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Sidney's Feigned Apology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
In his Apology, Sidney makes what appears to many readers to be an adroit synthesis of humanist defenses of poetry, joining Neoplatonic idealism to claims of ethical utility and delivering this synthesis with the winning playfulness of a shrewd rhetorician. A closer look at his argument, however, reveals it to be a complex and self-conscious fiction, which gestures toward external values only to turn back on its own assumptions. The playful tone shows that Sidney is fascinated by the conceptual difficulties that confront him but that he is incapable of resolving them. Sidney’s intellectual performance in the Apology demonstrates his affinities with Renaissance thinkers like Nicholas of Cusa, who imagined all mental activity to be a ceaseless fabrication of conjecture and metaphor.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979
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Notes
1 All quotations of Sidney are from An Apology for Poetry, ed. and introd. Geoffrey Shepherd (1965; rpt. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1973), hereafter cited as Apology.
2 For Sidney as a Renaissance Platonist, see F. Michael Krouse, “Plato and Sidney's Defence of Poésie,” Comparative Literature, 6 (Spring 1954), 138–47; William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 174; A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), pp. 15–29; and Walter Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 31, 37. Besides the obvious metaphorical difference, Augustinian illumination is different from Platonic inspiration; the former deals with the general nature of cognition, the latter with a special poetic gift. But both fulfill similar functions in Renaissance poetics. The argument for Sidney's Augustinianism is derived from Mornay and Hoskins' hierarchy of inner “words,” leading to the divine Logos. See Apology, pp. 59, 157–58, n.; An Apology for Poetry, ed. and introd. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 17, n. 63; and Forrest G. Robinson, The Shape of Things Known: Sidney's Apology in Its Philosophical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), Ch. iii.
3 Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph Peake (New York: Harper, 1968), pp. 91–92.
4 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 41–42.
5 Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (1943; rpt. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964), p. 308.
6 See A. C. Hamilton, “Sidney's Idea of the ‘Right Poet,‘” Comparative Literature, 9 (Winter 1957), 51–59.
7 This silence is part of Sidney's rhetorical strategy. He wants us to be able to say, as does John Buxton, that “Sidney describes the poet as a combination of vates, divinely inspired seer, and poet, or maker” (Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance [London: Macmillan, 1954], p. 4). But Sidney is careful to leave us enough evidence to deduce a more precise set of theoretical distinctions.
8 William G. Crane, Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1937), p. 14.
9 A. E. Malloch, “ ‘Architectonic’ Knowledge and Sidney's Apologie,” ELH, 20 (1953), 181–85.
10 See Allan Gilbert, ed., Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (1940; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 358–403, and Baxter Hathaway, The Age of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1962).
11 See Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of the Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 19–20. Tuve's final chapter in Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery has a brilliant summary of didactic theory, though it depends on some questionable platonizing and an idealized psychology that Sidney rarely, if ever, realized.
12 Ficino, “Five Questions concerning the Mind,” in Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 201–02. For an argument that Sidney's notion of poetic feigning may have been influenced by Ficino, see Cornell March Dowlin, “Sidney's Two Definitions of Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly, 3 (1942), 579.
13 See Murray Wright Bundy, “ ‘Invention’ and ‘Imagination’ in the Renaissance,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 29 (1930), 535–45, and Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces (New York: Random, 1968), p. 56.
14 William Rossky, “Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic,” Studies in the Renaissance, 5 (1958), 49–73.
15 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poésie, facsimile of 1906 rpt., ed. Edward Arber (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 1970), p. 35.
16 For arguments that Sidney's radical insistence on the poet's free feigning sets Sidney apart from such Italian sources as Scaliger and Minturno, see Cornell March Dowlin, “Sidney and Other Men's Thought,” Review of English Studies, 20, No. 80 (1944), 257–71, and Hamilton, “Sidney's Idea of the ‘Right Poet.‘ ”
17 For poetry as a mean, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 31. By contrast, Jacob Bronowski has noted that in the Apology poetry appears to be straining in two directions at once, toward liberated ideality and a forced application to the concrete. See Bronowski, The Poet's Defence (Cambridge: University Press, 1939), esp. pp. 39–56.
18 For the argument that Tasso likewise defines a new realm of poetic discourse through a coincidence of opposites, the “intellectual fantasy,” see Phillip Damon, “History and Idea in Renaissance Criticism,” in Literary Criticism and Historical Understanding (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967).
19 A. C. Hamilton, “Sidney and Agrippa,” Review of English Studies, 7, No. 26 (1956), 151–57. Similar claims are made in Hamilton's book on Spenser, cited in n. 2.
20 Montaigne, Essays, trans. John Florio (London, 1919; rpt. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938), II, 244–45.
21 Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935; rpt. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 53.
22 Weinberg, pp. 77, 93, 99–100, 158, 801. For later developments of this controlling of the imagination through res/verba distinctions, see A. C. Howell, “Res et Verba: Words and Things,” ELH, 13 (1946), 131–42.
23 Sidney violates an essential principle of Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, on the intuitive acceptance of first principles. From the thirteenth century on, this work, which shows what a body of knowledge should “look” like and deals with the use of syllogisms, became increasingly important in describing an art. See Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random, 1955), p. 312.
24 Of equal importance is Cusa's second major work, De Coniecturis, which complements the first. I am not arguing that Sidney read Cusa's works; if he heard of him at all, it was probably from chance comments made by Giordano Bruno. I am interested here more in pointing out conceptual parallels that will help to trace a Renaissance theory of fiction than in ascribing sources.
25 The essential studies of Cusa are in Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper, 1963), and Maurice de Gandillac, La Philosophie de Nicholas de Cues (Paris: Aubier, 1942). The best treatment of this paradox in Cusa's thought, however, is in Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harcourt, 1962), Vol. II.
26 Correspondence of Sidney and Languet, ed. and trans. Steuart Pears (London: W. Pickering, 1845), p. 29.
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