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Studies in English Literature,
1500-1900, Vol. 35, 1995
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Chivalry unmasked:
courtly spectacle and the abuses of romance in Sidney's 'New Arcadia.'
by Clare R. Kinney
In 1584, an exiled Italian Protestant humanist dedicated his
translation of twenty-five of the Psalms into Latin hexameters to
Philip Sidney. According to Katherine Duncan-Jones, Scipio Gentile laid
particular emphasis, in praising Sidney's accomplishments, on his "most
magnificent devising of shows and his equestrian feats."(1) Gentile was
presumably referring to Sidney's regular participation in Elizabeth I's
Accession Day tilts, as well as the speeches and lyrics he wrote for
other chivalric spectacles - most notably the pageants of May 1581, in
which he appeared as one of the four Foster Children of Desire who laid
siege to the queen's "Fortress of Perfect Beauty."(2) Yet despite his
frequent assistance at such public performances, Sidney's treatment of
chivalric spectacle in the more private "devisings" of his revised
Arcadia suggests that he might have found Gentile's encomium somewhat
ironic. The elaborate knightly devices and "shows" that play such a
large part in the unfinished third book of the romance do not so much
celebrate chivalric rituals as place them within a larger design that
invites their demystification.
Book 3 of the revised Arcadia departs entirely from the matter of
Sidney's original narrative when its relatively small-scale intrigues
are displaced by civil war. Books 1 and 2 describe the attempts of the
disguised princes Pyrocles and Musidorus to penetrate the pastoral
retreat of King Basilius and woo his sequestered daughters, Philoclea
and Pamela; they also introduce us to Amphialus, Philoclea's cousin and
Pyrocles' rival for her love. Amphialus's unrequited desires are
exploited by his ambitious mother, Cecropia, who, at the start of book
3, kidnaps both princesses, hoping to marry her son to one of the
Arcadian heiresses; although Amphialus has no political ambitions of
his own, his desperate passion for Philoclea leads him to consent to
her imprisonment and to raise an army to repulse Basilius's attempts to
liberate his daughters.
Sidney's
representation of the ensuing hostilities includes a lengthy
description of the first encounter between the forces of Basilius and
Amphialus. His narration initially stylizes and aestheticizes the
battle, but eventually lays bare its material consequences: "at the
first, though [the battle] were terrible, yet terror was decked so
bravely with rich furniture, gilt swords, shining armours . . . that
the eye with delight had scarce leisure to be afraid; but now all
universally defiled with dust, blood, broken armours, mangled bodies,
took away the mask and set forth horror in his own horrible manner."(3)
Yet although Sidney unveils the terrible face of war for his readers,
another mask remains in place for lovelorn and self-deceiving
Amphialus, who surveys the "mangled bodies" of the battlefield
undismayed: the horrors of his surroundings cannot "seem ugly to him
whose truly-affected mind did still paint it over with the beauty of
Philoclea" (p. 345). Amphialus's "painting" of his beloved continues to
occlude the reality of the dismembered body politic.
While the narrative that contains Amphialus relates the dire public
consequences of the uncontrolled passion of a princely individual,
Amphialus refigures his experience in terms of a private erotic quest.
Immediately after he redecorates the bloody field of war with the
features of Philoclea, he does battle with Musidorus, who, as the
Forsaken Knight, is supporting the Basilians incognito: "they
approaching one to the other (as in two beautiful folks love naturally
stirs a desire of joining, so in their two courages hate stirred a
desire of trial), then there began a combat between them worthy to have
had more large lists, and more quiet beholders" (p. 345). The
description of the martial skill and grace of the two men continues for
another ten lines, and although it is in the third person, its
perspective tends toward the Amphialan. From the idealizing viewpoint,
the encounter is "worthy" to be detached from the brutal chaos of the
surrounding battle and reimagined as a ceremonial spectacle, a single
combat fought for a lady in the lists of romance. But it nevertheless
constitutes only one part of a larger and infinitely more complicated
action - as we are abruptly reminded when an old mentor of Amphialus
slays Musidorus's steed and upbraids his lord for "stand[ing] now like
a private soldier, setting your credit upon particular fighting while,
you may see, Basilius with all his host is getting between you and your
town!" (p. 346).
It is
characteristic of Sidney's narrative practice in the New Arcadia that
he does not criticize Amphialus in his own voice, creating, instead,
another speaker to comment on the inappropriateness of his actions. As
book 3 unfolds, Sidney continues to make use of such dialogic
strategies to disclose Amphialus's implication in a kind of "romancing"
that allows him to pursue his private erotic and martial agenda while
obfuscating his responsibility for the larger conflict tearing apart
Arcadia. It is important to recognize here that Sidney is not offering
a wholesale indictment of the romance mode and its values in
themselves. Roger Ascham had insisted that the works of Malory
glorified "open manslaughter and bold bawdry" and that both the Morte
Arthur and the romances "made in Italy and translated in England"
corrupted the minds of young readers, but Sidney was quite prepared to
mention Orlando Furioso and the tales of "honest King Arthur" in the
same breath as Homeric epic when he defended the virtues of imaginative
fiction.(4) The New Arcadia's interpolated histories of the exploits of
Pyrocles and Musidorus prior to their arrival in Arcadia approve the
possibility that chivalric action may serve the larger community: the
princes spend more time restoring order to various disorderly and
mismanaged kingdoms than in seeking personal and private glory. The
revised work also introduces us to Argalus and Parthenia,
representatives of the noblest kind of love, whose moral integrity,
perfect fidelity, and exemplary public and private conduct are not only
utterly distinct from any notion of "bold bawdry" but also constitute a
standard against which the behavior of all the other lovers and
questers in Arcadia may be measured.
Sidney, then, is not offering a blanket condemnation of the literary
and didactic possibilities of the romance mode; he is rather inviting
his readers to question Amphialus's unexamined appropriation of the
protocols of chivalric romance to valorize his problematic desires and
actions.(5) (In making the New Arcadia a metaromance that can examine
its own informing values, its author of course takes his place in a
long line of sophisticated romancers, beginning with Chretien de Troyes
and extending to Edmund Spenser, whose fictions regularly interrogate
the discourses in which the quest for glory and the quest of love are
framed.) As book 3 opens, we are offered a preliminary example of the
way in which generic paradigms can be ruthlessly exploited by the
solipsistic - or frankly duplicitous - imagination.(6) The wily
Cecropia actually captures Pamela and Philoclea by sending female
agents disguised as Arcadian shepherdesses to invite the ladies to
watch some bucolic interludes (pp. 314-6): she transforms recreative
pastoral into a masque/mask concealing a darker plot. Her abduction and
adulteration of pastoral anticipate her son's own abduction and
deployment of the beguiling ceremonies of knightly romance within his
theater of chivalry.
Amphialus's
appropriation of the masques of romance for less than noble purposes
may offer, furthermore, an oblique commentary on the extratextual
abduction of romance in the pageants of Sidney's own queen. Northrop
Frye has argued that the idealizing fictions of romance have always
tended to be "kidnapped" by power brokers to ratify more or less
uninterrogated "social mytholog[ies]":(7) certainly all of the Tudor
monarchs, but in particular Elizabeth I, made use of the codes and
conventions of chivalric romance in the ceremonies that confirmed their
power. When Sidney creates an encyclopedic romance that both celebrates
the mode's informing ideals and exposes, in Amphialus's manipulation of
the masques of chivalry, the consequences of the alienation of those
ideals from chivalry's outward and visible shows, we are presented with
a potentially ironic gloss on contemporary rituals of "romancing the
throne" - something I shall be returning to later in this essay.
After the inconclusive battle between the Basilians and the Amphialans,
the dilettante courtier Phalantus instigates a new action that directly
speaks to Amphialus's fantasies. In book 1, Phalantus had arrived in
Arcadia accompanied by a peripatetic tournament, a moveable theater in
which he played the role, but not the reality, of the chivalric lover:
by the time he arrives in Basilius's camp in book 3, he has already
been identified with ossified artifice and empty ceremonies. When
Basilius forbids further large-scale assaults on Amphialus's fortress,
Phalantus, wishing "to keep his valure in knowledge by some private
act, since the public policy restrained him" (p. 364), invites any of
the foe to meet him on a nearby island "because it stands so well in
the view of [Amphialus's] castle as that the ladies may have the
pleasure of seeing the combat" (p. 365). He proposes to substitute
orderly private combat for generalized warfare, and to transform
violence into spectacle. His interest in furthering his own reputation
recalls some of the counsels of Federico in the second part of
Castiglione's Book of the Courtier:
[W]here the Courtier is at skirmish, or assault, or battaile . . . he
ought to worke the matter wisely in separating him selfe from the
multitude, and undertake notable and bolde feates . . . with as litle
company as he can, and in the sight of noble men that be of most
estimation in the campe . . . If he happen moreover to be one to shew
feates of Chivalry in open sights, at tilt, turney . . . or in any
other exercise of the person . . . he shall provide beforehand to be in
his armour no less handsom and sightly than sure, and feede the eyes of
the lookers on with all thinges that hee shall thinke may give a good
grace, and shall doe his best to get him a horse set out with faire
harnesse and sightly trappings, and to have proper devises, apt posies,
and wittie inventions that may draw unto him the eyes of the lookers on
as the Adamant stone doth yron.(8)
Through their emphasis on a certain kind of knightly display, both
Federico and Phalantus translate the lonely trials of the prototypical
hero of romance into the self-serving and emphatically public endeavors
of the aspiring courtier. Tellingly, Amphialus is delighted to have the
opportunity to display his martial skills before Philoclea's eyes, and
eagerly takes up Phalantus's challenge, ignoring anew his old mentor's
pleas that he not "affect the glory of a private fighter" (p. 366).
Amphialus and Phalantus come to their single combat ornately and
tastefully armed: Sidney's description of their array is almost as
elaborate as his account of their fighting. Their elegant maneuverings
on horseback present "a delectable sight in a dangerous effect, and a
pleasant consideration that there was so perfect agreement in so mortal
disagreement, like a music made of cunning discords" (p. 368). By the
end of the bout, the local and ceremonial rhetoric of discordia concors
has temporarily obscured the larger context of their meeting. Phalantus
disappears from the narrative immediately afterward, having seemingly
conspired with Amphialus to erase from its speaking pictures the
brutality and carnage of the previous scenes of war. But despite the
fact that the knights part amicably, this decorative and bloodless
skirmish gives rise to a sequence of encounters in which Sidney exposes
the ultimate inadequacy of chivalric protocols to the task of either
glossing over or recontaining the destructive forces unleashed in
Arcadia.
The discrepancies between
the forms of chivalric romance and the context in which they are
reinvoked quickly become apparent. After Phalantus's departure, several
Basilians challenge Amphialus to single combat in the island theater,
each grounding his quarrel in a different cause, as if he were an
individual knight errant rather than a member of Basilius's army. This
eventually results in the incongruity of a Basilian, officially in arms
to oppose Amphialus's unlawful imprisonment of his peerless liege
ladies, actually fighting Amphialus to prove that all women are merely
"shops of vanities" and "gilded weathercocks" (p. 371). The civil
conflict has been temporarily converted into a ritual so evacuated of
significance that it can unfold according to a rationale completely at
odds with the logic of the circumstances that have engendered it.
In his discussion of the narrative practices of book 3, Richard C.
McCoy suggests that in isolating important confrontations from their
informing context and disturbing consequences, Sidney substitutes an
uninterrogated "glorification of single combat" for "the critical
acuity of his early accounts of battle."(9) I am not convinced that
Sidney is beguiled by his own depiction of the stylized encounters of
romance. His narrative certainly represents them, but as these episodes
unfold, the perspective of the controlling authorial persona is
characteristically subsumed within a variety of voices and visions that
offer their own reconstructions of the action. In a suggestive essay on
the mixed modes of the New Arcadia, Stephen Greenblatt identifies a
connection between the dialogic narrative technique of Sidney's revised
text and the play of genres within the
tragical-historical-romantic-comical-pastoral work. Sidney, he argues,
"treats the genres, not only as literary categories, but as 'strategies
for living"': his juxtaposition of different literary modes within his
work has as much to do with the representation of ethical issues as
with aesthetic concerns.(10) McCoy maintains that Sidney retreats from
laying bare the animating issues - and ghastly results - of the
Arcadian rebellion to conjoin beauty and violence in the aestheticized
spectacles of chivalric romance.(11) If one accepts Greenblatt's thesis
that Sidney's portrayal of the conduct of his characters emphasizes
their predilection for figuring forth modally constituted "versions of
reality," it is not the author who is retreating from the complex
circumstances he has delineated: it is Sidney's characters, in
contradistinction to their creator, who persist in glorifying the
rituals of chivalric romance. The second Arcadia is not merely a
romance that veers into interesting new territory only to slip back
into chivalric fantasies. Sidney offers sundry (near-parodic)
elaborations of the protocols of chivalry (just as he has previously
offered in books 1 and 2 similar elaborations of Petrarchan
convention)(12) to comment on the way individuals appropriate and
valorize certain cultural constructs in order to accommodate and
obfuscate their most equivocal enterprises.
Sidney's chivalric pageants are nearly all original to the New Arcadia;
he departs from the first Arcadia's predominantly pastoral and
classical "romancing" when he augments books 1 and 2 of his revised
narrative with episodes imbued with the elaborate neomedievalism
characteristic of Ariostan - and, later, Spenserian - romance.(13) The
pages devoted to Phalantus's tournament in book 1 (pp. 90-104), and to
the Iberian jousts in book 2 (pp. 253-7) describe relatively
self-contained spectacles in which warriors direct their energies
almost exclusively toward the enhancement of their martial reputation.
These passages are full of courtly challenges on behalf of fair ladies,
highly stylized accounts of single combats, and lovingly detailed
renditions of knightly armatures and impresas: they give much more
emphasis to the manners than to the sustaining ideals of chivalric
romance.
Such episodes are
simultaneously thoroughly nostalgic and thoroughly up-to-date. Both
literary critics and cultural historians have pointed to parallels
between Pyrocles' description of the tournament held between the
Iberian and Corinthian knights in book 2 of the revised Arcadia and
surviving records of the 1577 Accession Day Jousts in which Sidney
appeared as Philisides the Shepherd Knight.(14) Interestingly enough,
Pyrocles praises the unmarried Helen of Corinth (one of the two queens
presiding over the ceremonies) in terms that might seem familiar to an
Elizabethan courtier:
[H]er
government . . . hath been no less beautiful to men's judgements than
her beauty to the eyesight . . . she using so strange and yet so
well-succeeding a temper that she made her people (by peace) warlike,
her courtiers (by sports) learned, her ladies (by love) chaste . . .
[H]er sports were such as carried riches of knowledge upon the stream
of delight; and such the behaviour both of herself and her ladies as
builded their chastity, not upon waywardness, but by choice of
worthiness: so as, it seemed that court to have been the marriage place
of love and virtue, and that herself was a Diana apparelled in the
garments of Venus.
(pp. 253-4)
Pyrocles' celebration of this monarch's beauty, chastity, and good
government, as well as his final allusion to Diana, recalls the
mythologizing of Elizabeth I as Cynthia/Astraea. Furthermore, his
description of Helen's schooling of her male and female courtiers in
both improving "sports" and chaste behavior reads like an idealized
description of Elizabeth's policing of her courtiers' sexuality and her
encouragement of the rituals and pageants that confirmed her own power.
In the tournament within Sidney's text, however, the Shepherd Knight
whose trappings are so reminiscent of the Philisides who jousted before
Elizabeth in 1577 is not in the service of this exemplary queen - he is
an Iberian subject of the promiscuous and designing Queen Andromena (p.
255), a woman who repays the faithful service of her lover Plexirtus by
seeking his destruction after she marries his father, the King of
Iberia. Louis Montrose has argued that Elizabeth I's promotion of the
protocols of romance in her own courtly pageants ceremonially
reinforced the subservience of aspiring members of the aristocracy to
their Virgin Queen;(15) in this light, Sidney's narrative placement of
this other Philisides in the service of the fickle and ungracious
Andromena rather than the Corinthian "Diana" might be viewed as an
ironic commentary upon the masterplot informing the official
"romancing" of Elizabeth Tudor. (The author of the New Arcadia would at
the very least be quite aware that loyal participation in the rituals
of courtly neomedievalism might not be particularly generously requited
by the monarch whom they celebrated. His performances in Elizabeth's
own theater of chivalry did not even win him a knighthood until 1583,
and then only because John Casimir, Count Palatine, had requested that
he stand proxy for him in his investiture as Knight of the Garter.)(16)
I do not wish to oversimplify the
relationship between Elizabeth Tudor's ceremonial mythologizing of her
power and the critical reexamination of "kidnapped" chivalric romance
in Sidney's fictional anatomy of rebellion in Arcadia.(17) But the
revised Arcadia undeniably opens up an imaginative space within which
an author very familiar with the Elizabethan masques of chivalry can
suggest how easily a privileged cultural form may frame a performance
that has more to do with the political needs of the moment than with
the affirmation of a transcendent ideal.(18) If the sixteenth-century
tournament entangled art and life in a manner that allowed "meanings
(moral, political, social) to be read, truths glimpsed,"(19) the jousts
of Sidney's New Arcadia offer equally intricate "symbolic actions."(20)
But the meanings available to the readers of the Arcadia are quite
different from those adduced by the readers within the romance.
I have already argued that Sidney's critique of chivalric protocols is
particularly evident in his characterization of the erring Amphialus,
himself a significant addition to the cast of the original Arcadia.
Amphialus's public self-justifications for his rejection of Basilius's
authority cloak his questionable actions in dissembling rhetoric; he
circulates manifestos "which with some glosses of probability might
hide indeed the foulness of his treason, and from true commonplaces
fetch down most false applications" (p. 325). Ethically and
etymologically between two seas, torn between his nobler aspirations
and his selfish desires, Amphialus bears witness to his inner confusion
by invoking "the exigencies of monarchic politics"(21) in his own
justification, even as he attempts to reconstruct his circumstances
according to the anachronistically feudal ideals of romance. At the
same time, he cannily tests the loyalty of his own followers by
employing informants to report their responses to rumors and libels he
spreads against himself (p. 326). The prince's practices recall
Machiavelli's advice that the aspiring ruler should play both lion and
fox; Sidney's account of his sleights introduces into the Arcadian
scene the strategems of Renaissance Realpolitik"(22) and ensures that
Amphialus's later efforts to frame his actions according to the
protocols of romance are compromised by his duplicitous beginnings.
If Amphialus's chivalric fictions are tainted from their very
inception, the combats that take place in Phalantus's theater of
chivalry complete their subversion. After Amphialus overthrows all of
Basilius's challengers, the Arcadian ruler decides that "his honour,
and (as he esteemed it) felicity" stand upon finding a knight to defeat
Amphialus in single combat (p. 371). Succumbing to the romantic
Amphialan vision, Basilius illogically allows the governing fantasies
of his rebellious subject to determine the nature of his own honor.
(The suggestive Sidneian parentheses quietly invite us to wonder where
Basilius's "felicity" might actually lie.) Significantly, the proper
defense of Basilius's honor is made the responsibility of the exemplary
Argalus, who is summoned to Basilius's aid from the domestic bliss in
which he had been left at the close of book 1. Argalus and his bride
Parthenia - whose history, like that of Phalantus, is an addition to
the Old Arcadia - are paragons of virtue and fidelity: their
much-enduring love ends in wedded joy and they become an ideal against
which all other noble lovers might be measured. Book 3, however,
reverses the moral hierarchy suggested by book 1's account of their
perfections. The chain of events set in motion by Phalantus - the
knight who, understanding love only as a game, a mannered performance,
is the very antithesis of the sincerely devoted Argalus - sacrifices
the couple's hard-won happiness to the arbitrary code of honor
punctiliously followed by Phalantus and blindly embraced by Amphialus
and Basilius.
Argalus expends no
more time than Basilius in asking what constitutes "honorable" behavior
in a country racked by civil conflict. When Parthenia begs him to stay
with her, he tells her "how much [the king's command] imported his
honour (which since it was dear to him he knew it would be dear unto
her)" (p. 372). Argalus has accepted that his honor is defined by his
willingness to fight for his lord in no matter how questionable a
contest. When, however, the authorial voice remarks that Argalus is
carried away from Parthenia "by the tyranny of honour" (p. 373),
Sidney's readers may be encouraged to conclude that tyrant honor, like
the "tyrant love" that Amphialus invokes to excuse his imprisonment of
Philoclea (p. 323), is a construct of the imagination, an arbitrary
rather than an absolute term of value. Amphialus had sacrificed perfect
honor to "tyrant love"; now we are offered the complementary spectacle
of Argalus sacrificing perfect love to tyrant honor.
Before doing battle with Amphialus, Argalus strives to persuade him to
give up his larger enterprise. The latter responds to Argalus's
suggestion that his current course of action is unjust and perilous by
remarking that "love, which justifieth the unjustice you lay unto me,
doth also animate me against all dangers, since I come full of him, by
whom yourself have been (if I be not deceived) sometimes conquered" (p.
374). Amphialus once more makes tyrant love the excuse for his unjust
actions; he also directly equates his situation with that of Argalus.
In the midst of the civil rebellion he has helped to promote, he
insists that there are continuities between his own experience and
endeavors and those of this exemplary heroic lover. The authorial voice
makes no comment, but Sidney's suggestive juxtaposition of the two
characters obliges us to recognize that Amphialus's actions in pursuit
of his desires have placed him in a very different moral universe from
the narrative space of "true romance" inhabited by Argalus in book 1.
Amphialus and Argalus seem to begin their martial encounter as equally
chivalric heroes. Argalus wears Parthenia's sleeve as his favor;
Amphialus, in the manner of Chretien de Troyes's Lancelot,(23) fights
with his gaze fixed on Philoclea's window, "as if he had fetched all
his courage thence" (p. 375). But we are not, after all, in a medieval
romance. When Argalus, near to defeat, will not accept his foe's mercy
- will not, that is, confirm him in the role of perfect, gentle knight
- Amphialus "forg[ets] all ceremonies" (p. 376) and wounds Argalus
mortally. I find it significant that when Amphialus's generosity is
slighted, Sidney has him forget "all ceremonies," drop the chivalric
mask/masque, and regress to a more brutal and unconstrained mode of
action.(24) The refining rituals with which Amphialus has sought to
mystify his involvement in an immoral conflict are revealed to be
ultimately inadequate to this task; moreover, his chivalrous play has
real and fatal consequences. His attempt to translate an anarchic civil
conflict born out of passion and deception into a series of
aesthetically pleasing encounters from the world of courtly romance
results in the destruction of that universe's most exemplary
representative.
Amphialus's next
challenge comes from a new arrival among the Basilians, a knight clad
in "an armour all painted over with such a cunning of shadow that it
represented a gaping sepulchre . . . His bases, which . . . came almost
to his ankle, were embrodered only with black worms, which seemed to
crawl up and down, as ready already to devour him" (p. 395). The
baroque ornament almost obscures the armor's wearer; as the
hypertrophied rituals of Amphialan romance become increasingly detached
from the ethical questions raised by Sidney's romance, such
overdetermined devices and insignia acquire a narrative life of their
own. The Knight of the Tomb is already embraced by the sepulcher he
seeks.
In his meeting with this
unknown knight, Amphialus reinvokes the ceremonies he had abandoned in
the fight against Argalus. As soon as he realizes that his adversary is
seriously out-matched, he chivalrously seeks to end the fight, begging
the knight to employ his valor against a more worthy enemy, since he,
Amphialus, has "'not deserved hate of you"' (p. 397). But when his
opponent tells him he is a liar to say so, Amphialus furiously deals
the stranger his death blow. Amphialus's courteous insistence that
there is no reason for the fight to continue testifies to his
persistent desire to divorce his participation in these exemplary
encounters from his actions in that other, more ambiguous universe
where he is at once faithful lover, cruel captor, noble warrior, and
disloyal promoter of civil strife. But his nonchalant assertion of the
nonsignificance of the contest is rendered meaningless when he unhelms
his dying foe and discovers the widowed Parthenia (p. 397). His
opponent has every reason to hate him: the train of events set in
motion by his rebellion has resulted in the death of her lord. And in
killing her, Amphialus once again destroys an exemplary representative
of the world of ennobled and uncompromised desire with which he had
aspired to ally himself.
Sidney offers his readers a remarkable description of the dying
Parthenia:
[H]er beauty then, even in despite of the past sorrow, or coming death
. . . was nothing short of perfection: for her exceeding fair eyes
having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her
roundy, sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed
their neighbour, death . . . her neck (a neck indeed of alablaster)
displaying the wound which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his
own beauties, so as here was a river of purest red, there, an island of
perfittest white, each giving lustre to the other . . . [T]hough these
things to a grossly-conceiving sense might seem disgraces, yet indeed
were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which, all looked
upon thorough the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of
her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief,
compassion and shame.
(pp. 397-8)
The passage discomfitingly grafts a Petrarchan celebration of female
loveliness onto a scene of violent death. Conventional praise of the
play of red and white in the beloved's countenance is recast in the
disquieting aestheticization of the dramatic contrast between
Parthenia's alabaster neck and the pools of blood from her wound; even
as the spectators contemplate the dying woman, the marks that the fatal
contest has left upon her body are refigured as additions to her beauty
and further provocations to the desiring eye. The blazon of Parthenia's
deathly loveliness is ultimately resituated in the controlling
perspective of the "astonished" Amphialus. It is his gaze, in effect,
that "apparel[s] beauty in a new fashion" - just as it had previously
repainted the horrors of war with the beauty of Philoclea (p. 345),
transforming the carnage of battle into the inspiring erotic object of
a private quest. The death scene of Parthenia, herself a victim of the
chain of events set in motion by Amphialus's ruinous desires, subtly
revises that earlier metamorphosis. Amphialus's attempts to substitute
the ritualized performances of chivalric romance for the brutal
realities of civil conflict have actually inscribed the violence he has
engendered on the body of another beloved woman. When the
disfigurements of death and the graces of the cynosure are collapsed
together in the paradoxes that figure forth the dying Parthenia, the
almost unbearable preciosity of Sidney's oxymoronic discourse speaks
all too precisely to the equally intolerable contradictions within the
Amphialan vision.(25)
Amphialus's
final performance in the theater of chivalry matches him once more
against Musidorus (a.k.a. the Forsaken Knight). Before the encounter,
Sidney describes Amphialus's armor and caparisons in loving detail:
[A]s if he would turn his inside outward, he would needs appear all in
black, his decking both for himself and horse being cut out into the
fashion of very rags - yet all so dainty joined together with precious
stones as it was a brave raggedness and a rich poverty; and so
cunningly had a workman followed his humour in his armour that he had
given it a rusty show, and yet so, as any man might perceive was by art
and not negligence.
(p. 404)
Like the disguised Parthenia, who sought only death and who therefore
reinvented herself as a memento mori, Amphialus refigures his
fragmented psyche and his dark despair in his dress. Such intricate
self-fashionings (where even "negligence" is artful) are book 3's
equivalent of the disguisings that follow hard upon the inner
transformations wrought by love in books 1 and 2 of the revised Arcadia
- but here, characters like Amphialus and Parthenia are nearly
obliterated by the baroque elaboration of their overdetermined devices.
Indeed, their insignia do not only record their present condition but
almost seem to constitute their future narratives, not so much marking
a surrender to the transforming power of eros as proclaiming and
predicting a desire to embrace the consuming power of death. Parthenia
finds the tomb she represents; Amphialus, clad in rusty black armor and
draped in rags, finishes his last single combat with his armor "rusty"
with blood and his body torn to shreds.
The encounter between Musidorus and Amphialus begins in accordance with
the usual rituals of the theater of chivalry. An exhibition of heroic
action is offered up to the eyes of Pamela and Philoclea, with "each
[warrior] fetching still new spirit from the castle window," and both
knights evincing more interest in remaining in sight of their ladies
than in getting the sun behind them (p. 406). But even as he elaborates
upon the fray and celebrates the martial skills and dogged endurance of
both participants, Sidney uses Musidorus's perspective to interrogate
Amphialus's moral position and expose the essential bad faith of his
chivalry. When Musidorus's steed is slain, the "courteous Amphialus"
begs his pardon for inadvertently dispatching the animal:
"Excuse thyself for viler faults!" answered the Forsaken Knight, "and
use this poor advantage the best thou canst . . . ""Thy folly," said
Amphialus, "shall not make me forget myself," and therewith . . .
alighted from his horse, because he would not have fortune come to
claim any part of the victory - which courteous act would have
mollified the noble heart of the Forsaken Knight, if any other had done
it besides the jailer of his mistress.
(pp. 407-8)
The exemplary behavior (in terms of chivalric protocol) of "the
courteous Amphialus" is irrelevant to his opponent. Musidorus has not
been so hypnotized by the rituals of romance as to forget his fury at
Amphialus's entirely discourteous and unchivalrous imprisonment of the
Arcadian princesses, which has "blotted out all complements of
courtesy" (p. 411). He refuses to be beguiled by Amphialus's virtuoso
chivalry, and both men gradually abandon all punctilio, all artifice:
the no longer courteous Amphialus bears "fury in his eyes and revenge
in his heart"; Musidorus, in his turn, "give[s] himself wholly to be
guided by the storm of fury" (p. 409).
The encounter ends brutally: while each knight is sorely injured, it is
Amphialus who receives "upon the belly so horrible a wound that his
guts came out withal" (p. 411). The masque of chivalry disintegrates;
the final stages of the engagement transform a courtly joust into a
savage free-for-all. Amphialus's seconds, "not recking law of arms nor
use of chivalry," assault the Forsaken Knight, Musidorus's seconds come
to his defense, Cecropia sends a squadron of Amphialan reinforcements
to the island, and the Basilians respond to her "traitorous" practices
by dispatching their own troops to the fray (pp. 411-2). We have come
full circle. Amphialus began to translate civil war into private
knightly combat when he fixed his attention on Musidorus and ignored
his public responsibilities in the midst of the initial bloody
encounter between the Basilians and the Amphialans. The series of
single combats into which the energies of both sides have been diverted
culminates in this second engagement, at whose conclusion all martial
sports give way to a final melee that once more unveils the cruel face
of war.
Sidney suggests in this
scene the utter exhaustion of the (misappropriated and much-abused)
protocols of chivalric romance - protocols that have certainly offered
Amphialus no final deliverance from his moral perplexities, obliged as
he is to reconfront the destructive and escalating consequences of his
errancy. At the onset of hostilities, the outcome of his revolt could
not "seem ugly to him whose . . . mind did still paint it over with the
beauty of Philoclea" (p. 345). But after Amphialus has returned from
battling Musidorus, his conscience lays "before his eyes his present
case, painting every piece of it in most ugly colours" (p. 413). His
idealizing desire no longer reinvents his circumstances: where horror
was previously translated into the countenance of the inspiring
Beloved, the ugly image of his compromised situation is now the only
speaking picture available to his view. Nor does this vision mark the
end of his miseries. Once he has retreated to his chamber to nurse his
wounds, his mother takes control of affairs within the besieged castle
and proceeds to torture the captive princesses in an attempt to force
one of them to marry her son. When Amphialus eventually discovers these
latest, brutal consequences of his countenancing Cecropia's abduction
of Pamela and Philoclea, he attempts suicide, stabbing himself
repeatedly until he presents "a pitiful spectacle, where the conquest
was the conqueror's overthrow, and self-ruin the only triumph of a
battle fought between him and himself" (p. 442).
Sidney's description of Amphialus in extremis represents a final
embodiment of the forces the prince sought to contain in the rituals of
romance. The New Arcadia's account of the initial skirmish between the
Basilians and the Amphialans had suggested that Amphialus's uprising
had displaced the violence of his rebellious passions, as well as his
own self-division, onto the Arcadian body politic:
In one place lay disinherited heads, dispossessed of their natural
seigniories; in another, whole bodies to see to, but that their hearts,
wont to be bound all over so close, were now with deadly violence
opened; in others, fouler deaths had uglily displayed their trailing
guts. There lay arms whose fingers yet moved . . . and legs which,
contrary to common nature, by being discharged of their burden were
grown heavier.
(pp. 340-1)
Amphialus's beguiling fantasies temporarily permit him to mask the
violence he has unleashed in the refining ideals of romance; it is only
when the bodily integrity of Philoclea, his causus belli, is violated
by Cecropia, that he explicitly confronts and catalogues all the
injuries his actions have inflicted upon the people and polis of
Arcadia (p. 441). Turning on himself the ruin he has wrought, the hero
who has consistently refused to recognize the disjunction between his
chivalric fictions and the actual consequences of his erring desires at
last inscribes the spectacle of his self-division on his own person.
And it is as a mutilated, barely breathing body that he makes his final
appearance in the unfinished New Arcadia, when he is carried out of the
narrative by his long-suffering admirer, Queen Helen of Corinth - that
same "Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus" whom Pyrocles praised
so highly in book 2.
The ultimate
consignment of Amphialus to Helen's care seems particularly revealing
in the light of my observation that the latter is depicted in terms
that recall conventional celebrations of Sidney's monarch and is
represented as presiding over a centralized and carefully policed
"Elizabethan" court. Sidney has not only purged his narrative of the
beguiling masks of chivalry and set a limit upon the self-deceptions of
their chief patron. He has also created a half-buried but suggestive
allegory in which a thoroughly problematized, morally exhausted, and
practically moribund version of chivalric romance is repossessed by a
virgin queen whose public mythology is akin to that of Elizabeth Tudor.
Sidney's critique of the "kidnapping" of the protocols of knightly
romance for morally ambiguous or politically self-serving purposes may
have played itself out within his unfinished narrative, but that same
narrative points to the continuation of this phenomenon within the
author's historical moment. Amphialus makes no more appearances in the
New Arcadia, but the ambiguous ceremonies over which he has presided
will be represented anew, outside the Arcadian text, in Cynthia's
revels.(26)
NOTES
1 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1991), p. 271. Duncan-Jones cites Scipio Gentile,
Scipii Gentilis in xxv. Davidis Psalmos epicaeparaphrases (London,
1584), sig. *[4.sub.v].
2 For an
account of the Foster Children of Desire entertainment see Louis Adrian
Montrose, "Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the
Motives of Elizabethan Courtship," RenD n.s. 8 (1977): 3-36, 24-7.
3 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New
Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp.
344-5. All subsequent citations of the New Arcadia refer to this
edition.
4 Roger Ascham, The
Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967),
p. 69; Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G.
Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), pp. 61-2. For an
illuminating discussion of the complicated attitudes of Renaissance
writers toward the simultaneously "necessary and dangerous" energies of
romance, see Gordon Teskey's introduction to Unfolded Tales: Essays on
Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 1-10.
5 We might note at this point that the revised Arcadia employs several
different strains of romance - Sidney borrows from the late classical
romances of Heliodorus, appropriates some of the characteristics of the
sixteenth-century pastoral romances of Sannazaro and Montemajor, and is
also influenced by the late medieval chivalric romance Amadis de Gaula.
It is specifically the misuse and misprision of the codes of chivalric
romance that are at issue in book 3 of Sidney's text.
6 In The Text of Sidney's Arcadian World (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press,
1989), Michael McCanles investigates the New Arcadia as a palimpsest of
prior texts and modes of fiction-making, which is productive of a
"discursive archaeology." He argues that the second Arcadia, in
contrast to the relatively generically unified Old Arcadia, criticizes
those "pure generic distinctions which cannot accommodate the
dialectics of human moral identity" (pp. 160-2).
7 Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of
Romance (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 29-30, 168.
Harry Berger offers an interesting elaboration on Frye's thesis in
relation to Spenserian narrative in "'Kidnapped Romance': Discourse in
The Faerie Queene," in Logan and Teskey, pp. 208-56.
8 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas
Hoby (1561; London: Dent, 1974), pp. 95-6.
9 Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New
Brunswick NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 174, 182. See also pp.
177-8.
10 Stephen Greenblatt, "Sidney's Arcadia and the Mixed Mode," SP70, 3
(July 1973): 269-78, 272.
11 McCoy, p, 182. See also Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their
Fictions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1985),
p. 242.
12 For a discussion of
Sidney's interrogation of Petrarchan masternarratives of desire in
books 1 and 2 of his revised romance, see Clare R. Kinney, "The Masks
of Love: Desire and Metamorphosis in Sidney's New Arcadia," Criticism
33, 4 (Fall 1991): 461-90.
13 For
a general discussion of the implications of Sidney's invocation of
medieval and Ariostan romance in the New Arcadia, see Nancy Lindheim,
The Structures of Sidney's "Arcadia" (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press,
1982), pp. 111-4.
14 See, for
example, Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth
Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 88-94; Roy
Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 149; and Thelma N. Greenfield's
discussion of Elizabethan court entertainments in The Eye of Judgment:
Reading the "New Arcadia" (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1982),
pp. 143-58. Of related interest is Maurice Keen's description of the
protocols of late medieval tournaments in Chivalry (New Haven: Yale
Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 201-6.
15
Louis Adrian Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of
Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50, 3 (Fall 1983): 415-59, 447. For
other interpretations of Elizabethan neomedievalism, see Yates, pp.
109-10 and Strong, p. 161.
16 Duncan-Jones, p. 249.
17 My caveats notwithstanding, these episodes do seem to support Arthur
E Kinney's argument that the New Arcadia is "a contemporary epic
(despite its settings) that translated the antique past into the
present's most pressing needs"; see "Sir Philip Sidney and the Uses of
History," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart
Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 311.
18 In The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of
Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ, of California
Press, 1989), Richard C. McCoy argues that Elizabeth's formal pageants
could be exploited in both directions. Aspiring courtier-politicians
(including Sidney himself) "joined in the 'rites of knighthood' to
assert their own rights and interests": the chivalric ceremonies became
"symbolic power struggles" in which "aristocratic militarism and
traditional notions of honor and autonomy" were celebrated in the guise
of "rituals of devotion" (pp. 2-18). His analysis of the significance
of the martial rituals diverges from those of Montrose, Strong, and
Yates, but supports my more general suggestion that contemporary
reproductions of the ceremonies of romance (whether in texts or in
life) lend themselves to the furthering and mystification of personal
and political agendas.
19 Greenfield, p. 152.
20 This term (borrowed from the critical terminology of Kenneth Burke)
is applied to Elizabethan chivalric spectacle by McCoy, Rites of
Knighthood, p. 4.
21 Martin N.
Raitiere, "Amphialus's Rebellion: Sidney's Use of History in New
Arcadia," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12, 1 (Spring
1982): 113-31, 130. Raitiere argues that Sidney's juxtaposition of
aristocratic martial ideals with the political contingencies of the
Amphialan revolt results in an ironic examination of the warrior ethic
comparable with that offered by Cervantes in Don Quixote.
22 Cf. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Peter Bondanella and
Mark Musa (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), p. 66.
23 Cf. Chretien de Troyes, Lancelot, in Arthurian Romances, trans. D.
D. R. Owen (London: Dent, 1987), p. 234, where the hero will not remove
his eyes from his lady in his duel with the false knight Meleagant.
24 Discussing this episode, Arthur K. Amos Jr. notes that "once the
ceremonial distinction between joust and war is lost, the death of at
least one of the knights is ensured" (Time, Space, and Value: The
Narrative Structure of the "New Arcadia" [Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ.
Press, 1977], p. 164).
25 For a
rather different reading of the narrative implications of this episode,
see Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle
(Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 106-7.
26 I would like to thank an anonymous SEL reader for various
suggestions that have influenced the final form of this article.
Clare R. Kinney is associate professor of English at the University of
Virginia. She is the author of Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer;
Spenser, Milton, Eliot (1992) and is currently working on a study of
gendered representation and the metamorphoses of Petrarchism in
Elizabethan romance. |
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