3 - Theory and Practice

Summary

Sidney's Defence is a fundamentally reactive text. It articulates Sidney's response both to the situation of writing in English in the later sixteenth century and to the emergence of his own ‘unelected vocation’ as a poet. C. S. Lewis famously described the mid-sixteenth century as the ‘Drab’ age of English poetry. After the initial promise shown by courtly makers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey - the enduring popularity of whom is attested by multiple reprintings of that seminal anthology of early Tudor verse, Richard Tottel's Miscellany (1557) - English poetry advanced relatively little in sophistication or inspiration. Attempts to apply the utilitarian emphasis of early Tudor humanism to English verse resulted in stolid, overtly didactic writing, frequently deploying heavyhanded allegory to revisit traditional moral commonplaces. (This is the reason many survey courses and anthologies on Renaissance poetry leap directly from Wyatt to Sidney and concentrate on later Elizabethan literature onwards.) As Sidney himself identifies, one of the only promising mid-century works was The Mirror for Magistrates (first printed 1559), a popular collection of verse tragedies. Following the opening anecdote of the Defence describing John Pietro Pugliano's advocacy of the art of horsemanship, Sidney admits that his own area of interest is far more contentious and problematic since poetry ‘from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughingstock of children’ (MW 212). As he later explains, contemporary practitioners of poetry seem to be driven more by a desire to see their work in print (and thus to subsist from their writing) than to further their knowledge of the poetic craft itself. There is little attention to the ‘artificial rules’ or ‘imitative patterns’ of poetry: to learning formal methods of poetic composition and copying models of good practice found in earlier authoritative texts (MW 242). The notion of a creative process characterized by conscious adherence to rules and imitation of previous writers seems anathema to our modern, post-Romantic ideas on authorial genius and originality (and the accompanying spectre of plagiarism), but for Renaissance writers and critics rules and conventions were fundamental to writing. Sidney perceives that the poor reputation of English poetry prior to 1580, when he began the Defence, is thus the result of a widespread failure to understand its form and function.