Garrett Martin - Sidney the critical heritage

Will you have all in all for Prose and verse? take the miracle of our age Sir Philip Sidney.

(Richard Carew, below)

I do almost think the Tyburn Chronicle a more interesting book than Sydneys Arcadia.

(Hannah More, September 1788, in William Roberts, Memoirs of
Mrs Hannah More, 1834, vol. 3, p. 131)

the silver speech
Of Sidneys self, the starry paladin.
(Robert Browning, Sordello, 1840, 1. 689)

Sidneys reputation grew with remarkable rapidity after his death and the publication of most of his work in the 1590s. Few authors, not even Shakespeare (himself much influenced by Sidneys writings), have been exalted further. And, as has not been generally the case with Shakespeare or other contemporaries, Sidneys lifeor heroic constructions of itcontinued to affect assessments of the work even after it had ceased to be generally read in the eighteenth century.

The story of Sidneys reception for much of the seventeenth century will already be broadly familiar to most readers. (They will also, however, encounter fresh material here, including the first printing of some manuscript material, most importantly of the bulk of Brian Twynes notes of c. 15991600.) I have included extracts from continuations and dramatizations of Arcadia, in addition to more direct comment.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century responses are, with a few exceptions (Walpole and Hazlitt, for example) less generally known. In view of thisand helped by the relative dearth of responsesI have attempted to cover the eighteenth century in almost as much detail as the earlier periods; space does not permit a very full selection from Victorian writing on Sidney, but entries by Hallam (1839), DIsraeli (1841), and William Stigant (1858) have been included as representative. It seemed appropriate to end with Stigant, because he combines traditional and newer approaches to Sidney: he regards the life of the hero as more important than his literary productions, and has certain traditional reservations about Arcadia, yet is largely enthusiastic about the works and willing to discuss them in some detail. Part 3 of the Introduction seeks to give a more general impression of tendencies in Sidney criticism up to about 1900.

The work of three Sidney scholars in particular has made editing Sidney: the Critical Heritage an easier task: Katherine Duncan-Jones, Dennis Kay and Victor Skretkowicz.

I should like to express my thanks to Jennifer Fellows and Brian Southam for their work on the text, and to Mrs Christine Butler and Dr Hubert Stadler for their help with Brian Twynes notes on Sidney in Corpus Christi College MS 263, fols 11420 (), which are printed here with the permission of the President and Scholars of Corpus Christi College in the University of Oxford.