|
participation in tournaments – elaborate entertainment, half symbolic
spectacle, half athletic contest, that were a chief amusement of the court. He
hankered after a life of heroic action, but his oficial activities were lafgely
ceremonial- attending on the Queen at court and accompanyng her on
progresses about the country.
In January 1583 he was knighted, not because of any outstanding
accomplishment but in order to give him the qualification needed to stand in
for his Prince Caimir, who was to receive the honour of admittance to the
Order of the Gatter but was unable to attend the ceremony. In September he
married Frances, daughter of Queen Elizabeth secretary of state, Sir Frances
Walsingam. They had one daughter, Elizabeth.
From this period his literary biography begins. Because the Queen would
not give him an important post, he had turned to literature as an outlet for his
energies. In 1578 he composed a pastoral playlet “The Lady Of May” for the
Queen. By 1580 he had completed a version of his heroic prose romance
“The Arcadia”, an intricately plotted narrative of 180,000 words.
Early in 1581 his aunt, the countess Huntington, had brought to court her
ward, Penelope Devereux, who later that year married the young Lord Rich.
Some time afterward Sidney fell in love with her, and durung the summer of
1582 he composed a sonnet sequence “Astrophel and Stella”, recounting the
first stirrings of his passion, his struggles against it, and his final
abandonment of his snit to give himself instead to the “great case” of public
service. These sonnets, witty and impassioned brought Elizabethan poetry at
once of age.
About the same time he wrote his “Defence of Poesie”, an urbane and
eloquent plea for the social value of imaginative fiction, which remains the
finest work of Elizabethan literary criticism.
In 1584 he began a radical revision of his “Arcadia” transforming its
linear dramatic plot into a many-stranded, interlaced narrative. Sidney left it
half-finished, but it remains the most important work of prose fiction in
English of the 16
th
century. Later he began a paraphrase of the Psalms. He
wrote for his own amusement and for that of his close friends. True to the
gentlemanly code of avoiding commercialism, he did not allow his writings
to be published in his lifetime.
17
His “Astrophil and Stella” was printed in 1591 in a corrupt text, his
“Defence of Poesie” – in 1595, and a collected edition of his work – in 1598,
reprinted in 1599 and nine times during 17
th
century.
In July 1585 he finally received his eagerly awaited public appointment (
his writings were to be his most lasting accomplishment), he was appointed,
with his uncle, the Earl of Warwick, as joint master of ordnance, an office
that administrated the military supplies of the kingdom.
In November 1585 the Queen was persuaded to assist the struggle of the
Dutch against their Spanish masters, sending them a force led by the Earl of
Leicester. Sidney was made governor of the town of Flushing and was given
command of a company of cavalry. But the following 11 months were spent
in ineffective campaigns against the Spaniards, while Sidney was hard to
maintaun the morale of his poorly paid troops. He wrote to his father- in –
law that “..if the Queen did not pay her soldiers, she would loose her
garrisons..”
On September 22, 1586 he volunteered to serve in an action to prevent
the Spaniards from sending supplies into the town of Zupohen. The supply
train was heavily quarded, and the English were outnumbered. But Sidney
charged three times through the enemy lines, and even though his thigh was
shattered by a bullet, he rode his horse from the field. He was carried to
Arnhem, where he wound became infected and he prepared himself
religiously for death. In his last hours he confessed: “There came to my
remembrance a vanity wherein I had taken delight, whereof I had not rid
myself. It was the Lady Rich. But I rid myself of it, and presently my joy and
comfort return.”
He was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on February 16, 1587
with an elaborate funeral of a type usually reserved for great nobleman. The
universities of Oxford and Cambridge and scholars throughout Europe issued
memorial volumes in his honour, while almost every English poet composed
verses in his praise.
Sidney won this adulation even though he had accomplished no action of
consequence – it would not be possible to write a history of Elizabethan
political and military affairs without mentioning his name. It is not what he
did but what he was that made him so widely admired: the embodiment of
Elizabethan ideal of gentlemanly virtue.
18
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
