Brothers' Keepers and Philip's Siblings: The Poetics of the Sidney Family - 16th century family of Sir Philip Sidney - Critical Essay

Criticism, Fall, 1999 by Elizabeth Mazzola

I have to fill a double space. I have to be my brother as well as myself.

--Henry James(1)

Now I, now I my self forgotten find, Even like a dead man, dreamed out of mind. --Philip Sidney, Psalm 31 "In Te, Domine, Speravi'

Introduction

EVEN IN THE CIRCLES CLOSEST to him Philip Sidney remained something of a riddle. Long before he died he was the subject of mythmaking, serving at once as "perfecte paterne of a Poet," emblem of courtly aspiration, and Protestant hero, a beloved and important figure who in reality appears sadly ineffectual and frustrated. Sidney seems to have inspired the same kind of devoted misunderstanding in family members that he inspired in English culture at large. This misunderstanding characterizes many Renaissance families, however, where affective ties were often bound to abstract entities; and if Sidney was a shining example for English poets to emulate, he was also, Katherine Duncan-Jones maintains, a "universal nephew figure" for a number of older humanists who lacked heirs.(2) Something which served a variety of hopes and range of desires, Sidney's detachment was charismatic because it could so readily, comfortably, assuredly be employed. Sidney was curiously a step or two removed, too, from both the courtly and literary centers of activity which sought to take him as an exemplar. When he died in 1586 he was famous neither for his knightly success nor for his poetry; in fact, it is his self-proclaimed heirs, poets like Spenser or Jonson for example, to whom we are indebted for our sense of Sidney's literary importance. They advance their careers by praising him.

Deriving "influence" always involves backward glances, but Sidney's image seems less stable the further back we look; what flashes before us is a fugitive phantasm, something always contemplated from a distance.(3) If we locate his contributions by considering what later poets took from him, we observe that Sidney's legacy derives not from the bounty of work published after his death (since it was circulated during his lifetime) but from an ancillary or indirect influence, spread out along a mazy river, not part of any main stream. He serves as a kind of corollary which ran along rather than clearly organized English verse and provided a deeper, hidden structure that could underpin--or more subtly cloak--a poet's vocation. I believe this secret, powerful current is at its most secret and most powerful in the work of Philip's brother and sister, Robert and Mary, both of whom began to write after their brother's death. Their poetry keeps alive and safely hidden a fallen knight, a silent hero, a buried puzzle.

1. Family Centers and Interior Designs

To be sure, unlike Spenser's self-effacing narrator (challenging us to beg his question "who knowes not Colin Clout?") or Shakespeare's chameleonlike persona, Philip Sidney's poems and prose boldly announce his voice in multiple ways, as ingenious lover Astrophil, as stern critic and divine singer, as his uncle Leicester's spokesman. Perhaps Sidney's literary impact was enervating because it was so flexible or pliant (even allowing later poets, as Raphael Falco suggests, to "invent" him as their precursor).(4) Yet in some ways Robert and Mary were better positioned to make use of Philip's learning and example than he was because they were better hidden than he was: Robert as second son, loving husband, and dutiful public servant, Mary as wife and mother and executor of Philip's estate. My essay considers the way their poetry challenges and exploits their brother's originality and obscurity. More broadly, I want to explore how culture employs some families to keep its secrets and how some families manipulate culture to tell stories about themselves.

Familial bonds in early modern England were fragile and loose and relatively weak, but they could be made to harness other forces, inviting outside threats or dissolving them.(5) Perhaps the best example of such techniques of "familiarity" is provided when Mary Tudor famously proclaimed Elizabeth a bastard after Mary assumed the throne in 1553. Of course, the queenly Catholic Mary's blood positioned her to judge her Protestant sister's lowly status, but Lawrence Stone has described the cool, relaxed ties between family members in other early modern households. Because of mortality rates and practices like primogeniture and fosterage, family members might be closer to neighbors or friends than to each other, aligning themselves with kin in terms of fear or need rather than through love. Their emotional detachment may have enabled the family to weather medical or economic storms, however, alleviating grief over an infant's death or deploying a workforce of adolescent apprentices.(6) (The "internalization" of family ties that encourages deeper, more intimate affections and desires may partly explain the problems tearing at the fabric of modern nuclear families.) The family could be a useful political or religious concept but not a psychic tool, at least not until the eighteenth century. Still, there are occasional gestures like Mary Tudor's where family bonds are important not because they have been internalized or encourage feeling but because they have become elaborately external or symbolic, established by complicated cultural codes or devised to provide solutions to larger problems.