Criticism, Vol. 36, 1994
Apologizing for
pleasure in Sidney's 'Apology for Poetry': the nurse of abuse meets the
Tudor grammar school
by Mary Ellen Lamb
As one of its major strategies for defending poetry, Sidney's Apology
describes poetry's capacity simultaneously to teach and to delight, to
instruct effectively by appealing to pleasure.(1) According to the
Apology, it is pleasure which creates poetry as superior to history and
philosophy, for poetry's ability to delight moves readers to virtue,
rather than subjecting them to tedious discussions or ambiguous
examples. Even in the initial stages of civilization, it was the "sweet
delights" (98) of poetry which prepared early peoples to exercise their
minds for the reception of knowledge. But on the other side of the
Apology's claim that poetry's delight enlivens its teaching lies the
inference that the experience of delight must be justified by
instruction. This inference becomes explicit in the Apology's
limitation of its defense to a definition of poetry as "feigning
notable images of virtues, vices, or what else, with ... delightful
teaching" (103). When separated from its moral function, poetry's
pleasure renders it a "nurse of abuse," dangerously capable of
eliciting the wrong sort of pleasure to infect its readers with
"pestilent desires" (123). By exploring the "nurse of abuse" image,
together with other highly gendered figures, this essay advances the
following argument: to the explicit charges against which Sidney's
Apology defends poetry--that it lies, it promotes immorality, it was
banished from Plato's ideal republic, and that it serves no useful
purpose--can be added an implicit charge, that the pleasures offered by
poetry rendered it dangerously effeminizing.
A reading of Sidney's Apology as defending poetry against charges of
effeminacy was perhaps first performed in a passing comment by Walter
Ong, who suggested that the anxiety, common among Renaissance
humanists, that "literature, and poetry in particular, was actually
soft or effeminate" motivated Sidney's claim that the Amadis de Gaule
moved men to courage.(2) More recently, M. J. Doherty's gendered
reading of the Apology has also linked Sidney's poet and femininity.
Interpreting the Apology's Lady Poesy in terms of the ancient figure of
Sophia or Wisdom, Doherty's work represents Sidney's poet as
appropriating a feminine self-knowledge which poses no threat, however,
to his masculinity.(3) Fran Dolan's essay on the dichotomies between
art and nature, on the other hand, locates Sidney's Apology within a
tradition representing poetry as an erotic threat precisely because of
a long-standing association between poetry's "pleasure and desire with
the feminine." Dolan claims that, like Puttenham and Montaigne, Sidney
uses a "gendered and eroticized" construction of poetry to "convey the
vulnerability and impairment of the masculine poet."(4) While much
remains to be done with the gendered metaphors and concepts in the
Apology, these discussions of the inextricable entanglement of poetry
in gender issues provide a radically new approach which promises to
recover ideological operations working deeply within the early modern
culture and its texts.
Any
full-scale rereading of the Apology in terms of gender must first,
however, take into account recent work representing a crisis in early
modern gender ideology. Since Laqueur uncovered the one-sex model of
early modern gender, scholars have newly understood that in this
period, in a more literal sense than in modern times, gender was a
question of performance--of costume, of gesture, of status--rather than
of ontological being.(5) In her study of Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, a
work dedicated to Sidney and convincingly claimed as a major impetus
for his Apology, Laura Levine describes how this one-sex model created
"an unmanageable anxiety that there is no such thing as a masculine
self."(6) Thus, for Gosson and others, the spectacle of boys on stage
in women's clothing embodied the culture's worst fantasy concerning the
reversability of male gender, as adopting the costume and gestures of
femininity, the boy actor became in some sense the part he played.
Extending Levine's argument, Stephen Orgel discovers an early modern
anxiety that heterosexual love can turn men not only into women, but
"back into women," for "in the medical literature we all started as
women, and the culture confirmed this by dressing all children in
skirts until the age of seven or so."(7) Laqueur's performative version
of masculinity further explains Orgel's perception of the essential
femininity of early modern boys: in his dependence upon women who
dominated him, a boy was not yet able to enact his masculinity. But
these essays do not account for the source of this threat of
infantilization. What within the nature of heterosexual love was
understood to propel boys (or men) helplessly back to this degraded,
effeminate state?
Sidney's Apology
provides an ideal vehicle through which to study this fear of
regression in its representation of the wrong sort of poetry as a
"nurse of abuse." Enacting a sort of demonic pieta reducing grown men
to the passivity of sleeping infants, this nightmare figure recurs in
various texts to embody a widespread anxiety that the pleasures of
poetry somehow unleashed the most infantilizing effects of female
domination on adult males. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, she appears as
Acrasia, cradling the limp Verdant who has left his "suspended
instruments" hanging in a nearby tree to sink into a helpless (and
seemingly permanent) post-coital lethargy; critics have noted that
Acrasia's Bower of Bliss is described in the same terms used by
contemporary defenders of poetry.(8) On a lighter note, Shakespeare's
comic artist-figure Bottom takes the place of the changeling child to
be pleasured and dominated in the arms of the fairy queen in A
Midsummer Night's Dream before he attempts to write a "ballad of this
dream."(9) In the Schoole of Abuse, Gosson's scorn for men who choose
"wallowing in ladies lappes" over "wrastling at arms" includes a
warning against "all suche delights as may winne us to pleasure."
Gosson's description of how such delights may "rocke us in sleep"
enacts this same merger of adult lust with regressive infantilism.(10)
While Sidney may have been directly influenced by Gosson, the presence
of this figure in the works of Shakespeare and Spenser shows that the
fear of this regressive process, elicited by the pleasures of poetry,
was widespread in the early modern culture. These anxieties, and their
link to poetry, are expressed with special clarity in Sidney's "nurse
of abuse" passage: " is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with
many pestilent desires; with a siren's sweetness drawing the mind to
the serpent's tail of sinful fancies ... both in other nations and in
ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, given to
martial exercises, the pillars of warlike liberty, and not lulled
asleep in shady idleness with poet's pastimes." (123). This splitting
of the male self between the warrior of the past and the infant-like
reader, nursed and "lulled asleep" in the present controls much of the
argument and the imagery of the Apology. Like rabbits and ducks,
warriors and infants perform a mental trompe d'oeil as they vie for the
prominent position in the Apology which will render the loser
invisible. Any victory is only temporary. They repeatedly exchange
places because in the binary oppositions which construct them, the
existence of each depends upon the absence/presence of the other. The
effeminacy of the infantilized readers of poetry is necessary to define
the highly phallic masculinity of the warrior: hard (not softened by
poetry), strengthened by continual effort (not weakened by idle
pleasure), oriented towards war (not towards sexual desire). But like
most alien Others, this effeminate infant lies not outside but within
the warrior. Following Theweleit's depiction of the soldier-male, the
phallic depiction of men as pillars connotes the hard body surface--the
armor--of the warrior male, which sharply differentiates him from
others and from the desiring "female" (or the effeminate child) which
remains within the self.(11)
Pleasure plays a central role in this process. Theweleit describes the
conversion of pleasure into anxiety in this splitting of the self
between female (or childish) interior and male exterior: for the
warrior male, pleasure evokes a fear that "dissolution may occur along
the borders of the body" (1:414), that the defined male self might
become lost in the "desiring-production of the unconscious" (1:432).
The worst fears described in Theweleit's paradigm are realized
abundantly in this passage. Dramatizing poetry's irresistible power,
the merging of nurse's lullaby with siren's song enacts a destructive
female engulfment of readers who are simultaneously infants and adult
males. Readers once "full of courage" now have no more will to resist
the pleasures of poetry than infants who cannot resist a lullaby or
refuse disease-laden nurses' milk. Equating nurses with sirens recasts
the narrative pleasures of lullabies, and the closeness with dominant
women they enact, as a seductive desire which draws men to their death.
Lured by an irresistible pleasure in poetry which dissolves the
boundaries between adult love and infantile passivity, readers of love
poetry helplessly regress to the time of female dominance when they
were not yet male.(12)
If the
reader is infantilized, the poet is cross-dressed. It is one matter for
poetry to be represented as a woman; it is another to represent even
the wrong sort of poetry as nurses' milk and sirens' songs. The lullaby
function of "poet's pastimes" which lulls readers' (moral) selves
asleep not only blurs the distinctions between adult poetry and the
songs and nursery rhymes of childhood; it also blurs the boundaries
between the poet's voice and the voices of nurses. Feminizing the poet
even more radically, the image of siren acts out the reversibility of
gender inherent in the one sex gender system. The homonym of "tail" and
"tale" in the description of the "siren's sweetness drawing the mind to
the serpent's tail of sinful fancies" locates the wrong kind of poetry
within the tails or genitalia of women. This homonym measures the
extent to which textual pleasures, even the textual pleasures offered
by poems written by adult males, were perceived as sexual pleasures,
and both were encoded as female.
It might be argued that the Apology presents the "nurse of abuse"
passage as one of various attacks against which Sidney defends poetry.
But Sidney's counter-argument does not deny the role of poetry in this
regressive process. In his impassioned claim "not that poetry abuses
man's wit, but that man's wit abuses poetry" (37), Sidney defends moral
kinds of poetry by distinguishing them from love poetry. But, as
Helgerson notes, against the wrong kind of poetry which "trains man's
wit to wanton sinfulness and lustful love," the charges still
stand.(13) Moreover, the very terms of Sidney's counter-argument
confirm the gender anxieties elicited by the "nurse of abuse" passage:
"I yield that Poesy may not only be abused, but that being abused, by
reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other
army of words" (125; my italics). Explicity countering the effeminizing
force of nurse-sirens in the imagery of poetry as an "army of words,"
the Apology personifies poetry as masculine for the first time in this
text. But the stereotypically feminine adjectives "sweet charming"
suggest that even as a military force, poetry's masculinity is
vulnerable to the reverses imagined within a one sex gender system.
Anxieties elicited by this reversability of gender identity similarly
underlie the rigid polarities contrasting poetry and needlecraft in the
counter-argument: "Truly a needle cannot do much hurt, and as truly
(with leave of ladies be it spoken) it cannot do much good. With a
sword thou mayest kill thy father, and with a sword thou mayest defend
thy prince and country. So that, as in calling poets the fathers of
lies they say nothing, so in this their agument of abuse they prove the
commendation" (126). The silent emendation of the original accusation
leveled against poetry as the "mother of lies" to call poets the
"father of lies" suggests the extent to which gender has become a
sensitive issue in this passage. The phallocentric anxiety revealed by
the contrast between the man's large sword to the woman's small needle
has pushed the Apology's argument into a false position. Instead of
defending poetry's morality, as this passage purports to do, it
presents the ability to kill fathers as a necessary, if regrettable,
aspect of poetry's virility. This morally dubious assertion of the
poet's masculinity is further undercut by the terms it employs. In
size, the poet's pen resembles a woman's needle more than a warrior's
sword; and like needles, poet's pens mark a flat surface within a
private, domestic space. The inherent instability of this comparison of
pens to swords calls into question an entire line of martial
representations of poetry in the Apology. But to understand the wider
cultural context which gives meaning to these representations, it is
necessary to return to the "nurse of abuse," this time to consider the
social formations by which middle- or upper-class males were installed
into a prominent form of early modern masculinity.
Like most nightmare figures, Sidney's "nurse of abuse" embodies both a
fear and a wish; it enacts both the desire and the threat of that
desire to regress to female nurturance and domination. At this time,
when according to Aries, "the effeminization of little boys" "had
reached its height,"(14) a natural nostalgia for childhood posed a
threat to gender identity. Yet while a desire for a release from
masculinity was rendered unspeakable within this highly patriarchal
culture, it was also an almost inevitable result of an abrupt childhood
transition commonly experienced by privileged males. Sometime between
seven and ten years of age, most upper class boys were suddenly
separated from a relatively easy-going environment dominated by women
to learn Latin from tutors or schoolmasters.(15) A significant force in
shaping the elite male subject was not only this abupt separation of
seven-year-old boys from their extended families, but the meanings
invested in this transition by the culture. One primary meaning was the
conferral of a dominant early modern version of masculinity. William
Kerrigan has eloquently represented the project of the early modern
grammar school as the rebirth of the students' "linguistic ego" into a
masculine world of Latin.(16) For Walter Ong, the learning of Latin,
and the severe methods through which it was taught, formed a "male
puberty rite."(17)
The learning of
Latin functioned not only to mark gender, but to justify it as a means
of transforming young boys into men worthy of assuming power. This
process left little time for play. As T. W. Baldwin put it,
Elizabethans "did not found schools to let boys play; in fact,
invented all kinds of sinister devices to attempt to thwart that
natural instinct.... They wanted
taught to be men."(18) The discipline required for a boy to spend most
of his waking hours memorzing Latin grammar, translating from Latin and
then back to English, and reciting lessons from rote, installed him
within the prevailing grammar school ethic of "instinctual
renunciation."(19) This considerable mental discipline, reinforced at
most schools with whippings and canings, was to be internalized to
create a student population "'broken and bridled'" into strict control
of the passions.(20) The theory advanced for this submission appealed
to the elite nature of its population: training in obedience enabled
children better to claim their proper positions of authority over
others as adults. This rationalization is, in fact, explicitly stated
in a letter to Philip Sidney from his father: "Be humble and obedient
to your masters, for, unless your frame yourself to obey others--yea,
and feel in yourself what obedience is, you shall never be able to
teach others how to obey you."(21) This obedience was to be internal as
well as external, as stated in, for example, the common schooltext
Erasmus's Adages: "Nemo bene imperat": "A man must fyrst rule his own
lustes, and be himselfe obedient to ryght reason, ere he can well
governe other."(22)
Central to the grammar school project was the forceful assertion of the
difference of boys both from women and from androgynous children they
had been under their charge. Richard Halperin's general argument, that
the Tudor education and culture were shaped by a troubling awareness of
a vagrant class of the new poor which it could not quite "banish from
its unconscious" (60), is even more true for the determinative
influence of the women and "effeminate" children of childhood. In the
schoolroom culture where reason and self-control were constructed as
masculine, the intensely desiring body had no legitimate space.(23) For
Vives, physical pleasures decrease virility and even threaten
penetration:(24) "Therefore our inner judgement must discover this
inclination toward the love of our body, and the desire of things here
in this life, which is customarily called our self-love. Such self-love
enervates the strength and virility of our minds to such a degree that
nothing can be so minute but that it is easily able to penetrate
therein" (italics mine). The simple, sensual pleasures of early
childhood became something that, by and large, schoolboys were to give
up. Not to give up the pleasures of the maternal environment meant not
to enter the arena where male adulthood was achieved, according to a
"learned man," a friend of Vives, who thanked God for the death of his
mother, for "if she had lyved, I had never come to Paris to lerne: but
had syt styll at home all my lyfe, among dicying, drabbes, delycates,
and pleasures, as I begonne."(25)
The immense power given by Vives's friend to his mother, who had to die
before he could attend school in Paris, resembles the power given to
the mothers, nurses, and other women of childhood, who formed a silent
binary term shaping (and threatening) the projects and even the
curriculum of the early modern grammar school. One sign of their power
appears in pedagogical writings which endow the vernacular fictions or
nursery rhymes first heard in childhood with a dangerously effeminizing
power. As Halperin has mentioned, one function of this educational
system was to alienate boys from a popular and a specifically female
culture whose influence was embodied in its stories (27). Erasmus's
advice reveals the extent to which these tales were contaminated by the
gender of their female narrators: "A boy learn a pretty story
from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as
readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives' fairy
rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and
serving women."(26)
As an
enactment of an affectionate bond between children and women, the
vernacular tales of childhood were rendered almost unspeakable. But
scattered evidence--a childhood reminiscence, warnings in books on
childrearing, histories of nursery rhymes--strongly suggests that these
seldom-mentioned stories--of fairies, ghosts, and goblins--told by
women to children remained widespread.(27)
While the few remaining references to this oral tradition identify (and
usually disparage) the narrators as women, sometimes narrators could,
of course, be male. The Apology's allusion to a domestic scene of
narration draws on this possibility in its argument that poetry teaches
morality more effectively than philosophy. Enticing readers with
delight rather than boring them with definitions, the poet begins "with
a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney
corner" (113). Conflating the pleasure offered by simple domestic
narratives with that offered by all poetry, the Apology insists upon
the childishness of literary response, a childishness which most adults
never outgrow: "So it is in men (most of which are childish in the best
things, till they be cradled in their graves): glad they will be to
hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas" (113--4). The
contrast between the childishness of this delight to direct instruction
in morality which most readers resist, swearing "they be brought to
school again," stresses its incompatibility with schoolroom experience.
This contrast merges this childish delight, essential to the
effectiveness of poetry, with the narrative pleasures later so
infantilizing to readers of love poetry. The threat of this
identification accounts for a troubling discrepancy in this passage.
What is the significance of the fact that the heroes claimed for these
tales--Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas--were, in fact, the heroes
of texts universally taught in schools?(28) Were tales of Hercules
prominent among the tales "which holdeth children from play," or were
the more common "old wives' fairy rubbish" indefensible within the
argument of the Apology?
The
actual gender of Sidney's narrators of vernacular tales is less
important than the ambiguous gendering of the boys who heard them; it
was their childhood effeminacy which created fictions as a threat to
later masculinity. Still, the Apology's substitution of a male narrator
of tales of Hercules for the more usual narrators of "old wives' tales"
participates in a wider silence within the culture. The erasure of the
influence of the women known in childhood could never be complete:
abjected from the schoolroom, they returned as spectres inhabiting the
psyches of early modern males and the texts they produced.
Sidney's famous evocation of the poet's golden world is one such text
haunted by the ghosts of childhood. As set apart from astronomers,
mathemeticians, musicians, and other intellectual professionals, poets
alone attain true masculinity through the creativity of their minds:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection,
lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in
effect another nature, in making things either better than Na-
ture bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as were never
in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Fu-
ries, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature,
not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but
freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit ... her
world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (100) In her
exploration of early modern distinctions between nature and art, Dolan
has aptly read this passage as the poet's attempt to create "a world
that surpasses nature and bypasses the female role in reproduction," to
ally his art with the "masculine and the divine" (225). Dolan's
interpretation of this passage can be pressed further, as an expression
of the project of the early modern grammar school to provide the
"rebirth" of the male subject into "another nature," where masculinity
is constructed through the constant exercise of the intellect, with an
ensuing disregard for the "natural" pleasures associated with the body
and women. Through the study of Latin, and the process through which
that study was conducted, the male subject moved beyond the "old"
nature now perceived as a confinement "within the narrow warrant" of
Nature's "gifts." Through the sheer effort of intellectual endeavor,
"lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, "the schoolboy learned
to participate in a new subjectivity centered on the mind, taking
precedence over the former subjectivity centered on the body.
Especially resonant of the early modern grammar school is the Apology's
peopling of this new nature of the mind with figures encountered in a
standard classical education. Besides revealing an educated familiarity
with classical texts, the figures themselves embody in exaggerated from
the privileges of class and gender forming the basis for the early
modern grammar school. Through military deeds or the privilege of
birth, male figures can be elevated to heroes or even (following Aeneas
and Caesar) demigods. They can also be degraded to the stupidity of the
despised Cyclops, the strong but clod-dish wooer of Galathea so easily
outwitted by Ulysses. (Indeed Erasmus used the Cyclops figure to warn
his students to study by comparing him to a person "who has great
strength of body, but not of mind."(29))
Within this new and misogynistic nature, women can only appear as
monsters. Their depiction as furies embodies the anger projected upon
women and the guilt they elicit, the "painful remorse and gnawing of
conscience, horribly tormenting wicked mindes" in hell.(30) Their
representation as chimeras, or "unreal creatures of the imagination"
(OED), points to their elision from the misogynistic discourses
informing the grammar schools. Constructed within yet outside language,
women are yet present in this wholly male environment as dangerous
illusions. This chimera image may also refer to women's narratives.
According to Puttenham, chimeras were bred only by "distempered
imaginations" rather than the fantasies of "good poets."(31) In its
resemblance to the serpent's tail of the chimera, Sidney's image of
poetry with a serpent's tail/tale of "sinful fancies" enacts the
denigration of women's fictions within the humanist culture of the
schoolroom.
This rejection of the
brazen world of sensual pleasures for a golden world of intellectual
accomplishments created a problem within an institution designed to
transform androgynous boys into virile leaders of men. Poetry remained
essential to students as a repository of eloquence, but because of its
pleasures, poetry became a site of conflict, or at least of suspicion,
in the grammar school curriculum.(32) Helgerson points out that among
humanists, whose ideas were so formative for early modern schools,
poetry was "soft and effeminate, weakening boys and leading them to
lascivious pleasure rather than manly and courageous accomplishment"
(35). The dangers posed by poetry to the establishment of the
disciplined schoolboy were eloquently expressed in Gosson's passage
describing their progress from the lower to the upper forms in the
Schoole of Abuse:
You are no soner entred but libertie looseth the reynes and
geves you head, placing you with poetrie in the lowest
forme, when his skill is showne too make his scholer as good
as ever twangde: he preferres to pyping, from pyping to play-
ing, from play to pleasure, from pleasure to slouth, from
slouth to sleepe, from sleepe to sinne, from sinne to death,
from death too the Divil, if you take your learning apace, and
passe through every forme without revolting. (14--5) Richard Halperin
has argued that this crisis posed by poetry to humanist teaching
derived from its subject matter, which was "pleasure itself" (52)
without reference to "social utility or seriousness"; poetry offered
the possibility of "detaching language's pleasing or persuasive force
from its ideological anchor." But a startling contrast in gendered
metaphors describing poetry's role in education reveals the extent to
which the pleasure of poetry brought on a crisis of gender as well as
of meaning. Simultaneously representing poetry as a nurse and a
military agent, works such as Thomas Elyot's The Book Named the
Governor signal radically unstable gender assignments for boys as
(effeminate) infants and (masculine) warriors.(33) The presence of both
of these contradictory identities corresponds to the uneasy splitting
of the self between the effeminate child of the nursery and the
masculine youth of the schoolroom.
These radically opposed metaphors for poetry, and the unresolved gender
identities for students they imply, enter the Tudor grammar school
curriculum in its two contrasting strategies for dealing with the
effeminizing potential of poetry. On the one hand, the emphasis on epic
poetry, and especially the martial episodes of epic poems by Homer and
Virgil, in the curriculum was to promote not only morality but martial
courage. Ong's claim that the "masculine" appeal of epic was
responsible for its privileging in grammar schools and in the culture
generally (118) is well substantiated by, for example, Thomas Elyot's
recommendation of the reading of "noble poets," particularly Virgil and
Homer, to teach boys the "marciall and discipline of armes" as well as
to inflame their "courage" (fols. 31v, 35). The second strategy
presented the pleasures of poetry as especially appropriate for younger
students, who needed to be "nursed" or enticed into learning Latin at
this early stage of their education. Any effeminizing effects of the
pleasure offered by poetry in the lower forms were then to be
counteracted by dispensing a healthy antidote of history and moral
philosophy in the upper forms.
The
prominence of both of these strategies in Sidney's Apology creates the
Tudor grammar school as an important cultural context through which to
read Sidney's defense of poetry. By moving readers to martial rather
than purely moral ends, military representations of poetry in the
Apology attempt to recuperate poetry's pleasure as "courage." The
Amadis de Gaule, for example, has moved readers' hearts to the exercise
of "courtesy, liberality, and especially courage" (114). For the
citizens of Hungary, songs of their "ancestor's valour" were the
"chiefest kindlers of brave courage" in that "soldier-like nation"
(118). Sidney attests to the power of that "the old song of Percy and
Douglas" to move his own heart "more than with a trumpet" (118).
Alexander's admiration for the "pattern of Achilles" stirred up his
courage on the battlefield. Edward Berry has analyzed these and other
military allusions as Sidney's attempt to transform the "marginal
figure of the poet's vocation into the leader of a militant
aristocracy."(34) But surely both Sideney's metaphors and his military
aspirations participate in a wider project: to assert the masculinity
of poets (including himself) and their readers. More than the actual
utility claimed for fictional works, the claim that "Orlando Furioso,
or the honest King Arthur will never displease a solider" (126) attests
to the masculinity of the pleasure taken by soldier-readers in these
texts.
The Apology does not adopt
this strategy for defending poetry uncritically; it also tests it to
reveal its limitations and the limitations of the version of
masculinity it constructs. As in the comparison of swords to needles, a
disturbing gender instability lurks within the representation of poetry
as the "companion of the camps": the phrase could as easily apply to
the male and female prostitutes commonly following the troops. In the
emphasis on poetry as a warrior-art, the Apology's argument shows more
signs of strain. As Katherine Duncan Jones has succinctly put it,
Sidney's own poems were "hardly the stuff to give the troops."(35) With
what "seriousness" was this military use for poetry advanced? Was it
part of an intellectual experiment to see how strongly a position could
be defended, according to oratorical practice in schoolrooms and law
courts?(36) As Peter Herman has recently noted, at the time he wrote
the Apology, Sidney also directed a letter to Edward Denny to recommend
books to further his knowledge of "soldiery"; all mention of poetry is
conspicuously absent.(37)
Within
the Apology itself, the representation of the warrior-reader is most
undercut by its portrait of John Pietro Pugliano in its opening frame.
The admiration for soldiers expressed in the Apology is exaggerated to
absurdity in Pugliano's overly enthusiastic defense of soldiers as the
"noblest estate of mankind, and horsemen the noblest of soldiers" (95).
The "strong affections and weak arguments" of this soldier, whose very
name means "fighter," cast into doubt the plausibility of the
soldier/reader who reads Homer before battle. Pugliano's unthinking
fervor validates, by contrast, Sidney's delicate irony; Sidney's wit
makes the martial form of masculinity look obtuse so that poets, even
effeminate ones, seem attractive by contrast.
But Pugliano presents too broad a target. Despite Sidney's own death
from battlewounds, the feudal warrior was fast becoming an anachronism
in this proto-capitalistic society; the majority of grammar school
graduates finally entered the professions or the court's bureaucracy
rather than the military.(38) The primary function of the
warrior-reader within the grammar school was not, then, so much to
improve courage in battle, as to cast a mystique over a less glamorous
masculinity better adapted to the hierarchical social structures of
early modern England. This masculinity of the disciplined subject
revived a model dating from classical times by which (male) passion was
to exert mastery over (female) passions within the self. Pleasure
threatened these gender boundaries; for yielding to a pleasure,
especially a sensual pleasure, strong enough to overturn reason's
control transformed otherwise rational men to not-men: to women or, I
would argue, to children, dominated by passions.(39) This hierarchical
model of masculinity enacted a defense not only against the desiring
female within the self, but also against the androgynous child, whose
traces it records.
The Apology
contests the effeminizing threat posed by poetry by appropriating its
power to inculcate a disciplined form of masculinity delineated
especially well in its portratis of Cyrus and Aeneas. The Apology's
treatment of these two denizens of the poet's golden world of intellect
may well reflect the way the Cyropedia and Aeneid were read at Sidney's
own grammar school; for both works figured prominently as required
texts at Shrewsbury.(40) In praising Xenophon for his "effigiem justi
imperii, 'the portraiture of a just empire'" (103) under the name of
Cyrus, the Apology alludes not so much to Cyrus' skill in battle as to
his ability to create order both in his realm and within himself by
exerting rigorous control over his passions and sensual desires. The
ascetic Cyrus presents an especially good example of a disciplined
subject; his contempt for physical pleasures may well have contributed
a military panache to grammar school discipline, as he addresses his
soldiers, for example: "yt becometh a ruler to excede hys subjectes,
not in easines of lyfe, but in the care of provision, and prest courage
of travell."(41) Thus, by bestowing the Idea of Cyrus "upon the world
to make many Cyruses" (101), the poet was imitating not only his
heavenly Maker but also the project of the grammar school curriculum.
In its depiction of how Virgil's Aeneid "stirreth and instructeth the
mind ... with desire to be worthy, and informs with counsel how to be
worthy" (119), the Apology explicitly argues poetry's power to produce
within its readers the ideal of the disciplined subject, who like
Aeneas excels both in his "inward self" and his "outward government."
These traits are revealed in Aeneas' reverence to patriarchal values
shown in "preserving his old father, and
carrying away his religious ceremonies." They are revealed in his
obedience to duty, including "god's commandment" to leave Dido to
fulfill his epic destiny. Obedience to hard patriarchal duty, the
suppression of soft emotions emerging from relationships with women,
the choice of a future destiny over a present pleasure: each of these
triumphs of (masculine) reason over the(effeminate) desiring body was
as essential to the creation of the disciplined grammar school subject
as to the founding of Rome. Suzuki's recent reading of the Dido episode
as representing "Aeneas' passage from a dependence on a maternal figure
to a position of leadership in a society of male comrades"(42) suggests
an apt analogy to the similarly difficult passage experienced by
grammar school boys. The protest expressed in Sidney's description of
Aeneas's abandonment of Dido despite "all passionate kindness," against
even "the human consideration of virtuous gratefulness" (119-120),
suggests a conflict in Sidney's own loyalties to patriarchal values.
Like his subversion of the warrior-reader in his portrait of Pugliano,
this empathy with Dido suggests that Sidney's interpellation as a
disciplined subject was not complete.
The instability in Sidney's loyalties is symptomatic of a larger
instability within the early modern culture which proceeds from the
splitting of the male self between effeminate child and masculine
adult. This splitting is reflected in the widespread metaphor of poetry
as nurse, which makes visible the effeminate child it was precisely the
function of the warrior imagery to conceal. Within grammar school
pedagogy, nurse imagery permitted the pleasure of poetry as appropriate
to an early stage in what Kerrigan has aptly termed a "rebirth" of the
pedagogical subject into the masculine world of intellect (285). Thus,
William Kempe's ideal schoolmaster acts as a "paineful nurse" to
beginning students as, reducing Latin to its simplest elements, he
"cheweth it all in small pieces, and thrusteth it into the childs
mouth."(43) Elyot recommends Virgil as a nurse to young students: "this
noble Virgile like to a good norise/ giveth to a childe if he will take
it/ every thing apte for his witte and capacities" (fol. 34v).
Robertello, an Italian scholar, revived Strabo's representation of
poems as functioning as nurses to entire cultures, for their "fables
gradually suckled and nurtured men until the time they would be more
capable of understanding matters in philosophy which are most
difficult."(44) The representation of poetry and the schoolmasters who
taught it as "nurses" in this early stage of the educational process
appropriated the formative pleasures of the child's earlier experience
with female nurses even as it attempted to erase the traces of their
influence.
In its own use of nurse
imagery, the Apology draws on the grammar school strategy of justifying
the pleasures of poetry as part of a longer process. The Apology's
description of "the poet as food for the tenderest stomachs" (109)
presents literature as uniquely qualified to teach because of the
pleasure it offers to those who are very young in intellect. Its
specific reference to Aesop's tales as an example of pleasureable
teaching draws upon current educational practice, for these fables (in
Latin or Greek) were commonly recommended for beginning students
precisely for the charm of their arguments in which "children moche do
delite."(45) The Apology extends the range of grammar school practice
in its representation of poetry as a necessary preliminary for more
difficult subjects, not only for students but for nations: even for the
"noblest nations and languages," poetry acted as the "first nurse,
whose milke by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of
tougher knowledges" (95). The Apology represents poetry as operating
for Indians the same way it was to operate for boys in grammar schools,
to prepare their minds for more difficult studies ahead: "Until they
find a pleasure in the exercises of the mind, great promises of much
knowledge will little persuade them that know not the fruits of
knowledge" (98).
This strategy for
justifying poetry as a stage in learning depended on the introduction
of more serious subjects--especially history and moral
philosophy--later in the curriculum. To some extent, this pattern
prevailed in the grammar schools, although it was no means absolute,
for it competed with the pressure to begin with the easier Latin texts
before moving on to more difficult ones. Thus, Philip Sidney would have
read some moral philosophy in the relatively simple Latin of Vives and
Cato in his early years at Shrewsbury before he advanced to the
sophisticated Latin poetry of Ovid and Virgil.(46) But Sidney's own
general sense that history and moral philosophy were appropriate for
older students emerges in his recommendations to Edmund Denny for a
course of study. If Denny were younger, Sideny would have directed him
to study Latin, Greek, and logic. Since Denny is older, however, he
recommends history and moral philosophy.(47) Sidney's recommendations
to Denny lend credence to Sidney's own deprecatory representations of
the Arcadia as a "toyfull book" and an "ink-wasting toy" as more than
simple modesty.(48) As Ong has noted, "literary studies in the
Renaissance were for youngsters"(114). This perception of poetry sheds
insight on Joseph Loewenstein's findings, drawn from the many
references in the Astrophel and Stella to the schoolroom and the
nursery, that poetry was perceived as essentially childish.(49)
What, then, can be made of the Apology's claim that pleasure creates
poetry as a more efficient teacher of morality than history or
philosophy? Not only does this argument run counter to Sidney's advice
to Denny, but within the context of the grammar school curriculum, the
Apology's advocacy of poetry's pleasure was no less than revolutionary.
The privileging of history and moral philosophy in grammar schools was
more than a curricular choice; this hierarchy of studies was to
replicate itself within the subjectivities of schoolboys. Read
according to grammar school dieologies, the Apology's defense of poetry
subverted not only the early modern curriculum but also the pedagogical
subject it attempted to shape. The very desire for pleasure which
history and philosophy were to "bridle" as schoolboys advanced in
discipline became, in the Apology, the standard of judgment by which
these later studies are found wanting. In the Apology, pleasure becomes
equated with, rather than opposed to, morality; for without offering
pleasure, texts can have no effect upon the minds and actions of their
readers.
The seriousness of
Sidney's argument hinges on whether the representations of philosophers
and historians are read as portraits or as caricatures. Read as
portraits, they further subvert the grammar school project by
questioning the ability of philosophers and historians to inculcate
virtues they obviously do not possess. Moral philosophers are unable
even to follow their own teaching that "passion... must be mastered,"
for the passions dominating their own souls are only too apparent as
they approach "with a sullen gravity," "angry with any man in whom they
see the foul fault of anger" (105). A very "tyrant in table talk," the
historian is no better. The very "great chafe" with which he denies
that "any man for teaching of virtue, and virtuous actions is
comparable to him" in fact reveals the falsity of his position. But
these representations can also be read as caricatures, as vicious as
they are hilarious. Read this way, the presence of these morally
dubious pleasures undercuts the Apology's defense of pleasure as a
moral force.
In this section of
the Apology, any pretense of reasonable fairmindedness has begun to
slip. In its passionate defense of its own highly self-interested
argument, the Apology employs the unfair tactic of contrasting the
worst traits of historians and philosophers to the best traits of
poets: only the "peerless poet" appears as a model of rationality as he
combines moral teachings and uplifting examples to "entice any man to
enter" upon the path of a virtuous life (107, 113). The exclusion of
the amoral poets who offer pleasure without instruction--the writers of
love poetry or (even worse) the lower-class, female narrators of fairy
tales--finally grants to them the considerable power of very bad
dreams. Hovering in the moonlit spaces around and between the words of
the text, these ghostly presences assume silent control of the central
arguments of the Apology.
More
than poetry, and even more than pleasure, is at stake in Sidney's
Apology for Poetry. Sidney's text marks a transitional stage in the
history of the bourgeois subject; it traces the process through which
anxiety became installed in the very experience of pleasure. The
stringent civilizing process shaping the privileged male subject
provides a context through which to read the Apology, which
recapitulates its figures, its experiences, and its ideologies in its
imagery and its argument. Like the Cartesian subject described by
Francis Barker, the early modern privileged male had begun to harbor a
"profound and corporeal guilt," to internalize a "self-disciplinary
fixation predicated on the outlawing of the body and its passions."(50)
The stirrings of the Cartesian splitting of the self, with the location
of subjectivity securely in the cogito, were already present in the
early modern grammar school, where the desiring body was tainted with
effeminacy. Unable to reject absolutely this emerging gender ideology,
Sidney strains logic to clear a legitimate space for the pleasure
offered by poetry. While Sidney records his own interpellation as an
early modern masculine subject, he also contests it, casting a
lingering look backward to the androgynous subjectivity of childhood.
Southern Illinois University
Notes
(1.)I thank Paula Bennett, Peter Herman, William Oram, Catherine Pesce,
and Gary Waller for reading drafts of this essay.
All citations are from Sir Philip Sidney, The Apology for Poetry, ed.
Geoffrey Shepherd (London: T. Nelson, 1965). Poetry's ability to teach
and delight has been mentioned by virtually every article on the
subject; see for example Andrew Weiner, "Moving and Teaching: Sidney's
Defence of Poesie as a Protestant Poetic," in Essential Articles for
the Study of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, 1986), 91--112. For a competing view, see James A.
Devereux, "The Meaning of Delight in Sidney's Defence of Poesy,"
Studies in Literary Imagination 15 (1982): 85--97. Richard Helgerson,
The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), 42 has noted that "the union of poetry and moral philosophy was
always ready to disintegrate at the first touch of social or
psychological strain, as I think it did when Sidney got around to
defending love poetry in the Apology."
(2.)Walter J. Ong, "Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty
Rite," Studies in Philology 56 (1959): 116.
(3.)M. J. Doherty, The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney's Defence
of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1991).
(4.)Fran Dolan, "Taking the Pencil out of God's Hand: Art, Nature, and
the Face-Painting Debate in Early Modern England," PMLA 108 (1993):
227.
(5.)Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
(6.)Laura Levine, "Men in Women's Clothing: Anti-theatricality and
Effeminization from 1579 to 1642," Criticism 28 (1986): 136. One of
various other important essays on this topic is Peter Stallybrass,
"Transvestism and the 'body beneath': speculating on the boy actor," in
Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman
(London: Routledge, 1992), 64--83.
For Gosson's importance to Sidney's Apology, see Roger Howell, Sir
Philip Sidney, Shepherd Knight (Boston: Little Brown, 1968), 172--73;
Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose
of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 62; A. C. Hamilton, Sir
Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 107--8; and Peter Herman's forthcoming book,
Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Spenser, Sidney, Milton and Renaissance
Antipoetic Sentiment.
Levine's
study participates in a wider exploration of anti-theatric and
antipoetic sentiments. See especially Jonas Barish, The Anti-theatrical
Prejudic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) and Russell
Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1970).
(7.)Stephen Orgel,
"Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?"
South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 14.
(8.)Patrica Parker, "Suspended Instruments: Lyric and Power in the
Bower of Bliss," in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce: Estranging the
Renaissance, ed. Marjorie Garber, Selected Papers from the English
Institute, 1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987): 21--39. Arguing
primarily from a colonialist perspective, Stephen Greenblatt draws the
comparison between Acrasia's bower and defenses of poetry, in
Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 189, 192.
(9.)Gail Kern
Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Early Modern England, 125--43 discusses Bottom in terms of this
regressive relationship with a maternal Titania.
(10.)Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse, Shakespeare Society of
London, 15 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1966), 24.
(11.)Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1:434--5.
(12.)These infantilized readers locate Levine's tenuous and appetitive
self, "both inherently monstrous and inherently nothing at all" (123)
in childhood.
(13.)Richard Helgerson, 128--29.
(14.)Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Vintage, 1962),
58--59. Boys were breeched sometime between the ages of five and seven:
see Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500--1800
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 258. The indulgent nature of this
early environment is qualified by Stone's descriptions of severe
childbeating; these have been countered by Linda A. Pollack, Forgotten
Children: Parent-child Relations from 1500--1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 144--48. Stone's generally pessimistic view of
early modern parent-child relationships has been widely questioned.
(15.)Stone 84, 273. Sidney was ten when he entered Shrewsbury:
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1991), 25.
(16.)William Kerrigan, "The Articulation of the Ego in the English
Renaissance," in The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the
Poetic Will, ed. Joseph H. Smith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980):
277, 285.
(17.)Ong, 103.
(18.)T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine & Lesse Greek
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:561.
(19.)Keith Thomas, Rule and Misrule in the Schools of Early Modern
England (Reading, 1976), 8. See also Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter:
From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990), 42--48, 116 and passim.
(20.)Thomas, 5--6; see also Ong, 109--23; the routines and punishments
are amply documented in Baldwin, 1:353--72, esp. 364--65. For a
competing view of humanist restraint, see Richard Halperin, The Poetics
of Primitive Accumulation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991),
26--9, but see also 35--36.
(21.)James M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney, 1572--1577 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972), 12.
(22.)Erasmus, Proverbes or Adagies, gathered by R. Taverner (London,
1552), A2.
(23.)There may, however, have been an illegitimate space; Bruce Smith,
Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 82--89, posits the
presence of a homosexual agenda, officially disavowed, in educational
institutions for adolescent boys.
(24.)Vives, Introduction to Wisdom, cited in Baldwin, 1:114.
(25.)Vives, Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde
(London, 1529), M3v; cited in Mary Beth Rose, "Where are the Mothers in
Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English
Renaissance," Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 301.
(26.)Erasmus, De pueris instituendis, in William Harrison Woodward,
Desiderius Erasmus concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New
York: Columbia University Teacher's College, 1964), 214; also cited in
Halperin, 25.
(27.)John Aubrey, as
quoted by Oliver Lawson Dick, "The Life and Times of John Aubrey,"
prefatory to Brief Lives (London: Secker and Warburg, 1950), xxix;
Bartholomeus Battus, De Oeconomia Christiana, trans. William Lowth as
The Christian Mans Closet (London, 1581), O2; John Dod and Robert
Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Householde Government (London, 1612), Q6v;
William S. and Cecil Baring-Gould, The Annotated Mother Goose (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962), passim.
(28.)Baldwin, vol. 1, passim.
(29.)Erasmus, Christian Prince, cited Baldwin, 1:609; see also
Erasmus's representation of Polyphemus in Colloquies, trans. Craig R.
Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 415--17.
(30.)Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium Linguae Latinae (London: 1586), Bb2.
(31.)George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge
Willcock and Alice Walker (1936; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1970), 19. This work circulated in manuscript in court circles long
before its publication in 1589; Puttenham was related to the Dyers,
close family friends of the Sidneys, through marriage (Willcock and
Walker, xxiv--xxviii).
(32.)Various contradictory purposes organized curriculum at this time,
as detailed in Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the
Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and
Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986);
Ramism oriented Latin language learning away from morals and towards
dialectic (161--209).
(33.)Thomas
Elyot, The Book Named the Governor (London, 1531), fols. 31v, 34v, 35,
41; Elyot's instructions, originally designed for tutors in private
households, gained considerable influence on pedagogical thought in
grammar schools of this time.
(34.)Edward Berry, "The Poet as Warrior in Sidney's Defence of Poetry,"
Studies in English Literature 29 (1989): 26.
(35.)Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Philip Sidney's Toys," Proceedings of the
British Academy 66 (1980): 175.
(36.)Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of
Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 152--53; Ronald Levao,
"Sidney's Feigned Apology," PMLA 94 (1979): 223--33. Shepherd, 12--16,
demonstrates the Apology's oratorical form.
(37.)Peter C. Herman, "'Do as I say, Not as I Do': The Apology for
Poetry and Sir Philip Sideney's Letters to Edward Denny and Robert
Sidney," Sidney Newsletter 10 (1989): 14--17.
(38.)Halperin, 24--26; also see Ong.
(39.)For the classical model see Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,
Vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Vintage Books, 1986), 84--85. Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's
Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Penguin, 1977), 131--32 clearly
alludes to it in Pyrocle' song, performed in women's clothing,
"Transform'd in show, but more transform'd in mind," which asserts that
his mind, not just his clothes, have become feminized through passion.
Musidorus's futile attempt to dissuade his friend describes this form
of masculinity: "If we will be men, the reasonable part of our soul is
to have absolute commandment, against which, if any sensual weakness
arise, we are to yield all our sound forces to the over-throwing of so
unnatural a rebellion ... to say "I cannot," is childish, and "I will
not," womanish" (132--32).
(40.)Baldwin, 1:389.
(41.)Bookes of Xenophon contayning the discipline, schole, and
education of Cyrus noble King of Persie, trans. William Barkar (London,
1550), E3.
(42.)Mihoko Suzuki,
Metamorphoses of Helen: Authority, Difference, and the Epic (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1989), 118; and see especially the role of
Cupid's masking himself as the young Ascansius to entice Dido into
loving Aeneas.
(43.)William Kempe,
The Education of Children in Learning (1588) in Four Tudor Books on
Education, ed. Robert Pepper (Gainesville: University of Florida Press,
1966), 228.
(44.)Cited Shepherd,
146. Leverenz, Language of Puritan Feeling, 142--46, describes the
American Puritan use of breast imagery by American Puritans to mean
churches or ministers; as in Tudor schools, this imagery uses fantasies
of regressive union to enhance male authority.
(45.)Elyot, fol. 30; Baldwin, 1:297, 304, 352, 370, 374, 383, 404,
425--6, 491, 607--9.
(46.)Baldwin, 1:388--92; see also Osborn, 10--16.
(47.)Osborn, 538; discussed Herman, 15--18.
(48.)Duncan-Jones, 161.
(49.)Joseph Loewenstein, "Sidney's Truant Pen," Modern Language
Quarterly 46 (1985): 128--42.
(50.)Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection
(London: Methuen, 1984), 59. This work has been especially influential
on my thinking throughout this essay, together with treatments of
similar issues in Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols.,
trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), and Theweleit.
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