Week 06, Elizabeth, Sidney, Ralegh, Hariot

Notes on Elizabeth I, Sidney, Ralegh, and Hariot.

Notes on Queen Elizabeth I.

From “The Passage of Our Most Dread Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth through the City of London . . .”

688-90. Elizabeth became queen when she was 25 years old, in 1558, and reigned for 45 momentous years. It is always difficult to get a sense of the real person behind all the pageantry of rulership, but in this ceremonious description of Elizabeth’s coronation day some flashes of her personality seem to shine through: from the outset, the Queen was possessed of a strong will and a sharp intellect. She was erudite and clear-headed, and had a superb sense of the showmanship necessary to the maintenance of power. Her reported conduct on this important first day of her reign shows a keen understanding of the need to express thanks and loyalty to English commoners, a graceful manner in all public actions, and piety without ostentation in religion. This last-mentioned item was all the more necessary because of Mary’s strict rule from 1553-58—Elizabeth’s predecessor was determined to return England to the Catholic fold, and spared no severity in trying to achieve her goal. Elizabeth was a solid Protestant, but she tried to avoid the worst kinds of persecution against those who held to the Catholic faith, and seemed more or less satisfied to keep the lid on England’s simmering religious disagreements. Most of Elizabeth’s subjects no doubt were pleased with her ascension to the throne, as if a current of fresh air had just swept into the land.

From “A speech to a Joint Delegation of Lords and Commons, November 5, 1566.”

692-94. This excerpt is evidence of a remarkable will and intellect. Elizabeth, now around 33 years old, was under great pressure to marry and bear children, and thereby settle the difficult issue of who would succeed to the throne after her. But Elizabeth didn’t relish giving any of her power to a man, and never married as she said she would. Her words are indomitable, acerbic, and forbidding: she reminds those who would now advise her that some of them once took the side of Jane Grey’s faction against her and Mary, placing them both in great peril. The bottom line, Elizabeth says, is that she “will never be by violence constrained to do anything” and that she is no sheltered weakling but rather a shrewd and practical individual: “I thank God I am indeed endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place of Christendom” (694). When a prince speaks with such force and clarity, her subjects had best just pipe down and leave the matter of the succession to her.

“A Letter to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, February 10, 1586.”

696. Elizabeth is clearly enraged at her close companion Dudley, with whom she seems to have had a stormy relationship until his death from an illness in 1588 (the year in which England fended off the Spanish Armada that had been sent to invade the country). I recall watching the meticulous 1971 British miniseries Elizabeth R, starring Glenda Jackson as the Queen, and being struck by the paradox of Elizabeth’s reign: on the one hand, she laid claim to nearly absolute power and implied that she owed allegiance to none but God, but on the other, she found herself having to remind even her basest servants of the fact almost constantly. It must have been extremely difficult for her to keep her more aristocratic subjects and ministers in line, with so many of them trading on their relationship with her and jockeying for ever greater influence in her name.

“A Letter to Sir Amyas Paulet, August 1586” and “A Letter to King James VI of Scotland, Feb. 14, 1587.)

697-98. These two letters make for an interesting story: it’s entirely clear that Elizabeth had to have Mary executed; her royal counterpart in Scotland had apparently been conspiring to replace her on the throne of England, and she had become a rallying point for Elizabeth’s enemies. The only way to deal with such a threat is to remove the person who serves as its focus and its cause. And Elizabeth did order Mary executed—she signed the warrant herself. Now in a letter to James we find her denying that she gave the order, and even professing to be shocked at the outcome of the whole affair. As the editors point out, perhaps Elizabeth was so deeply troubled by having to execute a fellow queen that she washed her hands of the deed, and placed responsibility for it on others.

“Speech to the Troops at Tilbury.”

699-700. This speech was given at a critical period in English history, with Philip II of Spain’s great fleet of warships preparing to crush Elizabeth’s forces. She shows great courage in appearing on the site of the anticipated battle to cheer the people and soldiers. By this time, Elizabeth would have been in her mid-fifties and the “cult of the virgin Queen” was well established. It’s clear that as a ruler, she was still in her prime.

“The Golden Speech,” 1601.

701-03. This speech occurs towards the end of a long and eventful reign, and sums up Elizabeth’s time and the impression she made on her contemporaries. For the most part, we remember Elizabeth the way she wanted to be known and remembered, and this fact is a testament to her skills as a “public relations” expert in an age of treacherous power politics. Without the aid of modern communications technology, Elizabeth managed to craft and maintain the image of a strong, upright sovereign whose loyalty to England and its people was beyond doubt. No doubt she made her share of mistakes as a ruler, as anyone who governs for four and a half decades would, but I don’t think her image permanently suffered for them. “All the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare says, and nobody was more aware of it than Queen Elizabeth I: she knew that she needed to be more than competent, and that the people (and her counselors) must see her being supremely competent and strong in state matters. What shines through this letter is Elizabeth’s desire to be known as a populist in the truest sense of the word. But part of the speech involves a significant concession to the Parliament: it seems that Elizabeth’s granting of monopolies had been much abused by powerful grantees to the detriment of the people. This is probably not something Elizabeth would have been eager to deal with, money politics being the complicated affair that they are at all times. But Elizabeth was a wise Machiavel and seems to have known where to draw the line: she would not risk the permanent anger and dislike of her own people, so she accepted Parliament’s advice to do something about the matter.

General Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

Sidney was the kind of courtier of whom Baldesar Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier (1528), would have approved. Castiglione’s conduct book says that courtiers should serve as the visible symbol of their prince’s fitness to rule. If the king or queen is the “soul,” courtiers are the “body” that indicates the soul’s goodness. Courtiers behave and speak elegantly and gracefully; their manners are fine but not exaggerated; their words—and poems—are appropriate to the occasion; they make it obvious that the court is all about harmony. Sprezzatura, “easy grace of manner,” is the operative term in Castiglione’s book: the courtier must be able to do the most artful things in the most artless manner. This ideal does not amount to what we post-Romantics would call “originality.” Sidney’s own poetry is typical in that it accepts the conventions earlier poets have established. Take, for example, this sonnet from Astrophil and Stella:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win; and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows,
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.”

There is nothing original about this poem—the pain-wracked lover, his unapproachable love object, his poring over the tropes and inventions of earlier authors, and his pose of “looking into the heart” to write are all conventional. Nonetheless, the sonnet makes for a virtuoso performance that must have delighted the courtly “friends of Philip” who read it. Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry” is another such performance. It is a racy, conversational piece much like the dialogues between the courtly figures in Castiglione’s book, which, incidentally, was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. Still, Sidney must have labored intensely over his excellent critical treatise. He may be laughing when he enlists Aristotle and Plato in the pragmatic task of bolstering his own status as a courtier, poet, and critic. Even so, the “Apology” is a serious reply to a serious attack on the arts. Its author has been careful enough to follow the classical model for an oration: exordium (catchy beginning), narratio (setting forth of the issue), confirmatio (exploring arguments and solutions), refutatio (dealing with counter-arguments), and peroratio (stimulating conclusion). (See the guide entitled Renaissance Rhetoric in my Wiki Resource Gallery.) Moreover, behind the studied flippancy of Sidney’s piece lies the Renaissance man’s fusion of classical humanism and Christian theology, all to mount what we might call a “literacy campaign” for narrow-minded detractors of poetry.

Sidney’s essay is a response to the condemnation of art leveled by the Puritan (radical Protestant) author Stephen Gosson in his tract “The School of Abuse.” According to him and others of like mind, poetry is the work of the devil: it is not only a waste of time but the “mother of lies,” “nurse of abuse,” and altogether worthy of being banished, just as Plato said it should be. As Sidney says, “this is indeed much, if there be much truth in it.” Sidney’s task then, is to demolish Gosson’s claims by enlisting his own peculiar version of Aristotle and Plato and, what is more, the authority of the same Bible that Puritans themselves use to denigrate poetry.

In order to undermine the old Christian insistence that all pleasure is harmful, Sidney invokes an equally powerful reading of men’s duty in light of their own fallenness. It is true, says Sidney, that the faculties of the mind have grown dim and disorderly since Adam and Eve’s first sin. The senses, the will, and the intellect or “reason” no longer work in harmony as God intended them to. Man’s “erected wit” is no longer quite a match for his “infected will.” The Puritan charge is that pleasure of any kind, and especially the kind that poetry sanctions, is apt to minister to already deranged human faculties and lead men still further astray from God. One way to oppose this notion, of course, would be to invoke the authority of Augustinian and Aquinian sign theory. Sidney himself does not quite do this, but because he pursues a line of defense analogous to it, we should introduce a basic Christian theory of the sign. (Medieval speculation about the workings of language are more complex than any brief essay could begin to deal with, but a brief explanation should prove helpful.) In The Confessions, Chapter 5, Saint Augustine says that his religious struggles were partially resolved when he heard the eloquent words of Saint Ambrose. Augustine had long been trying to dissolve the remnants of Manicheanism in his intellect when he heard this orator speak in defense of Christianity. In the passage below, Augustine explains—somewhat uneasily, perhaps—that what first caught his attention (aside from Ambrose’s kindness toward him) was not so much the matter of the man’s speech as the fineness of his words. For one trained in classical rhetoric as Augustine was, such eloquence must have been a powerful attracting force:

To Milan I came, to Ambrose the Bishop, known to the whole world as among the best of men. . . . And I listened diligently to him preaching to the people, not with that intent I ought, but, as it were, trying his eloquence, whether it answered the fame thereof, or flowed fuller or lower than was reported; and I hung on his words attentively; but of the matter I was as a careless and scornful looker-on; and I was delighted with the sweetness of his discourse, more recondite, yet in manner less winning and harmonious, than that of Faustus. Of the matter, however, there was no comparison; for the one was wandering amid Manichean delusions, the other teaching salvation most soundly. But salvation is far from sinners, such as I then stood before him; and yet was I drawing nearer by little and little, and unconsciously. // For though I took no pains to learn what he spake, but only to hear how he spake . . . yet together with the words which I would choose, came also into my mind the things which I would refuse; for I could not separate them. And while I opened my heart to admit “how eloquently he spake,” there also entered “how truly he spake”; but this by degrees. (The Confessions. Trans. Edward Pusey. London: Macmillan, 1961. 76-77.)

Saint Augustine does not say that Ambrose’s fine speaking directly converted him. Rather, he says that his eloquence set him on the path towards full conversion to Christianity. The final turn was to come later when, in a spiritual crisis, Augustine heard a voice from heaven, opened up the Scriptures, and was converted. The point for us, however, is that “mere words”—words which he was not yet able fully to understand in their spiritual dimension—had the power to lead Augustine some way towards God, towards a truth higher than any obtainable by the Manichees’ sophistical arguments. In a very practical way, then, Augustine is illustrating for us the basic Christian idea of the sign’s power: “material” words do not in themselves arrive at or constitute truth, but with God’s grace, they have the power, if we read them rightly (and sometimes, apparently, even if we don’t), to lead us upward to spiritual truth. Signs point fallen humanity beyond the fallen material world, beyond the literal events and earthly conceptions they signify. This notion is so strongly held by later Christian theologians that they insist upon paying strict attention to the Bible’s literal, material statements. In the Summa Theologica, while defending the use of metaphor in the bible, Thomas Aquinas explains the need for such close attention succinctly: “[I]t is befitting Holy Scripture to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense” (Norton Anthology of Theoryand Criticism 244; hereafter NATC). To pretend otherwise would be prideful. This is the insight that seems to underlie Christian typology, too: the notion that concrete personages and real events in the Hebrew Scriptures prefigure the life and mission of Christ.

Sidney is a graceful courtier, poet, and critic, not a philosopher or theologian, so we need not go any farther with such theories. We can see his practicality as a defender of poetry by examining one of the best known passages in his essay. In the following selection, Sidney makes far-reaching claims about the poet’s power to imitate God’s original creative act, and promptly lowers his sights to a more pragmatic argument about the poet’s ability to produce “speaking pictures” both delightful and instructive to the reader:

Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [as nature], lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature . . . . so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done—neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. . . .

Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man’s wit with the efficacy of nature; but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who, having made man to his own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam, since our erect wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it. (957, 330 NATC).

Sidney begins by asserting the mind’s power to complete nature. In itself, this claim amounts to little more than a glorification of what any Elizabethan familiar with faculty psychology would have said about human “wit.” “Imagination,” one of the five inner wits (along with the common sense, or faculty of unifying data received from the external world; the fantasy, or faculty of apprehending objects of perception present to the senses; judgment, or the faculty of apprehending the relation between two objects of thought; and memory), has the capacity to form images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses. This is the faculty that can produce the wonderful images of “Demigods, Cyclopes, Furies, and such like” (957) that Sidney praises in poetry. From this relatively humble point about wit, Sidney moves to a more important one: when the poet creates a Cyrus that never was in history, he demonstrates the truth of Aristotle’s claim about poets’ ability to portray the universal in human action. Cyrus the man was an imperfect mortal, but the poet makes a universal Cyrus, an image that shapes many men’s lives. In Christian terms, we might infer that the poet grasps to some extent the principle whereby God made all that was good in Cyrus, and can repeat it, at least in his own limited way. From this claim it is not far to Sidney’s ultimate argument that the poet is divinely inspired, for “with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing . . . [nature’s] doings” (957). So inspired is this poet, claims Sidney, that his utterances almost (though not quite, obviously) put us in mind of the perfection that Adam and Eve must have known before they fell.

Immediately below this passage, however, Sidney says dismissively, “But these arguments will by few be understood, and by fewer granted” (957). This statement hardly amounts to a true dismissal—it is a rhetorical ploy designed to highlight the very thing one alleges is being passing over (as when a classical orator says, “I shall not mention my opponent’s many treasons”). Even so, Sidney’s turn of phrase is important—he is announcing that while his largest claims for the poet are true, his real aim is to advance something even the Puritans cannot deny without appearing arrogant: the idea that “Poesy therefore is . . . a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (958). Like Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier, Sidney wants to make his audience comfortable again after having entertained a thesis too otherworldly for their sensibilities. Just as the courtiers of Urbino see no need for Bembo to argue his way from earth-bound love to the realm of pure spirit, Sidney’s own audience may have exerted its pressure on him a priori to make his case for poetry within the context of moral utility.

Most of Sidney’s argument fits very well within this moral context. Poets must excel in “feigning notable images of virtues, vices, and what else” (959). They must imitate the images of virtue that their “wit” is able to apprehend, and the result will be a “speaking picture” that delights viewers in order to move them to emulate the virtues presented. The idea behind this doctrine that we are moved to virtuous action by pleasurable images is something like this argument: virtue is self-evident; God has in fact planted in all of us the capacity to understand what virtue is. The problem is that thanks to our own willful destruction through “original sin” of the harmony between our faculties and of our relation to god and nature, we no longer want to behave virtuously. We post-lapsarians must, therefore, be treated somewhat like children who need a few lumps of sugar to sweeten what has become to us the bitter medicine of virtue.

Against the narrow-minded Puritanism of Stephen Gosson and his followers, Sidney argues that we must involve the senses and the “infected will” (957) if we are to lead a life of virtuous action. The very things that are most corrupted by the fall must be constantly and carefully exercised if imperfect humans are to keep to the path of right doing. Because the senses are apt to lead Christians astray, poets must present them with images of virtue. If they portray evil now and then, they must do so with a view toward delighting us by the spectacle of seeing it punished. The truth that Christ brought, Sidney might say, is within every human breast, but still, people must be moved to do what they know is right.

As for the craftsman best fitted to affect human passions, the poet, says Sidney, is our only choice. Historians cannot hope to succeed in convincing the fallen to reform their ways, since they are bound by the rules of the profession to portray a great number of proofs that God does not always reward virtue with earthly happiness. Likewise, the philosopher can do no more than speak to people’s clouded intellects in the cloudiest of terms; he offers merely “precepts,” the vain abstractions and word-juggling of the Medieval Schoolmen. Philosophers may teach us what virtue is, says Sidney, but they can’t inspire us to act on our knowledge. They can’t move our wills to perform good deeds. That capacity of the poet’s to move us is vital to Sidney’s whole defense of art: the aim of life is morally right action, and it seems that delightful poetry is the very best means of moving us to act rightly. The poet moderates between philosophy and history by combining both abstract precept and concrete example into one delightful, powerful image. This is the argument Sidney makes from pages 961-63 (339-42 NATC).

Before he gets halfway through his essay, Sidney has already made a good case for the pragmatic, moral value of poetry. But what about Gosson’s condemnation of poetry and the theater? Might there be something to it after all? Surely any Elizabethan audience could cite instances of plays in which blood flows freely and wicked deeds are rewarded. (Our modern reverence for Shakespeare makes us forget that Elizabethan plays contained their share of senseless violence.) Gosson’s argument is a classic example of the “contagion theory of art” that we find as early as Plato: bad art corrupts the spectator or reader. Sidney’s way of dealing with such diseases in the body of art is to argue that “man’s wit abuseth poetry” and not the other way around. (omitted in our selection, would be on 968) A man may just as easily kill his father with a sword, says Sidney, as defend his country with it. The fault, therefore, lies not in the instrument but in the agent who uses it. As for the potentially bad effects of immoral art, those occasional effects, if indeed any can be cited, only show how powerful a means of influencing people art is. The point is not to banish poetry from Christian society but rather to use it carefully and to moral ends. Besides, says Sidney, Plato banished Greek poetry for the most part because it told lies about the gods. But that isn’t much of a problem in Renaissance England—the false gods in whose name Plato banished poets have themselves given way to the Christian God. One further thought: sometimes modern critics react to crude, Gosson-like attempts to censor the arts with an equally extreme formalist claim that engaging with art has (and can have) absolutely no effect on how people conduct themselves. Sidney’s moralist argument actually does a better job of throttling Gossonism than such defensiveness: to say that art can never have much of an effect on how we live our lives is to suggest that it is little more than frivolous entertainment. Surely the best art is much more than that!

In his “Apology” Sidney tries to destroy his political and artistic enemies by playing one strain of Christianity against another. He opposes the tendency in Christian thought to claim that all pleasure is harmful with the notion that since men cannot be trusted to use their reasoning faculty in the right way, they have to be lulled into it, moved to want to know and act on their knowledge, by delightful images. The Puritans, besides their unreasonable opposition to the Queen, are so sure about the means to morality that they don’t know their place as fallen humans. They think that everything—and especially art—has to be held to strictly literal standards of truth. As Sidney sees them, Puritans are literal readers and bad Christian psychologists. The problem with the view of strict moralists like Gosson, implies Sidney, is that humans first fell by misusing their will and their senses. In their arrogant righteousness, Gosson’s partisans have forgotten that they are fallen and in need of constant correction and spiritual exercise. Their narrow-mindedness makes them lazy, and their distrust of pleasure cuts them off from the best source of virtuous teaching. It simply is not in the office of fallen humanity to be so certain about its capacity to arrive at spiritual truth by direct, rational means, whether we are speaking of art or any other human endeavor. When Puritan readers forget this fact, they become like the critic who is outraged at the mention of Aesop’s talking animals: “well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of” (968, 349 NATC). So Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” is in part a literacy campaign for Puritans. English history suggests that his supporters did not always manage to keep the upper hand in defending poetry from Gossonite do-goodism. When the middle-class Puritans came to power under Cromwell, they went so far as to close the theaters down and, if I recall correctly, to prevent poor citizens from playing at nine-pins on Sundays. The Puritan-tending Milton’s authorship of the great defense of an English free press, “Areopagitica,” may mitigate this severity for us, but it did not prevent the beleaguered British from toppling the Cromwellians in favor of Charles II in the Restoration of 1660.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry.”

956/330-31 NATC. Sidney follows Aristotle on imitation, with nature as the source. But while other disciplines are limited by their subject matter and must work with what already is, for better or for worse, the poet’s intellect escapes such narrow ties. The poet conjures for us our Golden World beginnings; he is the “Wizard of Ought.” This emphasis on the poet’s creative power is pre-Romantic: Sidney is not saying that the poet’s mind takes on godlike powers to create an independent reality. Rather, he’s using faculty psychology to argue that the poet’s wit has a freer range than other people’s, so the poet can go beyond imitating nature. And by “wit” he refers mainly to the imagination, fantasy, and memory. Those are three of the inner wits, and their function is to process and recall sensory data. (The other two are judgment and sensus communis.) This is a much more mechanical and passive idea about imagination than we will find in Romantic poetics, where the mind is more original and creative than combinatory and receptive.

957/331 NATC. Sidney also follows Aristotle in saying that poetry gives access to universal patterns: the poet makes not a particular Cyrus but a universal Cyrus, a “speaking picture” of a virtuous king. The poet grasps the principle by which nature made the original Cyrus, so he can complete Nature’s work by recognizing the eternal Form immanent in that material Cyrus, giving us a pattern of moral conduct to imitate. Sidney says that our faculties encompass nature’s workings, and the poet’s work therefore honors God the first “maker” of the original Cyrus.

957/331 NATC. Erected Wit / Infected Will. Here is the faculty psychology behind Sidney’s defense. The point is simple: when humankind fell, the will, appetite, and reason went out of sync, so that we are constantly being pulled away from virtuous conduct by our lowest appetites. In order for virtuous behavior to reign, our will must be properly aligned with God’s plan for us. Since we are “misaligned” in these latter days, we need pleasing patterns to realign our will so that it can let reason work as it should, and action happen as it ought.

958-59/331-32 NATC. The three kinds of poet: David, philosophical poets such as Lucretius, and poets who “imitate” only “what may be and should be.” These latter are the ones we need today. Sidney says that what constitutes a poet is moral purpose—the poet imitates in order to deliver universal moral lessons. Verse form helps us remember poetry, enhancing its effect. Sidney begins making distinctions between the poet, the philosopher, and historian by reminding us of the following moral purpose: “the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” And he further describes the body as a dungeon imprisoning the mind. In sum, a medium that appeals to the senses leads us beyond the senses; this accords with Augustine and Aquinas.

959-63/334-40 NATC. Only the poet teaches in a sufficiently concrete and delightful manner. Historians remain tied to things as they really happen in an unjust world, so imitating a corrupt world’s ways may further corrupt us. Philosophers teach abstractly, and cannot move us to virtuous action. Poetry moves us to learn and to behave well, so we will put our learning to good use. Poetry mediates between abstraction and materiality, sense and understanding; it is medicine for the fallen, taking us back to first principles and possibilities, and to causal patterns.

967-68/348-51 NATC. The charges laid at poetry’s door: 1) there are better uses of time; 2) poets lie; 3) poetry is morally corruptive; 4) Plato banished poets. As for 2, the poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Besides, people don’t take what they see on a stage or read in a fable as literally true. We know how to keep our distance from make-believe and yet take it seriously enough to profit by it morally, while truth-narratives like history may mislead us. Sidney may recognize here what Aristotle doesn’t in The Poetics: history requires invention and emplotment. Poetry, at least, doesn’t make false promises or bogus systems of abstraction. It mediates between sense and spirit for fallen humanity. As for the third charge, says Sidney, any instrument can be dangerous if misused—if it couldn’t hurt someone, it wouldn’t be worth much. So “man’s wit abuseth poetry,” and not the other way around.

Editions: Abrams, M. H. et al, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Package 1 (Vols. ABC) ISBN 0-393-92833-0. The selection is from Vol. B. Also: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Page-by-Page Notes on Sir Walter Ralegh.

917-18. In “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” the female speaker sees beyond the Shepherd’s pastoral annihilation of time—everything is subject to change and to the vicissitudes of time and opinion. She understands that his high words are situational. This poem winks at pastoral of Marlowe’s sort, and calls its idyllic bluff.

918-19. “What is Our Life?” This is a dark poem featuring the common metaphor that “all the world’s a stage.” The only thing we do “in earnest” is the one thing that we can’t really experience, in the common understanding of that term: we die once and for all.

918. “Ralegh to His Son.” Ralegh’s poem is more threatening and bitterer than Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 to “the fair young man,” which begins “They that have power to hurt, and will do none…” (1070). Ralegh’s poem seems designed to frighten the addressee into behaving well and not, as in Shakespeare’s sonnet, to encourage sensitive introspection.

919-20. “The Lie.” There’s religious piety and privileging of soul over body to be found in Ralegh, but in this poem, the escape from mortal life is not an untroubled one. The speaker couldn’t act on his own advice during his life, so he passes it on to those who will survive him. Is the price of honesty death? On the whole, Ralegh’s poetry is more cynical and declarative than the experimental style of Sir Thomas Wyatt. In “The Lie,” Ralegh denounces the gap between what people should do in their various offices and what they actually do; the gap between what they say and what actually motivates their actions. At the heart of everything lies corrupt self-interestedness, the very opposite of charitable dealings with our fellow human beings. Things and activities are turned from their proper purposes.

921. “Farewell, False Love.” This poem professes a need to renounce “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” but of course (as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129), this is the hardest thing to do, particularly in the corrupted courtly setting of Ralegh’s experience. Ralegh always seems to understand the Petrarchan conventions (otherworldly, unattainable love objects, extreme passions, etc.) as posing and game-playing. There’s more bitterness in his love poetry than delight. The extremes lead to philosophical reflections on death and decay.

921-22. “Methought I Saw the Grave Where Laura Lay.” Ralegh was a friend and patron to Edmund Spenser, and he describes his epic dedicated to Queen Elizabeth as the summation of the Petrarchan and chivalric literary tradition.

922-23. “Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk.” In this exchange between Nature and Love, Nature creates what Love has asked her to create, but this new being has “a heart of stone.” Then Time comes in and destroys what has been created. As usual, Ralegh credits nothing with permanence or comforting softness: the heart’s desires are set against cold, hard reality, and the latter is bound to win sooner or later. The medieval Christian strain of melancholy is very strong in Ralegh’s poetry: it’s as if he’s determined to invoke the strongest feelings only to tell us not to take them too seriously because, after all, nothing lasts.

923-26. Guiana. This is promotional literature similar to what we can find in Hariot. Ralegh describes Guiana as something like El Dorado, a new world where people can “live large,” as we would say, rather than be frustrated in Europe by the law of diminishing returns, where even a prodigious helping of ambition and courage has come to yield only the pittance Hamlet accords the men who fight for Fortinbras in Poland:

Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell…. (4.4.46-52)

Here in Guiana, men from the tired Old World can renew themselves in a land of endless promise of gain in any area of life we would care to mention: commercial, military, political, etc. Commerce takes center stage in Ralegh’s attempt to convince Elizabeth to support his colonial scheme.

Page-by-Page Notes on Thomas Hariot.

939. Hariot says in his Report on Virginia that the main goal is to instill “fear and love” in the native population. The tone is Machiavellian: inspiring love is good, but if that’s not attainable, fear will serve the purpose. The best combination would be love and fear. Hariot is brutally frank about the possibilities, and makes little attempt to dissemble about his goal of subjugating the natives.

940-41. Hariot points out that the natives of Roanoke Island are by no means lacking in ingenuity, which, he thinks, is promising because it may allow European settlers to “bring them to civility” and to the Christian religion. He describes Algonquins’ religion—they are polytheists who believe in an afterlife.

942-43. Hariot says that the European visitors’ technology convinced the natives that they were almost gods. Ominously, whenever the visitors left a town where they had not met with kind treatment, the natives began to die. This effect—no doubt the effect of something like smallpox—Hariot again suggests is promising in that the natives may soon be brought to love and obey.

On the whole, Hariot’s selection is clearly intended as what we might call promotional literature. His assumption is apparently that European ways are so obviously superior and so impressive to the native Algonquins as to make assimilation of them very likely. With hindsight, of course, we know things didn’t go so smoothly; the first few colonies set up on Roanoke did not fare well at all, and the subsequent history of European settlement in what would become “the Colonies” is anything but smooth or painless.