The sonnet was much cultivated in the literary society gathered around Sir Philip Sidney in and about 1580. His high birth,—he was son of Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales and Lord Deputy in Ireland, and nephew of Elizabeth’s sinister favourite, the Earl of Leicester,—the fact that he stood in the relation of patron to many of the men of letters of his time, his amiable personal character, and the heroic circumstances of his death in a skirmish fought to prevent a Spanish convoy from entering the besieged town of Zutphen in 1586, have combined to make Sir Philip Sidney a very shining figure. It is possible that he is more conspicuous than his intrinsic power would have made him without the gifts of fortune. Yet there must have been a great personal fascination in the man who could inspire the reverential love which was felt for Sir Philip Sidney by Fulke Greville, while his Apologie for Poetrie, his Arcadia, the sonnets collected under the title of Astrophel and Stella, with his other poems, remain to prove that wherever he had been born he would have left his mark on the time.
The Apologie for Poetrie.
The Arcadia may be left aside for the present, but The Apologie for Poetrie, though written in prose, cannot, without violently separating things akin to one another, be taken apart from his poetry. It is to some extent our English equivalent for the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue française of Joachim du Bellay, the manifesto of a new school of poets. The circumstances in which the two were written differ widely. The Pléiade, with the Frenchman’s usual love of a large and minute ordonnance, drew up a scheme for the conquest and orderly division of the poetic world. Sir Philip Sidney was provoked into writing his little treatise by a very foolish tract printed in 1579, and named The School of Abuse, the work of one Stephen Gosson (1535-1624), an unsuccessful playwright who took orders, and lived to a great age as a clergyman of Puritanical leanings. The School of Abuse, which was absurdly dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney without his consent, and perhaps because he was the nephew of the chief protector of the Puritans, is in itself insignificant, except in so far as it contains a statement of the narrow puritan view that all modern poetry was wicked, and that the theatre was the home of every corruption. It is chiefly worth naming now because Sidney did it the signal honour to give it an answer. The Apologie for Poetrie is in no sense an Ars Poetica. Sidney does not deal with the formal part of poetry. He replies to those who belittle it by an emphatic assertion that it is the noblest of all things. The view and the spirit of the Elizabethan time are nowhere more clearly shown than in the Apologie. That Sidney fell into one gross heresy is true. He said that poetry was independent of metre. But that was not an error likely to mislead either himself or others. Against it has to be set his conception of poetry as the noble expression of that which in itself is fine, made for a lofty purpose. There may not be much guidance in this; but it is not as a guide that the Apologie is to be considered, but as the challenge of the coming English poetry, lyrical, epic, and dramatic—a declaration that it was to be something more than ingenious exercises in metres, that it was to be the expression in beautiful form of passion and thought, of fancy and imagination. If English poets of that generation looked up to Sidney, it was not only for the reasons given above, but because he spoke early and worthily to the enemy at the gate. The style of the Apologie is full of the animation and sincerity of the writer. It has a colour and melody unknown to the downright sober English of his predecessor Ascham or his contemporary Puttenham, and is free from the conceits of his own Arcadia.
Sidney was himself one of the first to sound the high note of the great Elizabethan poetry.
No part of his work was printed in his life. The Arcadia was prepared for publication immediately after his death in 1586, but it did not appear till 1590, and then first in a pirated edition. A more accurate version followed in 1593. |His Sonnets and Lyrics.| The sonnets and other lyric pieces, collected under the title of Astrophel and Stella, were printed in 1591, and the Apologie for Poetrie in 1595. His metrical version of the Psalms remained in manuscript till 1823, while some fragments of his verse have only been recovered recently by Dr Grosart.[62] But the date of printing was comparatively unimportant at a time when a poet’s work not only could be, but generally was, known in manuscript to the reading world long before it was published. Sidney was renowned as a poet and prose-writer in his lifetime, and his case is only one of many. Therefore we may fairly count his influence as having been exercised from the day when his sonnets were handed about among his friends, which must have been as early as, if not earlier than, 1580. Those to whom they came must have learnt at once that the day when Gascoigne, Turberville, Googe, or an industrious decent verse-writer of the stamp of Churchyard, represented English poetry, was over. The sonnets are not all on the same high level. The epithet of “jejune” which Hazlitt applied to Sidney cannot be justly used of any of them; but the sonnet beginning, “Phœbus was judge betweene Jove, Mars, and Love,” or the other which has for first line, “I on my horse and love on me, doth try,” or the third, “O grammar-rules, O now your virtues show,” are not equally safe against the other epithet “frigid.” They are at least more marked by laboured and cold-blooded conceit than by passion or fancy. Yet even these have an accomplishment of form which was new, and in the others the greater qualities are by no means rarely shown. The first in the accepted order—“Loving in truth and faine in verse my love to show,”—with its ringing last line, “‘Foole,’ said my Muse to me, ‘looke in thy heart and write,’” and the last, “Leave me, O Love, which reachest but to dust,” are abundantly lofty and passionate; and were, in the sense in which the word was used, “insolent”—that is, unprecedented—in the English poetry of that generation. To these it would be easy to add many others. “With how slow steps, O Moon”; “Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance,” are but two of them; while the sonnet “Good brother Philip” is a gem of gaiety overlaying passion. Sidney did not confine himself to the so-called legitimate form of two quatrains and two tercets, but tried experiments. He stretched the term sonnet as far as it will go when he applied it to twelve Alexandrines and a heroic couplet. Nor was it in the sonnet only that Sidney set an example. The songs of Astrophel and Stella usher in the great Elizabethan lyric, in which there is nothing to surpass the “Doubt you to whom my Muse these notes entendeth” in soaring melody. The verse which abounds in the Arcadia and the metrical version of the Psalms does not reach the level of the Astrophel and Stella. Yet it appears inferior only when judged by his own best work, and the best that was to follow. We may doubt whether Sidney has a claim to the place in the active life of Elizabeth’s time assigned him by the affection of Fulke Greville and by tradition, but there can be no question that he stands beside Spenser as one of the beginners of the unsurpassed poetic literature of her reign.
Watson.
It is mainly on historical grounds that mention must be made of his contemporary Thomas Watson (1557-1592). Watson was a busy writer of verse and translator, whose claim to be remembered now rests on this, that he was working at the sonnet beside Sir Philip Sidney, and independently of him. What he called a sonnet was a set of three stanzas of six lines, each complete in itself.[63] There the independence of Watson ends. His sonnets are avowedly imitations of Italian or French originals when they are not translations. But his chief work, the Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love, has an undoubted value as a piece of evidence. It supplies a link in the chain of literary history, and then it gives what may be called a glimpse into the workshop of a sonnet-cycle maker. Watson candidly confesses, in a “Letter to the Friendly Reader,” that his pains in suffering the pangs of love which his sonnets record are “but supposed.” His less ingenuous followers leave us to guess as much concerning them. But in addition to this there is an apparatus criticus which in everything except bulk bears a very close resemblance to the pedantic commentaries added by his admirers to the early editions of the Spaniard Góngora. Each sonnet is introduced, explained, annotated, and the passion it is to express described, and we are shown the machinery at every stage. One of these introductions contains what is, in fact, a by no means bad criticism on the whole body of the sonnets. “This Passion,” No. xli., “is framed upon a somewhat tedious, or too much affected, continuation of that figure of Rhetorique whiche of the Greeks is called παλιλλογἱα or ἀναδἰπλωσις, of the Latins Reduplicatio.” Somewhat tedious, too much affected, and full of repetitions are these sonnets; but they show the increased mechanical skill of our writers of verse, and they are historically interesting. When tempted to make autobiography out of the cycles of other sonneteers, it is well to remember Watson’s confession, and also this, that to have a lady for the saint of your literary devotions had been “common form” as far back as the troubadours. His later work, The Tears of Fancy, is in regular quatorzains.
The sonneteers.
The popularity of the Astrophel and Stella (there were three editions in the first year in which it was printed—1591), as well as the example it set, help to account for the profuse production of sonnet cycles in the next few years. The following list, which does not profess to be exhaustive, of the collections published before 1595, will show the wealth of Elizabethan literature in this form: The Parthenophil and Parthenophe of Barnabe Barnes (which owes its survival to the accident which has preserved a single copy at Chatsworth, reprinted by Dr Grosart), the Licia of Giles Fletcher, and the Phillis of Thomas Lodge, were published before the end of 1593. In 1594 appeared the Cœlia of William Percy, Constable’s Diana, Daniel’s Delia, and Drayton’s Idea. To these may be added the names of Willoughby’s Avisa, which, however, does not consist of sonnets, and the anonymous Zepheria. Spenser’s Amoretti, or love sonnets, belong in date of publication to 1595. Three other collections—the Fidessa of Griffin, Lynch’s Diella (thirty-eight sonnets, prefixed to the amorous poem of Diego and Genevra), and the Chloris of W. Smith, belong to 1596. The sonnet, too, was written by others who did not construct cycles. Every reader of The Faërie Queen knows the splendid “Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,” by Sir W. Raleigh, and its less legitimately built successor, “The praise of meaner wits,” which was addressed less to Spenser’s masterpiece than to the vanity of Queen Elizabeth. During many long fallow years of silence the poetic genius of the English race had been accumulating, and it wanted but a touch to set it free. Even among the poets named here who are not otherwise famous, there was some measure of original power. Putting aside Spenser, who towers over all, the finest lyric force was in Lodge, and the most uniform accomplishment in Daniel. It was left to Shakespeare to give the greatest of English sonnets, but the form he preferred—the three rhymed quatrains and the couplet—had been polished and established as the prevalent English type by Daniel.[64]
Other lyric poetry.