Essex

The cultural impact of an Elizabethan courtier

Analiese Connolly, Lisa Hopkins, Annaliese Connolly, Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784993542
  9780719084942
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526110985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Literature

This collection of new essays about the earl of Essex, one of the most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural and political milieu. It identifies the ways in which his biography has been variously interpreted both during his own lifetime and since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine a wealth of diverse visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems, portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating his political views.

As well as prising open long-held assumptions about the earl's life, the authors provide a diachronic approach to the earl's career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish campaign and the uprising, and re-evaluating their significance and critical reception. Collectively, the essays illuminate the reach and significance of the many roles played by the earl and the impact of his brief, dazzling life on his contemporaries and on those who came after, making this the first volume to offer a comprehensive critical overview of the Earl's life and influence.

PART I

Essex: patron and patronage

1

‘Cleverly playing the stoic’: the Earl of Essex, Sir Philip Sidney and surviving Elizabeth’s court

Richard Wood

As the title of Paul E. J. Hammer’s landmark book indicates, the political career of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex is associated with the polarisation of Elizabethan politics towards the end of the sixteenth century.¹ And, although, as Hammer notes, the traditional image of Essex, as ‘the ill-fated favourite of Elizabeth’, who ‘lost his head, both metaphorically and literally’, and whose career historians have employed as ‘an easy explanation for the political problems of the 1590s’, is a ‘caricature’, there is a persistent sense that the earl’s personal qualities, often characterised as exclusively negative, were the most significant factors in determining the events of the period. That several scholars (including Hammer) have repeatedly countered this impression over a long period of time has not completely debased its currency.² In the entry on Essex published in the Dictionary of National Biography in 1888, Sidney Lee observes that

Essex’s character is a simple one. He was devoid of nearly every quality of which statesmen are made. Frank, passionate, and impulsive as a schoolboy, he had no control whatever over his feelings; and at a court like Elizabeth’s, split into warring factions, whose members strove to supplant one another by intricate diplomacy, his attempt to make a great political position by force of his personal character was doomed to failure.³

This nineteenth-century example of a caricature of Essex’s career contains the essential elements of many others: he is painted as an over-ambitious, arrogant courtier, who lacked the self-control and diplomatic ability to survive in the already overheated atmosphere of the late Elizabethan court. In Hammer’s entry in the 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he outlines a ‘more complex’, ‘modern historiographical image of Essex’ in which research demonstrates that

Essex developed a coherent military strategy for the war against Spain and examined the broader cultural context which helped to shape his career. More recent works have illuminated his role in intelligence gathering and his patronage of university scholars, whose research helped to serve his political needs.⁴

This latter view of Essex echoes that presented by Mervyn James, in his influential book, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England. In a chapter entitled ‘At a crossroads of the political culture: the Essex revolt, 1601’, James acknowledges that time was running out for figures in Essex’s mould, but, even so, prefers to emphasise the earl’s political and cultural sophistication. Indeed, he asserts that ‘the most interesting feature of the Essex revolt is not so much the fact of its failure, as that it was the last of its kind’. For James, ‘the revolt was motivated by, and arose out of, a specific aspect of the political culture of Elizabethan England: the cult of honour and its code’; ‘it was the last honour revolt’; Essex himself, a product of his ‘aristocratic lineage, his military career, and the tradition he inherited’, was ‘a paradigm of honour’.⁵ Moreover, a dominant feature of Essex’s make-up, according to James, was a new chivalric romanticism, ‘a synthesis of honour, humanism and religion’, inherited from Sir Philip Sidney and epitomised by his prose romance, the Arcadia.⁶

And so, building on the work of historians like James and Hammer, and in order to further the ongoing reappraisal of the political and cultural career of the Earl of Essex, this chapter will examine the relationship between the earl and the ‘specific aspect of the political culture of Elizabethan England’ (that ‘synthesis’) that is ‘Sidneian chivalric romanticism’.⁷ More specifically, it will read the Arcadia, Sidney’s prose romance and the chief source for what James terms ‘Sidneian romanticism’, with reference to the issues of counsel and court factionalism, which have particular relevance for Essex’s career and the 1590s in general. Employing the work of historians of the late Elizabethan polity, this chapter will argue that the revised Arcadia in particular, written in the 1580s, ought to be read in accordance with a distinctly feminine discourse of pragmatic stoicism and principled anti-factionalism. This reading privileges the philosophy of Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, Sidney’s sister and supervisor of the publication of the 1593 edition of the Arcadia, over that of Fulke Greville, Sidney’s friend, biographer and editor of the 1590 edition.

The first version of the Arcadia, completed by 1581, has come to be known as the Old Arcadia.⁸ Sidney’s reworking of his romance ‘might have begun’, according to Victor Skretkowicz, ‘as early as 1582 and continued into 1584’.⁹ This revised version, though incomplete at the time of Sidney’s death in 1586, is known as the New Arcadia. In 1590, Sidney’s closest friend, Fulke Greville, supervised the publication of an edition based on Sidney’s incomplete revision of the Arcadia. Three years after the publication of what has come to be seen as Greville’s edition, Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, supervised the publication of another Arcadia, combining the revised work with the third, fourth and fifth books of the Old Arcadia; this is often referred to as ‘the composite Arcadia’. The Old Arcadia circulated in manuscript in the 1580s, but was not available to a modern readership until after Bertram Dobell’s discovery of three copies in the years 1906–07. The first printed Arcadias, Greville’s of 1590 and those supervised by the countess (of 1593, and the slightly emended version of the same text of 1598) were much more widely available.¹⁰ Indeed, it is from the printed text of 1593 that Gervase Markham took the inspiration to write the two volumes of his prose completion: The English Arcadia, Alluding his Beginning from Sir Philip Sidney’s Ending (1607) and The Second and Last Part of the First Book of the English Arcadia (1613).¹¹ During the 1590s, Markham’s works were, as Matthew Steggle notes, ‘strongly identified with the faction of the earl of Essex’.¹² From its first appearances in contrasting print versions, the ethos of the Arcadia has been contested, and that contest has always involved a subordinate struggle over which version of the text has priority. In the very act of supervising its publication, Greville backed the incomplete revised version, unencumbered by any older additions; likewise, the Countess of Pembroke blessed the composite text published in 1593.

The basic plot of the Arcadia is recognisably similar in both the Old and New versions: two princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, of Macedon and Thessalia respectively, disguise themselves (the former as an Amazon warrior, the latter as a shepherd) to gain access to their beloved Arcadian princesses, Philoclea and Pamela, who have been secreted in a remote pastoral location; the princesses’ father, King Basilius, has sought to preserve his daughters’ safety after consulting the oracle at Delphi; both Basilius and his wife, Gynecia, fall in love with Pyrocles (disguised as an Amazon), which, understandably, complicates the prince’s courtship of Philoclea; the eventual resolution of this narrative, with the marriage of the two young couples, brings the Old Arcadia to a happy ending. Indeed, the Old Arcadia might fairly be described as ‘a relatively light-hearted chivalric pastoral-romance’.¹³

The incomplete revision that is the New Arcadia, however, does not benefit from such a felicitous conclusion. Indeed, compared to the five books (or acts) of the original, the revised text ends mid-sentence, before the conclusion of the third book. Nevertheless, so substantial are Sidney’s additions to his romance that the revised version is still significantly longer than the original. In what amounts to a change in genre, away from the comedic and towards the epic, Sidney introduces considerably more involutions to the narrative, including a wholly new episode in which the princesses and Pyrocles (still disguised as an Amazon) are kidnapped by Basilius’s sister-inlaw, Cecropia, who wishes to remove Basilius from his throne in favour of her own son, Amphialus. What becomes, in effect, Amphialus’s rebellion against his uncle’s rule institutes a significantly greater number of martial exploits, which, in keeping with the epic tone, multiply Sidney’s allusions to the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. Nevertheless, it is those passages dealing with the princesses’ captivity that are of most interest here.

As both Greville’s and Sidney Herbert’s editions contain the three books of the revised romance, the key to understanding their differing philosophies lies in their contrasting editorial practices rather than any fundamental differences between the captivity episodes in the two texts. In order to fulfil his (and what he believed to be Sidney’s) vision for the Arcadia, Greville omitted certain eclogues, divided the text into chapters, to which he added didactic chapter summaries, and left the romance without an ending. As Joel Davis persuasively argues, Greville’s editorial decisions ‘impose a Stoic interpretive frame-work [on the Arcadia], allowing Greville to highlight [what Greville believed to be] philosophical similarities between himself and Sidney’. Greville, according to Davis, wished to align himself and the Arcadia with the factionalism and the pessimistic Taciteanism of the circle of the Earl of Essex. This is evident in the chapter summaries for the captivity episode in the 1590 text, where Greville highlights ‘the reactions of Pamela and Philoclea to their captivity and torture’ as ‘direct examples of … passive female stoicism’.¹⁴

The Countess of Pembroke, in response, removed the chapter divisions and their summaries, restored what Davis terms the pastoral element (chiefly the missing eclogues) and, in doing so, re-established ‘her brother … as an advocate of Neostoic ethics … only insofar as the Sidney family itself embraced Neostoicism’. As such, she emphasised the Arcadia’s associations with the Sidney family, as opposed to ‘its intellectual relationship to the writings of partisans of the earl of Essex’.¹⁵

Paradoxically, though I accept Davis’s arguments about the differences between Greville and the countess, I wish to emphasise the continuities between Sidney Herbert’s philosophical outlook and that of the Earl of Essex, in effect bypassing Greville’s agenda as it is evident in his role as an editor of the Arcadia. Ironically, by publishing the New Arcadia, Greville put a text into the public domain that undermined his intention in doing so, not least because he prompted the Countess of Pembroke to publish what she believed to be a more Sidneian text. The approach here will shed light on the more optimistic and conciliatory aspe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Essex: patron and patronage
• Part II Self-fashioning
• Part III Afterlives
• Select bibliography
• Index