The Columbia History of British Poetry (45 page)

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vide an ironic context for his amorous lyrics reveal his delight in the riddles, disguises, pseudonyms, and "dark speech" of courtly discourse. In one of his best poems, "Gascoigne's Woodmanship," he prefers to interpret his failure to hit the mark figurativelyrather than "with plain paraphrase"because it allows him to excuse his shortcomings and impress his reader with his ingenuity. Far from the orthodox "drab'' poet he is often taken to be, Gascoigne is instead a creative innovator whose innovations were poorly received.
With Sir Philip Sidney we encounter the true flowering of Elizabethan poetrya high point inaugurated by Spenser's
Shepheardes Calender
(1579), which was dedicated to Sidneyas well as Sidney's own brilliant sonnet sequence
Astrophil and Stella
and his
Defence of Poesy
, both works written in the early 1580s. With the reticence characteristic of the aristocracy Sidney published none of his work in his own lifetime, but interest in his work was assured by his exalted reputation as a patron and statesman, not to mention his manifest skill as a poet. After Sidney's death various printers sought to capitalize on his renown with unauthorized editions of
Astrophil and Stella
in 1591. His family and friends responded by publishing a canonical text of the poems in a folio edition of his works (1598); two editions of the
Defence of Poesy
were published in 1595, as were various versions of his
Arcadia
in 1590, 1593, and 1598.
Sidney's renown as a poet has endured from his own day to ours, but despite his literary success, his political career proved frustrating. The nephew and heir to one of the most powerful men in England, Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester and a favorite and perennial suitor of Queen Elizabeth, Sidney hoped to achieve great things. An idealistic Protestant and internationalist, he pushed hard for a more active war policy against Spain, but he evidently only succeeded in antagonizing the queen. As a result, he spent much of his time at the edges of the court or rusticated at his sister's estate in Wilton.
It was during these times of enforced inactivity that Sidney turned to poetry, calling it his "unelected vocation" in the
Defence
. When Elizabeth reluctantly sent troops to the Netherlands under the command of Leicester, things finally seemed to be going Sidney's way, and he assumed a high military post under his uncle. Unfortunately, the campaign was poorly organized and eventually failed, and Sidney died of injuries received in a minor skirmish. He was given a splendid funeral and commemorated as a heroic martyr for the Protestant cause, but the
 
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tributes never fully dispelled the aura of noble failure that still haunts his life.
That ambiguity suffuses his otherwise resonant affirmation of the ancient dignity of poetry and the power of the "erected wit" in his
Defence of Poesy
. Written as a response to Stephen Gosson's
School of Abuse
(1579)a treatise attacking poetry as both deceptive and degenerateSidney's
Defence
ascribes tremendous moral authority and efficacy to verse. He argues that its power to move readers by appealing to their emotions as well as their reason makes it a great force for the good. By showing us the beauty of virtue, poetry can stir us both to know and do what is right. Sidney also draws upon a Neo-Platonic argument of Italian literary theorists to refute Plato, saying that poetry's imaginative vision allows us to see the transcendent ideal truths otherwise invisible to those bound by merely material realities. Nature's "world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden" one, and by recovering a glimpse of perfection, we are inspired to strive to attain it. Finally, Sidney tries to brush aside Plato's attack upon poets as liars by frankly acknowledging the fictive nature of poetry and insisting that the poetunlike the philosopher or historiannever seeks to pass off his creations as truths on a credulous audience. Such arguments arouse suspicions that Sidney is sophistically trying to have it both ways, and his humorous conclusion, in which he ''conjures" his reader to believe every extravagant claim ever made for poetry's power, reinforces our sense of the ironies underlying his
Defence
.
Astrophil and Stella
is also a profoundly ironic work of striking originality and considerable influence. Sidney's sonnets started a vogue that outlasted the decade inspiring similar sequences, such as Samuel Daniel's
Delia
(1592), Michael Drayton's
Idea's Mirror
(1594), and Edmund Spenser's
Amoretti
, as well as a number of lesser sonnet collections by Henry Constable, Thomas Lodge, Barnabe Barnes, and Giles Fletcher. The sonnet tradition in England was concludedand, in a sense, deconstructedby the belated publication of Shakespeare's
Sonnets
(1609), but many of the same unsettling ironies and ambiguities in Shakespeare's extraordinarily enigmatic sequence can be found in Sidney's.
Astrophil and Stella
has as one of its most striking features a clearly delineated narrativeits stages described in Thomas Nashe's prefatory remarks to the unauthorized edition: "the argument cruel chastity, the prologue hope, the epilogue despair"and various incidents are
 
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recorded, particularly in the songs included in the sequence, which function as turning points for the action. Astrophil steals a kiss, races on horseback to a furtive liaison, meets Stella in a grove only to part from her in sorrow, and is brusquely dismissed from beneath her window.
The plot is thickened and complicated by a series of explicit autobiographical references identifying Astrophil with Sidney (sonnet 30) and Stella with Penelope Devereux (sonnets 24, 35, 37), a well-born lady at court whom Sidney was once supposed to marry but who subsequently married Lord Rich, apparently leaving Sidney to pine for her. Nevertheless, the story presents with characteristic courtly evasion a deliberately confusing mixture of fact and elaborate role playing. When Stella is indifferent to Sidney's own plight but is moved to tears by a trite "fable . . . Of Lovers never knowne," Astrophil announces in sonnet 45's last line, "I am not I, pitie the tale of me."
In a sense, Sidney is simply revealing his artistic strategy, having turned the details of his life into a tale. However, his statement is an unnerving concession to Platonic suspicions of fiction's falsehood, and it coyly raises grave doubts about the authenticity of Sidney's persona and the sincerity of the feelings expressed. Questions are also raised regarding the claim advanced in the
Defence
that whoever "could see Virtue would be wonderfully ravished with the love of her beauty"since in sonnets 71 and 76 virtue provokes lust rather than a contemplative revery, with beauty generating more heat than light and desire demanding food.
Finally, there is the larger question regarding the purpose of these sonnets. Are they part of a program of seduction aimed at charming the lady addressed and amusing other readers, or do they serve the higher didactic purpose prescribed for poetry in the
Defence
, with Astrophil's defeat and despair working as a cautionary tale? Or do they perhaps lead to a moral impasse and suspension of judgment comparable to the reaction prompted by the strange mistrial of the lovers in Sidney's
Old Arcadia
? Whatever the answer, it is clear that in Sidney's lyric verse we have reached a new level of poetic complexity and ambiguity.
Samuel Daniel was closely affiliated with the Sidney circle as a protégé of the Countess of Pembroke and tutor to her son, and he called her home at Wilton, where Sidney wrote his
Arcadia
, his "best school." Daniel's literary debut was inadvertently linked with Sidney's when twenty-eight of his sonnets were published in the 1591 pirated edition
 
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of Sidney's
Astrophil and Stella
. The authorized edition of Daniel's
Delia
was published the next year and dedicated to Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke. "Care-charmer Sleep" (sonnet 49) is one of the more justly renowned of his sequence, but the next poem in which he criticizes other poets for indulging in the archaic accents and diction of chivalric romance (lines thought to be aimed at Spenser) and painting "shadows in imaginary lines, / Which well the reach of their high wits records" (sonnet 50) indicates one of Daniel's limitations as a poet. In one sense, this is a completely conventional jibe at poetic competitors and their mistresses, contending that the poet's beloved is truly beautiful while others perpetrate fictions; Shakespeare's claim that his love is ''as rare / As any she belied with false compare" (sonnet 130) is a similar boast. Nevertheless, Daniel's fear that high wits may overreach themselves shows his fundamental lack of sympathy with Sidney's as well as Spenser's conception of poetry.
Daniel displays in his poetry a kind of determined literal-mindedness and an allegiance to fact that disqualified him as a poet in the eyes of Jonson and others. Lyric poetry held few charms for him, and he committed his energies to a vast and virtually endless verse history of England's
Civil Wars
, in which he proudly proclaimed "I versifie the truth; not poetize."
Michael Drayton was also directly inspired by
Astrophil and Stella
a debt he archly acknowledges in his dedicatory verses to
Idea's Mirror
by quoting Sidney's sonnet 74 to declare his independence from Petrarchan convention: "Divine Sir Philip, I avouch they writ: / I am no pick-purse of another's wit." Drayton's irony exposes the pretense of such claims. Nevertheless, many of the poems in
Idea's Mirror
display a genuine originality and anticipate the immediacy and tension encountered in Donne's love poetry.
The most famous sonnet of the sequence (61) begins powerfully and memorably "Since there's no help, come, let us kiss and part"and proceeds to an urgent dramatic monologue aimed at a last-minute reversal of the direction set by the first line. The poet's disparagement of other lovers as "paltry, foolish, painted things, / That now in coaches trouble ev'ry street" evokes a London scene of urban energy far from the abstract idyllic landscapes of earlier love lyrics, and his assurance that his beloved shall "fly above the vulgar throng / Still to survive in my immortal song" reflects a more pronounced and aggressive tendency to hyperbole and self-aggrandizement (sonnet 6).
 
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Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence, the
Amoretti
, was published in one volume along with his
Epithalamion
, a long poem celebrating his marriage to Elizabeth Boyle in 1595. There is no necessary connection between the largely conventional Petrarchan mistress praised in the sonnets for her sovereign beauty (3) and reproached for her cruel tyranny (10) and the bride of the marriage song. Nevertheless, the song's happy anticipation of wedded bliss and the consummation of the couple's marriage casts its glow over the earlier lyrics. Unlike most other sequences, Spenser's
Amoretti
describes a love that is not inevitably unrequited or guilt-ridden. Despite the note of "pining anguish" in the collection's final line, sonnets 72 and 78, among many others, happily settle for contemplative contentment. Lustful desires are firmly exorcised, and the speaker commands himself to "Onely behold her rare perfection, / And bless your fortunes fayre election" (sonnet 84).
Maurice Evans notes the sharp contrast between Wyatt's and Spenser's treatment of Petrarch's vision of his beloved as a white doe: in Wyatt the hind flees from the hunter and proves too wild for any man, whereas in Spenser (sonnet 68 of
Amoretti
) the gentle deer submits to the speaker's touch as he "with her owne goodwill hir fyrmely tyde," and in sonnet 78 Spenser pursues the hind not as a hunter but a young fawn. A reconciliation of opposites is anticipated in the conceit of the spider and bee (sonnet 71), and the lovers achieve a deeply gratifying reciprocity (sonnet 82). In Spenser's love lyrics conflict is muted, transcendence is attained, and affections are returned, at least at some points in the sequence. The relative harmony of Spenser's love poetry sets it apart from most contemporary lyrics.
Spenser's ability to reconcile conflicts proves especially effective in his tributes to Queen Elizabeth. In sonnet 74 of
Amoretti
, Spenser compliments the three most important ladies in his lifeall named Elizabethhis mother, the queen, and his bride, "of all alive most worthy to be praysed." The poem is a delicate but precarious balancing act, gracefully harmonizing any conflict of emotional loyalties, even as it pays the highest compliment to his bride. Spenser, of course, wrote his great epic,
The Faerie Queene
, to honor Queen Elizabeth, making her the inspiration and end point for all its deeds of heroism, but even there, he preserves a separate space for his own, more personal attachments.
Near the end of the poem's final adventure (VI.x.2528), the poet makes an appearance, speaking through his surrogate, Colin Clout,

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