allusion to tobacco-that even Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol do not smoke-we may remember that the supposed year of the first approach of young Shakespeare to the stage was the supposed year also of the first landing of tobacco-Spenser called it the "divine tobacco "—on our shores. Sidney at At the beginning of 1580, Philip Sidney had addressed to the queen a wise and earnest written argument against the project of her marriage with the Duke of Anjou. His uncle, Leicester, whose secret marriage with Lettice, Countess of Essex, had become known, was already under the queen's displeasure; and Sidney, after writing this letter, found it best to withdraw from Court. Towards the end of March, 1580, he went to stay at Wilton with his sister Mary, who in 1577, at the age of twenty, had become Countess of Pembroke as third wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, then an amiable and able man of forty. It was she whom Spenser afterwards honoured as "The greatest shepherdess that lives this day, Wilton. And most resembling both in shape and spright and upon whose death, when her course was ended, Ben Jonson wrote "Underneath this sable herse Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; Time shall throw a dart at thee." Sidney's sister became "Pembroke's mother" in that spring of 1580 when her brother Philip was staying at Wilton. He remained there about seven months. Brother and sister worked together at that time upon a joint translation of the Psalms of David into English in Verse. verse. It was then also that Sidney occupied The Psalms hours of his forced idleness by beginning to write for the amusement of his sister a long pastoral romance, in prose Sidney's mixed with verse, according to Italian fashion, with abundance of poetical conceits,—his "Arcadia." It was done at his sister's wish, and, as he wrote to her, "only for you, only to you. For, indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done." This romance was not published by Sidney. On his deathbed he asked a friend to collect all the leaves of the MS. and burn them. But it belonged to his sister, who valued it, and claimed it as her property. By her it was, four years after his death, prepared for the press, and published in 1590. Much of it was written during the summer of 1580, and the rest chiefly or entirely in 1581. Though long, Sidney's "Arcadia" is unfinished, except by the addition of a hurried close. It is a pastoral of the school of the "Arcadia" of Sannazaro, and the "Diana Enamorado" by George of Montemayor; but its intermixture of verse and prose develops more completely a romantic story, and it adds to the pastoral a new heroic element. This was suggested partly by the Spanish romances of "Amadis and "Palmerin," partly by the "Ethiopian Historie" of Heliodorus, lately translated from the Greek by Thomas Underdown. Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca, in Thessaly, who lived at the end of the fourth century, wrote, under the name of " Æthiopica," ten books of romance on the loves of Theagenes and Chariclea. Sidney had been enjoying this in Underdown's translation. In his 'Apologie for Poetrie," written in 1581 (although not published until 1595), after saying that Xenophon had "in his portraiture of a just empire under the name of Cyrus (as Cicero saith of him), made therein an absolute heroical poem; so," he added, "did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagenes and Chariclea, and yet both these writ in prose which I speak to show that it is not rhyming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gown maketh an advocate, who, though he pleaded in armour, should be an advocate and no soldier." Sidney's "Arcadia" may be, in this sense, taken as all poet's work, giving a new point of growth for heroic romance grafted upon pastoral. As he was writing for his sister a romance after the fashion of his day, Sidney, in the "Arcadia," would amuse himself by showing how he also could be delicate and show a fine conceit. This is the groundwork of its story: Two cousins and close friends, Musidorus, the elder, Prince of Thessaly, and Pyrocles, the younger, Prince of Macedon, are wrecked on the Spartan coast. Musidorus is saved and taken to the delicious pastoral land of Arcadia. His friend is supposed to have been lost. Musidorus is sheltered by Kalander, an Arcadian noble. Presently he leads an Arcadian force against Helots of Sparta, who have made Kalander's son their prisoner, and, at the close of combat with a mighty captain of the Helots, finds him to be his lost friend Pyrocles. Peace is made. Kalander's son is released, and the two friends begin a course of love adventures. Basilius and Gynecia, king and queen of Arcadia, have two daughters-majestic Pamela and sweet Philoclea. To keep men away from his daughters, Basilius has built two lodges in a forest. In one he lives with his wife and his younger daughter, Philoclea; in the other Pamela lives under the care of a clown, Dametas, who has an ugly wife, Miso, and an ugly daughter, Mopsa. The only men who may come near are a priest and some shepherds skilled in music. Musidorus now loves Pamela; he is disguised as a shepherd, Dorus, and affects passion for Mopsa. Pyrocles loves Philoclea; he is disguised as an Amazon, Zelmane, and inspires love in King Basilius, who takes him for a woman, as well as in Queen Gynecia, who sees that he is a man. Many troubles and adventures, episodes of romance, conceited dialogues and songs, including experiments in "our English reformed versifying," are built upon this groundwork. The king's sister-in-law, Cecropia, desires to set up her son Amphialus as King of Arcadia, that she may rule through him. Cecropia carries off Pamela, Philoclea, and Zelmane. She fails to bend Philoclea to assent to the love of her son, goes to the chamber of Pamela, hoping to prevail over her, and hears her praying to heaven for succour. We shall meet again with Pamela's prayer. The Arcadian army battles for the rescue of the captives, and in the course of this contest Amphialus slays Argalus, the husband of Parthenia. She afterwards arms herself to avenge her husband, comes as a stranger knight, and is herself slain by Amphialus, who suffers grief and shame for his victory. The latter part of the "Arcadia" is less fully worked out. The princesses and Pyrocles, still as the Amazon Zelmane, are again at home. Musidorus escapes with Pamela to Thessaly. Pyrocles remains, troubled by the affections. of the king and queen, but he brings both to their senses, they resume their royal duties, and the lovers are made happy. The style of Sidney's "Arcadia" follows a fashion of rhetoric caught from the pastorals of Italy and Spain, and the Spanish romances following in the wake of Lobeira's "Amadis of Gaul." Antithesis abounds, but it is not coupled with alliteration as in the true Euphuism. Sidney, in writing to amuse his sister, meets the fashionable taste in wit, but he avoids the hunting of the letter. He avoids also Lyly's use of similes drawn from such fabulous properties of animals as were to be found in Pliny's Natural His similes are History and in the mediaval bestiaries.* often drawn from nature with a poet's grace, though with excess of rhetoric. Thus, in the opening of "Arcadia," the shepherd Strephon, who is witness to the wreck of Musidorus and is first in aid, has come to the sands opposite the island of Cithera, at the place where Urania departed— "sweetest fairness and fairest sweetness." "Let us think," says his companion Claius to him, "let us think with consideration, and consider with acknowledging, and acknowledge with admiration, and admire with love, and love with joy in the midst of our woes"; and he describes presently her breath as "more sweet than a gentle south-west wind which comes creeping over flowrie fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer." There is significance in the opening of this pastoral romance with suggestion of shepherds following the footprints of the lost Urania, and praising her as one who has "thrown reason upon our desires, and, as it were, given eyes unto Cupid. Hath in any but her love fellowship maintained friendship between rivals, and beauty taught the beholders chastity?" When these shepherds saw the wreck of the burnt ship—“a waste of fire in the midst of the water"-and the blood of slain men on the waters, we are told that " a little way off they saw the mast, whose proud height now lay along, like a widow having lost her mate of whom she held her honour." The wisdom of proverbs that delighted Spanish wits found its echo in Sidney's "Arcadia' in many a wellweighed sentence. Kalander, in his great house, "knew * Of the traditions derived from the old Physiologus and bestiaries founded on it("E. W." iii. 333-335), that were worked into similes by the Elizabethan Euphuists, a good study will be found in Englische Studien, xiv. 188-210, the work of Friedrich Lauchert of Strassburg, undertaken at the suggestion of Professor Bernhard ten Brink-Der Einfluss des Physiologus auf den Euphuismus. |