works such as Morte d’Arthur encouraged “bold
bawdry and open manslaughter”, and that especially Italian books were a form of covert Catholic propaganda. More particularly, he lamented the fact that England’s youth “have in more reverence the triumphs of Petrarch, than the Genesis of Moses…a tale in Boccaccio than a story from the Bible”1. These arguments, that poetry corrupted the minds and behaviour of young people, and especially that they mislead youth from the precepts of God’s Word, were to be echoed time and again throughout the Elizabethan period. In Ascham’s time, poetry was largely an aristocratic practice, as education, and also the amount of leisure time required to write good poetry, was the preserve of the upper classes. Poetry was sometimes considered as a delightful, and perhaps even useful, acquirement for an aristocratic gentleman that could improve his status at court. However, in the mid 1570s poetry officially became institutionalised as a public discourse in England for the first time. Until the first opening of the Theatre in 1576, the first purpose built theatre in England, most plays had been privately performed in inns, or community spaces under the auspices of the Church, but playing was now a professional institution which attracted large numbers of people from all walks of life. Almost immediately, the theatre came under attack from Puritan preachers who saw the largely autonomous institution of the theatre as in competition with and inimical to their radical Reformist ideals. One of the most famous Puritan attacks on the theatre was in Philip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuse (1582), an interesting insight into the various vices to which Elizabethan Londoners were prone. He also laments that the theatre tended to lure people away from God, encouraging blasphemous and licentious behaviour, saying that “so often as they go to those houses where players frequent, they go to Venus’ palace, and Satan’s synagogue to worship devils, and betray Christ Jesus”. Furthermore, after delineating a list of virtually any vice imaginable, he says that to learn them, “you need not go to any other school”2 than the theatre. This idea of the theatre as a school for vice had already been taken up in Stephen Gosson’s apostatical invective The School of Abuse (1579). He claims that having been a member of the literary scene and seen the error of his ways as described by the Puritanical St Paul’s preachers, in other words, a Prodigal, he was in a better position than anyone to comment on the misleadingness of poetry. He does not reject poetry outright, declaring that it was once a noble institution, encouraging virtue and valorous action, but that especially “poets in theatres…wound the conscience” and that poetry was “the father of lies”. He argued, in psychological terms of the time, that these public performances of poetry, mixed with “strange comforts of melody”, “costly apparel”, “effeminate gesture”, and “wonton speech”, by the privy entry of the ears, flip down into the heart, and with gunshot of affection gall the mind, where reason and virtue should rule the roost.
The School of Abuse sparked off a major literary debate on the social role of poetry, which prompted Gosson to write An Apology of the School of Abuse in which he stated, “we find no fault with the art itself, but with him that abused the same”3. This anticipates Sir Philip Sidney’s arguments in his Apology for Poetry, to whom the School of Abuse was dedicated, and whose works were circulated in manuscript around coterie audiences at court and not published - or anything so vulgar - in his lifetime.
Spenser recorded in a letter that Sidney scorned the dedication and the work, and Sidney specifically refutes Gosson 's argument that poetry is the "mother of lies"4 by saying that the poet is the least of all liars as "he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth5. However, Apology and School of Abuse are not so diametrically opposed in argument as it is often presumed, for example, when he concludes an argument by saying that it is “not to say that poetry abuseth man’s wit, but that man’s wit abuseth poetry”6, he echoes Gosson, and emphasises a core Christian belief in the erected wit and fallen will of the human soul. Sidney tries to persuade the reader that poetry, in its proper form, does have moral and didactic qualities superior to any other form of discourse in its capacity to both “delight and teach”7, and thus realign the will. He flatly denies that poetry in itself is pernicious, arguing, “Poesy must not be drawn by the ears; it must be gently led, or rather it must lead”8, suggesting that poetry “must not be drawn” for purely aesthetic or pleasurable reasons, but must be consciously “led” so as to express desirable opinions, and that by divine inspiration alone “it must lead” to desirable behaviour.
What he seems to advocate is an aristocratic aesthetic as opposed to bourgeois poetry written by "base men with servile wits...rewarded of the printer"9, such as the professional writers in the theatre companies. In his own life, Sidney exemplified Gosson’s idea of the virtuous warrior poet and champion of Protestantism, as well as the advocate of similar, if more learned opinions about the nature of literature. This then is the discourse in which Sidney 's Apology is involved. From the outset in the Apology, Sidney states that his subject is all imaginative writing, not just that composed in verse, and therefore his Arcadia falls within its purlieu. The Apology was written around the same time Sidney completed what is now known as the Old Arcadia, which underwent ongoing revision until his untimely death, resulting in the amalgamated Countess of Pembroke 's Arcadia composed of the Old Arcadia interpolated with the revised material. It is with The Countess of Pembroke 's Arcadia that this essay is concerned. The Apology is evidently coloured by his experience writing the Arcadia and is as much a defence of his own work as that of literature in general; likewise the aesthetics influencing Arcadia and the subsequent revisions are coloured by his theories as set forth in the Apology. Even in formal aspects of the Arcadia there are parallels with the Apology: for example, the entire argument of the Apology is organised in the form of a classical oration, as are the presentations of the cases in the final trial scene of the Arcadia. However, the rhetoric of Philanax, pleading for the prosecution, is at one point over-powered by his passion to avenge Basilius, who becomes "so overgone with rage that he forgot in his oration his precise method of oratory"10. Here we may see Sidney 's awareness that even in the most controlled examples of rhetoric such as the Arcadia, powerful emotions may sometimes burst the banks of reason. Throughout the Arcadia, the moralistic rhetoric of Sidney 's narrative is undercut by similar forces inherent to the romance form which militate against his ostensible moral purpose. Sidney 's exordium introduces the Apology by way of an amusing anecdote about an Italian horse trainer and extoller of his skill. Perhaps what Sidney wishes to say is that, whilst Pugliano 's bombast may be dismissed as overly enthusiastic and compromised by his vested interests, his practice cannot be so easily dispensed with during the Renaissance, because "soldiers were the noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers...the masters of war and ornaments of peace"11, that is to say, horsemanship was an indispensable part of the military regime, and therefore, the national societies of Europe, and a desirable attribute of national culture. In turn, this subtly introduces the main thrust of Sidney 's argument, that poetry is indispensable to society. The Arcadia takes a similarly tortuous path, since its central theme is that of love, the feature of literature most criticised by its critics. Sidney 's message over the course of the Arcadia seems to be that love, like literature, may not only be harmless, but in fact conducive to virtue and valorous action. He does not, however, ignore the possibility that love can be effeminising, but Pyrocles ' transvestism is induced precisely because Basilius has forbidden his daughters to marry, whereas if he had not taken such a prohibitive course of action, Pyrocles would have been able to court Philoclea in a more conventional, if less romantic manner. Sidney 's object over the course of the argument of the Apology is to demonstrate that not only is poetry worthy of study and practice by a gentleman, but that it is the single most important element of culture. The capacity of poetry to both "delight and teach" is the principle argument that Sidney employs in order to demonstrate the superior worth of poetry over the two other main humanities subjects, history and philosophy. Exactly what it is necessary for a humanities subject to teach the aristocratic readership is virtue, and this medicine is best administered with sugar. There were many prose works from the Renaissance which attempt to delineate the desirable character of the aristocrat, such as Castiglione 's The Courtier, in which he argues that "love is a certain coveting to enjoy beauty"12, and following Plato, beauty is associated with goodness and thus virtue. Sidney writes in this tradition, as may be plainly seen by his descriptions of Pamela, Philoclea, and Pyrocles as supremely beautiful and symbolising active virtue, humble virtue, and manly virtue, respectively, in the Arcadia. In this way, Sidney is able to write an erotic romance, the which Ascham decried so much, that is able to both "delight and teach" due to the Neoplatonic depiction of love, and the possibility that a virtuous love and a love of virtue may lead to virtuous behaviour. As Sidney says in the Apology: even those hard-hearted, evil men who think virtue a school name...and feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted - which is all the good-fellow poet seemeth to promise - and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries13.
This is exactly the method of teaching that was propounded in Ascham 's Schoolmaster. In the first scene of the Arcadia Sidney makes it clear that this is the effect his story of love is intended to have, as he has Claius, one of the two friends who share a love of Urania, the Muse of Platonic love in Symposium, say, "Hath not the love of her made us, being silly ignorant shepherds, raise up our thoughts from the ordinary level of the world?"14. In this instance, the Muse encouraging the thirst for knowledge in the lowly shepherds is surely an image representing Sidney 's doctrine that
Poetry...hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges15.
Following on from Virgil, for whom Arcadia was the setting for his Eclogues and represented a kind of Golden Age pastoral paradise, Sidney makes his Arcadia a prehistorical Golden Age tabula rasa out of which history could possibly emerge, but which also contains many anachronistic features that would be more fitting in a medieval chivalric romance, such as jousting, suits of armour, castles and suchlike. In this way Sidney is able, rather facilely, to make the narrative relevant to the concerns of his own time. By depicting multifarious noble types of rulers, knights, and ladies, and contrasting them with foils in situations that could arise the Elizabethan times, for example a neomedieval joust, in which Sidney himself was famously proficient. When the civil war that embroils the entire body politic of Arcadia is confined to the private theatre of the island, courtly chivalric modes of behaviour come into play in lieu of the morass of the battlefield. But Amphialus demonstrates his merely nominal adherence to the etiquette of chivalry in the deaths of Argalus and Parthenia, when he "forgat all ceremonies"16. Setting his narrative in the Golden Age also enables Sidney to evoke the memory of mythical figures such as Urania, Apollo, and Orpheus, who are all associated with the mythological origins of poetry.
Pyrocles uses Orphic powers to quell the rebellious mob that attacks Basilius ' lodge, and Apollo plays a key role in the story, more particularly his oracle at Delphi, as the source of the prophecy that acts as a stimulus to the central events of the plot: the removal of Basilius and his family to the sequestered regions of the "desert". In the Apology, Sidney reminds the reader of the venerable names the ancient Greeks and Romans gave to poets, that of "poet" or maker and of vates or prophet, respectively. Shakespeare would use a similar device in the prophecy of the wyrd sisters in Macbeth, where the ambiguous prophecies which seemed auspicious to Macbeth turned out to be his doom, which would not have come to pass had it not been for the resulting hubris with which the prophecies endowed him. In the Arcadia, on the other hand, the prophecy appears at first to be inauspicious, hinting at the disintegration of Basilius ' family unit, but in fact it leads to a happy ending, which, again, would not have occurred had not the prophecy engendered fear in Basilius in the first place. Nonetheless, in both these situations, the prophecies, which are related in verse and can be equated to literature in general, whilst appearing to be of doubtful worth, and ambiguous, and
being misprised, eventually lead to desirable consequences. Fortune, not unusually for a Renaissance work, plays an important role in the Arcadia. One of the most compelling characters is that of Amphialus who is constantly crossed by fate, despite being of supreme virtue and strength. In many ways he operates as a foil to Pyrocles: they are both virtuous, unvanquished in feats of strength, and rivals for the love of Philoclea. The difference is that the women in Amphialus ' life, through no fault of his own, unwittingly bring about his downfall. Amphialus is introduced as the Pandar between his best friend Philoxenus and his beloved, Helen, who inadvertently falls in love with Amphialus, resulting in a duel between the two friends which leads to the death of both Philoxenus and his father. Though Amphialus would court Philoclea through conventional channels, his mother 's ambitions for him lead her to kidnap Philoclea and Pamela with the view to forcing them into marriage with her son. Throughout these impositions of fate Amphialus conducts himself with the utmost probity, but this is not enough to conquer fortune, as he is overcome by the passions these stressful situations engender. Unfortunately, due to Sidney 's own untimely death, he was unable to complete the revisions of Arcadia that would possibly have led to a parallel rehabilitation of Amphialus, along with Pyrocles and Musidorus, at the end of the story. This all serves to demonstrate that even with the best of intentions, our actions may sometimes lead to undesirable consequences, as a result of the vicissitudes of fortune. The awareness of this possibility may have been one of the reasons Sidney wished his literary remains to be consigned to the fire: that would remove all potential they might have to corrupt the less educated readership who could well construe Sidney 's message the wrong way, despite his best intentions. The fact is that the Arcadia is a highly sensual work full of "bold bawdry and open manslaughter", even if Sidney does write with deep critical self-awareness and self-reflexivity. In the case of Pyrocles, his blazon describing Philoclea 's naked body as he observes her bathing in the river is highly erotic, and his bloodlust during the suppression of the rebellious mob, a situation highly aestheticised by Sidney, is positively gleeful. At all times Sidney observes what Renaissance writers considered to be the most important element of good literature - decorum - as George Puttenham states in his Arte of English Poesie, the author must write "to the intent the styles may be fashioned to the matters, and keep their decorum"17. Though, whereas in Milton this quality is admirable, in Sidney his strict adherence to decorum betrays his distasteful class attitudes. For example, the position of Dametas, a peasant, in the household of Basilius is indecorous under normal circumstances, and this is emphasised throughout the narrative. This problem can only be resolved in the economy of the text by the extreme punishment meted out to him and his family at the end of the story, even though the rest of the characters are rehabilitated, a very unsentimental treatment of this character by Sidney. His depictions of the other pastoral characters are only sympathetic because they are so heavily idealised and conceited according to the conventions of the pastoral mode. In this sense they conform to Sidney 's doctrine that the poet...lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature...Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden18.
Sidney is much like the beautiful woman Musidorus sees wondering in the forest, whose hair was stylised with such a careless care and an art so hiding art that she seemed she would lay them for a pattern whether nature simply or nature helped by cunning be the more excellent19.
However, appearances can be deceptive, and grotesque perversity may in fact be hidden beneath such beauty, as Musidorus discovers when the woman begins singing in the voice of his long-lost friend Pyrocles. Thus, we may understand the wisdom behind Puttenham 's prescription that "we do allow our Courtly Poet to be a dissembler only in the subtleties of his art"20. Sidney 's Arcadia ostensibly subscribes to the theories set forth in the Apology, but it is a subtle critique of the romance form that is never comprehensively successful. Both works were the product of a man described by Greville as one "in whom the life itself of true worth did (by way of example) far exceed the pictures of it in any moral precept21. We can perhaps take this for granted as by all accounts Sidney was indeed a virtuous person and model courtier, but in the end the Arcadia is as much about "open manslaughter and bold bawdry" as it is intended to both "delight and teach". The Apology is an exercise in rhetoric and a critical theory of literature, whereas the Arcadia is literature in practice; as ever, the practice cannot be comprehended by the theory. At crucial moments in the narrative of the Arcadia the passions invoked by romance escape the decorum circumscribed by the rhetoric of virtue. However, this too was anticipated by the Sidney of the Apology when he says "honest King Arthur will never displease a soldier". For all the rhetoric of the Apology, Sidney himself is not averse to a bit of the old "open manslaughter and bold bawdry", and it appears that even before the refutatio, Sidney had already made up his mind that poetry should, in the end, be allowed licence.

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