Friendship and Frustration: Counter-Affect in the Letters of Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet

This essay is an attempt at emotional excavation. The affective archive in question is the remarkable correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney—the premier courtier poet of the Elizabethan literary universe—and his friend and mentor Hubert Languet—the renowned Huguenot diplomat and political theorist. In recent years, scholars in the sciences and humanities have become increasingly invested in the study of emotion; in Renaissance studies, this “affective turn” has inspired a growing body of research that uncovers prominent nodes of early modern emotionality and historicizes the emotional ideologies that underpin them, such as notions of humoral physiology and theories of the passions.¹ This emphasis on emotion is complemented by a recent critical interest in early modern life-writing, as in Meredith Anne Skura’s Tudor Autobiography (2008)—a book that imagines, despite some longstanding (and vehement) skepticism, how an author’s emotional “inwardness” might be partly inferred by careful attention to the nuances of biographical expression.² In light of such work, I’d like to reassess the affective (and by extension, autobiographical) stakes of the Sidney/Languet letters, with hopes of providing a more inclusive account of the correspondence’s emotional architecture than has been offered by previous scholarship.³

Though long mined as a source of biographical data on the young shepherd knight, the Sidney/Languet exchange has inspired surprisingly little devoted scholarship.⁴ Existing treatments have emphasized the humanist conventions from which it borrows, such as ars epistolica compositional practice, the ludus literarius of early modern classroom pedagogy, and the classical tradition of idealized masculine friendship.⁵ This is, to be sure, with good reason: as Edward Berry and Andrew Strycharski have importantly demonstrated, the letters are heavily shaped by the tenets of Renaissance rhetorical and pedagogical theory, while their explicit emotional content—flush with professions of devotion and love—owes largely to the Ciceronian paradigm of amicitia perfecta, the “rarified ideology of complete virtue, selflessness, and unity” that so enthralled early modern humanists and that so dominated the interpersonal expression in their letters.⁶ The Sidney/Languet correspondence bears the stamp of this humanist rhetorical machine, and its affective tenor is tuned accordingly; this account, well documented in the existing scholarship, must indeed serve as the primary context for the study of their letters.

But this is not the entire story. By emphasizing Sidney and Languet’s debt to the tropes of classical and humanist convention, modern scholars have largely tended to occlude the alternate nodes of emotion that accrue in the margins of the letters—an approach that robs the correspondence of a full emotional range and necessarily effaces many nuances of Sidney and Languet’s epistolary exchanges. Indeed, in their affective complexity these letters recall not only the conventions of classical friendship literature, but also the emotional fireworks of a sonnet sequence, primed with bitter ambivalence, latent aggression, and frustrated erotics. While these dynamics, to be sure, have been noted in passing,⁷ there has been little sustained attempt to analyze what I will call the “counter-affect” of the Sidney-Languet correspondence: the affective nodes that seem to challenge, subvert, or disrupt the overt aims of Sidney and Languet’s epistolary relationship, and that trouble the rhetorical framework of friendship and mentorship that governs the correspondence more generally. Through a tropological analysis of their letters, I argue that this alternate emotional mode of the Sidney/Languet relationship was characterized by the indirect operation of two competing frustrations: Languet’s eroticized desire for his protégé, and Sidney’s reciprocal struggle to escape his mentor’s suffocating attention.

It is certainly true, as Judith Henderson reminds, that the early modern humanist did not “bare his soul in his letters,” and we must avoid reading their content nakedly through “the anachronistic lenses of Romanticism and [contemporary] psychology.”⁸ But this does not mean, in turn, that the emotional content of such Renaissance correspondence—documents that were not mere compositional exercises, and that really did circulate in the world—can be attributed merely to the rhetorical conventions of humanist epistolary theory, or that conventionality itself...