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

Readers like John Aubrey and Waller have focused on the peculiar wishes endemic in the Sidney family to fashion narratives about an incestuous union between Philip and Mary; Josephine Roberts makes use of them, too, to understand the web of erotic and familial displacements which inhabit Robert's daughter Mary's literary romance, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621).(40) But I wish to focus more squarely on the initial problem that makes these stories seem necessary: Philip Sidney's success and failure, his literary availability and exile. His ambivalent model compels his siblings to take him up as teaching tool or heuristic, someone to learn from and learn about and then push aside. The poems Philip's siblings produce are important texts in the story of what culture could take from such a figure and what it would leave behind.

2. Binds That Tie

It is Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, who presides over her late brother's literary estate, overseeing publication of The Defence and Astrophil and Stella and a revised copy of the Arcadia, as well as completing her brother's psalm translations. But what did Mary, a writer more eminent than Robert (and probably, ultimately, more influential than either brother) learn from Philip?(41) And what did Robert make of his brother's literary example? If Mary, at least until recently, was more recognized as "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," Robert has generated interest among critics mainly as Sidney's brother, Wroth's father. The Sidney family dynamics create a situation where text becomes context and back again, but I think these kinds of transformations are a feature of family life in general. Perhaps such dynamics are what enabled Renaissance families in particular to stay alive or to flourish, to turn threats into blessings, and blessings into threats. This can also explain why what Robert takes up from his brother is so different from what Mary derives from him. If she exploits Philip's potent anonymity, Robert anatomizes the defeats and inconsistencies such anonymity often fostered.

Obviously, though, they are not the only writers left to determine what to take from Philip Sidney, nor was the problem of his legacy solely confined to writers. Queen Elizabeth shrewdly detected the way Sidney's legacy had been parcelled out when she selected her favorites, severing the pleasing courtier from the dutiful servant so that, as J.B. James notes, "Elizabeth [later] found it hard to resist spoiling [Essex, the] young impetuous stepson of her adored Leicester, and easy to ignore [Robert Sidney,] the faraway, uncomplaining Governor of a Dutch town."(42) But Philip's siblings provide the starkest images of his influence, two pictures of Philip Sidney in relief. In examining a selection of Robert's and Mary's poetry, I want to establish how they believed their brother's different projects might continue, and what had to be emphasized or suppressed in order for this to occur.

Gary Waller claims that Mary succeeded because she had Philip's model before her, her portion of the Psalmes "written under her brother's (absent) tutelage."(43) But Robert was instructed to make use of his brother's example as well. Philip provided him with money and a reading list when Robert made his tour of Germany, and positions himself, albeit obliquely, as an audience in one letter, where he faults Robert's handwriting: "you write worse than I, and I write evil enough."(44) Perhaps Henry's fatherly injunction blocked Robert from the kind of success his sister Mary has come to enjoy, like the "covering cherub" or writer's block which Harold Bloom stations at the gate of literary paradise. Many of the myths surrounding Philip Sidney not only explain his incandescent presence but suggest how and where Renaissance obscurity could reach, yet we can also take up the poetry of his siblings to locate some of these bounds. Of course, the limits of obscurity is a theme fledgling Renaissance writers frequently take up, nowhere more clearly than in Milton's Paradise Lost (a history of fatherly illumination and sibling disenfranchisement). The Faerie Queene offers another example of these limits in Spenser's Florimell, who evades most admirers and makes shoddy imitators disappear.(45)