LECTURE NOTES: Does Art Matter? Renaissance Humanism & Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy

According to the Introduction to "The Sixteenth Century" in our Norton Anthology, one of the main emphases (or shall we say, symptoms?) of the Italian Renaissance was a new focus on individual self-assertion, the worth of human life in this world, and the remarkable malleability of the individual. Whereas the creative revolutions of the Italian Renaissance took place mainly within the visual and architectural arts, in England (from Henry VII’s reign onward) they mainly took place in a new spiritual and intellectual orientation known as humanism. In England and elsewhere, humanism was bound up with the struggles over the purposes of education and curriculum reform, and many humanists, such as Thomas More and Erasmus, were critical of what they regarded as a hopelessly narrow and outmoded intellectual culture based on scholastic hair-splitting and a dogmatic adherence to the philosophy of Aristotle, and educational programs in England began to shift their focus from training men for the church to the general acquisition of "literature," in the sense both of literacy and of cultural knowledge.

Here, then, we can glimpse the beginnings of what might be called an awareness of the importance of a national, English culture, which would ultimately lead, in the late 19^th century, to the establishment in colleges and universities of what many of you are majoring in today: British and American literature studies. Nevertheless, there is still in this period in England a real reverence for classical learning (Latin and Greek) over the study of more native cultures; at the same time, courtier-artists like Sidney are beginning to see the need for the cultivation of a native literary tradition. Note the following quotation from the famous schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster (ca. 1530-1611), who taught the poet Edmund Spenser:

"Is it not indeed a marvelous bondage, to become servants to one tongue for learning’s sake the most of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue, with the gain of more time? our own bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom, the Latin tongue remembering us of our thralldom and bondage? I love Rome, but London better; I favor Italy, but England more; I honor the Latin, but I love the English."

The two impulses illustrated by Mulcaster above—humanist reverence for classical literature and English pride in the vernacular language—gave rise to many distinguished translations throughout the century: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding, Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano by Sir Thomas Hoby, and Montaigne’s Essais by John Florio, just to name a few. Let us remind ourselves, too, that this was not the first time in England that such impulses led to the English translation of both classical literature as well as native literature that had been originally written in Latin—in the 9^th century, King Alfred initiated a program whereby many works seen as important to the Anglo-Saxons (i.e., the Vulgate Bible, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Aelfric’s Lives of the Saints, among others) were translated into Old English. Therefore, even in the so-called "Dark Ages," the importance of a "national culture" and education in the classics was perceived and acted upon.

As the Introduction to "The Sixteenth Century" in our Norton Anthology also tells us, Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. In 1512, Erasmus published De copia, which taught the arts of "copiousness"—verbal richness—in discourse. The work provides, by way of example, 144 different ways of saying "Thank you for your letter." Thanks to De copia and other treatises like it, prolixity and verbal self-display were encouraged in Elizabethan culture. Furthermore, Elizabethans had a taste for elaborate ornament in language as in clothing, jewelry, and furniture. In his Defense, Sidney was obviously at pains to show off his copiousness; additionally, he followed the strict patterns of a classical, Latinate-type rhetorical oration. To see exactly how such a classical oration is structured, see Silva Rhetoricae ("The Forest of Rhetoric"). For those of you who are more ambitious, you might think about how Sidney’s Defense follows the outline of a classical argument—exordium, narratio, confirmatio, refutatio, peroratio—provided on the Silva Rhetoricae website.

Sidney’s Defense is somewhat remarkable in that it represents a defense of a vocation that cannot, strictly speaking, be yet called a "profession"—in Elizabethan times, according to our Anthology ("The Sixteenth Century"), there was no such thing as an author’s copyright, no royalties paid to an author according to the sales of his book, and virtually no notion that anyone could make a decent living through the writing of literature. Writers sold their manuscripts to the printer or bookseller outright at what we would consider ridiculously low prices, and freedom of the press did not exist. In addition, royal regulations and censorship of printing were quite stringent and heavy. It was therefore so potentially dangerous to put pen to paper and so unprofitable that it is a wonder that any serious writing was published at all.

The Defense (probably written in 1579 but not published until after Sidney’s death in 1595) was likely a response to Stephen Gosson’s small book, The School of Abuse (1579), which was dedicated to Sidney. Gosson, a playwright turned moralist, attacked poets and actors from a narrowly Puritan perspective that called into question the morality of "fiction-making." According to Gosson, poetry is the work of the devil, "the mother of lies," and the "nurse of abuse." Gosson also reminds his readers that even Plato banished the poets from his ideal Republic. Therefore, as Al Drake reminds us in his "Philip Sidney Study Guide," Sidney had the daunting task of demolishing Gosson’s claims "by enlisting his own peculiar version of Aristotle and Plato and, what is more, the authority of the same bible that the Puritans themselves have used to destroy poetry."

AESTHETICS: the branch of philosophy that provides a theory of the beautiful and of the fine arts (i.e., Aristotle’s On Poetics); the theories and descriptions of the psychological response to beauty and artistic experiences; the criticism of taste

We do not possess the leisure nor the time to exhaust everything Sidney’s Defense has to offer. Therefore, let us at least consider the following points the most important to keep in mind for the purposes of this class:

I. Sidney begins (NAEL, pp. 934-35) with the classical rhetorical device, LITOTES (self-deprecation, deliberate understatement--from the Greek "litos," literally meaning "small"); this is why he calls the officer of the stables he met in Vienna his "master" (because he was so skilled in his praise of horses Sidney almost wished he could be a horse), which is ironic because Sidney is a nobleman who naturally outranks a stable-master; further, Sidney calls poetry "poor" and "silly," and refers to his own defense of it as "pitiful." This is what we call the "smoke and mirrors" of the rhetorical game—have you ever seen that movie where the man walks into a pool hall, and says, "aw shucks, I ain’t never played pool before; I bet it would be kind of fun, if y’all might let me play and all," and then he takes everyone’s money who’s willing to bet against him because, in fact, he’s Minnesota Fats? That’s LITOTES in action. [Elizabeth I also uses the device of litotes in her Tilbury speech when she refers to herself as "weak and feeble"]

II. Before making ORIGINAL claims in any argument, a smart rhetorician ALWAYS defers first to AUTHORITY. That’s why Sidney launches the argument proper (pp. 935-39) by referring to the tradition in Roman culture of the poet as vates—prophet, seer, and diviner—and then, in a somewhat brilliant cross-cultural move, links that tradition to David, the author of the Christian Psalms. He then also refers to the Greek tradition of the poet as "maker" (poiein = "to make"), and then holds up the "maker-poet" as the producer of the ONLY human art that is not completely dependent upon nature as a principal object. Further, the poet, "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, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like" (p. 936). Finally, nature’s "world is brazen, the poet only delivers a golden" (p. 937). What Sidney is doing here is trying to counteract the notion that fact is always better than fiction, for the world is ultimately "fallen" and corrupt, and art is about perfection and the beautiful. In an even more sophisticated move, he argues that good fiction can actually affect the factual world in socially positive ways, which is why he writes that poetry "worketh, not only to make a Cyrus [in othter words, to create the fictional persona of Cyrus], which has been a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him" (p. 937). The world, therefore, is fallen and corrupt, and the poet reaches through that world to both grasp and "picture forth" the more perfect, ideal world and ideal persons, and those ideal persons become models for us to follow in our real lives. The artist gives us heroes and ideals to live by, and he does all of this with his imagination, which brings us to:

III. In the Elizabethan conception (based on classical ideas about psychology), the mind (or intellect) contained five "inner wits":

• IMAGINATION (capacity to form images or concepts of external objects not present to the senses)
• COMMON SENSE (capacity to unify data received from the external world)
• FANTASY (capacity to apprehend objects of perception present to the senses)
• JUDGMENT (the capacity to apprehend the relation between two objects of thought)
• MEMORY

Keep these in mind when reflecting upon one of the most important claims in Sidney’s Defense—that the poet "goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit" (p. 936). This is a pivotal moment in the argument, because Sidney is making a very bold claim here and giving to the poet a very wide license and scope of power that many of his contemporaries might have viewed as dangerous. Sidney is basically asserting that, yes, the poet makes things up (in other words, is a liar), yet, after all, didn’t Aristotle himself say that poetry was an "art of imitation," therefore a "counterfeiting," BUT with a specific educational purpose—"to teach and delight"? (p. 937). Sidney would not have understood our modern conception of "art's for art's sake," which brings us to:

IV. A well-crafted argument always meets its opponent halfway—makes concessions, in other words. Therefore, Sidney agrees with the Puritans that men are inherently fallen and wicked (i.e., possess an "infected will"), yet it is only through this "infected will" (which inclines, naturally, toward vice and pleasure), that the poet will be able to push his listeners and readers toward the "higher good," toward "the divine consideration of what may and should be" (p. 938). In other words, by delighting his audience with his images—whether those images are virtuous or evil—the poet moves the audience to desire to be better than they are. According to Sidney, the very faculty (or passion)—desire—that moves men to only want to please themselves, can also be utilized to draw men’s "degenerate souls" toward a non-self-centered set of virtues. And this is why, in the middle part of the Defense (pp. 939-43) Sidney sets up the poet as the "monarch" of all the sciences (and here I catch the later echo of the Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who once wrote that poets were "the unacknowledged legislators of the world"). The poet, in Sidney’s determination, is therefore better and more useful than the historian, who is bound by the reality (the unalterable facts) of a human history in which the virtuous are not always rewarded and the evil often triumph, and he is better than the philosopher who offers so many dense abstractions and riddles and generalities that it becomes almost painful to learn how to be good. The philosopher "giveth the precept" and the historian "the example" (p. 941); by contrast, the poet "doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect in to the way, as will entice any man to enter into it." In other words, the poet is an entertainer who wraps his moral message in "a cluster of grapes, that full of that taste, you may long to pass further" (p. 942). And finally, in what one of your fellow classmates, Adam W., called his favorite line in the essay, "For who will be taught, if he be not moved with desire to be taught?" (p. 942) As an example of how this actually would work, a little later in the essay, while discussing the various "kinds" (genres) of poetry, Sidney explains how tragedy is one of the most "high and excellent" kinds because it "openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants" and "teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are built" (pp. 944-45). Reflect upon how this works in Hamlet, when Claudius (who has murdered Hamlet’s father) only really begins to worry about his own damnation after seeing a dramatic representation of his crime in the play Hamlet puts on, The Mouse-trap.

V. One of the most subtle counter-arguments Sidney makes to Gosson’s and other Puritan writers’ claim that poets are "principal liars," is that the poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth" (p. 947). Now, this is a tricky moment in the Defense, for Sidney has already spent a good deal of time defending the creative, unfettered imagination of the poet (the poet as "counterfeiter"—hence, a liar), and now he is basically claiming that the poet never actually expects his audience to really believe that the pictures he conjures are real, for they are merely and obviously images of "what should be" (p. 948) as opposed to "what is"—yet, hasn’t Sidney also argued that it is the very "sweetness" (i.e., the seeming realness of that cluster of grapes) of the images the poet offers that draws the audience in—seduces them, really—and leads them to a higher plane of awareness? But what Sidney is also saying is, "come on—of course we suspend disbelief when entering the worlds created in literature, as children do when listening to a story, but everyone knows that a play is really just a play, and not reality; therefore, anyone who believes that what they are seeing on stage is real and is harmed somehow—on a moral level—by believing that, is a fool."

Ultimately, in one sense, Sidney is trying to have his cake and eat it, too, for he wants his audience to believe that, on the one hand, the artist draws pictures and images that, because they represent an ideal "golden" world, are more "real" than anything the physician, historian, astronomer, and philosopher can tell us about who and where we are, exactly, in the cosmos, yet, on the other hand, the poet "nothing affirms." Can both be true?

It is worthwhile spending some time, I think, really reflecting upon what is probably the central theme of the Defense—that great art both entertains us with its beauty as well as leads us to be better persons (and here Sidney is really echoing what classical writers like Horace had claimed before him, yet the idea still and always will need to be defended). Which artworks might we assign to this category—not only from the Renaissance, but also from other periods and our own contemporary culture? Do we have, today, in our culture, the kind of "poetry" (i.e., representational art, whether it be actual poetry, fiction, film, painting, etc.) that Sidney is constructing—building an aesthetics for—in his essay? I can think of some works that I would nominate—Sophocles’ Antigone, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s King Lear, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Dickens’s Great Expectations, the poetry of John Donne, Ranier Marie Rilke, Pablo Neruda, and Czeslaw Milosz, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the paintings of Stanley Spencer, Mark Rothko, and Anselm Kiefer, the films of John Sayles, Lars von Trier, and Krystof Kieslowski. I could name a lot of other artists and works I admire for the reasons Sidney outlines in his Defense, and I even tremble when I think of what these works often demand of us (how they ask us, literally, how to be in this world), but I am also often troubled by the answers I know lurk behind the questions: is the world a better place because we have allowed the arts to flourish and have given artists great license to explore the "zodiacs of their own wits"? Because we love and revere certain texts and read those texts together in universities such as this one, have we become better persons? Do tyrants really shake with remorse when they see themselves in a play such as Shakespeare’s Richard III? If great art truly lifts our "degenerate souls" to a higher plane of enlightenment, how, then, are we to live—can one really live in such a place?