Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 423 - Heaven-Bred Poesy - Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Today's episode, Heaven-Bread Poacy. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. Now, I know what you're thinking. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, weren't they famous poets, not philosophers? What are they doing on this podcast? Well, I'm not one to rely on mere appeals to authority. And if I were, then the subject of our last episode, Richard Hooker, would have shown me the error of my ways. Still, when great authorities are on my side, there's no harm in mentioning it, especially when the authority in question is Aristotle. So I'm going to start this discussion by reminding you that Aristotle's writings include a work called the Poetics, a foundational work of literary theory. Even better, it features a passage in which Aristotle compares the writing of poetry to the writing of history, and says that the poet's enterprise is more philosophical. This is because poetry concerns itself more with the universal, whereas history speaks of the particular. Thanks to the humanist movement, this passage, and the poetics in general, were well known in Elizabethan England. And in this context, Aristotle's judgment was used to support an even bolder claim that poetry is superior not only to history, but also to philosophy itself. I trust that Aristotle would not agree, and as you might imagine, neither do I. If I did, you'd be listening to the Poetry Podcast without any gap, starting with epic and ending with rap. But we philosophers should always be ready to listen to counterarguments, so let's turn to the proponent of this claim, Philip Sidney. He was innovative in his poetic style, though he's perhaps best known as the author of a prose work, the romantic pastoral tale Arcadia. It does show some interest in philosophy, but I want to focus here on a much shorter text, his brief defense of poacy. The title already raises a question, why would anyone have felt the need to defend poetry in the Elizabethan period? This was the age of Shakespeare, after all. True, but to Sidney's mind, Queen Elizabeth's court was not doing all it could to support the cause of literature. Furthermore, this was also the age of religious reform, when the arts could provoke considerable anxiety, if not outright opposition. In particular, poetry could easily be associated with classical pagan culture, or the medieval and hence Catholic literary tradition. Roger Ascham's humanist work on education, the schoolmaster, made this point when it decried the rude beggarly rhyming that had been brought into England from papist Europe, by men of excellent wit indeed, but of small learning and less judgment. So there was pressure on the poets to show how their chosen art could be reconciled with the strictures of a godly Protestant society. And Sidney had an additional reason to be on the defensive about poetry. As grandson of the Duke of Northumberland, he was a high ranking aristocrat, who might have been expected to distinguish himself through warfare and diplomacy, not by writing verse. By this measure, he was not a complete failure. He was even knighted in 1583, one year before his early death at the age of only 31. But he fell out of royal favor after advocating too openly for a strong stance against Spain. So he may have seen his literary career as a kind of consolation prize. Ironically, this made him the ideal messenger for promoting poetry among his aristocratic peers. As one scholar has noted, they would believe Sidney because he only partly believed himself. On this reading, his defense was a bid to depict poetry as a valid alternative to military prowess. This would help to explain the way he begins by telling of a defender of the art of horsemanship, who was so eloquent in the praise of this skill, that it made Sidney almost wish he were a horse. Again, I must respectfully disagree, I'd much rather be a giraffe. Sidney's opening gambit satirically positions poetry as a foil to a paradigmatically chivalric art, and thereby invites the reader to reflect on Sidney's own social position. It's the sort of self-presentation familiar to us from Erasmus and other humanists who imitated him, and indeed to hold defense knowingly ironic, yet serious in its themes, echoes the tone of a work like Erasmus' Praise of Folly. It was a lightly worn literary persona that was hard won. Along with his noble lineage, Sidney brought to the defense an impressive humanist pedigree. He traveled widely in Europe, studying in Padua, Frankfurt, and Paris, where he sat at the feet of Peter Remus and experienced the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre. He was formed by the new educational model of Philip Melanchthon, which fused Protestant piety with humanist scholarship. Amongst his friends were such outstanding Protestant literary figures as Francois Hautman and Philippe Monet. Lipsius called him the Flower of England. Rich, charming, brilliant, and did I mention rich? Sidney moved easily in these circles and shared his ideas about poetry with refined colleagues, but not with anyone else. None of Sidney's writings were printed in his lifetime, so they were known only through manuscripts that circulated among like-minded aristocrats. Putting all this together, we can say that the goal of Sidney's defense was to use humanist rhetorical methods to make a case for poetry as the most excellent of pursuits, aiming to convince both the highborn and the godly. That's a lot of hurdles to jump over, but Sidney was himself no mean horseman and mounted a powerful case. His central contention was that the poet is the writer best positioned to instill virtue in his readers. Because of its aesthetic appeal, poetry can delight as it instructs, like a medicine of cherries. This makes it an ideal teaching aid, especially for those who are just forming their character. He chastises philosophers who have made slighting comments about poetry, since it is, in fact, the first light-giver to ignorance and first nurse, whose milk, by little and little, enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges. As evidence, he points out that the earliest philosophers, presocratics like Parmenides and Empedocles, presented their ideas in poetic form, which is true, though their poems aren't exactly suitable for beginners. It's also a little awkward for Sidney that a favorite author of the humanists, Plato, banished the poets from the ideal society described in his Republic. Sidney diffuses this objection by arguing that Plato was only against poetry that teaches falsehoods, for instance, about the gods. He was banishing the abuse, not the thing. But the main classical inspiration for Sidney is the one I mentioned at the outset, Aristotle. He takes from Aristotle's Poetics the idea that the function of poetry is mimesis, or imitation. The poet uses this technique to persuade his audience to adopt true beliefs about God and morality. This is where the competition between poetry, history, and philosophy comes in. The problem with history is that it is tied to factual events, which constrains its ability to impart constructive lessons. The poet's freedom to invent means that he can, like the philosopher, focus attention on moral precepts without getting bogged down in the tiresome question of what actually happened in a given price and time. Now, in fact, Renaissance historians were happy to be selective and creative, precisely because they wanted to offer their readers moral and political instruction, not just a neutral chronicle of events. But Sidney might say that this just shows the historian's awareness of their own limits. To achieve their aims, they need to use what we could quite literally call poetic license. As for philosophy, it has the reverse problem. Since it is entirely general and abstract, it cannot move the reader. Only poetry can use both precept and example. So it has the virtues of both philosophy and history and the weaknesses of neither. Sidney's focus on virtue is well chosen, since this should dispel religious concerns about the merely aesthetic and also show the utility of poetry for aristocratic readers interested in personal excellence. But like the hero of a Greek tragedy, Sidney's argument has a tragic flaw. The best poetry is not nearly as didactic as Sidney suggests it should be. Great poetic works do not surrender their lessons easily, but have layers of meaning that reveal themselves only to close interpretive scrutiny. They inexhaustibly reward reading and rereading. As an example, let's consider what is arguably the greatest literary work of this period, not written by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser's The Fairy Queen. As it happens, there was a connection between Spenser and Sidney. The two were about the same age, but Spenser came from a less exalted background. When he attended university, he had to make his way as a servant to other students. Fortunately for him, Sidney put his money where his mouth was by sponsoring Spenser and other authors, to the point that his name became proverbial for the act of literary patronage. As late as the 18th century, we find a bit of doggerel verse complaining about the failure of the rich to follow suit. For now, no Sidney's will 300 give that needy Spenser and his fame may live. Though Spenser rose to greater heights than one of his background could have expected, he did not achieve his full ambitions, or at least that's the usual verdict on the turn his career took in 1580, when he was sent to Ireland on the crown's business. Ireland was considered as a primitive backwater, not least by Spenser himself, so this hardly looks like a promotion, though it has been argued that the relatively autonomous political situation there could have provided opportunities for the ambitious. Nor was Spenser's attitude to his new home wholly negative. He called attention to the long history of literacy in Ireland, and also the tradition of bards, impressive to a poet like himself. But it wouldn't be unfair to call him an apologist for the depredations inflicted on the island during the reign of Elizabeth, in particular the killing of 30,000 Irish to make room for a plantation of 4,000 English at Munster. Spenser described the horrific consequences of a scorched earth policy used in Ireland, starving the population, out of every corner of the woods and glens, they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them. They looked like anatomies of death. He blamed it all on the Irish themselves, though. They were killed not by the sword, but by the extremity of famine, which they themselves had wrought. As you may know, our phrase, beyond the pale, refers to the idea of a pale, or supposedly civilized area around Dublin that was under the control of the English. A contemporary, William Camden, thus said that whereas the English pale was a place of law, the Irish folk outside it reject all laws and live after a barbarous manner. Spenser would not have disagreed, but he was also critical of the so-called old English, who had lived there for a long time, deeming them corrupted by exposure to this barbaric land. The solution, he felt, was even more English people and more English language. The Irish tongue should be stamped out because the mind must needs be affected with the words so that the speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish. His views were unveiled in one of the more unsettling examples of a humanist dialogue from this period called A View of the State of Ireland. These two characters discuss what is to be done with this country and how to remedy its defects. Spenser would like to see the rural populace give up their nomadic ways by settling down to focus on agriculture rather than wandering around with livestock. And he's at pains to say that it is indeed the populace and not the place that is to blame for the backwardness of Ireland. Rather implausibly, he suggests that the Irish are descendants of the Scythians, who in antiquity were considered to be the most barbaric of the barbarians. This is convenient for Spenser, since it means that there's nothing intrinsically barbaric about the land or the conditions of it offers. If the English could just exterminate the locals or completely overturn their way of life, then the place wouldn't be half bad. I linger on this in part because it gives us a first glimpse of attitudes we'll, unfortunately, be seeing again and again as the podcast goes forward. Spenser's writing on Ireland is an early articulation of the ideology of colonialism. Like the Enlightenment in the 17th century, the flowering of scholarship in the 16th century had a dark side. There was an easy slide from celebrating humanistic values to rationalizing the oppression of people who supposedly lacked full humanity. Though it should be mentioned that some philosophers of the time, like Montaigne and de las Casas, drew the exact opposite conclusion from similar starting points. But the material on Ireland is also of more immediate relevance, since the contrast between civilized and savage is a leitmotif of the fairy queen. When Spenser presented the whole work to his patrons, he called it, the wild fruit which savage soil hath bred, which being through long wars left almost waste with British barbarism is overspread. In the poem itself, there are numerous passages that touch on the same theme, as when savage characters appear to challenge or aid the chivalric knights and ladies who are Spenser's protagonists, or when the fairy kingdom is contrasted to the wild and untamed forest. At first glance, the allegorical meaning seems pretty clear. The court of the fairy queen represents civilization in general, and more specifically, the court of Queen Elizabeth, while unmannered and rude characters and places represent Ireland, or any other context where refined values and behavior are lacking. Civilization goes with virtue and barbarity with vice, an equation that Spenser does encourage, is when he writes of lust as a wild and savage man. But this simple reading might be a bit too simple. An influential interpretation of the fairy queen by Stephen Greenblatt is more nuanced. He calls attention to the way that Spenser evokes both the attractiveness and fearfulness of the wild and untamed, the passionate and licentious. His poem lingers over the seductive aspects of vice, only to stage acts of destruction that purge the sinfulness that has just been described. A central example is the so-called Bower of Bliss, a haven of sensual delights presided over by a witch called Akrazia, that's ancient Greek for weakness of moral will, who can turn humans into animals, presumably symbolizing the effects of unrestrained pleasure on humanity. The knight Guion defeats her and literally binds her up to stop her from doing further mischief. As Greenblatt writes, civility is won through the exercise of violence over what is deemed barbarous and evil, and the passages of love and leisure are not moments set apart from this process, but its rewards. The orgy of destruction offered to the reader in lieu of the sexual orgy they may have been anticipating would have recalled for Spenser and his readers the destruction of churches and their decorations in iconoclasm. All this is typical of the fairy queen, which seems to wear its symbolic meanings on its sleeve, only to reveal that in fact it has other, more complex ideas up its sleeve. As in the Bower of Bliss, the reader faces a powerful temptation to adopt a straightforward allegorical reading of each episode. Characters and places in the poem are literally called things like despair and error. Even when the meaning isn't quite that obvious, there's often a thinly concealed one. For instance, the female heroine and enchantress of the first book are named respectively Una and Duis, alluding to the concepts of unity and duality. The knightly hero of this book, whose true love is Una and who is seduced by Duis, is known simply as Red Cross. For the symbol emblazoned on his shield. Spenser might have well have started the poem with a note to the reader that says, now don't miss that the Arthurian romance is just an allegory for the journey of the soul to salvation. In fact, he pretty well did say this in a letter about the poem addressed to one particular reader, his friend and patron Walter Raleigh. Raleigh was famously an intrepid explorer, but Spenser was taking no chances that he might get lost in the symbolism, so he explained that the poem is a continued allegory or dark conceit, and proceeded to decode it for Raleigh's benefit, making Spenser an allegorical critic of his own poem, as one scholar has put it. That moralizing defender of poetry, Philip Sidney, would certainly have approved of all this, had he lived to see it. The Fairy Queen was published in installments, the first three books in 1589 with a further three books in 1596. And it may be that Spenser himself wanted to encourage a straightforwardly moralistic reading of the work, so as to forestall any objections that he was indulging in an outmoded and religiously suspect medieval form of writing. As the aforementioned Asham once put it, in our forefather's time, when papistry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue, that is English, saving certain books of chivalry made in monasteries by idle monks. But Spenser does not really dispel the tension between the romantic epic form and his religious message. Fundamentally, stories about knights and damsels are about heroic deeds, and good deeds are precisely what does not merit salvation in Protestant belief. When you think about it, isn't an allegorical tale showing how the soul confronts and defeats temptation and sin rather Catholic? Perhaps the idea is instead that the knights do not win grace, but receive it at the very beginning, as when the knight of the first book dons the Red Cross before setting out on his adventures. Then, the virtuous deeds could flow from divine dispensation, serving as signs of grace rather than cases of earning grace. That would be perfectly in tune with Reformed Thon, but it doesn't sit very well with the way the poem unfolds, since it seems that the knight's redemption still hangs in the balance. They're in constant peril of seduction by sin and also by false belief. The Red Cross knight encounters a figure representing Islam, named sans-foy, meaning without faith. Another opponent is a monstrous representative of potpourri, whose poisonous bile is vomit full of books and papers, a none-too-subtle dig at scholastics. The aforementioned duessa, meanwhile, is based on the Whore of Babylon, typically used by Protestants to symbolize the Catholic Church. These features certainly make clear Spencer's religious commitments without convincing us that a truly Protestant theology can be allegorized in the form of an Arthurian romance. Equally vexed is the poem's relationship to philosophy. Already in 1628, an exegete of Spencer called him a disciple of Plato's school. And in modern times, it has been argued that Spencer was powerfully influenced by Platonism. This intellectual debt is supposed to be shown especially in an episode in the third book of the Faerie Queen about the so-called Garden of Adonis. But some scholars have vigorously disputed that interpretation. There is general agreement that Spencer was well enough informed about the history of philosophy to have drawn on Platonism. He was a member of the European intelligentsia who benefited from the work of Italian Renaissance scholars like Ficino and Pico. But there is no consensus about whether the poem in general, or the section on the Garden of Adonis are simply recasting Platonist metaphysics in verse form. So let's look at that passage and make up our own minds. The relevant section tells of how the goddess Venus is searching for Cupid in the savage woods and forests wide when she encounters the realm of Adonis, who is responsible for sending children into the world. This garden is like a more acceptable counterpart of the Bower of Bliss, where sexuality serves its appropriate purpose, namely reproduction. Spencer calls it the seedbed or first seminary of all things that are born to live and die according to their kinds. The reference to kinds here does sound like an allusion to Platonic forms, and there are strong Platonic resonances in Spencer's description of Adonis' dispatching of souls into their new lives. This is worth quoting at length, in part so you get a sense of how the poem sounds. He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, all that to come into the world desire. A thousand thousand naked babes attend about him day and night, which do require that he with fleshly weeds would them attire. Such as him list, such as eternal fate ordained hath, he clothes with sinful mire, and sendeth forth to live in mortal state, till they again return back by the hinder gate. After that they again return at bin, they in that garden planted be again, and grow afresh, as they had never seen fleshly corruption nor mortal pain. Some thousand years, so do they there remain, and then of him are clad with other hue, were sent into the changeful world again, till thither they return, which first they grew, so like a wheel around they run from old to new. So we have here an Elizabethan-English version of Plato's Myths of the Soul, like the one at the end of the Republic, where disembodied souls come into the world and receive bodies like donning a new set of clothes. Just following this passage, we learn that souls can go into different species of animals, another idea familiar from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy. Through its many incarnations, the soul remains the same, or as Spencer writes, the substance is not changed nor altered, but they only form an outward fashion. To my mind, the question is not so much whether Spencer is evoking Platonist ideas here, it's why he's doing it. Platonism goes well with his suspicion of body and bodily desire, that attitude was clear from the destruction of the Bower of Bliss, and there are other examples, as when the four elements that make up the body are allegorically described as a threat to human rationality. Spencer is also fascinated by the way that images draw our minds and desires toward their exemplars, as in Plato's Symposium. On the other hand, there is a tension between such Platonist tropes and Spencer's presumably more fundamental Protestant beliefs. Think again about this story of Adonis. How are this god and Venus supposed to relate to the Christian god, and what exactly is the moral lesson of the story? Spencer associates receiving a body with sinfulness when he says that Adonis clothes with sinful mire the souls who are being born. That's easy to understand as a Christianization of Platonic myth, but if so, the Christianization is very incomplete. This myth has souls returning after death to the garden to be purified for some thousand years before being reborn again. Surely Spencer doesn't want us to believe in this kind of cyclical reincarnation. Rather, he seems to be playing around with classical pagan ideas, letting them both harmonize and clash with true religion. Like bodily pleasures, they are seductive yet to be treated with extreme caution. One critic, struck by the ambivalence of the whole passage, actually thinks that the garden scene is meant to subvert Platonic philosophy. Now, I'm no Spencer expert. In fact, until I sat down to read up on him for this episode, my main association with the name Spencer was a 1980s TV show about a private detective from my hometown of Boston. But for what it's worth, my own feeling is that The Fairy Queen is itself a mystery that calls for some literary sleuthing. A difficult and elusive text, not the simple allegorical work it at first seems to be. It has been called the most unreadable poem in the English language. That's a title it earns on the basis of its prodigious length alone, as it stretches over some 35,000 lines. But the description also fits because The Fairy Queen manages to offer itself as being readable in a rather straightforward way, and then to undermine that very reading. It is a Protestant work that revels in medieval chivalry, full of both moral strictures and lurid pleasures. Self-conscious, self-defeating, self-interpreting, and self-misinterpreting. Does this make it better than philosophy, or worse, or just different? Well, if I may again trouble you with my own opinion, I'm not sure that Sidney's distinction between poetry and philosophy really holds up. Philosophy is not a genre of writing, after all, like poetry is. It can be presented in poetic form, or as a dialogue, a treatise, a novel, you name it. Or how about this? Philosophical theater. Presumably such a thing should be possible, if all the world really is a stage, and the play really is the thing. So lend me your ears next time, as we'll find out what was dreamt of in William Shakespeare's philosophy, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.