Philip Sydney - A Double Life
Alan Stewart
Chatto & Windus £20, pp400
Buy it at BOL
The dustjacket of Alan Stewart's book, showing Philip Sidney's face as a head joined at the ear to its own mirror image, suggests that he has something wonderfully novel to say about the 'double' nature of his subject's life. Since a previous book was called Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England, I hoped to find that he had gazed less nervously than previous biographers have done at the profoundly 'grey area' of Sidney's sexuality.
The fussed-over darling of many older men, in England and on the Continent, Sidney was sometimes accused of 'unmanly' behaviour by these same men. The great statesman and diplomat Hubert Languet, who acted as his mentor during the three years of his Grand Tour, remarked after his only visit to England that 'the habits of your court seemed to me somewhat less manly than I could have wished'.
Stewart records an even more thought-provoking comment by Sir Francis Walsingham, who got to know Sidney during his momentous year in Paris, a year that reached a climax in the St Bartholomew's Day massacre, that the 19-year-old was 'in danger of a very lewd practice' because of the 'evil practice' of his personal servants. However, Stewart suggests only that Walsingham, wise and well-travelled diplomat though he was, 'instinctively distrusted' Sidney's servants because one of them was a denizened Italian, one a Welshman.
Nor is anything made of the mild oddity that in this period in which advantageous marriage was a virtually compulsory career move for any ambitious courtier, neither of Sidney's close courtier friends, Fulke Greville or Edward Dyer, ever took this step.
Indeed, like many other aspects of his extraordinary short life, testimony to Sidney's sexuality is scarcely examined, neither Aubrey's claim that he had an incestuous career with his sister, nor ample evidence in Sidney's own writings that his enthusiasm for the Ciceronian virtue of male friendship included an acknowledgement of physical attraction, as when the older of the two young heroes of the Arcadia is attracted to his cousin and best friend when he is dressed up as an Amazon.
Another possibility, I hoped, was that Stewart might have investigated the 'double' nature of Sidney's life in the sense of 'duplicity', perhaps giving Sidney and his huge network of political and diplomatic correspondents the sort of John Le Carré-wards make-over that Charles Nicholl devised for Christopher Marlowe in The Reckoning (1992).
Given Sidney's insistence on including within his circle both English Catholic exiles and continental Catholics, there might have been room for exploring the possibility that, as John Buxton once hinted, Sidney was some sort of spy, who used his charm and linguistic ability to win the trust of such men, in the hope of rewards at home. But this avenue isn't opened either.
Stewart's treatment of religious and political issues is disappointingly simplistic. Sidney is flatly described as coming from 'a prominent Protestant family', which hardly takes into account the fact that his parents had been flourishing courtiers during the reign of Mary Tudor, so flourishing, indeed, that baby Philip had Mary's consort Philip of Spain as his godfather.
Nor does Stewart face the implications of the undoubted facts that Sidney's father saved the life of the Jesuit Edmund Campion in 1571, hurrying him out of Ireland to avoid arrest; that Philip himself went out of his way to talk to Campion in Prague in 1577; and that his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, actively intervened to improve the conditions of Campion's imprisonment in the Tower in 1582. If the Queen repeatedly showed suspicion of the Sidney circle's true allegiance, either to her own authority or to the reformed religion, perhaps she had good reason.
It turns out that, as in the Edwardian music-hall song, 'You can't tell what's inside the pot by the label on the jam'. The concept of a 'double life' seems to have been an afterthought or marketing device. I spotted a single remark in the penultimate chapter that 'Philip Sidney now had a dual persona, soldier and poet', with reference to his patronage of Justus Lipsius. But if that is meant to support the 'doubleness' of the title, it is not convincing.
Much is made of Sidney's activities as a 'networker' - rather than 'soldier' - but virtually nothing of his writing. For instance, his slippery and much-debated poem on monarchy and tyranny is described as 'a fairly simple beast fable'. Even more astonishingly, Astrophel and Stella, probably the most intricate and formally sophisticated sonnet sequence ever written, 'appears... to be a simple unrequited love story', and the few quotations from it are treated as if they offer unproblematic biographical data.
Readers not already familiar with Sidney's creative writings will be sadly misled if they look here for some sense of their scope and tone. On the radical revision of the Arcadia, Stewart says that 'he had only got as far as redrafting the first two books, and was working on the third'. This gives no adequate sense either of the huge length of the revised Book Three or of its utter originality - as a piece of entirely new writing, exploring areas of human consciousness and frustration that were not to be touched again until Hamlet.
Stewart's own style is not that of a man who is sensitive to literary effect; it is slangy without being vivid. Minutes away from that fatal musket shot during the skirmish near Zutphen, Sidney is described as being 'unfazed'. Words like 'pragmatic' and 'ironic' regularly paper over vast chasms of thinking or thoughtlessness. Extensive footnotes set up expectations of scholarly rigour which are undermined by blunders such as the attribution of Sidney's Italian model Arcadia to 'Sansovino' rather than 'Sannazaro'.
This rather rushed-seeming survey unhappily endorses T.S. Eliot's claim that Sidney was a dead bore. First, he got around a lot and then died young in a foreign field. But why should we care?
