Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle.

Tom W. N. Parker. Proportional Form in the Sonnets of the Sidney Circle.

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 259 pp. $75. ISBN: 0-19-818443-3.

Lisa M. Klein. The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer.

Newark, DE and Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1998. l pl. + 319 pp. $46.50. ISBN: 0-87413-624-5.

"Everything wrought by or for the educated patrons of the Renaissance," Tom Parker begins, "from a tripping madrigal to the imposing palaces of state, was tuned to their notions of proportion derived from understanding of the cosmological scheme" (2); individual voice and feeling is a post-Romantic conception. It follows, then, as it had for Alastair Fowler, Thomas P. Roche, and Maren-Sofie Rostvig, that numerological schemes are at the basis of both the conception and execution of Renaissance English sonnet cycles. But Parker faults their pioneering work because they see numbers as embedded codes with single and concrete values that can be detected, turning poetry into a semiotic game. That is not, says Parker, how numerology works; even the term is misleading. Rather, what is at stake is proportion -- that is, in his definition, a form that may possess "a semantic value fundamental to a complete reading of the poem, but one that may not disrupt the verbal surface of the poem" (12). The analogy is with musi c, not (as for Fowler) architecture. Thus numerical elements are never discrete but part of a formal scheme that exists meaningfully only in relationship. Such relationships, moreover, rest in mathematical formulae that he traces back to the Timaeus of Plato (28-30) and the Pythagorean notion of intervals as points on a stretched string that, plucked, affects the whole (30). According to Thomas Moffett, Sidney's first biographer and like Sidney particularly adept at mathematics, the compression of Plato's formulae results in a single number -- "108 may be considered to be a condensation of the Platonic construction of the soul of the world" (32). And it is not coincidental that Sidney organized Astrophil and Stella in 108 sonnets and songs with 108 stanzas.

Sidney's mathematical and poetic genius, then, in which he uses proportional arrangement to undergird the pattern by which Astrophil and Stella shifts from the "frustrations of earthly desire to the ideal of heavenly love" (67), explains nor only the peculiar force of the sequence but its strong influence on all the sonneteers in the Sidney circle who followed his example despite their varying abilities. This group works by marked points within the twinned totals of 108 that represent -- but again proportionally -- perfect musical intervals seen either as "a group of poems, differentiated at each end by some structural mark (the ends of a sequence, say, or the ends of a series of poems in the same stanzaic pattern)" (71) along a monochord or, inversely, as harmonic divisions of the whole such as "an octave that could be divided by similar means into tetrachords, or tones, by counting equal divisions of the whole -- under this scheme, the fifth would occur seven-twelfths of the way through the group" (71). Wh ile various numbers can seem to form various divisions, depending on the approach (76 has examples), every part is relational and proportional. Indeed, the same arrangement structures the 33 poems of the Certaine Sonets sequence (82-84). What we must conclude, then, is that the "status" of Renaissance sonnet sequences is raised "from that of an elegant accomplishment in a purely literary fad, to one of closer involvement in higher philosophical, and mathematical, concerns" (85).

By always looking at the whole in order to understand the parts, Parker's sense of poetics is both more abstract and more concerned with the whole work than his predecessors; no part is understood distinct from the other parts or from the entirety. On the face of it, this might seem merely an ingenious turn of attention, but as Parker demonstrates over and over, even by examining biographical connections of poets, their fields of study, the state of their manuscripts and printed books, and textual variants, such entire works can be reconceptualized to make exciting new sense. Thus the repetition of elaborate systems of proportions in the sonnet sequences of Fulke Greville and Robert Sidney show more than the respect of imitation; "precise formal analysis" showed them and will show us how to write a sequence of poems with "the calculated restatement of sophisticated theoretical notions" (85). The Warwick MS of Greville's Caelica also has 108 poems and later, published revisions show the same concerns. (Seeing such overall patterns, Parker also conjectures about lost poems and certain revisions.) Robert Sidney's autograph MS is likewise altered; rather than jumbled fragments, the 119 poetic units (not poems) take on significance against the template of the total of 119 sonnets and songs in Astrophil and Stella; as with that work and Caelica there are clear markings at the 49th, 81st, and 100th units. (This overall sense is demonstrated too in Robert Sidney's notebook, 122-23.) Robert's daughter Mary Wroth works in the same way with Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, separating relatively homogeneous groupings of sonnets which are placed according to their length and number of stanzas to draw attention to key points, or markers, in the sequence (an example is given on 140), and the final printed version of her work moves toward the clarity and poise of Astrophil and Stella in design and presentation.

Still others follow suit. Henry Constable's poems echo Philip Sidney so clearly he must have seen a manuscript of Astrophil and Stella; the Todd MS shows how Constable was moving from secular towards Neoplatonic love, breaking down the direct love of his mistress as he proceeded through tragic lamentation, the "order of the whole" to be 216 units matching the total of units in Astrophil and Stella (163). A lesser poet, Barnabe Barnes, may have learned of Philip Sidney through Gabriel Harvey, for the same formal patterning is discernible in Parthenophil and Parthenophe as well as a second sequence, A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets -- for Barnes 100 rather than 108 constituted the whole. Yet even this second set of 100 works continues with the eight stanzas of a "Hymne to the Glorious Honour of the most blessed and indiuisible Trinitie." Michael Drayton, who paid homage to Philip Sidney early in his career, employs his sense of proportion in Mortimeriados dedicated to the Countess of Bedford. Even the p olitical satire of The Owle is fashioned this way. Thus poetry and philosophy for the Sidney circle, in Parker's view, merge, become indistinct. He cites Augustine's De Musica: "So terrestrial things are subject to celestial, and their time circuits join together in harmonious succession for a poem of the universe" (223). Even if Sidney and his imitators did not hold always and strictly to the music of the spheres, they held to the music of poetry and Parker demonstrates how such sounds are created in units and sequences more deeply than in end-stopped rhymes.

Lisa Klein's Sidney is not so much of a philosophical poet as a man whose life and work were heroic, classical, and exemplary. He shows other poets how to negotiate their work in light of their precursors, including Petrarch; by acts of misprision the author became auctor. Where Sidney's poetry and that of his followers gets special strength is not only in the combination of the past and present, but of Petrarchism and Protestantism, tensions between authority and aspiration, and earthly difficulty and achievement. Poetry leaned not toward the philosophical, but toward the personal -- and the royal favor and social status Stella represents to Astrophil signifies Sidney's own ambitions. The act of feigning for Sidney was both a poetic act and a political strategy. Such a perspective is borne our in Greville's tribute to Sidney (and his imitation of him) as a poet who is also a model courtier and a model Protestant courtier; here too ambition mixes with politics and religion but takes an apocalyptic turn (130) . In Delia, Samuel Daniel turns from the reckless and rueful Astrophil in his persona to a narrative stressing the superior power of virtue and the eternization of Delia (the anagram of "ideal"). In Musophilus poetry is metamorphized into a mother who breeds, nourishes, and instructs. Klein also argues that initial echoes of Sidney in the work of Spenser shows that he knew his predecessor from the start, and the Amoretti develops from virtue and virtuous behavior as the means of living and the proper end of poetry. Moreover, for Spenser love is not simply material but also spiritual: the Amoretti enact the same self-fashioning seen in Sidney's sequence in which a Petrarchan persona moves toward Protestant ideas of individual good. This conflict of the self is also traced, in a "Postscript," in the works of George Herbert, Wroth, and Thomas Carew. "Carew's poetry, if it seems remote from Sidney's humanism, represents an access of meaning for a revised Petrarchism that releases, rather than represses, desires f or erotic pleasure and power. Herbert and Wroth, on the other hand, are recognizably indebted to Sidney's example as a poet and humanist, and their Petrarchism sublimates, rather than celebrates, erotic desire" (231-32). Such closing remarks reveal both the purpose and method of Klein's book. Admirably enough, she means to show how Sidney is equally as influential as Shakespeare and arguably more influential than Spenser. But in complicating her exemplar and widening routes of influence, his exemplary becomes universal. Tributes to Sidney can harbor critical dangers.