THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

dignity of the modern gentleman poet by the values and social standing of a princely court. The ‘courtly makers’ of
Henry VIII’s reign, ’of whom Sir Thomas Wyat ... & Henry Earle of Surrey were the two chieftaines’, had been
succeeded by ‘Noble men and Gentlemen of her Majesties owne servantes, who have written excellently well’ (among
whom he includes the conspicuously gentlemanly figures of Sidney, Sir Walter Ralegh, and Sir Fulke Greville).
Puttenham’s carefully developed and scholarly thesis is consequently steeped in the adulatory oils which lubricated
the machinery of the Elizabethan state. In the past, he asserts, it was proper that ‘all good and vertuous persons
should for their great well doings be rewarded with commendation, and the great Princes above all others with honors
and praises’. If the ancient poets were ‘the trumpetters of all fame’, so Puttenham, as the definer of the nature of
poetry and an aspirant poet himself, takes the figure of Queen Elizabeth as the focus of his modern enterprise. When
he lists ‘the most commended writers in our English Poesie’ he concludes by trumpeting forth the writerly talents of
‘our soveraigne Lady, whose learned, delicate, noble Muse, easily surmounteth all the rest that have written before her
time or since, for sense, sweemesse and subtilltie’. Not only does the Queen exceed ‘all the rest of her most humble
vassalls’ as a practitioner, she is also the subject of his model anagrams and of three of the examples of the
pictogrammatic poems, or ‘figures’, that he prints in his second book (‘Of Proportion’). The Queen’s ‘most noble and
vertuous nature’ is seen as resembling a spire in a taper-shaped lyric; she is compared to a crowned pillar in a
columnar poem; and the shape of a ‘Roundell or Spheare’ is discovered to reflect essential qualities of the nature of
God, the World, and the Virgin Monarch (‘All and whole and ever alone, | Single sans peere, simple, and one’).
In addition to its insistent and sometimes over-ingenious courtliness, Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie also
attempts to establish codes of literary good manners. It offers a definition of a canon of acceptable poets: Chaucer and
Gower (‘both of them I suppose Knightes’) provisionally pass muster, but Skelton, ‘a rude rayling rimer’ and a
‘buffon’, is banished from the respectable ranks of those more recent ‘courtly makers’ whose work Puttenham holds
up for admiration. The main emphasis of the second and third books of his treatise falls upon attempts to define and
explain genre, form, metre, and imagery. Like many later prescriptive literary theorists, he reveals little actual
sensitivity to the material with which he deals, and, while making a pretence of disliking ‘schollerly affectation’ and
the ‘peevish affectation of words out of the primative languages’, he attempts to dazzle his readers with displays of
cleverness, with illustrative diagrams, and with a plethora of Greek definitions.
The overall tone of Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie seems easy and
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conversational in comparison to Puttenham’s portentousness. Sidney begins, offhandedly enough, with an anecdote
derived from his embassy to Germany during which he encountered one of the Emperor’s Italian courtiers. This
anecdote allows him to make play both with his Christian name (Philip, the ‘lover of horses’) and with his knightly
profession (‘Hee sayd, Souldiours were the noblest estate of mankinde, and horsemen the noblest of Souldiours ... I
think he would have perswaded mee to wishe my selfe a horse’). This witty opening gambit serves to alert us to
Sidney’s fascination with words and to his unpretentious projection of himself into his writings. As he gradually
develops the strands of his argument in The Defence of Poesie, he avoids confronting his readers with what might
pass as proofs delivered de haut en bas by instead bidding them to question the authority of those practitioners who
have allowed poetry to descend to ‘the laughing-stocke of children’. His treatise is shaped both by a need to reply to
the case put by Plato and his fellow mysomousoi or Poet-haters, and by an evident pleasure in displaying his own
enthusiasms and observations. If Sidney seems prepared to admit that Plato’s intolerance has a validity when directed
against sacred and philosophical verse - the poetry most likely to corrode or misrepresent ideas - he is at his most
relaxed and eloquent when he expounds the counterbalancing virtues of a form of writing which he sees as primarily
offering ‘delight’. The philosopher, Sidney argues, teaches obscurely because he addresses himself to ‘them that are
already taught’; the poet, by contrast, is ‘the foode for the tenderest stomacks’. When poetry, and lyric poetry above
all, gives delight it also breeds virtue. To illustrate his point he variously cites examples of men finding ‘their harts
mooved to the exercise of courtesie’ by reading medieval romances and of Hungarian soldiers rejoicing in ‘songes of
their Auncestours valour’. He also freely admits how much he was touched by a military ballad sung by a blind fiddler
‘with no rougher voyce then rude stile’. When, however, he turns to bemoaning the relative dearth of refined modern
love-poetry in English, he speaks as feelingly of amorous verse as he had of the martial, significantly beginning with a
chivalric image: ‘But truely many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistable love, if I were a Mistres,
would never perswade mee they were in love; so coldely they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read Lovers
writings ... then that in truth they feele those passions.’ For Sidney, despite his merriment and the calculated
gentlemanly nonchalance of his final address to his readers as those that have had ‘the evill lucke to reade this inckewasting
toy of mine’, poetry has to be taken seriously because it releases the earthbound mind by elevating and
inspiriting it. True poetry draws from the experience of sinful humankind, but it ultimately offers both a vision of
freedom and an injection of herculean strength, both a celebration of mortal love and the hope of immortality.
In many ways, the arguments posited in The Defence of Poesie are qualified, amplified, and justified by the body