Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (review)

"The most important event in the literary career of Sir Philip Sidney was his death in 1586," Gavin Alexander asserts. Had he lived, he might not have permitted his works to be printed, and thus he would not have dominated the literary culture of England throughout the 1590s. Because his works were "always cut off from the agency and immediate context of his mind and body his texts were therefore especially open" (xix). That is, "by a metonymy fundamental to literary history, Sidney was now his works" (1), and his works were read, sung, copied, revised, and completed by others. Because those who respond to his works have a particular interest in his death and also in the "incomplete nature of his works" (36), Alexander finds the figure of aposiopesis, of not finishing, central not only for Sidney's life and works, but also for responses to them.

In this study, expanded from his 1996 dissertation, "Five Responses to Sir Philip Sidney: 1586–1628," Alexander examines the impact of Sidney's works on English literary culture. The first chapter examines Sidney's own use of dialogue; the second looks at the early elegies for Sidney and the attempts, by Essex and others, to assume his mantle. Four chapters treat Sidney's impact on the writers closest to him: his sister Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; his brother Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester; his friend Sir Fulke Greville; and his niece Lady Mary Wroth. Because these writers were so closely related to Sidney, this approach privileges a biographical reading of their works. Alexander argues that Pembroke exempts herself when she refers to Sidney's "rare workes to which no witt can adde," for "she believed that only she could fully comprehend each work's idea or fore-conceit and bring it to a conclusion" (89), but she misunderstood the intention of his uncompleted stanzas. Dismissing political interpretations of Pembroke's work, Alexander declares that "Sidney's endings are the focus of her grief, and both the beginning and the end of her art" (127); she needs no other purpose in writing. Sidney's brother Robert is more sympathetically portrayed, beginning with the difference of the mottos in the two extant portraits: first his father's motto, Fata viam invenient (Fates will find a way), and then his own, inveniam viam aut faciam (I will find a way or make one). Alexander's own musical expertise is evident in his discussion of the circulation of Robert Sidney's lyrics in song and masque, and in his brilliant analysis of Robert's contrafactum, fitting music with other words, noting that while his sonnets are unremarkable, "his songs show an exceptional . . . lyric gift" (191).

Fulke Greville — who, as I have said elsewhere, sought to wrest both Sidney's corpus and his corpse from the control of his family — saw himself as Sidney's true heir. Greville speaks "confidently of what he knows Sidney's intentions to have been" (227). He edited not only Arcadia but also Sidney's life, Alexander observes, so that the Sidney we know is "Greville's Sidney": the Sidney he portrays has lived long in Greville's memory, "and he is of necessity a changed man" (237). Alexander then examines continuations of the Arcadia before turning to Lady Mary Wroth, who followed her uncle in writing a sonnet sequence and a prose romance, although her Urania is neither a continuation nor an imitation of the Arcadia. Noting how many readers, starting with Ben Jonson, have concentrated "on the woman behind the words" (284), Alexander gives his own biographical reading. Focusing on aposiopesis in Urania, he observes that Wroth cannot end, because there is no way to reconcile "Amphilanthus' centrifugal restlessness" with "Pamphilia's centripetal constancy" (303). The postscript notes that Jonson "made a place for himself in Sidney's family," but his nostalgia for Sidney shows that his...