The Argument of the Defence

Sidney wishes to establish that poetry is the highest form of learning, it is a kind of

“science” (source of wisdom) in the sense that it conveys knowledge well before philosophy and history appear on the horizon. He mostly quotes Greek examples (Homer, Hesiod, (legendary) Orpheus, Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, etc. but the English Gower and Chaucer, the Welsh bards and even the Turks, who have “besides their law-giving divines”

“no other writers but poets”, are also mentioned. He points out that among the Romans the poet was called “vates, [...] a diviner, forseer, prophet” and goes on to claim, in rhetorical questions, that David’s Psalms in the Old Testament are divine poems, too. Yet, of course, the poet is also a maker, as the Greek word poiein (‘to make’) indicates. He places poetry among the other disciplines (astronomy, geometry, arithmetic music, natural and moral philosophy, law, history, grammar, rhetorics, logic, medicine, metaphysics): these all depend on nature, too¹¹⁸. Poetry also has nature as its object and chief constituent, yet it is the only one which really invents, so in some ways the poet is a kind of Creator (maker – see above). The poet

“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”: heroes, demi-gods, chimeras, furies, etc.

Yet the skill of the “artificer standeth in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself” (Plato’s influence); “with the force of a divine breath [the poet] bringeth forth”

artefacts which are “surpassing” even the “doings” of Nature. Though we should not forget about the fall of Adam, it is “our erected (‘highest’) wit” which tells us what perfection is, while our “infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it”. In other words: Nature is fallen through the sin of Adam, so ‘to follow Nature’ (as the Stoic precept goes) would be to copy the imperfections of the fallen state. But the unique scope of poetic imagination (“the zodiac¹¹⁹ of his [= the poet’s] own wit”) transcends this essential state of things as they are since wit (=rational intellect) can see ideas beyond sensory perception: this precisely relates man to God; through wit we can see and remember the lost ideas (idein means ‘to see’) of

‘first Nature’, which are shown to fallen (sinful) ‘second Nature’ (cf. Plato again). Poetry is

118 It is interesting that for Sidney ‘abstract’ metaphysics depends on nature, too; his argument is that although metaphysics deals with “second” (i.e. ‘derived’) and abstract notions, it takes its ultimate source from sensory perceptions, from ‘direct’ experience.

119 The celestial zodiac is the perfect circle within which nature is confined.

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the effort of the individual mind to bridge the [ontological] gap between our fallen, sinful state and the lost paradise, the ‘golden age’ of the human being.

For Sidney, there are basically three types of poetry: divine (David’s Psalms, Solomon’s Song of Songs. etc.); philosophical (Cato, Lucretius, Virgil’s Georgicon, etc.) and the third belongs to the vates, who, “with learned discretion” does not talk about what is, was or will be but about “the divine considerations” of “what may be and should be” (Aristotle’s influence) and he teaches and delights (Horace’s influence). Delight moves people and makes the subject matter familiar, while teaching makes people know “that goodness whereunto they are moved”.

Probably on the basis of Horace and Quintilian, he subdivides poetry into heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral poetry, “and certain others”. Verse is only an ornament (but the “fittest raiment”) and not an essential part of poetry. To know through poetry is to “lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to his [=the human being’s]”

enjoying “his own divine essence”.

Sidney often comes back to the difference between philosophy, history and poetry. The philosopher – besides being sometimes difficult to understand – presents the “abstract and general”, which still has to be applied. The historian is tied not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things, so his example has not the force of the necessary consequence philosophy may provide (clearly Aristotle’s influence, see below). The poet, on the other hand, performs both what the historian and what the philosopher does, respectively: “for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in someone by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of what whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description, which doth neither strike, pierce, nor possess the sight of the soul so much as the other doth”. For example, compare the definition of a rhinoceros or elephant with a well-painted picture of theirs: poetry illuminates and figures forth a speaking picture.

The stress in Sidney’s aesthetics is unusually great on memory. To Sidney, the poet’s method depends heavily on his ability to conceptualise ideas in such a way that they become memorable; the speaking picture of poetry is like the mnemonic image containing an entire concept or argument which the philosopher’s method could only describe circumstantially. In traditional ars memoriae, each fact or part of an argument was translated into a striking image and next associated with a sequence of relatable places, e.g. to a room divided into many places, well and thoroughly known, from which the orator could fetch them back at any later time. These ‘natural seats’ have much in common with the loci, with the places or topics of conventional logical inquiry. The poet is “the food for the tenderest stomachs, the poet is indeed the right popular philosopher”.

When Sidney separates history and poetry, he directly refers to Aristotle’s differentiation in The Poetics, even using his terminology: poetry is more philosophical and more studiously serious than history, poetry dealing with the universal consideration, history with the particular. “Of all sciences, [...] the poet is the monarch” for he teaches through pictures, music, proportion, meter and tales “which holdeth children form play and old men from the chimney corner”.

Sidney allows the “conjunction” of prose and verse, comedy and tragedy, the heroic and the pastoral. Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, handling domestic and private matters. Tragedy opens the “greatest wounds” and shows “the ulcers that are covered with tissue”, that makes kings fear to be tyrants; with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration; tragedy teaches the uncertainty of this world and upon how weak foundations “gilded roofs are built” (this is truly Aristotelian again, with some elements of the Boethius (de casibus) tradition).

In the second part of the Defence, Sidney defends poetry from four common charges:

1. that there is a better way to spend time, 2. that poetry is a mother of lies, 3. poetry is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with “pestilent desires” 4. that Plato banished poets from his Republic. As to charge 1: poetry is useful, it teaches and delights (Horace!), as was demonstrated; as to charge 2.: the poet is the least liar (as opposed to the physician, for example, who promises that a certain drug would help), since he never affirms, claims or states anything. As to charge 3. (the most serious for Sidney) he says, among other things:

with the sword you can kill a father but also defend the country; like everything, poetry can be abused, too. As to charge 4: Plato (whose authority Sidney greatly admires) was a poet himself in his dialogues; besides he only banished the bad poets (Sidney claims) who spread wrong opinion on the gods and who were imitating wrong opinion already induced. Plato – Sidney says – “attributeth unto poesy more than myself do, namely, to be a very inspiring divine force, far above man’s wit”: Sidney refers to poetic rapture and fury, which he – eventually – does not subscribe to.

In what he calls a Digression (a kind of conclusion or appendix, in fact), Sidney talks about poetry in England. He praises Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the Mirror for Magistrates, and Spencer’s The Shepherd’s Calendar but from among contemporary tragedies he only likes Gorboduc (of course, all this is before even Marlowe) “climbing to the height of Seneca’s style”, otherwise he is very critical of the writers of tragedy for not observing the three unities (“by Aristotle’s precept and common reason” the “uttermost time” should be one day); as for place¹²⁰ Sidney remarks that in contemporary drama “you shall have Asia of the one side and Afric of the other”¹²¹; or three ladies walk among flowers, and you have to think it is a garden, then at the same place we hear of a shipwreck and we have to accept the same sight for a rock; “in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers: and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?”¹²²; comedies are too vulgar and the plots of both comedies and tragedies are highly implausible. Sidney’s positive example is here Euripides’s Hecuba. There is also an unnecessary mingling of “kings and clowns”, i.e. of tragedy and comedy; there is but loud laughter and no proper delight taken in comedy and no admiration and commiseration as it is fit for tragedy. Delightful themes are a fair woman, good chances, the happiness of our friends, etc. It is wrong to laugh at deformed creatures, mischance, mistaken matter; to laugh at sinful things is plainly forbidden by Aristotle – Sidney says.

Finally, he talks about love-poetry, about the English language and about English verse; he praises English for being suitable for both “ancient” and “modern” poetry; the former marks the quantity of each syllable, the latter observes only number (with some regard of accent) and the chief life of it stands in “like sounding of the words, which we call rhyme”.

6. 6. Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy

It is time to look at two of Shakespeare’s early contemporaries, Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe, and to see how drama is done in practice. We know very little about Kyd’s short life (1558-1594); it is certain that he was baptised in London and was the son of a scrivener and that he attended Merchant Taylors’ School in London, where he was a

120 It cannot be emphasised enough that the doctrine of the ‘unity of place’ (that the space of the plot should be confined to roughly the same place, e.g. a room, or castle, or at lest one town, is an invention of Renaissance aesthetics and cannot be found in Aristotle’s The Poetics.

121 It is true that lots of Renaissance playwrights can be found guilty of this charge even later, cf. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, or Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

122 Cf., with respect to “armies”, Shakespeare’s Henry V.

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contemporary of Spenser’s. He began his career as a translator and dramatist, most probably entering the service of The Lord Strange’s Men in 1590. Between 1591 and 1593, he seems to have lived with Marlowe. The Spanish Tragedy (probably written in 1587) gained immense popularity, it was frequently reprinted and renewed: Philip Henslowe asked Ben Jonson for extensions in the late 1590s.

The main plot is as follows: Revenge (a character in the play!) and the Ghost of Don Andrea oversee the disasters that follow from Don Andrea’s death. In a battle between Spain and Portugal, Don Andrea, a Spanish nobleman, died at the hands of Balthazar, Prince of Portugal. Horatio, Don Andrea’s best friend in the Spanish Court, and Lorenzo, a Spanish nobleman are in rivalry for the credit of having captured Balthazar, and both Horatio and Balthazar soon fall in love with Lorenzo’s beautiful sister, Bel-imperia. Lorenzo and the Spanish King favour the match with Balthazar for political reasons, yet Bel-imperia loves Horatio, and meets him secretly. Serberine (Balthazar’s servant), Lorenzo and Balthazar stab and hang Horatio, and imprison Bel-imperia. Hieronimo, Horatio’s father goes mad, but is sane enough to plot revenge: he stages a play for the combined royal courts, and the action on Hieronimo’s stage turns cruelly ‘real’: Hieronimo stabs Lorenzo, while Bel-imperia kills Balthazar. Andrea’s ghost rejoices over the happenings, putting the wicked one into Hell and the virtuous ones to the “Elisain fields’.

The structure is almost absolutely symmetrical: there is Spain versus Portugal; there are the “wicked” and the “good” ones, there are the victims and the victimisers. The sub-plot, featuring Serberine and Pedringano (servant to Bel-imperia), is carefully woven into main one, and they especially significantly meet when Pedringano’s letter to Lorenzo falls into Hieronimo’s hands.

One of the main topics of the play is illusion versus reality; Kyd is among the first playwrights to discover that madness is able to create, for the mentally disturbed person, a kind of ‘reality’ which is much stronger than ‘ordinary, everyday’ facts: in his madness, Hieronimo will for instance take an Old Man – who is pleading for justice on behalf of his own murdered son – to be his Horatio. (cf. III,13;132-175)¹²³. No wonder that madness becomes a ‘chief ally’ for Renaissance drama in creating ‘real-like-illusion’; it becomes one of the ‘as-if-s’ against which the ‘make-belief’ on the stage may be tested. The play-within-the-play seems to be Kyd’s invention, too: in rivalry with the very play called The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo’s play re-figures the ‘original’, as well as concluding it, making the actors act and get transformed even within the play.

The meta-theatrical element, the theatre’s own interest in itself, is present in other ways, too: for example, there are plenty of references to tragedy in the text: Lorenzo tells Pedringano: “But if I prove thee perjured and unjust / This very sword wheron thou took’st thine oath / Shall be the worker of thy tragedy” (II,1;91-94); and further he says: “And actors in th’ accursed tragedy / Was thou, Lorenzo, Balthazar and thou, / Of whom my son, my son deserved so well?” (III,7;41-43).

Another major theme – to return in Shakespeare’s plays as well – is the conflict between the private and the public: Hieronimo’a personal misery (the loss of his son, for which revenge is perhaps justifiable) is the result of public interest (the reconciliation between Spain and Portugal through marriage), while public interest, in turn, is carefully combined with the King’s and Lorenzo’s private goal, which is power. Personal misery is chiefly communicated here through soliloquies of feeling (a kind of lament, telling about a conflict

‘within’, full of parallels and repetitions). Yet there are so-called self-revelatory soliloquies, too, in which characters talk about their real motives or goals. The manipulators of the public versus the private spheres correspond to the two main plot-makers on the stage: Lorenzo’s

123 References to The Spanish Tragedy are with respect to the following edition: Katherine Eisman Maus (ed.), Four Revenge Tragedies, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 1-91.

plot is in constant rivalry with Hieronimo’s, the latter eventually introducing, as we have seen, his plot within the plot, i.e., his own theatre of cruelty.

However, The Spanish Tragedy might be called a “parody of tongues” as well; as early as Act One, Scene 2 (line 161) Hieronimo ironically says that “My tongue should plead for young Horatio’s right”; then, when lamenting over his son’s death, he exclaims: “My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell” (III,2;67); in his play, there is a strange mixture of

“unknown” languages (Latin, Greek, Italian, French) and finally he produces the ‘perfect’

speech-act: at the end of the play, he bites his tongue off.

Yet Kyd’s play is first and foremost a revenge tragedy, one of the most popular genres in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, to be imitated by Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus, c.

1591; Hamlet, 1599-1600), by John Marston (Antonio’s Revenge, 1600), by George Chapman (Tragedy of Bussy d’Ambois, 1604), by an anonymous author producing The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher writing The Maid’s Tragedy in collaboration in 1611, etc. One of he most important features of the revenge-tragedy is the convention of the Ghost (here: Don Andrea), who gives some clue to a close-family member (father, son, daughter, etc.) to take revenge for him (or her). The dramaticality of revenge is twofold: on the one hand, revenge, even in its ‘raw’ or ‘ordinary’ sense, contains the necessity of planning, of plotting, of designing, of structuring in itself: the hero, whose task is revenge, inevitably becomes the ‘writer’, the ‘stage-manger’ and the ‘principal actor’ of the play. And since, on the other hand, it is a blood-relative (of the same kind as the hero) to be revenged, the revenger’s contemplated act (which still counts as murder, of course) is not only totally motivated but, on the basis of an ‘ancient’, or ‘natural’ law, it seems even morally justifiable, yet it soon finds itself in perfect conflict with the Biblical teaching that it is only God who is entitled to take revenge and to give the just punishment for sins.

The revenge play, however, carries an inherent dramaturgical paradox as well: revenge cannot be taken immediately, even if the criminal is clearly identified: revenge should be the climax of the play; if it were done at the beginning or at the middle of the drama, the play would simply be over. This is why delay is invariably introduced in revenge plays: Kyd – unlike Shakespeare in Hamlet – first of all puts the crime (the slaughtering of Horatio) to the middle of the play and then introduces delaying factors like Hieronimo’s doubts concerning Bel-imperia’s letter; later suitors, an Old Man and some citizens, will prevent Hieronimo from working on his plans; for a while he hopes for public satisfaction or justice from the King, while the murder of Serebrine and the trial of Pedringano will also interfere with his plotting and taking action.

Finally, the fact that close family ties are on display helps the hero in one of the trickiest implications of drama: to recognise himself in the Other (say, a father in his son, a friend in a friend, etc.), to realise that the victimiser might become a victim himself, that a play-within-a-play can reflect the whole play, as the father might be the mirror-image of the son, etc. And the recognition is there to underscore the difference, the distance, the gap, too:

for example, Bel-imperia is almost ‘courting’ Horatio, as an index of some confusions around the gender-roles; Lorenzo is striving with Horatio for the title of the conqueror of Balthazar as if they were both falling in love with him, etc.¹²⁴ As Oedipus’ example has shown, the plotter might easily find himself to be the main hero of his own tragedy, while he experiences the split to the full.

Kyd is also a champion in presenting a conflict between love and fate: the passion of Bel-imperia towards Don Andrea, and his ‘substitute’, Horatio, is twice terminated in the death of the beloved one, also establishing a close association between love and death, a well-known metaphorical tie not only on the Renaissance stage (cf. Shakespeare’s Othello, for

124 LORENZO: “I seized his weapon and enjoyed it first” / HORATIO: Bt first I forced him to lay his weapons

124 LORENZO: “I seized his weapon and enjoyed it first” / HORATIO: Bt first I forced him to lay his weapons