"A pleasant and terrible reverence": maintenance of majesty in Sidney's 'New Arcadia.' (Philip Sidney)

Launching into his most dangerous literary performance--his letter urging Elizabeth not to marry Francis, duke of Alencon--Sir Philip Sidney addresses the queen routinely, as his "Most feared and beloved, most sweet and gracious Sovereign."(1) This salute, attributing quasi-divine powers of justice and mercy to the monarch, is thoroughly conventional and apparently unremarkable. Yet while another author might invoke the formula mechanically, then proceed to the matter at hand, Sidney's use of it foreshadows both the arguments he will employ within the letter and a central concern of the New Arcadia.

Written late in 1579 to counter Elizabeth's belief that marrying Alencon would prevent her from becoming an object of her people's contempt, Sidney's letter counsels her to pursue more effective means of evoking their continued love and fear. In the New Arcadia, similarly, Sidney enters the great debate of sixteenth-century political theory, that over how a ruler may best maintain security and majesty, dignity and admiration. In both of his most ambitious written performances, the matter at hand is the question most associated with Machiavelli: how do love and fear compare as foundations of power, as sources of admiration in the sense of wonder or awe?

Sidney's fascination with this question is not unusual: Quentin Skinner has recently shown that emphasis on maintaining peace and security is not peculiar to Machiavelli, but rather a feature of most late works in the mirror-for-princes genre. Unlike earlier humanists, for whom "the preservation of the people's liberty" was paramount, later authors, even commonwealth-theorists, tend "to argue that the fundamental purpose of government is . . . rather to maintain good order, harmony and peace."(2) But how?

For Cicero and the line of authors who echoed him in manuals for princes in the Renaissance, nothing is "better adapted to secure influence and hold it fast than love; nothing is more foreign to that end than fear."(3) For Machiavelli "it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting."(4) For Sidney the answer is not so simple.

Sidney's portraits of rulers in the New Arcadia reflect his sensitivity to the claims of each side, and what emerges most clearly from these portraits and from the incomplete plot is his belief that rulers must provoke the admiration of their subjects or lose all. Like Castiglione's courtier, Sidney's prince must insure that "all men wonder at him, and hee at no man."(5) Sidney offers rulers who successfully command reverence based predominantly on either fear (Euarchus of Macedon) or love (Helen of Corinth), but his ideal, as embodied in Pamela and especially Pyrocles, is an androgynous mixture of the love and mercy characterized as feminine in the Renaissance and the fear and justice characterized as masculine.

He approaches that conclusion, however, round about, engaging readers of the New Arcadia in a debate that builds in complexity as the plot develops. Weighing an issue by presenting arguments in utramque partem is of course standard procedure for humanists, the method they believed most capable of exposing the weaknesses of any single position.(6) The New Arcadia thus demands a reader familiar with the standard arguments over how to command admiration, able to see the abstract precepts behind the specific fictional exempla, and willing to join and enjoy a search that in Donne's phrase "about must, and about must goe."

1. LOVE OR FEAR

Because the issue was central to contemporary political discourse, Sidney's reader need not have had specific sources in mind to follow the drama of his debate. Most influential in advocating a ruler's pursuit of love and goodwill, however, is Cicero's de Officiis, which declares that "it is while we have preferred to be the object of fear rather than of love and affection" that violence and disruption have befallen Rome (2.8). After claiming that "it is manifest that the power of good-will is so great and that of fear is so weak," he states that "the highest, truest glory depends upon the following three things: the affection, the confidence, and the mingled admiration (admiratione) and esteem of the people" (2.8-9). People, Cicero says, "reverence and extol with the highest praises those men in whom they see certain preeminent and extraordinary talents; and they look down with contempt upon (despiciunt autem eos et contemnunt) those who they think have no ability, no spirit, no energy" (2.10). Later such early humanists as John of Viterbo and Brunetto Latini would emphasize that evoking fear through cruelty rather than love through mercy is a moral, prudential error, but Cicero defends love as more practical as well.(7) Cicero's advocacy of love and goodwill is routinely juxtaposed to Machiavelli's realpolitik, but Sidney would have understood Cicero's view as having been formed directly by the Roman civil wars. Experience of violence and upheaval in Italy led Cicero to advocate love, Machiavelli to advocate fear.

The Ciceronian position dominates the mirror-for-princes literature of the early sixteenth century. For Erasmus in The Education of the Christian Prince, the "good prince" must seek to imitate God in being "loved by all good men"; the tyrant, like Satan, "is beloved of no one, and is feared by all."(8) Here Erasmus displays more interest in how well than how long a prince rules, but elsewhere he, like Cicero, finds benevolence practical as well as virtuous:

There are two factors, as Aristotle tells us in his Politics, which have played the greatest role in the overthrow of empires. They are hatred and contempt (odium et contemptus). Good will is the opposite of hatred; respected authority of contempt. Therefore it will be the duty of the prince to study the best way to win the former and avoid the latter.(9)

Sir Thomas Elyot, similarly, asserts in The Book of the Governor that "Surely nothing more entirely and fastly joineth the hearts of subjects to their prince or sovereign than mercy or gentleness."(10) For those in the shadow of Cicero, love and admiration are balanced neatly against fear, hatred, and contempt.

In The Prince, of course, Machiavelli reverses Cicero's assessment, insisting that although "one ought to be both feared and loved," fear is the more powerful safeguard.(11) To Machiavelli love is fickle, fear constant, "for love is held by a chain of obligation which, men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails." To maintain security in the state the prince must concentrate power, virtu, in himself. Yet unlike Cicero and most humanists, Machiavelli is careful to distinguish the subjects' fear from their hatred. Indeed the longest chapter of the Prince, Chapter 19, informs the ruler how to fend off "hatred and contempt." Machiavelli shares the tradition's belief that contempt must be avoided, but denies that eliciting love is the way to avoid it.

To a greater degree than either Cicero or Machiavelli, Sidney was willing to see both love and fear as antidotes to contempt, and to accept the paradox that emotions so contrary could have a like effect, admiration. The term "admiration" itself, which Sidney uses in defining the effects of tragedy in the Defence of Poesy, conveyed in the sixteenth century this paradoxical conjunction: like the Latin term "admiratio" it carried a neutral meaning of wonder or astonishment, whether at something inspiring pleasure or fear.(12) The admiration that a ruler evokes can therefore be equivalent to awe or dread as well as respect and adulation. Thus Elyot, defining "majesty" in The Book of the Governor, invokes the standard comparison in saying that "like as the sun doth its beams, so doth it cast on the beholders and hearers a pleasant and terrible reverence."(13) The ruler, like God, is eagle and dove, just and merciful, feared and beloved. This supernatural stature--befitting the king's undying royal body--is never entirely absent from Sidney's evaluation of love and fear. Unlike the analytical discussions in the manuals, Sidney's examination of the question never seems clear cut: as he takes it up and worries it, the possibility of conjoining love and fear never entirely disappears.

Such witty blending seems especially apt when writing to the queen who encouraged celebration of herself as reconciler of opposites, as both beloved Belphoebe and dreadfully just Astraea. Sidney's immediate strategic goal here, secondary of course to his opposition to a French match that threatened the Protestant hopes of the Leicester faction, is to prove that the marriage would not solve the problems that motivated Elizabeth and her counselors to consider it: "fear of standing alone in respect of foreign dealings, and in home respects, doubt of contempt" (MP, p. 51). After arguing that Elizabeth and Alencon would make a poor political alliance because they share neither aspirations nor fears, Sidney proceeds to the question of contempt. Professing not to believe that Elizabeth could call forth "contempt in your subjects," he discounts her view that, provoked by the "uncertainty of succession," they could "be looking . . . to the rising sun." The idea "that uncertain good should bring contempt to certain good," he says, "is beyond all reach of reason" (MP, pp. 53-54). No contempt, no need for marriage.

Even if it were possible for Elizabeth's majesty to diminish, Sidney continues, marrying Alengon would not help. As Sidney puts it, bluntly, in his peroration, "the only avoiding of contempt is love and fear," neither of which "Monsieur" can increase: Love, as you have by diverse means sent into the depth of their souls, so if anything can stain so true a form it must be the bringing yourself not in your own likeness, but in new colours unto them. Their fear by him cannot be increased without appearance of French forces, the manifest death of your estate. (MP, p. 56)

Rather than seeking external support, Elizabeth should continue to display the qualities that have made her "most feared" but especially most "beloved." Love for her has been fueled by "so long descent of your royal ancestors, our minds joyed with the experience of your inward virtues, and our eyes delighted with the sight of you" (MP, p. 53); she can best maintain it, he claims, through "virtue and justice," "religion and equity" (MP, p. 54). Conceding that fear can be powerful by refuting Alencon's claim to it, Sidney nevertheless plays up love as Elizabeth's best means of commanding reverence.

If any change is necessary, it is in Elizabeth's already admirable self-presentation. Throughout the letter he entwines spectacle and power, advising Elizabeth to make her majesty more apprehensible:

Against contempt at home ... let your excellent virtues of piety, justice, and liberality daily, if it be possible, more and more shine. Let some such particular actions be found out (which is easy, as I think, to be done) by which you may gratify all the hearts of your people. (MP, p. 56)

By bringing out her own "colours" more sharply, with more energeia or vividness, Elizabeth will engender yet more love. Sidney recognizes that how one seems to rule is at least as important as how one rules: quiet virtue may bring most credit in the private, ethical sphere, but political acts must be open to all eyes in order to have their proper effect. Appropriately, Sidney compares both Elizabeth's "own likeness"--her public image--and the splendor of her majesty to the sun. She might allow her virtues to "shine" more and more, but she is already brighter than any successor or "rising sun"; "who," he asks, "would leave the beams of so fair a sun for the dreadful expectation of a divided company of stars?" (MP, p. 54). Again Sidney accentuates Elizabeth's milder qualities, yet also notes that she is "the only sun that dazzleth" the "eves" of the Catholic forces in Europe: she is beloved at home and feared abroad, a potent combination. The image of Elizabeth that Sidney holds up to her is Phoenix-like, self-contained, with nothing to gain politically by marrying Alencon. Through her own ability to evoke fear and especially love, she is the only and sufficient cause of her royal splendor, which she herself can magnify.

Elizabeth's decision not to marry Alencon hardly ended Sidney's speculation on the efficacy and value of love and fear. As he constructed the Old Arcadia in 1580, and especially as he radically revised it some years later, Sidney continued to weigh the Ciceronian and Machiavellian arguments against his own experiences with authority and against the tenets of Aristotle's Politics, his constant guide, though not commander, on political questions.(14)

In contrast to Machiavelli and even perhaps Cicero, the question of whether to be loved or feared was for most humanists predominantly prudential: they insisted on viewing the prince as a doer as well as a maker, and therefore refused to separate the question of how security can be maintained from the ethical question of how it should be maintained by one who claimed to be empowered by God. In the Letter to Elizabeth Sidney's arguments had been pragmatic, but in the Arcadia Sidney showed more clearly his interest in the quality as well as quantity of reverence a ruler could evoke, his refusal to approach the question without considering virtue as well as virtu. Like the Henriad or Marvell's "Horatian Ode," Sidney's Arcadia registers the difficulty of choosing between an older notion of personal virtue and a more dispassionate analysis of how to make power last.

2. THE LIVELY IMAGE OF THE PRINCE

In the New Arcadia Sidney also heightens his earlier emphasis on the importance of spectacle to power, employing again the dazzling splendor of the sun as fit image of the wonder the ruler's majesty must provoke through visible action. Philanax here takes on the role of image consultant that Sidney himself had played, without invitation, for Elizabeth, counseling Basilius in vain against withdrawing into the obscure forest: "Let your subjects have you in their eyes, let them see the benefits of your justice daily more and more; and so must they needs rather like of present sureties than uncertain changes" (NA, p. 21).(15) For Fulke Greville, the lesson of Basilius' retirement and its disastrous aftermath is clear; by reading the New Arcadia judicious readers will discover:

. . . that when Soveraign Princes, to play with their own visions, will put off publique action, which is the splendor of Majestie, and unactively charge the managing of their greatest affaires upon the second-hand faith, and diligence of Deputies, may they not ... understand, that even then they bury themselves, and their Esiates in a cloud of contempt, and under it both encourage, and shaddow the conspiracies of ambitious subalternes to their false endes, I mean the ruine of States and Princes?(16)

By withdrawing, Basilius fails both to act and to display himself in action. Retreating from the heat and splendor of public activity into the shaded forest places him under "a cloud of contempt" and his family and state in danger, as the rebellion of the clowns orchestrated by Cecropia and Clinias vividly demonstrates.

Having defined poetry as "that feigning notable images of virtues, vices or what else, with that delightful teaching," Sidney was acutely aware of the power of the image (MP, p. 81). Throughout the Arcadia Sidney reminds us that we are viewing portraits of rulers, that we come to know them through verbal ecphrasis. Sidney both teaches his readers that spectacle is crucial to power and offers them lively images of the kind he describes in the Defence, moving readers to emulate or avoid the styles of rule they depict. Sidney, that is, takes seriously the possibility that the work might be a mirror for prospective princes, one in which they can learn how to act and how to display themselves: their reactions as readers to the various rulers give them insight into how well their own behavior might go over with a larger audience of subjects. His portraits are memory-images that royal readers may not only absorb but reflect: the images they perceive, images designed to affect their memory and will, to shape their habitus, can be the source of the images that they project to their own audiences, their subjects. If successful, these images fulfill the goal that Sidney sets for the heroic poet in the Defence: "to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses" (MP, p. 79).

Within the Arcadia, Greville insists, both monarch and subject can find displayed the various stages of political growth and decay, success and distress, in which they might find themselves. Just as Sidney notes in the Defence that the abstract precepts of the philosopher "lie dark before the imaginative and judging power, if they be not illuminated or figured forth by the speaking picture of poesy" (MP, p. 86), Fulke Greville asserts "that in all these creatures of his making, his intent, and scope was, to turn the barren Philosophy precepts into pregnant Images of life" (Life, p. 14).(17) The ruler herself, Sidney suggests, must be a lively image, patterned after the rulers portrayed in his book. The trope of the admirable monarch as dazzling sun therefore becomes something more than a proportional metaphor for Sidney: the ruler must literally dazzle, and he shows how.

Sidney manipulates our reactions to his lively images both by constructing the plot to highlight their successes and failures and by balancing the rulers against each other. He introduces us to characters whom we understand only by noting how their qualities resemble, complement, yet remain distinct from the qualities of other characters: as for example Kalander's description of Pamela and Philoclea attempts to distinguish the two sisters but brings out much of what they share (NA, pp. 16-17).(18) These characters are defined as much by the qualities of others as by their own: what others have illuminates what they lack. As the plot proceeds and we judge each monarch in comparison to the others, our understanding of the entire art of governing becomes more profound. Thus although many of the characters in the New Arcadia remain static, the shadows they throw on each other make them seem three-dimensional, lively.

3. NOT BY LOVE OR FEAR ALONE

As soon as Kalander describes Basilius of Arcadia, Sidney's central example of kingship, the reader recognizes that he is no ideal prince. Kalander (who is here, significantly, glossing a picture of the king) depicts him with affection but without flattery as "a prince of sufficient skill to govern so quiet a country where the good minds of the former princes had set down good laws, and the well bringing-up of the people doth serve as a most sure bond to hold them" (NA, p. 16). In other words, Basilius has the capacity only to run a state that runs itself. He owes his success to the legislative foresight of his predecessors and the cultivated virtues of his people, not to any action of his own; in contrast, both Helen of Corinth and Euarchus of Macedon are presented as governing well despite inept ancestors and unruly subjects. Retirement merely capped Basilius' career of inactivity.

Passivity characterizes the Arcadians, shepherds and landowners living in "accompanable solitariness" and "civil wildness," disdaining the pursuit of glory through war, and "wanting little because they desire not much" (NA, pp. 11, 16). Basillus' method of ruling might seem appropriate given his subjects' dedicated pursuit of otium, but the events that follow suggest instead that a ruler must be an exemplar of active virtue. By retiring into the "forest hereby which he calleth his desert," Basilius tops the Arcadians in insularity (NA, p. 17), egregiously failing to display that extraordinary talent and energy Cicero had praised as antidote to contempt. Even in Arcadia, retirement from active life is disastrous.

By failing to exceed his countrymen in active virtue, furthermore, Basilius disqualifies himself for monarchy as described by Aristotle in the Politics. Monarchy (to basileuton) is appropriate only where "there is either a whole family or even some one individual that differs from the other citizens in virtue so greatly that his virtue exceeds that of all the others" (Politics 3.11.12; 1288a15-19).(19) Erasmus echoes Aristotle hollowly:

If a prince be found who is complete in all good qualities, then pure and absolute monarchy is the thing. (If that could only be! I fear it is too great a thing even to hope for. (If an average prince (as the affairs of men go now) is found, it will be better to have a limited monarchy checked and lessened by aristocracy.(20)

Basilius is the "average prince" in this sense; no better than his subjects, his title rests only on heredity. He stands in sharp contrast to Eu-archus, the "good ruler" of whom Musidorus/ Dorus says "I might as easily set down the whole art of government as to lay before your eyes the picture of his proceedings" (NA, p. 161). Sidney's use of Basilius rather than Euarchus as his normative example of kingship subtly suggests that he found Basilius more representative of kings "as the affairs of men go now": that he was resistant to absolute power even as he provided a blueprint for individual admiration. More practically, Basilius' failure to maintain majesty warns prospective rulers that if they hope to justify their absolute monarchy they must surpass others in displaying public virtue.

Although Basilius fails to stir admiration through energetic action, he does, according to Kalander, stir love:

But to be plain with you, he excels in nothing so much as in the zealous love of his people, wherein he doth not only pass all his own foregoers, but (as I think) all the princes living; whereof the cause is that, though he exceed not in the virtues which get admiration--as depth of wisdom, height of courage, and largeness of magnificence, yet is he notable in those which stir affection--as truth of word, meekness, courtesy, mercifulness, and liberality. (NA, p. 16)

Here Sidney allows Kalander to present admiration and affection as, if not reciprocally exclusive, entirely distinct. Whereas in the letter to Elizabeth love seemed a sufficient stay against contempt, here it is valuable, but not invaluable. Kalander's Kentish description of his statement as "plain" signals that the specific virtues Basilius lacks and their combined effect of admiration were recognized as indispensable. If Basilius is able to "stir affection" but not admiration, his hold on power would seem to be tenuous, as it proves to be.

Sidney's account of the rebellion against Basilius shows that kings cannot rule by love alone. The clowns had been demonstrating their affection to Basilius by celebrating his birthday, but had shown "the depth of their affection in the depth of their draught" (NA, p. 291; cf OA, p. 26). In "their winy conference" they began to look into those arcana imperii about which rulers prefer that their people do not become overly curious, and "your sacred person ... fell to be their table-talk." Soon "they descended (oh, never to be forgotten presumption!) to a direct mislike of your living from among them," and reasoned that "you disdained them; and what were the pomps of your estate if their arms maintained you not." They move rapidly (goaded by Clinias in the New Arcadia, but on their own in the Old Arcadia) from affectionate celebration of the king to irreverence towards him, and finally to the conclusion that they need not be "astonished with vain titles, which have their force but in our force" (NA, p. 292). For Fulke Greville this passage contains one of the primary lessons of the New Arcadia: that the ruler must avoid "contemptible familiarity" (Life, p. 12). The overly familiar ruler will swiftly lose the mystique of power, the ability to seem obscure and therefore terrible:

... where humor takes away this pomp, and apparatus from King, Crown, and Scepter, to make fear a Counsellor, and obscurity a wisdom; be that King at home what the ... credit of his former Government, for a while, may keep him: vet he is sure among forrain Princes to be justly censured as a Princely Shepherd, or Shepherdish King: which creatures of scorn seldome fail to become fit sacrifices for home-born discontentments, or ambitious forrain spirits to undertake, and offer up. (Life, pp. 12-13)(21)

Although far less adamant than Greville in identifying fear as integral to reverence, Sidney is clear: unless the king can command reverence, astonishment, admiration, there is no King.

If affection without admiration will not suffice, neither will fear. Basilius has often been justly contrasted with Euarchus, whom Annabel Patterson refers to as his "antitype"; unlike Basilius, Euarchus resorts to severe punitive justice, believing with Machiavelli that a prince must guard by any means "the majesty of his dignity, which must never be allowed to fail in anything whatsoever."(22) opposing Basilius to Euarchus, however, has obscured the way in which Basilius balances another unsuccessful ruler, the King of Phrygia, who relies as exclusively on fear to avoid contempt as Basilius does on love, with equal success. Like Basilius, this king attempts to avoid a prophecy: believing "over-superstitiously" that Musidorus will be his ruin and trying to execute him, he brings about his own overthrow (NA, pp. 162-77). Possessing the "melancholy constitution" traditional in tyrants, he is "wickedly sad (ever musing of horrible matters), suspecting (or rather, condemning) all men of evil because his mind had no eye to espy goodness" (NA, p. 169).

Eventually he turns suspicion into a principle of ruling; overwhelmed by fear, he makes himself feared:

... and then thinking himself contemned, knowing no countermine against contempt but terror, [he] began to let nothing pass which might bear the colour of a fault without sharp punishment; and when he wanted faults, excellency grew a fault; and it was sufficient to make one guilty that he had power to be guilty. (NA, p. 170)

The King of Phrygia is a caricature of tyranny, closely resembling the paradigm of the "tyrant by conduct" (tyrannus exercitio) presented in Vindiciae contra tyrannos.(23) Just as he introduces Basilius by presenting a picture of him, and refers to Euarchus as expressing in "the picture of his proceedings" the "whole art of government," Sidney heightens our awareness that the King of Phrygia is a lively image: while preparing to execute Pyrocles in order "to make all men adread to make such one an enemy who would not spare, nor fear, to kill so great a prince," the King of Phrygia insures that "all things [are] appointed for that cruel blow in so solemn an order as if they would set forth tyranny in most gorgeous decking" (NA, pp. 170-71). Ignoring Machiavelli's advice in chapters 15-19 to dissimulate at least the appearance of virtue, the King poses as tyrant in his self-portrait, and given the opportunity the people of Phrygia turn on their king as rapidly as the Arcadians on Basilius.

If Sidney leans toward the Machiavellian position regarding love in the rebellion of the clowns, he leans toward the Ciceronian position regarding fear in the overthrow of the King of Phrygia.(24) Rulers fail to avoid contempt in the New Arcadia through love or fear alone, but Sidney hardly encourages rulers to ignore these passions. Rather, we find that the rulers who succeed in keeping their realms stable, Euarchus of Macedon and Helen of Corinth, either mix fear with love or love with admiration.

4. ADMIRATION, LOVE, AND FEAR

Although Helen "of the fair city and territory of Corinth" exhibits various political skills, she highlights her ability to evoke love, introducing herself as "beloved of my people" (NA, p. 60). In confirmation, Pyrocles describes her government as "no less beautiful to men's judgements than her beauty to the eyesight" and underscores that she has succeeded even though inheriting a difficult situation (NA, p. 253). Despite "being brought by right of birth (a woman--a young woman--a fair woman) to govern a people in nature mutinously proud, and always before so used to hard governors as they knew not how to obey without the sword were drawn," Helen nevertheless could "so carry herself among them that they found cause, in the delicacy of her sex, of admiration, not of contempt." Like Basilius she is beloved, but unlike him she succeeds in evoking the admiration of a people in the habit of obeying only out of fear.

As scholars have long recognized, Helen's style of rule strongly resembles that of Elizabeth: she employs wit and artifice, showing considerable skill in foreign as well as internal affairs.(25) If Basilius represents Elizabeth's failures, Helen represents the queen he treats in the letter as immune from contempt. When her Corinth, like Elizabeth's England, faced numerous threats of invasion, "so handled she the matter that the threatens ever smarted in the threateners." At home, according to Pyrocles, she used:

so strange and yet so well-succeeding a temper that she made her people (by peace) warlike, her courtiers (by sports) learned, her ladies (by love) chaste; for, by continual martial exercises without blood, she made them perfect in that bloody art; her sports were such as carried riches of knowledge upon the stream of delight ... so as, it seemed that court to have been the marriage place of love and virtue, and that herself was a Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus. (NA, pp. 253-54)

Equipped with an impressive yet overtly contradictory array of political weapons, Helen practices shrewd homeopathic medicine upon her body politic. In her we see the queen Ralegh remembered "riding like Alexander, hunting like Diana, walking like Venus," and whom Sir John Hayward praised for "coupling mildnesse with majesty."(26) Helen is both beloved and admired, and her Corinth shows that love and admiration can be complementary, that love, employed astutely, can help maintain majesty.

Sidney's investigation of how love and admiration combine, however, extends throughout the Arcadia. He seems particularly interested in the Petrarchan analogy between the love evoked by a woman and the enthrallment of an individual or a nation. In the New Arcadia, especially, passions such as love that might seem private have reverberations in the public sphere, and these spheres are inseparable: the effects of love and majesty on a single person (usually male) figure those on entire crowds or realms, and vice versa. Thus Pyrocles/Zelmane reports that when first meeting the Arcadian royal family, he showed Gynecia and Pamela "no further reverence than one prince useth to another," but "when I came to the never-enough praised Philoclea, I could not but fall down on my knees" (NA, p. 84). When watching her, his eyes would "sometimes close up with admiration" (NA, p. 86). Amphialus similarly blends private love and public admiration in describing his love for Philoclea:

Accursed more than I am may I be, if ever I did approach her, but that I freezed as much in a fearful reverence as I burned in a vehement desire. Did ever man's eye look thorough love upon the majesty of virtue shining through beauty, but that he became--as it well became him--a captive? (NA, p.-401)

The effect of Philoclea's beauty and "majesty of virtue" is both love and "fearful reverence": she elicits obedience. However, Amphialus' speech is ironically undercut by the plot, since she, not he, is literally captive: here Sidney glances at the discrepancy between the power the Petrarchan tradition attributes to the beloved and her actual powerlessness, and reinforces the Machiavellian lesson that one whose power depends on love is vulnerable.

Sidney's Pamela, however, is more potent and revered than her sister. As befits the heir to Arcadia, "the admirable Pamela" exemplifies majesty continually, indicating that Arcadia will be more secure when under her control (NA, p. 425; cf. 155-58). Kalander accentuates her majesty when comparing the princesses, asserting that he perceived:

more sweetness in Philoclea, but more majesty in Pamela; methought love played in Philoclea's eves and threatened in Pamela's; methought Philoclea's beauty only persuaded ... Pamela's beauty used violence. (NA, p. 17)

In Pamela, even beauty and love inspire dread, as is especially noticeable in her effect on the indomitable Anaxius. After his brothers fail to persuade him not to execute the princesses, she, "hearing he was coming, and looking for death, thought she would keep her own majesty in welcoming it" (NA, p. 452). Despite his determination to kill her, "the beams thereof [i.e., of her majesty] so strake his eyes with such a counterbuff unto his pride that, if his anger could not so quickly love, nor his pride so quickly honour, yet both were forced to find a worthiness" (NA, p. 452).(27) Pamela's majesty shines with the kind of potent and threatening splendor that dazzled the eyes of Elizabeth's Catholic foes.

Here admiration precedes love, but their conjunction is evident. Significantly, Anaxius had been introduced as "esteeming fear and astonishment righter causes of admiration than love and honour" (NA, p. 390). His overthrow thus exemplifies both Cupid's power over those who disdain him and the power of female majesty. Pamela's effect on Anaxius resembles in miniature Helen's effect on her subjects: both women overcome and subdue those determined not to obey.

Although the majesty of Helen and the princesses depends on their virtuous strength of character, beauty is also intimately connected with female power, as emphasized both in Pyrocles' description of Helen (fair queen of fair Corinth, and namesake of the woman whose face launched a thousand ships) and in Cecropia's description of the power of "a fair woman" (NA, p. 356).(28) "It is the right nature ... of beauty," Cecropia tells Pamela, "to work unwitting effects of wonder." Through beauty, she argues, women can persuade as effectively as men do through "force" or "premeditated orations":

And see, a fair woman shall not only command without authority, but persuade without speaking.... She is served and obeyed ... not because the laws so command it, but they become laws to themselves to obey her.... She need not dispute whether to govern by fear or by love since, without her thinking thereof, their love will bring forth fear, and their fear will fortify their love; and she need not seek offensive or defensive force, since her lips may stand for ten thousand shields, and ten thousand unevitable shot go from her eves. (NA, p. 356)

Just as Sidney himself emphasized how Elizabeth's appearance bound the eyes of her subjects to "the beams of so fair a sun," so Cecropia equates female beauty with female power. Cecropia's assertion that the fair queen may dispense with the question of "whether to govern by fear or by love" makes Helen's conscious choice to seek the love of her people seem all the more virtuous. In contrast, Cecropia embraces fear; a terror to the princesses, she also looks back nostalgically to the days before Basilius' marriage when she had greater power over the Arcadians:

In my presence, their tongues were turned into ears, and their ears were captives unto my tongue. Their eves admired my majesty; and happy was he or she on whom I would suffer the beams thereof to fall. (NA, p. 318)(29)

Cecropia serves to demonstrate that being female is not for Sidney in itself sufficient to insure the virtuous and benevolent use of power. Her vices magnify by contrast the virtues of the princesses, and perhaps especially of Helen, whose portrait exudes both more majesty and splendor than that of Basilius and more warmth than that of Cecropia.

By maintaining majesty through love and admiration Helen also balances Euarchus: just as Helen is above all beloved, so Euarchus relies primarily on "an awful fear, engendered by justice." Euarchus is ever the good and wise prince while in Macedon; although like Helen he inherited a quagmire, according to Musidorus he avoids tyranny by ruling in the interest of his subjects, by using corrective rather than punitive justice, by not placing himself above the law, by being an exemplar of virtue, and by abandoning rule through fear after first subduing his people:

But so soon as some few but indeed notable examples had thundered a duty into the subjects' hearts, he soon showed, no baseness of suspicion ... could any whit rule such a ruler; but then shined forth, indeed all love, among them, when an awful fear engendered by justice did make that love most lovely; his first principal care being to appear unto his people such as he would have them be, and to be such as he appeared-making his life the example of his laws, as it were his actions arising out of his deeds; so that within small time he wan [sic] a singular love in his people, and engraffed singular confidence (for how could they choose but love him, whom they found so truly to love them).... (NA, p. 160)

The combination of "awful fear," "all love," and "singular confidence" that Euarchus evokes corresponds roughly to Cicero's tripartite formula for glory--"the affection, the confidence, and the mingled admiration and esteem of the people"--with the substitution of fear for admiration. Yet fear seems no more of a threat to Euarchus' majesty in Macedon than love does to that of Helen. Just as Helen distinguishes herself from Basilius by maintaining majesty in Corinth despite the distraction of her love for Amphialus, so does Euarchus distinguish himself from the King of Phrygia by successfully withstanding both foreign assault and the interior danger of becoming consumed by suspicion.

If the characters who provoke admiration tinged with love in the Arcadia tend to be female (Pyrocles in the guise of Zelmane is the exception), those who provoke admiration tinged with fear tend to be male (Pamela and perhaps Cecropia are the exceptions). Certainly all the knights who display prowess in battle are in part terrible, capable of causing fear, and they are predominantly male. The success of Helen and Euarchus through different methods might be read as an indication that Sidney considered admiration mixed with either fear or love to be equally acceptable formulas for the maintenance of majesty. But Sidney does not permit such easy conclusions, nor does he let stand any simple notion that the inclination of male rulers towards fear and of female rulers towards love results in equally valid and inevitably divergent "male" and "female" modes of ruling. Recognizing how Sidney attempts to move beyond these dichotomies to a new plateau in the debate requires another look at Euarchus.

5. MERCY AND DREAD

However successful and virtuous Euarchus may be in Macedon, while acting as magistrate in the Old Arcadia he fails to apply principles of equity when hearing the cases of Gynecia, Musidorus/Palladius, and Pyrocles/Daiphantus, or to extend mercy to them after judging them guilty.(30) He reverts to the strict justice of the Old Law, and his verdicts are forestalled only by Basilius' miraculous resurrection.(31) Euarchus' rejection of equity is inextricable from his slight but telling preference for rule through fear rather than love, just as in the mirror-for-princes literature the evocation of love by a ruler was often explicitly connected with the Christian virtue of clemency,

Quentin Skinner notes that in the humanist tradition descending from Cicero, "It was generally agreed.... as Pontano affirms at the start of his treatise on The Prince, that 'those who want to rule ought to display two qualities above all, the first being liberality and the second clemency.'"(32) For Pontano clemency indeed ensures wonder: "whenever we recognise this quality in anyone, we admire (admiramur) and honour him in everything. we consider him as a god."(33) Euarchus, as one whose admiration has its arche or foundation in fear, fails to apply the principles of equity expected of one, who displays "the whole art of government." Facing near-chaos comparable to that at the beginning of his reign in Macedon, Euarchus responds with the thunderbolt, the instrument of "awful fear."

Euarchus' failure--itself, of course, forgivable--fits with the slant towards reverence through fear which he shares with most male characters in the Arcadia.(34) The capacities he lacks--those for equity and mercy--were consistently understood during the Renaissance as feminine in gender, as Constance Jordan has recently demonstrated; Mercilla's clemency in Spenser's "Book of Justice" serves is a prime example.(35) I would speculate therefore, given the clear contrast between Helen and Euarchus that Sidney establishes, that Sidney planned to include near the conclusion of the New Arcadia an invasion of Arcadia by a force under the command of Helen (with or without a reformed Amphialus). This development would provide the delay necessary to enable Basilius to awaren from Gynecia's potion and prevent the execution of the princes. Helen would thus be able to temper Euarchus' justice with defaco clemency, and the episode would serve both a practical and a symbolic function within the providential plot, allowing forgiveness and mercy to emerge triumphant. (An invasion would also provide a marvelous reversal for Amphialus, allowing him to redeem himself and evoke as much admiration through virtue as he already had through force.) My hypothesis cannot be demonstrated, but it has an aesthetic logic, and Greville in fact notes that Sidney had intended ultimately to include the marriage of Amphialus and Helen (Life, pp. 14-15). By building up to the deus ex machina of the potion with such a surprising twist, Sidney would himself seem all the more admirable, god-like in his ability to extend fictional clemency.

Even within the incomplete text of the New Arcadia, however, we have hints that Sidney wished to mitigate the exemplary force of Euarchus, and furthermore that he was not content to leave justice and mercy polarized according to gender. The character whom Sidney teats as most admirable is unquestionably Pyrocles, who elicits wonder from nearly everyone, regardless of whether they recognize him or know his sex. Even in comparison' to Musidorous, Pyrocles stands out. When the members of Kalander's household receive Pyrocles/Daiphantus with "honourable admiration," for example, he displaces "the like wonder Palladius [Musidorus] had before stirred" (NA, p. 42).(36) As captain of the Helots, Pyrocles is so worshipped that he feels uncomfortable about their "barbarously thinking unsensible wonders of me" (NA, p. 47). Yet for all his ability to inspire wonder through fierceness, eloquence, virtue, and beauty, Pyrocles usually retains the capacity that, in Arcadia at least, his father lacks: the capacity to forgive. With one exception, Pyrocles exercises what Philoclea refers to as "womanly mercy" (NA, p. 420).

Pyrocles' quality of mercy may be strengthened by assuming the female guise of Zelmane, but he displays it emblematically even in the scene where we meet him, know him for who he is. When "the captain of the helots" strikes such a blow upon the helmet of Musidorus/Palladius "that he reeled astonied," the prince seems finished. But the "chief enemy"--whom we only later discover to be Pyrocles--"instead of pursuing that advantage, kneeled down, offering to deliver the pommel of his sword in token of yielding" (NA, p. 38). Clemency to his closest friend costs Pyrocles nothing, yet the scene introduces us both to his ability to astonish and to his willingness to forego his due. More indicative of his forgiveness in the political realm is "his," or Zelmane's, unauthorized decision to extend clemency to the clowns after their rebellion (NA, p. 287). The "pardon," which diffuses the rebels' desperation, shows a political wisdom that Basilius lacks and that Euarchus might have been too proud to exercise. Here again clemency costs Pyrocles nothing, but his response to the King of Pontus, who had executed two servants dear to the princes, is more telling. It is "by Musidorus' commandment" Pyrocles' heart more inclining to pity) that this king is "slain upon the tomb of their two true servants" (NA, p. 177).

Pyrocles fails to extend mercy only when avenging Lycurgus' attempt to rape Philoclea, an instance that further identifies mercy as conventionally female and justice as conventionally male. After a battle in which Zelmane leaves Lycurgus "amazed," "she" weighs Lycurgus' request for mercy in exchange for a promise "to make my brother [Anaxius] obey all your commandments" (NA, p. 462). When Lycurgus pleads that "As you have taken from men the glory of manhood, return so now again to your own sex for mercy," Pyrocles/Zelmane hesitates--"the image of human condition began to be an orator unto her of compassion" (NA, p. 462). Yet the sight on Lycurgus of a love token Pyrocles had himself given to Philoclea rekindles "her" anger, and prompts not the "womanly mercy" Lycurgus hopes for but the conventionally manly justice of execution. Ironically, Pyrocles follows to the letter Lycurgus' direction to return to his own sex. Pyrocles' behavior in this instance nevertheless comes across as a deviation from his habitual willingness to forgive.

The character who most needs Pyrocles' forgiveness in the Old Arcadia (and presumably in the New Arcadia as well if Sidney had completed it) is Euarchus himself. After the princes' punishment has been laid down, Musidorus angrily invites "tyrannical Euarchus" to "enjoy thy bloody conquest" and to "look upon this young Pyrocles with a manlike eye, if not with a pitiful" (OA, p. 412). Pyrocles, in contrast, speaks gently, reminding Musidorus "to consider it was their own fault and not his unjustice" that led to their fate (OA, p. 413). Pyrocles' mildness towards Euarchus here may be aimed in part at winning clemency for Musidorus, but signals that he forgives his father.

Pyrocles goes even further, offering himself as a sacrifice to the demands of justice: "what you owe to justice is performed in my death" (OA, p. 413). Euarchus turns down this opportunity for imitatio dei, and the resurrection of Basilius allows for a happier providence, but both Pyrocles' forgiveness of his father and his willingness to let his own blood redeem the crimes of all are astonishing, nearly divine. Nowhere is Sidney's interest in the kind of admiration a character evokes more apparent.

In Sidney's gallery of rulers, arranged so that the "splendor of Majestie" shines on some and a "cloud of contempt" shades others, the portrait of Pyrocles therefore holds pride of place. Pyrocles' contrast to his father and Pamela's contrast to hers suggest that the governments of Macedon and Arcadia are likely to be more secure and admirable in the next generation.(37) By promising to rule in a way that will enable him to avoid contempt and win admiration through an even more balanced combination of love and fear than Euarchus had been able to achieve, Pyrocles in particular expresses Sidney's hope that "womanly mercy" and "manly" dreadfulness may coexist within a single ruler. Sidney caps his own debate over the relative value of love and fear in securing majesty by insisting on their miraculous conjunction.

Conclusions about Sidney's ultimate view of monarchy and how it should be limited are notoriously difficult to draw: his focus on the ruler's capacity to maintain majesty is certainly only part of the story he tells in the Arcadia. In drawing attention to Sidney's lively images of princes, I do not wish to downplay the similarities that W. D. Briggs first pointed out sixty years ago between the theories of limited monarchy and justified rebellion held by Protestant activists and those contained in the "Ister bank" eclogue, Amphialus' justification of rebellion, and Pyrocles' establishment of government for the Helots.(38) Even E. W. Talbert, who considers Sidney generally monarchical and conservative, concedes that whenever the Arcadia presents the formation of a new government "an agreement of some sort exists, a derivation of power from the people is apparent, or the nature of a prince's rule is circumscribed in some way."(39) Yet the imaginative energy Sidney invests in his lively images indicates that, however strong his doubts about the value of absolute monarchy, he hoped his text might bestow rulers more merciful and just upon the world. If we are to "to learn aright how and why" Sidney made the New Arcadia, we must imaginatively reconstruct the "Idea or fore-conceit" that led him to endow various rulers--and Pyrocles most of all--with the "splendor of Majestie," making them objects of admiration, even if not to us.

NOTES

(1) In Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford U. Press, 1973), p. 46. Subsequent citations of this text (MP) will be internal. (2) Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1, The Renaissance (Cambridge U. Press, 1978), p. 235. (3) M. Tullius Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Harvard U. Press, 1913), 2.7. For Sidney's reliance on this text, see Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics (U. of Massachusetts Press, 1986), pp. 271-73. (4) Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci, rev. E. R. P. Vincent (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 61. (5) Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561; rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 129. Myron Turner, however, treats as a flaw Euarchus' refusal to wonder at anyone or anthing: "Distance and Astonishment in the Old Arcadia: A Study of Sidney's Pysychology," TSLL 20 (1978): 303-29. (6) On fictional debate see Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind (Princeton U. Press, 1983), pp. 285-305 and Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (U. of California Press, 1978). (7) Skinner, pp. 33-36, 47-48. (8) Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (Columbia U. Press, 1936), p. 158. (9) Erasmus, pp. 208-9; for the Latin, see Institutio Principis Christiani, ed. 0. Herding in Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterdodami (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974), series 4, vol. 1, p. 185. (10) The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), p. 119. (11) Machiavelli, p. 61. (12) See my unpublished dissertation, "Strange and Admirable: Style and Wonder in the Seventeenth Century" (Columbia U., 1990), pp. 1-8. On wonder and political spectacle, see pp. 165-82; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (U. of Chicago Press, 1988); and Christopher Pye, The Regal Phantasm (London: Routledge, 1990). The most broadly useful treatment of wonder in Renaissance literature remains J. V. Cunningham's Woe or Wonder (I 95 1), rpt. in The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham (Chicago: Swallow, 1976), pp. 1-129. (13) P. 99. (14) See Kinney, pp. 262-73. (15) Cf. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford U. Press, 1973), pp. 7-8. Subsequent citations of the Old Arcadia (OA) will be internal. (16) Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford U. Press, 1907), pp. 11-12. Subsequent citations of this text (Life) will be internal. (17) Erasmus urges royal tutors to find examples of "the king and the tyrant," then "create the picture of each, and impress [them] upon the mind and eye ... so that the prince may burn to emulate the one anddetest the latter" (Education, pp. 162-63). (18) In balancing characters, Michael McCanles argues, Sidney draws on Aristotle's approach to virtues and vices as "always related in various forms of mutually implicative and exclusive opposition's": The Text of Sidney's Arcadian World (Duke U. Press, 1989), p. 33. See also NA, pp. xiii-xliii. (19) Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Harvard U. Press, 1944). The author of Vindiciae contra tyrannos, however, arguing that "all rulers are human," finds that "we should not look for perfect princes but consider ourselves fortunate, indeed, if we have men of middling virtue as our rulers" (in julian H. Franklin, Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century [New York: Pegasus, 19691, pp. 189-90). (20) Erasmus, p. 173; cf. pp. 182-85. (21) Cf. Amphialus's poem: NA, p. 351. (22) Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 44; Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. 21, quoted in Irving Ribner, "Machiavelli and Sidney: The Arcadia of 1590," SP 47 (1950): 157. On "dignity" as the undying royal office, and thus a public rather than private concern, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies (Princeton U. Press, 1957), pp. 383-84. (23) The tyrant by conduct, Franklin summarizes, "is self-willed, is devious, lops off the taller stalks of corn, pretends that there are conspiracies against him, shows no respect for princes of the blood, advances low and vicious men, is suspicious of wise and virtuous men, fears public assemblies of any sort, encourages factions among his subjects to weaken them, uses foreign mercenaries, disarms his own countrymen, surrounds himself with bodyguards, foments foreign wars to distract the people, imposes oppressive taxes to keep his subjects impoverished, wastes the public revenue on his favorites, counterfeits religion and concern for the public welfare, and gives the appearance of virtue by deceit" (p. 186). The King of Phrygia, his kinsman the King of Pontus, and Plexirtus divide this catalogue. (24) Even less successful is the King of Pontus, Sidney's exemplum of a ruler who provokes hatred: see NA, pp. 175-77. (25) See Frances A. Yates, "Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts," JWCI, 20 (1957): 4-25, rpt. in Astraea (London: Ark, 1975), pp. 88-111, and Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (U. of California Press, 1977), pp. 146-51. (26) Quoted in J. E. Neale, Essays in Elizabethan History (1958; rpt. London: 1963), pp. 177-78. Sidney leaves to the reader's judgment whether Helen's "temper" is evidence of laudably practical wisdom or of questionable dissimulation. (27) In the Countess of Pembroke's translation of Robert Garnier's Tragedy of Antony, Diomed claims that Cleopatra's majesty would disarm even angry Jove (2.695-724; in Women Writers of the Reneissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina M. Wilson [U. of Georgia Press, 19871). See also Isocrates' comparison of Heracles' "strength" to Helen's "gift of beauty, which by its nature brings even strength itself into subjection to it" (Helen 16-17; in Isocrates, vol. 3, trans. LaRue Van Hook [Harvard U. Press, 1945]). (28) Pamela rebuts Cecropia's Machiavellian critique of religion "with so fair a majesty of unconquered virtue that captivity might seem to have authority over tyranny" (NA, p. 363). (29) By trying to usurp the throne and to "take advantage of a prince's inertness or negligence to rule his subjects tyrannically," she exemplifies the tyrant by usurpation as defined in the Vindiciae (Franklin, p. 197). Her power melt's quickly: while dying she orders the princesses murdered, "but everybody seeing (and glad to see) her end, had left obedience to her tyranny" (NA, p. 440). (30) See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism (Cornell U. Press, 1990), pp. 234-40; Arthur F. Kinney, "Sir Philip Sidney and the Uses of History," in The Historical Renaissance, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (U. of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 293-314; and Margaret E. Dana, "The Providential Plot of the Old Arcadia," SEL 17 (1977): 39-57. Kathy Eden demonstrates that equity is crucial to Sidney's poetics in Poetry and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton U. Press, 1986), pp. 157-74. Like McCanles Kinney, and Jordan, I think Sidney's inclusion of the oracle's prediction in the New Arcadia demands that the Work conclude much as the Old Arcadia had: see Michael McCanles, "Oracular Prediction and the Fore-Conceit of Sidney's Arcadia," ELH 50 (1983): 233-44; Kinney, "Sir Philip Sidney," pp. 310-11; and Jordan, p. 220n81. (31) On equity and the New Law see Eden, pp. 135-39, 160-63. (32) P. 127; cf. Franklin, pp. 170-71; and Erasmus, p. 209. (33) P. 128. For the Latin see Pontano's Ad Alfonsum Calabriae Ducem De Principe Liber (1490) in Prosatori Latini del Quatrocento, ed. Eugenio Garin (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1952), p. 1026. (34) Euarchus admits his fallibility, calling himself "a man; that is to say, a creature whose reason is often darkened with error" (OA, p. 365). As Jordan notes, "the reader concludes" that Euarchus is himself "in need of of forgiveness" (p. 240). (35) Jordan, pp. 222-40. (36) Musidorus/Dorus himself tells Pamela that the younger Pyrocles surpassed him in all activities, "which may well seem wonderful, but wonders are no wonders in a wonderful subject" (NA, p. 164). Like power in the courtly and diplomatic milieu of Sir Thomas Wyatt as described by Stephen Greenblatt, admiration is here inelastic: "the gain of one party is inevitably the loss of another" (Renaissance Self-Fashioning [U. of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 141). Similarly, Pyrocles/Zelmane says that Gynecia's "fairness" might have "purchased admiration" "if her daugthers had not been by" (NA, p. 83). (37) Kinney makes a similar argument on different grounds: Humanist Poetics, p. 268. (38) W. D. Briggs. "Political Ideas in Sidney's Arcadia," SP 28 (1931): 137-61 and "Sidney's Political Ideas," SP 29 (1932): 534-42. More recent arguments that Sidney promotes the monarchomach position include: Martin Bergbusch, "Rebellion in the New Arcadia," PQ 63 (1974): 29-41; Jan Van Dorsten, "Sidney and Languet," HLQ 29 (1966): 215-22; Alan Sinfield, "Power and Ideology: An Outline Theory and Sidney's Arcadia," ELH 52 (1985): 259-77. Asserting that Sidney rejects most limits on monarchy are Irving Ribner, "Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection," JHI 13 (1952): 257-65 and Martin N. Raitiere, Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory (Duquesne U. Press, 1984). Others contend that Sidney holds an equivocal position: Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Rutgers U. Press, 1979), pp. 23-41, 167-217; Patterson, pp. 24-43; and E. W. Talbert, The Problem of Order (U. of North Carolina Press, 1962), pp. 89-117. Raitiere's arguments for an anti-monarchomach position are especially forceful, but cannot erase the ambivalence of the injunction that concludes the "Ister bank" beast fable dedicated to Languet. The shepherd (Sidney's namesake Philisides in the Old Arcadia) advises the "poor beasts" suffering under absolute monarchy to "in patience bide your hell, / Or know your strengths, and then you shall do well" (NA p. 4; cf. OA, p. 259). (39) Talbert, p. 101.

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Author:	Biester, James
Publication:	Philological Quarterly
Date:	Sep 22, 1993
Words:	9608
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