Representations of Counsel in Selected Works of Sir Philip Sidney

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the historical, political, and literary-rhetorical framing of counsel in selected works of Sir Philip Sidney: his Letter to Queen Elizabeth (1579), The Old Arcadia (1580), the first two books of The New Arcadia (1585), and the strikingly different final book of The New Arcadia. In these works, Sidney makes resourceful and varying use of the topos of the mirror. First, I show in what ways Sidney serves as the Queen’s mirror in advising her against the marriage to the Duke of Alençon. In the Letter, Sidney gathers, shatters, and distorts aspects of Elizabeth’s image; he multiplies reflections to discredit arguments of his political opponents and reconstitutes Elizabeth in an imperial, Protestant image. Turning to The Old Arcadia, I argue that, through the presentation of Gynecia, Sidney broadens the conventions of the genre familiarly known as the mirror for princes. Gynecia’s complexity and moral ambiguity complicate the traditional generic categories of virtue to be emulated and vice to be avoided. She serves as both an object in, and a reader of, the mirror for princes text and becomes a means for Sidney’s commentary on the genre and the moral questions it raises. By inviting the reader into an active experience of the mirror’s pedagogical enterprise, Sidney tests and refines the reader’s assumptions and moral judgments. In Books I and II of The New Arcadia, Sidney presents and interrogates poetry as a strategy for overcoming limited human agency and imperfect knowledge, limitations that appear in deployments of the mirror that show stasis and in images of the maze to indicate blocked access and thwarted mobility. By questioning poetry’s capacity to uncover and represent truth, Sidney holds the mirror up to himself. Book III of The New Arcadia restores the mirror as the productive mode of counsel in a mirror for princes text that instructs on a central theme of the Renaissance debate on counsel: discerning the flatterer. Sidney’s New Arcadia in its entirety offers an exemplary mirror of the self-scrutiny that leads to self-knowledge and the consequent authority to offer counsel of worth.