Astrophil and Others

Fulke Greville, biographer and friend of Sir Philip Sidney, described in a letter of 1615 the double monument that he intended should immortalise in death the interconnectedness of their lives. In Greville’s plan, Sidney’s monument is, fittingly, ‘uppermost’, yet it is supported by that of Greville. For those living and reading after both Sidney and Greville, the planned monument emblematises the contradictions inherent in Sidney’s posthumous reputation: while honouring Sidney’s worth, the tomb simultaneously embodies the role played by others in establishing that worth and holding it up for scrutiny. As Gavin Alexander observes, ‘we cannot see Sidney without Greville’ (p. 221) – or, indeed, without many others, and it is these others, among them Sidney’s sister Mary, brother Robert, and niece Mary, that form the subject of this searching and detailed study.

The book’s witty title points in the first instance to the dramatic and much-lamented separation of Sidney from his family and peers caused by his early death in 1586, an event of such rupturing significance, according to comments uttered at the time, that the course of English letters, as well as the Sidney family fortunes, were permanently altered. Allied with this sense of separation, belatedness, and distance goes a contradictory, but nevertheless powerfully felt, connection with Sidney’s literary remains and grander project (if such he had), which in turn leads to a range of imitative and referential practices that seek to revivify his literary presence. It is this sense of writing ‘after’ – following, copying, quoting, remaking, interpreting, glossing, mimicking – Sidney that yields the book’s many insights. Alexander succeeds in inflecting the idea of writing ‘after’ in manifold different ways. This is no mean feat, given the tightly interlocking writing histories and lives of his subjects, most of whom fall within the charmed circle of the Sidney family as members or as recipients of patronage, and all of whom share a broadly similar vision of who and what Sidney was (or what they wanted him to be), and, to adapt the words of the television history show, ‘What He Did For Us’. Sometimes, too, there is a double engagement with the Sidney literary legacy, as in the case of Mary Wroth’s writing ‘after’ both her uncle Philip and her father Robert. Alexander’s prosopographical method, focusing on those who (by dint of actual knowledge) could write Sidney as man as well as poet, ably reflects this familial cohesion, although it does also constrain his range of reference. This is understandable given that the book is long already, but a chapter on George Herbert is sorely missed, especially as it would have allowed free rein to Alexander’s formidable skill in prosodic and rhetorical analysis.

Despite the book’s emphasis on those who wrote after Sidney, there is much that is valuable here on the subject of Sidney’s own writing. Inevitably, Alexander’s freedom in addressing Sidney’s works is circumscribed by the need to chart their afterlives in the works of others, but even so, the themes he chooses to address in chapter 1, ‘Dialogue and Incompletion’, yield many deft insights that possess critical worth beyond the precise terms of this study. He argues that Sidney’s writing, from the early Lady of May onwards, operates on a dialectal principle that is often manifested in dialogue – one reason why the Arcadia later served as such a happy hunting ground for the likes of Hoskyns and Fraunce. With confidence and ease, Alexander then expands the notion of dialogue to include rhyme schemes, eclogues, and the invitation to continuation that is framed at the end of the Old Arcadia. However, when the revisions to the Arcadia are brought into the picture, disruptions to Sidney’s tidy dialectal principle can be detected, not least in the unfinished state of the ‘new’ Arcadia. Incompletion is Alexander’s second strand to reading Sidney, which he pegs to the rhetorical figure of aposiopesis, or not finishing what...