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

The death of an author leaves behind an enormous imaginative burden, whatever liberties it permits writers and readers. This shadow self takes up room and craves attention; as Hamlet discovers, a ghost can speak more forcefully than any sleeping king. But what if this shadow self has different voices? Philip's unfinished, unsung pieties seemed to stimulate Mary on the one hand, while the ceaseless courtly machinations of a lover-artist encouraged Robert on the other. Such disparate lessons suggest we reorient our understanding of "influence" by returning to the term's etymological roots, seeing it as something that might work across familial lines rather than along them. After all, the term "influence" is tied to influenza, a contagion more likely to spread in especially close quarters.

This early modern sense of influence as something infectious or draining can be examined, too, in light of the simultaneous valorizing and degrading of Renaissance familial relationships which Stone chronicles. We see this at work in the dislodging of the Virgin Mary's divine status(46) and in Henry VIII's many marriages, operating on a lesser scale in Henry Sidney's letter. Some of these familial alterations characterize the "forging" of English literary lineage at this time as well, which pushed aside the faraway Chaucer, disdained the more recent Skelton, and no longer relied on the Bible as a text on which to graft all later poetry. Continental models were increasingly favored, but a native "precursor" like Philip Sidney was needed too, to stand at the head of the English line.(47) Scholars like Raphael Falco, John Guillory, and Richard Helgerson have explored these early modern transformations of literary genealogy to trace "the history of authority" which, Guillory reminds us, is the "real history of authors."(48)

Falco describes massive efforts by English poets to "fabricate" Philip Sidney as their progenitor, efforts which worked so well because the exemplar was dead, his threat mitigated by loud and public mourning. Commenting elsewhere on the "flexibility of genealogical truth" at this time, Falco argues that models of literary paternity would do better to note "father-in-laws" instead of fathers since there was little that was natural or inevitable about this reproductive procedure.(49) Suggesting the same kind of genealogical reconstruction (and the same kind of heavy lifting), Guillory analyzes the disentangling of secular from sacred motives during the Renaissance, pushing God into the heavens where dead poets reside. This division encouraged Spenser's and Milton's reworkings of biblical and mythical history by relocating authority from inspiration to the imagination. Finally, Helgerson describes how poetic debts could be discharged and influence buried when early English writers, plagued by anxieties about their "prodigal" art, passed off their productions as frivolous pursuits.(50) Poetic careers were motivated by careerism, and the "paterne" Sidney provides was "perfecte" because behind it could be located the bad faith or childish wishes and professional errors of a generation.(51)