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Dr John Pitcher
THE SIDNEYS
MSt C-option HT2008
The Sidneys, until the middle of the sixteenth century, were no more than a family of
high-ranking courtiers, provincial governors and administrators. They were godly,
efficient and well connected, but they had nothing of the super elite about them. This
all changed in the late 1570s when Philip Sidney began writing a romance called The
Arcadia. In the fifty years that followed, Sidney and his sister Mary and his brother
Robert and his niece Mary Wroth reinvented English lyric poetry and prose fiction.
They had literary ideas and ambitions well beyond those of anyone at the Elizabethan
court. Between them, the Sidneys were translators, literary critics and patrons,
novelists in all but name, and, in their own way, historians and re-makers of the Tudor
Protestant commonwealth they had been born into. They also piece by piece, and with
the help of others, invented themselves as a literary dynasty. Their combined effects
on contemporary culture and writers, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne et al, were
incalculable.
This MSt C option for Hilary Term 2008 is devoted to these members of the Sidney
family: Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
(1561-1621), Robert Sidney, First Earl of Leicester (1563-1626) and Lady Mary
Wroth (1587-1651). The aim of the course is to study what, how and why the Sidneys
wrote, to weigh the importance of their family and their political and cultural milieu,
and to decide, if possible, what they achieved together and separately as writers.
Sidney scholarship is of a high standard in many areas. There are scholarly editions of
all the writings on this course, as well as good, reliable biographies and helpful
introductions to particular works. The entries in the new DNB are especially useful.
Students who choose this option may, as the course proceeds, wish to specialise in
one or two writers or genres (Mary Sidney or romance or the sonnet etc), but it will be
assumed that everyone is able to discuss the full range of texts listed below before the
beginning of Hilary 2008. The items for reading for the classes will be supplemented
by a longer list of secondary reading, given out at the end of Michaelmas 2007.
Philip Sidney
The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney ed. W.A. Ringler (1962)
The Countess of Pembroke's ‘Arcadia’ ed. J. Robertson (1973); Old Arcadia, OA
The Countess of Pembroke's ‘Arcadia’ ed. V. Skretkowicz (1987); New Arcadia, NA
Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten
(1973)
Mary Sidney
The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, ed. M. P. Hannay, N. J. Kinnamon, and
M. G. Brennan, 2 vols. (1998)
Robert Sidney
The Poems of Robert Sidney ed. P. J. Croft (1984)
Mary Wroth
The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth ed. J.A. Roberts (1983)
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Love's Victory: the Penshurst Manuscript ed. M.Brennan (1988)
The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania ed. J.A. Roberts (1995)
The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery's Urania ed. J.A. Roberts, S. Gossett
and J. Mueller (1999)
The course will be taught in six two-hour sessions, Weeks 1-6, each focussed on two
or more Sidney texts (Astrophil and Stella and sonnets and songs by Mary Wroth and
Robert Sidney, for instance), viewed from different literary and historical angles.
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Arcadian families: lives and genres
The discussion will begin with the lives of these writers (Philip on his continental
tours, Robert fretting at not being recalled to England, Mary Wroth overwhelmed
with debt), and how they saw themselves connected to one another by bloodlines, but
also by literary genealogy and obligation, and by still deeper psychological links; and
how Sidney’s fiction of Arcadia provided a mental space in which he could explore
the interior of the elite family (sibling rivalry, conflict between generations etc). The
parallels between the Sidney genealogy and Renaissance theories of genre will be
considered in detail, as will the commemorations of Philip Sidney, by his family and
others. There will be an overview of the Sidney texts in manuscript and print.
M.G. Brennan and N.J. Kinnamon, A Sidney Chronology: 1554-1654 (2003)
K. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (1991)
M.P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (1990)
Domestic Politics and Family Absence. The Correspondence (1588-1621) of
Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, and Barbara Gamage Sidney, Countess of
Leicester, ed. M.P. Hannay, N.J. Kinnamon and M.G. Brennan (2005)
H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts,
1558-1640 (1996)
E. Mazzola, Favorite Sons: the Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family
(2003)
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Elite romances and popular novels
Where, in the history of prose fiction, are we to place Sidney’s Arcadia, original and
revised, and Wroth’s ‘continuations’ of it in the two parts of the Urania? This class
will consider some of the origins of ‘Arcadia’ (Heliodorus, Sannazaro etc), modern
critical thinking about the birth of the novel, and the formal properties and styles of
the Sidney stories and the manner(s) of writing in them. What were Sidney’s
innovations, and how far did his niece change these or take them further?
Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, trans. J.R. Morgan, in B.P. Reardon (ed.)
Collected Ancient Greek Novels (1989)
Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia & Piscatorial Eclogues, trans. R. Nashe (1966)
F. Jameson, ‘Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre’, NLH 7 (1975), 135-63
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W. Davis, ‘A Map of Arcadia’ in W. Davis and R. Lanham, Sidney’s Arcadia
(1965)
M.A. Doody, The True Story of the Novel (1986)
B. Fuchs Romance (2004)
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Men and women; Eros and the true God
It has been claimed that the Elizabethan love sonnet was a courtly device for personal
advancement; others say that it was a means of the poet infantilising the beloved, or
even himself. How does Astrophil and Stella strike us (clever baby talk or new ground
in love manners), and how did Robert Sidney and his daughter Mary Wroth respond
to Sidney’s sonnets? Can we see in them the sexual revolution that some critics have
identified in the Arcadia? Or are sexual matters in their writing always refracted
through the lens of religious devotion and worship (Mary Sidney’s Psalms etc)? Mary
Wroth’s Love’s Victory will be looked at, and so too Pamela’s speeches against
atheism in the ‘New Arcadia’.
M.E. Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (1982)
B.K. Lewalski, ‘Mary Wroth's Love’s Victory and Pastoral Tragicomedy’, In
N. J. Miller and G.F. Waller eds. Reading Mary Wroth: Representing
Alternatives in Early Modern England 1991. 88-108
N.J. Miller, Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in
Early Modern England (1996)
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Making, knowing and judging poetry
Sidney’s Defence of Poetry is the first major critical essay in English. We will read it
in the context of contemporary Elizabethan critical writing and discuss what’s old and
new in Sidney’s thinking, especially what he has to say about the social and emotional
impact of poetry and drama. What can be inferred from the writings and literary
endeavours of the other Sidneys (patronage, print editions of the Arcadia etc)? Did
they sign up wholeheartedly to the scope and role of imaginative writing that Sidney
argues for in the Defence?
Sidney's ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism,
ed. G. Alexander (2004)
A. Sinfield, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Defence of Poetry’ in ed. G.F. Waller
and M.D. Moore. Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance
Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours (1984) 124-143
O.B. Hardison, Jr., ‘The Two Voices of Sidney's Apology for Poetry’, in ed.
Arthur F. Kinney, Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (1986),
73-90.
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Stories of state
Rulers, courts and kingdoms are looked at from all sorts of perspectives by the Sidney
writers; in the Arcadia of course, but also, by implication in Mary Sidney’s rendering
of the final acts of Antony and Cleopatra, and, more obliquely, the languages of
powerlessness and service in the Sidney sonnet cycles. Elizabethan Protestant
theological and political contexts will be the starting point for this class.
F.J Levy, ‘Sir Philip Sidney and the Idea of History’, Bibilothèque
d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 26 (1964), 608-17
R. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979)
B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan
Politics (1996)
M.G. Brennan, The Sidneys of Penshurst and the Monarchy, 1500-1700
(2006)
V. Skretkowicz, ‘Mary Sidney Herbert's Antonius, English Philhellenism and
the Protestant cause’, Women’s Writing, 6 (1999), 7-25
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Influence and reputations
Each member of the class will be invited to analyse one of the ways in which
contemporaries of the Sidneys adapted or realigned what the family had written (the
Arcadia in King Lear) or how they fashioned legends and stories about them
(Greville’s version of Sidney’s life); or alternatively to discuss later evaluations
(Mary Sidney as patron of arts and sciences, Mary Wroth as the first Englishwoman
to write a romance, and a proto-novel one at that).
The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke ed. J. Gouws (1986)
G. Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip
Sidney 1586-1640 (2007)
H. Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (2000)
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