Sir Philip Sidney, the Shepherd Knight Roger Howell (Hutchinson 50s)
Pastoral PR
ROY STRONG
As a finicky old portrait busybody my mind always sinks into my toecaps when I open a biography and see as frontispiece an uncap- tioned engraved portrait made 200 years after the death of the sitter. After all, shouldn't the author be applying the same level of scholar- ship to his illustrations as to his text? Perhaps these are the moans of an old fogy but, if Sir Philip Sidney's new biographer prefers secondary, removed illustrations, it suggests that his text will fall into the same bracket. And it largely does.
Making straight for the footnotes at the back, I failed to add up more than six refer- ences to unpublished original manuscript sources. This would not be so remiss if we knew that all the relevant sources had been printed and impeccably edited. But we know they haven't. Apart from Ringler's edition of the poems, there is no modern critical edition of the Arcadia, lesser prose works or letters, but, as Mr Howell must well know, these are all on the way. In respect of letters, no one has ever collected incoming as well as the out- going ones. And- discoveries, particularly in archives abroad, are still being made, as we know from the Languet letters in Paris (not used by Mr Howell). In other words, much basic preliminary work needs to be done before the time is ripe for a new Sidney biography.
In this compilation, largely based on recent articles and monographs, Mr Howell has at least reacted aright in that the line to stress is Sidney as 'the great coun- sellor of state,' as against the virtuous 4Astrophel.' It means, of course, hacking away the Sidney myth. Every war requires its glamorous young hero, its Rupert Brooke, blond and beautiful, attractive both to the chaps at the front and the girls at home. Sidney as Philisides, the Shepherd Knight of Protestant- ism, fitted the bill exactly and his death and funeral were suitably stage-managed to paper over the cracks of a miserably mishandled Mili- tary campaign. We know this, just as we are all familiar with the lover penning ravishing sonnets to black-eyed, blonde Lady Rich.
But to his contemporaries he was seen prin- cipally in terms of Elizabethan power politics. He was heir to the Deputy of Ireland,' Sir Henry Sidney, and to his uncles, the Earls of Warwick and Leicester. As successor to most of the political patronage of Elizabethan Eng-
land one can see why he was welcomed on his continental tour almost as a kind of Prince of Wales. Thereafter we follow his career as a frustrated angry young man who wished England to head a militant Protestant league that would lay low Spain and that Whore of Babylon, the Church of Rome. Queen Eliza- beth, pretty accurate in her assessment of character, saw his illicit fishing in troubled political waters, steered clear of him, even banished him from court, and steadfastly re- fused him the vital court sinecures necessary to secure any Elizabethan courtier's totteting finances. When at last she did trust him again, he and his uncle Leicester pulled on her the gest confidence trick of the reign. Her letter to Leicester as 'a man raised up by ourself' rose magnificently to the occasion. Sidney, for- '
tunately, died before he had to face the Queen again in person.
Mr Howell tells his story in -competent academic fashion but, admitting himself to be solely an historian, ploughs on apologetically through Sidney as the man of letters. Somehow in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the Sidney circle, which included Greville, the magician John Dee and the Lullian hermetist Giordano Bruno, led to a flowering of poetic imagery unparalleled in the history of our literature. It requires a mind deeply read in the obscurer paths of renaissance philosophic thought to unravel this and Mr Howell does no more than present the facts as they seem to modern literary scholars.
Still, the past speaks more vividly in its own voice and one is glad that a wider audience will know of the discovery, by a modern scholar, of an account of Sidney's death which has the only reference he ever made to his affair with his beloved Stella: 'There came to my remem- brance,' the Shepherd Knight confessed, 'a vanity wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid myself. It was my Lady Rich.'
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