Lecture 5

THE RENAISSANCE (1485-1660)

PLAN:

1. Sir Philip Sidney

2. Christopher Marlowe

3. Sir Walter Raleigh

4. Shakespeare’s Literary Career

5. Shakespeare’s Theater

6. The Tragedy of Macbeth

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-1586)

To many of his contemporaries, Sidney was an em­bodiment of the ideal Renaissance man and cour­tier. Spenser addressed him in the dedication to The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) as "the noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chivalry." When he died prema­turely in 1586 at age thirty-two, the entire country mourned his loss.

/ Sidney came from a prominent aristocratic fam­ily who lived in Kent (also the native county of Sir Thomas Wyatt). His uncle was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Spenser's employer and Elizabeth's fa­vorite. He attended Oxford University, but left without taking a degree to complete his education by traveling in Europe. Coming from such a well-connected English family, Sidney was introduced to many famous writers, educators, and heads of state on his travels. He also saw firsthand the terri­ble religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics, which erupted in such disasters as the massacre of French Protestants on Saint Bartholo­mew's Day in 1572. Sidney returned to England passionately committed to the Protestant cause. He had also learned of the main literary and artistic developments of the late Renaissance in Italy, France, and northern Europe.

\Back in England, Sidney assumed the roles of courtier, diplomat, and casual man of letters. His deepest interests were political and religious. Writ­ing and discussing poetry were for him private and informal, not professional, activities. At the country estate of his sister, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, he began his long pastoral romance in prose, with interspersed poems, called Arcadia. Sometime* during the early 1580's Sidney wrote a long essay called The Defense of Poesy which is the finest piece of Elizabethan literary criticism we have and a classic in the history of criticism. His Defense, provoked by an extremist Puritan attack against poetry and plays, rises far above the imme­diate controversy and addresses itself to the uni­versal values of imaginative literature. Sidney's contribution to lyric poetry was enor­mous. About 1582 he wrote a sonnet sequence called Astrcphel and Stellakthe names mean "Star-lover and Star") modeled oh the sonnet sequences of Petrarch and other Italian and French poets of the Renaissance. This series of 108 sonnets reflects an actual autobiographical situation—Sidney's love for and eventual engagement to Penelope Devereux. The engagement didn't work out, and she eventually married Lord Rich. Penelope Devereux is unquestionably identified with the Stella of the sonnet sequence, and in some sonnets there are puns on her married name ("Hath no misfor­tune but that Rich she is").

Astrophel and Stella is the first fully developed sonnet sequence in English. Sidney's approach to the individual sonnet and to the cycle as a whole, is intensely dramatic. Astrophel is concerned not just with his love for Stella, but with the difficulty of giving convincing poetic expression to that love. Through the interplay of argument and feeling in Astrophel and Stella, Sidney develops both an an­alysis and a demonstration of how to write subtly and impressively about love. Sidney's sonnet cycle was the chief inspiration for many other such cycles in the 1590's. Two of the best-known son­nets in this sequence have been chosen for inclu­sion here.

S Although a brilliant and sophisticated love poet, Sidney was also a man of deep moral conviction. He died fighting for the Dutch Protestants against the Spanish at Zutphen in 1586.