Musician and Poet

Music-making was a popular leisure activity in aristocratic households in the early seventeenth century and a growing number of courtier poets wrote and exchanged verse in aristocratic salons and literary coteries. Chapter 12 continues the exploration of Herbert’s intellectual achievements and reputation as a polymath. It traces his interest in playing the lute and singing, and the musical preferences and fashions demonstrated by the music books he owned and the preludes, fantasias, pavanes, galliards, courantes, voltes, sarabands, and airs assembled in his unique manuscript lute book. It probes his inclusion among the metaphysical poets, exploring the influence of John Donne and Giambattista Marino, but also that of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Sir Philip Sidney, and of Horace, Juvenal, and Ovid. It uses the themes of love, beauty, immortality, and death to examine examples of his sonnets, elegies, epitaphs, satires, and lyrical poems, some of which were published posthumously as The Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury in 1665, and looks briefly at his Latin philosophical poems and his rough draft for a masque. It explores his preference for deploying verbal ingenuity and erudition rather than feelings, his deployment of metaphysical conceits and concepts, his innovative experimentation with rhyme and the extent of his participation in the literary coterie culture of the times. It claims a place for him among the leading minor poets and suggests that this was an impressive achievement for a man heavily engaged in other intellectual fields as well as political and estate matters.

Transatlantic Lifelines: Anne Bradstreet’s “Elegie upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney”

The legacy of Sir Philip Sidney, the distinguished Elizabethan courtier-poet, was the subject of numerous claims to memorialization. On 17 October 1586 Sidney died in battle at Arnhem in the United Netherlands. Less than a week later, his corpse was transported to Flushing, of which Sidney had been Governor, and in the following year Sidney’s body was “interr’d in stately Pauls”, as recorded by Anne Dudley Bradstreet—the first known poet of the British North American colonies. While Bradstreet is omitted from most early modern and contemporary literary accounts of Sidney’s legacy, this article demonstrates that Bradstreet’s commemoration of Sidney from across the Atlantic presents new insights into his afterlife and the female poet’s formulations of early modern nationhood. Bradstreet’s first formal poem, “An Elegie upon that Honorable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney” (comp. 1637–8), was a tribute to Sidney as well as to her own Anglo-American literary heritage and England’s rolls. Bradstreet exhibits her complex relationship to Sidney along the same lines that she reconceives her English identity. A comparison of the two published seventeenth-century editions of Bradstreet’s elegiac poem (1650, 1678) shows how she translates descent and lineage from kinship (and kingship) into poetic creation. In the process, Bradstreet takes her place not only as a “semi-Sidney”, as Josuah Sylvester characterized Sidney’s descendants, but also as a Sidneian Muse—in America.

Happiness in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

Sir Philip Sidney is not commonly associated with a search for happiness or the use he made of concepts of happiness in his works. Yet, as this article seeks to show, he employed a rhetoric of happiness throughout. In particular, Sidney’s Arcadias – the Old Arcadia, which he finished in 1581, and the New Arcadia, the substantial rewriting which remained unfinished – are markedly different in their representations of and their reflections on happiness. While happiness is associated with the Arcadian state as a – potentially fatal – aim in the Old Arcadia from its very beginning, it is subordinated to a sterner and more violent discourse in the New Arcadia, for which after Sidney’s death other writers wrote diverse happy endings. This different treatment of happiness in the Arcadias is also discussed with a view to different manuscripts and print editions as well as to the power play at the Elizabethan court.

JEREMY HALADYNA (b. 1955)Two Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney (1981)

This chapter looks at Two Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney. In this powerful cycle, the American composer Jeremy Haladyna demonstrates dramatic flair, musical vitality, and a keen sense of colour. Though written in a modernist, atonal idiom, the work skilfully incorporates a taste of Olde England, which is highly appropriate to the texts. References to Elizabethan music and dance forms are subtly blended in, yet the resultant effect is not so much English as an intriguing and highly individual fusion of New and Old Worlds. The work blazes with passion: the first song is an angry, self-flagellating diatribe against personal weakness and the destructiveness of desire, and the second, in more contemplative vein, acknowledges the joys of spiritual reward, and Love’s eternal life-affirming force.

ON LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR: A Selection of Annotated Medieval and Renaissance English Texts for (Spanish) University Students

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.