'So may the songe be famous': Sir Philip Sidney and the matter of Troy
Keywords: Classics
Sir Philip Sidney
literary reception
intertextuality
Matter of Troy

The thesis argues that for Sidney’s early readers and imitators his literary career and writings were inextricably linked to the matter of Troy and that the reception of Sidney’s texts involved co-reception of Trojan texts. The chapters explore instances of such simultaneous reception in a variety of published and unpublished texts and cover approximately five decades from Sidney’s death in 1586 to the 1640s aiming to demonstrate that the connection between Sidney and Troy was a significant factor for the shaping of literary careers across genres and communities.
The quotation in the title is taken from the ‘Second Eclogues’ of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, from Zelmane’s anacreontic poem hesitantly encouraging the muse to sing not the lover’s doleful state but ‘The warres of ougly Centaurs, / The life, the death of Hector’ in order to achieve poetic fame. While the juxtaposition of personal passions and the miseries of the Trojan war has been a familiar topos since antiquity, this particular verse sheds light on the tensions between the contextualisation of Sidney’s personal and literary memory within a broader frame of the languages of loss and praise and individual authorial attempts to establish their literary careers in relation to a legendary past and a more recent history. Troy was an inexhaustible store of early modern exemplars, and Sidney’s heroic death instantly turned his life and works into a multivalent myth of equal potency. In spite of numerous separate studies of the two myths’ influence on early modern English literature, no synthetic description of their interaction exists. The thesis attempts to fill this lacuna by locating numerous overlaps of these two mythopoetic systems and describing how they influenced each other to produce an amalgam myth rediscovering Troy and perpetuating Sidney’s memory. Gavin Alexander’s Writing After Sidney (2006) demonstrates that almost every author and every literary genre in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were affected and transformed by Sidney’s premature death. A very similar nostalgic sense of ‘writing after’ is peculiar to many early modern texts drawing on the matter of Troy and reflecting on their own genealogy. Re-enactments and emulations of a pan-European imaginary past embodied in Troy and its heroes and tragic reminiscences of a recent national loss co-existed in a kaleidoscopic relationship which was one of the significant factors shaping English literature at the time. Therefore, this study of the two myths’ confluence touches upon a range of important themes defining the culture of the period, which in turn brings together recent scholarship across different disciplines and encourages a variety of research methodologies. It begins as a series of classically inspired reconstructions of sophisticated intertextual referencing, ventures into an examination of aristocratic manuscript circulation and its influence on the merging of Sidney and Troy, explores the physical and rhetorical realities of maps and educational treatises underlying the readings of Sidney’s works and Trojan histories, and culminates in an extensive survey of theatrical Troy and its potential connections to the Sidneian matter.
The chapters of the thesis are bifocal in their treatment of the core texts and the scope of analysis. Each of them concentrates on one relatively unfamiliar source and sets it within a broader theme or discourse framed by standard Trojan and Sidneian reading, such as The Aeneid or The Arcadia. For example, the chapter on the earliest elegiac responses to Sidney’s death opens into a fundamental discussion of the construction of early modern exemplarity and national identity in the wake of a recent loss, and the chapter centred around Sir Kenelm Digby’s quasi-autobiographical narrative, Loose Fantasies, helps to redefine the pivotal notions and conceptions of the Jacobean grand tour and its implicit obsession with the exotic.
The thesis also engages with the structural bifocality of the Troy–Sidney relationship on a higher level. Different Trojan and post-Sidneian texts had different metabolic rates. The short-lived collections of elegies composed in the first few years upon Sidney’s death within the learned communities of Oxford and Cambridge and revitalised only a quarter of a century later after another national tragedy, the death of Prince Henry, were forced to test multiple Trojan strategies simultaneously in their spontaneous (and, therefore, sometimes self-contradictory) re-invention of the poetics of mourning for an exemplary hero while the memory of the loss was still fresh. On the other hand, the evolutionary development of plays on Trojan subjects, from Senecan translations in the 1550s and 1560s to Thomas Heywood’s encyclopaedic and career-shaping Trojan project, including Troia Britannica and The Iron Age, facilitated a more gradual and cautious introduction and interpretation of Trojan themes, such as Dido’s unrequited love or translatio imperii, so that the readership and audience of those plays in the late Tudor and early Jacobean periods, including Sidney himself, would have dealt with several distinct forms of Trojanism as opposed to one integral Trojan myth.
Consequently, the chapters can be read both as independent studies of local (Oxford and Cambridge communities) or chronologically isolated (Sir John Harington and the Sidney Psalter project) instances of the Sidney–Troy conjunction and as synergetic contributions to an overall understanding of how cultural memory and classical (or vernacular) reception functioned throughout the period. One of the major issues addressed in the thesis is the very definition of the matter of Troy and a literary career. The examination of various authors, genres, and media proves that early modern literary culture was faced with a multiplicity of Troys and Sidneian presences that could be synthesised into what is now known as ‘Troy’ or ‘Sidney’s life and works’ only anachronistically. There is a binary sense of uninterrupted continuity and radical rediscovery to both mythologies: the mediaeval vernacularism of Troy is contrasted by a humanist fascination with the antiquity of recently disinterred texts and ideas, and Sidney’s revolutionary classicism (for example, his experiments with quantitative metres) seems to clash with his attempts of self-presentation as a vernacular author and successor to a national tradition. The analogy between an individual heroic biography and a corpus of inherently heroic texts meant that Sidney and Troy became, in many ways, synonymous and that their imitation and emulation were seen as imitation and emulation par exellence. This analogy proved so potent that it permeated almost all modes and forms of writing, public and private, fictional and factual, English and Latin. The thesis, therefore, presents a cross-section of an entire literary culture thinking of itself as of a double heir to an exemplary English poet and courtier and an exemplary ancient history, and proposes a methodology of writing about the simultaneous, transformative reception of multiple sources.