SONNETS IN BLOOD

Whereas the Old Arcadia lends itself to assessment against the terms of Terentian comedy, its successor advertises from the outset an affinity with epic and tragedy (see Ringler 1962, pp. xxxvii-viii; Parker 1972; Carey 1987: 249-50). The epic dimension is manifested through the inclusion of well-known persons and tropes from classical epic, notably the fountain in Kalander’s garden that features Aeneas at his mother Venus’ breast (NA 14). The material that is added to the New Arcadia concerning the princes’ extra-Arcadian adventures also places them on a par with classical epic heroes. As Musidorus travels in search of Pyrocles, he discovers that his cousin’s deeds have been celebrated in the ways of ancient epic, via the erection of monuments and the memorializing of these acts in the collective memory. Memory, indeed, is an epic trope that figures large in the New Arcadia, from the amorous remembrances of Urania uttered by Strephon and Claius with which the revised version opens; to the tales of their past deeds told by the princes to vivify their heroic personae and to stir the passions of the princesses; to the memories of Parthenia’s beauty and Erona’s plight that sustain Argalus and Plangus respectively.258 As these last examples suggest, however, the generic attractions of romance ultimately undermine those of epic, so that amorous memories can exercise a greater force than heroic ones; the imperatives of love efface those of manly action (hence Pyrocles’ Amazon disguise); and events that would in epic inspire rhetorical set pieces, such as the Olympian games encountered by Musidorus, are passed over, the ‘huge and sportful assembly’ becoming in this case ‘tedious loneliness’ to the prince, since Pyrocles was lost (NA 67). Tragedy, on the other hand, is highly congenial to Sidney’s revisioning of romance in the New Arcadia. Taking up the theatrical metaphors of the Old Arcadia, and its flirtation with tragic ironies and reversals, Sidney continues the shift in emphasis away from comedy to tragedy that was seen in the ‘tragical end’ (OA 280) that threatens book 5 of the Old Arcadia before the deus ex machina that reveals Basilius is alive after all.

Women are key to the extension of the tragic sensibilities of the New Arcadia, particularly in their role as the prime agents of tragic articulation. Pamela’s observation in captivity that ‘you see how many acts our tragedy hath: fortune is not yet aweary of vexing us’ (NA 451) is worthy of one of Webster’s heroines, and Helen of Corinth collapses entirely the distinctions of female gender and tragic genre in her description of her heart as ‘nothing but a stage for tragedies’ (NA 64). The incident she is recalling at this point—the killing of her spurned lover Philoxenus by his friend Amphialus, and the death from sorrow of Philoxenus’ father—is indeed a ‘miserable representation’, as she terms it, well worthy of the tragic stage. Indeed, images of wasted life, treated with the cold disregard of tragic action, cluster around Helen in actuality as well as memory at this point: her narrative is delivered to Musidorus through the window other coach, which is surrounded by the bodies other retainers, ‘some slain, some lying under their dead horses and striving to get from under them’ (NA 59). Such a scene is common in the chivalric romances such as Amadis de Gaule, upon which Sidney drew in writing the Arcadia. However, his observation that Helen, having witnessed this situation, continues in conversation with Musidorus ‘without making more ot the matter’ transforms the easy bloodletting ot chivalric romance—in which the suffering ot opponents is regarded as an untroubling consequence ot their being on the wrong side—into a manitestation ot the extreme selt-obsession caused by passion, which deprives the sufferer ot all pity (a key heroic virtue, as typified by Aeneas), and theretore leads to untathomable acts ot cruelty. The innocent also die as a consequence ot Tiridates’ ‘cruel and tyrannous’ love tor Erona, which causes him to make war upon her country through an ‘extremity ot hatred’ initiated by the ‘extremity ot his love’. Such a flagrant breach ot the ethical golden mean by a ruler unleashes destruction upon the people; ot Erona’s population, Tiridates spares ‘not man, woman and child’, writing ‘the sonnets ot his love in the blood, and tun[ing] them in the cries other subjects’ (NA 206). At a private level, Demagoras’ rapelike disfiguring ot Parthenia with poison, conducted with ‘unmer-citul torce’ against her vain resistance (NA 30), manitests this same blunting ot the capacity tor mercy, and offers a cautionary example ot the moral disfigurement that threatens all ot the Arcadia’s lovers should they tall sway to passion’s tyranny. Sidney’s description ot tragedy in the Defence underlines the importance ot bodily danger and mutilation to his conception ot the genre, which he describes as operating with surgical violation as it ‘openeth the greatest wounds, and sheweth torth the ulcers that are covered with tissue’ (1912-26:96). In praising the capacity ot tragedy to move even pitiless tyrants, Sidney cites the example ot Alexander Pheraeus, a cruel man who was yet moved to tears by the sight ot the suffering ot Hecuba and Andromache in Euripides’ Troades. Sidney’s own quasi-tragedy also practises such ‘sweet violence’ (1973: 96) upon women, notably in the incarceration, torture, and staged executions ot Pamela and Philoclea by Cecropia—acts which constitute the sharpest proot ot Cecropia’s ‘absolute tyrannies’ (NA 420). It is during this incarceration that the New Arcadia cements its characterization ot Pamela as a princely stoic, and Philoclea as teelingly tender: the scourging ot Philoclea, tor example, is metaphorized as an assault by kites upon a white dove, a deed that moves even senseless objects (such as walls) to the pity that eludes Cecropia (NA 420), while Pamela conquers through her virtuous quietude (NA 421-2). The spectacular mistreatment ot the temale body is an Ovidian as well as a tragic trope, and both discourses are united in the scene ot Pamela’s supposed beheading, which is conceived by Cecropia as a ‘new play’, a tragedy, staged in the castle hall as a grotesque parody ot Tudor entertainments and hospitality rituals. Pursuing his theme ot Cecropia’s castle as a dehumanized location ot displaced pity, Sidney risks a moment ot comic insurrection by having the executioner botch his job: at the last moment, the sword experiences an excess ot pity and hits flat-long, requiring a second blow. Philoclea’s mourning speech in response to this event is uttered in the best traditions ot Senecan and Ovidian lament, being pretaced by the ‘storm ot amazement’ and sensory deprivation that are the precursors to tragic

Locquacity; her association with the ‘lamentable Philomela’ is fully expected when it comes (NA 426-7).

In the opportunities it offers for the displaying of the princesses’ tender flesh and the exercising of their soulful rhetoric, the episode of their imprisonment is violently sweet indeed. Yet the generic hybridity of the New Arcadia—in particular the insistently comic strain emanating from the underlying ‘Old’ version—ultimately inhibits the progress of this skein of tragic action and constrains its dignity. The reappearance of Philoclea in Zelmane’s room after her apparent death, and the revelation that the executions were deceptions, reimports a green-world mentality into tragic action and muddies the work’s generic distinctions. From this point, the imprisoning rooms of Cecropia’s castle seem more reminiscent of the pastoral prison of the princesses’ lodges in Arcadia, an impression that is furthered by Philoclea’s regally dismissive rustic simile for Cecropia, the ‘good woman’ who revealed her deceptions to the princesses ‘with the same pity as folks keep fowl when they are not fat enough for their eating’ (NA 437). The sudden reassertion of the green world is particularly pronounced in the 1593 Arcadia, which breaks off part-way through the fight between Zelmane and Anaxius only to resume with Dorus and Zelmane in an archetypally pastoral scenario—sitting in the shade of a sycamore, discussing their mutual joys and sorrows. The shift from a scene of male proximity in violence to one of proximity in friendship is circumstantial of course, determined by the broken-backed composite text, but would have been no less pronounced and peculiar to the original readers for that.

While the dictates of the original romance plot require that the tragic skein threatening the deaths of Pamela and Philoclea must revert to comedy, the material concerning the new characters (in particular Amphialus, Argalus, and Parthenia) is subject to no such constraints, and therefore competes with the central narrative as a source of readerly pity. The death of Argalus, for example, is particularly powerful in its adaptation of the conventions governing tragic speech. Although the sentiment of his parting words is heroic to the last, they are also futile, being audible to neither wife nor adversary, and in a touching victory of love over war, the hero’s farewell is swallowed up in his wife’s parting kisses. For a narrative in which woes of greater and lesser seriousness are endlessly talked out, Parthenia’s silence (‘sorrow lost the wit of utterance’; NA 378) marks a greater grief than any yet encountered. And the pity of war is nowhere better expressed than in Parthenia’s dissident, wifely, reinterpretation of the ‘great praises’ uttered concerning her husband, as being ‘records of her loss’ (NA 379). Even Amphialus, who is ‘pilloried’ by Sidney, according to one point of view, for his failure to resist tyranny and his anti-heroic actions, is granted the title of a ‘pitiful spectacle’, being a worthy prince whose bloody downfall is rich in the requisite horror (NA 442).259 Sidney is in many ways at his best and most heartfelt when portraying such horror, as seen in the collision of pity and furious grief, anger and beauty in the death of the boy Ismenus at Philanax’s hands, or when juxtaposing the artistic and ritualistic beauties of war with its cruel and bloody realities, a contrast that is encapsulated in the idea of terror bravely decked: ‘rich furniture, gilt swords, shining armours [...] now all universally defiled with dust, blood, broken armours, mangled bodies’ (NA 345). In the brave decking of terror during the climactic captivity episode, Sidney’s Arcadia achieves the most striking of its many hybridities, and comes close to artistic, if not textual, perfection.

PRIMARY WORKS

Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Wood, Anthony a (1691-2), Athenae Oxonienses, 2 vols.

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PART IV 1580-1603

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