Elizabethan Undercurrents: Shakespeare and Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney

 by Kris Vitols

Literary influence can be a sticky wicket. Ideally, we would prefer it to be straight-forward and easy in its measure, traceable through testament and witness, preferably with a slew of documentation. Literary history abounds with writers demonstrating their indebtedness to their forebears: Dante Alighieri thought enough of the Roman poet Virgil to cast him as his guide through Hell and the outskirts of Purgatory, referring to him simply as “The Poet”; John Milton, in his justification of verse form at the beginning of “Paradise Lost,” brazenly dismissed centuries of rhymed meter-schemes, choosing to write in dactylic hexameter, the unrhymed verse form of Homer, feeling that his poem’s subject warranted such a move; when James Joyce’s phantasmagoria, “Ulysses,” was published in 1922, he supposedly quipped, “I’ve just written a book that will keep the critics busy for 300 years.” In just this way, writers over the centuries have cited their influences and precursors, either by embracing them, or in some way reappropriating them. 

Indeed, the further we go back in literary history, the more likely we are to fall into a quagmire of supposition and guess-work. This is certainly the case where William Shakespeare is concerned, who has snubbed his nose at scholars and critics for centuries by not providing primary source material on his life and work, or even his name or signature appended to a verifiable piece of paper. What we are in fact left with is our own attempt to trace his influences as a poet and dramatist. Thus, we offer up a fascinating personage from the Elizabethan literary period: Sir Philip Sidney, poet, translator, and man-at-arms.

William Shakespeare was 22 years old when Sir Philip Sidney died a soldier’s death in 1586, setting Sidney up as precursor for young Will, who would produce his first play, “The Comedy of Errors,” only two years later. In terms of class, Sidney and Shakespeare couldn’t have been more different: born into royalty, Sidney’s father was an Earl, serving the Queen’s interests overseas at opposing courts, where he was often dismissed or ignored; counter Shakespeare, the ambitious, publicly educated scribbler, who liked to hang out at the local pub and jaw about writing with his friend Christopher Marlowe, hoping for patronage and success. Shakespeare seemed to work and write continuously for about a quarter century; Sidney, on the other hand, could only boast of one completed literary project during his lifetime, the sonnet sequence “Astrophel and Stella,” with nearly everything else existing in a horrible nether realm of fits and starts.

But what do we see in Sidney that would qualify him as a precursor to Shakespeare? Firstly, Sidney’s attempt to create an ideal world or state of being in his writing, usually within the context of a pastoral setting, a literary move which often revealed Sidney’s own misgivings that such an ideal could be maintained. As Fulke Greville, compiler and editor of Sidney’s work after his death, put it: “…Both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart to make himself and others, not in words and opinion, but in life and action, good and great.” Which is a fancy way of saying that Sidney was a dreamer and idealist, thinking that abstract thought could somehow free him from a stultifying court life and a knighthood he didn’t even want.

If we wish for a direct influence on Shakespeare, we need look no further than Sidney’s “New Arcadia,” where we encounter the blind and miserable Paphlagonian King, stumbling along the English countryside, vainly in search of his son to whom he seeks reconciliation. Upon finding him, the King wishes for death, is led to a cliff’s edge; given the opportunity, he does not take it, out of shame. Shakespeare, of course, would adapt Sidney’s melodramatics as plot and trope for “King Lear” late in his own career as a writer. In an eerie bit of metempsychosis, Sidney even seems to channel “Lear’s” Gloucester, when his Paphplagonian King pontificates: “I should tediously trouble you with as much poisonous hypocrisy, desperate fraud, smooth malice, hidden ambition, and smiling envy as in any living person can be harbored.” Shakespeare couldn’t have put it better.

At this point, it may be instructive to offer a basic definition of the pastoral literary mode, as both Sidney and Shakespeare employed its conventions. In Sidney, the idea of the pastoral is at least of a dual nature, occurring at once as a setting for literary conceits, but possibly more importantly, as an abstraction, a longed for ideal, a wish-fulfillment. In Sidney’s “Old Arcadia” the pastoral appears, superficially anyway, as a rural, peaceful setting named Arcadia---replete with shepherds, shepherdesses, pan-flutes, and the occasional goat---offering itself up as a quiescent, if somewhat grungy, alternative to western civilization. Put simply, Sidney conceives of the conventional, “Old Arcadia,” with its goat cheese and huts made of wattle, as an escape. Conversely, his “New Arcadia” disposes of any notions of rusticity, choosing instead to present an idealization of the regal, courtly setting in which Sidney moved on a daily basis. Within the “New Arcadia,” through the medium of Helen, queen of Corinth, Sidney imagines her as a paragon of courtly etiquette and tact, who, when knightly tournaments were held at her court, boasted of “…sports [which] carried riches of knowledge….and such the behavior of her ladies as builded their chastity, not upon waywardness, but by choice of worthiness.” In such a way is Sidney’s Arcadian ideal abstracted beyond any physical setting or tangibility, to the point where it becomes heartbreakingly untenable; in a heartfelt moment of pathos, Sidney exclaims, in an eerie presage of the King James Bible: “O God, what doth better become wisdom than to discern what is worthy thy loving? What more agreeable to goodness than to love it, so discerned; and what to greatness of heart, than to be constant in it, once loved.” What, indeed?

But what, in fact, did Sidney bequeath to Shakespeare, as a writer and creator? Certainly, Shakespeare was at least somewhat inspired by the idea of the pastoral as a rich venue for departure, whether in terms of plot-points, character creation, or symbolic content. While the idea of the pastoral is probably not paramount in Shakespeare, it is more than readily apparent, from even a cursory glance, that Shakespeare liked his woodsy, secluded settings: they appear everywhere, from the Theban wood of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” to the forest of Arden in “As You Like It,” on towards the secluded pastoral environs of “The Winter’s Tale,” even to the ensorcelled, prison-paradise of Prospero’s isle in “The Tempest.” There’s more to it than that, of course, as Shakespeare himself understood, keen student of his precursors as he was. Critic Theodore Spencer points us in the right direction when he writes of “…the deep melancholy which lay beneath the surface glamour of Elizabethan existence.” Spencer’s cogent observation at least begins to point towards Sindey’s true project, and thus, why Shakespeare would find him intriguing as a writer. Sidney’s ability to probe, at least to some degree, into the psyche of his literary creations, is certainly the thing which would make him someone Shakespeare would want to emulate. Sidney is a master at pithy, yet profound verbal bombs that work like a slow poison in the mind of the reader. To dip into the “New Arcadia” once more, we encounter Cecropia, who offers up barbed wisdom on love and marriage to a young female friend, newly betrothed. “Look upon your own body,” observes Cecropia, “and see whether it deserves to pine away with sorrow,” as a way of justifying a life of wanton pleasure, as long it is constrained within the confines of church-sanctioned marriage. For Cecropia, as well as for Sidney, human beings, no matter how high-born, “misconstrue everything,” misunderstanding a world that only makes us stumble along blindly with its opposites and reverses. Shakespeare shared in Sidney’s dissatisfaction with the world, enough so that he could create both the benevolent wonderment of Bottom the weaver as he wakes from his dream of being an ass, where sense perception has been inverted--ears that see, eyes that hear, where wonderment and questioning is welcome, even humorous--and, just as easily, the terrifying, unknowable, sense of paralysis Macbeth finds himself mired in, where nature itself is phantasmal or incorporeal, existing in a terrible state of living death.

Fortunately, despite their great ability at misprision and doubt, Sidney and Shakespeare are content to let love rule the day, as is witnessed in the numerous comedies and romances of the Shakespearean canon that end with a wedding or a dance. As Sidney puts it, Nature herself bestows human beings “…with beauty to move love…wit to know love...and an excellent body to know love.” Somehow, one imagines that life isn’t that simple or erotic, but it’s certainly better than contemplating visions of bloody daggers in your head.