Veronese), Prague, Poland and Holland. Here William the Silent offered to marry his
daughter to Sidney, in a Protestant alliance, but Queen Elizabeth vetoed this. Sidney
was out of favour for three years when he opposed the Queen’s proposed marriage
to a Catholic. (A commoner who published a pamphlet against the marriage had his
right hand cut off.) His political and religious positions remain unclear.
Sidney, son of the Governor of Ireland, had public ambitions, of which his writ-
ing was a part; Greville said that ‘his end was not writing, even while he wrote’. In
three years, Sidney wrote three books, each of a kind new in English:Arcadia,a
romance; a formal Defence of Poesy; and a sonnet sequence,Astrophil and Stella.
Sidney’s apparently private sonnets had a more literary end. The Arcadiais an enter-
tainment for family and friends, offering positive and negative moral and public
ideals to the governing class to which they belonged. It is an amusement for serious
rulers, as Jane Austen’s novels were later for the gentry. It is in prose divided by verse
eclogues, singing competitions between shepherds. These trial pieces in classical
quantitative metres and modern Italian forms proved that an English poem could be
formally perfect.
In a prefatory letter to his sister Mary, Sidney describes the Arcadiaas ‘but a
trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being
done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence; the rest by sheets sent
unto you as fast as they were done.’ In 1577, when he began the first version, he was
25 and Mary 16; he finished it in 1580 at Wilton, Wiltshire, the home of the Earl of
Pembroke, whom she had married. In 1580 he wrote his Defence and in 1582–4
rewrote the first half ofArcadia; this was published in 1590, but superseded in 1593
by his sister’s composite version,The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, in which it has
since been read.Arcadia’s success was in part a tribute to the author; mourned in
two hundred elegies,he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral as ‘England’s Mars and
Muse’.
The Countess of Pembroke continued her brother’s work, revising Arcadia and
co mpleting his translation of the Psalms with her own excellent versions in free and
inve ntive forms. Here is a stanza from her Psalm 58:
Lord, crack their teeth; Lord, crush these lions’ jaws,
So let them sink as water in the sand.
When deadly bow their aiming fury draws,
Shiver the shaft ere past the shooter’s hand.
So make them melt as the dis-housed snail
Or as the embryo, whose vital band
Breaks ere it holds, and formless eyes do fail
To see the sun, though brought to lightful land.The Arcadia draws on Greek, Italian, Spanish and French romances; its story is
in five prose acts divided by verses. Its splendid scale prefigures The Fairie Queene,
but Arcadia was finished, then half-rewritten, whereas Spenser’s poem is far from
complete. Sidney’s romance tells the story of two princes shipwrecked on the shore
of Arcadia, the home of pastoral poetry. They disguise themselves and fall in love
with the daughters of Basileus (Gk: ‘king’), who has withdrawn to live with shep-
herds in order to avoid the oracle’s prophecy: that his elder daughter Pamela shall
be seduced; his younger succumb to an unnatural love; he commit adultery with
his own wife; and his sons-in-law be accused of his murder. After fantastic adven-
tures, some tragic, and denouements like those of Shakespeare’s romances, the
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 93