THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Sidney had aimed at a dextrous solidity of expression in the versions of the first forty-three Psalms that he had
completed, Mary’s free translations of the remaining 107 suggest a metrical, lexical, phrasal, and metaphorical
variety which is quite her own. In Psalm 58, for example, she rejoices in the justification of the faithful and appeals
for wrath to descend on the heads of the un-Godly:
Lord, crack their teeth: Lord, crush these lions jaws,
So let them sink as water in the sand.
When deadly bow their aiming fury draws,
Shiver the shaft ere past the shooter’s hand.
So make them melt as the dis-housed snail
Or as the embryo, whose vital band
Breaks ere it holds, and formless eyes do fail
To see the sun, though brought to lightful land.
In the urgent plea for delivery from those that persecute ‘poor me, Poor innocent’ in Psalm 59 she presents a vivid
picture of her foes prating and babbling ‘void of fear, | For, tush, say they, who now can hear?’. She expands her
version of the terse Psalm 134 into an hour-glass-shaped hymn of praise which opens up finally to a vision of an allcreating
God ‘Whom Sion holds embowered, | Who heaven and earth of nought hath raised’. Where Coverdale speaks
of taking ‘the wings of the morning’ in Psalm 139, Sidney asks the sun to lend ‘thy lightful flightful wings’. Where
Coverdale had soberly declared that he was ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and that ‘though I be made secretly and
fashioned beneath in the earth, Thine eyes did see my substance’, she delights in the idea of God as a careful
craftsman knowing ‘how my back was beam-wise laid’, seeing the ‘raft’ring of my ribs’ and the covering human flesh
in ‘brave embroid’ry fair arrayed’ like a divine couturier working away ‘in shop both dark and low’. Mary Sidney’s is
one of the most precise, eloquent, and unsolemn Protestant voices of the sixteenth century.
Sixteenth- and Early Seventeeth-Century Prose Fiction
To argue that the English novel, as it was developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grew directly from
the native saplings of the prose fiction of the sixteenth century is as unhelpful a historical judgement as to insist that
Elizabethan and Jacobean fiction should be judged according to the realist norms evolved by the Victorians. What is
significant is that the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw a vast increase in the amount of prose fiction available
to the reading public (it has been estimated that three times more
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fiction was published in the 45-year reign of Queen Elizabeth than had appeared in the eighty preceding years). This
explosion of vernacular fiction appears to have established new patterns of reading and writing which have been
interpreted all too narrowly as evidence of the rise of ‘bourgeois’ tastes or seen merely as raw prologues to the
imperial theme of the mature English novel. A handful of sixteenth-century texts, most notably Sir Philip Sidney’s
Arcadia, continued to be popular, however, with a wide range of English readers long after the age and the audience
for which they were originally written. Sidney‘s Arcadia, first printed in its unfinished, revised form in 1590, and in
1593 published in a new version cobbled together with additions from an earlier manuscript, remained a standard
favourite. The university teacher and critic, Gabriel Harvey (c. 1550-1631), recommended it to readers in 1593 as ‘a
written Pallace of Pleasure, or rather a printed Court of Honour’; it diverted and inspirited King Charles I during his
confinement; and, as late as the early nineteenth century, it delighted Charles Lamb, who, in spite of what he
recognized as a certain ‘stiffness and encumberment’ in the narrative, rejoiced in ‘the noble images, passions,
sentiments and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all over the Arcadia’.
The ancient, medieval, and modern sources of Sidney’s Arcadia serve to suggest something of the complexity of
its origins and its essentially aristocratic reference. Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia of 1504, a series of Italian verse
eclogues connected by a prose narrative, gave Sidney his structural cue and shaped his conception of the modern
pastoral set amid idealized ancient landscapes. Sidney’s perspective on the Greek world was, however, probably
determined by the third-century account of the miscellaneous adventures of thwarted and separated lovers,
Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. Sidney’s replay of European chivalric norms also reveals a debt to medieval romances and
particularly to Amadis of Gaul, the fifteenth-century story of Spanish origin which, he had noted in his Defence, had
retained its power to move men’s hearts ‘to the exercise of courtesie, liberalitie, and especially courage’. Both the socalled
Old Arcadia (composed c. 1577-80) and the revised work of c. 1581-4 consist of complex narrative patterns