| English 2273 - Winter 2005 |
Sixteenth-Century Literature |
Sir Philip Sidney
|
•The
following notes are excerpted from Richard Bear’s
Introductory essay to the Electronic edition of the
Defence, © U of
Oregon, 1992.
|
•[Philip
Sidney was] born . . . at the estate of Penshurst, Kent, on
30 November 1554, . . . educated at Shrewsbury Grammar
School in Shropshire, and entered Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, in 1568.
|
•After
three years, he departed for the traditional "Grand Tour" of
continental Europe, arriving in Paris 1572, the year of the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
|
| [Sidney] returned to England, after a visit to Poland, in June 1575. In 1576 he became Queen Elizabeth's cupbearer and traveled to Ireland to take part in the campaign with Essex. |
[I]n
1578 . . . Sidney . . . began work on the Old Arcadia, which he
completed about 1581.
[Among Sidney’s close] friends [were] . . . Edmund Spenser. |
| [Sidney] was knighted . . . [in] 1583 [and] in 1584, [he was] made governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands |
[G]oing
to the relief of the garrison at Zutphen, 22 September 1586, was
wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. The wound festered, and
he died, in great pain, at Arnheim, 17 October.
|
The Defence of Poesie
[1580-81], Certaine Sonets [1581], and
Astrophel and Stella
[1581-2]. He also began, but did not complete, a new version of
the Arcadia.
|
Sidney's famous essay is said
to be a response to an attack on poetry and stage plays, which
had been dedicated to him without his permission, by Stephen
Gosson, a former playwright: The Schoole of Abuse, 1579.
Another reply, inferior but interesting, had been published by
Thomas Lodge in 1580.
|
Henry Olney produced a
printing of An Apologie for Poetrie in the spring of
1595; this edition proved to be unauthorized, as William
Ponsonby had entered the work in the Stationer's register on
November 29, 1594. Olney was directed to halt sale and turn over
his remaining copies to Ponsonby, who replaced the title page
with his own and sold the copies along with his own printing.
These combined copies, and those of Ponsonby's own edition
printed by Thomas Creede, are rare, whereas Olney's exists in a
number of copies. Four versions of the Defence are known: The
Penshurst manuscript, De L'Isle MS. no. 1226; The Norwich
manuscript found in 1966 in a commonplace book of Francis
Blomefield's; An Apologie for Poetrie, Olney's printing
of 1595, and Ponsonby's The Defence of Poesie of the same
year.
|
•The
Defence of Poesie reflects the humanist education which
Shrewsbury and Oxford had given to Sidney . . . It follows
the rules and outline of a standard argument: exordium,
proposition, division, examination, refutation, digression,
peroration; and does so with a spirit and style that must
have done its author great credit in the eyes of his
contemporaries. The Defence serves almost as a copia of
Renaissance theory . . .
|
•A
definitive edition, collating all these, and recording all
variants, with excellent endnotes, may be found in
Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney [1973], edited by
Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten. See also
Katherine Duncan-Jones' excellent contribution to the Oxford
Authors Series of Oxford University Press, Sir Philip Sidney
[1989].
|
[The thesis of Sidney’s
Defense is] poetry is useful because it delights as it
teaches (emphasis added).
|
•As imago
dei, we reflect our Maker in all that we do, and most of
all in doing what our Maker does: to make, especially by
imagining. . .
|
•Sidney
is conscious throughout his defence that it is fiction he is
defending, and that his strength lies in attacking the
privilege generally accorded to "fact." He says that "of all
writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer"; that
is, the practitioners of what we now call the academic
disciplines are regularly betrayed by their literalism,
while the poet, who is under no illusions, freely creates
"fictional" statements as true as any other, and the truer
for not being asserted as literal. Sidney's approach is
characteristic of Renaissance humanism, and more closely
akin to modern semiotic theory than is generally appreciated
(emphasis added).
|
Reminder: all notes on this page are
excerpted from Richard Bear’s Introductory essay to the
Electronic edition of the
Defence, © U of Oregon, 1992.
|
|
This page last modified January 12, 2005, by R. Cunningham |