Joel B. Davis, The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia and the Invention of English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 251p bibl index ISBN 9780230112520

Davis reads the earliest editions of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Astrophil and Stella, The Apology for Poetry, and the collected works of Philip Sidney published in the 1598 folio also titled The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia as interpretations that shape both late Elizabethan literary culture and our accounts of the formation of the early modern English literary system. The study applies Jerome McGann’s framework of textual moments, which revises both the practice and the scope of textual criticism. It also revises the dominant Helgersonian paradigm of the “literary system” (1983, Self-Crowned Laureates), which was based on intertextual references that could be traced by reading twentieth-century critical editions of literary works completely divorced from the early modern artifacts that embodied those “works.” The Helgersonian paradigm was synchronic and semiotic; the paradigm introduced here is diachronic and materialistic. The chronological organization of the book foregrounds dialogic exchanges across diverse aspects of Elizabethan literary scene (Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney Herbert, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Nashe, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville, John Florio, Gabriel Harvey, George Puttenham, and dozens of poets who flourished in the 1590s). Because it is organized chronologically, this study facilitates a diachronic account of change over a relatively short but crucial period of time. The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella emerge as radically new texts when understood from the perspective of their posthumous material reception in the 1590s, in contrast to typical readings that essentially reconstruct how and why they were written in the 1580s.
An introductory chapter clears the intellectual ground for the project by tracing the editorial and critical practices that have led us to rely on critical editions of literary works unmoored from their social and material contexts: the nearly coterminous rise of the New Bibliography in textual scholarship and formalism in literary criticism, which in turn reconfigures our notion of an author into something closely resembling the Foucauldian author-function. Our disciplinary accounts of the history of English literature and of the English “literary system” reproduce, with certain distortions, the process in the 1590s through which Philip Sidney and the Arcadia become analogous to transcendental signifiers that retroactively confer coherence on what the Elizabethans called their “English Petrarke” In our disciplinary discourse and in the writings of the 1590s, Sidney and the Arcadia stand above and outside the relations among other Elizabethan writers, authorizing their activity paradoxically by being inimitable, different not in degree but in kind. Chapter one, “Feigning history in the 1590 Arcadia,” argues that the 1590 quarto edition of The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia bears all the marks of its heterogeneous origins: the apparently intimate dedication to the countess, the division into chapters and chapter headings imposed by the “overseer of print,” and the editors’ admission that the eclogues in the 1590 have been disposed as they saw fit. On one hand the dedication casts the book as a pastoral entertainment. On the other hand, the chapter summaries, marked by superscripted numbers indexed to specific passages in the text, produce a mise-en-page similar to that used in newer “politic” histories in the Tacitean and Machiavellian vein; the summaries themselves are likewise little gems of the epitome genre. One might say the paratexts of the 1590 Arcadia amplify both positions in the sometimes contentious dialogue that has shaped the reception of Sidney’s pastoral-heroic romance: the notion that the work is deeply engaged in political discourse and the vita activa (Greenlaw, Hamilton, McCoy, Patterson) and the notion that the work primarily evokes a pastoral (or at least literary) retreat into the vita contemplativa (Davis, Lawry, Lindheim, McCanles). However, the textual apparatus of the 1590 quarto heavily favors the former interpretation. Focused on plot and characters, the chapter summaries help the reader quickly to grasp the work as a whole, but they also provide a useful framework for citations of notable speeches and actions. Thus the 1590 Arcadia is presented as a feigned history to be marked and studied – both digested as a whole and plucked of its rhetorical flowers, as scholars like Erasmus and Johannes Sturm recommended. Given the paratexts of the 1590 edition, it is unsurprising that rhetoric tutor John Hoskyns gave his students a marked-up copy to study along with his courtly Directions for Speech and Style (1599) and that at least one reader of a later, folio edition of the Arcadia transposed the 1590 apparatus into his folio. Moreover, the way of reading that the 1590 Arcadia paratext induces is consistent with the intellectual and political positions espoused by the most prominent men thought to have worked on it: Fulke Greville, John Florio, and Matthew Gwinne (likely with cooperation from Sir Francis Walsingham). All these men were keen students of Roman imperial history and embraced its pessimistic view of how human nature among the great influenced history, and all had an interest in Elizabeth’s foreign policy in the 1590s. The 1590 Arcadia was indeed a book of and for troubled times.
Chapter 2, “The performance of Astrophil and Stella in the 1591 quartos, and a reconsideration of the sonnet-craze of the 1590s,” argues that if the 1590 Arcadia was framed as feigned history for troubled times, the 1591 quartos of Astrophel and Stella is framed as a troubled history of feigning. The first quarto was called in during September of 1591, and a second, partially corrected quarto was issued. Despite their differences, both impose a distinct structure on Sidney’s writing. Although the evidence currently available cannot with certainty reveal the agents responsible for the printing of the 1591 quartos of Syr P.S. his Astrophel & Stella, few if any plausible explanations exclude Sir John Harington. Indeed, the winking, nudging, gossipy tone of the references to Sidney’s writing in the “Apologie for Poetry” that prefaces Harington’s 1591 translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso exploits Harington’s access to texts that remained unprinted in 1591, Astrophil and Stella and An Apologie for Poetry. By claiming such access to Sidney’s writings, Harington constructs his own authority to be an arbiter of taste among the literary avant garde of the 1590s, quite appropriate for a contributing agent in the publication of the trendiest sonnet sequence in English literature. Whoever they were, the editors of the 1591 Astrophel & Stella quartos produced a book that exerted greater influence over the so-called Elizabethan sonnet craze – a craze that included a wide variety of lyric poetry, often arranged by kind – than any other single book of poetry. Between 1591 and 1609, the year in which Shakespeare’ sonnets were published, about forty sonnet sequences were published (fifty-six if we include augmented editions, like Samuel Daniel’s constant tinkering with Delia). By the time of the 1598 folio, at least twenty-six (thirty-one including augmented editions) of the English sonnet sequences following Astrophil and Stella had already been published – well over half of the English sonnet sequences in the period, and all of the most important ones saving Shakespeare’s (Roche, Kuin). And if Shakespeare composed a substantial part of his sonnet sequence in the 1590s, then its influences or intertextual references would include the 1591 quartos, not the 1598 folio edition of Astrophel & Stella. Similarly, otherwise valuable studies of late sixteenth-century poetry and Sidney’s influence founder because they uncritically accept William Ringler’s text as the basis for their own studies. Notably, Tom Parker’s Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle argues that a sense of the precise numerical proportions in Astrophel and Stella’s 108 sonnets and 11 songs influenced the numbers and dispositions of poems in the 1590s publications of lesser poets like Michael Drayton and Barnabe Barnes; but Barnes and Drayton had no access to Astrophel and Stella except in the 107-sonnet, 10-song version presented in the 1591 quartos. More commonly, Sidney’s reputation and biography tend to overshadow accounts of poetry in the 1590s in relation to Sidney, again obscuring the books that gave most writers access to Astrophel & Stella (e.g. Klein). In contrast to previous studies, I contend that the most-imitated aspects of the 1591 quartos (not necessarily original in them) are a strong awareness of a narrative implied among the sonnets themselves, the division of the book into parts representing particular lyric forms – e.g. sonnets in one part, odes in another, pastorals in a third – and a relatively overt consideration of poetics in certain parts of books of poetry printed in the 1590s.
In chapter 3, “The One and the Many: The Sidney Name in Print, 1590-93,” Davis asserts that as poets in the early 1590s imitated aspects of the 1591 quartos of Astrophil and Stella and traded on Sidney’s name, so other men seeking to make a living in the printing business appropriated the name for more or less nakedly self-promoting purposes. William Ponsonby, who had taken a considerable risk in committing nearly all his resources in 1590 to printing the Arcadia and the Faerie Queene, essentially “cross-promoted” the authors of these two books by publishing Spenser’s Complaints in 1591, a volume whose Spenserian authority is at best questionable (Brink), by publishing some more-or-less pro-Essex histories, and by publishing several works by one of Sidney’s most grateful benefactors, Abraham Fraunce – works whose titles invoked the name of the countess of Pembroke. Ponsonby had a bit of good fortune, as well, for the Harvey-Nashe quarrel reached its greatest intensity in just this period: even though other printers owned the screeds these two were producing, Ponsonby’s sales undoubtedly benefited from Harvey’s advertisements of his friendship with Spenser and his pretensions to the countess of Pembroke’s patronage, as well as Nashe’s own invocations of both poets’ names. Above this fray but reflecting its means in a much more genteel mirror stands the beautiful 1591 folio edition of Orlando Furioso whose printing Sir John Harington supervised with evident care and pride. Harington’s folio was clearly conceived as something of a collector’s edition, and the intimate, provocative comments that festoon its elaborate paratexts invoke an insider’s view of the literati of the English court whose tastes follow those of a particularly urbane, aristocratic, and almost leisurely version of Sir Philip Sidney. In exploring all these relatively commercial relations, this chapter debunks the prevailing view that the Arcadia, the Faerie Queene, and the projects of Spenser and Harvey are symptoms of the force in the cultural unconscious of early modern England that would eventuate in the literary system as we know it and the literature of England. That is, the chapter discriminates in a useful way between incipient literary nationalism on one hand, and the celebrity or even mere notoriety of writers who would later become known as significant parts of the English canon on the other. In chapter 4, “(Re)Inventing The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, the Sidney family discourse, and an English literary system,” Davis notes that Margaret Hannay, Mary Ellen Lamb, Wendy Wall, and other influential scholars have cast the 1593 publication of the first folio edition of The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia as part of countess of Pembroke’s assertion of her right to represent the Sidney family literarily, to remind readers of the Sidney family’s continental connections, and to re-shape the image of Sir Philip Sidney in a more literary than military mold. But why include material from the end of Sidney’s “old” Arcadia that does not obviously “answer the precedents” (as John Florio put it) of the famous captivity episode in book III of the 1590 edition, why not include a corrected Astrophel and Stella, and why emphasize a pastoral retreat from politics in the edition? To suggest adequate answers to these questions requires attention not only to the countess’s literary activities between 1590 and 1593 particularly as a response to the sort of commodification that the name she shared with her brother had undergone in the same period. Since Helgerson, literary bids for status have typically been read as gestures constitutive, at least in the aggregate, of the newly emergent Elizabethan “literary system” legible as a semiotic code, but closer examination demonstrates that this code is merely a series of opportunistic gestures made possible, paradoxically, by the countess of Pembroke’s efforts to distance her brother’s writings from merely English literature. The countess’s own publications and her 1593 Arcadia mark an effort, noted by Hannay and Lamb, to set Sir Phillip in more international company, indeed into streams of thought current on the Continent but largely foreign to the English of the 1590s. What has not yet been examined is the role played by the addition of books IV and V of the “old” Arcadia to the folio – at least not with respect to its intellectual affinities. The addition of the trial scene, in particular, to the 1593 Arcadia allows the romance to recuperate pity as a social virtue – something that the 1590 Arcadia decidedly moves away from. Moreover, the tone the 1593 Arcadia achieves in all its revisions fits with the internationalist, ecumenical, Phillipist spirit of many of the Sidney family’s most important continental friends (as Robert Stillman has recently and impressively explored). In sum, the countess’s actions in the early1590s attempt to lift her brother’s reputation and works out of merely localized literary squabbles (which appear to us as an incipient literary system) and instead place them among the ornaments of a much broader and more significant international religio-political movement.
In the final chapter, “The Apology for Poetry, the 1598 folio, and constructing the desire for origins,” Davis begins with the assertion that in many significant ways, the single most influential work of twentieth-century scholarship in Sidney studies remains Kenneth O. Myrick’s 1935 study, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Significantly, Myrick’s book was part of the incipient hegemony the New Criticism and the New Bibliography were beginning to exercise in the rapidly professionalizing discipline of English literary studies. Myrick’s approach to Sidney is formalist in that it seeks to recover the principles that guided Philip Sidney’s literary output – namely the theories of Antonio Minturno and Julius Caesar Scaliger. But in Myrick’s account, as Sidney wrestles with its Italian predecessors toward an ethical view of literary activity in the Apology for Poetry, he is composing the New Arcadia according to these new principles as he forges them. The theory that the Defence holds the key to grasping Sidney’s works has prevailed in Sidney studies ever since, equally among biographical, more broadly historicist, and formalist readings (e.g. Rudenstine, Kalstone, Heninger et al.).
The publication of the 1595 quartos of the Apology for Poetry and the 1598 folio of The Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia (which comprised most of Sir Philip Sidney’s corpus) offered a fulfillment of the promises implied by the hints in Harnington’s Orlando Furioso, the second quarto of Astrophel and Stella (1591), and the new material published in the 1593 folio Arcadia. These books created the ethos of a more authentically aristocratic Sidney than earlier volumes had by presenting previously unpublished texts that had, in the case of the Apology, been referenced in other books, that demonstrated their occasional origins clearly as in the Certain Sonnets and even more explicitly in the pastoral entertainment written for Queen Elizabeth, and perhaps most effectively, hinted tantalizingly at surreptitious occasions in the substantial revisions to Astrophil and Stella. That is, the 1598 folio retroactively casts previous editions of Sidney’s writings as successively and genetically farther removed from their origins – origins reconstructed not in the sense of fair autograph copies posited by our New Bibliographers as part of the making of critical editions, but rather reconstructed as private moments known to the Sidney family and folded into a cosmopolitan Sidney family discourse, accessible to the intellectual fellow-travelers the countess of Pembroke has designated. The great success of the 1598 folio lay not in finally housing Sir Philip Sidney’s works in a fitting monument, but rather in creating, via a sense of layers of meaning apparently accessible to those close to the Sidneys, degrees of apparent authenticity in an edition of Sidney’s writings that implicates all editions, previous and succeeding, in a chain of signification that points toward a forever deferred point of origin. For the late Elizabethans, this desire for origins fixates on the ideal English shepherd-knight-poet, and for twentieth-century shapers of the profession of English, this desire for origins fetishizes the Apology for Poetry.