The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton and Their Conexts 9781442688315

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Notes on Transcriptions
1. Counselling the Unstable Self: Conflicting Emotional Frameworks, Persuasion, and Inwardness
2. Unyielding Judge or Gentle Physician? The Friend as Counsellor in Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation and Sidney’s Old Arcadia
3. Poetry as Orator and Physician in Sidney’s Defence
4. The Politics of Emotion in Hospitality, Rivalry, and Erotic Love: Sidney’s New Arcadia
5. Anger as an Instrument of Justice: The Vehement versus the Mild Style in Milton’s Early Prose
6. Emotion as Defined by the Discourse of Honour: Spiritual Warfare and Rhetorical Agon in Paradise Lost
7. Seventeenth-Century Protestant Rhetoric: Cause and Cure of Fallen Emotion
8. Marriage as a Site of Counsel in Marriage Handbooks, Milton’s Divorce Pamphlets, and Paradise Lost
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Citation preview

T H E I M PE R FE C T F R I E N D : E MO T I ON A N D R H E T O R IC I N S ID N E Y, MI LTO N, A ND T H E I R C O N TE X T S

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WENDY OLMSTED

The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Olmsted, Wendy, 1943– The imperfect friend : emotion and rhetoric in Sidney, Milton and their contexts / Wendy Olmsted. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 1. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554–1586 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Friendship in literature. 4. Rhetoric, Renaissance. I. Title. PN56.F74O55 2008

821c.3

C2007-904019-5

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

To Bill

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on Transcriptions

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1 Counselling the Unstable Self: Conflicting Emotional Frameworks, Persuasion, and Inwardness 3 2 Unyielding Judge or Gentle Physician? The Friend as Counsellor in Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation and Sidney’s Old Arcadia 20 3 Poetry as Orator and Physician in Sidney’s Defence 54 4 The Politics of Emotion in Hospitality, Rivalry, and Erotic Love: Sidney’s New Arcadia 76 5 Anger as an Instrument of Justice: The Vehement versus the Mild Style in Milton’s Early Prose 106 6 Emotion as Defined by the Discourse of Honour: Spiritual Warfare and Rhetorical Agon in Paradise Lost 128 7 Seventeenth-Century Protestant Rhetoric: Cause and Cure of Fallen Emotion 146 8 Marriage as a Site of Counsel in Marriage Handbooks, Milton’s Divorce Pamphlets, and Paradise Lost 175 Conclusion Notes 217 Index 273

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Acknowledgments

A scholar of friendship and company must be keenly aware of the contributions of workshops, colleagues, and friends to the intellectual life that sustains the writing of her book. I am deeply grateful to those who have shared inquiries with me. I owe more than I can say to the Renaissance Workshop and the Ancient Societies Workshop at the University of Chicago for stimulating dialogue that led me to look more closely at emotion in its distinct historical contexts and to notice new ways that Renaissance writers read and revised classical sources. As a result, I sought to understand Sidney and Milton’s treatments of emotion in light of conflicts between socio-cultural categories articulated in books on rhetoric, counsel, and friendship. Dennis Hutchinson, Master of the New Collegiate Division, John Boyer, Dean of the College, and Richard Saller, Provost at the University of Chicago, graciously granted course reductions to give me muchneeded time at crucial moments in the writing process. My research was also sustained by Special Collections at the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library and by the Newberry Library, Chicago, who gave me access to their collections and to the courteous knowledgeable assistance of their librarians. I thank Modern Philology for permission to reproduce arguments that first appeared (in slightly different form) in volume 103 (2005): 155–86 and Blackwell Publishing for permission to reproduce lines of argument that appeared in Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 83–95. Conferences of the International Congress on Medieval Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Renaissance Workshop at the University of Chicago gave me wonderful opportunities to discuss papers that became part of this volume. I received invaluable comments and suggestions from participants in these meetings.

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Acknowledgments

Colleagues generously gave of their time to read drafts and offer indispensable encouragement and correction. (My mistakes, of course, must be attributed to me.) Janel Mueller’s scholarship and honest counsel helped me embody my ideas more lucidly and accurately in print. Michael Murrin, Joshua Scodel, and Richard Strier offered insightful, judicious suggestions and important critical comments. Their excellent scholarship has informed my work. Braden Cormack, Walter Jost, Arthur Kinney, Roger Kuin, Anne Lake Prescott, and Laurie Shannon also provided learned, intelligent and searching responses to chapters. Wayne Rebhorn’s writings have been important to my project, and the broadreaching, detailed comments of the anonymous readers at the University of Toronto Press made this a better book. I thank Suzanne Rancourt, the Humanities Editor at the Press, for her cordial, clear-headed handling of the publication process. My work is the fruit of years of stimulating intellectual interchange. The interest and encouragement of friends, relatives, and colleagues – especially David Bevington, Chris Faraone, Steve Gabel, Eugene Garver, Steve Raudenbush, Laurie Shannon, Maurine Stein, Katie Trumpener, James Redfield, and Peter White – helped the project greatly. My children Jennifer and Nicholas, and my daughter-in-law, Shirley Huey, were an unfailing source of affection and lively discussion. Finally, my greatest debt is to William Olmsted, who commented on the whole manuscript and cheered me on my way. His judgment, faith, and care have made all the difference. I dedicate this book to him.

Notes on Transcriptions

I have often cited sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts rather than modern editions because I want the reader to imagine the contemporary interchanges and reading experiences that informed discussions of friendship, rhetoric, and emotion. But in the interests of readability, I have modernized the orthography. I have used modern transcriptions of obsolete letters such as the long ‘s,’ and I have transliterated ‘i’ as ‘j’ and ‘j’ as ‘i’ in accordance with modern practice. Middle ‘u’s have become ‘v’s and ‘v’s have become ‘u’s following modern English usage.

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T H E I M PE R FE C T F R I E N D

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1 Counselling the Unstable Self: Conflicting Emotional Frameworks, Persuasion, and Inwardness

While Homeric heroes could lament bitterly, weep, or abandon themselves to grief without seeming unmanly, warriors in Renaissance representations of emotion reject such display.1 As Sir Philip Sidney’s character Boulon asks, ‘what can breed more peevish incongruities / Than man to yield to female lamentations?’2 Writings on emotion in this period seek to prevent dissolution into effeminate tears. They attempt ‘to mitigate’ the ‘griefe’ of a friend, that he ‘knowing the grounds of these passions ... might be the more comforted’ and refreshed, as the Protestant Timothie Bright puts it (1586).3 Authors relieve diseased passion by clarifying the causes of illness and pain.4 They imply that any man who laments must be in want of a cure. Whether women’s grief demands less attention is more difficult to determine; those of ‘hardest hearts,’ according to Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia (1579–81), ‘have ... thought woman’s tears to be a matter of slight compassion (imagining that fair weather will quickly after follow)’ (368.33–4). Thomas Wilson, the English rhetorician (1586), implies that all do not lament equally, more liable to lamentation are ‘such as are subject to passions, and furthest from fortitude of mind, as women commonly rather then men, rude people rather then Godly folke: the unlearned soner then the learned, foolish folke soner then wise men, children, rather then yong men.’ Given these weighted discriminations of inferiors and superiors, one can infer that moderation in grief signifies civility. Indeed, Wilson’s consolatory speech continues, ‘immoderate sorowe is not naturall (for that which is naturall, is ever like in all)’; paradoxically, he exhorts a gentlewoman: ‘Whereas by nature, you are a weake woman in bodie, you will shewe your selfe by reason, a strong man in heart.’5

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Responding to perceptions that emotions need to be civilized and hearts made strong, Renaissance treatises and rhetorical handbooks provide strategies for persuading the emotions.6 These strategies inform dialogues between friends and between lovers or married people in the major works of Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton and in their contexts. My book examines how these texts use and teach rhetorical means to cultivate emotional intelligence in their readers.7 I argue that while writers of treatises and handbooks aspire to scientific objectivity, they actually imbue readers with cultural categories that shape emotions and influence evaluations of them. Emotions deemed to be socially unproductive arise from individualism and solitude, including anger, melancholy, fear, and (erotic) love, which are rigorously attacked as unhealthful and dangerous to the mind. Yet, according to writings on counsel (literary and otherwise), those who would be cured of diseased passions defend them as definitive of identity itself. So Milton’s Adam exclaims to Eve before he eats the forbidden fruit, ‘with thee /Certain my resolution is to die; /How can I live without thee,’ affirming the primacy of their mutual life over legal and religious prohibitions.8 Similarly, William Guazzo, the confessed melancholic in the Italian humanist Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation (1574; English translation, 1581), tells his friend that he finds only pain and subjection in courtly society, whereas solitude allows him to recover his liberty. William, a former warrior and courtier, believes that his presence in the court goes ‘against the heart’ (1.17). Faced with friends who wish to follow the heart, counsellors strive to change their passions and preferences. When William Guazzo pleads for solitude, Anniball responds that he must have a ‘maladie’ that is ‘incurable’ (1.17). Far from validating the emotions of other people, friends and spouses explain emotion away or use rhetoric to move it in a different direction. Writers of handbooks and characters who offer counsel in literary texts try to divert emotion from socially unproductive ends, confident that rhetoric may replace force in civilizing subjects and ruling their wills. Although the most violent subjects might require physical restraint, many were believed tractable to eloquent words. Wayne A. Rebhorn and Debora K. Shuger show that rhetorical texts celebrate the power of persuasion to impel men’s emotions and actions.9 Shuger shows how arguments move the will and emotions in sacred rhetoric. Rebhorn demonstrates that Renaissance texts aimed to empower sovereigns with absolute rule over their subjects’ wills, and Protestant writers agree that law and persuasion coerce action by appealing to ‘servile fear.’10 But the lat-

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ter perceive a disadvantage in using persuasion to compel assent. Philip Melanchthon, the great Lutheran humanist and mentor of Sidney’s friend Hubert Languet, sharply distinguishes despotic governance, in which the mind coerces the limbs to move or be still, from political governance, under which ‘the heart itself agrees with right reason and by honest will is moved to being persuaded.’11 This emphasis on persuading the heart needs to be understood in light of Protestant beliefs in the primacy of faith. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559) deemphasizes knowledge in favour of deep trust: ‘The word is not received in faith when it merely flutters in the brain, but when it has taken deep root in the heart ... there is more distrust in the heart than blindness in the mind; and it is more difficult to inspire the soul with security than to imbue it with knowledge’ (3.2.36). Desiring belief founded in trust, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant writers ponder how to engage without coercing the assent of troubled friends or acquaintances. My book explores issues that writers raise about full persuasion. How can rhetoric that moves emotion be trustworthy and capable of leading to whole-hearted assent? Clearly it must engage emotion without compelling or seducing it. Here lies the mutual pertinence of the terms ‘rhetoric’ and ‘emotion’ in my title. Focusing on rhetorical texts and the literature of counsel, I show how Renaissance English writings represent emotion as caused by rhetoric and, thus, as open to change by persuasion. The favoured site for seeking full assent is friendship, because it is free of the coercion by which, for instance, the law moves reason to right action. Scholars have shown how rhetoric can force people to follow the law, but the importance of friends’ gentle persuasions has been examined less often.12 Friendship provides a nearly utopian site where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other.13 In English Renaissance representations of counsel, friends and spouses correct the excess or deficient emotions of others by leading them to a truer view of circumstances.14 But what, we may ask, grounds that truth? Treatises argue for a single true knowledge of the things to which emotion can be directed. John Rainolds, a professor of rhetoric writing in the 1570s whose interests are theological, argues that good emotions arise from intellectual knowledge of good and evil things. ‘Intellect teaches that sloth is evil; appetite produces disgust so that we avoid it. Intellect teaches that industry is good; appetite produces love so that we embrace it.’15 Bad emotions follow, on the other hand, when people err in their cognition of things. However, this view, though reiterated frequently in treatises on self-knowledge and analyses of rhetoric,

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conflicts with the actual multiplicity of discourses that shape emotion. While acknowledging the power of a transparent cognitive scheme of emotion in the imaginations of early modern writers, I draw attention to conflicting practices in the systems of rhetorical topoi that shape cognitions. Different types of topoi produce specific emotions. The topoi a general uses to inflame anger differ from the topoi humanists use to moderate it.16 Writers from one subculture criticize the norms common in another. So Juan Luis Vives, writing from a Catholic humanist perspective against emotions arising from competition for honour in De Anima et Vita (1538), complains that ‘human pride and suspicion have multiplied excessively the expressions of contempt: words, facts, laughter, nods, features, motions of the body. Once suspicion has become strong, it runs out of control.’17 A person who favours one set of topoi will fail to persuade someone governed by a different set. Musidorus fails to persuade Pyrocles, whose ‘mind was all this while so fixed upon another devotion that he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson’ (OA 20.31–3). The existence of multiple emotional frameworks often prevents one friend from persuading another. Building on the work of Mary Floyd-Wilson, Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, Joshua Scodel, and Richard Strier, my study argues that writers use historically and culturally distinct topoi to produce emotion. Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson’s introduction to Reading the Early Modern Passions asks, ‘Are there early modern passions? Do the emotions in the period and place we now designate, however unsatisfyingly, as “early modern Europe” have a character and distinctive profile – an “emotional universe” – such as anthropologists describe for societies?’18 I argue that early modern England has distinct emotions and that ‘some form of evaluation or appraisal [is] essential to and constitutive of ... emotion.’ As Douglas Cairns argues, words for emotion ‘are not simply names for bodily sensations; an occurrence of fear, anger or aidôs [shame] relates to some perceived attribute of the world “out there” and such emotions are thus ways of seeing and responding to the world.’19 Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson assert that early modern writers offer ‘different maps’ of emotional ‘terrain,’ and ‘competing taxonomies of passions.’20 But instead of analysing taxonomies, I show how uses of conflicting rhetorical topoi of emotion decentre selves. My analysis intervenes in the literary history of emotion by exploring the sometimes contradictory but synchronous emotions characters experience in the interactions between the humanistic idealizing of moderation, the vital archaic and Aristote-

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lian model associated with rivalry for honour, and Neoplatonic emotions of aspiration. I argue that Sidney, Milton, and some contemporaries give these topoi a distinctly Protestant inflection.21 My emphasis on contradictions between frameworks that are simultaneously present in English culture as well as in individuals (though not in exactly the same configuration over time) can be understood in relation to Norbert Elias’s analysis in The Civilizing Process of how the change of the European nobility from a warrior class to a courtly one and the emergence of a bourgeoisie transformed affective life.22 Elias argues that whereas medieval warriors could be uninhibited in the discharge of anger and hatred, the ‘tamed courtly nobility’ experiences ‘more muted affects.’23 The warrior uses force to compel others, but the courtier restrains emotions based on their probable effect on others. The warrior expresses intense aggression and eroticism without thinking, while the courtier adjusts words and behavior to the opinions of others in order to succeed at court. He ‘“conceals ... his passions,” “disavows his heart,” “acts against his feelings.”’24 The bourgeois, on the other hand, finds himself subject to constant impersonal supervision of his drives, ‘tightly bound’ by their ‘functional dependence on’ broad social, functional pressures that affect time, action, and emotion.25 I argue, however, that sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century pamphlets, treatises, and literary works that contrast the intense emotion of the man of honour with the caution of the courtier and the unconscious self-restraint of the bourgeois also represent the perturbed courtier as resisting the control stressed by Elias and as striving to express strong emotion. And writers represent ‘bourgeois’ English Protestants during the civil war as subject to sudden rage even while imbued with selfrestraint and foresight. Persons living within various frameworks experience multiple incommensurable emotions because the stages that Elias outlines as phases of a developmental historical process actually co-exist in tension with one another. I agree with Daniel Juan Gil that ‘the unevenness of the civilizing process gives rise to a fissure ... within the ... fabric of civility.’26 But my analysis differs from Elias’s, Gil’s, and others’ in that it explains representations of emotion in sociocultural terms rather than depending upon the revised Freudian framework employed by Elias and Gil or upon, for example, the Galenic theory of humours that is central to Gail Kern Paster’s account.27 I use the word ‘emotion’ to distinguish the phenomena I analyse from the more common Renaissance term ‘passion.’ The OED (2) defines passion as ‘any strong, controlling, or overpowering emotion, as desire,

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hate, fear, etc., an intense feeling or impulse.’ But ‘emotion’ (not used until 1660) emphasizes the stirring or exciting of a mental state (OED 4a). It comes from the Latin emoveo, ‘I move out,’ and emota, ‘stirred,’ related to the verb moveo (‘I move, stir’) that is used figuratively to mean ‘move, influence, affect, excite, or inspire.’ Rhetoricians writing in Latin use this verb to refer to moving the audience’s emotions. I use ‘emotion’ to refer to what is moved in Aristotle’s sense that emotions pertinent to rhetoric are ‘those ... through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure’ (On Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a).28 In the Renaissance, the different types of topoi appropriate to the subcultures of Aristotelian honour, humanism, and Neoplatonic aspiration generate distinct emotions and judgments. When writers focus on emotions arising from the pursuit of honour, they draw on Aristotle to emphasize the persons and occasions that give rise to emotion.29 Persons become ‘angry with those who ridicule, mock, and scoff at them, for this is an insult’ to their honour (2.11, 1379a). Juan Luis Vives takes Aristotle’s characterizations a step further, arguing that ‘anger without insult is not possible,’ and later Thomas Hobbes’s Human Nature (1640) goes even further to claim that ‘in the pleasure men have, or displeasure from the signs of honour or dishonour done unto them, consisteth the nature of the passions.’30 Contempt and disdain express a person’s sense of superiority. By elevating one’s own status through lowering the status of another, one slights and dishonours the other, making him angry.31 Renaissance texts on the duel take up these Aristotelian topics. Domenico Mora, for example, praising the duel in Il cavaliere (1589), argues that, as Frederick Robertson Bryson puts it, insult ‘pertains to the nature of man; because everyone seeks distinction, one mark of which is to offend fearlessly.’32 Bryson argues that Lodovico Carbone (1583), an opponent of the duel, claims that a person may show contempt by ‘“forgetting a man’s name, nor caring a star for his words and deeds.”’33 Sidney and Milton revise cultural discourses that produce emotions of rivalry, illuminating the historical specificity of emotion. The young princes in the Old Arcadia and Pamela in the New Arcadia use Aristotelian rhetorical topoi associated with honour to express the anger that identifies their status as aristocratic. The New Arcadia uses these topoi along with the Politics to represent emotions of rivalry that cause rebellion (stasis) against the monarch. These emotions become one-sided in flatterers and tyrants, isolating them from others and propelling them into a selfdestructive solitude. Whereas criteria of emotion in Aristotle are inter-

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subjective and social, the New Arcadia poises them between social and interior spaces. The mind uses a social discourse but speaks to itself. Milton’s relation to honour dramatizes the differences between his socio-political, historical position and Sidney’s. He, like many other seventeenth-century Protestants, redefines norms of honour in egalitarian terms. He despises titles of degree, remarking in the Prolusions, ‘But indeed to any such nickname as “Lord” or “Lady” I utterly reject and repudiate it; for, gentlemen, it is only in your courts and on your platforms that I have any ambition to lord it.’34 His complex assertion expresses the two aspects of his attitudes towards honour. On the one hand, he disliked hereditary status; on the other, he competed for the ascendancy of truth in legal and parliamentary venues. He never fought in a battle,35 where honour is paramount, but ‘in his own mind he was but another recruit in the warfare of the spirit.’36 He, and Abdiel, God, and the Son use topoi of emotions associated with honour to express their indignation and anger that their worth has been outraged. Paradise Lost brilliantly rewrites classical topoi of emotions and the Homeric/ Aristotelian economy of honour to illuminate the psychology of religious controversy. It represents deformed competitive topoi that Satan uses to fuel his and Eve’s malice and envy. Using one-sided topoi, Satan falls into one-sided, open-ended emotions more intense, because more inwardly defined, than those of Sidney’s tyrants. Drawing on a second set of topoi, humanists like Erasmus (1503) and Sir Thomas Elyot (1532) lead people away from intense aggressive and erotic emotions to love of the common good.37 They believe that anger, fear, and deeply felt compassion are dangerous. Edmund Spenser’s rendering of Mercilla’s ‘piteous ruth’ in The Faerie Queene suggests why. If Mercilla (Queen Elizabeth) had been unable to overcome her ‘passion,’ she would have been unable to judge Duessa (Mary Stuart) fairly.38 Similarly, Elyot stresses love of the commonwealth as binding up and mediating private anger. Whereas Aristotle shows how anger can be appropriate to persons and occasions, Elyot treats anger as an excessive emotion that ‘disturbeth reason’ and results in ‘desire ... of vengeance.’ He emphasizes the ‘incomodities’ of anger, such as ‘lacke of appetitie,’ and ‘lacke of slepe,’ along with ‘frozne dysdayne’ and ‘hatred of others’ that damage reputation.39 Other humanists draw on Stoic thought to urge independence from the vicissitudes that lead to strong emotion. Lipsius, the Dutch Neostoic, declares (1586),‘Constancie ... being firmelie setled against all casualties, neither puffed up nor pressed downe with either fortune’ makes man ‘immooveable.’40 Strength of mind reduces

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extreme emotions like anger and fear. Elyot, on the other hand, grounds emotion in brotherhood. He bids the reader to consider that ‘lyke as he is a man, so is also the other with whome he is angry,’ overcoming the inequality of status that fuels anger in the framework of honour.41 Elyot argues that fierceness and mildness should be combined to make the virtuous temper of ‘severitie.’42 Earlier in the century, the Roman Catholic humanist Erasmus recommends still more understanding in Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503, 1534 English translation), advising his readers to ‘wepe with them that wepe, to joye with them that joyen,’ to see all men as brothers and to reject the ‘circumstaunces of the rethoricyens,’ derived from Aristotle.43 Erasmus asserts that it does not matter whether a person is a citizen of the same city, a cousin, or a friend; all members of the body of Christ are ‘my flesh ... my brother’ (153). As Roman Catholic humanists emphasize the closeness of human bonds, a more intense responsiveness becomes acceptable. The Roman Catholic humanist Vives discerns a deep affinity between the subject and object of compassion. He writes that ‘the feeling of sympathy (sympathia)’ is like the attunement between ‘strings of two different lyres, that ... blend and respond to each other.’ He who can ‘bend’ his soul to ‘the afflictions’ of another helps him most.44 Shaping emotions in yet another way, religious and courtly writers in the Neoplatonic tradition appeal to a beauty and goodness that can be contemplated by the eyes of the mind alone. De la vérité de la religion chrestienne (English translation 1587), written by Sidney’s Huguenot friend, Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, and partially translated into English by Sidney,45 traces the progress of the soul: ‘And like as from the earth wee have styed up too the ayre, and from the ayre too the skye, from the skye too the heaven of heavens, still mounting up from greater too greater, from light too light, and from subtile to subtile: let us advaunce our selves yet one degree higher, namely too the infinite, too the light which is not too bee conceived but in understanding.’46 Everything that has being is related to this light; ‘evill hath not any being in it selfe’ (229). Only by beholding the light can the soul be happy (239). He adds, this ‘Everlastingnes ... [is] not subject to ... moving and chaunge ... he ... can have neither beginning nor end’ (257). Drawing on Neoplatonic categories earlier in the century, Pietro Bembo in Baldesar Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) famously articulates the love of the ‘beauty of a single woman’ as the first step to the love of universal beauty. Having moved beyond loving one beautiful woman, and all love of earthly things, ‘love gives the soul greater happiness still. For just as from the

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particular beauty of a single body it guides the soul to the universal beauty of all bodies, so, in the last stage of perfection, it guides the soul from the particular intellect to the universal intellect.’47 Although Bembo acknowledges that sensual love is not in itself worthy, in young men ‘there are many who perform worthy acts in order to win the favour of the women whom they love’ (328). Imitating medieval courtly love and chivalric traditions, English writers such as Edmund Spenser and Sidney represent aristocratic male characters who displace their search for honour into the pursuit of noble women and express their feelings in idealized Neoplatonic and courtly terms. Astrophil, Sidney’s hero in the sonnet sequence ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ writes of ‘those skies /Which inward sun to heroic mind displays.’ Stella, the embodiment of goodness, overthrows ‘all vices’ ‘not by rude force, but sweetest soveraigntie / Of reason’ (Sonnet 71, lines 5–7). Her beauty draws minds to her and turns them to good: ‘Thy selfe, doest strive all minds that way to love, Who marke in thee what is in thee most fair; So while thy beautie drawes the heart to love, As fast thy vertue bends that love to good.’

(71, lines 10–13)48

And if desire responds, ‘Give me some food,’ that cry expresses the tension between love of body and love of soul that characterizes much Neoplatonism. The Arcadias boldly strive to synthesize the disparate ideals of Neoplatonic erotic love (which focuses on an idealized woman) and Protestant Neoplatonism (which ascends to God).49 Sidney follows the Huguenots in uniting a chivalric ideal and aspirations of serving God, formulating Pyrocles’ and Musidorus’s pursuit of inward honour in Neoplatonic terms similar to those one finds in Duplessis-Mornay’s De la vérité. These terms permit a contemplative ascent to God that was otherwise attacked by Protestants and by Roman Catholic humanists such as Guazzo for interfering with God’s commands to serve one’s neighbour through action. For my inquiry, Milton’s most salient use of Neoplatonic terms of emotion consists in Raphael’s widely cited account of the Almighty, ‘from whom /All things proceed, and up to him return, /If not deprav’d from good’ (PL V.469–71). Raphael’s description of the degrees of substance departs from standard Neoplatonism by not leaving materiality behind and by not promoting a dualism of body and soul. Scholars have noted

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that Raphael’s hierarchical system provides a cosmological warrant for Milton’s later, more conservative views with respect to the people and their need for education, reformation, and guidance by compulsion.50 But, additionally, Raphael’s explanation that he and Adam share rational freedom, ‘different in degree, but not in kind,’ enables what Barbara Lewalski calls the ‘dynamics of self-development’ in Paradise Lost, where even in Eden human beings have been given freedom to learn, change, and grow, perhaps even into angels.51 Neoplatonism, with its emphasis on aspiring to an ideal, enables Milton’s inquiry into the role and dangers of idealization in human love and in desires for upward mobility. Nevertheless, the desire for upward mobility comes into conflict with a Protestant emphasis on ‘overcoming evil’ ‘with good,’ ‘and by small /Accomplishing great things, by things deem’d weak /Subverting worldly strong’ (PL XII.565–8). By revising the terms of honour competition to focus on the glory of God, Paradise Lost redirects aspiration away from self-assertion for its own sake and towards the defence of truth. Likewise, the text construes social role in terms of Protestant ‘office,’ rather than pure Neoplatonic hierarchy.52 God calls each individual angel and human being to perform an office that has dignity and worth independent of how it may be interpreted by Satan and the fallen angels in terms of status.53 Milton (along with other Protestants) revises and accommodates classical and Renaissance topoi to meet seventeenth-century challenges as Sidney did with sixteenth-century issues. A study of the two writers gives one a keen sense of the historical specificity of rhetorical discourses as they are taken up and used distinctively in new circumstances. Central to my inquiry, Sidney and Milton also represent ways that multiple frameworks of emotion destabilize selves. Pyrocles, Musidorus, Philanax, and Basilius are caught between emotions associated with honour, service to the state, and love. Eve feels torn between her desire to win honour by standing alone and her duty to keep company with Adam. Counsellors try to ameliorate instability, but differences in frameworks interfere with persuasion.54 Philanax fares badly in his efforts to dissuade Basilius from his love for solitude, while Philoclea’s religious arguments against Pyrocles’ Stoic wish to perform a self-sacrificing suicide arouse his delight without persuading his action (OA 298.23–4), a sure sign in theories of religious rhetoric that vehement discourse has failed.55 Even when people feel compelled by reason, they are profoundly unhappy, and, in a sense, unpersuaded because they are unhappy. When reason (or, for Milton, orthodox doctrine) rules, as it does in Euarchus’s handling of the trial, it often fails to change the deeper attitudes, desires, and

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actions of others. No one is satisfied with Euarchus’s judgment that the young heroes and heroine are guilty. Kalodoulos and Kerxenus, illustrious men, are reduced to ‘roaring lamentations’ (412.11); Musidorus is enraged by Euarchus’s unkindness to Pyrocles; and Philanax’s heart ultimately feels pity for the condemned. Adam and Eve are similarly unmoved by rational arguments not to eat of the fruit (PL IX.776–9, 908– 10, 998–9). In resisting pressure, these characters articulate interior, if inchoate, feelings. But the assertion that Sidney and Milton represent interiority raises vexing questions. Katharine Eisaman Maus observes, ‘some new-historicist and cultural-materialist critics of early modern English literature have tended to deny or downplay the significance of a rhetoric of inwardness in early modern England.’56 And, in a famous article on new historicism, Jean E. Howard claims that scholars and critics now understand the self and even the body in the period as ‘the products of specific discourses and social processes.’57 Even emotions and instincts are studied insofar as they ‘are produced in a particular, historically specific social formation’ (21). As Maus astutely observes, the belief that there is no transhistorical self leads many to reject the possibility of inwardness in the period.58 But she demonstrates that conditions created by religious persecution produced a historically specific interiority (19–24). The self, even when capable of inwardness, ‘is not independent of or prior to its social context’ (28). My study argues that conditions produced by multiple, sometimes contradictory, emotional frameworks led to an interiority also not prior to its social context. Critics have recognized similar contrarieties. Richard Helgerson and Richard C. McCoy set an important new direction for Sidney scholarship when they articulated certain crucial tensions in his life and art. Helgerson, identifying the ‘prodigal poet,’ demonstrates a generational difference between the humanist and the courtier.59 McCoy links the contradictions in the social position of the courtier under Elizabeth with Sidney’s life and fiction.60 He shows that in the Old Arcadia the ‘battle between autonomy and submission is never resolved.’61 Scholars have not claimed that Milton is fundamentally ambivalent. But some argue strenuously that he is a humanist, others that he appropriates archaic heroic models, and still others that his approach is Protestant. For example, whereas John M. Steadman claims that Milton made Satan an archaic hero in order to indict ‘Homer and his imitators for investing their heroes with specious rather than substantial heroism,’62 John Peter Rumrich argues that Achilles is a ‘literary model for Milton’s

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own heroism.’63 Richard Strier and Joshua Scodel demonstrate that unlike Homer, who makes a person’s shame depend on the opinion of others (when, for example, Hector refuses to withdraw from battle lest the ‘Trojans “should think he did ignobly”’), Milton bases shame on selfesteem and proper pride.64 I argue that Milton rewrites kinds of rhetorical topoi to represent characters in incommensurable emotional frameworks. Eve is caught between Adam’s humanist advice to rely on company for protection and a discourse of honour that demands individual trial. Satan gives himself Protestant counsel, but remains embroiled in envy and malice, emotions fuelled by rivalry for honour. Multiple emotional frameworks along with the pressure created by counsel and an advisee’s resistance to it generate uncertain selves. Friendship enables persons to adjudicate between different emotional frameworks and social identities. But how do friends negotiate between frameworks? Classical and Protestant writers debate about how friends should treat those who deviate from social good. Cicero (whom Renaissance writers drew on for humanist ideals) insists that when someone turns away from the common good, his friend should use sharp speech to return him to it. Laurie Shannon demonstrates that this frankness of speech is the sign of a true friend in Cicero’s De amicitia, the model for ideal Renaissance friendship.65 The good friend tells the truth even when it causes pain. As Shannon emphasizes, Plutarch’s ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,’66 translated into English in 1603 as The philosophie commonlie called, the morals by Philemon Holland,67 argues that sharp speech differentiates the friend from the flatterer. Elyot claims that a flatterer ‘is alway pleasaunt and without sharpnes, inclinynge to inordinate favour and affection,’ thus betraying himself for what he is.68 But admonitions, which Montaigne calls ‘the chiefest offices of friendship,’69 assure that friends’ likeness to one another springs from their virtue. For this reason, when counsel does not return a person to that virtue, Cicero advises, his friend should break off the friendship. But he also cautions that speech must be used with reason and care (ratio et diligentia) and without harshness (acerbitate) or insult (contumelia) (De amicitia 24.89). The frank speech of the friend must be distinguished from the grand style appropriate to the courtroom. B.A. Krostenko comments, the ‘grand style create[s] and reinforce[s] the persona of an emotionally intense speaker (some terms for the grand style speaker are acer “fierce, sharp,” ardens, “fiery,” vehemens “energetic, forceful”).’70 Ferocity and forcefulness are useful qualities for orators who wish to attack criminal behaviour and moral turpitude.

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Sidney and Milton contrast the fiery speech of the courtroom, Parliament, or polemical debate with the speech of friends who speak frankly but carefully. Sidney reshapes angry language linked to contests for honour between equals to his hierarchical society where status was based on birth. His ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester’ expresses rage that someone whom he charges ‘hates England and the queen’ must hate ‘her councilor,’ the Earl of Leicester.71 The ‘Defence’ bases hatred on affiliations with the monarch, not on rivalry between equals. It compares the aristocratic nobility of various houses in England, giving great honour to Leicester’s house. Referring to how ‘noble and well known a man’ his uncle is and the ‘enmity’ (128.18) that makes the ‘base’ (128.7) ‘vomit [hate] out against the’ king’s counsellor, Sidney expresses his indignation at the undeserved credence he fears will be given to their ‘malice’ (133.17). His use of terms like ‘hate,’ ‘malice,’ and ‘base’ suggests the rivalry that creates fierce emotion.72 Milton’s excoriations of prelacy and tyranny also use vehement rhetoric to unleash emotions such as anger and indignation associated with competition for honour, but he challenges others on the basis of merit rather than birth. Far from moving beyond a concern with honour as one might assume bourgeois writers do, Milton (along with other Protestants) turns the agonistic structure of honour to new social, cultural, and political ends. He gives energy to invective by using it for epistemological and ethical purposes. At the same time, he defines a range of speeches, including mild ones, appropriate to different audiences. Friends, on the other hand, were supposed to use speech carefully, sometimes rejecting strong speech, which aims to change the other, in favour of gentle speech adapted to the afflicted. In order not to injure those who suffer, Catholic humanists and Protestant writers revise humanist strategies for negotiating emotion, drawing on Plutarch, who writes of the friend as a physician: ‘a chirurgian, [who] when he maketh [an] incision and cutteth the flesh of his patient, had need to use great dexteritie, to have a nimble hand and an even ... So [is] this libertie of speech unto a friend.’73 The counsellor-surgeon needs skill to adapt strong, frank speech to specific cases. The French Protestant and humanist Pierre de La Primaudaye, author of The French Academie (English translation 1586), and the Lutheran Jacobus Acontius, author of Darkness Discovered (English translation 1651), draw on Plutarch, but go further than he does to warn against caustic language when friends are suffering from misfortune or perturbations.74 They encourage advisers to use gentle speech. Gentle persuasive strategies are also articulated in the Protes-

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tant humanist Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), whose rhetoric subsumes medical lore under cures by persuasion and conversion, differentiating little between philosophy and religion.75 E. Patricia Vicari comments that ‘Burton advocates curing the patient with medicines and kindly treatment, as well as with admonishment and exhortation,’ pitying ‘“the imbecility of human nature”’ (8). I attend to this neglected vein in the history of persuasion, illuminating the gentle strand in rhetoric adapted to the perturbed. Physicians and friends use strong rhetoric and gentle speech judiciously to persuade others without injuring them.76 So Musidorus, Adam, Eve, and other friends in Sidney’s and Milton’s texts sometimes choose to abandon their better arguments, seeking a more whole-hearted response to and from their passionate friends. Sidney and Milton engage their characters in a prudential practice of evaluating ‘cases, timeliness, circumstances, and probabilities of efficacy,’ to overcome reason’s tendency to compel action without engaging a full assent of the heart.77 My book explores this practice of friendly persuasion along with the structure of friendship itself as it mediates between solitude and company in Renaissance treatises on the self, in rhetorical texts, and in the romance writings of Sidney and Milton. It argues that Sidney and Milton revised friends’ persuasive strategies in order to facilitate change in human identities. Both writers use friendship as the utopian site for dialogue that evaluates and sometimes redefines cultural norms. Sidney’s and Milton’s major literary works offer a searching literary imitatio of discourses of rhetoric, civility, and friendship. Both writers were deeply concerned about how to move the will and emotions towards good without forcing them, as the law and the ruler often do. Chapter 2 explores the inability of either humanist speech or Aristotelian topoi that cause emotions of anger and indignation to persuade people during the trial at the end of the Old Arcadia.78 The text also criticizes counsellors who impose humanist maxims on the troubled without attending like physicians to their emotions. But when Musidorus and other characters use gentle speech attentive to the emotions of others, they create a new model of friendship and discover new definitions of honour. Chapter 3 argues that Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry (1582–3) develops the model of poetry as a physician or counsellor that draws people towards good actions and away from bad ones without forcing them, while chapter 4 explores the New Arcadia’s treatment of friendship and gentle persuasion in the midst of faction and war generated by tyrants and flatterers who used deformed topoi of honour to stimulate

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malice and rage. These topoi become one-sided and open-ended because tyrants and flatterers lack friends who might offer alternative interpretations leading to different emotions. Tensions between frameworks of honour and humanism call for characters to develop dialogic capacities, drawing on the masculine and feminine, the commanding and obedient sides of their characters. Chapter 5 takes up Milton’s attempts in the early prose to use the discourse of honour to attack boldly what he took to be the one-sided, coercive rhetoric of his opponents. Milton writes extensively about how to lead audiences to genuine assent. A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659) rejects the use of ecclesiastical force to compel religious beliefs, because it interferes with freedom of conscience. Like A Defence, A Treatise emphasizes the power to induce rather than coerce: God does not ‘draw’ by external force, but only ‘by the inward perswasive motions of his spirit and by his ministers.’79 Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus (July 1641) praises ministers who, rather than forcing beliefs on others, change them ‘by infusing [God’s] spirit and likeness into’ them. This infusion lifts ‘out of darksome barrennesse a delicious, and fragrant spring of saving knowledge, and good workes’ (CPW I.721). Oratory, rightly used, revivifies. Chapter 5 explores Milton’s insistence in An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642) that writers use vehement and mild styles (along with many others) appropriate to different listeners (CPW I.662). Angry rhetoric focused on honour expresses a writer’s indignation at being treated unjustly, whereas mild speech addresses those who err because of human imperfection. Chapter 6 argues that Paradise Lost adapts rhetorical topoi of honour to represent Abdiel, God, and the Son as expressing indignation because their sense of honour and worth have been denigrated by Satan. But, in chapter 7, the figure of Satan as orator in Paradise Lost also exposes the dangers of Ciceronian moving speech, as the poem tests the inadequacies of humanist counsel. For just as Philanax cannot persuade Basilius to surrender his passion for solitude, Adam does not dissuade Eve from her desire to be alone. Moreover, Satan, like the tyrants and manipulators in the New Arcadia, insinuates one-sided topoi into Eve’s thinking, facilitating her fall. Counsel becomes dangerous when a listener such as Eve, baffled by conflicting emotions, seeks relief in solitude. Chapter 8 addresses the need for mutual counsel in marriage and friendship to heal metaphysical solitude. Like the Arcadias, Milton’s divorce pamphlets and Paradise Lost represent characters as binary: reason predominates in Adam and emotion along with imagination in Eve, but both share these faculties. By

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drawing on all faculties, each becomes capable of leading the other away from one-sided solitary emotion. Sixteenth-century humanist and Protestant psychologies80 (and to some extent their seventeenth-century counterparts) denounce solitude for engendering treason, heresy, and insanity. Anniball, the counsellor in The Civile Conversation, warns that in solitude ‘corrupt humours, covertly lurking, with more force consume, and destroy the faire pallace of your minde’ (1.18). Sidney’s and Milton’s literary works represent characters whose solitude allows them to follow one-sided topoi that lead to spiralling suspicion and hatred. The writers show how characters use rhetoric to move their own emotions. Philanax, for example, softening towards Gynecia, ‘feeling his heart more and more mollifying to her, renewed the image of his dead master in his fancy, and using that for the spurs of his revengeful choler, went suddenly without any more speech from the desolate lady’ (OA 305.32–5). By using an image to move his own anger, Philanax becomes a rhetorician to himself. Confronting Philanax’s anger, a friend would correct his preoccupation with his dead master. Lacking this correction, emotion proliferates in the solitary tyrants of the New Arcadia and Paradise Lost. Satan falls by creating a deformed rhetoric of honour-based emotion that imitates perversely the divine agon manifested in the behavior of God, the Son, and the angels. His overweening rhetoric operates at odds with his humanist emphasis on merit and self-sufficiency. Eve, caught between her conviction that she should not break God’s prohibition and her struggle to form a worthy, rational self, falls into delusive emotion, a self-suasion shaped by Satan’s rhetorical topoi.81 Expansive imagination and inner dialogue turn emotion inward. But solitude and inwardness are not necessarily demonic, for seventeenth-century writers envision a person who keeps company with himself. Solitude becomes sweet society. In dialogues and soliloquies aimed to persuade the emotions virtuously, a feeling self achieves full voice. Paradise Lost asserts the value of individualism, the need to interpret and choose for oneself. But it also explores attendant difficulties when characters experience conflicting values and emotions. The chapters that follow unfold the dimensions of this conflict and the selves that emerge in conversation about it. Seeking to understand emotion as it is shaped and experienced through words in the English Renaissance and Reformation, I was led to study disguise, friendship, faction, legal conflict, pamphlet wars and revolution, hospitality, and marriage, as these states impinge on or arise from emotional persuasion. In these settings, chapters 4 and 8 argue, issues of ‘otherness’ or

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‘difference’ challenge the powers of human conversation, in the Miltonic sense that includes intimacy and civil life along with discussion and discourse. Without conversation between friends, the worlds of the Arcadias and Paradise Lost fall into faction, revolution, and the violence of religious warfare.

2 Unyielding Judge or Gentle Physician? The Friend as Counsellor in Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation and Sidney’s Old Arcadia

Introduction Renaissance rhetoricians entertained powerful fantasies that eloquence could compel people to follow the laws, as Wayne A. Rebhorn has amply demonstrated.1 Anto Maria de’ Conti, a Milanese professor of rhetoric writing in the 1550s, claims that only the eloquent speaker ‘could have softened and changed the spirits of people so as to force them to obey his will.’2 The English humanist Thomas Wilson (1560) insists that the eloquent man must ‘perswade and move the affections of his hearers’ so that they shall be ‘forced to yeeld unto his saying,’ following Cicero and Augustine, who argue that, ‘To teach is a necessity, to please is a sweetness, to persuade is a victory.’3 However, victory may not be enough. When Musidorus, the hero of Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) (1579– 81), admonishes his friend Pyrocles for being in love, Pyrocles grants him the victory for his vehement arguments but pleads that he cannot change, because no one can be persuaded to leave aside his identity, no matter how flawed: ‘If you seek the victory, take it; and if you list, triumph. Have you all the reason of the world, and with me remain all the imperfections; yet such as I can no more lay from me than the crow can be persuaded by the swan to cast off his blackness.’4 In so pleading, Pyrocles invokes an alternative discourse to the forceful speech celebrated by classical, Christian, and Renaissance rhetoricians. This medical and psychological discourse appeals to a gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion in which speakers accommodate themselves to the imperfections of their friends, knowing that emotions cannot always be changed by vehement persuasion.

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This chapter analyses the tensions between frameworks of honour and humanism and between vehement and gentle speech in Renaissance writing on persuasion. I argue that despite all the praise of masculine selfrule in many texts, it must be seen that emotion and gentle persuasion play positive roles in humanist and Protestant thought and in Sidney’s understandings of friendship.5 Although humanists advise counsellors to use forceful correction when another’s self-control fails,6 they also advocate a milder approach to the afflicted that has been less studied. Stephano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation (1574) advocates accepting the differences of others.7 Guazzo’s text, as we shall see, greatly illuminates the Old Arcadia.8 Because scholars have focused on the power of the humanist adviser’s rhetoric to persuade subjects to the law and friends to virtue, the gentle strand has fallen into the background.9 But it has important consequences for our understanding of emotion, friendship, and identity in the English Renaissance. In the ideal classical and Renaissance formulations, as Laurie Shannon argues and chapter 1 of this book claims, friendship is founded upon virtue, and when a person errs seriously, his friend is advised to bring him back to virtue or to end the friendship.10 Musidorus follows this Ciceronian tradition when he threatens to leave Pyrocles. But Pyrocles calls on a different discourse when he claims that he cannot change his identity and asks Musidorus not to ‘abandon your friend in his greatest need’ (OA 24.32). According to this second tradition, one who cannot be persuaded may be suffering from diseased emotions, or he may be oscillating between the identities of aspiring warrior, humanist civil servant, and lover or writer. He may be unable to subscribe to only one social definition of virtue. So conflict ensues when Musidorus asserts, ‘the head gives you direction,’ and Pyrocles responds, ‘the heart gives me life’ (23.27–8). The self becomes a contested site, pressured by the adviser’s forceful rhetoric but defended by the advisee’s shaping of his or her own emotions. Counsellors have difficulty persuading others when their advisees use a different rhetoric of emotion. Frameworks of emotion pertinent to honour and to humanism provide a spectrum along which the Old Arcadia positions its characters. This spectrum extends from Timautus, ‘blinded with his own ambitious haste’ (354.22), whose name indicates an honour derived from the self, and whose ‘words expressed rather a violence of rancour than any just ground of accusation’ (352.31–2), to Euarchus, the model of impartial justice who is not blinded by ambition. The text dramatizes how Philanax (‘lover of his lord’) serves initially as

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an exemplary humanist counsellor, who begs the people to use judgment instead of ‘fore-judging passion’ in listening to his words (353.25). However, Philanax’s friendship for Basilius becomes so excessive ‘that he thought no age was timely for his death’ (360.5–6), a thought that drives him to ‘raving melancholy’ (360.2), and to ‘incontinently’ ‘thirst for ... blood’ (381.15–16). Having become more attached to the person of the king than to his office, Philanax responds to the king’s death with a desire to punish the ‘causers of his death and dishonour’ (384.30). In contrast to the claims of revenge or dispassionate judgment, the claims of compassion are represented by an important but overlooked group of characters, Kerxenus, Sympathus, and Kalodoulos, who respond affectively to the speeches of Pyrocles and Musidorus.11 They have ties of guest-friendship with the young men but do not relate to them as officers of the state. If Euarchus stands for rational judgment, these men represent affection and sympathy: ‘Kerxenus,’ meaning one whose heart is hospitable, and ‘Sympathus,’ meaning ‘one who commiserates.’ ‘As for Kerxenus and Sympathus, as in the one a virtuous friendship had made him seek to advance, in the other a natural commiseration had made him willing to protect, the two excellent (though unfortunate) prisoners’ (352.16–19). When these men hear Musidorus’s arguments that Pyrocles’ actions and his own were but ‘human error’ (402.31) they are moved to tears and hope that the princes may be saved, whereas Euarchus’s face shows no emotion; he pays attention only to ‘whither their reasons tended’ (403.10–12). The trial consists of a contest between the groups of characters and between the emotional and rhetorical systems upon which they draw. Part 1: ‘Dead pitiless laws’: Law, Emotion, and the Trial Competition between an allegiance to honour that produces pity or anger and Euarchus’s more dispassionate humanist love of corporate justice animates the trial scene of the Old Arcadia. Debora K. Shuger argues persuasively that the trial pits the heroism of the young lovers against the ‘dead pitiless laws’ praised by republican theorists (OA 304).12 But Shuger claims that Sidney celebrates the aristocrats’ magnaminity while attacking republicanism and impersonal law, whereas I argue that the text shows the limitations of aristocratic and humanist frameworks. Resolution requires a king, Basilius, who links fatherhood (the role pertinent to lineage and honour) with political authority (the humanist role of the just ruler) and whose faults have led him to recognize the need for

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mercy.13 During the trial, however, some characters display their concerns for honour through angry disdain, while they also respond emotionally to the humanist claims of justice. The angry disdain of the heroes and heroines shows their nobility and love of honour, but it also raises important questions concerning Renaissance attitudes towards emotion in the law court. The dangers of appeals to emotion in trials are examined by the Protestant John Rainolds, who wrote his Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (ca. 1570s) a short time before Sidney went to Oxford. Rainolds eventually endorses the importance of emotion to legal rhetoric, but first he raises the question of whether it is permissible to move the passions in court. He claims, ‘rousing the emotions clouds the mind and often turns a judicial inquiry into a contest, so that ... the powerful escape and the poor are oppressed.’14 According to Aristotle, in a contest people use the law courts to seek revenge as they pursue an honour that ‘stimulate[s] [them] to fight against each other’ (Politics 1302a39).15 Sidney draws on Rainolds’s comment and Aristotle’s analysis of the way competition for honour creates faction in representing how the conflict between Euarchus and his son and nephew during the trial threatens to lead to war.16 In Aristotle’s Politics, which Sidney read intensively, when a prospective father-in-law and official fines his would-be son-in-law, the son seeks revenge which produces civil strife (1304a15).17 Likewise, when Euarchus convicts Pyrocles and Musidorus, Musidorus has faith that the Thessalians will revenge the verdict with war: ‘I hope the Thessalians are not so degenerate from their ancestors but that they will revenge my injury and their loss upon thee’ (OA 412.26–8). The enmeshment of familial with legal relationships provides the matter for romance, as in Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian History (Elizabethan translation by Thomas Underdowne), a text that serves, along with other Greek romances, as an important source for Sidney’s Arcadia.18 (The last book depicts a father judging his son and his son’s beloved.) But we cannot understand the emotional conflicts that pressures to feel anger, revenge, love of justice, and hatred of vice produce in Sidney’s characters without a more detailed analysis of how rhetorical topoi pertinent to honour and humanism shape their emotions. Aristotle clarifies the connection between insult and anger by treating them and other causes of emotions in terms of three headings (Rhetoric 2.1, 1377b). He considers the dispositions of the persons who feel anger, the persons who make them angry, and the occasions that provoke anger. By interpreting these factors, a rhetorician may produce emotions of anger, fear, envy, emulation, shame, and pity. A speaker who wants to

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anger a person will refer to someone who (he claims) has insulted that person. His claim will appear more probable if the person is young and wealthy, for ‘the cause of the pleasure felt by those who insult is the idea that, in ill-treating others, they are more fully showing superiority. That is why the young and the wealthy are given to insults; for they think that, in committing them, they are showing their superiority. Dishonour is characteristic of insult.’19 Depending upon a person’s disposition (whether he or she is accustomed to receive respect, for example), how a person interprets the occasion of emotion, and who causes the emotion (i.e., whether he or she is young and wealthy), that person will feel more or less anger. The Old Arcadia employs Aristotle’s topoi of emotion to represent Pyrocles and Musidorus’s anger and their rhetoric in moving their audience’s emotion.20 Because people feel anger when they think they have been insulted, people who ‘ridicule, mock, and scoff’ can produce rage, as when Pyrocles ridicules Philanax.21 By insulting others, people demonstrate their superiority to them. The text uses the topoi of emotions pertinent to honour to represent the nobility of Pyrocles and Musidorus.22 Even though the text criticizes their uses of disguise and trickery to win Philoclea and Pamela, it exalts their natural nobility during the trial. For example, Pyrocles responds with appropriate rage when Philanax defames him with bitter reproaches, and the implied author notes, ‘it was well to be seen his heart was unused to bear such injuries’ (391.25–6). Pyrocles speaks with ‘despiteful scorn to the accuser’ (391.33–4). Scorn expresses Pyrocles’ sense of worth in the face of unjust insult, an effect similarly achieved in Milton’s early prose, as I argue in chapter 5. Musidorus’s noble spirit expresses itself in anger when he hears Philanax speak against Pyrocles: he ‘had looked round about him, to see whether by any means he might come to have caught him in his arms, and have killed him – so much had his disgracing words filled his breast with rage’ (400.24–6). Emotional expression also has implications for gendered identity and the moral worth of persons. It carries ethical weight because characters use topoi from different emotional frameworks freely, consciously choosing one emotional response over another. Philanax, for example, eschews ‘womanish complaints’ when his master apparently dies on the grounds that lamentation would indicate ‘love of myself’ rather than love of his prince (287.8, 9). Defending the values of the honour code and ‘carrying manful sorrow ... in his face,’ he argues that ‘true love must be proved in the honour of [Basilius’s] memory’; and ‘that must be

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showed with seeking just revenge upon your unjust and unnatural enemies’ (287.21, 10, 11–12). Anger and revenge, not lamentations, blood on the tomb and not tears, are the constituents and manifestations of his ‘manful sorrow.’ So reluctant is he to succumb to what he believes is the effeminacy of lamentation, and so fixated on the honour of the king, that his tears turn to a blind, incontinent ‘thirst for blood’ (381.17). In the trial, Pyrocles and Musidorus use the rhetoric of honour to move the emotions of the spectators to admiration and pity. Pyrocles takes as his first duty the defence of Philoclea’s chastity, the female sign of honour. A desire to avoid shame leads Pyrocles to his arguments advocating marriage, not punishment, as the prudent solution. Following Anniball’s counsel in The Civile Conversation to use gesture and action to move emotions, Pyrocles and Musidorus also use their physical presences to overcome the contempt of the onlookers (377.21–2).23 They display themselves in gorgeous clothing to persuade the audience of their status (394.11–13). These visible demonstrations are necessary because the people, though they feel compassion for Gynecia, a great lady who has come to sudden ruin, feel otherwise towards the princes. The princes are ‘hated’ as strangers, an emotion that could easily shade into ‘contempt,’ so Pyrocles and Musidorus come out gorgeously clothed with jewels to manifest their princely status (377.18, 20). Kerxenus, the host and friend of the princes, asserts, ‘heroical greatness shines in their eyes, such an extraordinary majesty in all their actions, as surely either fortune by parentage or nature in creation hath made them princes’ (325.29–31). The Old Arcadia juxtaposes the idea that honour is natural to princes with Euarchus’s argument that the status of the prince is conventional, depending upon a relation between a ruler and subject that is defined by law to highlight a conflict that cannot be resolved by the trial.24 As Debora K. Shuger has shown, Sidney uses Livy’s History of Rome to provide an ‘intertextual scaffolding’ for the conflict between a human monarch and impersonal law: ‘A king, they argued, was, after all, a human being, and there was a chance of getting from him what one wanted, rightly or wrongly; under a monarchy there was room for influence and favour; a king could be angry, and forgive; he knew the difference between an enemy and a friend. Law, on the other hand, was impersonal and inexorable. Law had no ears. An excellent thing, no doubt, for paupers, it was worse than useless for the great, as it admitted no relaxation or indulgence towards a man who ventured beyond the bounds of mediocrity.’25 Like Euarchus, Livy’s Brutus sentences to death

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the young men (including his sons) who make this argument and plot against the monarch, and he ‘watches the execution with a “father’s anguish.”’26 As Shuger and other critics observe, this scene resembles the conclusion of the trial, except that Basilius awakes.27 Like Livy, Sidney contrasts the impersonality of the law with the mercy of the king. The trial scene pits the emotional claims of lineage and honour against those of humanistic impersonal justice, while the text attempts to resolve the conflict between them. Pyrocles, after Philanax has defamed his person, tries to harmonize the two, signalling his respect for the representative of the law while he defends his honour and displays ‘as much modest humbleness to the judge as despiteful scorn to the accuser’ (391.33–4). He follows a pattern that Elyot traces in his story of King Henry V, who was known ‘to be fierce and of wanton courage,’ and who, being ‘incensed’ because his servant had been arrested, in a ‘furious rage came hastily to the barre.’ But when the chief justice told him he must follow the ancient laws of the realm, the prince was ‘abasshed’ and went to prison.28 Elyot celebrates a judge who was a ‘subjecte’ and yet did not fear ‘to execute justice on the eldest sonne of his soveraigne lord,’ a prince who, ‘in the midst of his fury,’ considered the evil example he set, the judge who showed ‘constance in justice,’ and a ‘noble king and wyse father’ who ‘rejoiced’ to see his son’s disobedience corrected by his subject (II.72). Pyrocles, like the son of the king, defers to the judge, but he also seeks to control the courtroom by reshaping its activity according to standards of honour. He defines justice in personal terms, locating authority in the sovereign rather than in impersonal law, reminding the assembly of the ‘natural duty’ that they ‘owe’ to the ‘princess Pamela,’ and asking, ‘will you now keep the right from your prince who is the only giver of judgement, the key of justice, and life of your laws’ (378.6–7, 13–15). Pyrocles refers to his own ‘love of justice,’ a phrase that sounds humanistic, but means he does not accept a wrong done to his honour or the honour of others, stressing his individualistic response to bad treatment. He represents himself, not Euarchus, as the custodian of justice (395.7, 12–13) and argues against the ‘bloody tears’ of Philanax, whom he says ‘weeps to procure death and not to lament death’ whereas he himself seeks to move Euarchus with ‘pity at a just cause of tears’ (395.9, 10, 9). Here Pyrocles utters another humanist phrase that discloses a violation of important social norms. He and Musidorus advocate a settlement that would turn the fault of the four young people to good. Whereas Philanax urges Euarchus to restore Philoclea’s honour by executing her lover, Pyrocles, Pyrocles argues that the ‘salve of her

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honour ... must be my marriage and not my death’ (394.31–395.1). The princes appeal to a consensus of the nobility as the grounds of judgment rather than to a written law. Musidorus argues that the search for love is a ‘human error’ that may be turned by Euarchus into a ‘profitable event’ (402.31–2). By verbally constructing an imaginary tribunal of the aristocracy who can work out the conflicts between the parties to their mutual satisfaction, Musidorus elides the force of the tribunal and its laws. The speech in which he does so produces an ‘astonished attention’ in the people, ‘a kindly compassion’ in the noble gentleman Sympathus, tears and hope in Kerxenus, but no ‘motions’ in the face of Euarchus at either speech; rather, ‘letting pass the flowers of rhetoric and only marking whither their reasons tended’ Euarchus impassively sentences the two men (403.4, 11–12). Thus, Musidorus’s attempt to engage the emotions of the judge by using a volatile emotional language associated with honour finally fails. Euarchus comes out strongly on the side of punishment and against ‘conveniency,’ ‘the quality of being personally convenient – commodity, personal comfort; saving of trouble’ (OED 5). In doing so, he engages in a complex play on the word: ‘For if the governors of justice shall take such a scope as to measure the foot of the law by a show of conveniency, and measure that conveniency not by the public society but by that which is fittest for them which offend, young men, strong men, and rich men shall ever find private conveniences how to palliate such committed disorders as to the public shall not only be inconvenient but pestilent’ (407.13–19). ‘Conveniency’ may refer to ‘fitness’ or ‘aptitude’ (OED 2), including the fitness within a law or between a law and some other law.29 But young rich men weigh ‘private conveniences’ (commodities) according to what suits their youth, strength, and wealth. This ‘private’ convenience will not only be highly ‘inconvenient’ (unfitting) to the public, but ‘pestilent.’ Euarchus refuses to judge as the father whom Musidorus enjoins him to be (without knowing that Euarchus is, in fact, Pyrocles’ father and Musidorus’s uncle), and he repudiates the efforts that Pyrocles and Musidorus make to harmonize the demands of honour with the demands of humanist judgment. Many modern readers admire Euarchus’s refusal to be swayed by Pyrocles and Musidorus’s appeals to honour. But Euarchus’s refusal to be moved by passionate arguments flies in the face of Renaissance writings on emotion. John Rainolds, agreeing that the ‘litigant should teach what is the case and what is not,’ also asks (to quote him at greater length), ‘who would teach this who did not also move the emotions.’ He asks

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whether Cicero could ‘have shown the innocence of Roscius, unless he procured goodwill by recalling piety, and compassion by recalling misery? We teach even when we move, as Agricola says in book 1, chapter 1.’30 If judgments in law are to convince, they must include normative statements that affect the judge as important and that therefore arouse his emotions. Rainolds continues with the caution that ‘emotions should not be aroused by clumsy spectacles, but by serious arguments’ (Oxford Lectures, 147). Even though Euarchus is not swayed by partiality towards the nobility or towards members of his own family, the law fails to win the assent of the participants in the trial. A closer look at Euarchus’s judgments demonstrates that his position is extreme when regarded in contemporary terms. He disregards Aristotle’s questions about the intentions of defendants and the importance of the norms they have violated.31 He also ignores Cicero’s questions for establishing a legal issue in De inventione. Cicero’s questions move beyond the issue of fact (he killed) to questions of the definition of the fact (was it murder?) to the qualitative issue (what was the moral importance of the act?).32 Euarchus, after imposing harsh, incorrect definitions, calling Basilius’s ‘death’ murder and Musidorus’s departure with Pamela ‘ravishment,’ refuses to consider mitigating circumstances such as the character and intentions of Gynecia and the young people.33 Even more striking, he gives such a strict definition to what he calls ‘right love,’ namely, that ‘it can never slide into any action that is not virtuous,’ that all instances of human love must necessarily be classified as ‘ill-governed passion’ (OA 407.4–5, 1). Euarchus leaves no room for human imperfection as a mitigating factor. The idealism of his statement, in the midst of his own ‘inward and outward desolation’ (411.23) with respect to his son and nephew, leads him to an extreme position: ‘never, never, let sacred rightfulness fall. It is immortal, and immortally ought to be preserved. If rightly I have judged, then rightly have I judged mine own children, unless the name of a child should have force to change the never-changing justice. No, no, Pyrocles and Musidorus, I prefer you much before my life, but I prefer justice as far before you ... Nay, I cannot in this case acknowledge you for mine; for never had I shepherd to my nephew, nor never had woman to my son’ (411.24–30, 32, 412.1). Although Euarchus’s sacrifice appears noble, we need only contrast the result of it with a story Thomas Wilson tells of Prince Seleuces to discover Euarchus’s rigidity. Prince Seleuces judged that his son, who had been taken in adultery, ‘should lose both his eyes, according to the lawe then made,’ but the city wished to remit the punishment, ‘for the honour of

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his father.’34 Like Euarchus, this father and judge refused to suspend the penalty. However, the father undergoes part of the punishment himself, causing one of his own eyes to be plucked out along with one of his son’s eyes. According to Wilson, ‘through equitie of the law, he used the due meane of chastisement, shewing himselfe by a wonderfull temperature, both a mercifull father, and a just law maker.’ Euarchus’s tears disclose the degree to which he suffers for his children, but they do not affect his actions. Unable to balance the appeal that family, nobility, and youth make to his pity with the need for impartial judgment, he fails to unite his role as a merciful father and a just judge. Instead, pity, ‘placability,’ and merciful equity belong to the rightful prince of Arcadia, Basilius. Philanax suggests as much when he tells the alleged conspirators that they destroyed mercy when they destroyed the king and that they may now ‘look for no other than that which dead pitiless laws may allot unto you’ (OA 304.25–6). Clemency belongs to those who exercise the power of revenge, and the full exercise of that power belongs to the monarch.35 Elyot calls mercy and ‘placabilitie’ (the ability to be calmed and to have one’s mind changed) the most ‘honorable’ virtues to be ‘desired in a prince or noble man’ (Boke Named the Governour, 72) and argues that experience and reason prove that one who lacks mercy has all other vertues ‘drowned’ (73). However, Euarchus, who is sovereign in his own commonwealth but not in Arcadia, does not possess the sovereign’s power to bestow mercy. As a result he comes into direct, painful, and irresolvable conflict with the claims of lineage, family, and honour. The conflict between justice and mercy can only be resolved by a monarch, who combines in his person princely honour and benevolent fatherhood with political authority.36 In this way, the denouement of The Old Arcadia makes a serious political comment about deep divisions within sixteenth-century English aristocratic culture, warning of the destructive consequences that ensue when there is no monarch to mediate between the affective claims of relations based on honour and the rational claims of judicial impartiality. The presence of the monarch ensures that familial relationships are healed: blood is not shed; marriages correct breaches of honour; the hospitality relationship between Kerxenus and Pyrocles is brought to fruition; and Sympathus, always the most grieved at Euarchus’s judgments, accompanies Euarchus to Macedon, where Euarchus ‘highly advanced him’ (417.9), thus bringing about a union of sympathy and judgment, which had been disjoined in the dialogue between Musidorus and Pyrocles at the beginning of the romance.37

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Before achieving this union, Basilius addresses the brokenness within himself, perceiving that the work of ‘highest providence’ has brought the outcome of the action to its current state and judging that his own fault ‘in all these matters ... had been the greatest’ (OA 416.18, 19–20). Even before he drank the drug, Basilius’s ‘own shame had found him culpable’ (278.6) and he knows that he has abandoned his responsibility as king and has injured his wife through his desire for Cleophila.38 Having acknowledged his fault, he addresses the injury he caused his wife, publicly desiring her pardon for his errors and reciprocating the generous mildness with which Gynecia treated him just before he drank the potion. His benevolent actions emerge from his conversation with Gynecia, in which she treats him with exemplary Protestant mildness and encourages him to right action. In so doing she enables him to move outside of the discourses of honour and of the humanist state to a Protestant acknowledgment of his own folly, an act of self-knowledge that paves the way for his reconciling the breaches that have occurred between himself and his daughters, as well as the divisions that have separated the magistracy from obligations of hospitality and friendship. Indeed, Basilius acts as an agent of providence as described by Sir Thomas Elyot: ‘Providence is wherby a man nat only foreseeth comoditie and incomoditie prosperitie and aduersitie but also consulteth & there with endeuoureth as well to repelle anoyaunce as to attaine and gette profite and aduantage.’ This providence ‘is grounded in prudence and foresight,’ but Elyot adds ‘that nat onely it is attributed to kinges and rulers but also to god creator of the worlde.’39 Basilius and, as Arthur F. Kinney shows, Sidney bring their work to an end like ‘the workemaister of all things’ who created his world for some end.40 Basilius, by knitting up the relationships that had been broken, unites the reason and emotion that had become bifurcated in the trial, fulfilling the words of the ‘Debate between Reason and Passion’ in the ‘Second Eclogue.’ That debate ‘does not end with the folly of reason’s triumph over passion, or the folly of passion’s domination of reason.’ Instead, reason and passion submit to ‘heav’nly rules’:41 Then let us both to heav’nly rules give place, Which passions kill, and reason do deface.

(OA 136.29–30)

When passion and reason give place to ‘heav’nly rules,’ the latter kill passion and ‘deface’ reason by uniting it to mercy.42 The union of mercy and reason brings the Old Arcadia to a new level. But the trial, previous to

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the reawakening of Basilius, has no power to persuade fully the hearts of the participants and the spectators towards mercy and justice. Only advisers who use both forceful speech and gentle strategies persuade their advisees within the private space of friendship. Part 2 of this chapter argues that by using a gentle approach, friends in the Old Arcadia achieve affective exchange and explore changing selves. Conversation between friends is challenging because they, like the participants in the trial, live in conflicting frameworks of emotion. Nevertheless, conversations go beyond the rigid contradictions of the trial to facilitate the articulation of new identities, new friendships, and new aspirations towards inward honour. Part 2: The Gentle Physician Gonzalo My lord Sebastian, The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness, And time to speak it in – you rub the sore When you should bring the plaster. Sebastian Very well. Antonio And most chirurgeonly! Shakespeare, The Tempest 2.1.4–9

In the protected site provided by friendship, Sidney’s characters use a gentle rhetoric articulated by Plutarch and rewritten by Protestant writers to engage with the afflicted. These afflicted constitute a distinct audience. Neither attaining the perfection desired by the elect, nor descending to the condition of the reprobate, the faithful who suffer from unruly passions benefit from persuasion.43 Augustine, whose rhetoric strongly influenced Reformation thought, helps us understand why. By means of persuasion the audience ‘loves what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, sorrows at what you maintain to be sorrowful ... and is moved ... not that they may know what is to be done, but that they may do what they already know should be done.’44 Calvin and Sidney reiterate the importance of doing what one knows should be done.45 Yet some persons cannot be brought to love good as their friends would wish, when they feel themselves unable to choose right because they are melancholy or lovesick. Plutarch and La Primaudaye warn that such persons may be injured by forceful rhetoric. Pyrocles follows in

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their steps when he reproaches Musidorus for his use of vehement humanist rhetoric because he, Pyrocles, cannot lay aside his imperfections: ‘But truly, you deal with me like a physician that, seeing his patient in a pestilent fever, should chide him instead of ministering help, and bid him be sick no more; or rather, like such a friend that, visiting his friend condemned to perpetual prison and loaden with grievous fetters, should will him to shake off his fetters, or he would leave him. I am sick and sick to the death ... if you list, leave him ... but remember ever to carry this with you: that you abandon your friend in his greatest need’ (OA 24.23–8, 30, 31–2). Instead of an adviser, Pyrocles wants a realistic physician. Pyrocles, drawing on the terms of treatises on melancholy and civility, constructs himself as imprisoned and ill. The friend no longer shares virtue but ministers to pain, much as Timothie Bright claims to minister to his friend by writing A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) and Anniball in Stephano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation serves William Guazzo, a figure of the author’s brother. But when Musidorus ministers to Pyrocles’ pain, he fails to rule Pyrocles’ emotions, and, instead is moved by them. By allowing his emotions to be moved, Musidorus risks becoming effeminate. Anthony Fletcher argues that early modern men feared effeminacy partly because they understood masculine and feminine genders as the extremes on a continuum.46 They believed that as persons move from one extreme towards the other, their sexual identities change. Extraordinary women with masculine attributes aroused men’s anxiety (and admiration), while men feared lest they slide into effeminacy.47 Part 2 of this chapter focuses on the Old Arcadia’s exploration of the tensions between manly vehemence and gentle speech’s respect for emotion. I argue that, despite Renaissance writers’ praise of masculine self-rule, emotion and gentle persuasion play positive roles in Renaissance/Reformation thought and, particularly, in Sidney’s understandings of conversation and friendship.48 Gentle speech is virtuous in the counsellor (when properly done), even though it can soften to feminine pity. It is well established that Renaissance humanists advise counsellors to use forceful correction when another’s self-control fails.49 What has been less noted and less studied is that handbooks on civility encourage counsellors to use gentle speech in attending to the troubled. Elias mentions the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam’s precept from De civilitate morum puerilium (1553) to ‘Tell him alone and say it kindly’ and his warning to ‘Be lenient toward the offenses of others. This is the chief virtue of civilitas’ (65).50 Plutarch cautions that a friend must not correct so strin-

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gently ‘that thereby he breake or undo the knot of friendship’ (92). This model was formulated in Plutarch’s ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,’ translated into English in 1603 in The philosophie commonlie called, the morals by Philemon Holland and developed in The Civile Conversation and in the French Protestant humanist Pierre de la Primaudaye’s The French Academie (1586). Plutarch’s essay offers practical strategies for negotiating resistance to persuasion that springs from misfortune, diseased passions, or changing identities. These strategies protect the emotionally troubled from being injured by rebuke, for the rebuking person does not cure the infirmity or mitigate the pain, but ‘doth exasperate a wounded heart’ (The philosophie, 109). Advisers should correct their friends as they would themselves. Horace’s Satire III went even further, arguing that a friend should be blind to the faults of his friend.51 This stress on human fallibility appealed to Protestant advice-givers, though they were not prepared to accept defects completely. La Primaudaye reminded his readers that there is ‘alwaies some imperfection mingled with’ our friendship and that ‘we must gently support and beare with all wants and discommodities of our friends.’52 In The Civile Conversation, diversity and human limitations produce tension in the discourse of the physician and friend. On the one hand, diversity implies pathology, so the physician explains ‘deviant’ emotions as diseases or effeminacies and uses precepts and examples to heal them. On the other hand, the advisee’s difference compensates for the bias of the physician, who, as human, tends to experience one-sided attitudes and emotions. An angry warrior can be calmed by a mild humanist counsellor, and the mild inspirited by the angry. In the absence of company, necessarily imbalanced emotions exert their harmful sway over the person, and melancholy, arrogance, or mistrust of the self ensues. Then, Anniball in The Civile Conversation recommends that William cure his melancholy by expanding his society beyond the court to include a variety of people who will balance his one-sidedness. As Daniel Javitch points out, this remedy for melancholy and idleness is ‘not founded on hope in the possibilities of institutions, such as the court, but in the possibility of the individual self’ in the whole of society.53 Friendship occupies an intimate, affective space within this whole, adjudicating between society and the solitary individual. It invokes the sense of ‘civil conversation’ from Guazzo’s dialogue in a social world ‘separable from the world of civic responsibility and larger than the sphere of the household.’54 The Civile Conversation may have been particularly attractive to Sidney because the interlocutor, William Guazzo, has returned home from war,

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having served as a humanistically trained courtier to a prince. William’s experiences at court have soured him on society, and he withdraws from it to seek pleasure in solitude.55 Frustrated by his inability to realize the humanist goal of the active life in a court that does not respect learning or eloquence, William stubbornly resists the advice of his physician and friend Anniball to return to society.56 Although The Civile Conversation strongly defends the ideals of the active life, it defends even more strongly a conversation that moves beyond the court to civil life in general, including people who exhibit changing, varied, and imperfect identities that become articulated as they defend their points of view in dialogue. Javitch argues persuasively that Guazzo’s concept of civil conversation appealed to Elizabethans’ qualified anticourtly feeling in the 1580s, at a time when the Elizabethan court aspired to actualize the ideology of the perfect courtier represented by Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) and exemplified for many contemporaries in Sir Philip Sidney himself.57 Rather than attacking abuses at court directly, The Civile Conversation broadens its criticism to social behaviour more generally. And, instead of attempting to change the court, Anniball focuses his advice on the individual, encouraging William to believe in the possibility of upward social mobility by means of virtue, while advising him to seek the company of equals rather than cultivate superiors. As in The Book of the Courtier, this company includes women, whose conversation ennobles the men who seek their society, and friendship becomes a model not only for same-sex intercourse but also for opposite-sex interchanges. William Guazzo and Anniball converse about solitude and women’s virtue, and Anniball formulates a notion of heavenly love in Books 4 and 5. The Civile Conversation, when understood in light of Protestant texts, suggests that friendship becomes a site for articulating identities not wholly founded on the social roles of warlike knight and humanist ruler. By redefining Ciceronian models of friendship, Guazzo and Protestant writers create an experimental space for enunciating emotion and identity.58 Laurie Shannon shows that the concepts of likeness and identity serve a definitional function for Cicero.59 ‘Cicero’s speaker, Laelius, declares “the most complete agreement in wills, in pursuits, and in opinions” to be “the whole essence of friendship”’ (‘“Sovereign Amity,”’ 41). This agreement must be founded in masculine virtue.60 Chapter 1 (above) comments that when one friend wavers in virtue, the other must use honest, bold speech to urge him back (‘“Sovereign Amity,”’ 47–50). Guazzo, however, has Anniball qualify the idea of virtue as the pertinent likeness

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defining friends, urging William to accept imperfect persons as friends, for there is no person without some ‘fault or imperfection either greater or lesser’ than we find in ourselves (The Civile Conversation, I.104). Likeness, the cornerstone of friendship, arises from shared human incapacity in relation to virtue. Following Plutarch, La Primaudaye advises readers to care for the vulnerable friend: ‘if one behold his friend in some great affliction ... a friend well advised ought then to be beware that he use no sharpe or biting wordes, which are apt to provoke him to anger, that is pressed with adversity’ (The French Academie, 62; The philosophie, 109–10). If the case involves some shameful passion, one must use strong speech but keep the reprehension between ‘two private walls, that is, secretly when the door is shut,’ because to discover sin or vice is ‘shameful’ (63).61 But we should show compassion and ‘gently support and beare with all wants and discommodities of our friend, and oftentimes frame our selves to many passions, so they be not directly contrary to virtue, but such as proceede from the imbecillitie and frailtie of nature common with us’ (The French Academie, 59). The description of potentially subversive passions as proceeding from ‘frailtie’ allows these passions to be verbalized and healed. This emphasis on accepting imperfection has important consequences for humanist friendship theory. The Civile Conversation goes beyond Plutarch in arguing that, if the passions are too diseased, friends may need to limit their use of sharp speech.62 Anniball advises that when you perceive ‘your selfe to prevaile nothing by reasoning with your friende, and that there is doubt of some disorder, you ought rather to bowe than to breake, feeding his humour’ (The Civile Conversation, I.93). Cicero, on the other hand, while acknowledging the need for some latitude when friends would pursue less than perfectly honourable goals, following Aristotle, insists upon the need to break off a friendship if the friend does not act virtuously (Nicomachean Ethics 8.13, 1163a, De amicitia 12.42). Guazzo argues that friends should preserve their friendship by accepting all but the most egregious flaws. Instead of breaking off the relationship, the friend as physician interprets emotions as symptoms of illness. Anniball offers a medical explanation that reveals the illusory character of these feelings. He insists that pleasure in studying is acquired by habit, not nature, and that solitude produces ‘ill humors’ that distort one’s sense of pleasure (I.18), even though William claims that he enjoys the ‘libertie,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘comfort’ that his ‘solitude’ produces (I.17).63 Anniball discounts William’s feelings by arguing that pleasure in solitude

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is ‘counterfeite,’ and that only one response can be ‘true’ (I.19).64 Anniball’s belief in a single standard allows him to dismiss images and feelings that he terms ‘frantike fansies’ (I.20). He argues that passions, especially melancholy ones, distort feelings of pleasure, much as pregnancy alters the food preferences of a woman, leading her to desire what is not naturally good (I.19). Emotions exert an influence on sense, producing patterns of interpretation that pull perceptions into their sphere of influence, predisposing persons to judge things in a particular way.65 Instead of entertaining the possibility that objects may be responded to emotionally in a variety of ways, writers on the passions reiterate the idea that some emotions are private and diseased.66 Anniball, for example, explains that William’s attraction to solitude moves him to retreat from company, but ‘divers men ... by living long time in solitarinesse, have falne into such vehement and frantike fansies, that they have given occasion to bee laughed at, and pitied’ (I.20). The humours produced by solitude distort a person’s apprehension of objects, creating feelings of fear. Unchecked by corrective discourse, these monstrous fictions grow into terrifying proportions. Then the sick person needs to leave the house (I.117), to frequent ‘the companie of others,’ and to examine his misperceptions (I.115). But in true humanist fashion, Anniball also allows room for solitary leisure. Persons may withdraw their minds from ‘waightie and earnest cogitations, by the example of the invincible Hercules, who for recreation sake used sometimes to play with his litle children,’ for, ‘our life is like to instruments of musike, whiche sometime wresting up the stringes, and sometime by loosing them, become more melodious’ (I.244). Anniball balances the dangers of solitary diseased passion with the need for occasional private recreation to refresh the mind. Sidney heightens the contradictions between the ideas of solitude as regenerative and solitude as dangerous in his representation of Pyrocles as Hercules at play. Musidorus’s attacks on Pyrocles’ solitude reprise Anniball’s and William’s dialogue in The Civile Conversation. But Musidorus adopts the role of physician less consistently than Anniball does. Instead, the Old Arcadia dramatizes the tensions and ironies produced by the conflict between the desire to use frank speech to control emotion and the need for a gentler approach. Early moderns worried that if men did not rule their emotions, they would become soft and feminine.67 Love for a woman was believed to produce an especially dangerous kind of effeminacy.68 Following this line of thinking, Musidorus charges that Pyrocles’ infatuation threatens to ‘womanize’ him (20.20). Here the Old

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Arcadia explores the contradictions that arise when Musidorus attempts to use manly rhetoric to overcome his friend’s ‘effeminate love of a woman’ (20.19). Musidorus shifts back and forth between gentle and vehement speech, caught between his affectionate desire to befriend Pyrocles and the duty of the ideal friend to chastise him. Pyrocles, the Herculean figure of Sidney’s romance, claims the virtues of solitude for leisure and contemplation but seems instead to ‘wallowe continually in pleasures and delightes’ (The Civile Conversation, 1.245). When Pyrocles praises solitude for unbending the mind, the text construes his desire as dubious; later, for example, Basilius echoes Anniball’s words that ‘a man being by himselfe is often tempted to commit many evils’ (1.46) when he warns Cleophila against the ‘suspicion’ that may be excited by his loneliness and the ‘melancholy’ that he may experience (35.14, 15). In The Civile Conversation, persons who walk alone and talk to themselves are warned that they talk with a ‘naughtie fellow.’69 Rejecting the warning from Basilius, Cleophila responds, ‘They are never alone ... that are accompanied with noble thoughts’ (35.10–11). This longing for solitude and contemplation is rooted in Sidney’s own preferences, as Neil L. Rudenstine demonstrates.70 In 1578 Hubert Languet expressed his worries in a letter to Sidney that ‘the sweetness of your lengthened retirements may somewhat relax the vigorous energy with which you used to rise to noble undertakings.71 In 1574 Sidney had warned that the ‘age in which we live ... resembles a bow too long bent, it must be unstrung or it will break’ (The Correspondence, 36), drawing on the image from The Civile Conversation (1.93). But Languet worried lest Sidney slacken. The Old Arcadia makes fiction of Languet’s advice, and Pyrocles uses Guazzo and Sidney’s metaphor of the bent bow: ‘The mind itself must, like other things, sometimes be unbent, or else it will be either weakened or broken’ (14.27–8).72 Pyrocles defends solitude and leisure from Musidorus’s humanist arguments. Even though Musidorus’s strong words ‘pierce poor Pyrocles’ (OA 14.8), Pyrocles does not change.73 Instead, ‘his blushing cheeks did witness with him he rather could not help, than did not know, his fault’ (14.9–10). Like William, and like Protestant interlocutors who know their faults but are powerless against them, Pyrocles cannot be altered by forcible persuasion. Instead he endeavours ‘to bring his friend to a gentler consideration of him’ (14.10–11). Musidorus restrains his vehemence temporarily, becoming more patient and observant. He notes with ‘loving attention’ (15.36) the ‘shaking unstaidness’ of Pyrocles’ body, his ‘great determination mixed with fear,’ and his ‘sighs’ (16.3–4, 5, 7). Musi-

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dorus’s sensitivity contrasts with his initial abruptness and assertiveness. He abandons his own speech ‘in the praise of honourable action’ (16.14) and joins with Pyrocles’ humour (16.24–5). He mitigates his counsel as La Primaudaye suggests. But his gesture is controversial in the manly framework of Plutarchan counsel, for the flatterer, not the friend, frames and applies ‘his actions wholly to the humor of another’ (The philosophie, 88). A flatterer increases the ‘sorrow and griefe’ of others, ‘with moaning them and lamenting with them for companie’ (100). Musidorus risks acting as a flatterer rather than as a physician or friend. Plutarch uses the metaphors of the physician and the musician to teach friends how to negotiate between sharpness and gentleness. On the one hand, a man must not go so far in displeasing his comrade that ‘thereby he breake or undo the knot of friendship.’ He ought to use ‘sharpe rebuke,’ but only ‘as a Physician doth some bitter or tart medicine, to save or preserve the life of his patient.’ He limits himself to what accomplishes good for his friend. On the other hand, he plays ‘the part of a musician’ by setting up ‘some strings’ and letting down others to ‘exchange profit with pleasure’ (The philosophie, 92). La Primaudaye reiterates these ideas, insisting that ‘a prudent friend yeeldeth unto some things, but refuseth and contrarieth others, changing his mind as honestie and profit require’ (The French Academie, 62). Plutarch also insists that whereas flatterers are always pleasant, and ‘play upon the same string,’ namely pleasing and following the humour of another, the friend ‘ought to exchange profit with pleasure, and use one with another, as occasion serveth’ (The philosophie, 92). Musidorus’s action in joining with Pyrocles’ humour is ambiguous at first. Does he become a flatterer, applying his actions wholly to the humour of another, or a physician who adjusts his medicine to the humour of the patient? On the one hand, he keeps his own beliefs and arguments to himself and shares Pyrocles’ feelings, joining ‘therein with him because he found him in that humour utter most store of passion’ (OA 16.24–6). His ‘kindly’ embrace expresses affection, not severe judgment (16.26). On the other hand, Musidorus does not surrender his own views as a flatterer might. He retains his belief that ‘such kind of contemplation is but a glorious title to idleness’ (16.14–15), even though he does not verbalize it. Instead he tries to diagnose Pyrocles’ condition, framing ‘his answer nearest to that humour which should soonest put out the secret’ (16.11–12). He wants to discover what is bothering Pyrocles, at the same time that he is honest about his reservations when he comments, ‘I marvel at the excessive praises you give to this desert’ (16.33–4).74 And,

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although Musidorus confesses himself to be moved by Pyrocles’ eloquent words to ‘yield [himself] up unto’ solitariness (16.28 and 29), he wittily defines his separateness from Pyrocles by deciding that it ‘is more pleasant to enjoy the company of him that can speak such words than by such words to be persuaded to follow solitariness’ (16.30–1). Company, so central for Guazzo and Plutarch, allows for interchange without a surrender of the listener’s emotions to the friend. And, by keeping company with him, Musidorus relieves Pyrocles’ potentially dangerous solitude. Musidorus’s gentleness is short-lived and gives way quickly to stringent words when he discovers that Pyrocles is in love and wishes to dress as an Amazon. His sudden shift to sharp speech smacks less of Plutarch’s musician than of someone experiencing severe conflicts between the manly effort to remonstrate and an affectionate attempt to understand his friend. His advice overstates, even parodies, Renaissance views about masculine control of emotion. He calls Pyrocles an ‘Amazon Cleophila that hath counterfeited the face of my friend’ (18.34–5), one whose mind is ‘blemished’ (19.2). He argues that love does not just rebel against reason but ‘utterly subverts the course of nature in making reason give place to sense, and man to woman’ (20.11–12). He voices the patriarchal fear that ‘effeminate love of a woman doth ... womanize a man’ (20.19–20) but increases its misogyny by stating that it will make Pyrocles a ‘launder, a distaff-spinner, or whatsoever other vile occupation [women’s] idle heads can imagine’ (20.21–2). Sidney also exaggerates the rigour of Musidorus’s humanism by making him declare that reason does not just rule emotion, but commands absolutely (19.14). Blair Worden points out that Musidorus has got his Aristotle half wrong here.75 Aristotle states that reason rules the emotions with a constitutional and not a despotic rule, and constitutional rule operates through persuasion not force.76 Thus, Musidorus’s later stricture that to say ‘I cannot is childish, and I will not womanish’ (19.20– 1), while exemplifying the fear of being effeminized and infantilized, also grants more coercive power to reason than Aristotle admits. Musidorus makes reason a despot rather than a monarch. Sidney alters Musidorus’s rendering of maxims in order to criticize his rigid patriarchal rhetoric.77 Though Musidorus may sound Peripatetic in defending anger as the ‘cradle of courage’ (19.33) and attacking love as ‘the basest and fruitlessest of all passions’ (19.32), Cicero argues that the Peripatetics defend lust (libido) on the grounds that ‘lust (libidinem) and delight (laetitiam) ... originate in what is good.’78 Libido makes virtue possible, so Musidorus’s attack goes too far.

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The effects of Musidorus’s stringent rhetoric on Pyrocles are devastating. His ‘words, spoken vehemently and proceeding from so dearly an esteemed friend as Musidorus, did so pierce poor Pyrocles that his blushing cheeks did witness with him he rather could not help, than did not know his fault’ (14.8–10). He grants his ‘imperfections’ (14.19), as Guazzo advises and Protestants demand, but he also challenges Musidorus’s claims that love for women effeminizes men, protesting that men, through ‘tyrannous ambition,’ bring women’s ‘virtuous patience under them’ (21.14–15). He protests against the tyrannical ‘masterhood’ that does ‘injury to them who ... are framed of nature with the same parts of the mind for the exercise of virtue as we are’ (21.16–18), criticizing Musidorus’s overstated defence of manly rule. When Musidorus argues that ‘the head [should] give you direction,’ Pyrocles answers, ‘the heart gives me life’ (23.27, 28), resisting Musidorus’s efforts to civilize him. Sidney represents Pyrocles as vigorously asserting his beliefs rather than passively assenting to advice, correcting the usual humanist picture of counsel. Even in defending his ideas, however, Pyrocles insists on his inability to fulfil the virtuous ideal of love, claiming that Musidorus’s criticisms should be directed at Pyrocles, not at love. Like Basilius, who paves the way for reconciliation at the end of the romance ‘most conscious that his own fault had been greatest’ (416.19–20), Pyrocles answers Musidorus’s criticisms by saying that he himself (Pyrocles) is a ‘good witness of mine own imperfections, and therefore will not defend myself’ (22.13–14). Pyrocles’ acceptance of his imperfection and his desire for more ‘of pity than pleading’ (15.34) differentiates him from the ideal friends who, upon listening to the reasoning of their friends, return to their virtuous selves. Pyrocles solicits pity, asking, in effect, that Musidorus use the gentle approach to advice giving (15.34). Musidorus’s ‘more than accustomed vehemency’ in his third speech (23.30–1) and the threat to break off the friendship deeply ‘wound his [Pyrocles’] soul’ (24.15). Sidney heightens Pyrocles’ language about his emotionality and pain, just as he intensifies the stringency of Musidorus’s advice earlier. Musidorus’s rigid, controlling rhetoric penetrates the very sensitive Pyrocles. Pyrocles’ ‘deep wound ... being rubbed afresh with this new unkindness’ begins to ‘bleed again,’ ‘gushing out abundance of tears and crossing his arms over his woeful heart, he sank down to the ground’ (24.33–7).79 When Musidorus becomes kind, ‘this kindness made Pyrocles the more melt in his former unkindness’ (25.8–9). But the narrator does not reject the emotion as excessive; rather, it is a ‘true passion’ of ‘unkindness’ that is ‘never aright

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but betwixt them that most dearly love’ (25.14–16). The affectivity of the friendship demonstrates its depth. Yet the text also parodies commonplaces of friendship discourse. Having asserted that he cannot lay aside his erotic love or his imperfections, Pyrocles reproaches Musidorus for his inappropriate rhetoric. Pyrocles says that Musidorus is like a physician who scolds a patient for having a ‘pestilent fever’ instead of healing him. ‘I am ... sick to the death ... Now if you list, leave him that loves you in the highest degree; but remember ... that you abandon your friend in his greatest need’ (24.23–5, 28–9, 30–2). Although Pyrocles constructs himself as ill in the terms of treatises on emotion, the phrase ‘sick to the death’ lightly ironizes the self-pity of one who is lovesick. Because of his affliction, his wounds, and his illness, Pyrocles wants Musidorus to function as a helpful physician, not as a counsellor. Musidorus’s attempt to follow Cicero’s advice and to end the friendship when he discovers the besottedness of his friend provokes in Pyrocles the response that ‘you ... shake off me ... being, for my unperfectness, unworthy of your friendship’ (25.19–20). Pyrocles implicitly charges Musidorus with failing to accept a friend with all his faults even though the friend retains some virtue.80 Ultimately, Pyrocles’ emotional collapse makes Musidorus repent, reversing the Ciceronian model according to which Pyrocles should have repented (25.15ff.). They reconcile, and their conversation leads to ‘flowers of new-begun friendship’ (26.7), planted upon new ground, namely, that Musidorus should ‘look upon my imperfections with more affection than judgement’ (26.3–4).81 Musidorus puts his friendship above the value of commitment to virtuous action, a choice that would be utterly self-contradictory in Ciceronian terms. Pyrocles then becomes Cleophila, and Musidorus, admiring Cleophila’s beauty, promises her that ‘if I were not fully resolved never to submit my heart to these fancies, I were like enough while I dressed you to become a young Pygmalion’ (27.30–2).82 He doubts that Philoclea has ‘a greater portion of beauty’ (28.2), implying that s/he has been gloriously effeminized. Though he sorrows over the infection of Cleophila’s mind, knowing love is ‘so deeply grounded that striving against it did rather anger than heal the wound, and rather calls his friendship in question than give place to any friendly counsel, he was content to yield to the force of the present stream, with hope afterwards ... to prevail better with him’ (28.17–21). All too soon, Musidorus experiences the truth of the saying that people who seek to reform others would do better to find out their own faults (42ff.).83 He becomes subject to the same passion that animates

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Cleophila, who smiles ‘remembering how vehemently he had cried out against the folly of lovers’ (42.12–13). Musidorus becomes able to ‘deliver out his inward griefs’ to the compassion of Pyrocles (42.37). They exhibit the resonant sympathy described by Vives and ‘easily fall to compassion of them who taste of like misery.’ Their complaints ‘seem to touch the right tune of their own woes’ (43.2–3, 5–6).84 Their common suffering in the utmost change fortune can produce – the change in Pyrocles’ sex and Musidorus’s estate – offers further grounds for a friendship that the two seal with kisses as they promise ‘to continue partakers of all either good or evil fortune’ (43.16–17). The idealized model of noble friendship as independent of fortune becomes redefined as companionship in vulnerability to fortune. A solitude that could have become pernicious provides a setting for evaluating purposes, healing wounds, and experiencing the humility that comedy brings. Friendship turns solitude into sweet society. Musidorus and Pyrocles (like Basilius and Gynecia, Philoclea and Pamela, and Pyrocles and Philoclea) keep company and use conversation, as Philippe Duplessis-Mornay advises, to know themselves.85 Self-knowledge requires that they correct for the influence of innate self-love (The philosophie, 83, 84). For the implied author of the Arcadia cautions, ‘In such a mould are we cast that, with the too much love we bear ourselves being first, our own flatterers, we are easily hooked with others’ flattery’ (206.28–30).86 People’s fondness for their own ways of seeing things requires that they be corrected in conversation. They need to examine their own conduct in light of the opinions of others to find their own faults (see The Civile Conversation, 1.115). Their self-knowledge is unlike the self-confidence of the virtuous humanist who, in Calvin’s metaphors taken from the warrior discourse, ‘with overweening confidence in his own intelligence and integrity ... takes courage, and spurs himself on to virtuous deeds, and when, declaring war upon vice, he uses his utmost endeavour to attain to the honourable and the fair’ (Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 2.1.3). Sidney subjects humanism to Protestant irony and critique.87 Excessive self-confidence blinds people to the difference between themselves and the ideal of virtue: ignorant of their own inadequacies, they harshly criticize the flaws of others. Early in the Old Arcadia, Guazzo’s idea that true self-knowledge arises from practice and conversation informs Musidorus’s advice to Pyrocles that he must eschew solitude because the mind best comes to know its own ‘good or evil by practice; which knowledge was the only way to increase the one and correct the other’ (16. 20–1). The narrator’s witty

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idea that love bestows experience (along with education by means of failure) suggests Sidney’s playful revision of the humanist ideal of practice serving to refine knowledge gained from study.88 The Civile Conversation adds the idea that people need to test their judgments in conversation (33–5). In Sidney, the young lovers subject their theories about love and honour to the judgments of one another. The solitude of Arcadia, detached as it is from public and courtly functions, creates a distinct space for a friendship that interrogates cultural commonplaces and affirms alternative identities. Pyrocles and Musidorus invert the expectation that the counsellor will move the emotions of his advisee when Pyrocles unexpectedly ‘finds himself transported with a little vehemency’ (22.1). Confident of the truth of his arguments in favour of woman’s virtue, he argues forcefully that though he himself cannot fulfil the conditions of heavenly love, that love is worthy (22.5ff.). Anniball’s argument that persuasion should come from the heart suggests why Pyrocles must be moved to be persuasive:89 ‘And it can not be that you shoulde bee sorowfull for my mishap, if while I recount it unto you, you perceive not me to be sorowfull. Neither can I possibly wring the teares from your eyes, unlesse I first wipe them from mine owne. To be short, one thing can not give to an other that which it selfe hath not’ (The Civile Conversation, 1.131). Pyrocles, not Musidorus, produces the most heart-felt speech, as the oration ‘stirs the speaker himself’ (in Cicero’s words) ‘even more deeply than any of his hearers’ (De oratore 2.191). Friends affect one another. In assuming the sympathetic attitude of a listener and by offering a spontaneous response to Pyrocles’ feelings instead of listing commonplace arguments to control them, Musidorus hits on exactly the word ‘lover’ that pierces no less ‘than the right tune of music toucheth him that is sick of the tarantula’ (17.10–11). This image recalls Cesare Gonzaga’s description of music’s power to elicit and heal hidden folly in The Book of the Courtier : ‘They say that in Apulia many musical instruments are used for those who are bitten by the tarantula, and various tunes are tried until the humor which is causing the malady is (through a certain affinity which it has with some one of those tunes) suddenly stirred by the sound of it and so agitates the sick man that he is restored to health by that agitation.’90 Gonzaga tells this anecdote in the context of a discussion of how one person is sensitive to one thing and another to a different thing, so that people perceive the errors of others but not their own.91 Musidorus, then, in discovering the flaw of his friend, may disclose his own shortcomings. Yet, both texts make conver-

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sation a corrective to one-sided perceptions. In this way, human diversity both enables and requires conversation, the distinctive activity of human beings. When Musidorus’s words move Pyrocles, and Musidorus has compassion for the other’s ‘manlike tears’ (25.9), and when he apologizes for speeches that may have been ‘over-vehement’ (25.3), Musidorus demonstrates his love for his friend. Their conversation shows the need for accommodating oneself to others. Musidorus accepts Pyrocles’ love and his dual nature as an Amazon, though he does not condone them. The two princes exhibit the flexibility of Sidney’s distinctions with regard to estate and gender. As Constance Jordan argues with regard to the composite Arcadia, the distinctions within the psyche between masculine/ feminine, reason/passion, and ruler/ruled allow characters to act flexibly, drawing on each side of their natures as needed.92 I would add that people who have reconciled with their opposites (whether of gender or status) become capable of conversations that overcome the one-sidedness of solitary life. Because the Arcadia analogizes friendship, marriage, and the psyche to the polity, reconciliation with the different sides of the self and with friends strengthens the unity of the polity.93 Persons who rule themselves are capable of ruling others. But the Old Arcadia also defends the plurality of positions and arguments; dialogue and deliberation are indispensable. What emerges from Pyrocles and Musidorus’s passionate negotiations is not agreement in virtue but articulations of the emotional depth of the men’s convictions on two sides of the question. One defends the power of female virtue to inspire men to honour; the other argues for the destructive effect of men’s love for women. Passionate negotiations redefine their ideas of virtue and the structure of their friendship. How do these ideas of virtue change? Pyrocles expresses his aristocratic fantasy that he may seek virtue by pursuing honourable love with a lady, but the text qualifies that fantasy by poking fun at the follies that he commits. Nevertheless, the fantasy of (courtly) love as a pursuit of honour survives debate and comic deflation. By debating about honourable and dishonourable actions, friends and lovers refine ideals associated with vehemence and mildness, emotion and social identity. The conversations between characters in Books 4 and 5 explore the possibilities of different kinds of honour as characters strive to heal one another. They develop new ways of conversing related to their new understandings of honour. Conversations redefine the social identities of the participants as the Old Arcadia works to soften the rigid differentiations between warrior and

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humanist social identities. Sidney also represents his characters as changing the model of same-sex friendship to include opposite-sex friends. Pyrocles and Musidorus’s earlier interchanges create conflict about honour but fail to resolve it. Pyrocles finds his ‘greatest honour’ in counterfeiting the ‘estate’ of an Amazon (21.19). He ‘inwardly honour[s]’ women (21.30) and attributes to love ‘the honour of the highest power of the mind’ (22.6–7). But Musidorus cautions him lest he take ‘the very first down step to all wickedness’ (19.27). Later conversations propose an odd syncretism between the Neoplatonic framework of erotic love and a Stoic and Protestant concept of inward honour.94 By rendering this inward honour in erotic terms, Sidney seeks to deflect the contest for honour from the battlefield to the bedchamber. His inflection of honour and love expresses tensions in the history of honour. On the one hand, honour retains some of its ancient associations with autonomy, self-assertiveness, and prowess in battle, where virtue is rewarded with wealth and reputation.95 On the other hand, by the late sixteenth century, opportunities for self-assertion have diminished and the virtues of a gentleman have become redefined in important ways. First, a narrower code of honour emerged than the one that harmonized with humanist virtue. This narrower code was closely linked to courage, and it distinguished gentlemen from other men when ‘distinctions of dress, ways of living, armorial bearings, even occupation’ were collapsing in the face of increasing social mobility.96 Second, men and women sought a more internally defined honour, often with religious connotations, taking as a point of departure the belief expressed by such writers as Erasmus and Sir Thomas Elyot that God, not the monarch and not even lineage, authorizes honour.97 Whereas ordinary honour depends upon the opinion of equals, so that ‘a gentleman’s honour ... was the essence of his reputation in the eyes of his social equals, providing him with his sense of worth and his claim to pride in his own community,’ intrinsic honour depends upon self and God.98 As Joshua Scodel has shown, Renaissance writers draw on Neostoicism for an honour that depends on self-respect and a person’s autonomous sense of worth. They attend to Epictetus’s claim that ‘the wise few feel proper self-respect’ and have no ‘ignoble thoughts about themselves’ (Discourses 1.3).99 Epictetus argues that whoever is persuaded that we all originate in God ‘would never think of himself meanly or ignobly’ (1.3). Likewise those who believe they are made for faith and honour ‘will never think meanly or ignobly concerning themselves’ (1.3). By ascribing the source of honour to the self or to a divine being rather than to social equals, such persons

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envision an honour that survives public shame. The Old Arcadia achieves a bold synthesis between inward honour and (courtly) love. Sidney links Pyrocles and Musidorus’s sense of inward honour and self-respect to their erotic desires. The different social definitions of honour affect the way emotions are experienced and verbalized in a text. If, as we have seen, the idea of honour as prowess dominates human behaviour, then emotions such as anger at slights and pleasure in revenge dominate psychological life.100 Shame tends to be focused on public disclosures of cowardly actions, particularly before those one admires, including one’s rivals. When honour and virtue are understood in humanistic terms, virtue extends beyond prowess to include justice, learning, prudence in counsel, moderation of the passions, and benevolence. Love of kindred, love of country, and love of humankind result from love of good understood in these terms. Whereas honour won from competition depends on public opinion, Stoic humanist and Protestant honour is anchored in the self or in God. Sidney represents his heroes and heroines in terms of Stoic ideals of constancy in adversity, linking honour based on courage with inward honour. He draws on Cicero’s De officiis, which praises a magnanimity that despises (despicientia ponitur) external circumstances and holds as slight (contemnere) things that others believe are great (1.66, 67). But Sidney still links feelings of spite to lineage and rule. Pamela feels ‘spite’ because she sees herself ‘as she thought, rebelliously detained’ (NA 370.5–6), and her ‘knowledge of herself, and what was due unto her, made her heart full of a stronger disdain against her adversity’ (370.2– 4). Description of the young heroes also mixes metaphors of rule with Stoic virtue, when they ‘did so endure as they did rather appear governors of necessity than servants to fortune’ (370.25–6). The love of inward honour inspires heroic action in the face of error and public disapproval. Because this love is grounded in self-knowledge and contemplation, its failure to be realized through action cannot destroy it. When Musidorus and Pyrocles find themselves in prison, they appeal to inward honour as an ultimate value. They can do so because, as Bright argues, the body may affect the spirits and so ‘minister discontentment ... to the mind’ only in those activities that use the body as its instrument.101 Bright preserves the inviolability of the soul as a comfort in the face of the frustrations the soul encounters when it needs to use the body. Duplessis-Mornay also offers the immortality of the soul as a consolation for the fact that good people are grievously afflicted and often slain by wicked, seditious, and tyrannical persons.102 When Pyrocles and

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Musidorus face death, they turn away from the union of body and soul. They argue that ‘eternity is not to be had in this conjunction’ (371.27) and affirm that ‘our souls (which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies) have achieved the causes of their hither coming’ (371.22–4). Having transferred the focus of honour from ‘the kennel’ of this embodied life to the gods, Musidorus finds no loss in his physical death, since, in his words, ‘the love of you [Pyrocles] doth overbalance all bodily mischiefs’ (371.33–5). Pyrocles’ concept of inward honour depends upon the authority of a transcendent being, as he calls the ‘gods to witness, [that] I am so far from that repentance for loving that no shame, no torment, no death, would make me forgo the least part of the inward honour, essential pleasure, and living life I have enjoyed in the presence of the faultless Philoclea’ (372.9–12).103 Musidorus rejects the authority of public shame over his emotions and locates honour in the idealized figure of Pamela, much as Pyrocles had named Philoclea Jove’s ‘perfectest workmanship’ and human kind’s ‘chiefest honour’ (292.16, 17). But Pyrocles and Musidorus do not arrive at the love of inward honour easily. They, along with other characters, need to converse to adjudicate between the contradictory claims of different sorts of honour. Many of these conversations occur between persons whose unequal relationships with respect to gender and estate create obstacles to honest speech, which presupposes parity. Pamela, as heiress to the throne, controls the relationship between herself and Dorus. Philoclea, younger and more innocent than Pamela, exhibits greater modesty and reluctance to speak authoritatively. Sidney frames both heterosexual relationships in the terms of friendship writings, challenging misogynist discourses according to which women were believed incapable of friendship. Friendship writings celebrate manly virtue,104 and conversation presupposes independence and freedom of speech, but many Renaissance writers praised women for their modesty, submissiveness, and silence.105 According to Michel de Montaigne (1580), women’s minds are ‘not strong enough to endure the pulling of a knot so hard, so fast, so durable’ as friendship requires.106 Female weakness undermines the self-sufficient virtue that makes friendship possible. Marriage writings also make gender a factor in organizing marriage as a relation of domination and subordination.107 The centrality of obedience and silence to woman’s virtue challenges the possibility of true friendship between men and women. Nevertheless, marriage tracts praise friendship between the spouses while also emphasizing female submission to the husband.108 Following The Courtier, The Civile Conversation, and Petrarch’s Secretum,

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the Old Arcadia idealizes feminine powers of civilizing conversation and friendship.109 Indeed, Anniball argues that each partner needs to bear his just part of the burden of honour, even though the wife follows the head ‘as the shadowe doth the body’ (The Civile Conversation, 2.25). He also enjoins the husband to respect his wife’s care for her own honour. Honour as chastity comprises abstinence as only one of its Renaissance meanings insofar as chaste women possess, as Shannon puts it, a ‘kind of liberty,’ a ‘self-sufficiency, autonomy, and constancy’ like the Ciceronian friend; autonomy precedes engagement.110 Honour, like chastity, indicates the ‘self-possessed integrity’ and strength analogous to manly virtue, most notably in Spenser’s Britomart, the chaste warrior and heroine of marriage.111 Honour as chastity excludes the weakness and slavery to passion believed to be characteristic of women and tyrants. It goes beyond temperance by indicating self-sufficiency. Anniball’s reference to honour (chastity) includes meanings appropriate to self-command: when the wife has responsibility for her honour, she is ‘carefull and jealous’ of it, ‘as of that whiche is her owne’ (2.24).112 However, the wife who sees her husband appropriate the role of master over her honour ceases to exert her own agency to defend it. Thus, the husband ought not to be suspicious and guard his wife. Basilius commits a similar error when he hires Dametas to guard his daughters. The Arcadia supports Anniball’s advice, for Basilius’s claustration of his daughters stimulates Pyrocles and Musidorus to court them in disguise, and their entrance into the family circle tempts Gynecia to adultery. In the New Arcadia, Philanax advises Basilius to give ‘thir minds virtuous delights, and not grieving them for want of well-ruled liberty. Now to fall to a sudden straitening them, what can it do but argue suspicion, a thing no more unpleasant than unsure for the preserving of virtue? Leave women’s minds, the most untamed that way of any. See whether any cage can please a bird, or whether a dog grow not fiercer with tying.’113 Pamela feels great ‘disdain’ at being guarded by the ‘lout,’ Dametas, but she obeys her father (83.28, 29). The Old Arcadia portrays women as strong and weak, capable of plain speech and silently modest. Gynecia possesses more princely virtues than her husband Basilius but becomes enslaved to her passion for Pyrocles. Pamela shows heroic Stoic ‘disdain’ against ‘adversity’ (370.4), but falls to her knees and pleads for Musidorus’s life with tears when they are captured by a mob (310.2ff.). A modest, silent, almost childlike woman, Philoclea gives Pyrocles humanist advice, as I will show. Innocence takes the place of masculine integrity in her character, so that she becomes

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capable of friendship and honest speech. Because the virtue of integrity conflicts with the ideal of subordination of women and persons of low estate, Sidney’s opposite-sex friends and those from different estates adopt practices in conversation that negotiate contradictions. The women mitigate the troubles of the men by using vehement humanist arguments, but they are also moved by passions expressing their own vulnerability. However, the women’s susceptibility to such passions does not rob them of the courage to speak plainly. Musidorus shifts from one system of honour to another in order to counsel Pamela. Emotions play an important role in conversations that explore different senses of honour. Gynecia exhibits emotions pertinent to the strength and weakness of her character when she deliberates about the relevance of conflicting types of honour to her actions. Her flaws manifest themselves when, moved with the ‘spiteful doubt ... [that] Cleophila had abused her’ (275.27–8), she finds herself drawn to violent revenge until she reflects that ‘her own honour might be ... interessed’ by her action (275.32–3). This fear of losing her honour (in its public sense) motivates her to bring the Duke to ‘a perfect good opinion of her’ (276.1). In spite of her self-interested motives, however, her conversation with Basilius dissolves her desire for revenge; when Basilius stammers his defence, she fastens ‘up the last stitch of her anger’ (277.8) and uses her independence as a friend and wife to advise Basilius: ‘govern yourself as you may be fit rather to direct me ... and rather be a wise master of me than an unskilful pleader before me’ (277.10–12). She briefly steps into the master position in order to make him master: ‘For well I know that by your good estate my life is maintained. For my part, therefore, I claim nothing but that which may be safest for yourself; my life, will, honour, and whatsoever else, shall be but a shadow of that body’ (278.1–5). Gynecia, reversing Anniball’s statement that married persons share a single, equal honour, freely subordinates not just herself but her honour to be a ‘shadow of that body.’ Yet she retains her integrity, for she subordinates herself with the understanding that Basilius will pursue virtue. If he were to deviate from virtue, she would use speech to bring him back to the right path. With a sense of her own shortcomings, she remonstrates with Basilius mildly for the ‘very untimely ... fires’ within him and makes peace, saying ‘let us not plant anew those weeds which by nature’s course are content to fade’ (277.20– 3). Guilty of the very same faults herself, she joins him in exhibiting mercy. By claiming to care only for ‘that which may be safest for yourself,’ she ‘captive[s] his heart unto her, which otherwise perchance would have grown to a desperate carelessness’ (278.8–10).

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Basilius’s emotional response to Gynecia’s words and gentle attitude paves the way for the reconciliation he initiates at the end of the romance. Because ‘his own shame had found him culpable,’ Basilius is touched by Gynecia’s ‘mildness’ (278.6, 8). He vows henceforth to be faithful, thanking ‘the destinies that had wrought her honour out of his shame’ (278.14–15). In this way, conversation between the spouses heals breaches between them, between the parents and the children, the commonwealth and the young people, and those who sympathize and those who judge. Gynecia and Basilius are able to work out their differences and their emotions in dialogue. Each relieves the anger or shame of the other, Basilius by being humble and Gynecia by being merciful and acknowledging her need to follow reason. Earlier in the romance, however, Gynecia’s deep sense of shame nearly leads to her suicide because her isolation prevents conversation. Her shame helps us to understand the dangers of solitude. Gynecia’s conscience becomes tyrannical (366.28). Combining the true knowledge that murder is wrong with her passionate despair over her adulterous wishes, Gynecia makes an erroneous judgment. She ‘was brought ... by the despairing conceit she took of the judgement of God in her husband’s death and her own fortune, purposely to overthrow herself, and confirm by a wrong confession that ... shame which, with her wisdom, joined to the truth, perhaps she might have refelled’ (384.18–22). Gynecia creates her emotion of shame by the Calvinist rhetoric that shapes her view of her situation.114 Calvin internalizes legal judgment as ‘conscience,’ that is as a ‘sense of the divine justice that ‘drags [men] forward as culprits to the bar of God’ (Institutes 3.19.15). Once man compares his own power with’ the requirements of the Law,’ he sees that ‘he teems with innumerable vices’ (Institutes 2.7.6). Gynecia sees herself condemned in this total sense: not that she has simply acted wrongly but that she herself is odious. However, friends have power to mitigate the ravages of a conscience that tears at the inward self. Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie illuminates Gynecia’s plight. He writes so that his friend may leave aside self-punishment and examine his deeds more fairly.115 Bright avers that the lack of a friend to offer counterarguments to a persons’ doleful and terrorstricken imaginings allows melancholic humours to do their worst. Gynecia lacks such a friend and her shame produces selfhatred as she in her own mind rejects the counter-arguments that a friend might have used to console her: ‘For whither should I recommend the protection of my dishonoured fall? ... To men, who are always cruel in their neighbours’ faults ... ? To the heavens? O unspeakable tor-

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ment of conscience which dare not look unto them; no sin can enter there’ (279.30–1, 33–6). Gynecia’s perfectionism remains untreated by honest, compassionate speech of a friend, so that her misery drives her into tyrannous oppression of herself. Inward shame, then, is not an unmixed blessing. However, Stoic and Protestant self-respect sustains Pamela under the pressure of tyrannical treatment from her father’s former counsellor. But the legitimacy of inward honour can mask an attachment to public honour. Pyrocles and Philoclea debate the ambiguity between the two when he wishes to commit suicide. He argues Stoically that he wishes to die contentedly, at his own hand, rather than wretchedly at the hand of the commonwealth. He would die ‘rather with a clear and joyful conscience than with desperate condemnation in myself that I, accursed villain, should be the means of banishing from the sight of men the true example of virtue [namely Philoclea]’ (295.32–5). Philoclea interrogates the moral ambiguities of Pyrocles’ claim, challenging Pyrocles with the frank speech of a friend. She suggests that Pyrocles’ desire to kill himself results from ‘disguised passion’ (298.22).116 But Sidney qualifies her advice, emphasizing the tensions between the parity that strong speech assumes and the hierarchy that defines a man’s relationship to a woman. Sidney avoids contradictions between the two by having Philoclea invoke paternal authority: ‘And truly, my Pyrocles, I have heard my father and other wise men say that the killing oneself is but a false colour of true courage, proceeding rather of fear of a further evil, either of torment or shame ... This being an utter banishment of hope, it seems to receive his ground in fear’ (294.24–6, 29–30). However, as she warms to her speech and rejects humanist ideals of self-mastery, she argues in Christian language and shifts to her own voice, saying ‘that we should be master of ourselves we can show at all no title, nor claim; since neither we made ourselves, nor bought ourselves’ (297.34–298.1). She bids him to ‘think honours or shames (which stand in other men’s true or false judgements) ... to be nothing in regard of an unspotted conscience’ (298.17–18, 19–20). Pyrocles claims to have rejected his concern for external honour, asking ‘how can I be ashamed of that for which my well meaning conscience will answer for me to God, and your unresistible beauty to the world?’ (296.12–14). Following Epictetus, who argues that one who thinks of God as his father ‘never would think of himself meanly or ignobly’ Pyrocles invokes God as the authority for his honour. But he defends his avoidance of shame on the grounds that some kinds of suffering show a lack of courage and that, ‘if honour be to be held dear, his contrary is to

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be abhorred; and that not for fear, but of a true election’ (297.6–7). Since, in his view, he chooses to feel hatred of dishonour, he does not experience the passion of fear. Pamela and Musidorus confront another set of contradictions in their conversation about honour. Musidorus grieves that his attempt to bring Pamela into greater public honour by taking her to Thessalia, which ‘should have yielded unto you ... that honour’ (311.3, 2), has instead led to ‘treason’ (311.6) and to their capture by a mob. He finds himself mired in contradiction, for ‘the honour I bear you is the field wherein your dishonour is like to be sown’ when the public discovers that they have run away together. Like Pyrocles, he calls on ‘that universal and only wisdom’ as a source of honour that goes beyond reputation, but he feels miserable because he is ‘“barred from giving you counsel. For how should I open my mouth to counsel you in that wherein, by my counsel, you are most undeservedly fallen?”’ (311.15–16). He bears a double burden. Not only has the outcome of his choice changed him from a loyal subject to a treasonous one, but he has also lost the authority of a friend. Pamela becomes his counsellor, reversing their relationship by making him the source of her honour. She does so by redefining the meaning and grounds of honour. First, she prepares herself to be a worthy counsellor by ‘[treading] down all other motions with the true force of virtue’ (311.20–1), that is, she refuses to succumb to her sorrows. Instead, either love or noble compassion for the afflicted moves her to ‘descend in most favour to one when he is lowest in affliction’ (311.24–5). By joining him, she obviates their inequality. She then appeals to a Stoic and erotic integrity as a new basis for their honour. The appeal is Stoic because she argues that ‘a man is bound no further to himself than to do wisely, the chance is only to trouble them that stand upon chance’ (311.27–9). She celebrates virtue at the expense of outcomes. Then she asserts the integrity of her own love and Musidorus’s virtue: ‘it is yourself I love, which can no more be diminished by these showrs of ill hap than flowers are marred with the timely rains of April’ (311.34–312.2). ‘Unblemished virtue,’ not success or external reputation, provides ‘honour’ (312.3). Finally, she fully restores Musidorus to sovereignty by asking ‘how can I want honour as long as Musidorus (in whom indeed honour is) doth honour me? Fools’ opinions I will not reckon as dishonour’ (312.3–6). When Pamela recognizes Musidorus’s honour, they become equal in virtue, whatever fools might say. He has the power to honour her, though he retains for himself a language of grace, hoping to ‘deserve’ the ‘grace’ she has shown him, and

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recommitting himself to serve her (312.11, 12). Both move from conventional ideas of seeking public honour to the more powerful idea of giving honour. Nevertheless, in order to protect Pamela’s public honour, Musidorus resolves to reveal his true status (although not his full identity) as Palladius. Musidorus and Pamela, the older, more sovereign characters, find ways to serve one another just as Pyrocles and Philoclea, the younger more vulnerable characters, find ways to assert themselves. By pairing the lovers, Sidney explores relations of inequality in his culture. Like Musidorus, Pyrocles maintains his public sense of honour based on valour, along with his inward virtue, and he attempts suicide to avoid Philoclea’s public dishonour. His allegiance to public honour endures to the end of the romance. Evidently, inward honour does not quite satisfy the princely insistence that status be recognized publicly. Yet Guazzo’s strictures also endure as a check to aristocratic self-sufficiency and selfassertiveness. Only those who keep company, allowing their passions and fantasies to be expressed, adjudicated, and corrected, avoid the terrors and hatreds created by the monstrous fictions of solitary imagination. Sidney himself submits the pages of the Old Arcadia to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, from a fear that his head, ‘having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster’ (3.19–20). His words appeal to a discourse of humors in which a humor ‘counterfetteth terrible objectes to the fantasie and ... causeth it ... to forge monstrous fictions.’117 According to Anniball, the only antidote for ‘wild extravagant Fancies’ that may become ‘the Objects both of Pity and Laughter’ lies in conversation and company (Civile Conversation, I.9). Sidney chose to submit his solitary fancies to the judgment and conversation of his lady, sister, and friend, asking that she read it in her ‘idle times,’ and ‘blame not, but laugh at ... the follies’ her ‘good judgment will find in it’ (3.27–8). He affirms to her as Musidorus affirms to Pyrocles that he makes her ‘desire ... an absolute commandment’ (3.9, 10). He cautions her to keep his work to herself ‘or to such friends who will weigh error in the balance of goodwill,’ treating it as an object of private conversation, rather than of public statement. So, perhaps, his romance became the occasion of a civil conversation able to humanize and to delight himself and his dear friend, while later suggesting to us one important function of coterie writing at the end of the sixteenth century in England.

3 Poetry as Orator and Physician in Sidney’s Defence

Introduction: Powers and Dangers of Moving Emotions While revealed truth concurs with the general consent of mankind in teaching that the second part of wisdom consists in self-knowledge, they differ greatly as to the method by which this knowledge is to be acquired. In the judgment of the flesh man deems his self-knowledge complete, when, with overweening confidence in his own intelligence and integrity, he takes courage, and spurs himself on to virtuous deeds, and when, declaring war upon vice, he uses his utmost endeavour to attain to the honourable and the fair. But he who tries himself by the standard of divine justice, finds nothing to inspire him with confidence; and hence, the more thorough his self-examination, the greater his despondency.1 Except for those who went into exile, the nobility continued to move within a world where honor, loyalty, and chivalry were the cardinal virtues. The Calvinist shaping of the aristocratic conscience was never a completed process, precisely because the deepest feelings of the vast majority of aristocrats were never sufficiently emancipated from the feudal and patriarchal world.2 Amor sui ‘is the first and strongest basic motive ruling the nature of man (primus affectus and summus naturae hominis); it overpowers him, and for its sake he seeks and desires only that which seems to his nature good, pleasant, sweet, and glorious; he hates and fears whatever appears hostile to him; he avoids whatever opposes or whatever dictates to him; he does not pursue and seek what is not pleasing to him.3

If the Old Arcadia explores the tensions between manly vehemence and gentle counsel, endeavouring to balance sympathy and judgment, A

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Defence of Poetry strives to authorize a poetry that moves people to act well. ‘Right’ poetry does not coerce the will; it draws audiences towards truth and right action, cultivating their delight in learning and arousing ardour in the heart. Like the physician and counsellor, it produces shame at folly and heals diseased emotions. In doing so, it uses rhetoric’s power to move emotions and encounters the danger that it may injure rather than curing the patient. Renaissance rhetoricians engaged in ‘a fantasy of power’ that enthroned the orator as ‘an emperour of men’s minds.’4 As Wayne A. Rebhorn demonstrates, they celebrated the poet-orators as the ‘first legislators ... and the first polititiens.’5 George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) identifies the poet with the ‘mythical Orpheus and Amphion’ who tamed wild beasts and brought ‘rude and savage people to a more civill and orderly life’ (Emperor of Men’s Minds, 23). Rhetoric was celebrated as a political art offering the means to ‘dominate others through their emotions’ (Emperor of Men’s Minds, 34). Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry (1582–3), a source for Puttenham, defends poetry on the same grounds, namely that ‘Amphion was said to move stones ... to build Thebes, and Orpheus to be listened to by beasts.’6 Yet, as many critics have argued, Sidney’s attempt to make poetry the monarch over emotion encounters obstacles.7 Asserting that people may both use and abuse poetry, Sidney acknowledges that poetry, ‘by the reason of his sweet charming force, it can do more hurt than any other army of words’ (104.26–7). His comment situates the text in the centre of an intense classical, humanist, and Protestant dispute about whether the emotions are trustworthy guides to action. On the one hand, images too often move people to excessive emotion. On the other, the will and limbs may be moved while the heart and emotions refuse to assent. Patristic and Protestant rhetoric informs Sidney’s argument that passionate poetry can heal the resulting paralysis. Emotion heals when it involves the whole self. Education of the mind alone cannot achieve this goal. By analysing classical and Renaissance distrust of images and extreme emotions, I intend to show how the Defence becomes a healing counsellor and physician to sick poets. Writers’ fears of emotion focus initially on their use in law courts. Aristotle first rejected appeals to emotion in the courts, making a comment repeatedly cited in sixteenth-century rhetorical texts and books of counsel, that ‘it is wrong to warp the [judge’s] feelings, to arouse him to anger, jealousy, or compassion, which would be like making the rule crooked which one intended to use.’8 Emotion projects a pattern of interpretation that inclines people to attend to some facts rather than

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others and leads to bias. He illuminates how rivalry for honour in the law court makes it easy to sway others (Rhetoric 2.1–17). If orators can make the judges angry at a perceived insult or show that a defendant is at enmity with a plaintiff, they can influence the outcome of the trial unfairly. Quintilian takes a different approach and recommends moving the judges’ emotions to distract them from the ‘contemplation of the truth.’9 Protestant writers on rhetoric are troubled by the clash of arguments. John Rainolds (1570s) lists arguments against appeals to emotions to discover arguments in favour of moving them.10 He articulates a cornerstone of Renaissance belief when he claims, ‘emotion (affectus), therefore, is a natural commotion of the soul (animi commotio), imparted by God for following good and fleeing evil’ (Oxford Lectures, 143, 142). But he acknowledges that persons may err about what is good and what evil. The Defence intervenes in this long controversy. This chapter examines arguments that images arouse excess emotion in order to show how the Defence takes steps to remedy error. Despite the dangers, the text ultimately finds the raison d’être of poetry and the cure for sickness in passion. Nor does the poet or the writer of A Defence need to be perfect. Far from fashioning himself as a ruler who possesses the absolute power of eloquence, Sidney dramatizes himself as subject to self-love, with a will that distorts his judgment concerning his ‘unelected vocation’ (73.31). As Margaret Ferguson has argued so well, the ‘gilding’ that makes ‘that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties’ threatens to undermine the text (73.25–6).11 In acknowledging this defect, I argue, the Defence defines a poetry that can be used to move the ‘infected will’ and to teach the ‘erected wit.’ It argues that inspiring poetry persuades men to martial valour (given a humanist, ethical cast) and that curative poetry pains the heart and makes it draw back in shame. Comedy, satire, and tragedy work like physicians to heal the audience’s emotional disease. The Old Arcadia provides evidence that such poetry is necessary. During the trial neither law nor reason moves persons to good; advisers also fail to persuade. Only with difficulty, using the gentle strategies advocated by Plutarch, Guazzo, and La Primaudaye, do friends negotiate the passions of the angry or sorrowful. Nor does the Arcadia offer a public means for persuading people to be virtuous. Images that move people produce sudden anger and debilitating sorrow more often than they lead to good. Sidney’s Defence also casts doubt on the power of poetry to benefit mankind. As Ferguson astutely observes, his Defence is defensive. If it is not true to say that ‘poetry abuseth man’s wit,’ ‘man’s wit’ does

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abuse poetry (104.12–13). Sidney compares poetry to a sword with which ‘thou mayst kill thy father,’ and with which ‘thou mayst defend thy prince and country’ (105.3, 4). Poetry also works like a physician, and the English poet, including Sidney, needs a physician (119.11–12). But how do poets heal and not kill? The Defence stages a series of finely grained arguments to answer this question. The Defence’s consciousness of its own defects takes up a theme that had already been introduced in the Old Arcadia. If we take the date of the Defence to be 1582–3, after Sidney had written the Old Arcadia but before he revised it, then the Defence comes between two rather different treatments of the dangers and limitations of rhetorical persuasion. 12 The Old Arcadia represents ways that characters use images to move people to destructive actions. Similarly, the second half of the New Arcadia (ca. 1584) proliferates ‘a flood of images’; characters intensify fear, suspicion, and hatred by fixating on the data that produce these emotions.13 Images in the Old Arcadia act powerfully when they appeal to the prejudices and self-love of audiences. When Philanax perceives that Philoclea has no knowledge of her father’s death and that he is unjustly accusing her, he uses the memory of her dead father to spur his anger and leaves her without acknowledging her innocence (305.32–4). When Musidorus tells Dametas that he thinks he has found a buried treasure, Dametas goes away ‘having already made an image in his fancy what palaces he would build’ (188.7–8); and the conceits Dorus plants in the minds of Miso, Mopsa, and Dametas are difficult to disperse later with zany results. For ‘it was a sport to see how the former conceits Dorus had printed in their imaginations kept still such a dominion in them’ that Miso continues to think her daughter is her husband’s mistress and Mopsa continues to think her father is Apollo, come to rescue her (270.35–6, 267ff.). These episodes amuse the reader concerning the absurdities that come from a devotion to compelling fancies. Similarly deceptive powers of images worried other Protestant writers. Rainolds distrusts spectacles that appeal to class, creating emotions in the courtroom that cloud the mind so that ‘the innocent are condemned and the guilty acquitted, the powerful escape and the poor are oppressed.’14 The trial scene of the Old Arcadia also raises the issue of preferential treatment when Pyrocles and Musidorus dress in elaborate apparel to affect the emotions of the spectators and judge. In the face of these impressions, Euarchus is challenged to judge fairly without caring more for kinship ties and familial honour than for the general welfare of the polity. Thinking along the same lines, Rainolds cautions, ‘very many

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bonds of law are broken by force or weakened by favor, fettered by envy or loosened by pity, severed by anger or bound by hatred, or else they are dissolved by other frenzies of the passions.’ He refers to Servius Sulpitius Galba, who was ‘convicted of an infamous crime,’ but having ‘brought his small sons into the public assembly, and, with the orphan son of his kinsman Gallus high on his shoulders, he stirred the people to such pity, that although convicted of the most atrocious crimes, he still was pardoned’ (Oxford Lectures, 129).15 Similarly, the sight of the ‘notorious courtesan’ Phryne’s magnificent breasts ‘moved the hearts of the judges to such pity that they imagined their religion forbade them to kill a servant and priestess of Venus’ (Oxford Lectures, 131).16 Though finding them powerful, Rainolds rejects such sources of emotional persuasion on the grounds that ‘emotions should not be aroused by clumsy spectacles, but by serious arguments. And by skillful oratory, not by histrionic display’ (Oxford Lectures, 147). He develops Quintilian’s arguments for excluding mere display on the grounds that ‘many other things have the power of persuasion, such as money, influence, the authority and rank of the speaker, or even some sight unsupported by language, when for instance the place of words is supplied by the memory of some individual’s great deeds, by his lamentable appearance or the beauty of his person,’ but none of them constitutes part of the art of persuasion which must involve language and fall within the power of the speaker.17 In relying on spectacle, the speaker loses control and the effects may misfire and become ludicrous or awkward. Rainolds’s later attacks on the theatre in ‘The overthrow of StagePlayes’ also point to the instability of a spectacle’s effect as a serious drawback to dramatization. In response to his opponent Gagers’ argument that no evil affections could be stirred up at the sight of Ulysses (because who would not be ‘be moved to compassion to see Ulysses ... a begger in his owne house?’) and in response to the Sidneian-sounding question of who would not ‘admire the constancie of Penelope,’ Rainolds responds that Lucretia was not inferior in chastity to Penelope and yet ‘the very sight of her [Lucretia] stirred up his [Tarquin’s] wicked lust.’18 These references might gloss Anaxius’s lust towards Pamela’s dignified figure in the New Arcadia. According to Rainolds, the immediate effect of dramatic spectacles cannot be controlled because plays fail to provide, as Lawrence D. Greene puts it, the ‘perceptual distancing from the action’ that would permit the writer to control meaning through language and emphasis on causal relations.19 Though Rainolds wrote the ‘Overthrow’ too late to have influenced Sidney, his view of images is anticipated in the

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lectures on rhetoric, where he challenges the display of wounds and of pitiful dependent children in the courtroom.20 Renaissance psychologies also warn that spectacle and images cannot always be trusted. They argue that sense perceptions are delivered to the understanding by means of the imagination. As Thomas Wright puts it, ‘“whatsoever we understand, passeth by the gates of our imagination.”’21 If imagination receives accurate impressions, human beings respond in a healthy way, but ‘if fantasy is “marred,”’ say Sir John Davies, ‘wit perceives everything falsely.’22 Popular Elizabethan psychology casts imaginative activity into ‘disrepute’ (‘Imagination,’ 50). Spenser represents Phantastes’ chamber as filled with ‘leasings, tales, and lies’ (Faerie Queene II. ix. 51.9), and Greville ‘decries the lack of veracity in the distorted “pictures” of “Imagination” which are “still too foule, or faire”’ (Poems and Dramas, I.156, quoted in ‘Imagination,’ 49, 54). Given the possible unreliability of images, it is easy to understand why the Old Arcadia forcefully juxtaposes the power of the ‘pitifull spectacle’ of Euarchus condemning his own children with his dispassionate reliance on reason. Just because a spectacle seems pitiful doesn’t mean a judge’s determination of guilt is wrong. Imagination is so easily influenced by emotion and especially by self-love that it may blind judgment. If we read more closely, however, we find that the Old Arcadia redefines the meaning of blindness in a way crucial to understanding the Defence. Although, conventionally, the just judge is supposed to be blind to personal interests, Musidorus reverses the meaning of blindness when he calls upon Euarchus to ‘examine the eyes ... of all this people’ and ‘be not blind in thine own case’ (OA 412.36–413.1). Musidorus charges Euarchus with the very self-love that Euarchus hopes to avoid by judging his son and nephew within the letter of the law. He uses the words ‘eyes’ and ‘see’ to indicate Euarchus’s lack of discernment in the particular case. Euarchus’s seemingly rational approach lacks cogency because he errs in his judgment of facts. He combines myopia in the particular case with insight into the general law, a problem that Calvin points to as the chief effect of the fall. For, all people have ‘the law naturally engraven on their minds’ and thus are not ‘altogether blind as to the rule of life’ (Institutes 1.2.22). However, as soon as the intellect ‘descends to particulars,’ deception comes into being: ‘That homicide, putting the case in the abstract, is an evil, no man will deny; and yet one who is conspiring the death of his enemy deliberates on it as if the thing was good ... The ignorance lies here; that man, when he comes to the particular, forgets the rule which he had laid down in the general case’ (1.2.23). In stressing the way

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involvement in particulars distorts knowledge, Calvin cites Aristotle’s concept of akrasia: ‘where incontinence reigns,’ he says, ‘through the passion (pathos) particular knowledge is suppressed: so that the individual sees not in his own misdeed the evil which he sees generally in similar cases; but when the passion is over, repentance immediately succeeds.’ Even one who has ‘been regenerated ... confesses that he stood in need of direction every moment, in order that he might not decline from the knowledge with which he had been endued’ (2.2.25). The redeemed need persuasion at times to set them straight. But Euarchus is so worried about being a perfect judge that he ignores facts about the case. Whereas Calvin explicates fallen error, Melanchthon shows the way to error’s correction. In an important article for reorienting Sidney’s relation to Protestant thinking, Robert Stillman elucidates Sidney’s ‘erected wit’ by mean of Melanchthon’s idea of the natural light. Stillman claims Melanchthon, not Calvin, as Sidney’s primary source.23 His claim is supported by the Defence’s praise of Melanchthon and Beza as ‘famous preachers and teachers’ who patronize poetry (110.17–18). Melanchthon was also the teacher and intimate friend of Sidney’s mentor, Hubert Languet. Melanchthon’s description of the post-lapsarian obscurity of perception suggests why Sidney may have focused on the image as the locus of change for the fallen.24 Melanchthon uses the terms ‘image’ and ‘mirror’ to analyse human incapacity: ‘God has infused his image, that is, the awareness of God, and the distinction between good and evil in human minds, just as in a mirror, and these perceptions (notitiae) would shine much more clearly, and the will would burn with the love of God, and be adorned with all the virtues, if the nature of men had remained uncorrupted. These are now truly obscure perceptions: but they remain nevertheless.’25 Melanchthon posits a general power (the image of God) and a more particular element, the ‘perception’ of good and evil that shines in the mirror. The revealed word clears the obscurity from the image of God so that the ‘holy spirit may descend upon us, so that our emotions may be agreeable with God in both our will and heart.’ The Defence argues analogously that heroic poetry plants the image in the mind.26 The image ‘teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth,’ namely, ‘magnanimity and justice,’ the classical virtues that poetry makes ‘shine through all misty fearfulness and foggy desires’ (Defence 98.3–5). Poetry clears up the fog with which passions cloud perceptions of the virtues. But how does the poet ensure that the image he plants moves to good? Sidney’s revisions of classical rhetoric give poetry the power to correct erroneous perceptions of good and evil things.

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Classical writers celebrate images but imply that they may arise from vice. Quintilian, for example, links the ability to move the emotions to the power of imagining vividly the details of an action.27 He praises the power of phantasiai or visiones to make things absent present to the imagination with such vividness that we seem to see them before our very eyes: ‘It is the man who is really sensitive to such impressions who will have the greatest power over the emotions. Some writers describe the possessor of this power of vivid imagination, whereby things, words and actions are presented in the most realistic manner, by the Greek word euphantasiôtos; and it is a power which all may readily acquire if they will.’28 The euphantasiôtos, deriving from Plato and reiterated in Sidney’s euphantastic imagination, is realistic.29 But Quintilian links phantasiae to such vices of the mind as idleness, fantastic hopes, and daydreams. Nevertheless, he suggests, ‘it may be possible to turn this vice of the mind to some profit’ (hos animi vitium ad utilitatem non transferemus): I am complaining that a man has been murdered. Shall I not bring before my eyes all the circumstances which it is reasonable to imagine must have occurred in such a connexion? Shall I not see the assassin burst suddenly from his hiding-place, the victim tremble, cry for help, beg for mercy, or turn to run? Shall I not see the fatal blow delivered and the stricken body fall? Will not the blood, the deathly pallor, the groan of agony, the death-rattle, be indelibly impressed upon my mind? From such impressions arise that enargeia which Cicero calls illumination and actuality, which makes us seem not so much to narrate as to exhibit the actual scene, while our emotions will be no less actively stirred than if we were present at the actual occurrence. (6.2.31–2)

Kathy Eden argues that this representation ‘relies at every stage on the evidential quality of the images. The advocate must seem to exhibit (ostendere) rather than merely narrate (dicere) his proofs in order to achieve evidentia.’30 Sidney expresses a similar confidence in images and details, and praises Plato for his ‘poetical describing the circumstances of their meetings, as the well ordering of a banquet, [and] the delicacy of a walk,’ and celebrates the historians for their use of poetry in ‘passionate describing of passions’ and ‘the many particularities of battles, which no man could affirm’ (75.17–19, 28–9). Imagination creates a fullness of detail that persuades readers of the reality of events and draws them towards learning. Though it illuminates some of Sidney’s understanding of euphantastic

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poetry, Quintilian’s valorization of heightened descriptions raises a problem for my interpretation of the Defence. Quintilian advocates using emotion not only to compel ‘the judge to the conclusion toward which the nature of the facts lead him’ but also to awaken ‘emotions which either do not naturally arise from the case or are stronger than the case would suggest.’31 How does the Defence handle this possibility? Kathy Eden argues that by linking poetry to law as Aristotle’s Poetics does, Sidney instructs without claiming factual truth. ‘The poet’s fiction, like the lawyer’s, serves only as a “profitable invention” for the purposes of demonstration or instruction.’32 The fiction’s attention to detail does not deceive, for the poet ‘nothing affirms.’ Eden’s account of De anima claims that the vivid particularities of the example prompt the soul to right action, an idea Sidney incorporates into the speaking picture. This ‘picture’ gives a ‘true lively knowledge,’ while it couples the example with a true precept.33 The poet presents an ideal model, of Cyrus, for example, that the reader uses to make many Cyruses (79.9 and 15).34 If the historians ‘know an example only informs a conjectured likelihood, and so go by reason, the poet doth so far exceed him as he is to frame his example to that which is most reasonable’ (89.1–3). Eden’s analysis illuminates Sidney’s attempt to teach right action, but there is a complicating factor in her reference to Aristotle’s argument by example.35 Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of rhetorical example; ‘one ... consists in relating things that have happened before, and another in inventing them oneself’ (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.20, 1393a).36 He praises the fictional example because it can be shaped ‘to that which is most reasonable.’ In a rhetorical context, ‘what is more reasonable’ is probably true and could be challenged by a counter-example. Sidney’s dependence on Aristotle’s Rhetoric tacitly implies that poetic arguments are subject to evaluation by audiences. Aristotle’s fictional example shares many qualities with Sidney’s poetic example. Both thinkers discriminate the fictional from the historical example. Aristotle’s word for ‘make,’ poiein,37 is the same word Sidney uses as a root for poet: ‘The Greeks called him a “poet” ... It cometh of this word poiein, which is, to make’ (77.32–4). Aristotle praises fictional examples because they are easy to obtain. The speaker should make them so that ‘a man [who] is capable of seizing the analogy’ can do so, an easy task if one has experience in philosophy (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.20, 1394a). Sidney’s example of Nathan illustrates the importance of seeing likeness. Sidney also increases the validity of the speaking picture by coupling ‘the general notion with the particular example,’ healing the

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deception that, according to Calvin, arises when persons descend from the knowledge of natural law to particulars (Defence 85.25–6). Whereas Sidney argues that the philosopher’s knowledge is so ‘abstract and general’ (85.15) as to scarcely be understood or applied in action, and ‘the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is ... that his example draweth no necessary consequence’ (85.17– 21), the poet unites them ‘to frame his example to that which is most reasonable’ (89.3). In Arthur F. Kinney’s words, the ‘poetic image ... functions as both a major and a minor premise, both precept and illustration.’38 The argument of the practical syllogism moves persons to rational action. But emotion also plays a central role in healing judgment. David, who initially fails to see the connection between the rich man’s seizure of the poor man’s sheep and his own action, feels shame when Nathan points it out. The shame announces the truth of the story. Again, however, emotions are not always trustworthy. Even though, Calvin argues, ‘the minds of all men have impressions of civil order and honesty,’ human beings ‘licentiously hate what their mind and understanding approve’ (Institutes 2.2.13). These passions need to be addressed directly. Melanchthon’s De modo et arte concionandi (c. 1537–9) urges that preachers should aim at ‘“renovation and spiritual life”’ and insert ‘“better emotions into the soul.”’39 Sidney’s Defence draws on Melanchthon’s language, urging the poet to ‘plant goodness even in the secretest cabinet of our souls’ (85.4). The speaking picture changes the audience’s mind about a particular (as in the story of Nathan and David), reforming its audiences’ hearts. To understand this phenomenon, we need to turn to Melanchthon and the Augustinian ideas that influenced him. Religious Rhetoric’s Influence on the Moving Power of Poetry The need for a passionate, reforming rhetoric can be found in the Protestant belief that the fallen are unable to will with a whole heart. Melanchthon asserts that in despotic rule, the ‘mind and will force motion, so that the outward limbs are either restrained or impelled.’ Even the thirstiest person’s will ‘can control the hands so that it not touch a cup.’40 Philippe Duplessis-Mornay uses the same image of the hand and the cup to show that sheer will power may prevent suicide without being capable of producing virtue.41 Augustine’s rhetoric helps us understand why. For as Debora K. Shuger argues, ‘Melanchthon’s sacred rhetoric develops a Protestant interpretation of Augustinian psychology.’42

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Like Anne Lake Prescott, who shows the importance of the Church Fathers’ writings (especially Athanasius and Basil) to the Defence, I wish to increase scholars’ awareness of a broadly Christian rhetoric to Sidney’s poetics.43 The patristic tradition on the role of images is especially significant because of passages from the Church Fathers circulated in the 1567 psalter of Sidney’s father’s friend, Archbishop Matthew Parker. Augustinian persuasion of the audience through their emotions, broadly conceived, emphasizes their power to heal.44 This power needs to be understood in relation to the problems poetry encounters in the Defence when it seeks to persuade. Admonitions may be despised, as in the case of philosophers; the hearer may not connect a story to his own life, as in the case of David’s initial response to Nathan’s story; laws may affect the actions but not the characters of persons; didactic poetry may bore rather than engage and change its audience; and finally and most importantly, the audience may know what it ought to do but not be moved to action. Book IV of De Doctrina Christiana (DDC ) addresses the problem of how to move ‘the minds of listeners, not that they may know what is to be done, but that they may do what they already know should be done.’45 It suggests that the failure to act results from the listeners’ inability to ‘fully accept those things which they acknowledge to be true,’ and that it must be addressed with eloquence (IV.iv.6, p. 121). ‘Persuasion is victory, for people may be taught and pleased and still not consent’ (IV.xii.28, p. 137): ‘Just as the listener is to be delighted if he is to be retained as a listener, so also he is to be persuaded if he is to be moved to act ... He [is] persuaded if he loves what you promise, fears what you threaten ... and is moved by whatever else may be done through grand eloquence toward moving the minds of listeners, not that they may know what is to be done, but that they may do what they already know should be done’ (IV.xii.27, pp. 136–7). Only if the emotions are moved will people change their actions. Delighting and teaching will not help anyone who ‘confesses the truth ... but still does not give his assent’ (IV.xiii.29, p. 138). The split between knowledge and action can be healed by the grand style in which the force of matter moves the ardour of the heart. Augustine departs from Cicero and Quintilian’s privileging of moving over teaching by linking emotion to truth. If ‘the beauties of eloquence occur’ in the grand style, it is because ‘they are caught up by the force of the things discussed and not deliberately assumed for decoration.’ ‘It is enough for the matter being discussed that the appropriateness of the words be determined by the ardor of the heart rather than by careful

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choice. For if a strong man is armed with a gilded and bejeweled sword, and he is fully intent on the battle, he does what he must with the arms he has, not because they are precious but because they are arms’ (IV.xx.42, p. 150). DDC brings together several strands that make knowledge move: the heart’s ardour arises from the matter not from ornament. And the force that results works like a sword, not like a jewel. The text also praises eloquence that exercises and sharpens the minds of readers, stimulating their desire to learn (IV.viii., p. 132). Renaissance writers reiterate Augustine’s emphasis on emotion and Cicero’s claims that one must truly feel the emotions one wishes to move in others.46 Lorenzo Valla asks, ‘“Can a man move his listeners to anger or mercy if he has not himself first felt these passions?”, responding that “It cannot be ... So he will not be able to kindle the love of divine things in the minds of others who is himself cold to that love.”’47 Writers also appeal to the heart as the source of emotion and thought.48 Melanchthon describes the actions of the heart as those of a lover: ‘Happiness is the movement by which the heart acquiesces in a present good, and it is an expansion by which the heart, as it were, takes its object within itself and encircles it, as a lover takes joy in embracing his girlfriend, and as it were joins her to his heart, and tries to draw her into his heart.’49 Man and heart become interchangeable, as the heart is first compared to a man and then the man is identified with his heart. Later, Melanchthon writes that the heart expands with happiness in the presence of good and achieves greater health, whereas ‘when the heart is struck by an unwelcome object,’ it is ‘constrained, pressed, trembles and languishes with a keen sense of sadness. And unless the sadness ceases, the dessicated heart will be extinguished’ (On the Soul, 244–5). Musidorus uses this language when he claims that ‘joy openeth and enableth the heart’ (OA 19. 33–4), while the narrator sympathizes with Pyrocles when grief closes his ‘heart that his breath failing him, with a deathful shutting of his eyes,’ he falls down on Philoclea’s bed (235.12–14). The Defence calls on poetry to expand hearts in emulation of noble actions or to contract them in shame and sorrow for crimes. The elegy moves pity ‘in a kind heart’ (95.12), while tragedy seeks to ‘mollify’ a ‘hardened heart’ (97.1–2). Before we move on to a study of the genres, however, I will show how the Defence draws on the broad sweep of Christian rhetoric to discover an English poetry that can be healed by passion. By examining the way the text reiterates and sometimes revises Augustine and Melanchthon’s emphases, I hope to show why poetry must be passionate to cure the ills Sidney discerns.

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Like DDC, I have argued, the Defence articulates an art that moves those who know what they should do but do not do it. The text famously aims poetry towards virtuous action and adds an Aristotelian qualification that praxis not gnosis must be the fruit. Yet a difficult question remains: ‘how praxis can be, without being moved to practise, it is no hard matter to consider’ (Defence 91.14–15), for ‘to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, hoc opus, hic labor est’ (Defence 91.32– 4). The failure to act in accordance with what is known may arise from indifference, but, as in DDC, it may spring from a failure of assent in those for whom virtue is a ‘school name,’ who ‘despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon’ (93.9–10, my emphasis). ‘Feel not the inward reason’ expresses exactly the disjunction of knowledge and feeling that blocks full assent. In order to meet this challenge and departing from DDC, the Defence enlarges the role of delight in mediating between knowing and moving. Augustine advocates delight to make the hearer attentive, but is cautious in using it. In addition, delight will not help those who believe a truth but do not give ‘assent’ (DDC IV.xiii.29, p. 138). But for the Defence, delight is central. Just as Augustine praises eloquence because it stimulates people to learn, Sidney relies on delight to encourage the exercise and sharpening of the mind: ‘if ever learning come among them, it must be by having their hard dull wits softened and sharpened with the sweet delights of poetry – for until they find a pleasure in the exercises of the mind, great promises of much knowledge will little persuade them that know not the fruits of knowledge’ (Defence 76.6–10). In both texts pleasure leads, draws, and helps the auditor to attend and cleave to truth. But DDC also distrusts the sweetness of pleasant words, and Sidney departs from it significantly by praising pleasure in imitation.50 Poets imitate ‘both to delight and teach; and delight, to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach, to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved’ (Defence 81.11–14). Unlike Augustine, Sidney does not thinking of teaching, moving, and delighting as serving distinct purposes. He blends ‘force in teaching’ and ‘delightful teaching,’ using delight as a bridge from knowledge to being moved. Delight entices even those ‘evil men’ who ‘feel not the inward reason’ virtues ‘stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted’ until they ‘steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love)’ (Defence 93.9, 11–12). Here Sidney expresses a Neoplatonic optimism that delight and knowledge will lead to assent.

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DDC also helps us to understand why passion stands at the centre of Sidney’s rhetorical understanding of poetic composition and explains apparent contradictions in his attitude towards figurative language. Critics have been puzzled by Sidney’s attacks on invention and ornament in the Defence and in Astrophil and Stella (1591), given the presence of ornament in his own poetic works.51 In the third sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil scorns ‘Pindare’s Apes, enam’ling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold,’ and those who ‘with strange similies enrich each line, of herbes or beastes.’52 Similarly the Defence denigrates poets who ‘follow the method of a dictionary’ or proliferate ‘figures and flowers, extremely winter-starved,’ blaming what Sidney perceives as the low condition of English poetry on the fault of ‘poet-apes, not poets’ (117.18–19, 120.34). The Defence insists that ornamented poetry fails when it lacks passion. The text exclaims that some poets, ‘so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings – and so caught up certain swelling phrases which hang together like a man that once told my father that the wind was at northwest and by south, because he would be sure to name winds enough – than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be bewrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer’ (117.2–9).53 As we saw in Quintilian’s analysis, energia comes from verbally setting an event before the eyes so that the orator feels the passions himself which he wishes to convey to his audience, and Sidney comments that in using the figure of repetition to drive out Catiline, Cicero, ‘inflamed with a well-grounded rage ... would have his words (as it were) double out of his mouth, and so do that artificially which we see men in choler do naturally’ (Defence 117.35–118.2). Sidney’s characterization is informed by Augustine’s argument, not that the grand style never uses ornament, but that ‘the appropriateness of the words be determined by the ardor of the heart rather than by careful choice’ (DDC IV.xx.42, p. 150). Following Augustine’s simile that eloquence is like a sword not like a jewel, Sidney insists that poetry works like a sword (105.3). That Sidney did not always follow the prescription for passion, he himself attributes to his ‘finding’ himself ‘sick among the rest’ of English poets (Defence 119.10), and Astrophil likewise seeks fruitlessly to find ‘fit words to paint the blackest face of woe’ in the first sonnet. But then his Muse interrupts to say ‘Foole ... looke in thy heart and write.’54 Anne Ferry argues that this apparently simple direction leads to ambiguous and shifting relations between inward experience and Sidney’s poetic term for experience.55 Though this ambiguity cannot be

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pinned down, Sidney frames it within the idea of the heart as the source of emotion and the seat of assent.56 William J. Bouwsma has shown the importance of the heart to the period, calling it ‘that mysterious organ which is the center of the personality, the source of its unity and its ultimate worth.’57 I have shown that Melanchthon writes about the heart as if it were a whole person. The Defence, like classical, Christian, and Renaissance rhetorical works, implies that the best way to move others is to be moved oneself.58 Just as Valla asserts, ‘he will not be able to kindle the love of divine things in the minds of others who is himself cold to that love,’59 Sidney urges that the cold cannot write passionately, and without passion there is no persuasion, no movement towards knowledge and virtuous action. Yet, while the text celebrates moving, it also reminds readers of the obstacles to being persuaded. Whereas Melanchthon argues that reason may coerce the will without producing assent, Sidney insists that audiences are responsible for their emotional responses to poetry because assent involves choice. For example, Alexander Pheraeus, ‘from whose eyes a tragedy, well made and represented, drew abundance of tears’ and who could not ‘resist the sweet violence of a tragedy’ even though he had ‘murdered infinite numbers,’ protected himself from being changed by his emotions, and ‘withdrew himself from hearkening to that which might mollify his hardened heart’ (Defence 96.31–3, 36; 96.37–97.2). The Old Arcadia uses Stoic language to suggest that people have power over how their hearts respond. Philoclea denies after she falls in love that she had ‘by any idle lusts ... framed my heart fit for such an impression’ (OA 111.21–2). When Pamela finds herself under guard she weeps, but, ‘in the end, remembering how necessary it was for her not to lose herself in such an extremity, she strengthened her well created heart, and stoutly demanded’ by what authority she was taken (319.13–15). She identifies her ‘self’ with her agency over her heart and with her heart. Pyrocles also thinks of his heart as something over which he has power, offering Stoic arguments that ‘to do requires a whole heart, to suffer falls easiliest in the broken minds’ (296.33–297.1). He claims that he makes himself strong-hearted through action unlike the ‘weak-hearted man’ who ‘will rather die than see the face of a surgeon’ (296.26–7). Finally, the Defence suggests that the quality of heart influences the way it is affected by emotion. A reference to ‘the lamenting Elegiac; which in a kind heart would move rather pity than blame’ suggests that the heart’s quality affects its response (95.12–13). Melanchthon’s comments on free will are helpful in understanding Sidney’s idea. As we have seen, Melanchthon believes

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that God leaves the fallen understanding some freedom over the motions of the body, and he finds this control indispensable to governance of the state. But he stresses that when a rationalizing will (‘which is not like the heart’) ‘concerns itself [only] with thinking and commanding the external members of the body to follow understanding’ (On Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes [1555], 53), hypocrisy results.60 He looks to full persuasion of heart and will for a more adequate form of political influence. Not satisfied with the ability of the other arts to make persons good, the Defence celebrates poetry for exerting this influence. Using the Augustinian idea of ‘drawing,’ Sidney claims the poets work ‘as causes to draw with their charming sweetness the wild untamed wits to an admiration of knowledge’ (74.25–7). Even the ‘hard-hearted’ will be ‘content to be delighted ... and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love)’ (93.10–13). The ‘final end’ of poetry is to ‘lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls ... can be capable of’ (82.14–16). The word ‘draw’ suggests a non-coercive energy that pulls persons towards the good. As Lorenzo Valla and Calvin stress that religious experience must be ‘not intellectual but affective,’ and ‘that assent itself ... is more of the heart than the head, of the affection than the intellect,’ Sidney seeks the engagement of both by the poet.61 Calvin argues that neither ‘words nor singing (if used in prayer) are of the least consequence ... unless they proceed from deep feeling in the heart’; Sidney’s feeling poet uses words to move persons towards good (3.20.31). But to what good should poetry lead? I hope to illuminate this question by considering the genres. Virtue and the Physician in the Genres Although the Defence argues that the poet should lead people towards good, the nature of that good is not clear. Some passages emphasize a Platonic ascent to ideas, producing ‘heart-ravishing knowledge’ (76.25). Given Sidney’s Petrarchism and his friendship with Henri Estienne (Stephanus) who probably gave him his famous 1578 translations of Plato, one cannot be surprised at this Neoplatonism.62 The Defence also interprets the Psalmist David as a Platonist who wrote ‘a heavenly poesy, wherein almost he showeth himself a passionate lover of that unspeakable and everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind, only cleared by faith’ (77.21–4). Yet the references to ‘heart-ravishing knowledge’ and ‘everlasting beauty to be seen by the eyes of the mind’ pertain not to the ‘right poet’ who invents his own matter, but to the divine poet

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(vates) who is inspired by God (Defence 77.10–11). The ‘Examination’ of poetry differentiates the ‘felicity’ produced by ‘knowledge’ and that would ‘lift up the mind from the dungeon of the body to the enjoying his own divine essence’ from the ‘knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration’ (Defence 82.18–19, 26–7, and 83.1–2). Critics who emphasize the influence of Calvin on the Defence argue that Sidney gives the vates the gift of being inspired by God to know Christian ethical truth, whereas he restricts the right poet to moral virtue and political deliberation, activities that do not pertain to salvation.63 Others stress his celebration of the warrior’s prowess.64 Robert Stillman redraws the lines of the controversy by arguing that those who interpret Sidney’s distinction between the vates and the true poet as a division between the sacred and the secular misunderstand the Defence. He argues that the two differ not with respect to the sphere of their activity, but with regard to their ends. The vates writes in praise of God and the right poet writes to improve human beings.65 The latter moves audiences to Christian and civic virtue, for ‘David is an altogether appropriate model for right poets’ (‘Deadly Stinging Adders,’ 252). In the latter three-fifths of the Defence, the genres of right poetry that celebrate virtue and move people to good are heroic poetry and lyrics devoted to heroic virtue whereas Nathan’s story to David, the elegaic, the comic, and the tragic produce shame and sorrow. But the Defence is most enthusiastic about the heroic as in the ‘tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas’ (92.20). Following Aristotle’s Poetics, ‘cruel battles ... are made in poetical imitation delightful’ (Defence 92.26–7). The text ascribes civic virtues to heroic figures such as Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, and Aeneas, exemplars of ‘wisdom, valour, and justice’ (92.21). Martial poetry, whether heroic or lyrical, draws Sidney’s highest, most sustained praise.66 He confesses that he ‘never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet,’ and he praises the feasts he attended in Hungary, with their ‘songs of their ancestors’ valour’ (97.10–12, 17–19). No other genre engages wholly the emotional expansions and dilations of the spirits and the heart. Whereas heroic poetry inspires emulation and praise, the other genres turn to sympathy and correction. Sidney clearly understands poetry in terms of epideictic rhetoric, which praises a noble person, action, or virtue and blames an evil person, action, or vice. In the latter, judgment, not sympathy becomes the dominant mode, and more particularly, self-judgment. Though being pierced allows the hearer to experience a ‘true lively knowledge’ (85.36), the treatment of genres suggests

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that knowledge can be painful, leading to tears, shame, and contempt for oneself. Comedy, satire, and the iambic confront and convert rather than inspiriting and lifting up. Even Sidney’s description of the effects of tragedy uses language derived from Roman and Augustinian praises of vituperation for overwhelming the audience.67 Sidney mentions earlier that in the Roman court, the enraged orator Cicero could bring home the guilt of a defendant by using the force of an angry style (117.33– 118.2), an approach Milton advocates, as I argue in chapter 5. Augustine alludes to Cyprian and Ambrose, who vehemently urged women ‘not to adulterate their appearance with rouge and to be shameful and fearful’ (DDC IV.xxi.50, p. 158). Augustine describes the power of his own style to produce tears. When the citizens of Caesarea stoned each other, each killing ‘whomever he could’: ‘I pleaded in the grand style in so far as I was able that they should cast forth from their hearts and customs such a ferocious and inveterate evil. But I did not think that I had done anything when I heard them applauding, but when I saw them weeping ... They do not show [the effect of the grand style] through applause but rather through their groans, sometimes even through tears, and finally through a change of their way of life’ (DDC IV.xxiv.53, pp. 160–1). Only the grand style bends (flectendam) the hard heart, flecto meaning I bend, turn, direct, soften, or overcome. The Defence likewise stresses that tragedy ‘might mollify’ the ‘hardened heart’ even of the tyrant, having once drawn an ‘abundance of tears’ from Alexander Pheraeus,’ who ‘without all pity had murdered infinite numbers’ (97.1–2, 96.33–4).68 Like a wise counsellor or doctor, the tragedy also ‘openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue’ (Defence 96.22–3). Ulcers were hollows of infection, from which secretions flowed; to open the wound was to promote healing as surely in the psyche as in the body. So the OED cites Nashe’s An Almond for Parrat to exemplify the psychological use of the word ‘ulcer’ (10): ‘The disease of disobedience proceeds from the swelling of pride, as madness from some untollerable ulcer.’ But tragedy diagnoses, brings to light, treats, and heals the disease of the tyrant. Analogously, the ‘bitter but wholesome iambic,’ satire, and comedy produce painful emotions of shame and self-contempt in their audiences as ways of altering their actions (95.18). Sidney follows Renaissance ideas about shame that one finds in Vives, who writes that ‘the feeling of shame was given to man as a tutor ... The young have the feeling of shame as a stimulus to make them follow the advice of those who are more prudent, and to make them revere their betters.’69 He views

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shame as especially important for those who are ignorant of appropriate social duties because it restrains indecent, ugly, criminal, and evil actions. It is, in Vives’s view, ‘extremely necessary’ to everyone who lives ‘in the communion of society.’70 Like Aristotle, Vives argues that the experience of shame becomes more acute when evil actions are seen than when they are only known or reported. He follows Aristotle in linking shame to the eyes and to the approval and disapproval of others. When people feel ashamed they lower their eyes or close them, or like children, even cover their eyes and faces. Even the memory of a bad deed can make some people feel shame when they are alone. In this case, external disapproval becomes internalized in the imagination. Uncomfortable as the feeling of shame is, Vives believes it can be used to set limits on children, women, and others deemed to be of little experience or prudence. For shame expresses the affective component of a judgment of oneself as failing to bridge the distance between oneself and an idealized social role. The close relation between shame and seeing oneself helps to explain why, when Nathan wishes to check David’s sexual self-indulgence, he performs ‘the tenderest office of a friend in laying his own shame before his eyes,’ by telling the story of the poor man whose lamb was taken by a rich man. Nathan’s application of that tale ‘made David ... as in a glass see his own filthiness’ (94.4–6). The image of a mirror or glass had long been a commonplace to express the power of fables, plays, and books to inspire emulation and initiate shame.71 According to the Defence, the ‘bitter but wholesome iambic ... rubs the galled mind, in making shame the trumpet of villainy, with bold and open crying out against naughtiness’ (Defence 95.18–20). The satiric ‘never leaveth till he make a man laugh at folly and at length ashamed, to laugh at himself,’ and comedy represents ordinary error in everyday life ‘in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be’ (Defence 95.20–5, 34–96.1). Sidney’s emphasis on the ridiculous and scornful arises partly because he is defensive about comedy, referring to ‘the comic, whom naughty play-makers and stage-keepers have justly made odious’ (Defence 95.30– 1). But he defends comedy on the ground that it makes error ridiculous. Protestant attacks on the theatre had claimed that the spectacle of sin infected people’s imaginations even when the play attacked sinfulness. But Sidney argues that ‘little reason hath any man to say that men learn the evil by seeing it so set out, since ... there is no man living’ whose eyes will not be opened ‘to find his own actions contemptibly set forth’ (Defence 96.11–12, 18–19). Thus, although ancient and Renaissance accounts

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of laughter celebrate urbanity and jest because it indicates balance and good judgment, Sidney’s treatment of comedy as a ‘kind’ or ‘part’ of poetry focuses on its ability to express scornful and contemptuous attitudes that make people know themselves and turn away from their wrong actions (Defence 94).72 The Defence draws on ancient and early modern rhetorical treatments of ridicule and scorn. Aristotle argues that laughter is pleasant and so are ridiculous things (Rhetoric 1.11, 1371b–1372a). Rhetoric 2.12 goes further, arguing that wit (eutrapelia) is cultivated hubris, the word ‘hubris’ pointing to the system of honour and shame that undergirds laughter (1389b). Similarly, Quintilian suggests, ‘laughter is never far from derision (derisu non procul abest risus).’73 Following Cicero, he argues that laughter has its roots in what is deformed and base (in deformitate aliqua et turpitudine): when we point out such a failing in someone else, we call it wit, when we speak against ourselves we call it folly.74 Similarly, ‘Castiglione reiterates that feelings which find their natural expression in laughter are chiefly those of scorn and contempt.’75 Thomas Wilson’s comments on laughter, though derived from the earlier rhetorical texts, differ from them in giving us a better sense of social practice in England. He comments that ‘the occasion of laughter, and the meane that maketh us mery ... is the fondnes, the filthines, the deformitie, and all such evill behaviour, as we see to be in other ... Somtimes we jest at a mans bodie, that is not well proportioned, and laugh at his countenance.’ Wilson suggests further that ‘when we would abashe a man,’ we may jest or diminish his doings or ‘laugh him to scorne out right.’76 He treats jest as part of conversation. Likewise, the Defence locates comedy in ‘the common errors’ and practices of ‘our life’ (95.33–4). The text admires the way the satiric ‘sportingly never leaveth till he make a man laugh at folly, and at length ashamed, to laugh at himself, which he cannot avoid without avoiding the folly’ (95.23–5). Again, the poet like the orator manipulates the emotion of shame to control people’s actions. At the same time, the Latin tag ‘Omne vaser vitium ridenti tangit amico’ (the satiric ‘craftily strikes every defect of his friend, while making him laugh’) assimilates poetry to conversation between friends (95.22). As in the case of tragedy, Sidney’s language suggests that he views the poet in the role of counsellor, doctor, or friend, probing and healing the deformities of his audience by his wit. However, the analysis of decorum limits the scope of scorn, arguing that ‘the end of the comical part be not upon such scornful matters as stir laughter only, but, mixed with it, that delightful teaching which is the

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end of poesy.’ Delightful teaching comes to the fore as the indispensable feature of comedy. The text also strongly enjoins readers not to laugh at the ‘wretched’ or the ‘execrable.’ Unlike the writings I just cited, it attacks those who would ‘gape at a wretched beggar’ or, ‘jest at strangers, because they speak not English so well as we do’ (Defence 116.9–12). The analysis of mixed genres claims that comic elements in tragedies fall short because of their ignorance of the difference between laughter and delight: ‘in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but scurrility ... fit to lift up a loud laughter, and nothing else: where the whole trace of a comedy should be full of delight.’ Laughter does not make comedy any more than verse makes poetry. Whereas laughter comes from observing disproportion, delight comes from ‘conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature’ (115.18). Unlike Vives, who argues that ‘laughter arises from joy,’77 Sidney links delight to joy and laughter to a ‘scornful tickling’ (115.21) and echoes Laurent Joubert’s comment in Treatise on Laughter (1579) that ‘one can be joyous without laughing.’78 As evidence, Sidney points to the way in which we are delighted to ‘hear of the happiness of our friends’ (115.26) without laughing, and we laugh at ‘twenty mad antics ... without delight’ (115.35). Yet scorn and delight may be mingled, as the provocative figure of Hercules ‘in a woman’s attire, spinning at Omphale’s commandment’ shows, for it ‘breedeth both delight and laughter’ (115.37–8). To see the power of love provokes delight, but the ‘scornfulness’ of the action ‘stirreth laughter.’ The example comments powerfully on the poetic effect of Pyrocles’ crossdressing and his jewel picturing Hercules with a distaff (commanded by Omphale) in the New Arcadia.79 The Defence’s treatment of the genres suggests that poetry expands the heart when it inspires men to courage and contracts the heart when it shames those who deviate from public virtue. But instead of specifying these virtues, the text relies on commonplace terms taken from advice books and rhetorical handbooks. Readers may still err with respect to the particulars, and, thus, in their emotional responses. Poets may still be subject to idiosyncratic enthusiasms, for ‘self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous wherein ourselves be parties’ (73.24–5). Sidney’s predilections may have led him to exalt the poetry of the camp above all other modes of ‘right poetry,’ even though many of his peers would have argued for the superior value of peaceful service to the state. And, even though he defends poetry’s power to attack vice, he offers scanty evidence of exactly what sorts of actions are foolish. Yet self-love need not render his Defence or his poetry abusive. Sidney’s method for

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handling the writer’s narcissism has been ably treated by Margaret Ferguson, who argues that readers who ‘delight in poesy’ must ‘look themselves in an unflattering glass of reason’ (Defence 111.25, 27), and become in Ferguson’s words ‘critical readers of themselves,’ while also evaluating the cogency of Sidney’s argument.80 If poetry is not to move audiences to vice, readers must recognize errors in the poetic work and in themselves. We are given a ‘choice not between error and truth but between error and the recognition of the inevitability of error in the self’ (Trials, 155). For this reason, a critic analysing the poet as ‘monarch,’ because poetry moves the emotions, must not forget the ‘familiar’ poet whose tales contain a logic that can be understood and evaluated rationally by the discerning audience. The poet’s effort to heal the Calvinist split between known generalizations concerning virtue and vice and their application to particular circumstances has efficacy, even where he himself may have misunderstood the ethical character of the particular action, for poetry is open to revision by its readers using the same logic by which the poet set forth the tale in the first place. In this sense, both the Defence and poetry retain a dialogic character in which text and reader correct each other.

4 The Politics of Emotion in Hospitality, Rivalry, and Erotic Love: Sidney’s New Arcadia

Part 1: ‘Mutual Succour’ Against Factional Emotion The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia) (1584) (NA), a revision of the Old Arcadia, recasts friendship in terms of hospitable interchanges that, damaged by civil war, require inventive forms of counsel. Criticizing emotions that produce war, the text turns to representations of civil conversation to shape emotions that otherwise run out of control. Emotion can be ameliorated in the company of persons who live in solitary self-sufficiency. The geography of Arcadia provides a template for this ideal. After Musidorus witnesses a shipwreck that fills the sea with the blood of war he travels through Arcadia, where the houses ‘were all scattered’ and yet capable of ‘mutual succour – a show as it were of an accompanable solitariness, and of a civil wildness’ (NA 11.10–13),1 recalling humanist efforts to integrate the separateness of solitary life with the civilizing force of company, and reprising issues from The Civile Conversation and the Old Arcadia. But Arcadia is not far from Laconia, whose ‘face’ has been ‘disfigured’ and made ‘unhospital’ ‘by a civil war ... between the gentlemen and the peasants’ (11.23, 24, 20–2). War between estates injures hospitality and friendship; hospitable Arcadia is threatened by loss and suffering. Pyrocles’ and Musidorus’s conversations give new emphasis to hospitality, occurring after significant hospitable interactions. In a newly added passage, Pyrocles emphasizes that he would rather die than break ‘the laws of friendship’ with Musidorus (73.23–4), giving friendship a more objective social definition than it had in the Old Arcadia. Friendship also needs to be understood in terms of three different social and emotional frameworks affected by rivalry. First, idealized standards of

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honour lead Kalander, Pyrocles, and Musidorus towards noble friendship and great deeds, fostering emulation (33.23). Second, humanists use contrasting topoi to create a moral balance in architecture, hospitality, and individual behaviour, moderating emotion and making it judicious. Finally, Strephon and Claius’s Neoplatonic love for Urania, with its ‘tears,’ and ‘sorrow,’ turns the potential rivalry of lovers who compete for her favour into friendship (4.16, 17). Persons in all three frameworks perceive the good and love it. Initially, the epic harmonizes the three strands and fulfils Mervyn James’s claim that in the Arcadia a ‘synthesis of honour, humanism, and religion was achieved.’2 Musidorus and Pyrocles are ‘supermen of honour ... contrasted with the retired timidity of the unworthy king of Arcadia, Basilius’ (Concept of Honour, 70), following in the footsteps of the heroes of A Defence of Poetry. However, noble hospitality and great deeds occur against a background of rivalry and faction that subverts cultural institutions. Social pressures arise from contradictions between the framework of honour and (erotic) love, between the search for honour and a scramble for place, and within the community of honour itself when persons’ desire for distinction leads them to emotions that increase faction (stasis).3 Emotions produced by rivalry lead to civil war when one rhetorical framework of emotion impinges upon another. Conflicts between social frameworks produce what Daniel Gil calls, in another context, ‘a collision of different ways of picturing the social world, a collision of social imaginaries.’ The ‘friction between these incompatible social imaginaries and the different norms of sociability that characterize them’ produces a ‘crisis’ in efforts to establish ‘social ties’ and to share emotions.4 Degenerations of emotions in and among three socio-rhetorical frameworks require new skills in friends who must come to terms with grief and human imperfection. Even Neoplatonic idealism suffers under these conditions. While celebrating spring, new life, and erotic love in its opening lines, the text quickly moves to the ‘hopeless shepherd Strephon,’ who joins Claius in ‘languishing remembrance’ of a ‘Urania abscondita’ (3.5, 4.3).5 They have witnessed the ‘ever-flourishing beauty,’ of a Muse praised by Spenser as having ‘the skill /To make men heavenly wise,’ but she has gone, leaving them a yearning Neoplatonic desire for recollection.6 In her absence, Strephon and Claius remain friendly rivals, but hospitality and friendship become destabilized by a ‘human inhumanity’ that threatens Musidorus with loss of life, grieves Kalander with civil war and the capture of his son, and injures civil society.

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The humanist deference to moderation does not overcome conflict. Though opposites are brought together in Kalander’s house, which is ‘handsome without curiosity and homely without loathsomeness’ (NA 12.23–4), the wicked Cecropia alters humanist opposite topoi to describe a rage that ‘did swell in my heart – so much the more as it was fain to be suppressed in silence’ (319.4–6). Her imitatio takes a worse than Machiavellian turn when she counsels her son, Amphialus, to adopt a ‘hate’ that ‘often begetteth victory – love commonly’ being ‘the instrument of subjection’ (320.2–3).7 Amphialus then dresses himself with a delicate taste that parodies humanist exactitude in balancing opposites: ‘he took a garment more rich than glaring’ with ‘precious stones ... among certain tuffs of cypress, that the cypress was like black clouds through which the stars might yield a dark lustre’ (321.13–17). This seeming delicacy papers over his sophistic claim that Philoclea’s beauty, not his prison, limits her freedom (323). The fragility of hospitality and deterioration of discourses of emotion express tension in the period.8 Sidney may have had Duplessis-Mornay and his memory of his experiences in France on his mind at the time of revising the Arcadia, when he was translating Duplessis-Mornay’s treatise De la vérité de la religion chrestienne into English.9 Later, Fulke Greville underlines the relevance of the epic to issues of civil war and tyranny when he characterizes the New Arcadia as representing the ‘change of government and lawes: vicissitudes of sedition, faction’ and ‘hospitality, travail, and all other moodes of private fortunes, or misfortunes.’10 The text contemplates the quarrels and acts of kindness similar to those that occurred in factional conflict in France.11 William Dinsmore Briggs and Martin Bergbusch argue convincingly that the New Arcadia supports the Huguenot theory of the right to resistance of subaltern magistrates under tyrannical rule.12 More relevant to the present study, however, the text represents tragic imitations of bloody feuds and parodies discourses that generate rage and fear. These discourses define emotions associated with the pursuit of honour and power by a class that aspired both to warrior status and to serving the state. The influence of Huguenot feudal nobility on Sidney’s writing (argued by Michael Walzer) along with the influence of English notions of chivalric nobility derived from Elizabeth’s court (as illuminated by Arthur Ferguson and Michael Murrin) help to shape Sidney’s representations of the vicissitudes and achievements of the nobility amid rivalries and single combats.13 Hospitality scenes similar to those described by Charlotte d’Arbleste Mornay, the wife of Sidney’s close friend and mother of his godchild, in

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memoirs about her husband and religious wars in France introduce the epic. They may be similar to Sidney’s own personal experience, as well as those of his friends. (Like Mlle Duplessis-Mornay, Sidney was present during the Bartholomew Day’s Massacre.)14 Mlle Duplessis-Mornay portrays a terrifying picture of furious mobs, of travelling in disguise and relying on friends who, she writes, ‘helped me through all my troubles.’15 These friends could not serve fully as hosts because of the war, so they delegated their servants to do so. The French, like the English, seem to have frequently regarded a friend not only as ‘a person to whom one had some emotional attachment, but [also as] someone who could help one on in life.’16 Yet their guests sometimes felt intense emotions for their hosts, as when Mlle Duplessis-Mornay writes that she ‘received such generous friendship and assistance in my need (from M. and Mme de Tambonneau and all their family) that, apart from the relationship between Mme de Tambonneau and myself, there will never be a day of my life when I do not feel deeply indebted to them all’ (Huguenot Family [ca. 1599], 124). Because of the decline of political institutions such as monarchy in the New Arcadia, hospitality takes on a greater social burden than in the earlier version, and the scenes of help become more poignant against the background of violence. Instead of relying on intimate friends, victims of war depend upon the hospitality of strangers. But warfare injures the social roles upon which hospitality depends. Kalander, piously observing the laws of hospitality, finds himself unable to complete the duties of the host because of his grief. Amphialus, who wishes to entertain his beloved Philoclea generously, instead finds himself enforcing her presence because he has become caught up in greed and rivalries for honour. Philoclea discerns that while he says he loves her, he makes her feel ‘the effects of enmity’ (NA 322.26–7). We cannot understand the seriousness of these infractions without realizing the centrality of hospitality for early modern culture. Felicity Heal has shown that, although for moderns, hospitality exists as a matter of ‘personal preference’ among intimates, for early moderns as for the ancients, hospitality could not be neglected without humiliation. The institution formulated a binding obligation that required guests and hosts to consent to reciprocal relationships. Sidney was one of the earliest to use the term ‘law of hospitality’ as dictating good behaviour towards strangers.17 This term conveys that hospitality ‘has a mandatory quality,’ rooted in the chivalric duty to offer food and lodging and supported by Christian injunctions to succour the hungry and homeless.

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Sidney glorifies Kalander as an emblem of hospitality. His maintenance of a great house brings honour to him as well as to the stranger who visits him. Nancy Lindheim comments that Sidney’s concern for hospitality ‘extends even to details describing the architecture and management of Kalander’s great house.’18 She argues for the text’s use of contrasting topoi to discern a moral balance in his exercise of hospitality. So the ‘lightes, doores, and staires, rather directed to the use of the guest, then to the eye of the Artificer: and yet as the one cheefly heeded, so the other not neglected,’ lead the reader to a mean that properly relates beauty and use.19 Sidney’s rhetoric exhibits the prudent adjustment of opposite categories to achieve a mean. Michael McCanles shows how Sidney’s rhetoric of oppositions creates a balance that displays the range of choice open to characters and specifies the choices they actually make. The ‘careful balances’ of Kalander’s house reflect the balances within its owner, as the text ‘plays “provision” off against “thrift,” as well as hospitality against “magnificence”.’20 Thus hospitality carries moral force. These analyses suggest that a deeply humanist discourse informs the descriptions associated with hospitality. The text offers the topoi of provision and thrift to help readers to think prudently and ethically with respect to magnificence: ‘Kalander knew that provision is the foundation of hospitality, and thrift the fuel of magnificence. The house itself was built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness’ (NA 12.16–20). The lines draw on Cicero’s De officiis, which cautions that a householder’s kindness ought not to exceed his capability, advice that Machiavelli applies more stringently when he comments that ‘a reputation for liberality is doubtless very fine; but the generosity that earns you that reputation can do you great harm.’21 Machiavelli coins this maxim because a man who uses hospitality to excess bankrupts himself and his people. However, Kalander furnishes ‘all such necessary additions to a great house as might well show’ that he ‘knew that provision is the foundation of hospitality, and thrift the fuel of magnificence’ (12.15–18). His use of humanist topics shows his awareness of the dangers of which Cicero and Machiavelli warn their readers (De officiis 1.42, 44; The Prince, XVI). Kalander founds his generosity on the virtue not just the status of his guests, saying he is ‘no herald to inquire of men’s pedigrees. It sufficeth me if I know their virtues’ (NA 12.40–13.1). He hospitably nurses Musidorus for six weeks, omitting ‘nothing which he thought might either profit or gratify Palladius’ (Musidorus under his new name) (13.37–8).

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Their hospitable conversations lead Kalander to be ‘enamoured with a fatherly love’ towards him (14.7). However, in spite of his superlative performance as a host, threats from the civil war prevent him from completing his task. Violating one norm of hospitality, that the host should share food and conversation with the stranger, he supports another ideal that the guest ought not to be infected with the host’s grief. He withdraws from his guest, creating an imbalance in the host-guest relationship. In order to reinstate the proper relation between them, Musidorus becomes comforter and counsellor to his host, reversing roles under the pressure of distressing events. A similar imbalance occurs when Musidorus washes up on the shore. Strephon and Claius’s hospitable efforts are challenged by his disorientation. They face a difficult task of becoming friends with someone unwell and unknown. However, following Aristotle’s observation that people pity those who are like them, Strephon and Claius, when they perceive that Musidorus speaks Greek, ‘their natural language,’ become ‘more tender-hearted towards him’ (6.28–9). Earlier, on the other hand, when they first see that he is not a thing but ‘a man’ they run to him ‘for pity sake’ (5.36), following Calvin’s advice that ‘the whole human race, without exception, are to be embraced with one feeling of charity: that here there is no distinction of Greek or Barbarian, worthy or unworthy, friend or foe.’22 The pressures produced by war and Musidorus’s depression challenge Strephon and Claius’s attempts to comfort him. They need tact in knowing when and how to use emotional persuasion. Initially they fail, because they use reason to impose emotions upon Musidorus, trying to turn him away from despair. They argue that if he fears the death of his friend, ‘he should be comforted by his own proof, who had lately escaped as apparent danger as any might be’ (6.34–6). This rational argument fails and they turn to common experience (rather than mere social likeness) to find grounds for persuasion. Sidney draws on Juan Luis Vives and Pierre de La Primaudaye to invent a new mode of counsel. As I noted in chapter 1, Vives argues that he who can ‘bend’ his soul to ‘the afflictions’ of others helps them.23 La Primaudaye adds that when someone is afflicted, one ‘ought rather in such a case to minister some such sweete and gracious speech of comfort, as yieldeth and giveth a place a little to the just griefe of his friend, and from whence hee may draw some ease of his evill, whether it be talking thereof together with him, or otherwise in lamenting the same’24 (emphasis added). Strephon and Claius skilfully yield and still act to comfort

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The narrator’s words (‘fitting to his dolour dolourous discourses’) resonate as feelings do. Vives’ comment is illuminating and worth quoting at length: ‘sympathy (sympathia) is like the plucking of a faculty which similar faculties are attuned, as they say about the strings of two different lyres, that when the same note is played on them, seem to blend and respond to each other’ (Passions of the Soul, 46). The sorrows the shepherds share with him gradually ‘make his thoughts bear away something else beside his own sorrow,’ until he listens to them. Sidney emphasizes that having found shared experience, they do not need to manipulate him into a preconceived emotional state. Their skilful practices create ‘company’ and friendship among the three such that later Musidorus is ‘loath to part with them for the good conversation he had of them’ (13.10–11). Though Musidorus endeavours to reward them with a jewel, they tell ‘him they were more than enough rewarded in the knowing of him’ (13.14–15), and drawn by heavenly love, they go ‘speedily away’ (13.17). Charity and compassion form ties stronger than those achievable by the gifts, though Kalander, ‘by that sight’ judging that ‘his guest was of no mean calling ... therefore the more respectfully entertain[ed] him’ (13.18–20).25 Strephon and Claius use evidence to comfort emotions in rhetorically inventive ways. Listening becomes prudential, exploratory, and deliberative, and Musidorus turns these compassionate skills to understanding Kalander’s grief. He recalls the image of his own lost friend, and that resonates in his mind with the knowledge of Kalander’s lost son. Having heard the circumstances of the loss from the steward, he joins with Kalander, saying ‘you know myself miss one who, though he be not my

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son, I would disdain the favour of life after him’ (33.31–3). Bidding him take comfort, the two ride to the war of the Helots and Lacedaemonians. But as the plot develops, hospitable interactions degenerate. In Book II, Musidorus, having freed Dido from the torments of her captors, accepts her invitation to ‘harbour’ himself in her father’s castle (244.3), receiving what she astutely predicts will be miserable entertainment from her niggardly father, Chremes, whose name suggests ‘goods’ or ‘money’ in Greek (chrêma) (244.9). Chremes betrays Musidorus to his enemy, Queen Artaxia, in order to receive a reward. Queen Andromana proves a malevolent ‘host’ when she entertains Pyrocles and Musidorus only to imprison them when they reject her erotic desires (250ff.) So it goes until Cecropia, most shockingly, seizes Zelmane (Pyrocles), Philoclea, and Pamela by force, using rites of hospitality, including the ‘tribute of gifts’ to Philoclea ‘to bring her mind into servitude’ and entice her to marry Amphialus (337.15). Characters use persuasion and force to coerce marriage because of their hatred and excessive ambition. After foundational examples of hospitality in Book I, the text tells many stories of comfort and hospitality working to heal where competition and war have broken social bonds. Competitive and hospitable emotions move Amphialus, for example, who finds himself caught tragically between the two. His imbrication in enmities that destroy friendship, courtship, and familial ties distorts his efforts to honour Philoxenus (‘friend to the stranger’), his mother, and Philoclea. When he seeks to love, his actions produce the effects of enmity. When he honours friendship, his friend hates him. Striving to be an obedient son, he facilitates the death of his mother. In order to penetrate the tragic coils that encircle Amphialus, Argalus, Parthenia, and many others, we need to understand more clearly the emotions produced by the search for honour. Erotic Rivalry as a Source of Faction Though Sidney draws on the tropes of chivalry so prominent on the continent and in the Elizabethan court to celebrate the prince’s adventures, and though he clothes private combat in the ‘costumes of chivalry,’ he also criticizes agonistic social rites.26 He shows how the emotions associated with individual combat and romance distort kinship relations, friendships, marriage, courtship, and hospitality. In a fine article, Clare Kinney illuminates the tendency of competitions for honour to degenerate into exhibitions of force fuelled by rage, especially in erotic contexts.27 She rightly argues that honour is sometimes a ‘construct of the

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imagination’ designed to justify unjust actions.28 My interest lies in the rhetoric that generates rage. For the text draws on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to represent how competition for honour leads men to emotions that cause rebellion (stasis).29 The Rhetoric implies that a society organized around the struggle for honour engenders persons who are sensitive to signs of contempt, and the Politics that contempt causes rebellion.30 The New Arcadia offers a literary mimesis of Aristotle’s topoi by portraying the Laconian freemen (who have been conquered by the Lacedaemonians) as motivated by contempt: when ‘the Lacedaemonians through greediness growing more heavy than they [the Laconians] could bear, and through contempt less careful to make them bear’ their rule, the freemen respond with anger and seek revenge by slaughtering the gentry.31 Faction comes into being when men ‘are dishonoured’ (Politics 5.2, 1302b).32 The Politics claims that local rivalries produce anger and the search for ‘revenge, which leads to faction [stasis].’33 Revolution (stasis) arises from small matters, even though it is about great ones (Politics 5.3, 1303b). Family conflict over honour may even cause civil war. For example, two young men enter into rivalry over a lover and two brothers quarrel about the division of their inheritance. Both lead to civil war. Analogously, when Demagoras interprets Parthenia’s preference for Argalus as dishonourable and feels insulted by being punished for disfiguring her face, he joins the Helots’ rebellion against the state, committing ‘most outrageous villainies’ (NA 30.26). This same pattern occurs repeatedly.34 Characters function in what René Girard calls ‘a system of political rivalry.’35 The text’s representations of emotions that proliferate rivalries are associated historically with sixteenth-century aristocrats’ efforts to increase their honour by competing with others. These efforts did not die out with the rise of a centralized state. During the transition from feudal to modern society absolutist monarchs endeavoured to establish the reign of law, but the aristocracy continued to exert its influence. Private warfare between ‘baronial families or factions’ grew into religious and civil war. Late sixteenth-century aristocrats also used tropes of chivalry as a fitting vehicle to express honour conflict in the royal tilts in Elizabeth’s court.36 As Sidney himself experienced painfully when Queen Elizabeth I forbade his duel with the Earl of Oxford because he was not noble, duels drew class boundaries by restricting opportunities to compete to aristocrats, validating class rank at a time when it was ‘increasingly threatened with submergence.’37 Huguenot noblemen also represented their missions to protect their communities in chivalric

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terms.38 Michael Walzer emphasizes, ‘it was as a soldier and an old-fashioned feudal lord that the French nobleman first established his connection with the Protestant congregation. In a period of increasing violence, he offered the protection of his sword and his men, and became, as it were, the feudal patron of Calvinist worship.’39 The Huguenot lords read the Amadis de Gaule, also a favourite of Sidney’s, upon which he drew for important elements in the plot of the New Arcadia.40 These lords envisioned themselves as the chivalric defenders of the helpless. The Huguenot author of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, either Hubert Languet or Duplessis-Mornay, also defended the right of princes to intervene against tyranny ‘without selfish motive on behalf of the tyrannized people.’41 Elements of aristocratic life analysed by Walzer are fictionalized in the New Arcadia. As Michael Murrin’s lucid study of epic and war shows, Sidney also represents Pyrocles and Musidorus’s fights in tilts and single combats in medieval terms.42 Tilts are highly formalized social rites for expressing and containing violence. Regarded as parts of a hospitality rite, they mediate the hostility that serves as one pole and one possibility of the hospitality relationship. Single combats in the New Arcadia also mediate conflict when more centralized means for ordering disputes between powerful lords break down. The Arcadian princes fight in tilts to defend the honour of their ladies. They intervene in civil wars and engage in single combat, sometimes to support monarchy, at others to aid tyrannized people to overthrow their tyrants and to establish legitimate rule.43 In all their activities, they can be understood to support constitutional monarchy, as Sidney did.44 Yet the New Arcadia also represents illegitimate private wars that spin off into cycles of violence when competition generates emotions intensified by rhetoric. Here again the text draws on Aristotle’s argument that, given the enmity that naturally occurs when one person establishes superiority over another, revenge and civil war inevitably follow from individual conflicts.45 Plato and Aristotle make ‘stasis [faction] appear inevitable unless institutional means [are] found to inhibit it’ (Law, Violence, 29). Because the New Arcadia represents the social constraints on individual violence as weak, conflict threatens to unleash the chaos of ungoverned violence.46 The text shows that those who pursue individualistic honour as the supreme good find security not in law or centralized government, but in individual power and domination. In this respect, some characters criticized by the text belong to the community of honour in which, Ruth Kelso argues, ‘honor is to be preferred above life, laws, country, and everything else, and endurance of injuries and contempt signifies a man

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unworthy of honor.’47 Additionally, the Politics argues that since one man achieves honour at the expense of another, competition produces enmity and envy (Law, Violence, 64–6). In many, many episodes, the New Arcadia represents enmity, anger, fear, and envy as leading to ungoverned violence. When two giants have been rejected by their prince, finding their whole security and raison d’être in their own strength, they kill harmless people, ‘thinking the more innocent they were, the more it testified their spite, which they desired to manifest’ (178.15–17). Whereas their anger had once been ‘serviceable’ to do ‘public good’ (following Plato’s Republic 440b, 442c), now ‘unbridled ... anger’ made ‘wickedness violent’ (178.21–2). One person’s revenge on another quickly leads to civil strife. After Pyrocles liberates Musidorus from being executed, one man strikes another ‘reviling him,’ and the other, angered ‘in revenge thrust him through’ (173.34, 36–7). A great tumult follows, leading to civil war where many were ‘by the blindness of rage killing many guiltless persons, either for affinity to the tyrant, or enmity to the tyrant-killers’ (174.12–14). Emotions that arise from rivalry become intensified when they are produced by self-contradictory social norms. When Argalus fails to find Parthenia after her face has been disfigured by Demagoras, he despairs ‘and the more he despaired, the more enraged’ he became until he determines to be revenged of Demagoras (NA 32.19–21). This extreme rage differs from the anger that arises from the perception of insult described in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and from the fine discriminations of insults to honour delineated in Italian fencing manuals because it grows independent of specific social factors. In the Rhetoric Aristotle argues that if it can be shown that an insult was unintended, the angry person becomes mild.48 Anger can be increased or decreased by rational persuasion and Italian duelling manuals distinguished between degrees of insult (for example, ‘a blow with a rod gave greater disgrace than did a slap’) along with appropriate responses.49 But in Sidney’s text, anger often dissolves into indiscriminate rage as social boundaries and norms collapse. Argalus, for example, becomes so frustrated at his inability to comfort Parthenia in accordance with humanist and Protestant values that he despairs and turns to the prosecution of violent revenge. The tendency of emotion to become one-sided and extreme is also magnified in those seized by erotic desire. Aristotle’s definition of anger yields insight into why anger becomes infinite: he calls anger a longing (horexis) for revenge that is felt by those who desire something but cannot obtain it. He ties anger to need, illness,

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love-sickness, and passion (Rhetoric 2.2, 1379c). Vives takes his point a step further when he argues, ‘the violent desire of things like wealth, political power, or pleasure, exacerbates our cruelty again those who stand in our way.’ He comments that the same thing ‘happens when we fear to lose something dear to us, such as our life or power, as it happened to Nero, Caligula, and Commodus, whose fears made them cruel,’ (Passions of the Soul, 92). Amphialus finds himself entangled self-contradictorily in such emotions when ‘by a hunger-starved affection,’ he is ‘compelled to offer ... injury’ to Philoclea in order to satisfy his desire (323.11–12). Emotions caused by rivalry become intensified by the search for an erotic object. Gail Rubin’s and Eve Sedgewick’s analyses of courtship as a social transaction between men depend on models of exchange that the New Arcadia elaborates and challenges.50 As Lorna Hutson has shown, the idea of gift exchange illuminates sixteenth-century representations of women.51 Although moderns may be accustomed to think of marriage as something contracted by the participants, Rubin draws on Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship and Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift to argue that in societies with clearly defined structure of positions, courtship can be understood as a form of gift exchange.52 In courtship, one man gives a woman to another. Gifts create ‘a social link between the partners of an exchange’ (172) but women are ‘the most precious of gifts’ because through them a relationship of kinship is established (173). In the societies Rubin analyses in ‘The Traffic in Women,’ the woman serves as a ‘conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it’ and has no rights over herself (174). ‘The woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange.’53 The marriage transaction occurs between two men. Sedgewick takes this idea a step further to argue that in major European (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) fictions the bonds of male rivalry in an erotic triangle are as intense as the bond between the male lover and the female beloved (21ff.). Rubin’s and Sedgewick’s ideas of erotic rivalry illuminate the tilts and single combats that occur in the revised Arcadia. Each man engages in single combat to defend his woman’s beauty and his own right to be her knight. Phalantus of Corinth, for example, is not content to love Lady Artesia, but comes to court to ‘defy all Arcadian knights in the behalf of his mistress’s beauty’ (90.25–7), making her beauty (not her chastity) a sign of his honour. Many other knights act in the same way.54 However, destructive rivalry in the revised Arcadia (and possibly in England) is especially intense because it extends to heterosexual interactions. Women are agents in the rivalry, not mere objects of it. Lady Arte-

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sia, for example, not to be outdone by Phalantus, takes an active role, calling ‘her disdain of him chastity’ (91.35–6). In this malignant competition, the object of courtship becomes a rival to her own suitor. Rivalry also infects familial relationships: Gynecia feels jealous of her own daughter (278.27–8), so that ‘the blessings of a mother turn to the curses of a competitor’ (279.3–4). In addition to the homosocial relationships studied by Rubin and Sedgewick, the New Arcadia includes mothers and aunts who use rhetorical and physical force to coerce their children’s marriages. Widows like Parthenia’s mother and Philoclea’s aunt Cecropia behave most tyrannically, perhaps because Sidney had in mind Catherine de’ Medici’s treacherous role in her daughter’s marriage.55 Parthenia’s mother views herself as a competitor in the struggle over Parthenia’s choice of marriage partners. When her mother discerns that one of the suitors, Demagorus, is wealthy, she pressures Parthenia to accept him. The more his rival Argalus proves his superiority in the many dangerous enterprises that the mother assigns him, ‘the more [the mother] hated him, thinking herself conquered in his conquests’ (29.29–30). Her view of him as a rival in the absence of customary social factors that create competition suggests that a predisposition towards anger may be shaping her perceptions. The story of Argalus and Parthenia intensifies the problem of rivalry by making explicit the conflicts between the metadiscourses of honour and marriage. Argalus and Parthenia’s ideal marriage is cooperative, mutually self- and other-enhancing, in contrast to the zero sum game of honour competition. Whereas one who seeks honour can only achieve it by depriving another of his share, in Parthenia and Argalus’s marriage, giving enhances the giver and the gift: ‘a happy couple, he joying in her, she joying in herself (but in herself because she enjoyed him); both increasing their riches by giving to each other; each making one life double because they made a double life one’ (371.40–372.3). The text represents Parthenia’s subordination as arising from her freely willed consent: ‘he ruling because she would obey – or rather, because she would obey, she therein ruling’ (372.4–5). But despite her free obedience, his leadership ultimately causes their deaths. The seeds of trouble lie in their distorted commitments to honour. Parthenia (on the whole) emblematizes the perfect wife (Basilius calls her ‘the perfect picture of a womanly virtue and wively faithfulness’ [NA 97.13]), whereas Argalus (on the whole) emblematizes the union of honour with virtue. They define their identities according to these conflicting norms. As perfect wife, Parthenia rejects the idea that her beauty

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should be a public sign of Argalus’s honour. Instead, she makes her beauty visible to his perception alone. She cares more for his distinctive response than for the objective social evaluations of the group. When Argalus wishes to redeem her picture in a tilt, she ‘desired to be beautiful in nobody’s eyes but his, and that she would rather mar her face as evil as ever it was than that it should be a cause to make Argalus put on armour’ (97.18–22). Her projected idea of his subjective perception, not objective social criteria, defines beauty and honour. Yet, after Demagorus has disfigured her face with poison, she rejects Argalus’s compassionate love and refuses to marry him, ‘so in heart she loved him as she could not find in her heart he should be tied to what was unworthy of his presence’ (31.20–2). Here Sidney uses the word ‘heart’ to refer to what William J. Bouwsma calls ‘that mysterious organ which is the center of the personality’ according to Augustine and Calvin.56 Her heart is the source of her wish that Argalus not be dishonoured, so that honour becomes interiorized.57 Argalus also leads her to criticize social honour. When sent for by Basilius during the siege of Amphialus’s castle, Argalus feels honourbound to go: disregarding Parthenia’s sorrow, her ‘tears and sighs; which he not able to bear, [he] left her alone and went to give order for his present departure’ (372.28–31). In response to his choice, Parthenia makes a wise criticism of the conflict between social frameworks: ‘then was it time for you to follow these adventures when you adventured nobody but yourself and were nobody’s but your own’ (373.4–5). But he leaves ‘carried away by the tyranny of honour’ (373.22). Their tragic story suggests that marriage and chivalric adventure cannot be harmonized. Sidney’s most dramatic defence of woman’s liberty and his most penetrating analysis of distorted forms of rivalry occur in his representation of Amphialus and Philoclea. Amphialus destroys his friendship and ties of kinship with Philoclea when erotic greed moves him to accede to her imprisonment. Whereas a self-sufficient friend and suitor would allow free consent to his beloved, Amphialus, pitying himself, offers gifts and service that coerce her ‘thralled obligation’ (335.2).58 He lacks the independence praised in the description of Arcadia’s houses in Book I and understood as a condition of true friendship in the period. Though he would not ‘constrain’ Philoclea’s ‘presence’ in his household, he cannot ‘consent’ to her absence (320.30–1). His treatment of Philoclea serves as a (negative) speaking picture of Sidney’s eloquent defence of the principles of liberty and free engagement in forming erotic relationships.59 Because of his ‘hunger-starved affection,’ Amphialus inflicts injuries upon Philoclea (323.11). She demystifies his violence, seeking grounds

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for mercy in ties of kinship and courtship: ‘But if the nearness of our kinred breed any remorse in you, or there be any such thing in you, which you call love, toward me, then let not my fortune be disgraced with the name of imprisonment; let not my heart waste itself by being vexed with feeling evil – and fearing worse; let not me be a cause of my parents’ woeful destruction. But restore me to myself and, so doing, I shall account I have received myself of you’ (322.34–40). Philoclea asks for the restoration of that autonomous selfhood which friendship and courtship theory required. But Amphialus cannot grant her liberty for, in spite of his tender-heartedness, his actions spring from his desire to possess her and from enmity against her father, lest he retain the kingship and reassert his role in Philoclea’s courtship. Rhetorical Tactics for Dominating Emotions The New Arcadia extends its attack on destructive emotion by exploring ways that tyrannical persuasion damages people when it makes the value of things and persons pure reflections of competitive desire. The text uses a proto-capitalist discourse to represent how value becomes a product of characters’ competitive ways of seeing. Flatterers use deformed rhetoric to manipulate perception and emotion. Pamphilus, for example, inveigles his way into the psyches of those whom he would infatuate, and Dido, one of the ladies, diagnoses the subterfuge of his rhetoric: ‘The cunning of his flattery, the readiness of his tears, the infiniteness of his vows were but among the weakest threads of his net. But the stirring our own passions, and by the entrance of them to make himself lord of our forces – there lay his master’s part of cunning, making us now jealous; now envious; now, proud of what we had, desirous of more; now giving one the triumph to see him, that was prince of many, subject to her’ (238.14–20). The text’s use of ‘metaphore,’ as described by Abraham Fraunce in The Arcadian Rhetorike discloses his strategy. Fraunce offers a passage from Sidney’s Sonnets to show metaphor’s power to represent inner experience: ‘Alas the race /Of all my thoughts, hath neither stop, nor start, /But onely Stellaes eyes, and Stellaes hart’ (‘Sonnet 23,’ p. 16).60 The imitatio of ceaselessly recurring thoughts through the metaphor of the ‘race’ renders inner experience in action. Using a similar literary device, Dido calls Pamphilus’s flattery, tears, and vows ‘weakest threads of his net’ uniting rhetorical strategies into a single aggressive, cunning device. She develops the trope of device as weapon through ‘allegoria’ (an extended metaphor), and accuses Pamphilus of using the

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flatterer’s tactic of entering into the ladies’ emotions to make himself ‘lord of our forces’ and ‘prince’ (NA 238.17). The political allegory becomes all too real when Pamphilus cleverly creates a competition for which he is the prize and that generates feelings of rivalry such as jealousy and triumph. Yet the woman he seduces and whose estate he wastes is wise enough to see that the prize has no substantive value: ‘even in the greatest tempest of my judgement was I never driven to think him excellent, and yet so could set my mind both to get and keep him, as though therein had lain my felicity – like them I have seen play at the ball grow extremely earnest who should have the ball, and yet everyone knew it was but a ball’ (238.28–32). Though Dido knows that Pamphilus has no objective worth, she cannot help perceiving him as desirable. Her inner longing, defined by Pamphilus’s rhetoric of rivalry (not by his person) defines her perception; Pamphilus and the ball receive their entire value from their being interpreted as objects of rivalry. La Primaudaye diagnoses the social ills that produce emotions of rivalry when he refers to those who ‘thinke themselves worthy of great honour, and to be preferred before other men. For they suppose that honour ought to be measured by that good will and liking which men conceive of them, although they themselves be most wicked, and not by the triall of the worke whether it be good or evil in itselfe.’61 Instead of relating honour to prowess or virtue, they find it in status and in other people’s perceptions of them. So Cecropia, when her son was heir to Basilius’s throne, enjoyed the ‘port and pomp’: ‘In my presence, their tongues were turned into ears, and their ears were captives unto my tongue. Their eyes admired my majesty; and happy was he or she on whom I would suffer the beams thereof to fall. Did I go to church? It seemed the very gods waited for me’ (318.14–17). Cecropia has neither honour nor identity apart from the eyes and ears of others. She cannot bear the change that occurs when her son is cut off from all hope of succession to the crown. For ‘from the multitude of followers, silence grew to be at my gate, and absence in my presence’ (319.15–16). When her son was heir to the throne, she gloried in her power over the ears of others; now she is captive to the ‘absent’ presences.62 Like the flatterer, she merges with others’ imagined perceptions. In order to be visible, characters desire high place. Ordinarily, honour requires excellent action, and the ‘right to pride’ in that action is a ‘right to status ... and status is established through the recognition of a certain social identity.’63 Moreover, the claim to excellence ‘is always implicitly the claim to excel over others.’64 However, where the two meanings of

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honour come apart, precedence alone is the focus of competition. Cecropia pushes her son to produce an heir and tortures Philoclea into marrying him, being unable to bear that ‘another’s voice than mine should be more respected’ (319.10–11). She desires to have precedence without achieving anything, fantasizing to Pamela that whereas men study long to persuade others to their wills, ‘a fair woman shall not only command without authority, but persuade without speaking. She shall not need to procure attention, for their own eyes will chain their ears unto it. Men venture lives to conquer; she conquers lives without venturing’ (356.24–8). Cecropia appropriates the orator’s power to ‘chain ... ears,’ and her beauty ‘conquers’ without risking action. Her desire for precedence apart from achievement aims to eliminate equality, which is indispensable for trial by combat. A person moved by this desire elevates himself at the expense of others, using whatever means come to hand. Whereas in straightforward competition for honour the means (prowess) and the end (victory) are bound together, in competing for place alone the means (beauty) may have little to do with the end (authority). And, because the ambitious seek precedence, they tend to oppose themselves to all others. Enmity and anger are unbalanced by friendship and mildness. When Cecropia no longer commands attention, she feels a huge anger towards her family, remarking, ‘it is certain it is not so great a spite to be surmounted by strangers as by one’s own allies’ (319.1–2). Cecropia goes beyond what Daniel Gil calls ‘traditional social hierarchy ... [that] allow[s] for fierce love between those bound together by kinship ties and equally fierce hatred of blood enemies.’65 Whereas Aristotle and later writers represent spite as produced by insults from rivals, Cecropia competes with members of her own family. The text delineates the contradictions of a system based partly on honour and partly on primogeniture.66 Cecropia says that when Basilius married, ‘the rage did swell in my heart’ (319.4–5). Sadly, the basically virtuous Amphialus becomes caught up in his mother’s desire to be first and seeks to gain power over Philoclea by defeating her father. If Cecropia uses tyrannical compulsion to obtain precedence, Amphialus flatters in order to lead a rebellion. His approach is illuminated by Anniball’s comparison of flatterers to the fish Polypus: ‘For as that fishe chaungeth colour according to the object that it incountreth, so they alter their opinions according to the appetite of the hearers.’67 Cunning, unstable, changeable like the chameleon, simulating affinities with others, the flatterer ingratiates himself to others but pursues his own interests.68 Amphialus is Sidney’s most poignant flatterer

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because he once served as an exemplar of noble friendship, wooing Helen for Philoxenus.69 When he fails to win Philoclea, however, he incites rebellion against her father, using ‘special motions’ to draw lords away from their duty. Like Polypus, he conforms himself ‘after their humours: to his friend, friendliness; to the ambitious, great expectations; to the displeased, revenge; to the greedy, spoil – wrapping their hopes with ... cunning’ (325.1–4). Whatever his allies want, he offers them. Instead of appealing to common experiences and interests, he merges himself with their desires.70 By acting out the wishes of his mother, he abandons himself. By making himself appear like other noblemen rather than actually being so, he remains unknown and unconnected. But Amphialus is not the only shape-changer in the text. Characters merge with others in order to manipulate their minds. Tyrants and manipulators disguise themselves in order to manage emotions arising from rivalry. Leonatus’s bastard son Plexirtus (the precursor to Shakespeare’s Edmund), hiding his ambition and his ‘smiling envy’ (181.31), moves his father ‘first to mislike, then to hate, lastly to destroy – to do my best to destroy – this son’ (181.26–7), fearing lest his legitimate son usurp his throne. Using similar tactics, Andromana implants greater and greater suspicion in the king of Iberia, altering the basic emotional orientation that determines how he perceives the world. She takes advantage of the way, according to Aristotle, emotion changes judgment. Aristotle writes, ‘For things do not appear the same to those who love and those who hate, nor to those who are angry and those who are gentle’ (Rhetoric 2.1, 1377b). Indeed, the emotions pertinent to rhetoric are those ‘affections that make people change their judgments.’ They determine ‘patterns of salience among objects of attention.’71 By observing the way emotions determine salience in Clinias’s habits of mind, we can discern Andromana’s method more clearly. Fear channels Clinias’s attention so that when something frightening appears, he ‘simply look[s] for more’ facts to make it even worse:72 ‘now that the enemy gave a dreadful aspect unto the castle, his eyes saw no terror, nor ear heard any martial sound, but that they multiplied the hideousness of it to his mated mind’ (NA 338.3–6). Although reassuring signs also exist, Clinias ‘misdoubted each man’s treason and conjectured every possibility of misfortune’ because fear selects out and exaggerates, even manufactures, dangerous signs (338.19–20). Andromana grafts a similar monomania into the mind of the king of Iberia, advising him to make much of his son, Plangus’s, favour because it is too late to keep him under. She makes many generalizations that awaken her husband’s

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suspicions73 and chooses words that reduce the judicious humanist opposites appropriate to virtues such as magnificence and thrift to a single treasonous motive: ‘all Plangus’ actions began to be translated into the language of suspicion ... even contraries being driven to draw one yoke of argument: if he were magnificent, he spent much with an aspiring intent; if he spared, he heaped much with an aspiring intent; if he spake courteously, he angled the people’s hearts’ (219.31–6). Eventually, Plangus’s father ‘had so deeply engraved the suspicion in his heart that he thought his [Plangus’s innocent] flight rather to proceed of a fearful guiltiness than of an humble faithfulness’ (222.14–16). Andromana transforms the king’s mind, establishing a pattern of salience among the objects of his attention. She imitates perversely the humanist judicious use of opposites when she compells the king to marry her. She uses ‘the spur that his desire ran on, [and] the bit that it ran on even in such a career as she would have it; that within a while the king, seeing with no other eyes but such as she gave him, and thinking no other thoughts but such as she taught him ... saw no other way but marriage to satisfy his longing’ (217.24–30). She dominates his psyche in a political act more dangerous than physical tyranny. The only way to obviate such domination, the text suggests, is to get control over one’s own psyche and, if pressured by others, to develop a resistant but flexible identity. Part II argues that by developing a ‘dialogic’ self, characters achieve self-sufficiency and independence from flatterers and tyrants, who use their cognitive skills and knowledge of rivalrous emotions to invade and dominate the minds of others. Then Sidney offers a counter-rhetoric to the topoi that drive people to rage at being subjected to insult and contempt. Part 2: Differences as Resources for Counsel Whereas the one-sided emotions of tyrants and flatterers lead to horror and terror, the openness of friends to other interpretations heals emotions. But fear of unlikeness inhibits their attentiveness. The Civile Conversation seeks to remedy this problem in ways that clarify Sidney’s approach. Anniball acknowledges that people tend to prefer the company of their own countrymen (104) to that of the ‘diverse nations,’ the ‘Frenchmen, Spaniardes, Englishmen, Fleminges, Almanes, Scottes, and Italians’ found in the court of France (103). They tend to seek those companions with similar dispositions: the merry person cannot abide one who is ‘heavily given’ (104). But because ‘we can not finde either friendes or parentes, which are in all pointes agreeable to our disposition and nature

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... wee must frame ourselves to beare with the imperfections of others.’ For ‘one offendeth by arrogancie, another by obstinacie, another by misreporting,’ and in other ways (104). Because we differ, we tend to judge the flaws of others more harshly than our own. We need to accommodate ourselves to them, for ‘if I should refuse the companie of a cavilling contentious fellowe, hee woulde perhappes refuse mine for some greater imperfection’ (105). The revised Arcadia shares Guazzo’s aim of teaching readers to discriminate between imperfect friends and intolerable flatterers and tyrants. It uses what Constance Jordan calls a coincidentia oppositorum to incorporate differences into individuals and their relationships. Jordan argues that, according to Sidney, ‘the true point of comparison between ... the ethical, embodied in the personal relations between man and woman; and the political, embodied in the civil relations between magistrate and the people ... was in their exemplification of the figure of oxymoron. In marriage and the family, the union of husband and wife, reflected initially in their experience of androgyny within their own persons ... was the basis for domestic harmony.’74 Differences exist between persons and within the soul, which are composed of the masculine and feminine, the commanding and the obedient, justice and mercy. Jordan claims, ‘Sidney’s text is feminist to the extent that it gives a positive value to the feminine aspect of male behavior in private life’ (222). I argue that Sidney found in the coincidentia oppositorum a way to make gender, status, and temperamental differences fruitful for emotion and for conversation. The model of ruler/ruled posits an analogy between political, domestic, and internal relations of reason to emotion. As Aristotle comments in the Politics, whereas the soul rules the body with a despotic rule, the intelligence rules desire (a cause of emotion) with a political and kingly rule (1.2, 1254b). Political rule uses persuasion, not force. The distinction between despotic and political rule was quoted frequently by writers on marriage and psychology, and operates in the revised Arcadia as a framework for clarifying oppositions between flattery and tyranny, on the one hand, and friendship and conversation, on the other.75 Flatterers and tyrants enslave others, whereas virtuous persons govern themselves and others by persuasion. The New Arcadia studies the socio-political and ethical implications of the analogy ruler/ruled :: man/woman :: reason/passion. Faced with differences, tyrants resolve conflict by eliminating or subduing the ruled. They are monologic, not dialogic. The flatterer’s attempts to enslave are more oblique but similarly monologic. Instead of forcing themselves on others, manipulators seem to go with the flow of the audience’s predispositions. Clinias, for

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example, ‘perceiving the flood of [his audience’s] fury began to ebb ... thought it policy to take the first of the tide, so that no man cried louder than he upon Basilius’ (288.31–3). He tickles Basilius with praise ‘in the hearing of his mistress’ (293.20), so that Basilius feels drawn to him. He produces these affects dispassionately, like Plexirtus, of whom the narrator says, ‘though no man felt less pity, no man could tell better how to stir pity’ (185.21). The manipulator seeks to become the ruling principle in another person’s mind. If flatterers cynically manipulate the emotions of others, tyrants use physical and verbal force to rule others as slaves. Cecropia, for example, makes force the source of gender distinctions and advises Amphialus to become absolute master over Philoclea in order to establish his manhood. Nothing can contrast more starkly with injunctions for married partners to abjure the rule of master to servant than her words: ‘For indeed, son, I confess unto you, in our very creation we are servants – and who praiseth his servants shall never be well obeyed; but, as a ready horse straight yields when he finds one that will have him yield, the same falls to bounds when he feels a fearful horseman’ (403.4–8). She defines women as beings who relish being violated. Menelaos regained Helen ‘by force; by force carries her home; by force enjoys her – and she, who could never like him for serviceableness, ever after loved him for violence’ (402.31–3). Rape defines the manly gender and victimhood the womanly one: ‘my Amphialus, know thyself a man; and show thyself a man – and believe me, upon my word, a woman is a woman’ (403.13–15). Service, on the other hand, denotes the voluntary subordination of oneself to others, following a chivalric and Christian model. As Pyrocles says of Daiphantus (Zelmane), ‘There is no service like his that serves because he loves’ (261.17). Unlike those who make themselves master of others’ minds, servants base their actions on self-command. Pamela praises Musidorus because ‘he, as if centaur-like he had been one piece with the horse, was no more moved than one is with the going of his own legs, and in effect, so did he command him as his own limbs’ (153.19– 23). Musidorus’s sovereignty over the horse (an image of passion derived from Plato’s Phaedrus) requires no use of force; Pamela can hardly distinguish his command from the horse’s obedience. He goes ‘with the horse,’ and ‘as he borrowed the horse’s body, so he lent the horse his mind.’76 Possessed of a unified self, he dedicates it to serving the lady, concluding each thing he does with his face towards Pamela, ‘as if thence came not only the beginning, but ending, of his motions’ (154.12). Be-

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cause self-command gives Musidorus autonomy, others cannot usurp power over the spur and whip of his mind or titillate and flatter his desires. Pamela demonstrates Stoic sovereignty over herself in her response to Cecropia’s torture, for she with ‘so heavenly a quietness and so graceful a calmness ... rather directed than obeyed the vexation’ (421.37, 39–422.1). She makes her senses ‘tokens’ rather than ‘instruments of her inward motions’ (336.30, 31). She displays heroic Stoic magnaminity by embroidering her purse, for her ‘mind which could cast a careless semblant upon the greatest conflicts of fortune, could command itself to take care for so small matters’ (355.15–17). Such a mind can be brought into submission only at its own behest. Yet her magnaminity leads to Christian patience, not Stoic apatheia, because she shows her openness to grief when she prays that she will ‘joyfully embrace what sorrow thou [God] wilt have me suffer’ (336.5). Calvin differentiates patience from Stoicism by asking, ‘were there no hardship in poverty, no pain in disease, no sting in ignominy, no fear in death, where would be the fortitude and moderation in enduring them?’ (Institutes 3.8.8). He scornfully rejects those ‘among Christians’ who are ‘a new kind of Stoics, who hold it vicious not only to groan and weep, but even to be sad and anxious’ (3.8.9). Pamela’s self-mastery is not incompatible with suffering. Zelmane, Pyrocles, Strephon, Claius, Kalander, and Musidorus also exhibit self-command, which makes them capable of serving others. Zelmane disguises herself as a man (Diaphantus) to serve and die for Pyrocles, and Pyrocles (Diaphantus) disguises himself as a woman (Zelmane) to serve Philoclea. The funny disguises of the Old Arcadia become tragic when Zelmane dies serving Pyrocles, and heroic when Pyrocles serves Philoclea to make his actions a memorial to Zelmane. The revised text celebrates heroism as enabling the most powerful character to achieve the deepest servanthood. Pyrocles exhibits his nobility by submitting ‘himself to be servant to the executioner’ that would have killed Musidorus, ‘a far notabler proof of his friendship, considering the height of his mind, than any death could be’ (NA 172.29–32). Sidney idealizes good marriages and courtships as relationships of reciprocal service. But the lack of equality between spouses makes counsel difficult. The text avoids a total impasse by representing ways that unequal persons achieve reciprocity through an exchange of roles. For example, Kerxenus feels a father’s love towards Musidorus, but vows to serve the virtue within him. Musidorus, who is older and more educated than Pyrocles, counsels him but is also counselled by him because Pyrocles is more experienced in love. Gynecia advises Basilius when he is

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weak, and he counsels her when she is troubled. Each friend or spouse becomes the troubled advisee and wise counsellor for the other, for Sidney’s compassionate comedy notes the imperfection of both, adapting Guazzo’s and Protestant writers’ emphases on accepting others as flawed human beings. The revised Arcadia represents social roles as partly arbitrary and reversible, building on Aristotle’s formulation of the man’s rule over his wife and children in the Politics: ‘The male is by nature more fit for leadership than the female (unless it somehow comes out unnaturally), and the elder and mature than younger and immature. But in political offices mostly the ruler and ruled take turns (the idea is to be naturally equal and differ not at all); however when in office one seeks to be different in stance and language and honours ... The male is permanently related to the female in this manner. But the rule over children is kingly. The parent is ruler by affection and by seniority, which is the form of kingly office ... for the king must differ in nature but be the same in race’ (1259b, 2–15).77 Aristotle differentiates a man’s rule over his children (based on the difference between the mature and the immature), from a man’s rule over his wife, which he compares to political rule. In the polis, the ruler and ruled are naturally equal by virtue of being citizens but politically unequal by virtue of the magistrate’s holding office. Domestic rule is partly natural, insofar as the male is believed to be generically (but not always specifically) more capable, and partly political, insofar as the woman can understand the reasons for the man’s decision. The wife can deliberate (unlike the slave), but she cannot rule. Writers on marriage follow Aristotle’s logic and argue that wives should participate in deliberations about the household but should abide by the decisions of their husbands. Vives scolds husbands who ‘through evyll and rough handelynge and in threatenynge of their wives, have them not as wives but as servauntes.’78 Writers base the wife’s subordination not on force but on consent. They depart from Aristotle when they advise women to persuade their husbands against sinful actions because spiritually they are equal before God,79 but they still insist on obedience. William Gouge expostulates, ‘“Let wives be subject to their husbands in everie thing,”’ but he ‘urges women never to obey husbands who want them to do what “is forbidden by God.”’80 Wives were supposed to oppose husbands who did not follow virtue. In Othello, Emilia rejects the rule of her husband, Iago, once she learns of his perfidy: ‘“Tis proper I obey him, but not now.”’81 Writers make exceptions to the man’s rule when the man was incom-

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petent and the woman prudent. Guazzo argues that, ‘some women are so skilul in the managing of affairs, that their husbands would be thought to do amiss, if they should dispose them in any other matter. And therefore Cato used to say to the Romans. We rule over the whole world, and our wives over us’ (The Civile Conversation, 209). Gouge, after going on for pages about the submission of women, grants that ‘it oft falleth out that a wise, vertuous, and gracious woman, is maried to an husband destitute of understanding ... In such a case the whole government lyeth upon the wife, so as her husband’s consent is not to be expected’ (Of Domesticall Duties, 169). Thus, in extraordinary circumstances the relation between husband and wife can be reversed, like the relation between the magistrate and the citizens in the passage from Aristotle. In the Old Arcadia, as we have seen, Gynecia counsels the guilty Basilius, paradoxically advising him to resume command over himself that he may resume command over her. The revised Arcadia takes the idea of the subordinate but autonomous woman one step further. Sidney believes that God has planted within women a love of excellence and knowledge of the law that gives them the power to resist tyranny, as Pamela and Philoclea resist Cecropia and as Parthenia resists her mother.82 This resistance defines identity, unlike Pyrocles’ early wavering search for the ends of private desire in the Old Arcadia. Parthenia’s heart binds her to Argalus’s virtue before she can obey her manipulative mother’s command to become betrothed to Demagoras. ‘Out of passion’ Parthenia begins ‘to take the authority of judgement’ (NA 29.3–4). Her mother tries all the persuasive means available to a ‘witty and hard-hearted’ person to force her daughter’s consent. However, ‘the more she assaulted, the more she taught Parthenia to defend’ (29.13–15), until Parthenia develops a resistant identity. Parthenia does not resist out of stubborness but because she cannot break a vow. Her passion becomes the source of agency and authority. Once she marries Argalus, she obeys him freely, following Protestant idealization, ‘he ruling because she would obey – or rather, because she would obey, she therein ruling’ (372.4–5). She disagrees with Argalus only when she believes he acts wrongly; but he insists on his way and leads them to death. Likewise Pamela resists Cecropia’s tortures and sophistries, grounding her constancy in her father’s will and in divine justice, using theological arguments from the Trewe Knowledge of the Christian Religion.83 She demonstrates her fittingness to rule by being willing to be ruled by her father and by God; she supports the beliefs that define her commonwealth and family. She, as a virtuous person, unites the opposites of ruler and

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servant, as well as man and woman. This coincidentia oppositorum also expresses itself in Pyrocles’ disguise as a woman and Musidorus’s disguise as a servant. The proper function of the household, the commonwealth, and the psyche requires the assent of both parts. Sidney, like Sir Thomas Smith and Plato (Republic 443, 444), stresses that a common welfare unites the ruler and the ruled.84 His narrator praises Euarchus, who ‘(virtuously and wisely acknowledging that he with his people made all but one politic body whereof himself was the head) even so cared for them as he would for his own limbs.’ Likewise, persons embody the union of differences of political status and gender displayed in the body politic.85 Because they can rule themselves, they can rule and be ruled by others (Plato Republic 444). This notion of the soul as composed of ruler and ruled alters the way persons are believed to experience emotion, and enlarges the resources for finding likeness between people that increases compassion. We have seen that Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Vives’s De anima et vita define humane pity as depending upon the capacity to see oneself as like others.86 Sidney’s New Arcadia, on the other hand, uses the circumstances of Renaissance rhetoricians (the topics denoting person, place, time, and so forth) to delineate the perception of ‘equality’ (or, more properly, likeness) as inflected by issues of status, gender, lineage, and special subsets of cultural interchange, such as hospitality relations and relations in courtship. Whereas Aristotle defines the persons whom people pity as ‘those who are like them in age, character, habits, reputation or family,’ Sidney’s rendering of Philoclea’s claims to pity suggests a more complex social and ethical grid. Philoclea addresses an appeal for mercy to her tormentor, Cecropia, in these words: ‘“If ... the common course of humanity cannot move you, nor the having me in your own walls cannot claim pity – nor womanly mercy, nor near alliance, nor remembrance ... that I am a prince’s daughter – yet let the love you have often told me your son bears me ... procure [relief]. And as for granting your request, know for certain, you lose your labours, being every day further-off-minded from becoming his wife, who useth me like a slave”’ (420.27–31, 37–9). Philoclea appeals to Cecropia’s humanity, to hospitality, gender, alliance, and princely status as sources of pity; but Cecropia sees no likeness between herself and Philoclea. She and Amphialus use Philoclea as a slave. Strephon and Claius, on the other hand, feel their compassion increase as they perceive Musidorus first as a thing, then as a man, then as a young and handsome man, and then as speaking Greek, the language of the shepherds. Whereas Aristotle stresses that people pity those who are like them, in

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the New Arcadia pity also reaches across a gap of difference. Euarchus as ruler differs from his people, but because they are also united in a coincidentia oppositorum, he cares for them as he would for himself. Similarly, characters who embody an internal union of opposites can mobilize opposite capacities. Pyrocles, dressed as a woman, finally acts and feels as a woman; when he believes Philoclea has died, he suffers with ‘cries and tears’ (432.17–20). His pity for Philoclea moves Philoclea to have the ‘pleasure to weep with’ him, saying that ‘so kindly came forth thy lamentations that they enforced me to lament too’ (438.9–10). Sidney reworks humanist ideas of the prudent character as a concord of opposites. In The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot compares prudence to an internal dance of gendered qualities: Wherfore, whan we beholde a man and a woman daunsinge to gether, let us suppose there to be a concorde of all the saide qualities, beinge joyned to gether, as I have set them in ordre. And the meving of the man wolde be more vehement, of the woman more delicat, and with lasse advauncing of the body, signifienge the courage and strenthe that oughte to be in a man, and pleasant sobrenesse that shulde be in a woman. And in this wise fierseness joyned with mildeness maketh severitie ; Audacitie with timerositie maketh magnanimitie; wilfull opinion and Tractabilitie (which is to be shortly persuaded and meved) maketh Constance a vertue ... These qualities, in this wise beinge knitte to gether, and signified in the personages of man and woman daunsinge, do expresse or sette out the figure of very nobilitie.87

Elyot uses marriage both to figure the concord of courage with soberness and to represent individual nobility. Elyot and Sidney claim that virtuous persons draw on opposite capacities. Sidney interprets opposites through the categories of estate and gender. Constance Jordan argues with respect to the Arcadia that the disguise of the prince as a servant and the man as a woman mediates oppositions between estates and genders that cannot be mediated by the political body because Basilius abdicates his responsibilities as king and father.88 The disguises also fulfil the wish expressed in romance that marriage may unite high status with love. In addition, the New Arcadia uses disguise to achieve comic effects. The text becomes hilarious (though not as consistently funny as the Old Arcadia) when Zelmane (Pyrocles) finds herself trapped between Basilius and Gynecia, both of whom are infatuated with her and jealous of each other: ‘Zelmane betwixt both, like the poor child whose father, while he beats him, will make him

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believe it is for love’ (NA 223.36–224.2). The narrative comments, ‘their love was hateful,’ treating as comic the humanist mobilization of opposite emotions to achieve a mean. Comedy, as the Defence of Poetry argues, lays bare human folly, or as Guazzo puts it, human imperfection. Sidney’s image of ‘Hercules in a woman’s attire, spinning at Omphale’s commandment’ shows how delight may be mixed with laughter. The image appears again in the New Arcadia when Pyrocles appears with the ‘rich jewel’ whose ‘device’ images ‘a Hercules made in little form, but set with a distaff in his hand (as he once was by Omphale’s commandment)’ (69.5–6). The Defence elaborates: ‘for the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight, and the scornfulness of the action stirreth laughter’ (115.37–116.2).89 The texts invite a moral judgment, but not such a severe one as to injure our pleasure in human nature, for ‘delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves’ (115.17–18). Internal dualities do not save characters from imperfection, but Sidney’s language allows readers to perceive the tensions and absurdities possible in gender dualisms that can also promote understanding and compassion. The New Arcadia represents the emotional versatility of Pyrocles and Musidorus as serio-comedy; one draws upon masculine and feminine capacities and the other on qualities of the servant and prince. Zelmane (Pyrocles in disguise), who appears and acts as a woman also acts like a man, most humorously after she has slain a lion and pursues Philoclea, who continues to run away in fear; Zelmane carries the lion’s head in her hand, but runs slowly so that she might have glimpses of the beauties that appear through Philoclea’s light apparel (112–13). Musidorus uses his shepherd’s disguise more seriously as a cover for wooing Pamela with stories, giving her glimpses of the noble character that lies beneath his disguise. Disguise expresses the coincidentia oppositorum within persons that enables them to act flexibly in varying circumstances. The text uses this idea to attack deformities of the honour code that lead adherents to overvalue honour and rage until they become tyrannical. It traces the consequences of seeking mastery at the expense of service (represented most bitingly in Cecropia) or masculine prowess at the expense of feminine pity (demonstrated especially in Anaxius) and clarifies confusions between an honour system founded on valour and one arising from rage. Noble warriors capable of courage are also capable of mercy.90 After Zelmane has disarmed Lycurgus, through a vigorous exercise of martial skill and strength, Lycurgus sues for mercy: ‘“Enough! excellent lady,” said he.

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“The honour is yours – whereof you shall want the best witness if you kill me. As you have taken from men the glory of manhood, return so now again to your own sex for mercy”’ (462.15–18). Zelmane finds herself caught between disdain at the idea of pity and the feeling of compassion when she sees ‘image of the human condition’ in the suffering of her opponent; but she kills Lycurgus because she notices Philoclea’s garter on his arm, a garter he had seized forcibly from Philoclea. Even though she is temporarily overcome by rage (in a manner Sidney comically exaggerates), she also demonstrates nimbleness, resolution, virtue, courage, and nobility against Anaxius’s strength, rage, fury, confidence, and pride (463). The text redefines honour in the direction of martial virtue and against honour based on precedence alone. The battle between Zelmane and Anaxius pits a man disguised as a woman against a misogynist man who ‘liked no music but the neighing of horses, the sound of trumpets, and the cries of yielding persons’ (393.14–15), a man who scorns women ‘as a peevish, paltry sex, not worthy to communicate with my virtues’ (391.34–5). The text’s representation of their fight clarifies Pyrocles and Musidorus’s debate about whether women can be virtuous and whether men who love women become effeminate. The treatment of Anaxius suggests that a man who has no respect for women and no feminine aspect to his personality makes honour depend upon predominance by force alone.91 But courage and skill in arms do not add up to valour. Anaxius, rather than being courageous, is ‘tenderly sensible’ to anything that he can construe as a ‘wrong’ (390.10, 12). He is incapable of distinguishing ‘between valour and violence,’ and he falsely describes inflexible anger as courageous constancy (390.13). The narrative does not quite insist that honour must be accompanied by moral virtue, as humanists argue, though references to pride and injustice move in that direction. Instead, Anaxius lacks martial valour, because he is incapable of judging insult and the degree of force appropriate to a response. His inflexibility produces angry, blind reactions to all stimuli that suggest insult.92 He lacks the masculine and feminine capacities that make the psyche a ‘commonwealth,’ and he cannot dance, literally or in Elyot’s figurative sense. Defined by anger, he cannot feel feminine pity. Even when he sees his brother dead, ‘then pity would fain have drawn tears, which fury in their spring dried; and anger would fain have spoken, but that disdain sealed up his lips’ (463.5–7). The text does not go so far as to suggest that women are capable of martial valour; after all Zelmane (Pyrocles) is really a man. Parthenia and Zelmane, the woman who served Pyrocles, die in their attempts to

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assume male roles. Even Pamela and Gynecia, princely women, subordinate themselves firmly to male authority.93 But Pamela exhibits martial courage by choosing to face death unafraid, arguing that ‘hope is the fawning traitor of the mind. While under colour of friendship, it robs it of his chief force of resolution’ (456.6–8). In the absence of internal duality, characters endure a miserable solitude. Solitary tyrants have nothing in their heads but horror and terror, emotions that find their own ‘evidence.’94 They fear to be sociable and put themselves on a level with other men. Seeking mastery only, they are left alone with their boundless desires and anxious cares, unable to make distinctions between the possibly frightening and the actually terrifying. Lacking an internal commonwealth and friends, which would allow him to perceive things from another point of view, the king of Phrygia creates the reality he fears. ‘Thinking himself contemned, knowing no countermine against contempt but terror,’ he punished his people (170.11–13). Unconsciously, he frightens himself by using rhetorical topoi that cause fear. Philanax illuminates such self-fulfilling prophecies when he objects to Basilius’s plan to retire from governing because of the threatening oracle: ‘Why should you deprive yourself of government for fear of losing your government, like one that should kill himself for fear of death?’ (21.23–5). Philanax’s comment suggests that characters create their own emotions by their internal uses of rhetoric. But rhetoric need not be pernicious. Rhetorical handbooks show how emotions can be negotiated; they are persuadable. Speakers and inward orators turn anger to mildness and fear to confidence. Such changes are possible because emotions involve evaluation. When Aristotle defines fear as a disturbance arising from an image (phantasias) of a painful or destructive evil that is about to happen, he specifies that the perceived distance of the imagined evil affects the degree of fear one experiences (Rhetoric 2.5, 1382a). The speaker increases or decreases fear by making danger seem near or remote. Because emotions shaped by rhetoric can change into their opposites, people can negotiate differences. Those who do not do so fail to persuade others. Philanax and Musidorus do not change Basilius and Pyrocles with their sharp speech because they do not acknowledge differences between their points of view and those of others. They advise without awareness of their own shortcomings. Persuasive characters acknowledge their limitations; they adjudicate between contradictory norms and between emotional frameworks. The New Arcadia represents these adjudications in its hospitality scenes. When Kalander, the host, becomes incapacitated with grief, Musidorus, the guest, takes

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care of him (see above 82–3, NA 33.31–2). After Strephon and Claius fail to comfort Musidorus because they impose their reason on his sorrow, they learn to yield and give place to his grief (see 81 above, NA 10.14– 29). The limitations and diversities of humankind require persons to accept qualities apparently unlike their own. Opposite qualities bestow flexibility that allows persons to persuade emotions rather than being victimized by them. Sidney articulates emotional persuasion as a form of rhetorical invention in which characters discover the circumstances that support more hopeful, active, and intelligent action. Without prudence characters are condemned, like the text’s tyrants and manipulators, to imprisonment in their own self-created, one-sided emotional fantasies.

5 Anger as an Instrument of Justice: The Vehement versus the Mild Style in Milton’s Early Prose

Like Sir Philip Sidney, John Milton explores the inner rhetoric of tyrants who consume themselves with envy and hatred. Seeking to surpass all others, Paradise Lost’s Satan creates insatiable desire and anxious cares. The fallen Satan, Adam, and Eve cannot by themselves shift from angry to mild emotions, from despair to hope. They cannot acknowledge counter-evidence to their own feelings. Without friends or internal conversation, Satan (eternally), and Adam and Eve (temporarily) experience emotion that turns ceaselessly back on itself, independent of objective social facts and norms. Paradise Lost discovers an internal solitude more absolute than anything envisioned by Stephano Guazzo or Sidney. Milton’s epic also represents persons who heal radical solitude by arguing from at least two sides of questions pertinent to emotion. Just as the Arcadias emphasize the need for opposite qualities within and between characters, Milton’s major works emphasize a multiplicity of sharply contrasted types of characters and styles. An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642) defends different human temperaments and persuasive modes. Melancholy speakers check the high spirits of the ‘over-confident’ and the ‘staid ... teach ... the sober-minded.’ ‘Bitter and irefull rebukes’ leave ‘wilfull impugners’ without excuse.1 But only vehement rhetoric, in Milton’s view, can confront and unmask one-sided rhetorical topoi that produce open-ended tyrannical emotions. In order to understand how to counter these emotions and how to criticize a deformed rhetoric of emotion, we need to understand how Milton represents anger’s relation to truth and how a deformed rhetoric of honour imitates in deceptive ways rhetoric’s right use of anger. Paradise Lost’s Satan and Eve use distorted rhetoric to create feelings of injury,

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envy, and deprivation.2 But Milton discriminates between rivalry that discovers truth, engaged in by Abdiel and Milton himself, and one that injures self and others, created by Satan. The early prose recommends invective as the best antidote for the latter. Once we understand Milton’s agonistic concept of anger, we can interpret Satan’s rhetoric and discern how and when he produces factional emotions that lead to civil war. Milton’s major works use anger to shame opponents by bringing tacit beliefs into the open and challenging them. Anger and indignation arising from a sense of being dishonoured lead him to excoriate perceived insults.3 Milton, like Sidney in ‘The Defence of the Earl of Leicester’ and Pyrocles and Musidorus in the Old Arcadia, expresses indignation and anger when his sense of worth is impugned. Unlike Sidney and his characters, however, who respond when their aristocratic status has been ignored, Milton expresses hatred for the rigid social hierarchies that differentiated aristocrats from others. But even though he (like Sidney before he wrote the Arcadias), as Michael Murrin rightly emphasizes, ‘never joined the army or saw a battle,’ he adapts terms of honour to individual merit and to egalitarian rhetorical contests and polemical debates.4 Milton draws on Aristotle’s rhetoric of emotions and creates a caustic invective to unmask lies. Abdiel, the constant angel of Paradise Lost, uses this rhetoric against Satan.5 Milton’s invective exceeds anything in Sidney’s writing, even in ‘The Defence of the Earl of Leicester,’ though Sidney had a reputation for being hot headed and quick to take offence at insult. Few readers have not been offended by Milton’s references to body parts and sweaty sock in attacking his opponents, but we need to be aware of the culturally specific meaning of anger before we judge.6 Our culture distrusts extreme anger, but classical and seventeenth-century English cultures connected anger to justice. Classical Athenians, for example, judged the plausibility of legal charges according to the persuasiveness of a plaintiff’s anger.7 Milton likewise considers anger in a distinct way that speaks to our very different early-twenty-first-century world. He justifies angry rhetoric as the only adequate weapon against oppression and deception. This chapter analyses how the early prose attacks the epistemology of euphemistic rhetoric, and chapter 6 pursues this topic into Paradise Lost. Chapter 7 argues that the text deepens our understanding of deformed rhetoric by exploring the way Satan removes it from shared social norms, interiorizing and expanding emotions of envy and malice until he lives in metaphysical solitude. Chapter 8 claims that to heal radical solitude, Paradise Lost’s Adam and Eve use mild speech to address rivalry and blame. But we

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cannot understand interiorized malice or creative counsel without first analysing the structure and ends of Milton’s mild and vehement styles. Nevertheless, any treatment of Milton’s vehemence must take into account modern scholarly aversion to his scathing language. Even scholars with deep commitments to Milton have strongly criticized his language in Animadversions Upon the Remonstrants Defence, against Smectymnuus (1641) and An Apology.8 Don M. Wolfe, the author of the introduction to the Yale Complete Prose Works, and Rudolf Kirk, who edited Animadversions, defend Bishop Hall, the object of Milton’s attacks. Wolfe calls him ‘moderate’ and ‘learned’ (30, 31, 55) and Kirk praises him as a ‘good man’ (655).9 In the scenarios of the critics, Milton plays ‘bully’ to Hall’s ‘victim,’ as Thomas Kranidas puts it.10 But the purpose of Milton’s denigration remains opaque until we examine the culturally specific nature of anger. Milton’s prose and Paradise Lost represent anger as arising out of a sense of injury to one’s self-respect and from a belief that one has been treated unjustly. Philip Fisher’s The Vehement Passions helps to explain why.11 Fisher argues that the Homeric, Platonic, and Aristotelian frameworks that influence treatments of emotion until Hume and Kant treat anger as restoring worth to one whose honour has been slighted. Whereas our ‘therapeutic’ culture treats anger as something to be controlled or understood, the classical model presents anger as a positive moral state.12 Fisher notes that when Aristotle defines anger as a ‘desire’ for a ‘conspicuous’ revenge because of a slight, he emphasizes that the slight is ‘without justification.’13 A person’s anger at unjust insult asserts self-worth and restores justice.14 Fisher goes on to explain that because the slight is directed ‘against oneself or those near to one,’ the angry response to it must be distinguished from mere immediate and selfish reaction. Anger restores justice to important others in one’s world.15 Linking anger to concern for others, Milton’s Animadversions asserts that Joseph Hall’s insidious arguments so mislead the innocent that they transport those ‘who love the soules of men’ into ‘a well heated fervencie.’16 This love of souls is the ‘dearest love, and stirs up the noblest jealousie’ (CPW I.663). Milton’s prose draws on Aristotle’s rhetoric of emotions to shame the prelates for misleading the people.17 Critics have demonstrated the importance of Aristotle and Cicero to Milton’s writing, noting that he recommends their rhetorical works in Of Education (June 1644) (CPW II.402–3). Annabel Patterson and Barbara K. Lewalski show how they contribute to Milton’s vision of himself as a writer.18 An Apology intensi-

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fies and redirects Aristotle’s treatment of indignation by claiming that when ‘corruptions’ need to be reformed, the speaker needs ‘power, high autority and indignation’ to cast ‘derision and scorne upon perverse and fraudulent seducers’ (CPW I.900).19 Whereas Aristotle treats indignation as an emotion caused by a person’s undeserved good fortune, Milton treats it as a response to undeserved dishonour (Rhetoric 2.9, 1356b). For example, he attacks Hall’s pamphlet impugning the purity of his youth by writing ‘that, if he would needs put his foot to such a sweaty service, the odour of his Sock was like to be neither musk, nor benjamin’ (CPW I.895). ‘Sweaty’ and ‘sock’ register viscerally Milton’s distaste for the personal attack.20 Milton uses anger to manifest his intellectual prowess in competition for truth by expressing emotion pertinent to confrontation. He urges brotherly understanding for the perturbed but rage against the deceptive. Drawing on humanist writings, he argues that the need for a multiplicity of approaches springs from human imperfection. Imperfection makes us differ from one another, and yet it serves as a means of social connection. The ‘cheerfull and free’ strengthen the ‘dejected of spirit,’ and the derisive and scornful bruise the ‘perverse and fraudulent’ (CPW I.900). Anger and ‘grim laughter’ find their place amid a broad range of attitudes adapted to the moral and psychological differences of readers (CPW I.663; see also 664, 903–4).21 Milton’s treatment of anger qualifies the clear differentiations Norbert Elias draws between the medieval warriors who unhesitatingly express their aggressive impulses, courtiers who constantly assess the opinions of others to achieve their ends through conversation, and the bourgeoisie who are subject to a highly organized system of social pressures that structure their time, actions, and affect.22 Although Elias acknowledges that even in civilized bourgeois persons, ‘conscious and unconscious selfcontrol always remains diffuse in places and open to the breakthrough of socially unproductive forms of drive energy’ (455), he insists that outbursts of rage are ‘exceptional phenomena,’ or ‘“pathological” degeneration’ in ‘later phases of social development’ than that of the warrior (159). But Milton and other English Protestants interpret anger as a sign of heroic fervour. They adopt metaphors of warfare, even when they were not fighting in a war.23 Yet Milton, though a fiery orator, does not (according to his own account) act from immediate passion as Elias claims feudal lords do. Milton argues that the intensity of anger arises from epistemological and ethical grounds. Far from being controlled from without by invisible social constraints, Milton’s anger arises from

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his spirited perception of his honour; he defies the external constraints of the Established Church, cutting through them with biting force. But he recommends using invective with awareness of the need on occasion for gentle speech. Milton’s bitterness and rage exceed that found in other Protestant writings early in 1641, especially the writings of the moderates, the Smectymnuuns (whom he defends).24 But, by arguing for the ethical necessity of rage, he brings anger within the terms of civilized speech that are the focus of the present volume. He, like his Independent and tolerationist contemporaries, adjudicates between what is appropriate to the deceptively malicious and what is fitting for the innocently confused. The grounds for making such a discrimination with the concomitant choice between the use of invective and gentle language was a bone of contention in the mid-seventeenth-century Protestant war of words, a conflict that, I argue, shaped and redirected Milton’s use of gentle and vehement speech in Areopagitica and ultimately in Paradise Lost. Though the roots of Milton’s zeal in classical and Protestant vehemence have been well recognized, scholars have not focused on the controversies that surround the use of vindictive and mild language. Orthodox Protestants (who aimed at having a State Church) and tolerationists (Independents who believed in tolerating a plurality of religious beliefs rather than seeking a state church with coercive power) used rhetoric to combat what they viewed as satanic threats to true belief, though they understood ‘true’ in different senses. For the former, ‘true’ applied to Presbyterian belief, but for the latter, truth was subject to argument and debate. Milton’s vehement rhetoric moves from a defence of the first to the earnest promotion of the second. Orthodox Protestant and Tolerationist Discourses on Anger and Mildness Presbyterians and tolerationists discriminate enemies against whom one uses invective from the naively erring who deserve mildness, but tolerationists are, unsurprisingly, broader in their sympathies and offer distinct reasons for gentle language. Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), written by the Lutheran Jacobus Acontius as Satanae Stratagemata (1565) and translated (Books I–IV in 1647) by Milton’s friend John Goodwin, goes so far as to banish anger from religious controversy. Acontius revises Plutarch’s comment in ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend’ that nurses should raise up children who have fallen and ‘still them by all meanes’

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before they ‘rebuke and chastise them for looking no better to their feet.’25 Making a slight but important change, he argues that counsellors in matters of religion should be loving with erring comrades as one would to a ‘brother or son’ to whom, if he fell, ‘thou wouldst run ... and raise him up as gingerly as thou canst.’ Acontius leaves out the scolding and recommends compassion only. He dwells on how moved one would be, not with anger to ‘inveigh against him with harsh language,’ but with tenderness.26 But other Protestants were not always as gentle. Unlike Cicero, who excludes fully experienced anger from conversation and counsel, some Protestants demand that counsellors manifest rage against the wicked. They do so in part because they are more afraid of evils within the soul than earlier Catholic humanist and Protestant writers. The late-sixteenth-century psychologist, Timothie Bright, for example, warns the friend to whom he addresses his treatise that melancholy may arise from the effect of the wrath of God on his emotions.27 But he does not make that influence the overriding focus of his analysis. Seventeenth-century Protestants, on the other hand, become preoccupied with the possibility of demonic interference. They view emotions and impulses as potentially subversive to orthodox political and religious beliefs, and they objectify these threatening beliefs onto ‘Satan,’ against whom extreme anger must be used as a weapon. Protestants feared that their opponents might use psychological persuasion to win the people, the unknowing victims of religiously motivated duplicity. The preacher John Downame’s The Christian Warfare (1604) warns against the ‘temptations and assaults of our spirituall enemies,’ who withdraw ‘Gods servants from their subjection and alleageance ... making them their slaves and perpetuall vassals.’28 He makes readers conscious of how an appeal to their emotions might change their convictions and gives them signs by which to recognize satanic strategies.29 Faced with the dangers of a cunning persuasion, some Protestants resort to a language of struggle and combat. Sermons repeatedly allude ‘to spiritual ... warfaring’ (Christian Warfare, 142). Satan makes an ambush during this war, creeping into the soul, ‘a subtle disputant plying us with false reasoning against the light, a bold accuser bearing down upon our own inward weakness’ (Christian Warfare, 145). Patrick Collinson comments in The Birthpangs of Protestant England that ‘the military paradigm is so apt and so vivid that sometimes Christian publicists have started at a spiritual and metaphorical level with the analogy of holy violence and have ended up in the midst of actual violence.’30

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A polarizing tendency contributes to this ‘warfare’ by lumping all positions into sharply opposing camps. Radical Protestants insist ‘on the crudest and most prejudicially damaging division of all, into two, as if everyone had to be one thing or the other’ (Birthpangs, 147). Following a similar logic, Christocentrism in the sixteenth century led to a focus on the Antichrist. Desiring strong faith, writers formulated it through its opposite, Atheism. In pursuing such invidious distinctions, zealous Protestants exaggerate small differences: ‘there was no halfway house between truth and error, which were both epistemological and moral absolutes.’ Anyone whose belief was at all suspect could be identified with the enemy (Birthpangs, 148) and invective could be turned against them. But those of the godly who felt tormented with excessive fear of their own sinfulness might be counselled in a milder tone, and Protestant writers use moderating topoi to help them.31 They list cognitive errors to which a godly person may be prone. For example, the preacher John Ball’s A Treatise of Faith (1657) comments that when a person feels that there is not ‘any good thing in himself’ (175) one should supply moderate counsel that reminds the unfortunate of previous acts of God’s graciousness.32 Even when he recommends strong speech, Ball emphasizes ‘the spirit of meekness and compassion’ with which counsel should be given (Treatise, 185). Downame earlier resolves to beat ‘downe with the cannon-shot of Gods threatnings, the high forts of their proud presumption, and rouzing them out of the deepe slumber of retchlesse securitie’; but he also recommends ‘raising up and comforting those that mourne in Syon, stooping, yea lying groveling under the heavie burthen of their sin.’33 One state of mind requires vehement language, the other gentle advice. Tolerationists redraw the lines of accommodation. Whereas orthodox Protestants reserve brotherly language for the godly and use vehement language against ‘sects,’ tolerationists and Independents advocate a compassionate attitude towards God’s ‘distressed servants the separatists,’ as William Walwyn puts it in ‘The Compassionate Samaritane’ (1644), a tract that influenced Areopagitica (1644). Walwyn asks that God ‘suffer those afflicted people no longer to endure reproach or molestation for doing of their duties.’34 Walwyn deconstructs the invidious binary distinctions discussed by Collinson, claiming that the divines ‘openly condemne, cry up, or cry downe, what makes for or against themselves.’ He criticizes their rhetoric, claiming that they ‘brand men with the name of hereticks, and fasten what errours they thinke are most

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hatefull to the people, upon those men that they purpose to make odious’ (Compassionate, 39; Tracts 3, 84). Lumping Anabaptists, Brownists, and Independents and others into an ‘odious’ category (Compassionate, 71, 72; Tracts 3, 100), conformists manufacture fantastic charges: against the Anabaptists, that they ‘allow not’ government (a charge Walwyn rebuts in Compassionate, 65ff.; Tracts 3, 97ff.); against the antinomians, that a believer may live as he likes. Walwyn rejects this polarizing discourse, appealing to ‘Our Saviour Christ’ who ‘did not use the Sadduces in so unkinde a manner ... though they came to him in a kinde of insolent confidence in these their opinions, which he knew sufficiently, he, neverthelesse both heard and answered them gently; he did not revile them with reproachfull language’ (Compassionate, 85). Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, whose last words Milton memorializes as ‘full of meeknes and breathing charity,’ because he ‘exhorts us to hear with patience and humility those, however they be miscall’d, that desire to live purely’ (CPW II.561), goes further than Walwyn to claim that those who are branded as false believers may ‘maintaine some errors ... But oft-times in the midst of thickest ore we finde the purest gold,’ a position Milton elaborates in Areopagitica.35 Tolerationists attribute satanic deceptiveness to the supporters of censorship because they employ ‘shifts and stratagems’ to suppress beliefs with which they disagree. In answer to the ‘Divines’ who claim that they do not wish to compel consciences, but only to ‘prevent the growth and encrease of errors,’ Walwyn replies that if their conclusions be built on ‘certaine foundations, they need not avoyde the combate with any sort of men of what opinion soever. Truth was not used to feare or to seeke shifts or stratagems for its advancement.’36 The refusals of Presbyterians and Episcopals to engage in debate suggest to Walwyn a lack of confidence in the truth of their positions. He adapts the language of warfare and trial to the testing of truth, emphasizing the open field of battle. John Goodwin uses the analogy of light and dark to make a similar point in Theomachia (1644). This time the idea of light captures the need for public, manifest statements of truth: ‘error cannot be healed or suppressed but by the manifestation of the truth, as darknesse cannot be destroyed or removed but by the shining of the light.’ The ‘congregationall ways ... rejoyceth in the method of this warfare and advance, against ... errors and heresies.’37 Goodwin’s words illuminate Acontius’s title, Englished as Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), which promises to ‘discover’ in the sense of ‘bring to light’ Satan’s secret tactics for angering people and producing conflict. In order to fight these ‘stratagems,’ Goodwin advo-

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cates the testing of error against the light of truth. Walwyn also advocates a fair exchange of opinions about beliefs between ordinary people against the bishops’ desire to forbid all but the Episcopals and scholars from exploring religious truth. The desire to test truth leads to a vigorous rhetoric designed to reveal error and expose moral decay. Tolerationists set limits to the scope of freedom and compassion. When it comes to ‘Prelaty,’ they use vehement rhetoric. Even Walwyn calls the bishops ‘drones and caterpillars of the commonwealth, in making deservedly odious to the people their oppressive courts, fines, censures, and imprisonments’ (Compassionate 19; Tracts 3, 74). Milton makes the distinction between the harmless and the hateful as early as 1641, but unlike contemporary orthodox Protestants (and, later, the tolerationists), he offers reasons for using gentle rhetoric towards people with other beliefs and vindictive rhetoric against those who would coerce others to believe as they do. The choice between the gentle and the vehement draws boundaries between friend and enemy. By articulating reasons for drawing the boundaries as he does, Milton creates a rationale for a discourse that produces emotions such as anger, hatred, and indignation. He adapts Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and epic treatments of emotions related to honour to the conditions of orthodox Protestant and tolerationist spiritual warfare. Miltonic Anger and Mildness: The Animadversions and An Apology The Anti-Prelatical Tracts, along with parts of the later prose and Paradise Lost, are preoccupied with the moral force of anger and use epic language to explore and represent it. Critics, especially Annabel Patterson, have argued strongly that Milton’s concept of the orator is heroic.38 Barbara K. Lewalski demonstrates that Milton’s verbal agon advances truth ‘by a constant clash of opinions that promotes arduous intellectual struggle and individual choice.’39 Paradise Lost also examines the powerful struggles for honour engaged in pre-eminently by God, the Son, and the unfallen angels, as I argue in chapter 6. It dramatizes their anger at insults to their honour and to the profound reality of what they are and believe. Milton represents the anger of God and the angels in terms of archaic topoi of wrath, identifying it with legitimate power.40 Unlike earlier scholars, I argue that Paradise Lost and the prose celebrate appropriate anger and scornful laughter identified with rivalry over honour.41 Articulating cognitive criteria for indignation and rage, An Apology helps to explain why. The text insists that anger draws bound-

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aries between lies and truth by rejecting attempts to conceal honest arguments. Mild or disinterested language cannot draw lines in this way. Milton’s agonistic rhetoric, like the ferocious eloquence of Protestant zeal that Thomas Kranidas analyses, cleanly and emphatically divides the better from the worse action or opinion.42 An Apology (CPW I.900) illuminates this effort when it identifies the rhetoric of zeal with apocalyptic warfare, adapting the language of honour to religious conflict.43 Milton’s verbal anger defines the boundaries of his beliefs. The role of anger changes as his beliefs evolve from the Anti-Prelatical tracts to Areopagitica. The shift from bitterness at being suffocated in his conscience to fiery energy as he ardently pursues freedom can best be understood in light of contemporary controversies. For Milton, anger does not just define differences of status, party, or religion even in his more Presbyterian pamphlets, An Apology and Animadversions. Although he intensifies zealous rhetoric against the prelates, he gives anger and indignation ethical purpose in Aristotle’s sense. Anger restores justice to oneself and others when their worth has been impugned. Anger seeks to measure the real ethical quality of actions hidden beneath appearances. In An Apology, Milton addresses criticism of his invective by raising the question of whether, in oratory, a ‘vehement vein throwing out indignation, or scorn upon an object that merits it, were among the aptest ideas of speech.’ Though he chooses not to defend vehemence by reference to classical rhetoric (because his opponents attack it on religious grounds), he remarks that it were easy to make the aptness ‘cleare both by the rules of best rhetoricians, and the famousest examples of the Greek and Roman orations’ (CPW I.899).44 By referring to the ‘indignation, or scorn’ directed upon an appropriate object, Milton invokes the Aristotelian and Ciceronian idea that people ought to speak with indignation against outrage. For Aristotle, ‘style expresses emotion when a man speaks with anger of wanton outrage (hubris)’ or ‘with indignation and reserve ... of things false and impious.’45 Hubris (insult) rightly provokes anger because hubris is a slight or ‘esteeming little’ (oligôria from oligos, ‘little’). It consists in causing injury or pain to another so that the injured one is shamed, not for just any purpose, but for the pleasure of the aggressor (2.2, 1378b). Aristotle suggests that those who commit hubris feel pleasure because in acting badly against others, they outdo them. According to Aristotle a slight diminishes the worth of the other person and implies a judgment about what has value. In the face of this diminishment, people rightly feel anger. Of course, emotions may be

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based on erroneous or misleading information. But anger is often called for.46 Failure to show anger would make one ridiculous or contemptible. Indignation expresses a writer’s sense of social norms and ethical values. Like Aristotle, Milton defends the cognitive and ethical bases of anger and indignation. He directs zealous anger against ‘new heresies’ and ‘old corruptions’ (CPW I.900). Animadversions and An Apology express anger based on Milton’s active disapproval of arguments he considers deceptive. But he also employs Cicero’s ‘explosive heat’ to defend the glory of God.47 When Milton’s early pamphlets express anger against what he views as the pernicious practices and arguments of the bishops, his fierce words suggest that he feels mortally offended by the language and argument of ‘Episcopacie.’48 Anyone who adopts the arguments used to defend the doctrines and practices of the Episcopal Church becomes the butt of Milton’s satire.49 Such is the fate of Bishop Hall in the Animadversions. Don M. Wolfe comments that Hall was a moderate who wished to resolve controversy between the Protestants and members of the Established Church. But in the pamphlet to which Milton responds, A Short Answer to the Tedious Vindication of Smectymnuus (12 April 1641), Hall resorts to sharp language.50 Milton excoriates Hall for his response to the Smectymnuun positions he holds dear. Modern readers, understandably, have trouble accepting as serious Milton’s response of ‘Ha,ha,ha’ to Hall’s praise of the English clergy for their ‘eminent schollers’ (CPW I.726).51 Rudolf Kirk calls Milton’s identification of Hall with ‘clarks’ who ‘spend their youth in loitering, bezzling, and harlotting,’ ‘scurrilous’ (CPW I.655; see also 676–7). Nor can we condone Milton’s selecting out Hall’s worst arguments and misrepresenting them so that he can vilify them.52 But Milton does not write about or use invective in our terms. His scorn needs to be understood in the Homeric, Aristotelian, and Ciceronian framework in which he thought and in light of his own history. Personal matters probably influenced Milton’s attitudes. He had once aspired to be a clergyman, but Archbishop Laud’s strictures turned him away from that calling and left a bitter memory. In addition, his friend and tutor, Thomas Young, had contributed to an earlier pamphlet attacked by Hall, An Answer to a Booke entituled, An Humble Remonstrance (20 March 1641), and Milton himself was probably involved in writing the ‘Postscript.’53 But Animadversions goes beyond personal response to express Milton’s hatred and disgust at the kind of argument Hall makes. He follows the Presbyterian practice of attacking Anglican rituals, set prayers, and the order of worship rather

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than defending the search for truth against the imposition of belief as he does later in Areopagitica. But, while he shares a great deal with the Presbyterians, his defence of anger and invective differs from theirs because of its much greater focus on ethical and cognitive criteria. ‘The Preface’ of Animadversions justifies Milton’s departure from ‘Christian meeknesse’ into ‘rougher accent’ (CPW I.662) and articulates the decorum of anger. Milton acknowledges that ‘in publique sufferings for the cause of Christ, his rule and example’ teach us not to ‘answer the reviler in his language though never so much provok’t,’ and identifies mild speech as the rule for suffering Christians. However, he makes one crucial exception: ‘in the detecting, and convincing of any notorious enimie to truth and his countries peace,’ ‘it will be nothing disagreeing from Christian meeknesse to handle such a one in a rougher accent, and to send home his haughtinesse well bespurted with his owne holy-water’ (CPW I.662). This irritable insult seems gratuitous, personal, and offensive. But Milton regards Bishop Hall as a person who, by virtue of defending Prelacy, has become an ‘enimie to truth,’ and he attacks the rhetorical and epistemological bases of Hall’s arguments. His goal is to uncover the deception that he believes the bishops use against the souls of the people. Milton identifies truth with the expression of belief held in good conscience by ordinary people, whom he compares to Roman slaves. Once a year these slaves ‘might freely speake their minds’ (CPW I.669). He excoriates the bishops’ ‘imprimaturs’ (‘censorship of pamphlets against the prelates’ n.24) ‘when liberty of speaking, then which nothing is more sweet to man, was girded, and straight lac’t almost to a broken-winded tizzick,’ metaphors that express his sense of being smothered, almost strangled and rendered breathless by a lung disease (‘phthisic’ or ‘tissick’). Within the Homeric/Aristotelian framework, such a diminution of his truth as he sees it must produce anger that seeks to restore his sense of worth and the value of his beliefs. Milton defends truth by dissecting the sleights and stratagems of his enemy, teaching readers to recognize the argumentative measures by which Hall befuddles them and distracts them from what is important. Milton praises Christ and Solomon because they were moved to wrath against the scribes and Pharisees who oppressed and misled people into thinking outward ceremony was more important than inner belief. Like Aristotle, Milton locates a source of anger in care for others. Following his models, Milton turns his wrath on Hall, analysing stratagems whose deceptiveness can be uncovered by disclosing their method. He accuses

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Hall of enclosing the ‘Christian insensibly within the close ambushment of worst errors.’ The metaphor of ambush suggests arguments that leave a reader no way out. Then, Milton continues, Hall confuses his readers ‘with a slye shuffle of counterfeit principles chopping and changing till hee have glean’d all the good ones out of their minds.’ Focusing their attentions, for example, on the need for hierarchy in running a church, Hall distracts his readers from their need to attend what is right in conscience. ‘Counterfeit principles’ come to the fore. The bishop ‘leaves [his readers] at last’ in ‘a desperate stupidity,’ befuddled by these principles. Rather than confronting Hall’s arguments, Milton denigrates the techniques by which Hall argues. For Hall’s military and agricultural ambushing and chopping causes Milton, who loves truth and the conscience of the people, to be ‘transported with the zeale of truth to a well heated fervencie’ (CPW I.663). Milton insults Hall’s profession as appropriate to the ambitious. Hall himself was probably not possessed by any extraordinary urge for advancement, but, Milton implies, because bishops as a social group necessarily seek ‘place,’ that is, a living, Hall by virtue of being a bishop is implicated in the search for advancement. To ‘uncase’ a ‘grand imposture,’ Milton mixes in ‘grim laughter,’ free of insolence because it is in an ‘austere visage,’ giving it moral weight (CPW I.663).54 Milton argues that such laughter possesses ‘a strong and sinewy force in teaching and confuting.’ The believer in truth properly focuses laughter, ‘indignation and scorne’ on a ‘false prophet ... in the greatest dearest and most dangerous cheat, the cheat of soules’ (664). In revealing his anger, Milton indicates his outrage against the attack on what he holds dear, namely the ordinary person’s ability to discern truth in his conscience. Aristotle’s characterization of anger as a response to the denigration of friends and family is pertinent once again. Milton’s defence of laughter recalls Cicero’s analysis of wit.55 Cicero shows that the orator can use wit to turn an unfair attack against itself. Biting humour uncovers the hidden insult or lack of decorum contained in an expression and, in this way, calls up a surprising perspective. In Ciceronian terms, Milton’s smart sayings can be seen to play a serious role in the criticism of his opponents and not to be mere gratuitous insults. Cicero emphasizes the serious aspect of wit, arguing ‘whatever subjects I may touch upon, as being the sources of laughing-matters, may equally well, as a rule, be sources of serious thought.’ Wit does not exercise itself upon what is trivial or silly. We are serious about ‘things of good repute,’ and we use humour against what is ‘unseemly ... or uncouth’

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(turpiculis ... deformibus); both are in the same genus. Humour ‘has its point in facts’ or ‘in words’ (De oratore 2.248). Similarly, Milton defends anger and laughter as the ‘two most rationall faculties of humane intellect’ (CPW I.664). They work most quickly to restore justice when a person and his belief have been diminished. Milton’s brief answers to his opponent’s charges take the form of Ciceronian wit and quickly expose fallacies in their arguments. Cicero displays wit through the example of Antonius who, ‘when Philippus inquired of him “What are you barking at, Master Puppy,” answered “I see a thief.”’ In a few words, Antonius crushes and reverses the insult of ‘Master Puppy’ (De oratore 2.220). Likewise, when the Remonstrant Milton cites in Animadversions defends set prayer by writing, ‘Our Saviour was pleas’d to make use in the celebration of his last and heavenly banket both of the fashions, and words which were usual in the Jewish feasts,’ Milton responds snappily, ‘What he pleas’d to make use of, does not justify what you please to force’ (CPW I.685). The tart answer sharply discriminates common prayer participated in freely from set prayer imposed upon the people. Milton also attacks what he views as the disingenuousness of Hall’s arguments. The opposite of Milton’s truth is deceit, not just falsehood. But the deceit may or may not be consciously intended and so Milton focuses his ire on the deception latent in certain ways of thinking. For example, when the remonstrant defends his preface on the grounds that it was a ‘too just complaint of the shamfull number of libels’ that Hall discerned in the previous pamphlet against the bishops (CPW I.667), Milton sees an allusion to censorship and quickly exposes the ‘inside nakedness’ of the prelates. He refers to Sir Francis Bacon, who complained of the uneven ways the bishops treated pamphlets, ‘confining those against bishops to darknesse, but licencing those against Puritans to be utter’d openly.’ These tactics are devious and Milton finds Hall’s hidden suggestion of censorship equally devious. Therefore, he taunts the prelates: ‘O what a death it is to the prelates to be thus unvisarded, thus uncas’d, to have the periwigs pluk’t off that cover your baldnesse, your inside nakednesse thrown open to publick view’ (CPW I.668). Milton consigns Hall to the group of underhanded bishops who would publish their own libels but restrain the pamphlets of the opposition. In Animadversions, as Stephen N. Zwicker argues with regard to Eikonoklastes, Milton uses an aggressive hermeneutics of suspicion to read behind the lines.56 His indignation strips away the outer armour to force hidden assumptions into the open.57 He casts his scorn in epic terms. For from

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Homer on, the reluctance to appear openly in battle marks the coward; Spenser’s knights tear off the helmets of their opponents to display their true identities, and Milton’s verbal weapons seek to accomplish the moral and verbal equivalent. Invective makes truth plain, removing what Milton views as excrescences that befuddle ordinary people and sometimes the bishops themselves. Metaphors and comparisons dramatize the structure of arguments Milton wishes to refute or advance. He uses this tactic to defend Protestant worship against the charge that it deviates from ‘the prescription of an order’ in antiquity. Milton takes this charge as an insult to the Protestant form of worship, as if removing the Episcopal form disintegrates the structure of worship entirely. To the insult he applies ‘some familiar, and kitchin phisick,’ insulting his opponent’s intelligence (CPW I.681). He claims that Bishop Hall cannot understand that one may have a different order of worship from the Episcopal service just as one may have a different ‘order of breakfast, dinner, and supper’ and still have order. The homely example and excessively plain reasoning of his analogy imply that Hall cannot think clearly unless another makes the logic obvious. He asks whether, just because a man has a set order of meals, ‘a man [is] therefore bound in the morning to potcht eggs, and vinnegar, or at noon to brawn, or beefe, or at night to fresh sammon, and French kickshoes? May he not make his meales in order, though he be not bound to this or that viand?’ (CPW I.682). Milton’s mocking terms defend the implicit reasoning behind alternative orders of worship. He brings reasons out into the open. Milton’s vehement rhetoric assertively exposes insults hidden within the assumptions of his opponents’ arguments. To those who might argue that his responses are excessive, he insists that accommodating oneself to the opinions of others can be dangerous and false. Like Cicero, he links truth-telling to love and flattery to oppression. Cicero’s strictures against flattery in his dialogue on friendship illuminate Milton’s choice of confrontational public speech. De amicitia discriminates ‘feigning and hypocrisy’ (fictum and simulatum) from friendship; for friendship is more ‘befitting a candid man.’58 Flattery, on the other hand, is incompatible with freedom, and hypocrisy ‘pollutes truth and takes away the power to discern it’ (92). Cicero claims that if one is careful, one can always distinguish hypocrites and truth-tellers; even in ‘a public assembly’ one can ‘usually see the difference between a demagogue (popularem) – that is, is a smooth-tongued, shallow citizen (assentatorem et levem civem) – and one who has stability, sincerity, and weight (constantem et verum et gravem)’

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(95–6). Assentor denotes one who always assents and agrees. Milton avoids such assent and argues passionately against it. Cicero’s distinction explains why Milton rejects mild speech alone as an ideal in order to ‘put into practice’ what Annabel Patterson calls ‘the fully antithetical structure of classroom rhetoric’ (CPW IV. Pt. 2:795).59 The free speaker states truth openly, even antagonistically, rather than insinuating himself into the minds of others as Sidney’s tyrants and manipulators do in the New Arcadia.60 Milton’s bold speech springs from ardent love. Satan’s speech parodies this love when he plays the orator to Eve, indignant at the ‘wrong’ God has done to her (PL IX.670–6, 666). Paradise Lost’s representation draws on Cicero’s character, Antonius, in De oratore, who emphasizes the need for emotion (especially indignation) in the law courts. Antonius insists that he does not act or dissimulate in court: ‘I was myself overcome by compassion before I tried to excite it in others ... not by way of technique ... but under stress of deep emotion and indignation (motu magno animi ac dolore) – I mean my tearing open his tunic and exposing his scars ... [My invocation] was accompanied by tears and vast indignation on my own part; had my personal indignation (dolor) been missing from all the talking I did on that occasion, my address, so far from inspiring compassion, would positively have deserved ridicule’ (II.195–6). Decorum requires that the speaker really experience the emotions expressed through his language. Antonius’s indignation arises when he sees Manius Aquilius (whom Cicero actually defended), a former commander-in-chief cast down, crippled, and oppressed by the charges. Indignation arises closely commingled with pity at an unjust action being perpetrated by the prosecutors, but Antonius brings the emotional and factual truth to light when he tears open the man’s tunic and exposes his wounds.61 So Milton feels indignation in Animadversions because his love of the souls of men cannot countenance their oppression by seducers and liars, whereas in Paradise Lost, he represents Satan as simulating ‘indignation’ to Eve’s ‘wrong’ (IX.666). But An Apology shows that, like Cicero, Milton insists on a variety of styles, each to be chosen according to rational and ethical standards. He draws on Cicero and Augustine to link styles to many types of personality. Cicero divides style into three kinds, following Hellenistic precedent: ‘the grand, which stirs the emotions; the middle, which persuades, through pleasure; and the plain which proves points.’62 As B.A. Krostenko shows, style is appropriate to topics, not ‘per se,’ but ‘in view of some objective.’63 If one wishes to pursue a property claim, the plain style works best, but if one wants to celebrate the greatness of the republic to arouse

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anger against her betrayer, vehement language works better.64 Augustine modifies this distinction to focus on styles in relation to audience rather than in relation to topic.65 If hearers are to be taught, the speaker should address them in the plain style. If hearers have trouble attending, the speaker should use a delightful style, and if they understand and attend, but do not wish to act, he should use the grand style. Three different styles could presumably be used with reference to the same subject.66 An Apology retains Augustine’s emphasis on audience, but multiplies the kinds and dispositions of auditors. Many styles are needed to reach these different kinds of people. Each person needs to be drawn to salvation in his own distinct way. The idea that humankind is by nature susceptible of irreducible differences recalls Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation, whose ideas Milton may have encountered in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning.67 Because objections to Milton’s fierce style are made on religious grounds, he turns to the Bible for illustrations of decorum. Jesus was capable not only of the mild and the bitter, but of all the powers later divided among ‘the teachers of his Church’ (CPW I.900). Like Milton he sometimes used ‘plaine and impartiall home-speaking,’ even with those who thought he should have held them ‘in more respect’ (CPW I.899). At other times, when he could not teach, he used ‘bitter and irefull rebukes’ to leave ‘excuseless ... his wilfull impugners’ (CPW I.899, 900). Milton argues that Jesus attunes his persuasions to human differences and respects diversity. Jesus gave each of his distinct styles to a different type of teacher. Those ‘severe’ and ‘of a sad gravity’ were given their gift to win the sad and ‘check’ those ‘of nature over-confident and jocund.’ The ‘cheerfull’ and ‘free’ draw others who are cheerful ‘to salvation’ and strengthen the ‘too scrupulous.’ Drawing on humanist discourse, Milton creates a rich human world in which every type of rhetorician finds an appropriate audience needing his spirit. All of these persuasions ‘draw’ but do not compel. Milton indirectly defends his own vigorous polemical spirit when he writes that no one is forced to ‘dissolve that groundwork of nature which God created in him.’ Even the ‘cholerick’ person does not need ‘to expell quite the unsinning predominance of his anger.’68 Instead, ‘each radicall humour and passion’ may be ‘corrected’ and ‘made the proper mould and foundation of every mans peculiar guifts, and vertues’ (CPW I.900). In all these varieties, Milton defends the distinctness of human person and gift against a unitary model of human rhetoric and human virtue. With all his references to the choleric, the severe, and the jocund, Mil-

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ton does not exclude moderation from his list, a quality associated with the Anglicans and the tolerationists. ‘Soundnesse of argument’ does ‘teach’ the ‘rationall and sober-minded.’ But in extraordinary times of reformation, ‘of opposition ... against new heresies arising, or old corruptions to be reformed ... mildnesse of positive wisdome is not anough.’ Milton follows this assertion with his famous heroic celebration of Zeal ‘armed in compleat diamond’ ascending ‘his fiery chariot.’ Zeal’s creatures, like the beasts that the prophets Ezekiel and Saint John saw in a vision, express ‘power, high autority and indignation’ as well as ‘derision and scorne’ to cast upon ‘perverse and fraudulent seducers’ (CPW I.900). They draw on the Aristotelian discourse of emotion and on the characteristics of satire – indignation, derision, and scorn – to move human beings. Milton appeals to these prophets to authorize ‘a sanctifi’d bitternesse against the enemies of truth.’ Milton perceives Luther as a kindred spirit and in defending Luther’s ferocity indirectly exonerates his own. Luther’s own ‘friends ... were many times offended with the fierceness of his spirit,’ an experience that he shared with Milton. Yet, Milton adds, Luther refused to retract the books that ‘he had sharply written,’ defending them by saying that he was ‘of an ardent spirit, and one who could not write a dull stile.’ Milton writes about Luther in terms apposite to himself as one who ‘thought it Gods will to have the inventions of men thus laid open, seeing that matters quietly handled, were quickly forgot.’ Animadversions exposes the inventions of prelates. Milton praises God for making Luther’s ‘tart rhetorick’ useful, and observes that Luther’s moderate writings were held in ‘contempt’ (CPW I.901). Milton recommends using anger to teach ordinary people and defends harsh laughter as a way of showing scorn, because ‘Laughter being one way of answering a foole according to his folly, teaches two sorts of persons, first the foole himselfe not to be wise in his own conceit as Salomon affirms ... Next, it teaches the hearers, in as much as scorne is one of those punishments which belong to men carnally wise’ (CPW I.903). Laughter makes folly ridiculous and scorn teaches the simple man, ‘for when [fools] are punisht the simple are thereby made wise.’69 Even when the proud cannot be taught, scorn teaches simple observers that the arguments of the proud are empty. Milton justifies invective against oppressors by the authority of the martyrs, who in the midst of their sufferings ‘were not sparing to deride and scoffe their superstitious persecutors.’ The remainder of An Apology against a Pamphlet uses wit and indignation to excoriate the arguments and style of A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, Entituled, Animadversions ... (1642). Milton

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projects his hatred of the arguments of the author and shows that he reckons these arguments as insult. For example, the author (possibly Joseph Hall or Robert Hall, CPW I.203–4) defends himself against the charge that he is self-interested. Using Ciceronian wit, Milton savagely attacks his defence: ‘He has a fortune therefore good, because he is content with it. This is a piece of sapience not worth the brain of a fruit-trencher; as if content were the measure of what is good or bad in the guift of fortune’ (CPW I.908). Milton practises a rigorous hermeneutics of suspicion, arguing that according to the author’s rule, an evil man might have a good fortune if he would only be content. The rule might justify laziness and other base qualities. Of course, the author did not intend his sentence as a philosophical statement. But Milton tears into it to reveal its deceptiveness. Even the author’s mild resistance to the attack on the ‘illegall proceedings’ of the high commission results in Milton’s anger. A Modest Confutation states that ‘if that court hath been illegall, either in the constitution of it, or in its proceedings, it is more than I know: but if so, the remonstrant is as guiltlesse of such illegalities, as I am ignorant.’ 70 After besieging him with stinging epithets, Milton asserts ‘that the remonstrant cannot wash his hands of all the cruelties exercis’d by the prelats’ and ‘they scourg’d the confessors of the Gospell, and he held the scourgers garments’ (CPW I.913). Comparing the author to Pilate, Milton detonates the legalistic language of A Modest Confutation to show the cruelty underneath its blandness. The author’s defence of legality obscures the fact that the government’s oath ex officio demanded that a defendant answer all questions without having a charge brought against him. Don M. Wolfe comments that ‘without a charge having been leveled against him, [the defendant] was constantly in danger of incriminating himself even for his opinions, on the basis of which incrimination he would be liable to sentence by the court.’ His trial had no jury and no right of appeal.71 Hall defended this government, and he defended the ceremonies that caused the men to resist Episcopacy. Thus, in Milton’s view, he cannot be considered innocent of tyranny. Milton’s love of truth (as he sees it) produces his hatred of insincerity and hypocrisy. Indeed, Milton roots contempt and anger in love. Ralph A. Haug remarks astutely that in the anti-prelatical pamphlets Milton reveals, ‘in his contempt for learned grubbing,’ ‘his love for true learning and his hatred of pedantry.’72 His love for plain speaking drives his wrath against the euphemisms of his opponents. Likewise, his love for reformed worship drives him to hate the enforced use of sensory sym-

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bols, that ‘drag so downwards, as to backslide one way ... into old cast rudiments, and stumble forward another way into the new-vomited paganisme of sensuall idolatry’ (Of Reformation [1641], CPW I.520).73 Milton attacks hypocrisy with the indignation praised by Antonius in De oratore. But his strongest rhetoric praises open struggle and conflict over truth. In April 1641, he left his brother Presbyterians and the Smectymnuuns to join the Independents. In November 1644, he wrote Areopagitica, his most famous celebration of the need for competition and anger to test truth. Walwyn had argued in The Compassionate Samaritane (June or July 1644) against the Anglican divines’ refusal to debate, claiming that those who believe in truth ‘should desire that all mens mouthes should be open, that so errour may discover its foulnesse, and truth become more glorious by a victorious conquest after a fight in open field: they shun the battell that doubt their strength.’74 Walwyn identifies truth with openness and error with what is hidden. Walwyn’s language of openness resonates with Milton’s practice in Animadversions and An Apology of bringing the assumptions of his opponents into the light of day and confronting them forcibly. But Areopagitica goes further and uses military metaphors to argue that encounter with error is a better way to refute it than the suppression of error. Even if ‘all the windes of doctrin were let loose to play upon the earth, (Eph 4:14–15),’ Milton argues, it is better ‘to let her [truth] and falshood grapple ... Her confuting is the best and surest suppressing’ (CPW II.561). Milton attacks all means that would hide or disguise truth, using the metaphor of ambush as he had against Hall in Animadversions. Comparing oratory to drawing up the equipment for a battle, Milton delineates the method of intellectual warfare. A man ‘[draws] forth his reasons’ from the ‘deep mines of knowledge,’ ranges the arguments in a battle formation, scatters and defeats all obstacles, and ‘calls out his adversary into the plain’ (562). Calling out an adversary brings him into the full sight of the public, again following epic precedent. Milton’s warrior for truth offers every advantage ‘only that he may try the matter by dint of argument,’ but his opponents ‘skulk’ and ‘lay ambushments,’ and ‘keep a narrow bridge of licencing where the challenger should pass.’ In other words, they hide like cowards. Stratagems are ‘weaknes and cowardice in the wars of truth’ (562). Error uses policies and hidden means, ‘stratagems’ and ‘licencings’ to win. These are ‘shifts and defenses,’ not genuine argumentative moves in a dispute (563). In the end, combat over truth is unavoidable, even when opponents

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bear good will to one another, because in the face of suppression, she turns herself into ‘all shapes, except her own’ (563). Given the resulting ambiguity, the shock of conflict is necessary to test and try appearances. Anger and indignation fuel the conflict, bringing forth truth and casting off the splinters and errors (the sects and false opinions) that must necessarily result from the clash of opinions. Discovering truth is a process – of birth, of enlightenment, but also of agon, competition, and victory. Thus terms of honour continue to resonate in Milton’s prose and Paradise Lost. But, like Walwyn, Milton also argues for a milder dialogue that seeks truth in a brotherly fashion. Walwyn’s writings illuminate Milton’s project. The Compassionate Samaritane defends the need for respecting a multiplicity of positions. Walwyn bases this respect on each person’s possession of reason and the freedom to follow his conscience. He defends the separatists against the charge that they are ‘rash’ and ‘heady’ (Compassionate, 7; Tracts 3, 68) by insisting that the ‘Brownist and Anabaptist are rational examiners of those things they hold for truth; [they are] milde discoursers, and able to give an account of what they believe’ (Compassionate, 8; Tracts 3, 68). Because they are rational, he argues, we ought to ‘put on the spirit of meekness, and rather endeavour to rectifie by argument and perswation one anothers infirmities, then upbraid the owners of them’ (Compassionate, 9; Tracts 3, 69). Walwyn’s sentiment reiterates the Protestant emphasis on gentle speech. He praises the Anabaptists for their orderly discussion of doubt, ‘by which meanes the weakest becomes in a short time much improved, and every one able to give an account of their tenets’ (Compassionate, 10; Tracts 3, 69). Their virtues enhance the possibility for mild discourse, which is necessary because no matter how much people examine all things, there ‘remaines a possibility of errour.’ Error makes it dangerous for one sort of person to compel another, since the person in error may constrain the one who knows truth (Compassionate, 11; Tracts 3, 70). Therefore, Walwyn opposes the prelates who would enforce their beliefs on everyone else. Milton goes further than Walwyn in probing the sources of error and truth, and the exploration affects his formulation of gentle discourse. He argues that truth ought not to be limited, because it is like light from heaven that grows when it is left free. The metaphor of light appears first in Animadversions, where Milton praises the preacher who infuses God’s spirit into his listeners and with ‘new light’ raises a ‘fragrant spring of saving knowledge’ (CPW I.721). Likewise Areopagitica uses the metaphors of light and spirit to celebrate ‘liberty which is the nurse of all great wits.’

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Liberty ‘rarify’d and enlightn’d our spirits like the influence of heav’n.’ ‘Rarify’ means ‘to make rare or thin especially by expansion’ (OED 1). But to limit truth by licensing would do just the opposite; it would make Parliament ‘oppressive, arbitrary, and tyrannous’ (CPW II.559). The effort to limit truth, far from preventing error, causes error. Truth seems to become duplicitous and multiple, but it ‘is not impossible that she may have more shapes then one’ (CPW II.563). Because truth may appear in unfamiliar shapes and people may mistake her, we need gentle discussion with them (CPW II.567). Milton makes discussion a moral duty: ‘what witholds us but our sloth, our self-will, and distrust in the right cause, that we doe not give them gentle meetings and gentle dimissions, that we debate not and examin the matter throughly with liberall and frequent audience; if not for their sakes, yet for our own? seeing that no man who hath tasted learning, but will confesse the many waies of profiting by those who not contented with stale receits are able to manage, and set forth new positions to the world’ (CPW II.567). Like Walwyn, Milton stresses examination of truth for the sake of all concerned, but he adds his own emphasis on discovery and freshness of ideas. His reference to ‘stale receits’ suggests that even what is true (in some sense) loses its rationale when it becomes a tired, received doctrine.75 Doctrines need to be examined if they are to be understood and believed fully. By gentle debate, one may also ‘set forth new positions’ (567, my emphasis). Gentle conversation promotes inquiry and discovery. In sum, Milton’s discrimination between gentle and vehement speech finds its roots in the rhetorical tradition from Cicero to Augustine. But Milton articulates distinct intellectual criteria for choosing a style, criteria that are consistent with a broad set of expressive modes. His defence of invective does not reject civility so much as it varies its possibilities. His arguments for the efficacy of anger in testing truth help to explain why Paradise Lost draws on the epic rhetoric associated with the struggle for honour to represent the trial of merit. The powers and dangers of this rhetoric serve as the subject of the next chapter.

6 Emotion as Defined by the Discourse of Honour: Spiritual Warfare and Rhetorical Agon in Paradise Lost

Like Milton’s early pamphlets, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (February 1659) calls for a vigorously agonistic ‘confutation’ that, ‘by instant and powerful demonstration ... by opposing truth to error,’ changes people’s beliefs.1 Paradise Lost represents such clashes in terms of the discourse of honour articulated in archaic epic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric.2 God, the Son, and the unfallen angels respond with anger at slights to their goodness. Milton represents them as retaining their identities by the righteous indignation they feel when enemies diminish their glory (PL III.164–5, V.719ff., VI.675–87). Francis A. Blessington demonstrates that Milton draws upon archaic epic competition for honour to represent conflict in his own epic,3 and John Peter Rumrich argues that Achilles, not Aeneas, is ‘the better literary model for Milton’s own heroism.’ He calls the pamphlets the ‘literary equivalent of Homeric combat, where you kill the one who would kill you and achieve glory in victory,’ and he argues that Homeric glory (kleos) and prowess (aretê ) inform Paradise Lost ’s treatment of glory.4 Building on Rumrich’s argument, I argue that Milton’s epic uses the Homeric/Aristotelian discourse of honour to represent the strife that determines truth and error. The nature of this competition is articulated by Abdiel’s pairing of rational and physical strife: ‘nor is it aught but just, /That he who in debate of truth hath won, /Should win in arms, on both disputes alike /Victor’ (VI.120–4). He expresses the faith that when rational agon tries the ‘false’ (VI.121– 2), conflict in arms will validate that result and, as Victoria Kahn puts it, ‘virtue and success, virtue and [Machiavellian] virtù,’ will correspond.5 God’s competitions for honour with Satan also define the cognitive and ethical grounds of his righteous anger, laughter, and derision. Paradise Lost, like Milton’s prose, draws on Aristotelian representations

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of anger as the feeling that arises from the perception of injustice and on Plato’s Republic’s claims that when a person thinks he has been wronged, ‘his spirit will “seethe and grow fierce”. He will fight on for justice or accept death’ (Republic 440C–D).6 Analogously, Paradise Lost represents the debate between Satan and Abdiel as a conflict of honour in which each feels intense anger against the other for the wrong he thinks has been done to his self-worth. Satan attacks the Son because he has ‘us eclipst under the name /Of king anointed’ (PL V.776–7). He asks indignantly, who ‘can introduce /Law and edict on us, who without law /Err not?’ (V.797–9). Abdiel uses invective against Satan, and his anger limits the insults and overweening behaviour of the fallen angels. If An Apology represents a zeal that casts ‘derision and scorne upon perverse and fraudulent seducers’ (CPW I.900),7 Abdiel stands up ‘and in a flame of zeal severe’ opposes Satan’s ‘fury’ (PL V.807–8).8 Abdiel uses cognitive and linguistic devices to bring out the vicious assumptions hidden in Satan’s apparently justified complaints.9 His harsh word, ‘ingrate,’ punctures Satan’s plausibility and self-righteousness, and his anger aims at lies and hidden fallacies (PL V.811). When Satan argues plausibly that, by God’s ‘decree,’ the Son has eclipsed the other angels and ‘to himself ingross’t /All power’ (V.774–6), Abdiel ferrets out the malice in Satan’s statements. Satan assumes that competition for status requires a zero sum game; any aggregation of power by one must be accompanied by an equal derogation of power by the other. Then he defines the Son’s elevation in all or nothing terms: the Son is not just more powerful; he is all-powerful and, hence, tyrannical. From these premises he concludes that no one can ‘assume /Monarchy’ over those who are, by virtue of being free, his ‘equals’ (V.794–6), clothing his argument in republican ideas.10 But Abdiel challenges Satan’s idea that it is ‘unjust to bind with laws the free.’ He asks, ‘Shalt thou give the law to God ... who made /Thee what thou art?’ (PL V.819.822–4) and draws on Romans 9:20, where Paul answers one who questions God’s justice: ‘Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?’ Like Paul, Abdiel reverses the implied power of the questioner over the questioned, asserting God’s supremacy as creator. More interestingly, he rejects the implications of the argument that in elevating the Son, God demoted the other angels and made them pay ‘knee-tribute’ (V.782). Abdiel is outraged at the idea that God would offend angelic dignity; instead, he insists ‘of our dignity /How provident he is’ (V.827–8). Far from wanting to make the angels less,

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God cares ‘to exalt /Our happy state’ united ‘under one head’ (V.829– 30). Abdiel argues that God originally created the angels and ‘Crown’d them with glory’ (V.839), and when the Son is ‘reduc’t’ to the status of angel, ‘all honour to him done returns our own,’ that is, the whole angelic host become elevated and glorified (V.843–5). In short, God honours the angelic host by making his Son one of them. Abdiel implies that Satan has insulted God and the Son so egregiously; he has interpreted them to be so tyrannical and hungry for power that Abdiel tells him to ‘hast’n to appease /Th’ incensed Father, and th’ incensed Son’ (V.846–7). Thus, the divine beings are not at all immune from strong anger against a derogation of their worth and beneficence. For God and the Son to fail to feel anger in this context would be for each to care little about his own self-esteem or for the worth of the other. Abdiel does not have the last word, however. Interestingly, Satan becomes the zealous respondent as he struggles against the bold statements of Abdiel. He brings into the open assumptions he regards as invidious in Abdiel’s speech. To the point that God created them, Satan derisively argues that there is no evidence that they were created. Instead, they are ‘self-begot’ (PL V.860), a momentous statement whose implications go beyond what I can analyse here. Satan asserts the angels’ power to test their strength, using the concept of heroic combat: ‘Our puissance is our own, our own right hand /Shall teach us highest deeds, by proof to try /Who is our equal’ (V.864–6). Retaining the discourse appropriate to Homeric heroes, who define status through acts of prowess, Satan rejects the entire framework of honour proposed by Abdiel. As a result, the conflict remains unresolved until warfare on the field can demonstrate the relative strength of the opponents. They go to war over different perceptions of the structure and implications of competition for honour. In testing different systems of honour, Paradise Lost makes war the basis for discerning truth, drawing on the concept of single combat articulated in Milton’s prose. Defensio Secunda, for example, represents Milton as a warrior who ‘met [Salmasius] in single combat and plunged into his reviling throat this pen’ (CPW IV.I.556).11 It invokes a social process of competition and adjudication in order to establish authority, with the consequence that truth cannot be identified with a particular class, estate, or ecclesiastical establishment, as it is in the writings of sixteenthcentury aristocratic Huguenots such as Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. Competition for honour results in anger, disdain, and enmity, all of which play roles in the emotional economy and persuasive acts of Para-

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dise Lost’s God and the angels.12 Thus, though some critics argue that the text rejects warfare in favour of pacifism, values associated with warfare and honour persist.13 Even the famous lines that criticize chivalric tales of ‘fabl’d knights /In battles feign’d; the better fortitude /Of patience and heroic martyrdom /Unsung’ (IX.30–3) occur in a passage that specifies God’s wrath as the subject of Milton’s epic, an ‘argument ... more heroic than the wrath /Of stern Achilles on his foe pursu’d’ (IX.13–15). Milton celebrates the heroic moral vehemence of God: Anger and just rebuke, and judgment giv’n That brought into this world a world of woe, Sin and her shadow death, and misery Death’s harbinger: Sad task, yet argument Not less but more heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles on his foe pursu’d ...

(IX.10–15)

The narrator lauds the Son’s driving his chariot ‘o’er the necks ... of warring angels’ (III.395–6), language that recalls ‘the invincible warriour Zeale’ who ‘drives over the heads of scarlet prelates’ (CPW I.900). The Son’s prowess elicits ‘loud acclaim’ in which God is ‘extoll’d’ (PL III.397, 398), as the Son executes ‘fierce vengeance on his foes’ (III.399). Divine revenge operates as justice.14 Here the text draws on Lactantius’s defence of the idea that divine anger is just. De ira dei argues that God uses anger for the preservation (conservatio, 15.12) of the world. The text insists that it would be sacrilegious for God to witness violence and fraud without being moved to anger (Ira, 16.4). Paradise Lost celebrates the ardent wrath of God, who hurls ‘dreadful thunder’ at the fallen angels because of their ‘malice’ (III.393, 400), and Abdiel’s vigorous sense of righteousness expressed in ‘hostile scorn’ (V.904) against Satan.15 But Paradise Lost goes even further to celebrate derision and laughter in a passage that has understandably offended critics, including William Empson and C.S. Lewis.16 The Son claims to God that ... thou thy foes Justly hast in derision, and secure Laugh’st at thir vain designs and tumults vain, Matter to me of glory.

(V.735–8)

The passage has roots in Psalm 2 concerning the ‘kings of the earth,’ who ‘take counsel together against the Lord, and against his anointed’

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(verse 2). It registers God’s response in epic language: ‘He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: The Lord shall have them in derision’ (verse 4). Laughter and derision signify power: verse 9 declares that God will ‘break them with a rod of iron.’ God is angry because ‘the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing’ (verse 1). Similarly, Milton’s God laughs at the ‘vain designs and tumults vain’ of his foes. The Son praises God’s laughter at these designs, underscoring the justness of his derision and the principle that ‘tumults vain’ only provide matter for God’s glory. The idea that opposition provides matter for glory appears in heroic literature and the literature of counsel. Machiavelli argues that danger provides the material for the prince’s virtù because it stimulates the prince to find resources and generate ideas (The Prince, XX). Milton’s resourceful, intelligent God uses danger and evil as material for his dynamic agency. He manifests, possibly even acquires, excellence in the face of evil opposition. When faced with rebellious angels, for example, God warns the Son that the two of them need to ‘be sure /Of our omnipotence’ (PL V.721–2) and to ‘to this hazard draw /With speed what force is left.’ He and the Son both see the battle as an opportunity to manifest the Son’s ‘glory’ (V.729–30 and 738). The Son relates God’s laughter to his being grounded and secure, responding to God’s concern lest ‘unawares we lose /This our high place’ (PL V.731–2). But the laughter may also be related to God’s sense of ‘glory’ reflected in his Son (V.719). John Peter Rumrich links Milton’s sense of glory to kabod in the Hebrew scripture. Kabod means most properly ‘weight,’ or ‘the very being of a substantial entity.’ But ‘kabod can mean sensible manifestations of his [God’s] majesty through his creatures – as in the verse “the heavens declare the glory of God”.’17 The Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul repeatedly emphasize that God finds his glory through the actions of those who obey him.18 Because God created the Son and mankind good, their actions bring into being more goodness and glory. A sense of this glory leads to laughter. Thomas Hobbes, who translated Aristotle’s Rhetoric into an English ‘briefe,’ defines the ‘passion of laughter’ as ‘nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others,’ and he adds, ‘it is no wonder therefore that men take heinously to be laughed at or derided, that is, triumphed over.’19 Though it may seem inappropriate to modern readers, the laughter of Milton’s God within its own normative context signifies consciousness of his worth and power, just as his wrath denotes a sense of honour that ‘in derision’ laughs at the ‘vain designs and tumults

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vain’ of the fallen angels. Because God and his creatures are virtuous and glorious, they manifest their attitudes openly. The power to manifest one’s commitments rather than disguising them belongs to virtue. Paradise Lost and the New Arcadia link anger, derision, and disdain to honest speech, distinguishing them from the tyrant’s deception and the sycophant’s flattery. Anger is an emotion of the resistant intellect and heart. When Cecropia tries to impose her atheism upon Pamela, Pamela’s eye shows a ‘grain of virtuous anger, with eyes which glistered forth beams of disdain,’ as she forcefully states her own principles in vehement, unwavering rhetoric (New Arcadia, 359.18–19). Abdiel, ‘unmov’d, /Unshak’n, unseduc’d, unterrifi’d’ (PL V.898–9) by the scorn of Satan and his followers, exhibits ‘retorted scorn’ as ‘his back he turn’d / On those proud tow’rs to swift destruction doom’d’ (V.906–7). The adjective ‘unshak’n’ and the heroic simile underscore the strength and certainty of courageous belief. But although Milton’s prose and Paradise Lost celebrate the power of anger to fulfil ethical purposes, Paradise Lost also criticizes anger, malice, and envy by evaluating characters’ interpretations of events and the effect of these interpretations on their emotions. Hobbes’s discussion of emotion in Human Nature (1640) illuminates these evaluations. Hobbes challenges the idea that emotions have grounds, using glory as his example and introducing a scepticism that threatens to undermine Milton’s project. Hobbes celebrates the feeling of ‘sudden glory,’ calling glory ‘the passion which proceedeth from the imagination or conception of our own power above the power of him that contendeth with us,’ basing it on competition, which raises the status of one person by lowering the status of another. This glory manifests itself in ‘ostentation in words, and insolency in actions,’ similar to those displayed by God and the unfallen angels.20 But Hobbes qualifies glory by writing that ‘this passion, of them whom it displeaseth, is called pride; by them whom it pleaseth, it is termed a just valuation of himself’ (40–1). Drawing on the analysis of style from Aristotle’s Rhetoric (3.2, 1405b) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Hobbes dramatizes how the choice of words colours judgment about a thing and argues that names depend arbitrarily on what pleases or displeases the person using them.21 This scepticism undermines social agreement about what factors appropriately discriminate glory from vainglory. Yet Hobbes does not rest with this position either. The text goes on to discriminate the two: ‘This imagination of our power or worth, may be from an assured and certain experience of our own actions; and then is that glory just, and well grounded, and begetteth an

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opinion of increasing the same by other actions to follow ...’ On the other hand, ‘The same passion may proceed not from any conscience of our own actions, but from fame and trust of others, whereby one may think well of himself, and yet be deceived: and this is false glory, and the aspiring consequent thereto procureth ill success. Further, the fiction, which is also imagination, of actions done by ourselves, which never were done, is glorying ... as when a man imagineth himself to do the actions whereof he readeth in some romance, or to be like unto some other man whose acts he admireth: and this is called vain glory; and is exemplified in the fable, by the fly sitting on the axletree, and saying to himself, ‘What a dust do I make rise!’ (Human Nature, 41). Human Nature discriminates just glory, which depends on certain experience of one’s own actions, from false glory, the inaccurate reputation given one by others. Like Sidney’s New Arcadia, it differentiates the pursuit of honour for achievements from the search for status and reputation as ends in themselves. Hobbes brands as ‘fiction’ those actions one imagines oneself to have done, though one has not. (Sidney’s Cecropia engages in fiction when she imagines her power.) Hobbes’s distinctions are helpful in understanding Satan’s complexity, because he belongs in all three categories. Satan’s false glory prevents him from confessing his dismay to his followers. Instead, his outward behaviour contrasts with inward feeling when, ‘vaunting aloud,’ he is ‘rackt with deep despair’ (PL I.126). Satan manifests vain or fictional glory when he ascribes merit to himself by claiming falsely that the angels were ‘self-begot, self-rais’d /By our own quick’ning power’ (V.860–1). He displays true glory when he ventures into the unknown alone (II.450–6). Yet he does not attain true glory fully because he does not convince the reader that he can sustain his risk-taking action. Hobbes calls glory ‘just and well-grounded’ when it conveys the belief that more glory will follow. God, because of his endless productivity, persuades others that he will increase his glory by further action. But Satan’s actions reduce his substance and worth, initiating a downward spiral into weakness and vice. Because Satan’s courage and leadership are marred by false glory and fictional glory, his excellence is only partial. He seeks false and fictional glory because he is fixated on his own glory at the expense of his true ability. Paradise Lost uses terms of honour from the Iliad to criticize the individualistic stance that Satan cultivates. It represents Satan as outraged and insulted that the Son is elevated when he (as he perceives it) equals the Son in merit, just as Achilles feels insulted that his prize has been taken from him, the greatest fighter.22 However, Achilles really is

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the greatest warrior, whereas Satan does not surpass or equal the Son.23 Not only does Satan seek the fictional honour of being equal to God, he experiences envy. Envy arises from competition for honour, but unlike anger, pity, and emulation, Aristotle argues, it indicates baseness (Rhetoric 2.11, 1388ab) and leads to faction (stasis) and revolution. Again like the New Arcadia, Paradise Lost uses Aristotle’s Politics to show the political consequences of emotions produced by the pursuit of honour and the avoidance of dishonour. Aristotle argues that men fall into faction when others receive honour they believe belongs to them.24 He claims that since one man achieves honour at the expense of another, competition produces enmity and envy.25 These emotions become an additional source of conflict.26 Aristotle treats envy as a vicious emotion because the person experiencing it is pained at the noble person’s success rather than emulating his virtue (Rhetoric 2.10, 1388b). The fallen angels exhibit this vice when they, rather than emulating the virtue of the Son, ‘have dispis’d, yet envied’ him. ‘All thir rage’ arises against the Son because the Father has honoured him. Paradise Lost, like the New Arcadia, finds the roots of faction in competition for honour that leads people to interpret the successes of others as an insult to their own status. But Paradise Lost also draws on a seventeenth-century discourse of dissident emotions pertinent to honour. The text offers a problem of discrimination to the reader, an exercise in culling out and sorting ‘the confused seeds’ of just and vain, well-grounded and ill-grounded emotions (Areopagitica, CPW II.514). In order to discern the differences, we need a better understanding of how Milton revises classical representations of the conflict for honour to explore the possibilities of dissident emotions. I analyse Milton’s use of the archaic code of honour in light of classical humanist and early-seventeenthcentury Puritan and aristocratic works on the gentleman and on counsel in order to show the role competition plays in creating virtuous and vicious identities in Paradise Lost. Honour Identity as a Source of Dissident Emotions Paradise Lost revises ancient representations of emotions that arise in a social structure based on achieved, not ascribed, status. Just as Milton’s prose turns the vocabulary of honour conflict into a means of exploring agon over good and evil, Paradise Lost uses archaic terms to advance a notion of merit that is not based on social status. James M. Redfield illuminates the Homeric epics when he shows that a man risks his honour

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every time he faces an opponent in battle. The man who wins receives his opponent’s share of honour, reputation, and status. The term for honour (timê) has an economic base: a man’s value depends precisely on how good a fighter he is and how much ransom would be required to liberate him if he were taken prisoner.27 When Achilleus complains that he has not received the prize he deserves for his greatness in fighting, he points out an inconsistency in the honour code that distributes timê. Why should a man who is not a great fighter (Agamemnon) receive more honour than Achilleus, even if that man is king over many (Iliad 1.164ff.)? Satan experiences a similar conflict; why should the Son receive honour when he, Satan, has merit that has not been recognized? When Achilles and Satan fail to receive honour they respond with rage, for their honour has been insulted and revenge offers the only cure.28 Revenge realigns the distribution of honour when the insulted person, by means of his prowess, wins back the honour that he lost. Achilleus has reason to be angry against Agamemnon, even though his anger is excessive. He is the greatest fighter, but Agamemnon takes his prize for a trivial reason. But Satan’s idea of his own merit is inflated: he not equal to the Son. Yet not all of his judgments and emotions are distorted. When he sees Beelzebub, Satan exclaims, ‘if thou beest hee; But O how fall’n! how chang’d /From him, who in the happy realms of light /Cloth’d with transcendent brightness didst outshine /Myriads though bright’ (I.84–7). He is appropriately dismayed and sorrowful, recognizing the loss of glory registered in Beelzebub’s appearance. Readers need to discriminate the virtue he retains even after the fall from the vices that slowly encompass him. Agonistic speech tests and differentiates true merit from false in a trial by contest focused on the nature of liberty. A Readie and Easie Way elucidates the problem of liberty when it laments ‘that a nation should be so valorous and courageous to winn thir liberty in the field, and when they have wonn it, should be so heartless and unwise in thir counsels as not to know how to use it, value it, what to do with it, or with themselves’ (CPW VII.428).29 Merit lies in knowing how to value liberty and make wise choices. Similarly, Paradise Lost’s God insists that strength in battle is second to the true courage and the ‘better fight’ (VI.30) of asserting truth in the face of overwhelming public opposition.30 Milton draws on humanist thought to interconnect the ability to discern truth and the courage to stand fast. Cicero’s conjunction of foresight with magnaminity in De officiis shows why. Cicero radically modifies the Aristotelian understanding of courage as a virtue found chiefly on

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the battlefield (Nicomachean Ethics 3.6,1115a). He believes that the truly ‘brave and resolute spirit’ is not ‘disconcerted in times of difficulty’ and does not ‘swerve from the path of reason’ but holds fast to reason even in adversity.31 Constancy belongs to ‘great courage’ (animi) but also to ‘a great intellectual ability’ (ingenii magni) (De officiis 1.81). Constancy allows one to be sufficiently undeterred by trouble to anticipate the future by foresight, rather than charging rashly into battle. Similarly, Milton presents the warfaring Christian as one who does not react to circumstances but sees, abstains, and discerns the hidden assumptions and implications of words and events. This discernment requires an adversarial stance that seeks trial and contest.32 Like Sidney’s Arcadias, Milton’s works found constancy on self-rule. Milton’s prose declares that a person capable of self-governance is capable of persevering in a trial by contest of truth. The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce praises Milton’s courage in being ‘the sole advocate of a discount’nanc’t truth; a high enterprise Lords and Commons, a high enterprise and a hard,’ in a characterization that resonates with God’s praise of Abdiel:33 ‘Servant of God, well done, well hast thou fought The better fight, who single hast maintain’d Against revolted multitudes the cause Of truth, in word mightier than they in arms.’

(PL VI.29–32)

The individual’s defence of truth against the multitudes shows the greatest heroic constancy.34 Similarly, Areopagitica famously interconnects the virtues of discernment and abstention: ‘He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian ... Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary’ (Areopagitica, CPW II.514–15). Adam and Eve have not yet fallen, but Paradise Lost presents temptation as the occasion for a heroism that encounters the malice of Satan and is not seduced. Adam and Eve encounter ‘triall’; they need to pause, to abstain, and to discern the hidden assumptions of Satanic reasoning. Their combat is a matter of honour; when Adam warns Eve against Satan’s envy, he warns that she should not venture ‘where danger or dishonor lurks’ (IX.267).35 Adam and Eve’s conversation uses terms of honour to enunciate a position capable of a dissident stance from the one enunciated by Satan,

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the aspirer to monarchy and godhead. They are called in Ciceronian and Miltonic terms to be undeterred, to examine the deceptive surface of appearances and to bring into the open hidden premises of arguments. Milton contextualizes their challenge in terms of a history of dissidence based on honour. Earlier in the century, this dissidence had been articulated by Fulke Greville and Robert Greville as a way of justifying resistance to the Stuart monarchy and of criticizing those who served James I. Fulke Greville, in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, attacks the courtiers as ‘creatures’ of the king, ‘children of favour and chance,’ who ‘for this reason lacked the inner freedom and sense of worth of the man of honour.’36 Milton, likewise, wonders how a free nation can make itself a king’s ‘servant and vassal’ and ‘so renounce their own freedom’ (CPW VII.428). Both Grevilles criticized ‘new men’ because of their lack of honour, opposing them to a religious elite based on ‘providentialist faith’ to form a dissident position.37 Milton goes further, endorsing the idea of honour as based in humanist virtue, but detaching honour from lineage, and reattaching it to human beings as God’s creatures: Two of far nobler shape erect and tall, God-like erect, with native honour clad In naked majesty seem’d lords of all, And worthy seem’d, for in thir looks divine The image of thir glorious maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure.

(IV.288–93)

Adam and Eve possess the substantive qualities of honour virtue (truth, wisdom, and sanctitude). However, their lineage springs not from blood descent but from God’s creative act. Because honour depends upon wisdom and truth (the image of God in man), it survives only as long as a person chooses virtue: merit becomes the sole criterion of nobility. Honour requires respect for oneself as an image of God.38 Milton’s emphasis on merit and his hatred of aristocratic gradations of degree might seem to preclude his use of terms of the competition for honour and of the emotions that accompany it. But Milton’s elect are a spiritual elect, as Stephen M. Fallon’s keen analysis demonstrates. Fallon argues that although De Doctrina Christiana and Paradise Lost affirm the Arminian position that grace is sent to all, this position stands in tension with Milton’s ‘quasi-Calvinist’ doctrine that some persons are specially called and are, so to speak, ‘elect above the rest.’39 By retaining a category of ‘extraordinary ministers’ in De Doctrina Christiana without quali-

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fying this category in Arminian universal terms, Milton, Fallon argues, ‘leaves an opening for a spiritual aristocracy’ (105–6). Given this opening, Milton may have envisioned himself as one of these ‘extraordinary ministers’ who ‘are sent and inspired by God to set up or to reform the church by both preaching and by writing’ (CPW VI.570). The reference to writing suggests an expansion of the category of those especially called beyond the clergy, intimating that the spiritual aristocracy, insofar as it exists, does not reside in a particular socially or ecclesiastically defined status. Adam and Eve belong to the elect whose honour depends upon their virtue. Given their reason, freedom, and educations, Adam and Eve have the power to dissent from the seductive rhetoric of Satan, and to overcome it by a courageous statement of truth. Eve, though she eventually succumbs to him, capably criticizes Satan’s arguments (‘Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt /The virtue of that fruit, in thee first prov’d’ [PL IX.615–16]), and she opposes doctrine to his illusions, stating that ‘of this tree we may not taste nor touch; /God so commanded’ (IX.651– 2). However, she lacks Abdiel’s vibrant ability to challenge the hidden pernicious implications of Satan’s arguments. She cannot imagine that the serpent envies God; she believes him ‘Friendly to man, far from deceit or guile’ (IX.772). She cannot distinguish a flatterer from a friend, a failure of discernment that in friendship writings hints at selflove. In her conversation with Adam, she rejects the idea that she should be cautious to avoid temptation. Her comment, ‘how are we happy, still in fear of harm?’ (IX.326) suggests that she is too assured in her beliefs.40 She acknowledges that there is insult in the ‘foe’s’ temptation, but she denies that his ‘foul esteem’ can dishonour them (IX.326, 327). Her sophistic question, ‘then wherefore shunn’d or fear’d /By us’ (IX.331– 2), expresses a false sense of a strength that cannot be influenced by others. It intimates that because she is confident, she does not feel the need to test the statements of others.41 Protestant writings and the angel Raphael argue, on the contrary, that persons need to be alert to the guile and seductions of Satan, who will lead them to heresy unaware. Although Eve is still unfallen, Milton draws on Protestant writings about Satan to represent Satan’s interaction with her. These writings call for an alert, militant attitude. Goodwin, for example, argues that those who ‘desire to serve as good souldiers of Jesus Christ, against errors and heresies, must first conscienciously study the Christian art, and method of this warfare.’42 Acontius warns his readers to avoid religious controversy because they are likely to become angry

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when they defend their religious beliefs. Anger and hatred, the works of Satan, are among ‘the causes [that] true opinions in matter of religion are changed for false.’ Other causes include ‘false arguments, passions and affections of mind ...; a good opinion of such as err, a bad opinion of such as teach the truth, and lying signs or wonders.’43 These come into play in the seduction of Milton’s Eve, as I argue in chapter 7. Yet Protestant texts differ in the ways they define the contest. Some strive to replace identities based on honour with a purely Christian identity, and because they resonate with Paradise Lost’s complaint that the ‘better fortitude /Of patience and heroic martyrdom’ remains ‘unsung,’ we need to examine them (IX.31–3).44 They share with Milton the project of redefining competition for honour in Christian terms. Manuals on how to be a gentleman written in the 1630s through the 1660s illuminate Paradise Lost’s representations of honour. They use the discourse of honour to lead their readers to reject competition, duelling, and the princely world of ambition. Richard Brathwaite (1638), for example, claims that ‘“he enjoys sufficiently who has learnt to be a soveraigne over his own passions: to restraine the surging billows of overflowing will, to the command of reason”,’ an assertion similar to those Milton repeats often.45 These texts articulate a passive Christian piety that provides a basis for a dissident stance. The manuals turn to models of Christian selfhood and providential faith to bind the elect together in what Mervyn James calls their ‘disillusion with the established structure of royal authority and honour.’46 For example, Clement Ellis’s The Gentile Sinner or England’s Brave Gentleman (1668) redefines the gentleman’s ‘valour; which he exercises more in obeying his God, then opposing his brethren. His highest piece of fortitude is that whereby he conquers himselfe and his sin ... He looks upon it as the basest degree of cowardice, to yeild unto ... feeble passions.’47 Ellis recommends that his readers reject traditional valour, courage, and prowess in favour of Christian obedience, temperance, and constancy. Such a reversal of values also occurs earlier in Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman, which turns its readers from valuing anger at insult and desire for revenge to not being ‘angry, for, true love is not provoked to anger.’ Rather, the gentleman should exert himself in ‘exercising and performing the offices of our calling ... in practicing workes of pietie, exercises of devotion, meditation, contemplation.’48 Meditation and contemplation rather than prudential deliberation should inform political action. Paradise Lost reiterates the themes of self-conquest and celebrates patience and martyrdom. The Archangel Michael stresses temperance

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and love (XII.583). These emphases seem to imply that people should surrender one set of emotions (including anger and hatred) in favour of another (including patience and charity). However, as I have shown in chapter 5, Milton believes that Christian gentleness towards the erring needs to be matched with just anger against those who deceive and oppress the weak. Paradise Lost, rather than renouncing terms of emotion associated with competition for honour, uses them to educate Adam and Eve and its readers about the powers and dangers of emotion. Competition for honour plays a role in the war between God and Satan and the text uses a discourse of honour from Protestant sermons and treatises to alert readers to signs of Satan’s subtle duplicity. Creating Hell by Means of Rhetoric The logic of Satan’s appeals to emotion illuminates cultural shifts in ways of constructing emotion. Topoi of emotion associated with competition come to be applied metaphorically to internal ‘warfare,’ while seduction and deception surpass physical force as a threat. Milton and other Protestant writers illuminate this discourse by representing and criticizing the deformed rhetoric of envy and anger. Downame’s The Christian Warfare, John Ball’s Treatise of Faith, and Paradise Lost aim to influence religious controversy by trying to strengthen their readers’ agency over certain modes of argument and feeling. A Treatise of Faith, for example, offers words to temper the readers’ fear that they cannot be pardoned by God.49 The text calls fear ‘a deceitful and malitious passion, tyrannical, rash, and inconsiderate, proceeding oftentimes from want of judgement, more than from the presence or approach of evil to be feared, tormenting with the dread of what shall never come ... It is therefore valiantly to bee resisted’ (181). To awaken readers to danger, it uses the epic language of 1 Peter 5.8 to warn that ‘the divell, who goeth about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devoure, will not spare to suggest to the contrite and humbled soule, that God cannot or will not forgive his transgressions’ (176). Like Andromana in Sidney’s New Arcadia, Satan plants negative, one-sided ideas in people’s minds. He insinuates, alters the contents of thought, and infuses certain modes of argument, ways of thinking, and topoi of emotional persuasion into them. Protestant texts use the discourse of honour to criticize Satan’s arguments. Christian Warfare deconstructs Satan’s skill in using distorted rhetorical terms of honour to judge God: ‘in all sathans skirmishes, he seeketh to impeach Gods glory with false imputations, and to bring us to

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utter destruction. And this may appeare by his first conflict with our mother Eve, Gen. 3.4.5. where he accuseth God of a lye, who is truth it selfe; and of impotencie and envious disdaine, saying, that the cause why he did forbid them to eate of the fruite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evill, was not (as he had said) because they should die, but because he knew that when they should eate thereof, their eyes should be opened, and they should be as Gods knowing good and evill ... so that you see that the end of Satans fight is to dishonour God and destroy us’ (My emphasis. Christian Warfare, 10–11). Satan impeaches God’s honour by accusing him of a lie, an insult that, according to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century system of honour, requires a challenge and a duel. Similarly, Milton’s Satan implies that God lies, referring to God’s prohibition as designed ‘to keep ye low and ignorant’ (IX.704), disconfirming God’s statement that eating the fruit will make Adam and Eve die. Like Downame’s Satan, Milton’s Satan also suggests that God envies humans lest they ‘should be as gods’ (IX.708). He envies worthy subordinates (IX.729–30) as the tyrants denounced in Milton’s prose envy merit in their subjects or younger brothers (CPW V:389, 395).50 Milton similarly educates his readers in Christian warfare by bringing to the surface the destructive distortions in their inner rhetoric. Primary among these are the cognitive errors proliferated by the logic of envy. Milton intensifies Aristotle’s definition of envy: whereas envy, Aristotle writes, aims to ‘prevent’ a ‘neighbour’ from ‘possessing’ goods (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.10, 1388b), Milton’s Satan focuses on destroying others along with their gifts and possessions. Compared to Aristotle, Juan Luis Vives also increases the invidiousness of the emotion: envy ‘wants to see the misery of the other,’ there is ‘no torment similar to it,’ and it cares more for the external signs of honour than for virtue. 51 Envious persons desire ‘reputation, honour, prestige, glory.’52 Satan, like Sidney’s Cecropia and represented in Vives’ terms, seeks precedence apart from excellence (see chapters 4 and 7.) Envy is above all competitive. Hobbes’s ‘briefe’ of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1637) argues that to produce envy, a speaker must make the envied seem to be someone who strives with him for honour, who covets the same things he does, and is equal in ‘blood, in age, in abilities, in glory, or in meanes.’53 Relative status, not substantive good, fuels the emotion of envy. Paradise Lost expresses Satan’s envy in terms of competition for honour. When the Son explains that the fallen angels envy him because the father honours him (PL VI.812–16), his explanation fits the calculus of honour in Aristotle’s Rhetoric 2. Similarly, Adam warns Eve about

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Satan’s envy in terms that stress equality and reciprocity. Adam identifies Satan as one ‘who envies now thy state’ (VI.900), and who seeks to make her share ‘his punishment,’ which would be ‘his solace and revenge’ (VI.904, 905). He explicitly identifies Satan’s goal as a ‘despite done against the most High’ (VI.906). Satan wants to pay God back and to injure Eve. Satan himself asserts that he desires the pleasure of revenge that rhetoricians argue comes from ‘returning pain with pain.’54 For ‘revenge at first’ is ‘sweet’ (PL IX.171). Satan interprets God’s creation of Adam, whom he calls ‘son of despite,’ as done ‘the more to spite’ us (IX.176, 177). He cannot envision any other motive and so he responds, ‘spite then with spite is best repaid’ (IX.178). Framing God’s creation of Adam as an arbitrary elevation out of dust done to insult the fallen angels, Satan projects his own competitive feelings onto God. He construes Adam as a ‘new favorite’ whose status has improved without any merit on his part. Because Satan cannot win victory over God directly, he seeks to injure God’s closest kin and associates. The Son intervenes to prevent Satan’s revenge and to protect God’s honour. He scolds God for not attending to the danger of his situation, asking whether the ‘adversary’ shall ‘fulfill /His malice’ and ‘with revenge accomplish’t’ draw ‘the whole race of mankind’ after him ‘to hell’ (PL III.157–61).55 He inquires whether God will be forced to ‘unmake’ his creation, which ‘for thy glory thou hast made?’ (163–4). Terms appropriate to archaic conceptions of honour competition (enmity, revenge as justice, glory) inform the Son’s implied criticisms of God. But, I have argued, Milton also alters the economy of honour by introducing a privileged notion of glory as something weighty, full of substance, and admired by its creator.56 Whereas Satan interprets God as hungry for glory in the sense of desiring the servile submission of his creatures, the Son perceives God’s creative activity as generating man, the ‘glory of that glory’ as Adam calls him (X.722). God glories in his creatures because of their goodness and capacity for fruitful action. He appreciates the glory of his Son and of mankind rather than wishing to extinguish it through his own prowess. Eve also sees Adam as ‘my glory, my perfection’ (V.29) – the idealization towards which she aspires. Thus, although Paradise Lost uses archaic terms of honour, it does not rest with them. Paradise Lost, in addition to using Homeric and Aristotelian topoi of honour, transforms the topoi and alters their moral economy. Reversing the commonplace that revenge satisfies anger and imposes suffering

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upon its object, Satan asserts that the negative effects fall on the subject: ‘Revenge, at first though sweet /Bitter ere long back on itself recoils’ (IX.171–2). Emotion, motive, and action redound on the one who acts in a pattern that intensifies with time. So Satan’s own conscience awakens the memory ‘Of what he was, what is, and what must be /Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue,’ poignantly predicting that ‘in the lowest deep a lower deep /Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide’ (IV.25–6, 76–7). Like Malbecco in The Faerie Queene who becomes the self-gnawing jealousy that he once occasionally felt, Satan becomes the malice and envy that make his identity hell. Whereas in an archaic heroic context, degrees of error are calibrated so that revenge equals injury, Paradise Lost (VI.903–7) stresses that a single choice to rebel against God invokes a total change in a person’s fate. Depending upon the choice, a person experiences happiness or ‘eternal misery.’ How can such extreme punishments and rewards be just? Extreme metaphysical contrasts between punishment and reward are endemic to Christian formulations of emotion, as chapter 7 will argue. Satan reaches hell because his envy and revenge create a ‘fixt mind /And high disdain, from sense of injur’d merit,’ that drives him to contend with God (I.97–8).57 He invents not the hatred that Aristotle’s Rhetoric ascribes to persons of conflicting family, class, or ideals, but an endless, fixated hatred whose object is the good itself. Renaissance psychologists understood the good to evoke love and the bad to evoke hatred, and Satan threatens to subvert the entire theoretical framework of this psychology by hating what is intrinsically lovable and attractive. He hates the sun (and the good): ... to thee I call, But with no friendly voice, and add thy name O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams That bring to my remembrance from what state I fell, how glorious once above thy sphere.

(IV.35–9)

His hatred reverses the psychological terms that define emotion. How can evil, repellent as it is, ever attract desire, energy, and movement, becoming, in some sense of the word, ‘good’? How, given Milton’s monism, can evil, a mere nothingness, attract? The implications of Satan’s subversion become clearer in light of the Renaissance definition of emotion. Emotion results when affects produce motion towards good objects, motion away from evil ones, or resis-

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tance to evil ones. H.M. Gardiner, Ruth Clark Metcalf, and John G. Beebe-Center argue that Vives, rewriting Thomas Aquinas’s classification of emotions, defines emotion as ‘activity directed to the attainment of good or to avoiding or resisting evil,’ and ‘divides the simple emotions into those aiming at good’ (as love and delight), those expressing a distaste of evil (as hatred and sadness), and those resisting evil (as anger and courage).58 Similarly, Philippe Melanchthon, the Lutheran theologian and humanist, discriminates joy and sadness as movements of the heart that pursue or avoid objects. These objects either aid or destroy the natures of those who are moved by them; they produce either ‘sadness or destruction when the nature is wounded, or pleasant motions of pleasure or joy when the heart acquiesces in the object.’59 Because Satan hates the good, he can only turn to what wounds, eating away at his own substance and destroying others. By destroying God’s good work, he hopes to grieve and vex him. He competes with God, not merely to excel over him but to set in motion against God’s regenerative activity a more energetic counterforce of destruction. The text contrasts a process of turning evil to good with one of turning good to evil: If then his providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labor must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil; Which oft-times may succeed, so as perhaps Shall grieve him.

(I.162–7)

Having defined a contest between God’s providential creativity and Satan’s resourceful undoing, Paradise Lost uses Homeric/Aristotelian, Protestant, and humanist topoi of emotion to represent and to heal the injuries to human beings produced by the fall. These processes form the subject of chapters 7 and 8.

7 Seventeenth-Century Protestant Rhetoric: Cause and Cure of Fallen Emotion

Paradise Lost represents imaginings that become unmoored from their references to external socially defined action. Whereas in the Iliad Achilles becomes angry at a particular insult to his honour, fallen characters in Paradise Lost experience unbounded anger, envy, shame, and fear arising from their imaginations and their dreams. Emotion becomes more onesided and unlimited than it was even in Sidney’s New Arcadia, where tyrants caught up in intense emotion nevertheless appealed to evidence from the external world to feed their fears and hatreds. Although Sidney’s tyrants produce one-sided emotions, they use discourses oriented towards socially defined events. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, represents an inner self whose emotions depart from the social world to become all encompassing. We cannot understand Satan, who seeks unlimited honour, in terms of honour competition alone, because the latter belongs to the external world of status, combat, and social interaction. Especially in his soliloquies, Milton’s Satan replaces normative social criteria for producing emotions with fantastic absolutist ambition and passion. Satan, pursuing a desire for infinitely upward social mobility, loses his social identity, becoming unrecognizable to others. He becomes an orator, a deceiver, a consummate actor, and seducer – a figure for Charles II – and he manipulates the emotions of others by merging with their desires, taking on the shape of a lion, toad, and serpent in order to do so. He permeates the psyches of others, breaking down the boundaries between self and other as well as between god, human, and beast. Like error in A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659), which becomes ‘slie’ and ‘shifting’ (CPW VII.261), Satan uses defences that are unnecessary to truth, which is ‘strong’ (II.563).1 Paradise Lost traces Satan’s fall into slyness and shape-changing. As Satan’s identity disinte-

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grates, he becomes less and less capable of conversation, experiencing a solitude that estranges him even from himself. Communicating his deformed rhetorical topoi focused on competition for honour to Eve, and through her to Adam, he leads them to experience inward, annihilating (because indefinite) shame and fear. Paradise Lost inflects Homeric/Aristotelian topoi of emotion in seventeenth-century Protestant representations of emotion and persuasion. Treatises and psychologies represent the self as permeable to suggestions marked as satanic. Accentuating the extreme dualism characteristic of Christian representations of happiness and misery, Protestant writers celebrate the nobility of unfallen persons and bemoan the wretched perturbations of the fallen. They draw on classical topoi, detaching them from their locus in time, place, and action (the ‘circumstances’ of the rhetoricians), and generalizing them to show how they torment people ‘with the dread of what shall never come.’2 By tracing this historical process, discerning how fantasy departs from its status as registering the appearance of events (Aristotle) and becomes identified with illusion (Quintilian), and with the diseases of the fallen (Protestant writings), I contextualize Paradise Lost’s representation of Satan’s malice, Adam’s fear, and Eve’s shame in Protestant concerns with an imagination so powerful that it could strike people dead. Imagination could, of course, also lead people towards God, as Sidney argues in The Defence of Poetry. Milton’s Satan surreptitiously teaches Eve distorted rhetorical topoi of emotion and works on phantasiae that shape her emotional response.3 She takes them up, uses and reshapes them.4 In telling the story of Eve, Paradise Lost draws on Protestant representations of persuasive strategies that aim to change beliefs without a person’s being aware of it. These representations raise questions about early modern perceptions of the self, its boundaries, its vulnerabilities, the relativity of its experiences, its tendency to slip into new assumptions and convictions. For Protestants depict the fancy as most open to influence from persuasion, that faculty most providing ‘matter out of which [Satan] doth extracts his formes,’ mingling ‘himselfe with our most intimate corruptions.’ For, according to Henry Lawrence, the father of Milton’s friend, ‘the seate of his warfare is the inward man.’5 The indeterminacies of influence (i.e., whether it is external or internal, whether it belongs to the self or to Satan) motivates the writing of such treatises as Lawrence’s Of our communion and warre with angels (1646), as surely as it did Timothie Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), which also sought to bring order to the psyche. Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) uses language that imitates

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the exigent pressure of images, referring to ‘these phantasticall and bewitching thoughts, [that] so covertly, so feelingly, so urgently, so continually set upon, creepe in, insinuate, possesse, overcome, distract and detaine’ persons that they can hardly resist them.6 Yet, despite the powerful persistence of these images, the godly are free to consent or not to consent to the shadowy insinuations of Satan. Although, as Lawrence explains, the ‘Angells’ can ‘make compositions of what they finde’ in the fancy, ‘they cannot put in new ones,’ but ‘worke upon what matter they finde,’ and Satan ‘may necessitate a man to feele a temptation, but not to consent to it.’7 Godly persons possess the freedom and reason to engage in single combat with the master of illusion, to demonstrate the strength of truth. The consequences of choice are determinative because people live in a bipolar world in which they, because of their choices, experience happiness or become ‘swallow’d up in endless misery.’8 Extreme anger, pity, and fear are seen as dark shadows against the bright foil of unfallen noble human nature. Such extreme contrasts characterize Christian formulations of emotion, as in Augustine’s opposition of the happy life of the blessed to the miserable life of the sinner in the Confessions, a text first read and appreciated in the Renaissance.9 But Protestants represent the change from happiness to misery even more hyperbolically, focusing on the fall as an event that changed the whole nature of humankind, including even the reason.10 The Anatomy of Melancholy dramatizes the utter degradation of the faculties brought on by the fall, idealizing ‘man’ beforehand as ‘the most excellent, and noble creature of the world ... soveraigne lord of the earth ... sole commander and governour of all the creatures in it ... created to Gods owne image ... at first pure, divine, perfect, happy’ (I, 121). Burton’s description possesses the glow of the Renaissance and Pauline celebration of the human being. This human being was ‘put in paradise, to knowe God, to praise and glorifie him, to doe his will’ (I, 122). Whereas Genesis emphasizes that Adam and Eve changed after the fall by knowing that they were naked (3.7), Burton represents them as noble creatures that degenerate totally and become completely miserable. The bipolar emphasis affects the terms in which emotion is experienced and represented: ‘But this most noble creature, Heu tristis, & lachrymosa commutatio ... O pittifull change! is fallen from that he was, and forfeited his estate, become miserabilis homuncio, a cast-away, a catiffe, one of the most miserable creatures of the world ... How much altered from that he was, before, blessed and happy, now miserable and accursed; He must eat his meat in sorrow, subject to death and all manner of infirmities ... Wrath,

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envy, trouble, and unquietnesse, and feare of death, and rigor, and strife, and such things come to both man and beast, but seavenfold to the ungodly’ (I, 122). Burton emphasizes the violent emotions and ‘tortures, brasen bulls, rackes, wheeles, strappadoes, gunnes, engins, &c.’ that ‘wee have invented.’ Though we might look to the gifts of wit and learning, we use them ‘to our owne destruction.’ Because of the degeneration of the faculties, even the ‘reason, art, judgement, all that should helpe us’ in healing the indiscretion and intemperance that cause misery are ‘as so many instruments to undoe us’ (I, 127). Like Milton, as we shall see, Burton registers the effects of wrath, envy, and fear as metamorphic: ‘wee degenerate into beasts, transforme our selves ... and heap upon us ... melancholy, and all kindes of incurable diseases’ (I, 128). The unleashing of wretched passions makes the need for counsel more pressing but also more challenging than in earlier humanist texts. But Burton, like Bright retains some agency for human beings even after the fall. The Anatomy of Melancholy and Summum Bonum argue that the effects of the fall can be healed by divine regeneration and by educating readers about their emotions, an idea that informs Milton’s representation of Michael’s talks with Adam, as I will argue in chapter 8.11 In this respect, as well as in his analysis of the kinds of souls and the faculties, Burton follows in the footsteps of writers like Duplessis-Mornay, Bright, and La Primaudaye. Burton educates his readers’ emotions by distinguishing their causes: though Adam’s sin was the ‘impulsive cause’ of human misery, ‘Gods just judgement’ is the ‘principall agent’ of human misery, trying ‘our patience ... to make us knowe God and our selves’ (122, 123, 124). Pain is the stimulus to self-awareness; Burton quotes Pliny’s maxim, ‘In sicknesse, the minde reflects upon it selfe’ (I, 124). He also uses a copia of discourse on disease, the anatomy of the body, and the faculties of the soul to comfort and teach.12 The sheer weight of evidence draws the reader’s mind away from melancholy. Furthermore, the text also discovers opportunities for agency in the uncertain human condition. By her vigilance, a soldier may avoid a worse ‘labyrinth of cares’ (I, 138) by embracing good counsel rather than voluntarily subjecting herself to a corrupt imagination that produces additional ‘bugbeares, divels, witches and goblins’ (I, 251). Otherwise, ‘“feare commeth like sudden desolation, and destruction like a whirlewind, affliction and anguish,” because they did not feare God’ (Proverbs 1:27, Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 123). Paradise Lost represents misery in similarly extreme terms and portrays the fall as a stimulus to Adam and Eve’s educations, sharpening their

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need to know God and themselves. And like the Anatomy, Milton’s text encounters obstacles to education in the fallen reasons and passions of Satan, Adam, and Eve. This darkening affects the way rhetorical topoi and phantasiae produce emotion. Satan’s malice, for example, becomes unhinged from its location in the particular insult he thinks he received from God. As his emotions become detached from specific social contexts, he turns inward to seek grounds of emotion. In order to refine our understanding of how this process works, I offer a brief history of the concept of phantasia and its effect on emotion.13 Imagination as a Cause of Emotion We can better understand the intensity of fallen Adam, Eve, and Satan’s emotional experiences by tracing historical shifts in the ways that rhetorical phantasiae were used to move emotion. I have argued that Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Renaissance writers anchor emotion in the interpretation of particular social situations and especially in those related to competition for honour. Insofar as texts are definite in recommending that speakers look for distinct social signs that might increase or decrease fear, anger, and the other emotions, they construe passion (Aristotle’s pathê ) as judicious. Thomas Hobbes’s translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique (1637), locates emotion in specific considerations of what sort of people arouse anger or are to be feared, the things or occasions which produce anger or fear or other emotions, and those who are likely to be angry or to fear.14 Aristotle implies (Rhetoric 2.3, 1380a) and A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique asserts that the orator may move emotions by shifting interpretations of these elements (for example, by arguing that words or gestures were not intended as insults). However, Aristotle also focuses on how phantasiae influence emotional response. Aristotle uses phantasiae not to suggest illusion but that a slight, for example, appears, is manifest (timôrias phainomenês, 2.2, 1378a), or, as we would say, is perceived in a certain way.15 Because slights may sometimes be apprehended as gestures of other kinds (and vice versa), the orator increases or diminishes anger by changing people’s perception of the gesture. Fear, on the other hand, arises from an image (phantasia) of future but imminent destructive or painful evil and is less tied to specific observable signs (2.5, 1382a). The orator can decrease or increase an audience’s fear by altering a phantasia so the threat seems remote or immediate.

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Quintilian accentuates the fantastic quality of imagined circumstances, making comparisons between oratorical speech and acting in theatrical performances. Whereas for Aristotle the phantasia closely relates to what appears or is, Quintilian praises the power of counter-factual daydreams that arise when one’s mind is at leisure.16 He argues that the orator may turn this vice of the mind (animi vitium) to some use. Quintilian’s stress on vain (inanes) hopes and daydreams tends to detach phantasiae (visiones) from actual circumstances. The person ‘who is really sensitive (bene conceperit) to such impressions’ whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be ‘before our very eyes,’ becomes a great orator. Conceperit suggests that this person can conceive (not just receive) images and the reference to ‘things absent’ diminishes the importance of what is present. Vives takes the shift a step further. He uses Aristotle’s definition of fear ‘as an imagination of an approaching evil,’ and ‘as a disturbance of the soul caused by the thought of a future evil, something that could trouble or even destroy us.’17 But he expands his account to include such things as fear of ignorance of the good, and he alters his definition of fear to ‘a dejection caused by what looks to an individual as an imminent evil,’ making the emotion depend on the individual’s point of view (102). The imagination also creates obstacles to persuasion because telling ‘a coward that fear itself is ... harmful’ makes him ‘fear even more.’ As it happens with ‘contagious diseases: our imagination hurts more and causes a double fear, the fear of the disease and the fear of fear itself’ (104). Fear based on imagination becomes a tyranny, as his anecdote proclaims. ‘A married couple, seated next to the fireplace, felt miserable and began to cry when they began talking about the possibility of losing their only son, who was whole and hearty. The tyranny of the imagination applies to all emotions’ (107). Insofar as an emotion is produced internally, arising from signs produced by memory and imagination, the signs may intensify the passion’s scope and indefiniteness until it becomes overwhelming. So vivid are the experiences of the terrors, the wrath, envy, trouble, and fear of death endemic to the fallen human condition that persons do not trust their discriminations of what is inward and what outward, what arises from fancy and what results from events in the external world. This blurring of inward and outward leads Duplessis-Mornay, Bright, Burton, and La Primaudaye to delineate the causes of emotion, to lay intelligible

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boundaries within an amorphous and terrifying field of experience. Do melancholy, despair, fear, or anger come from one’s humours, excessive studying, the devil speaking in dreams, the fancy, or from God himself? Is fallen imagination the cause of dreads more acute than events in the world merit, or does the terrified perspective of the fallen only approximate an evil that surpasses the power of persons to grasp it?18 The texts offer practical signs and strategies to enable troubled readers to answer these questions. The Anatomy of Melancholy offers copious exempla from humanist and Christian texts to acquaint readers with the monstrous experiences they might face and to delineate some sphere of agency within an otherwise overwhelming plethora of miseries. Evil surpasses the human capacity to grasp it and fallen imagination darkens the human view of suffering. Human beings are ‘subject to infirmities, miseries, interrupt, tossed and tumbled up and downe, carried about with every small blast ... And he that knowes not this, is and is not armed to indure it, is not fit to live in this world ... Arme thyselfe with patience, with magnanimitie, to oppose thy selfe unto it, to suffer affliction as a good souldier of Christ; (as Paul adviseth) constantly to beare it. But forasmuch as so few can imbrace this good counsell of his or use it aright, but rather as so many brute beasts, give a way to their passions, voluntarily subject and precipitate themselves into a labyrinth of cares, woes, miseries; and suffer their soules to be overcome by them’ (I, 138). The soldier of Christ faces a world so chaotic and painful that the ordinary condition of enlightened life must be envisioned as warfare. Rather than giving way to miseries, a surrender that injects one into additional cares, Christians must be good soldiers. Burton’s imagery echoes a long line of writers going back to Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani. Like Erasmus, Burton calls those not subject to passion good soldiers, but the degree of misery and confusion that they face is characterized as much greater than previously. Imagination is so strong that by its force, Burton avers, Agrippa supposed that some men ‘are turned to wolves, from men to women, and women againe to men ... from men to asses, dogges, or any other shapes’ (I, 252). Imagination has the power to cross boundaries of gender and species, life and death. Even the mere sight of a hanged man may cause a person to fall down dead. By bridging boundaries, imagination produces an uncertain, shifting world. Equally salient to my question about the source of suffering, Burton recites a story that also appears in Vives about a man who ‘came by chance over a dangerous passage, or planke, that lay over a brooke in the darke, without harme, the next day perceaving what danger he was in, fell downe

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dead ... Let ... men consider with themselves, as Peter Bayrus illustrates it, if they were set to walke upon a planke on high, they would be giddie, upon which they dare securely walke upon the ground.’19 This story dramatizes how people’s perceptions of an action dramatically affect their estimates of its danger. In Vives’ version of the story, a man sleeping on his donkey crosses a broken bridge that has only one narrow plank. He is perfectly relaxed at the time and passes over unharmed, but the next day when he thinks about ‘the terrible danger he had been in,’ he faints (The Passions of the Soul, 107). Vives emphasizes the degree to which the way one thinks enlarges or diminishes fear. Using this fact, rhetoricians can presumably make actions seem more or less terrifying and bring emotional response within the control of imagination. William Perkins, on the other hand, uses the image of the bridge to convince his readers of one true view and of ‘how little a step there is between [a person] and his damnation.’20 ‘The man that passeth upon ridges of mountain and sides of hills, or that goeth over a narrow bridge or some dangerous and steep rocks at midnight fearest not, because he seeth no danger: but bring the same man in the morning and let him see the narrow bridge he went over in the night, under which runs a violent stream and a bottomless gulf and the dangerous mountains and rocks he passed over, he will wonder at his own boldness, and shrink for fear to think of it and will by no means venture the same way again’ (Work, 284). No longer illustrating the difference a vivid perception makes in whether a bridge seems dangerous or not, Perkins uses the story to dramatize the difference between seeing truly and failing to see at all. ‘For now he seeth the height of the mountains, the steepness of the hills, the cragginess of the rocks, the fearful downfall and furious violence of the stream underneath, and thereby seeth the extreme danger which afore he saw not’ (Work, 284, my emphasis). Whereas Vives uses the story to imply that a person who does not perceive his danger may pass through it unharmed, while one who sees with a lively imagination will faint, Perkins compares the one who did not know his danger to ‘a sinner in his first estate which is natural and corrupt ...’ and who ‘hath a veil before his face so that he seeth nothing’: ‘hell and damnation seeking to devour him he seeth them not, although living always in sin he walketh in the very jaws of hell itself ’ (my emphasis). Of course, the preacher’s task is to rend the veil and reveal ‘the craggy rock and hell the gaping gulf under it’ (285). Which of these views of the role of imagination and rhetoric in shaping experiences of the fallen does Paradise Lost develop? The text

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answers that because the cosmos falls with Adam, his estate is miserable and his imagination makes the fallen world even more dreadful than it already is. After the fall the night is no longer Wholesome and cool and mild, but with black air Accompanied, with damps and dreadful gloom, Which to his evil conscience represented All things with double terror.

(X.847–50)

Adam’s conscience multiplies the terror of the truly black night. Milton represents fear as Ball does: it is a ‘deceitful’ and ‘malitious passion ... tormenting with the dread of what shall never come’ (Ball, Treatise of Faith, 181). Like Bright, Ball, and Burton, Milton explores ways to discriminate between the evil already in the world and that intensified by human faculties, all of which send their messages through imagination. Like Burton, who believes human beings are ‘subject to infirmities, miseries, tossed and tumbled up and down,’ Milton shows Adam filled with ‘a sense of endless woes’ (PL X.754), ‘tost’ in ‘a troubl’d sea of passion,’ and falling into an ‘abyss of fears /And horrors’ (X.842–3). Reasoning as Burton does in terms of an extreme, metaphysical opposition between former ‘glory’ and present accursedness (X.721–2), Milton’s Adam goes beyond the earlier representation of fallen humankind (Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 121). Burton’s man falls to become ‘one of the most miserable creatures of the World’ (I, 122), but Milton makes Adam recognize himself as the ‘glory of that glory’ (God), ‘who now become /Accurst of blessed’ (PL X.722–3) heightening the sense of loss. Adam can envision no way out, ‘for what can I increase /Or multiply, but curses on my head?’ (X.731–2). God’s word takes on ironic meaning – from ‘increase and multiply’ to multiplying curses. If we ask whether Adam is correct or his imagination exaggerates the woe, the answer is not simple. In one sense, unregenerate humankind can by itself only multiply curses on its own head according to Protestant belief. But Adam’s despair also arises from his loss of faith in God, when fallen imagination makes suffering worse: ... these were from without The growing miseries, which Adam saw Already in part, though hid in gloomiest shade, To sorrow abandon’d, but worse felt within, And in a troubl’d sea of passion tost ...

(X.714 –18)

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Adam saw the growing miseries, as Perkins’s man crossing the bridge finally sees the gaping gulf beneath, but he felt ‘worse within.’ The pain of being confronted with the double evil stirs Adam to self-reflection. According to Burton’s rendering of Pliny, to quote at greater length, ‘In sicknesse, the minde reflects upon it selfe, with judgement survaies it selfe, and abhorres its former courses’ (Anatomy of Melancholy I, 124). Milton makes this view palpable in order to represent Adam’s critique of his own inability to perform his covenant to God and unwillingness to accept the conditions of the good he received. But Paradise Lost greatly enlarges the role of ratiocination in fallen thoughts not only to show how it clarifies Adam’s responsibility and the dilemmas he faces, but also to demonstrate that it errs in quirky ways difficult to discern. Discriminating between truth and error in Adam’s speech is a challenge. For example, he asks, ‘To the loss of that [good], /Sufficient penalty, why has thou added /The sense of endless woes?’ (PL X.752–3). Did God impose these woes or does Adam’s fallen imagination depict the woes as endless or are they endless until God regenerates him and the Son redeems him? What is the problem to which Adam needs to address himself? The answer requires judgment, and thinking through the problems requires reason. Adam’s reason sometimes heals, as when he accepts the consequences of his act and acknowledges that his punishment is just: ‘Be it so,’ he concludes, ‘for I submit, his doom is fair, /That dust I am, and shall to dust return’ (X.768–9). The Biblical quotation and affirmation of God’s justice makes it likely that Milton endorses this statement. But when Adam proliferates questions such as ‘why do I overlive /Why am I mockt with death, and length’n’d out /To deathless pain?’ his reason and imagination undo him by multiplying erroneous assumptions. Burton comments that, once fallen, humans are ‘farre worse by art, every man the greatest enimy unto himselfe’ (Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 127); Adam’s rational art and his selfawareness lead him to more trouble than he has already. Paradise Lost also adds complexity to the Protestant discourse when it focuses on the use of language to probe the reality of evil and good. Representations of hell suggest the existence of an evil so extreme as to defy description, using paradox and self-contradiction to imply that the poet must strain his expressive power to convey evil. This strain registers Milton’s emphasis on the hermeneutic distance between words and referents: At once as far as angels’ ken he views The dismal situation waste and wild,

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A dungeon horrible, on all sides round As one great furnace flam’d, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible Serv’d only to discover sights of woe, Regions of sorrow, doleful shapes, where peace And rest can never dwell.

(PL I.59–66)

Privatives subtract whatever positive qualities the reader associates with flames or darkness; the flames burn without light, just as the darkness fails to hide regions of sorrow. Perception cannot grasp the intense torture produced by ‘ever-burning sulphur unconsum’d’ (68). Unlike Perkins’s story, Milton’s text seems sceptical that one could ever grasp evil fully. Nevertheless, the text suggests that location does not sufficiently define evil either; rather, Satan sees ‘undelighted all delight’ (IV.286), having discovered that ‘which way I fly is hell; myself am hell’ (IV.75).21 The text discloses Satan’s agency in creating his own torment. The relation between word and referent in the fallen world also contributes to Adam’s difficulties in discerning evil. Adam’s fall into a new condition that he does not understand robs him of the referents for words. Whereas before the fall, he named creatures ‘as they pass’d, and understood /Thir nature’ (PL VIII.352–3), after the fall he vainly sorts through the meanings of ‘death’ ‘woe,’ ‘pain,’ and ‘anger ... infinite’ (X.773ff.). He knows that death follows from his eating the fruit but he doesn’t know what death is.22 His conscience and imagination produce woeful, indeterminate meanings for the term. His fears focus on fantasies of the future, where his imagination has room to expand indefinitely. He feels not just woe but ‘the sense of endless woes’ (X.754). He wishes for death and fears not just pain ‘but deathless pain’ (X.775). His question, ‘why do I overlive, /Why am I mockt with death, and length’n’d out /To deathless pain?’ (X.773–5) expresses not the daydream and hope of which Quintilian writes but nightmare and doubt, which in the larger providential framework of the text are unfounded. Adam’s language also makes deathless pain seem infinite by leaving its expression abstract. He also doubts ‘lest all I cannot die’ (X.783), even though the prohibition promises death. The text implies that death, rightly understood, is a blessing compared to the possibilities Adam envisages. Reason helps him conceive of horrid options while imagination makes them vivid. Fallen imagination creates the sense of infinite woe that Adam fears. He reads his sufferings as divine inflictions of torment. In his speech in

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Book X, he veers between precipitating himself into Burton’s ‘labyrinth’ (I, 138) of miseries as his reasoning leads him ‘through mazes’ (PL X.830) and discerning his own agency in creating his woes. Only when he listens to counsel, as Burton and the other Protestants recommend, does he stop the self-destructive process that plunges him into an ‘abyss of fears and horrors’ (X.842–3). Writers agree that embracing good counsel is requisite to interrupting the despair and escaping from the labyrinth. Paradise Lost also draws on Protestant terms to depict the misery into which Satan falls. It contrasts the ‘happy realms of light’ (PL I.85) in the prelapsarian state with the depths of sorrow in the fallen condition. Satan concedes that he and his comrades now live in ‘misery’ and ‘in ... ruin’ (I.90–1). Hell is a ‘prison ordained in utter darkness’ (I.71–2). There can be no doubt that the fallen experience real evil. Yet their fallen imaginations deepen the darkness in which they live. Although the text makes clear the deformities in the devils’ imagination, it also represents them as accurate at times. Paradoxically, the worse things they imagine, the truer they are. In the assembly in Book I, the fallen angels use imagination to increase their misery. Moloch, for example, asserts that nothing can be worse than being the ‘vassals’ of God’s ‘anger, when the scourge inexorably, and the torturing hour /Calls us to penance’ (II.90–2), so he advises that the fallen angels to risk all and attack God again. But his ‘desperate revenge’ is founded upon ‘despair,’ as Belial points out (II.107, 126). Belial fears lest they ‘Caught in a fiery tempest shall be hurl’d /Each on his rock transfixt, the sport and prey /Of racking whirlwinds’ (II.180–2). His imagination makes the future as bad as possible because he is fearful and cowardly. Both anticipations are the products of imagination gone wrong, but imagination may not always make evil worse than it is. This ambiguity creates problems for characters that wish to discern the source of the evils they experience. As in the case of Gynecia and Amphialus in Sidney’s New Arcadia, Satan’s memory, (which Renaissance writers understood as part of the faculty of imagination) selects evidence of good lost and evil received, producing extreme emotions of fear and despair. Even perception is influenced by imagination because, as Burton characterizes it, citing Agrippa, Lemnius, Bright, and others, ‘to our imagination commeth, by the outward sense or memory, some object to be knowne ... which he mis-conceaving or amplifying, presently communicates to the heart, the seat of all affections’ (Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 249). Because all perceptions, memories, and cognitions pass through the imagination, they are

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subject to amplification and other kinds of distortions. Deformed images produce deformed emotions. But when Satan experiences relentless torment and his conscience brings only fear and suffering, these ‘distortions’ of his imagination register his situation accurately: Now conscience wakes despair That slumber’d, wakes the bitter memory Of what he was, what is, and what must be Worse; of worse deeds worse sufferings must ensue.

(PL IV.23–6)

Satan perceives correctly that he will choose progressively worse actions that create more suffering. Like the tyrants in Sidney’s New Arcadia, Satan experiences a recursive rhetorical structure: the tyrants’ fear and envy suggest new grounds for greater fear and envy; and these emotions seek out more warning signs. Satan makes the destructive circle worse by creating ‘evidence’ in his imagination. But Milton innovates by representing his imagination as creating real evil. In making competition absolute, Satan introduces ‘infinite wrath, and infinite despair’ (IV.74) into the world. Paradise Lost represents Satan’s ‘creativity’ by showing how he vitiates social terms pertinent to honour, desire, metaphysical envy, and deprivation, fixing aspiration not on honour within a community but on absolute precedence. By fixating on evil, understood by Milton as nothingness, Satan empties the desire for honour of its social content. Ambition turns away from prowess towards a supremacy that has no substance or focus. Rejecting a socially defined identity, Satan creates artificial personae that include animals, a lover, an orator, and a friend. More particularly, Milton uses the debased image of a Renaissance orator to show how Satan’s tendency to merge himself with others by flattering them becomes a substitute for a functioning social identity. The text represents Satan’s identity as becoming more and more insubstantial while his malice and envy grow. Paradise Lost’s Transvaluation of the Rhetoric of Honour and Emotion Paradise Lost uses Homeric/Aristotelian terms in new ways to represent Satan’s metaphysical reorientation of ambition, hatred, and revenge. Milton admired the Iliad and Paradise Lost revises its central passages, including the assemblies in Books I and II and the fall of divinities from heaven.23 As I argue in chapter 6, it draws on the Homeric concept of

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injury and honour to represent God, the Son, the angels, and Satan, but the text alters the Homeric emotional economy. Homeric competition for honour occurs between free, equal men: warriors do not fight with women, or with men of lower status. But combat establishes inequality by bestowing the loser’s honour onto the winner. Because, as we have seen, honour has an economic aspect, based as it is on the amount for which a warrior would be ransomed, the exchange has a fixed economic value.24 However, Milton represents Satan as operating in an absolutist framework that replaces precise exchanges of value with infinite stakes. Like Achilles, Satan contends with his leader because he thinks he has not been rewarded appropriately, and he feels ‘high disdain, from sense of injur’d merit’ (PL I.98).25 But Agamemnon is anax andrôn (king of men), first among equals because he is king over many, whereas Milton’s God is qualitatively superior to Satan and absolutely supreme. Nevertheless, the narrator describes Satan as ‘affecting equality with God,’ almost as if they were Homeric heroes (V.763). Satan believes that God demands the ‘suppliant knee’ and that the angels ‘deify his power’ (I.112), like an illegitimate monarch claiming divine right. But in Paradise Lost, God is the deity. And because of Satan’s search for total domination, his revenge cannot occur in a precise economy that redistributes honour according to merit. Instead, he seeks the ‘study of revenge, immortal hate’ (I.107). Milton explores the structure of a principle of evil rather than the competing gradations and comparable increments of economic good. Paradise Lost’s transvaluation of value makes emotion metaphysical, open-ended, and inward because there is no actual physical power as great as the unlimited creativity of God or the unlimited malicious destructive potentiality of Satan.26 The consequence of this approach emerges in the beginning of Book II, where Satan sits like an Eastern despot on a throne ‘exalted ... from despair /Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires /Beyond thus high’ (II.5, 6–8). Despair, hope, and desire soar (or plunge) beyond limit, though Satan himself is lifted even ‘beyond hope.’ The extension of the economy of emotion beyond calibration has powerful consequences for Milton’s representation of satanic envy and malice. Using the Platonic/Aristotelian framework adopted by Aquinas, Augustine, and Renaissance writers, Paradise Lost defines emotion in terms of desire. It draws on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which calls anger, for example, a ‘longing (horexis) accompanied by pain’ for revenge for a ‘manifest’ slight.27 All the emotions pertinent to rhetoric involve ‘long-

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ing’ or desire, as horexis can also be translated. The intensity of the desires affects emotion, as when the ‘sick, the necessitous, the love-sick, the thirsty, in a word, all who desire something and cannot obtain it, are prone to anger’ (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.2, 1379a). Satan desires supremacy and cannot attain it; hence his limitless anger. Envy also arises from the ‘desire’ for ‘glory or honour’ (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.9, 1388a), as I argue in chapter 6. Aristotle specifies that men are envious when those like themselves attain goods and especially when the possession of glory or honour makes others a little superior to them. Envy fluctuates depending upon the discrepancy between what people think they deserve and what someone like them receives. Paradise Lost redefines and intensifies Aristotelian and Baconian definitions of envy. Aristotle’s distinction between envy and emulation (in which someone is pained when another obtains good things which he or she lacks) makes emulation a virtuous emotion because it leads people to seek good things. Envy, on the other hand, ‘is base and characteristic of base men’ because their object is ‘to prevent’ their neighbour possessing good things (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.11, 1388b). Francis Bacon elucidates the deeper evil possible in envy by writing,‘he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.’28 For a rational being ‘that has no virtue in himself, ever envieth virtue in others (‘Of Envy,’ 354). Bacon introduces psychologically acute words to discern the sickness of the envious mind. ‘For men’s minds will either feed upon their own good or upon other’s evil; and who wanteth the one will prey upon the other’ (354). ‘Feeding upon ... another’s evil’ anticipates Satan’s obsession with others. He can find ‘ease’ to his ‘relentless thoughts’ ‘only in destroying’ (IX.129–30), and Death finally devours all living creatures. But Satan’s problem goes deeper because he cannot desire the good ... any good. Since Paradise Lost incorporates the Neoplatonic understanding of good as what people seek for its own sake, Satan deprives himself of satisfaction when he rejects good. By choosing evil over good, Satan locks himself into fruitless desire. This step brings us to another way in which Paradise Lost represents his desires and emotions as sapped of social content. Choosing evil (nothingness) he finds himself desiring out of a sense of deprivation. In hell, according to his own account, he experiences ‘neither joy nor love, but fierce desire ... still unfulfill’d’ (IV.509, 511). If, according to Renaissance psychology, joy arises when some good object affects the imagination and dilates the heart, the renunciation of good implies the end of joy.29 Satan conveys the emptiness of his own desire when, responding to

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the sight of Adam and Eve’s kiss, he complains that they enjoy their fill of bliss while he ‘to hell’ is ‘thrust’ (IV.508). In this distortion of the period’s psychology, desire becomes purely social (in a vitiated sense of that word) and competitive (in a similarly vitiated sense). Milton’s representation resembles that of Sidney’s New Arcadia, where the search for ascendancy takes precedence over the pursuit of substantive good. Sidney represents the self-contradictions in this search through the figure of Pamphilus, who makes himself an object of attraction to women by setting up a competition that produces envy, jealousy, and pride (see chapter 4 above). One insightful woman diagnoses his strategies, perceiving his lack of excellence even while she strives to possess him. I repeat this important quotation from chapter 4: ‘Even in the greatest tempest of my judgement was I never driven to think him excellent, and yet so could set my mind both to get and keep him, as though therein had lain my felicity – like them I have seen play at the ball grow extremely earnest who should have the ball, and yet everyone knew it was but a ball.’30 Hovering at the intersection between absolutism, on the one hand, with the competition for office it entailed (often without consideration of merit) and proto-capitalism, on the other, where competitive market value determines worth, desire in this vignette focuses on socially perceived competitive value at the expense of joy in something good.31 The ball’s whole value derives from its social definition as the object of rivalry. Similarly, the desire Satan arouses in Eve depends on the fruit’s status as the object of the envious and frustrated desires of others. For, when he slithers up the tree, he (allegedly) notices that ... Round the tree All other beasts that saw, with like desire Longing and envying stood, but could not reach.

(IX.591–3)

Satan uses his distorted rhetoric to define the fruit’s attraction as the result of social competition.32 Paradise Lost later takes this idea to its logical conclusion when the fruit turns to dust after Satan and his followers taste it, implying allegorically that the fruit’s aura comes from its having been withheld, not from its flavour or health-giving properties. Living in a state of deprivation, Satan initiates the war against God’s creativity. His efforts mirror perversely the dynamism of the prelapsarian state. To describe that state, Milton uses monistic Neoplatonism and contemporary vitalism to represent life as constantly striving for new and less

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material shape.33 The ‘green stalk’ ‘springs lighter’ ‘from the root,’ then the leaves, and last the flower (V.480, 479, 481). Flowers and fruit nourish man and aspire to vital spirits and ultimately to human sensible and rational faculties (V.479ff.). Eden in Paradise Lost is no static golden world; if human beings had not fallen they might have looked forward to becoming angels, ‘more refin’d, more spiritous, and pure’ (V.475), able to eat lighter food and to change shapes and genders.34 Such angelic beings make love unimpeded by gross earthly matter, mixing and joining as they wish (VIII.626–9). Rather than seeking to become more refined, Satan presumes ‘all equality with God’ (V.763), and he uses the rhetoric of honour to make himself pre-eminent among his peers, referring to what ‘besides, in counsel or in fight, /Hath been achiev’d of merit’ (II.20–1) as producing his leadership. Although he seems heroic, he is merely ambitious. Unlimited aspirations generate extreme emotions not subject to the prudential evaluations that shape emotions pertinent to honour (II.1ff.). However, by aiming to make themselves gods, the fallen angels ironically create identities that are more enmattered and resistant to change. The fallen angels’ metamorphoses dim their brightness; they stand ‘faithful ... thir glory wither’d’ (PL I.611–12). They become less spirituous and more bestial, while Satan takes on the shapes of vulture, toad, and serpent, only to find that he cannot escape returning to the serpent form. If Burton argues that the use of the fallen human faculties causes us to ‘degenerate into beasts’ and ‘transforme our selves’ (128), Milton’s Satan renders that change palpable. His perverse use of oratorical skill reduces him finally to the writhing body of a serpent, as he becomes more reactive to God’s actions and less generative in seeking his own agency. But his initial fall completely transforms his identity. Infinite Error into Infinite Fall Milton’s revision of archaic and Aristotelian terms of honour establishes a framework for Satan’s utter degradation after he makes only one error. In ancient competition for honour, anger and revenge set boundaries for the identity of the warrior. Hubris was the transgression of such a boundary through such actions as insult to honour, assault, murder, and sexual humiliation.35 By means of anger and revenge, the wronged man re-established the security of the boundaries that preserved the individual and his household. Vengeance was equilibrated to injury in the sense that the honour of the person killed accrued to the one who avenged the

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wrong. Anger thus had limits and specific social indicators, as I have argued before.36 However, the invocation to Paradise Lost Book IX significantly alters the discourse of honour to defend God’s anger as a ‘just rebuke, and judgment giv’n’ (IX.10). Unlike Satan, who seeks to retaliate against God by injuring his dependents (which, in archaic times, would have been appropriate revenge and possibly even just in the context of honour if Satan had actually been injured), God applies his rebuke as a judge does to a criminal and defends his judgment as a matter of principle. Eve also implies that more than the violation of an individual law is at stake, ‘... of this tree we may not taste nor touch; God so commanded, and left that command Sole daughter of his voice; the rest, we live Law to ourselves, our reason is our law.’

(IX.651–4)

Eve’s locution ‘sole daughter of his voice’ suggests that the command is the only external law that restrains human action. As such it represents the principle of lawfulness in addition to setting a specific limit. Reciprocally, when Satan seduces Eve, he transgresses a particular prohibition and assaults the principle of lawfulness itself. He succeeds because, although Adam and Eve must obey the law because it is God’s command, they lack the information needed to interpret the meaning of the prohibition, having no knowledge of death and no experience of evil.37 Satan undermines the absolute status of the law by telling Eve that she shall not die and by questioning the reason behind the prohibition. He argues that knowledge of good and evil cannot be bad, and therefore, that ‘God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just’ (IX.700). As Victoria Kahn argues, Satan presents his interpretation as truth (‘Machiavellian Rhetoric,’ 244). Unfortunately, the debate about the law allows Eve to fall into error, showing that the opportunity for conscience and reason to make wise choices also involves the possibility that passion and deception will lead to folly (241). This point of choice becomes the most serious arena for conflict where competing truths can be tested, examined, and chosen. As in conflict about honour, struggle between competing views leads to a change in the status of the participants. But the change in Paradise Lost is total, transforming the species of one who errs. Milton represents this change by drawing on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the entrance of a

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divine figure into the form of an animal heralds radical transformation of its mortal victim, usually driving the victim downward into an animal or vegetable form.38 Paradise Lost reverses the Ovidian emphasis, for the perpetrator of cosmically disrupting change, not the victim, becomes more enmattered. Whereas in archaic epic, gods display their power by freely taking on the forms of human beings and animals, Satan’s disguises debase his nature.39 Additionally, in archaic conflict about honour, diminished honour can be brightened; the consequences of conflict are reversible in a new battle (for those who survive). But persons here, once fallen to a lower mode of being, cannot regain their former identities without divine intervention. Only the Son demonstrates his divine status by becoming other than he is (human) without losing his own nature. For God argues: Nor shalt thou by descending to assume Man’s nature, lessen or degrade thine own.

(III.303–4)

By quitting ‘all to save /A world from utter loss’ (III.307–8), the Son demonstrates that merit, not birthright alone, makes him worthy to be Son of God. By becoming human, the Son brings into the fallen world a possibility that human beings who are limited by the consequences of their choices may reverse that process and be forgiven. At III.305ff. God reassures the Son that ‘Because thou hast, though thron’d in highest bliss Equal to God, and equally enjoying God-like fruition, quitted all to save A world from utter loss,’

he shall ‘reign /Both God and man’ (III.305–8, 315–16). Any sacrifice of equality with God that the Son makes in order to become man supports his goodness, and therefore his merit: ‘Love hath abounded more than glory abounds, Therefore thy humiliation shall exalt With thee thy manhood also to this throne.’

(III.312–14)

According to a graciously transformed metamorphosis, the Son’s incarnation enlarges his merit and power, bringing to him ‘all power’ to ‘reign forever’ (III.317, 318).

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Given the enormous consequences that follow it, choice serves as a focal point in the text where human and angelic beings define identity. This choice can be informed by debate and conflict or seduced by hidden error. Even God and the Son engage in conflict to test goodness and truth, as Michael Lieb argues. The Son respects the Father, but his assent depends upon God’s acting rightly, for the Son implies that he would censure the father if God should allow Satan to draw mankind to hell (III.163):40 So should thy goodness and thy greatness both Be questioned and blasphem’d without defense.

(III.165–6)

Lieb links their conflict to the Hebrew term for ‘reason’ (yachach) in Isa.i,18, a term ‘that suggests the idea of arguing, debating, and contending, as much as it does the act of reasoning’ (‘“Dramatick Constitution”,’ 231ff.) God and the Son wrestle together to work out the implications of the consequences that have flowed from God’s decrees. Far from being ‘the flat presentation of dogma by an unpleasant and pedantic figure who has his “Yes Man” sitting at his right-hand side ready to assent to anything his Father might hand down,’ the theology emerges in the struggle and ‘passionate interchanges’ of two persons, as Lieb’s spirited argument discloses (‘“Dramatick Constitution”,’ 215).41 God stresses the need for justice and atonement, while the Son freely offers to suffer the punishment deserved by man. Each contributes distinct insights into truth so that the readers may be educated. Satan, on the other hand, cannot really debate, for his efforts to persuade the emotions of his followers, Adam and Eve, lead him to disguise himself, to change his appearance and words to please others. Once committed to the pursuit of evil (or nothingness), Satan loses the self-definition and independence that permit a free statement and defence of ideas. Human and angelic identities depend upon their place in a cosmic and social hierarchy, one that remains fluid because it depends on excellent action.42 But having aspired to boundless elevation in status, Satan loses his cosmic and social place. He becomes metamorphic in his Ovidian attempt to mingle categories, divine with bestial, and earth with sky. For Ovid, metamorphoses occur quintessentially when one element, such as water, overwhelms another, such as earth. To mix elements and set them in conflict courts destruction, a return to chaos where ‘No form of things remained the same; all objects were at odds, for within one body cold things strove with hot, and moist with dry, soft

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things with hard, things having weight with weightless things’ (ll.17– 20).43 Likewise, Satan wishes to mingle categories, with disastrous effect, for his ‘malice, to confound the race /Of mankind in one root, and earth with hell /To mingle and involve’ is ‘done all to spite /The great creator’ (II.382–5). As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the effort of a mortal to become divine changes that being into an even lower form. Although Satan’s voluntary disguise as a snake imitates the gods’ metamorphic action in antiquity, his involuntary metamorphosis undercuts his divine stature. Satan’s ability to change shape also undercuts the possibility of a stable identity, and his chameleonic character links him to the Renaissance orator.44 Disguise and Shape-Changing in Satan as Orator Sometimes compared to an orator in Protestant handbooks, Satan becomes associated in Paradise Lost with the Renaissance orator’s social dislocation. As Wayne Rebhorn formulates it, ‘perhaps the most subversive aspect of the orator as he is imagined by Renaissance rhetoricians involves his placement in the social and political hierarchy – or, rather his non-placement, his uncertain placement, within it.’45 Paradise Lost assimilates qualities of the Renaissance orator to represent Satan as a shape-shifter and ultimate self-fashioner, a ‘Proteus who converts himself into everything he desires and takes everything as his material.’46 Like the Renaissance orator who was identified with social mobility, Satan attempts to use rhetoric to raise his status and attain great honours by penetrating the hearts of his listeners.47 Rather than stating his beliefs openly to Eve, Satan insinuates himself into her psyche. He relies on actio, persuading through the visual and auditory images he creates by means of his body. Using his magic on Eve, he ‘lure[s] her eye’ (PL IX.518) and ears by means of his gestures and voice, for as the Italian Renaissance rhetorician Cypriano Soarez puts it (1589), ‘an audience is affected by the gestures and voice of the orator, “of which the first moves the eyes, the other the ears, and through these two senses all emotion penetrates the spirit”.’48 Satan penetrates the snake, and his words make their way ‘into the heart of Eve’ (IX.550).49 He dangles the pleasure in learning before Eve so that she will eat of the fruit.50 Satan merges himself with the desires of his listener, lurking about like a tiger to overhear Adam and Eve’s conversation and learn their circumstances. Similarly, Antonius in Cicero’s De oratore claims that in order to carefully explore the ‘feelings of the tribunal’ he

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would ‘scent out with all possible keenness their thoughts, judgements, anticipations and wishes,’ discerning the direction in which they may be led by the oration.51 Milton also draws on Quintilian, who advises the orator to identify with the audience. Again, like a great Ciceronian orator Satan ‘with show of zeal and love /To man, and indignation at his wrong, /New part puts on, and as to passion mov’d, /Fluctuates disturb’d ...’ (IX.665–8). Satan identifies himself with the injustices he alleges were suffered by Adam and Eve, with what he represents as their contemptuous treatment by God (IX.665ff., 687ff.).52 However, the text unmasks Satan’s sincerity when it refers to the ‘new part’ he ‘puts on,’ for though the Ciceronian orator is a great actor, he must feel the emotions he expresses (De oratore 2.195). Like the rhetorician, Satan views his own placement in the social and political hierarchy as malleable, but he is not always happy with the specific incarnations into which he injects himself. He bemoans that he ‘who erst contended /With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrain’d /Into a beast, and mixt with bestial slime.’ His words set him in dramatic opposition to the Son’s gracious acceptance of the human condition, with all its limitations (PL IX.163–5). He uses the serpent as a tool to be manipulated as he wishes. Less obviously, as Satan degenerates, he relies more abjectly upon false embodiments to achieve a facsimile of identity. Shifting into worse modes of being, Satan becomes less socially determinate. As orator, lover, serpent, and friend to Eve, his self becomes a mirror image of what he discerns her to be.53 Such strategies prevent debate; through them Paradise Lost interprets the ‘policies’ and ‘stratagems’ that make error vicious (CPW II.563). The text makes insinuation, accommodation, and flattery signs of error. These strategies entail not only faulty logic but also a psychological indirectness that discloses Satan’s fluctuating, incomplete self. Satan attempts to insinuate himself into Eve’s good graces when he calls her ‘fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair’ (PL IX.538) implying that she is more like God than Adam is. He accommodates himself to her by appealing to her consciousness of others’ praise: ‘thee all things living gaze on ... and thy celestial beauty adore’ (IX.539–40). He takes the role of flatterer, and flatterers mould themselves to others. Plutarch argues that ‘since the flatterer has no single foundation for his attitudes as a source of stability ... and since he moulds and adjusts himself by reference to someone else, then he is not straightforward or single, but complex and multifaceted; he is always streaming from one place to another like water in the process of being poured.’54 Satan ingratiates himself to Eve and

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rolls (IX.631) from one place to another as he leads her to the fruit. In seducing Eve, he resembles both horned owl and flatterer: ‘A horned owl, apparently, is caught as it tries to copy a human being and move and dance along with him; a flatterer, on the other hand, is the one who inveigles others and leads them into the trap, by playing a variety of parts: he dances and sings with one person, but wrestles and rolls in the dust with another’ (Flatterer, 68). Satan, though a snake, copies human speech and moves with Eve as she walks. But he also leads her into the trap of viewing the fruit. He is busy, always involved in other people’s affairs, like the envious man described by Francis Bacon: ‘a man that is busy and inquisitive is commonly envious ... Neither can he that mindeth but his own business find much matter for envy. For envy is a gadding passion, and walketh the streets, and doth not keep home.’55 Satan rushes from hell to chaos to earth; he meddles in the lives and marriage of Adam and Eve. Satan shares other qualities with the flatterer, who, like the orator, identifies himself with the needs and wishes of his counterpart, becoming part of a psyche shaped by self-love and craving praise. Eve’s nascent but famous vanity, expressed in her admiration of her own image in the pond and in her wonder that stars shine when no one observes them, provides an opportunity for Satan’s mirroring and thus shaping her desire. Satan calls her ‘there best beheld /Where universally admir’d’ (IX.541–2). His words are cynical and manipulative, but they project his own longing for precedence and aspiration towards godhead. Satan passes on to Eve the very rhetorical topoi that inflate his longing, envy, and sense of injury. As Nancy Hagglund Wood argues, he uses Aristotle’s topics of anger to make Eve feel slighted.56 By following Aristotle’s recommendation for producing anger in an audience, showing that he, a mere serpent, has been elevated while she has been neglected, Satan implies that God has contempt for her. Satan also asserts that God instituted the prohibition to keep Eve low and to elevate himself, a ‘form of slight Aristotle calls hubris.’57 More generally Satan’s words give Eve the sense that her merit has been injured, that her desire for godhead has been blocked by God’s contempt for and rivalry with her. But Eve does not fall as a direct result of Satan’s persuasions; she openly challenges Satan’s judgment and directly counters his insinuations about God with her own knowledge of the prohibition, answering, ‘Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt /The virtue of that fruit, in thee first prov’d’ (IX.615–16). When she sees the tree, she cites the command that ‘of this

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tree we may not taste nor touch’ (IX.651). Like Abdiel, she confronts error and states her own understanding forthrightly. However, she falls when she infers that the serpent’s ability to talk confirms the power of the fruit to endow beings with intelligence and that God’s forbidding of the fruit commends it more (IX.753). She absorbs Satan’s modes of reasoning and by her own choice actively uses them to interpret the value of eating the fruit.58 Satan’s influence is more insidious than the persuasions of an orator; he offers an entire signifying system that Eve takes up and uses freely (IX.825). Eve adapts, develops, and plays off of the competitive discourse she receives from Satan. Eve makes her own interpretations of the meaning of the prohibition, drawing on a satanic framework but adapting it to the case at hand. She argues that the prohibition ‘infers the good /By thee communicated, and our want’ (IX.754–5), basing the idea of good on deprivation rather than on fulfilment (i.e., that God has provided abundantly for their needs). Where Satan argues that the fruit brings life not death, for he lives and has attained ‘life more perfet ... than fate /Meant mee’ (IX.689–90), Eve also stresses his discernment and marvels at his speech, that ‘hee hath eat’n and lives /And knows, and speaks, and reasons, and discerns, /Irrational till then,’ formulating her desire for wisdom (IX.764–6). Like the early-seventeenth-century writer Rachel Speght, in her poem ‘A dreame,’ Eve covets ‘Knowledge daily more and more,’ though unlike Rachel she cannot discern the difference between kinds of knowledge:59 The one is good, the other bad and nought; The former sort by labour is attain’d, The latter may without much toyle be gain’d.

(51, lines 94–5)

Oblivious to such distinctions, Eve experiences extreme delight in tasting the fruit ... whether true Or fancied so, through expectation high Of knowledge, nor was God-head from her thought.

(IX.788–90)

Eve’s pleasure arises from her ‘high expectation’ of knowledge as much as from sensuous longing for the fruit itself. Satan’s rhetoric creates this expectation (‘O sacred, wise, and wisdom-giving plant,’ IX.679), but Eve

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helps to fashion her own idol, calling the fruit the ‘cure of all, this fruit divine/ Fair to the eye, inviting to the taste, / Of virtue to make wise’ (IX.776–8). After the fall, Eve generates her ‘satanic’ rhetoric. Experiencing the same self-division as Satan and falling as he does earlier into soliloquy, she names God ‘the great forbidder,’ following Satan’s locution of ‘the threat’ner’ (IX:687), but altering its content and imagining ‘all his spies/ About him’ (IX.815–16), a phrase that implies self-consciousness about whether her true state can be seen.60 She becomes suspicious that God wants to punish her instead of having faith in him.61 Her first question with regard to Adam also creates a split between inner and outer, appearance and reality: ‘But to Adam,’ she asks, ‘in what sort/ Shall I appear?’ (IX.816–17). Topics of seeming versus being, and equality versus inequality organize a competitive world of experience as she seeks ... so to add what wants In female sex, the more to draw his love, And render me more equal, and perhaps, A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior: for inferior who is free?

(IX.821–5)

If insecurity about being slighted haunts her speech before the fall (‘For us alone /Was death invented? or to us deni’d/ This intellectual food,’ IX.766–8), comparison and competition dominate her discourse afterward. Anxiety about her inferiority fuels her grandiosity (expressed in ‘dilated spirits, ampler heart, /And growing up to Godhead,’ IX.876–7). Her fear that Adam may find another, better Eve moves her to entice Adam: Thou therefore also taste, that equal lot May join us, equal joy, as equal love; Lest thou not tasting, different degree Disjoin us.

(IX.881–4)

Eve’s wish for total merger, one that Adam reiterates just before he eats the fruit, exclaiming that ‘Our state cannot be sever’d, we are one,/ One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself’ (IX.958–9), creates a false solution to perceived problems of inferiority and loss. These problems arise from her rhetoric of emotion that construes human and divine interactions as full of slight, insult, and contempt – gestures the meaning of which de-

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pends upon status and competition. And because Adam and Eve fear God’s eyes on their misdeeds, they experience shame. But Paradise Lost extends the archaic terms of honour that define shame, making it an inward and devastating self-judgment. Inner Shame after the Fall Milton transforms Aristotle’s topos of shame as a ‘phantasia’ about ‘dishonour’ (Rhetoric 2.6, 1384a) to represent Adam and Eve’s shame after the fall. As Milton shows how Satan’s infinite aspiration produces unlimited malice and envy, so he diagnoses Adam and Eve’s shame as an experience that becomes removed from the specific circumstances of contempt and insult. Internalizing the shame represented in traditional epic, Milton draws on Protestant discourse to show how shame creates a radical solitude that separates the self from the self. This shame arises from an intense consciousness of being scrutinized. Unlike its archaic and honour contexts, where shame expresses the experience of being abandoned and shunned by others, here it involves the person’s rejection of himself. Milton follows Aristotle in linking shame to the view and esteem of others. According to Aristotle, ‘men feel shame before those whom they esteem’; indeed, people are ‘more ashamed of things that are done before the eyes,’ from which comes ‘the proverb, “the eyes are the abode of shame”.’ Aristotle ties esteem to wonder and admiration (thaumazein) (The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.6, 1384a), the responses that Adam and Eve’s natural dignity and honour elicit even in Satan (PL IV.362–3) and in Raphael, who admires Adam’s ‘comeliness and grace’ descended from the honour bestowed on him by God (VIII.222). Admiration is appropriate to idealization, but shame breaks the connection between the ideal and the real. It is a painful affect that arises when one’s vice or cowardice appears before the eyes of others (Rhetoric 2.6, 1383b–1384a). Vives links the sense of exposure to embarrassment, referring to children who ‘cover’ their eyes when they are ashamed, a term that Milton also employs and complicates in PL IX.1057–9: ‘naked left /To guilty shame: hee cover’d, but his robe /Uncover’d more.’62 The discourse of covering and uncovering highlights a sense of visible defilement that makes one vulnerable to the critical gaze of others. In contrast, Milton’s Son provides a cloak that covers human beings with a robe of righteousness. The idea of sin as defilement also emerges in Reason of Church Government, where Milton treats shame as a source of virtue. Joshua Scodel

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argues that Milton ‘is indebted to classical philosophy and classically influenced patristic thought rather than to Protestantism’ to formulate a view of positive shame and self-respect upon which moral virtue is founded.63 He argues persuasively that this positive view draws on ‘ancient formulations glorifying self-respect as a source of self-restraint’ (Excess and Mean, 272). According to Milton, ‘the man with a proper sense of self-worth would “blush” at his own “reflection” were he to do evil even in “deepest secrecy”,’ a position that ‘recalls Stoic treatments of âidos.’64 Seneca shows how proper shame may be internalized. He advises that one should imagine ‘one’s self continually observed by a virtuous man whom one “reveres” [vereatur] until one becomes “worthy of reverence” [verendus] one’s self, even in the “secret place” [secretum] of one’s soul (1, 9–10; trans. modified).’65 Milton adds that when persons are aware of their own nobility, they refuse ‘to deject and defile [themselves] with such a debasement and such a pollution as sin is’ (CPW I.842). Sin, unlike wrong action, affects the total being of the person who errs. Because of such deformities, Vives argues, people hide themselves: ‘when our faces are covered and we are not recognized, we feel less shame.’66 Adam and Eve experience their vulnerability to one another’s shaming gaze as soon as they fall, and their shame is represented not only in archaic and humanist terms but also in Hebraic and Protestant ones. In Genesis, the fall allows Adam and Eve to know that they are naked and they sew fig leaves together as loincloths (3.7). When man fell, Calvin argues, he was ‘punished by a withdrawal of the ornaments in which he had been arrayed–viz. wisdom, virtue, justice, truth, and holiness, and by the substitution in their place of those dire pests, blindness, impotence, vanity, impurity, and unrighteousness.’ He and his descendants are ‘in God’s sight defiled and polluted’ (Institutes 2.1.5). Milton’s Adam and Eve, their ‘ornaments ... soil’d and stain’d,’ feel pollution and shame (PL IX.1076).67 Adam cannot imagine beholding the face of God or Angel with joy. His pain deepens when the conscience God has set over him to guide him away from sin represents ‘all things with double terror’ (X.850). Milton adds the idea that innocence which had served as a ‘veil ... was gone,’ along with ‘just confidence, and native righteousness, /And honor.’ Adam and Eve use language drawn from Calvin to express shame. Calvin stresses that God put conscience into human beings because ‘simple knowledge may exist ... as it were shut up.’ Conscience ‘is set over [the human being] as a kind of sentinel to observe and spy out all his

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secrets, that nothing may remain buried in darkness.’ Calvin internalizes conscience but makes it a forbidding judge that ‘sists [sic] man before the bar of God’ and serves as ‘sentinel’ (Institutes, 3.19.15). Eve feels the effects of such a conscience when she calls God the ‘great forbidder, safe with all his spies /About him’ (PL IX.815–16). As a consequence of his fear of being exposed to God’s eye, Adam seeks solitude. His cry for obscurity conjures up the wilderness historically associated with solitude. His shame goes so deep that he doesn’t want to see God either: O might I here In solitude live savage, in some glade Obscur’d, where highest woods impenetrable To star or sun-light, spread thir umbrage broad, And brown as evening: cover me ye pines, Ye cedars, with innumerable boughs Hide me, where I may never see them more.

(IX.1084–90)

In wishing to live obscur’d, Adam may be mourning the loss of a pre-critical unself-consciousness. His shame conjures up the fantasy of an audience, causing him to focus on his self and critically judge it. If Satan confronts and hates the sun, Adam longs to evade the sun’s power to expose him to being seen. By avoiding exposure, he drives himself into a deep solitude in which there is no release from his endless fears and horrors until Eve approaches, a friend and confidant who breaks the cycle of shame. (See chapter 8 below.) As Reason of Church Government links noble shame to virtue, Paradise Lost links fallen shame to its loss (CPW I.841). Drawing on Calvin, who argues that in the fall ‘the heavenly image in man was effaced’ (2.1.5), Paradise Lost argues that the fall subjects understanding and will (the image of God) to passion, delivering Adam and Eve to shame. Eve, ‘with shame nigh overwhelm’d,’ confesses her offence (PL X.159). But because the Son covers their ‘inward nakedness’ with his ‘robe of righteousness,’ shielding them from their ‘Father’s sight’ (X.221, 222),68 they do not resort to the hypocritical self that Satan creates as protection from his externalized self-disregard. Satan’s ‘dread of shame’ before the spirits whom he seduced creates a split between inner and outer selves and prevents his repentance (IV.82 and ff.). On the other hand, Adam’s externalized self-disregard, because it makes him want to hide from the eye of God, leads to feelings of being abandoned and to self-abandon-

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ment. With self-abandonment come unending perturbations that nearly lead him to suicide: ‘I find no way, from deep to deeper plung’d!’ (X.844) he exclaims, a cry similar to Satan’s ‘in the lowest deep a lower deep /Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide’ (IV.76–7) before he commits himself to absolute solitude and evil. Such examples show how Paradise Lost transforms the rhetorical terms that shape emotions. The text’s representations of shame and fear disclose Satan and Adam’s loneliness and self-division, states that make conversation and inner dialogue impossible. Chapter 8 analyses the consequences of Milton’s formulation of solitude as a challenge to conversation, showing how the friend may serve as another self in prelapsarian and fallen intercourse. It argues that humanist and Protestant writings inform Paradise Lost’s representation of characters who strive to overcome radical loneliness and heal tortured emotions.

8 Marriage as a Site of Counsel in Marriage Handbooks, Milton’s Divorce Pamphlets, and Paradise Lost

Part 1: Milton’s Works and Seventeenth-Century Representations of Friendly Counsel Paradise Lost, like Sidney’s Arcadias, represents advisers as using humanist topoi to correct endless fear, envy, and rage. Sidney, following a long tradition, represents tyrants as friendless, but Milton goes further to represent the fallen as estranged from themselves. Experiencing a shame that makes them want to avoid their own registering eyes, Adam and Satan flee themselves and God. But when Adam becomes lost in self-division, Eve’s words and gestures bring him back to himself. Instead of taking an independent stand like the ideal Renaissance friend, Eve supplicates him to ‘bereave me not ... thy gentle looks, thy aid’ (PL X.918–19). Critics have disagreed about the effect of her actions.1 Diane K. McColley understands Eve’s submission to Adam as a reconciliation modelled on the Son’s relation to God, whereas Richard Strier shows that Adam’s rebuke points out ‘the absurdity of Eve’s desire’ to bear his guilt as well as her own.2 Adam’s reason dominates over Eve’s heartfelt emotion. I interpret Eve’s gesture in terms of friendship writings and Milton’s revision of classical terms of honour as a means for abrogating blame and rivalry. When Adam becomes overcome with shame and anger, Eve casts herself at his feet, reversing her competitive, blaming attitude to him and opening the way to a reciprocal, accepting gesture. Adam and Eve institute a new relationship that enables conversation between them. Francis Bacon illuminates Adam and Eve’s gestures in ‘Of friendship.’ Whereas Renaissance writings call on the friend to use forceful speech with an erring friend, Francis Bacon adds to this advice praise of the ‘true friend’ as one ‘to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, ... and

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whatsoever lieth upon the heart.’3 ‘No receipt openeth the heart, but a true friend.’ Bacon stresses the opportunity friendship provides for ‘discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart’ when the friend enables an almost physical release of passions. The fruits of friendship are so great that kings risk their safety to seek it. But because they are so far superior to their subjects, they ‘cannot gather this fruit, except ... they raise some persons to be as it were companions and almost equals to themselves’ (‘Of Friendship,’ 391). When Eve supplicates and Adam raises her up, he invites her into a similar relationship to himself ... not equal, because he still emphasizes her frailty, but equal enough to ‘strive /In offices of love, how we may light’n /Each other’s burden in our share of woe’ (PL X.959–61). He offers a model of reciprocity to supplant their mutual blame. But earlier there are tensions in their marriage similar to those that Laurie J. Shannon discerns between ‘relations of parity’ and ‘monarchical relations of hierarchized power’ in the Renaissance.4 Although the kings and leaders Bacon cites find it ‘many times sorteth to inconvenience’ to have partners in care ‘(participes curarum),’ that link is what ‘tieth the knot’ of friendship. And, he asserts, ‘it is a mere (absolute) and miserable solitude to want true friends’ (‘Of Friendship,’ 391, 392). Adam falls into this solitude, and his reconciliation with Eve leads him out of it. But, like the monarchs and their partners, Adam and Eve must find some approximation of equality in order to work together, an approximation that strains the relation of rule and submission in the Protestant ideal of marriage. Yet Protestant writers also use friendship between equals as a model for ideal marriage. This chapter will examine marriage as a mode of friendship with an eye to its aptness for overcoming absolute solitude. But first I turn my attention to solitude more broadly. For Milton, like Aristotle, Montaigne, and Cowley, discovers in the right kind of solitude a friendship with the self that precedes friendship with others. Solitude may generate the torment of self-estrangement, but it is also the setting for a soul that in Montaigne’s words ‘can keep itself company.’5 We cannot understand the differences in these two modes of solitude without inquiring further into seventeenth-century revisions of the discourse on solitary life. Seventeenth-century representations of solitude reveal the importance of the deep thoughts than can inform the solitary, but which may also lead to despair. I argue that these thoughts and emotions call for counsel that seventeenth-century marriage could not easily provide because of its emphasis on harmony and subordination.6 The tendency of

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writers on marriage to privilege marital harmony and unity over the interactions of independent, autonomous persons required them to adapt humanist advice for persuading emotion. Milton, in turn, revises the discourse of marriage and rewrites norms of honour culture to make differences between Raphael and Adam, Adam and Eve as fruitful as possible. Eve creatively adapts strategies for reducing competition for honour and the excesses that result from it when she intervenes in Adam’s deep, lonely anger and shame. Company by itself would not have been adequate to this task as it is for Stephano Guazzo and Sidney, who advocate conversation as a way of encountering alternative points of view that heal one-sidedness. But Satan, Adam, and Eve (when fallen) cannot accept humanist advice. True words do not penetrate their woe or engage their concerns. Friendship as a Cure for Solitude Bacon’s essay ‘Of Friendship’ explains why he does not believe in company as a sufficient antidote to solitude and provides a starting point for my analysis of the limitations of humanist counsel in healing solitary persons in despair. Whereas Guazzo defines solitude as the lack of company, Bacon goes further and argues, ‘a crowd is not company ... where there is no love.’ Only friendship provides this love.7 When Milton follows Bacon’s lead, his distinctive handling of radical solitude in the context of contemporary handbooks and sermons on moderating emotion points the way to a new problem in the psychology and rhetoric of emotion. Seventeenth-century treatments of solitude intensify elements present in earlier texts. The Civile Conversation warns that whoever ventures into solitude risks ‘horror and terrour’ (1.46), and Timothie Bright cautions against succumbing to ‘the devil,’ who uses melancholy as ‘an apt instrument ... to terrifie our mindes with vaine, & fantasticall feares, and to disturbe the whole tranquillity of our nature.’8 But Robert Burton warns more darkly in The Anatomy of Melancholy that solitude produces ‘feare, sorrow, suspition ... discontent, cares, and wearinesse of life’ that ‘surprise in a moment.’9 Whereas Aristotle and the sixteenth-century writers hold that a man alone is either a beast or a god, Burton claims that the solitary may not just meet devils (as in Bright’s Treatise on Melancholie), but may become ‘Divels alone’ for ‘a man alone is either a Saint or a Divell’ (245). In The Christian Warfare, Downame alerts his readers to ‘arme themselves with the spirituall armour’ lest the devil throw them into ‘bit-

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ter agonies,’ while he frightens and torment others ‘with doubtings, feares, and the continuall assaults.’ As we have seen, other writers believe that fallen imagination is so powerful that it can make men fall down dead.10 Influenced by humanist practices, Protestant treatises and sermons instruct readers in using rhetorical arguments to control diabolically inspired fear. I. Downame gives ‘undoubted signes and markes’ so that his readers may know how to apply rhetorical ‘consolations’ to themselves and achieve more balanced emotions.11 John Ball urges valiant resistance to a fear that is ‘a deceitful and malitious passion, tyrannical, rash, and inconsiderate, proceeding often times from want of judgement, more than from the presence or approach of evil to be feared, tormenting with the dread of what shall never come.’12 By increasing readers’ interpretive skills, he helps them overcome a lack of charity towards the self that allows emotion to become one-sided and extreme. By providing cheerful consolation, writers relate to their readers as friends while readers learn to advise themselves by means of confidence-building arguments. Writers help their readers achieve a mean between underassurance (excessive fearfulness) and over-assurance (excessive confidence), two excesses that, as David Quint demonstrates, characterize Adam and Eve before the fall.13 Humanist practices of moderating emotion also inform Adam and Eve’s actions towards one another in Eden; Joshua Scodel observes that Adam and Eve deviate ‘in opposite ways, from a proper sense of self-worth, conceived as a mean between a selfabnegation that idolizes the other and a self-regard that renders the other superfluous.’14 Each of these impulses results in characteristic over-emphases of emotion, one towards fear and excess shame, the other towards shamelessness and lack of self-restraint. But these humanist practices are not available to Satan or Adam after they fall. Seventeenth-century writers discover an internal self-estrangement so intense that company cannot overcome it. Departing from an oft-cited Aristotelian tag, Bacon revises ordinary interpretations of solitude by asserting that ‘it had been hard for him that spake it to have put more truth and untruth together in few words, than in that speech, “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god”.’15 Unlike Guazzo, Bacon finds company inadequate to heal ‘solitariness.’ For, to quote Bacon more fully, ‘little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For ... faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, without love ... It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends; without which the world is but a wilderness.’ Bacon

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diminishes the power of company celebrated by the humanists. One may see only a ‘gallery of pictures’ in publicly displayed faces and hear not talk but the ‘tinkling cymbal’ warned against in Corinthians I:13, where even ‘speaking in tongues of men and of angels’ is reduced to inane sound when love is absent. The lack of a friend makes a wilderness, a term traditionally associated with solitude (‘Of Friendship,’ 391). Bacon also shifts the locus of conversation from public company to private friendship, a move made only by implication in Sidney’s Arcadia. Bacon uses imagery of fair weather and storm, light and darkness to distinguish healthy thoughts and emotions from diseased ones. ‘For friendship maketh indeed a fair day, from storm and tempests; but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness and confusion of thoughts’ (393). In communicating ‘and discoursing with another ... [the troubled person] tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words’ (393–4). Bacon’s observations become pertinent to Paradise Lost when Satan and Adam, finding themselves in solitude after the fall, experience confused thoughts and oppressive emotions. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644) deepens Bacon’s idea of solitude when Milton evokes the image of the ‘unconversing’ wife who procures ‘no remedy’ to the solitariness of man’ which ‘lies under a worse conditions then the loneliest single life.’ The presence of the mute, unsociable wife estranges a man from himself and leads to melancholy, a presence that recalls Milton’s painful experience with his first wife, Mary.16 To convey this distinct loneliness, Milton describes an interior state where the self becomes incapable of banishing ‘thoughts without cure.’ Thoughts exacerbate estrangement, which, in turn, allows emotions of fear, anger, and sorrow to proliferate in ways warned against by psychologists and Protestant writers. However, other seventeenth-century writers define solitude in positive ways that also illuminate Milton’s poetry, helping us to see that the value of solitude can be defined by the activities undertaken there. Writers explore these activities, which exist in dialectical relation to action in the world.17 This shift has implications for counsel because seventeenth-century writers see solitude as an opportunity for vision and for consulting with oneself. Echoing Scipio’s praise of Africanus (his grandfather) for his productivity in solitude, royalists (often hyperbolically) represent solitude as a space for political vision.18 Such representations illuminate the Son’s experience of solitude in Paradise Regained as the site for the discovery of a sacred mission. Whereas classical epics represent deliberation as

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a public, verbal activity, seventeenth-century poetry suggests that inner debate may be equally important to political action, and it conceives solitude more generally as an occasion for learning and reflection.19 When the changes of government from monarchy to republic and back again interrupted the public lives of writers, they turned their attention to the virtues of retirement.20 However, these writers differ radically in the activities they praise. Aristocratic writers celebrated the opportunities that solitude and private life offered for symposiast gatherings with friends to indulge in excessive drinking. Like Davenant, Robert Herrick valued such gatherings. Joshua Scodel contrasts symposiast praises of excess to Paradise Lost’s encomium of moderate labour and delightful refreshment in Eden (Excess and the Mean, 201, 255ff.). He shows that royalist writers also thought of solitude as an occasion for political planning and for contemplating the greatness of England’s wealth and power. Thus, evaluations of solitude come to depend upon the worth of the activities undertaken there. Royalists Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley, finding moderation to be outmoded, celebrate growth of wealth through trade (14), an epideixis that spills over into Waller’s overstated encomium of Charles II in solitude (135ff.): Free from the impediments of light and noise Man, thus retired, his nobler thoughts employs. Here Charles contrives the ordering of his states, Here he resolves his neighboring princes’ fates; What nation shall have peace, where war be made, Determined is in this oraculous shade; The world, from India to the frozen north, Concerned in what this solitude brings forth. His fancy, objects from his view receives; The prospect, thought and contemplation gives. ‘St. James’s Park As Lately Improved by His Majesty’ (1661)

Whereas medieval men might retire to turn their ‘nobler thoughts’ to God, Charles turns his thoughts to ordering the state. His contemplations serve action, while the world waits for what his solitude brings forth (136). Far from representing Charles as oppressed with dangerous fears, Waller describes his fancy hyperbolically as receiving objects from the vast view he contemplates as he orders princes’ fates. And Waller’s embellished description of the prospect, whether a park or ‘the world, from

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India to the frozen north,’ gives imaginative location to his contemplation. Waller makes solitude generate vast political aspirations. For Milton and his like-minded contemporaries, on the other hand, solitude (nonhyperbolically) denotes ambiguously a space for confronting one’s own deep thoughts, or for hiding foul thoughts that make a person ‘his own dungeon.’21 Abraham Cowley, in retirement during the Interregnum, finds solitude an occasion for friendship. He thinks it ‘very fantastical and contradictory in human nature, that men should love themselves above all the rest of the world, and yet never endure to be with themselves’ and notes ironically, ‘our dear self is so wearisome to us, that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together.’ Avoidance of solitude constitutes avoidance of oneself.22 Cowley’s meditations draw on Montaigne’s arguments that solitude provides the conditions for independence and self-knowledge: ‘We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place. We have a soul that can be turned upon itself; it can keep itself company.’23 If in friendship writings the friend is another self, here the self is another friend. For Montaigne, the soul’s company with itself protects against possible loss, an idea Milton does not entertain. However, Montaigne’s words intimate some of what Adam might have meant when he interprets Eve’s desire to work alone, namely, that ‘solitude sometimes is best society, /And short retirement urges sweet return’ (IX.250– 1), a maxim that also expresses Guazzo’s idea that solitude, if ‘taken and used in due season, have great force to stir up the spirits, and to prepare them a more easie and sure addresse to the works and actions belonging to conversation.’24 Milton, like Cowley and Sir John Harington the younger, limits contented solitude to those capable of deep thought. Cowley names ‘cogitation’ the ‘thing which distinguishes the solitude of a god from a wild beast,’ in strong contrast to Guazzo, for whom lovers of books who seclude themselves become ‘fooles,’ because they lack ‘experience and practise.’25 Indeed, Cowley, though he acknowledges that ‘the solitary Life will grow indigent’ without books, claims that ‘once we be thoroughly engaged in the love of letters, instead of being wearied with the length of any day, we shall only complain of the shortness of our whole life.’26 Sir John Harington distinguishes the unlearned person, whose solitude is ‘not lesse displeasinge then exile, imprisonment and torture,’

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from the learned, who finds solitude a native country of the soul, a place of freedom and pleasure.27 Similarly, in Reason of Church Government, Milton expresses his unwillingness to ‘leave a calme and pleasing solitarynes fed with cherful and confident thought, to imbark in a troubl’d sea of noises and hors disputes,’ separated from ‘the quiet and still air of delightful studies.’28 And in Paradise Lost, Milton, ‘from the cheerful ways of men /Cut off,’ and ‘‘the book of knowledge fair ... expunged and razed,’ calls for ‘celestial light’ to ‘shine inward’ that ‘I may see and tell /Of things invisible to mortal sight’ (III.46–7, 49, 51–2, 54–5). Solitude allows for inspiration, which brings to view its own proper world. Conversely, it allows Satan’s conscience to awaken memories that lead to ‘infinite despair’ and ‘dread of shame’ (IV.74, 82). In the next section I trace the role of thoughts, whether cheerful, enlightening, or damning, in Milton’s representation of solitary experience. For solitary thoughts affect emotion and the power of a conversing self to shape its own interpretations and passions. ‘Deep thoughts the better to converse with solitude’ Wise versus Demonic Thoughts: The Emergence of Despair By the seventeenth century, the darkness or cheerfulness, doubt or confidence of the thoughts that feed solitude shapes emotional experience and the ability of persons to transform emotions through conversation. In Paradise Lost thoughts drive Satan to deeper self-hatred as ‘horror and doubt distract /His troubl’d thoughts, and from the bottom stir /The hell within him’ (IV.18–20). Thoughts later lead Satan to his cruel deceptions of Eve. Thoughts are actions in the making, an idea Milton adumbrates earlier in his letter to a friend asserting that solitary study may make him more fit for action.29 By tracing the fruitful (and unfruitful) relationships between thoughts, solitude, and the self as represented in A Mask (Comus) and Paradise Regained (1671), I aim to illuminate by contrast a spiritual fear, shame, and despair that can scarcely be penetrated by the words of a conversing other. Whereas Waller depicts Charles II hyperbolically as using solitude to contrive ‘the ordering of his states,’ Paradise Regained represents the Son soberly as ‘revolving in this breast’ how he might best begin ‘the work’ of saving mankind (I.185, 186).30 This musing, far from indicating a clear direction, subjects him to a swarm of thoughts, confusingly both outer and inner, which he must clarify in order to define his identity and his mission. Led by the ‘Spirit,’

Marriage as a Site of Counsel And his deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude, till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He enter’d now the bordering desert wild, And with dark shades and rocks environ’d round, His holy meditations thus pursu’d. O what a multitude of thoughts at once Awak’n’d in me swarm, while I consider What from within I feel myself, and hear What from without comes often to my ears, Ill sorting with my present state compar’d.

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(I.190–200)

The agency of thought works strongly in the Son, moving him into the desert, the ambiguous home of saints and devils. Thoughts foster a new relation between loneness and company: namely, he follows his thoughts ‘the better to converse with solitude’ (I.190–1). In solitude, thought follows thought to lead him into deeper wilderness where he entertains a multitude of suggestions. He considers what he feels himself and what he has heard from his mother and elders, learning to discern himself and his calling. The company of thoughts of ‘things past and to come’ recommends ‘such solitude before choicest society’ (I.301). If Waller exaggerates Charles II’s view in solitude of the vast world laid open to his ambition, Milton respectfully represents the Son as finding the broadest temporal context in which to evaluate his mission. Faith enables him to follow ‘some strong motion’ that leads him ‘into this wilderness,’ even though he does not now nor may ever know ‘to what intent’ he is led (PR I.290–1). His faith leads him in a trackless desert full of ‘horrid shades’ (I.296) that Satan suggests bodes death: ... for single none Durst ever, who return’d, and dropt not here His carcass, pin’d with hunger and with drought?

(I.332–5)

Although Satan links solitude to deprivation and death, the Son remains untouched by ‘fiery serpent’ and the ‘noxious worm’ (312) as surely as he is visited by high thoughts, not fears and terrors such as those that beset Adam in Book X of Paradise Lost. For Milton, solitude remains open to interpretation and faithful use and the wilderness becomes a place for discerning the inner light. In A Mask (Comus, 1634) the Lady’s virtue makes a haven of a ‘close

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dungeon of innumerous boughs.’31 The poem’s allegory makes solitude the condition of wisdom’s companionship with herself, but the ‘dark soul’ in the represented action feels itself ‘benighted’ even in the ‘midday sun.’ The incapacity for companionship marks the dark soul and will provide terms in which to trace Satan’s loss of society with himself in Book IV of Paradise Lost. A Mask (Comus) comments, And wisdom’s self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse contemplation She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in the various bustle of resort Were all to ruffl’d, and somtimes impair’d. He that has light within his own clear breast. May sit i’th’ center, and enjoy bright day, But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun; Himself is his own dungeon.

(I.375–84)

In solitary contemplation, Wisdom ‘plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings’ like the Platonic winged souls of the Phaedrus.32 Milton’s images convey comfort, innocent self-love, and spontaneity. Here the ‘mind is its own place,’ as Satan later claims, bringing light within its breast or hiding ‘a dark soul and foul thoughts.’33 This sharp distinction between the allegorical ideal of wisdom and the dark soul’s experience anticipates the representation of divine wisdom and the satanic hatred of the sun in Paradise Lost. For ‘Urania,’ who was ‘Heav’nly born ..., with Eternal Wisdom didst converse, /Wisdom thy sister, and with her didst play /In presence of th’Almighty Father’ (VII.1, 7–11). This playful and conversing spirit animates Milton, In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visit’st my slumbers nightly, or when morn Purples the east.

(VII.27–30)

Urania, capable of inner conversation, becomes a presence and a safeguard to Milton in his journey to a soon-to-be fallen earth. In Paradise Lost inner dialogue becomes the site of governance and counsel that in Sidney’s Arcadias belonged to the voice of the literal friend and adviser.

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In the two long soliloquies of Satan and Adam after the fall, the roles of friendly counsel, sanity-restoring friendship, and sweet society are glimpsed through interior dialogues that end tragically when Satan suppresses one voice.34 Then the self becomes not solitary but lonely, in the sense Milton means when he cites the text ‘God said that it was not good for man to be alone.’ Here we find the ‘solitarinesse’ that, according to Burton, leads to dreams, fears, terrors ...,’ indeed, to a state where ‘each passion’ dims a person’s face as Satan’s is ‘Thrice chang’d with pale, ire, envy and despair’ (PL IV.114, 115). Milton discloses a loneliness that arises from the severing of a self from itself, contrasting strongly with the soul locked in the dungeon in A Mask (Comus). Satan’s and Adam’s speeches have an initial voice that expresses troubled thoughts and another one that persuades rationally, thus internalizing the counsellor relation represented so abundantly in treatises, sermons, and manuals on the emotions.35 Satan’s mature, rational, social voice confronts his emotionally expressive, hating voice (that wishes ‘O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams’ [PL IV.37]), openly remonstrating in the sharp corrective speech recommended to friends in friendship writings and, by Milton, to competitors in the testing of truth. By internalizing the frank voice of the friend who counsels his erring counterpart and brings him back to virtue, Paradise Lost gives a new emphasis to the history of friendship writing. Cicero, Plutarch, La Primaudaye, and Sidney (at times) base friendship on the virtue of the friend. Knowing himself to be virtuous and independent, a person finds the same virtue in another and comes to love it.36 Only by speaking honestly does the friend show his true concern for the other person. Satan, who does not immediately abandon all gestures in the direction of virtue when he falls, uses this counselling voice to exhort himself, as if he were a friend to himself. His counselling voice is like that of Abdiel, the confrontational truth-teller in Paradise Lost, who reminds Satan that ‘he [God] deserv’d no such return /From me, whom he created what I was’ (PL IV.42–3).37 The self-knowing voice analyses truthfully the psychology that led Satan to fall: ‘Yet all his good prov’d ill in me, /And wrought but malice’ (IV.48–9). The voices stay in dialogue, but they become opposed as the rational, socialized voice more sharply corrects Satan: Hadst thou the same free will and power to stand? Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse, But heav’n’s free love dealt equally to all?

(IV.66–8)

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The passionate voice then sharply rejects the truth and voice of the other (‘Be then his love accurst, since love or hate, /To me alike, it deals eternal woe. /Nay curs’d be thou’ (IV.69–71). This cursing, not now of God, but of Satan himself, initiates dizzying devolution of emotion, and then despair, ending in the wish to flee the self entirely (‘Me miserable! which way shall I fly ... /Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell’ [IV.73, 75]). The voice of counsel returns briefly to ask, ‘is there no place /Left for repentance, none for pardon left?’ (IV.79–80), only to disappear in Satan’s succeeding self-analysis, one that ends in a conscious rejection of hope and an embrace of evil as his good. For a moment Satan becomes honest, disclosing his true ethical state, but his counselling voice disguises the despair-creating power of its arguments: But say I could repent and could obtain By act of grace my former state; how soon Would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay What feign’d submission swore.

(IV.93–6)

Though A.J.A. Waldock sees in the soliloquy a Satan ‘who now begins to unsay all that the other Satan (of Books I and II) said, who all of a sudden recognizes his “pride and worse ambition” for what they are,’ interpretation of this passage in light of contemporary treatises on how to confront despair suggests that Satan asserts the truth that, given another chance, he would reject repentance and surrender to despair.38 Satan becomes a model of the fallen condition, experiencing for a moment an ‘agony of conscience’ similar to those alluded to in Protestant treatises. Human beings are vulnerable to satanic thoughts, according to John Ball, when in an agony of conscience we become ‘unfit to judge of our estate ... Though at other times we be sick of self love, and too partiall in our own case; yet in this state, toward ourselves we are most uncharitable; and being out of love with our selves ... we commit no small errors.’39 Satan’s lack of charity towards himself is absolute and leads to definitive error. If we attend to Keith Stavely’s argument that Milton was Arminian even with respect to Satan, we find that ‘the psychic struggle on which Satan ... embarks (in the soliloquy in Book IV), feels as authentic as Adam’s similar struggle in Book X.’40 Satan experiences selfenthralment rather than divine reprobation.41 As I argue in chapter 7, he freely creates topoi clustering around a relentlessly competitive framework. His use of these topoi leads to increasingly malicious, envious, and despairing emotions in the face of which he disintegrates by

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splitting off and rejecting his reasonable, counselling voice. Finally, unchecked by any alternative view, any friendly, consoling, or combative voice that might interrupt his ‘disdain’ and ‘dread of shame,’ Satan takes his despairing voice as truth. Milton transforms seventeenth-century discourses on counsel to represent Satan as suppressing his counselling voice in the soliloquy. Having lost the possibility of friendship, he becomes wholly the flatterer and hypocrite analysed in chapter 7. Satan’s self-division after the fall creates a split between his appearance as a resourceful, hardy leader and his inner despair, a despair he can initially express only indirectly and briefly to Beelzebub, crying out passionately, ‘If thou beest hee; But O how fall’n! how chang’d’ (PL I.84). Raphael reports that Satan whispered once, ... Thou to me thy thoughts Wast wont, I mine to thee was wont to impart; Both waking we were one.

(V.676–8)

But their friendship no longer permits openness. Indeed, even here in Raphael’s narrative, Satan inquires of Beelzebub ‘how then can now /Thy sleep dissent’ (V.678–9), taking the non-volitional state of sleep as implying a barrier to communication. After the soliloquy Satan speaks not in dialogue, but as a rhetorician, accommodating his words to the passions of his audience.42 Satan’s solitude, expressed in his travels through chaos and wilderness, as well as in his lonely decisions, though it parodies the hero’s independence and self-sufficiency, also exposes a radical loneliness surpassing anything we encounter in earlier humanist works, even in Sidney’s Arcadias, with their focus on wilderness, imprisonment, and solitary sorrow.43 Paradoxically, while seventeenth-century writers praise solitude for the opportunities it offers for study and for company with the self, they excoriate the sufferings inflicted by loneliness.44 Bacon makes the ‘principal fruit’ of friendship a medicinal one that heals the effects of solitude. Responding to an inevitable physical fluctation in the body, friendship is ‘the ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce. We know diseases of stoppings and suffocations are the most dangerous in the body; and it is not much otherwise in the mind’ (‘Of Friendship,’ 391).45 Bacon identifies friendship with candid expression of emotions, for even without any counsel from his friend, the disclosing person sorts his thoughts and clarifies

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them as he communicates them. The turbulence of unexpressed passion opens to good weather when a person breaks up ‘his wits and understanding ... in the communicating and discoursing with another’ (393). Having turned thoughts into words, he or she becomes conscious of what those thoughts are and so becomes wiser than she was before. Satan’s and Adam’s soliloquies express the absence of such expressive and sorting possibilities. Satan despairs, first feeling miserable, wishing to flee misery but seeing then only ‘infinite wrath, and infinite despair.’ Finally, identifying himself with hell, he creates a vision of a nether hell opening below him, in the fashion of Perkins’s soul on the high bridge of life (see chapter 7), perceiving or imagining the rushing current below, a gaping gulf opening to receive him: And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threat’ning to devour me opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heav’n.

(PL IV.75–8)

Nor do Satan’s thoughts add up (or perhaps they add up too well) as he envisions the probable consequence of repentance; though he might return to heaven, he argues ‘ease would recant /Vows made in pain, as violent and void’ (96–7): For never can true reconcilement grow Where wounds of deadly hate have pierc’d so deep: Which would but lead me to a worse relapse, And heavier fall.

(IV.98–101)

As Satan imagines them, all ways lead down; but his choice to fall deprives him of friendship so that he cannot order his thoughts and ‘see’ them in Bacon’s word, an action that Bacon implies to require the presence, the possible point of view, of an other. By setting himself beyond all others, he condemns himself to absolute solitude. If anything, fallen Adam’s words in soliloquy are, as we have seen in chapter 7, initially even more tangled, circular, and perturbed. Reinterpreting the voice ‘once heard /Delightfully, increase and multiply,’ as now implying death, Adam asks what can he increase or multiply but ‘curses on my head’ (X.729–32). The speech circles around the word ‘death,’ tossing and turning the idea, making it increasingly horrible. Designating ‘death’ first as something with which he is ‘mockt,’ apprehensive that his life may be ‘length’n’d out /To deathless pain,’ he later fears, ‘who

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knows /But I shall die a living death?’ – a thought that horrifies him. He then envisions a ‘deathless death,’ and then ‘death’ not as a single ‘stroke ... bereaving sense,’ ‘but endless misery /From this day onward’ (X.774–6, 787–8, 798, 809–11). But Adam is blessed by the approach of Eve, who addresses ‘soft words’ to his ‘fierce passion’ (X.856). The efficacy of her words and gestures in turning the tide of his passions requires us to understand the role of wife as friend and counsellor in marriage manuals, Milton’s prose, and Paradise Lost. To understand Eve’s approach, with its powers and limitations, we need first to understand friendship and marriage. For Adam’s despairing words hint that friendship might have served him better than Eve does. He questions why God did ‘not fill the world at once /With men as angels without feminine’ (892–3), and expresses the wish for a male friend, who would not create ‘disturbances on earth through female snares’ (897). Such a friend might have been less vulnerable to falling and more capable of counsel. Part II of this chapter analyses the tensions between seventeenth-century models of friendship and marriage, discerning how the wife’s counsel is imagined to intervene in solitude. Part 2: Comforting in Friendship and Marriage According to friendship writings, friends can counsel one another because they are independent and equal. Each person is virtuous in himself and fit to judge the virtue of the other. Though friends achieve intellectual union, they do not lose their autonomy. Friendship writings argue that because the partners are defined by the same virtue prior to the friendship,46 death does not put an end to virtue or the friend. So, after Scipio’s death, Cicero’s Laelius exclaims, ‘Scipio still lives and will always live; for it was his virtue that caused my love and that is not dead.’47 Humanist and Protestant writers model marriage on friendship because both relationships aim at conversation and companionship.48 The model of virtuous friendship ‘envisions relations of parity,’ in Shannon’s words.49 But Protestant writers do not found marriage on virtue, except insofar as man is defined as being created in the image of God and woman in the image of man. Marriage writings depict the partners as unequal, harmonious, and unified. The fitness of the woman to the man was imagined to produce complete harmony.50 When Milton calls the married partner an ‘other self,’ he substitutes the idea of equality as fitness in place of the equality as parity.51 Not founded on equal virtue, marriage seems more fragile than friendship. When Adam imagines that

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Eve may be gone, he wakes, ‘To find her, or for ever to deplore /Her loss, and other pleasures all abjure’ (VIII.479–80). Eve is so fit for him that he cannot live without her. Although in classical and ideal Renaissance friendship love (philia) arises from one’s perception of virtue like one’s own in another person, Milton rewrites Plato’s Symposium to find the source of love in loneliness: ‘Love was the son of lonelines, begot in paradise by that sociable & helpfull attitude which God implanted between man and woman toward each other’ (CPW II.252). In addition, Milton’s loss of Charles Diodati, his closest friend, may have led to the idea that marriage puts ‘off an unkindly solitarines’ (CPW II.251).52 By rooting marriage in the wife’s power to heal loneliness, Milton draws on seventeenth-century writers who enmesh mutual counsel in contradictions. Whereas friendship springs from virtue, writers on marriage describe the wife’s virtue as flowing from her husband. William Gouge (1626) derives the woman from the man: ‘she was created after man, for mans good and out of mans side’ (Gen. 2:18).53 He argues that the source of the wife’s duty lies in an ‘inward reverence’ or ‘an awfull respect which a wife hath’ not of herself but ‘of her husband, esteeming him worthy of all honour for his place and office saide’ (168). Her reverence and her support for his goals produce harmony between them.54 The privileging of harmony over independence and equality also emerges in manuals on marriage that interpret the unity of ‘one soul in two bodies’ to go beyond the union of intellects and hearts that defines Renaissance friendship.55 The more complete unity that they advocate produces great sympathy and affective warmth, influencing the way man and wife converse with one another. And if it be true that men doe say, that friendship maketh one hert of two: much more truley and effectually ought wedlocke to doe the same, which farre passeth al manner both of friendship and kindred. Therefore it is not said, marriage doth make one man, or one minde, or one bodie of two, but cleerely one person: wherefore matrimonie requireth a greater dutie of the husband towards his wife, and the wife towards her husband, then otherwise they are bound to shew to their parents. The Apostle biddeth, to rejoice with them that rejoice, and weepe with them that weepe. With whom should the wife rejoice, rather then with her loving husband? Or with whom should she weepe and mourne, rather then with her owne flesh?56 (My emphasis)

Going beyond intellectual union, John Dod and Robert Cleaver stress a unity of persons, so that, in response to their shared fortune, they ‘re-

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joice with them that rejoice, and weepe with them that weepe.’ Marriage handbooks cement the unity of man with wife by privileging marriage over friendship as the site of common life.57 Dod and Cleaver thus claim, ‘there can bee no great societie or companie, then is between a man and his wife; whose house, whose goods, whose chamber, &c. is common, their children are common, and they themselves partakers of all good and evill successe, or prosperitie and adversitie’ (Godlie Forme [1612], 152). Living together increases amity and love. They argue further, ‘Societie, and to live together, is the most surest and strongest knot to knit, and joyne amitie and love among men, and beasts themselves.’ Gouge also stresses that the partners suffer the same consequences from their actions: ‘for sinne provoketh God’s wrath, his wrath sendeth down vengeance, that vengeance which falleth on the husband, can hardly misse the wife, or that the husband, which falleth on the wife; and that by reason of their neere union’ (241). Equality of circumstance (rather than equality of rule or virtue) fosters common life and amity. Gouge also advises the husband to seek an ‘equal’ wife in another sense, alluding to ‘Age, Estate, Condition, Piety.’58 Alexander Niccholes (1615) advises men to look for equality of the affections. In his advice, we discover a strange twist in the meaning of equality. Niccholes explains that by ‘equality,’ ‘I mean not equality or fitness of stature, for the more equal conjunction and action, but a fitness in affection.’ ‘Equal’ designates what is ‘adequately fit or qualified’ (OED 3b), as in ‘equal to the occasion.’ ‘Equality’ designates ‘the condition of being “equal to an emergency”’ (OED 2b). Niccholes’s equality is ‘conveniency and fitness,’ that ‘materially concerneth the peace, the welfare, and felicity of their whole life and conversation therein.’59 Niccholes’s definition illuminates why, when Adam asks for an equal partner, God gives him an inferior one.60 For God gives Adam an equal in the sense of Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish, exactly to thy heart’s desire.

(PL VIII.450–1)

Where we hear Adam’s desire for ‘equality’ as as desire for parity, God interprets him to have requested a ‘fit help,’ pleased that Adam ‘couldst judge of fit and meet’ (VIII.448). Adam’s mate needs to be ‘fit to participate’ in ‘rational delight,’ not equal in status or in the use of reason (VIII.390, 391). Instead, God emphasizes that the mate ‘shall please thee,’ and shall be ‘thy wish, exactly to thy heart’s desire’ (VIII.449,

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451).61 Unlike classical friendship’s self-esteem directed outward in love of virtue, Adam’s loneliness and desire generate his search for Eve.62 The jarring discord between this emphasis on wish fulfilment and Raphael’s insistence that the husband’s love for the wife should rest on self-esteem threatens the possibility of mutual conversation between Adam and Eve. Milton also stresses the woman’s unity with the man to an extent that makes independence difficult. Adam extends friendship’s unity of intellect and heart to include the Biblical flesh. Viewing Eve newly formed, he exclaims, ‘I now see /Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, my self /Before me,’ adding that man and wife ‘shall be one flesh, one heart, one soul’ (PL VIII.495–6, 499). Man and wife are also unified as images of God. Milton concurs with Gouge that the woman’s virtue derives from the man’s, arguing that ‘woman is not primarily and immediatly the image of God, but in reference to the man.’63 However, the dependence of the woman’s virtue on the man’s does not mean that she cannot help him in his loneliness. Commenting on the same Biblical text as Niccholes, Milton celebrates comforting sociability as the end of marriage. ‘For ... God in the first ordaining of marriage, taught us to what end he did it, in words expresly implying the apt and cheerfull conversation of man with woman, to comfort and refresh him against the evill of solitary life.’ A good wife is fit to protect man against loneliness but Milton, unlike Niccholes, stresses the need for fitness on both sides: Let them finde themselves ... so mistak’n in their dispositions ... they can neither be to one another a remedy against lonelines, nor live in any union or contentment all their dayes.64

Later, he writes that when the man and wife find themselves unfit for one another, the man experiences a solitude worse than absence of company: ‘The solitarines of man, which God had namely and principally ordered to prevent by mariage, hath no remedy, but lies under a worse condition then the loneliest single life: for in single life the absence and remotenes of a helper might inure him to expect his own comforts out of himselfe, or to seek with hope. But here the continuall sight of his deluded thoughts without cure, must needs be to him, if especially his complexion incline him to melancholy, a daily trouble and paine of loss in some degree like that which reprobates feel’ (CPW II.246–7).65 As Satan grieves the loss of heaven, so the disappointed husband suffers pain at viewing lost good. The husband’s loss also images for Milton in De Doctrina Christiana ‘the punishment of the damned,’ consisting ‘partly in

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the loss of the chief good, namely, the favor and protection of God, and the beatific vision of his presence, which is commonly called the punishment of loss’ (CPW IV.488). The intensity of this grief suggests the cost Milton himself bore after the departure of his first wife.66 Adam experiences something like this loss and despair after the fall. Differences between Adam and Eve before the fall solace Adam’s loneliness. Eve is ‘manlike, but different sex,’ who exhibits ‘heav’n in her eye’ and ‘dignity’ that spring from her likeness to man and to God (PL VIII.471, 488–9). Her beauty is an image of wisdom and draws Adam by its winning softness, a feminized emblem of the beauty that elicits passionate response in Plato’s Phaedrus. Her likeness to Adam permits the ‘unity of mind and heart’ (Tetrachordon, CPW II.602) so efficacious against solitude. Conversely, Eve prefers Adam’s ‘grateful digressions’ to Raphael’s purely intellectual account and loves to solve ‘high dispute /With conjugal caresses’ from Adam’s lip (PL VIII.55–6). She longs to unify rationality with sexuality and emotion,67 a unity expressed in Adam’s tender ministrations and counsel after her dream. But attractive as the picture of amorous, rational interchange may be to many readers, it also sets the stage for mutual injury, hurtful competition, and miserable ‘solitariness.’ Harmonious differences makes marriage functional, but at a high cost.68 In representing Eve as healing Adam’s loneliness by her loveliness, Milton eroticizes a relationship that marriage handbooks treat in ethical terms. Precisely because of her greater softness and grace, Eve fulfils a dearth in Adam’s own make-up, just as his greater wisdom and sententiousness strengthen her more wandering reason. Strangely, perhaps, to our understanding, writers on marriage construe this relation between marriage partners as a pertinent equality. Equality allows couples to draw on opposite characteristics to resolve marital conflicts. Niccholes advises that men seek equality by selecting wives whose characters compensate for their own weaknesses. ‘Equal’ actually implies something like ‘the complement of,’ as in Richard Eden’s Decades of 1555, which refers to ‘the equalitie of the daye and nyght.’69 The choleric man, for example, who tends to ‘provocation and impatience, ever to kindle that fire afresh, which of itself consumes ... the very peace and tranquillity’ of marriage, should seek ‘meekness and endurance’ in a wife: ‘such a lenitive as this should rather have wasted the malady; than augmented the misery.’70 Humanists believe that one emotion can work against its opposite, and Protestants advise that extremes of emotion can be made workable by pairing opposite types.

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Milton similarly encodes difference in the married relationship, but instead of featuring opposite temperaments, he moulds Platonic / Aristotelian faculty psychology to produce characteristically different proportions of reason and passion in Adam and Eve. Adam’s protest against God’s suggestion that he consort with earth’s creatures dramatizes the importance of Eve’s likeness to him. Adam rejects the animals as living ‘in disparity’ with him, for true delight ‘must be mutual’ (PL VIII.386, 385). If Adam alone possessed reason, and Eve sensible passion and imagination without reason, the two would live ‘in disparity’ (VIII.386). Instead their qualities are ‘in proportion’ (VIII.385). Proportionate qualities joined together create unity. Because Adam views Eve as deriving her being from him, and as ‘henceforth an individual solace dear’ (IV.486), she becomes inseparable from him and a hedge against loneliness. He calls her ‘part of my soul’ and ‘my other half,’ drawing on terms from friendship writings. But she flies from that union, since her existence originally required her differentiation from Adam (IV.487, 488). Nevertheless, she comes to recognize the superiority of Adam’s wisdom to her beauty: ... I yielded, and from that time see How beauty is excell’d by manly grace And wisdom, which alone is truly fair.

(IV.489–91)

Adam’s reason supplements her lesser wisdom, while she supplements his imaginative and emotional powers. Harmony thus outstrips parity as a desideratum of amity.71 Eve’s status as an image of Adam also serves a heuristic function, as Linda Gregerson demonstrates. When Eve glimpses an image of herself in a pond, a voice corrects her error and directs her search towards Adam, the real image from whom hers is derived, initiating a process by which she clarifies her own nature and discovers wisdom in Adam.72 To the extent, however, that Adam serves as Eve’s chief end, she lacks a model of virtue that is independent of him, and when she wanders from him, she loses her focus on her proper human excellence. Eve’s status as image of Adam inspires him to overvalue her beauty, while his status as model for her undermines her sense of worth. Comparative judgments easily erode mutual respect in this framework. Instead of counselling one another effectively, Eve feels slighted and Adam blames Eve. In order to heal the injuries that result, Paradise Lost rewrites structures, norms, and rhetorical topoi of emotion associated with honour competition. The Biblical concept ‘image of God’ provides a principle that allows

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Adam and Eve to heal the over-emphases of their characters and use difference productively. Although Adam’s gender makes him superior to Eve as husband to wife, and his reason offers greater scope and knowledge than Eve’s does, he and Eve are spiritually equal, equally free to love God or to hate God and rebel. Though Eve is secondarily differentiated from Adam by gender, ‘her primary classification is human.’73 Both are ‘of far nobler shape erect and tall, Godlike erect, with native honor clad’ (IV.288–9). Both are worthy to be honoured; and in this concept we find a key to Milton’s reworking of marriage and of honour. Paradise Lost ultimately derives honour not from the assertive, self-aggrandizing action of an individual within a particular social context, as was the case in traditional honour communities, but ultimately from God. Worth thus conceived requires others to perform the duty of recognizing honour, as when Raphael bids Adam: What higher in her society thou find’st Attractive, human, rational, love still.

(VIII.596–7)

Less noticed by critics, and curious given the previous discussion of Adam as Eve’s head, Raphael recommends ... that with honor thou may’st love Thy mate, who sees when thou art seen least wise.

(VIII.576–7)

Raphael reminds Adam of his fallibility and his openness to the gaze of Eve. Vulnerability can become the occasion for shame and spite (as happens when Adam and Eve blame each other), but Raphael, by exhibiting a respectful attitude towards them, hints at a cure for such emotions. Raphael exemplifies for Adam and Eve the duty to honour the good in others (even when that good may be inferior to one’s own), asserting that angels ‘differ from them in degree though not in kind,’ a startling comment when we consider that the differences between Raphael and the human beings are far greater than those between Adam and Eve, who share the same faculties, the same image of God, the same flesh. And although Milton maintains a hierarchy of merit in ordering the company of angels with respect to human beings, he construes places in the ‘hierarchy’ as freely chosen callings worthy of respect.74 As Raphael explains, ‘Nor less think wee in heav’n of thee on earth /Than of our fellow servant, and inquire /Gladly into the ways of God with man’ (VIII.224–6). Paradise Lost echoes and revises Biblical and Homeric enactments of

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hospitality in order to model friendly counsel between members of different orders of being.75 As Felicity Heal has shown, hospitality existed for early moderns not as a matter of personal choice, but as a social and ethical obligation that required guests and hosts to affirm reciprocal relationships. The obligation was based on the chivalric duty to offer food and lodging and the Christian command to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.76 Milton extends this view of hospitality to embrace ‘the moderate pleasure’ that friends may share in food and conversation, representing hospitality in Sonnet XX (‘Lawrence of Virtuous Father ...’) and Sonnet XXI (‘Cyriack, whose Grandsire ...’) as the occasion for friendship and delight (XX.6) (Excess and the Mean, 236ff.). In Paradise Lost, he shifts the site of friendship from humans to man and angel: by demonstrating mutual respect, Adam, Eve, and Raphael bestow honour on one another. Milton draws on ancient representations of the gods’ disguising themselves as men and being entertained by human beings (Genesis 18, Odyssey 1.96–105) to frame Raphael’s educative dialogue with Adam.77 These visitations were common in ancient texts, most saliently for Milton in the angels’ visit to Abraham at Mamre and Athena’s visit to Telemachos where divine figures offer advice and friendly help.78 Following the model of such visitations, Milton represents Adam as showing respect to his divine visitor by going forward to welcome his guest. Adam generously offers food to Raphael, fulfilling the Biblical and epic obligation to succour others and demonstrating his honour and virtue to Raphael. But Milton goes a step further, representing this interchange in the terms of friendship writings. In Raphael’s arrival, the text images the ancient accounts of the gods’ visitations to human being, often flying in the form of birds, but Milton distinguishes Raphael as a phoenix, a reference that suggests the Elizabeth proverb: ‘A faithful friend is like a phoenix.’79 Thus, friendship writings and, as I will argue, Protestant writings, also inform his treatment of Adam and Eve. But Milton’s models also express the difficulties of divine-human encounters. Even when the divine and human beings feel good will towards one another, they encounter obstacles in seeking to be understood. When Sarah overhears the angel telling Abraham that they will have a son, she laughs. Exhibiting an analogously inappropriate response, the Phaeacians, instead of weeping at Odysseus’s story of his travels and sufferings, find themselves suspended in silent wonder: ‘so [Odysseus] spoke, and they were all silent, held by the spell in the shadowy rooms’ (Odyssey 13.1–2).80 Odysseus’s story of suffering on the seas produces a

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magical effect on people immune from suffering, whose ships guide themselves. Milton echoes lines from the Odyssey when, The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear So charming left his voice, that he a while Thought him still speaking, still stood fixt to hear; Then as new wak’t thus gratefully repli’d.

(PL VIII.1–4)

In Paradise Lost as in the Odyssey, the incommensurability between the tale told and the capacities of the hearers to understand manifests itself in the audience’s remaining fixed and charmed.81 Paradise Lost extends this incommensurability to food, reversing the pattern of hospitality for Genesis 18 and the Odyssey. Whereas Abraham and Telemachos offer food before engaging the guest in conversation, Adam and Raphael converse before they eat because Adam offers food but is uncertain of the food’s acceptability to the angel. Raphael must explain the possibility of rapprochement between them before they can proceed with the meal. Milton also revises Biblical and epic representations of hospitality, affirming Adam’s contradictory state with respect to honour as he walks forth ‘to meet /His god-like guest.’ Like Pyrocles when he faces the judge in the Old Arcadia’s trial scene, Adam combines submissiveness with assurance. He walks ... without more train Accompanied than with his own complete Perfection, ... Yet with submiss approach and reverence meek, As to a superior nature, bowing low.

(PL V.352–3, 359–60)

Adam’s own excellence does not preclude the need to be submissive towards a superior. Likewise, Eve’s natural nobility expresses itself in her actions while she, at the same time, reveres Adam. But the need for a pertinent equality and hierarchy produces tensions in both relationships. Milton addresses contradictions between the hierarchy of merit needed for education and the need for sufficient equality to promote dialogue by reshaping the code of honour. He represents Adam as redefining the gift from something exchanged in order to achieve reciprocity (as in the Odyssey) into something freely bestowed. Adam is initially nervous lest he inadvertently dishonour his guest by ‘unsavory food perhaps /To spiritual natures’ (PL V.401–2) so that he qualifies his gen-

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erous offer of bounty. But Adam also articulates a remedy: God as generous giver joins man and angel as grateful receivers. Moreover, instead of competing for honour, Raphael explains (by means of the food chain and the great chain of being) that human beings achieve upward mobility through the dynamic possibility of growth and change into higher forms.82 Adam and Eve may someday become what Raphael is now. Eden offers room for social, intellectual, and spiritual mobility. Milton also qualifies his representation of a hierarchy of merit by representing Raphael as acknowledging that he may learn from Adam. He replies ‘heav’nly meek’ that God so abundantly pours gifts of grace and eloquence on Adam that angels can admire, can think highly of their ‘fellow servant, and inquire /Gladly into the way of God with man’ (PL VIII.217, 225–6). What would be, in archaic epic, differences in degrees of honour, here produce mutual admiration and promote inquiry, for Raphael brings his knowledge of the creation of heaven and earth and the fall of the angels to Adam, while Adam narrates God’s creative act in making him, allowing Raphael to participate in Adam’s self-discovery.83 Milton draws on humanist affirmations of differences in point of view. Adam, though inferior, may contribute because angels, eternal as they are, may never have lived in such intimate, transformative relation to God’s creative action as Adam does at the beginning of his life. Difference proves fruitful and engaging as man with angel speaks. Friendship writings also inform Milton’s representation of Adam’s interchange with Raphael. Raphael engages the conversation of ‘friend with friend’ (PL V.229) to admonish Adam. Protestant writers adapted the humanist ideal of the friend’s counsel to urge the importance of admonition.84 Following his teacher, William Chappell, Milton represents Raphael as exhorting Adam and Eve by asserting the uncertainty of their future happiness, the danger posed by Satan, and the need for agency in maintaining freedom from sin.85 Chappell writes that in order to dispel illusions about the ease of winning grace, the preacher should demonstrate ‘how careful and assiduously Satan and his instruments endeavour, to deterre us from entering into the right way, or lead us another.’ In addition to correcting the illusion about the ease of obtaining blessedness ‘which is of the time or space of gaining the thing; may be considered the contingency and incertitude of the future, as well concerning life, as capacity. Adde also the danger ... from the efficacy of an evill custom, which comes creeping in by degrees, and encompasseth the mind with an hardnesse, causing it no longer to obey wholesome counsels and admonitions.’86 Raphael’s warnings that the angels fell,

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that Adam and Eve’s happiness is contingent upon their obedience (V.501), and that passion poses a danger address the three concerns raised by Chappell. Perhaps the sharpest speech Raphael uses, however, follows Adam’s celebration of Eve’s beauty and his expression of his doubt lest God had bestowed on her ‘Too much of ornament, in outward show /Elaborate’ (VIII.538). Raphael answers ‘with contracted brow,’ feeling anger at Adam’s criticism of nature, and sharply censuring his apparent focus on Eve’s ‘outside’: For what admir’st thou, what transports thee so, An outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well Thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, Not thy subjection.

(VIII.567–70)

Adam responds to Raphael’s challenge, ‘half abash’t,’ disconcerted, perhaps, and pained in his sense of honour (VIII.594). However, he does not fear to advance truth by confronting Raphael’s characterization of love.87 Adam uses his capacity for agon and refutation: Neither her out-side form’d so fair, nor aught In procreation common to all kinds ... So much delights me, as those graceful acts, Those thousand decencies that daily flow From all her words and actions.

(VIII.596–7, 600–2)

Adam courageously articulates his Protestant representation of domestic happiness in opposition to Raphael’s Neoplatonic ladder of love. Raphael, angel that he is, does not quite grasp the distinct union of loving delight with reason that is open to human beings, wishing instead to oppose rational love to passionate love.88 Both characters show spirit in refuting, articulating, defending, and refining their different positions and activities. Humanist and Protestant models of conversation inform Milton’s representations of Adam and Eve. As I argued earlier, Niccholes recommends that a husband seek a wife as a way of balancing his emotional temperament. For example, an irascible man should choose a meek wife so that she will not provoke his anger. Milton modifies this idea, giving both partners reason and emotion but in different proportions. Whereas Raphael mediates difference by translating intuitive reason into a discur-

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sive account of creation and fall, Adam accommodates discursive reason to emotional, imaginative experience as he accompanies explanations with affection towards Eve, kissing her and wiping her tears after her dream. Eve likewise gives Adam access to the human blessedness of ‘paradisal state,’ by celebrating in poetry her love and the beauty and pleasure of Eden: (‘With thee conversing I forget all time, /All seasons and thir change, all please alike,’ IV.639–40). As Kristin Pruitt McColgan puts it, ‘Eve’s beauty moves him, makes him feel ’ (79). As Eve aspires to greater knowledge, an aspiration expressed in her questions about the stars, Adam learns to experience more deeply. A path opens for them towards dynamic change and growth, moving away from fusion to a changing balance.89 But because their differences also suggest possible overemphases in their characters, Milton uses the humanist discourse of solitude and society to explore resolutions to conflict. Although Eve imagines new possibilities and Adam evaluates and judges them, Eve’s creation orients her towards virtue outside herself and in Adam.90 She mistakes Satan’s voice for Adam’s in her dream (PL V.37).91 Coming into being out of Adam’s rib, she also tends to favour differentiation from him. Adam, on the other hand, having lived without human company, tends to overvalue Eve’s presence and to seek the wholeness they possessed as literally one flesh.92 Recalling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century identification of solitude with wandering imagination, the text opposes Eve’s desire for separation and independent work to Adam’s longing for the ‘sweet intercourse of looks and smiles’ (IX.238–9). But Adam integrates the two in his humanist response to her idea: ... But if much converse perhaps Thee satiate, to short absence I could yield. For solitude sometimes is best society, And short retirement urges sweet return.

(IX.247–50)

Worthy of a Cicero (De republica I.27) or a Guazzo, Adam’s sentence weaves solitude and society together into a Miltonic celebration of variety as ‘a form of moderation’ and delight.93 However, Adam’s decorous humanist response collapses under the fear of the new threat from Satan.94 Adam fears that Satan lies close, ‘with greedy hope to find ... us asunder’ (PL IX.257–8). To Adam’s mind, the grave and unprecedented spiritual and moral threat of Satan justifies a preference for perpetual society and makes solitude intensely dangerous.

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Following the humanist and Protestant traditions, Milton represents Adam and Eve as engaging in conversation to resolve their differences. However, Protestant treatises and sermons also insist that such conversations may easily go awry. Though it may seem that Adam and Eve cannot ‘go awry’ while unfallen, I agree with Don Parry Norford and Nancy Hagglund Wood that Eve departs because she feels injured by an insult.95 John Goodwin’s translation of Jacobus Acontius’s Darkness Discovered stresses the dangers of insulting and provoking anger in others during religious controversies.96 Anger causes people to embrace false, impious arguments: ‘If they observe it, [their change,] there must needs be some cause, why they should leave that doctrine they had approved, to embrace some other false and impious. Now the causes that true opinions in matter of religion are changed for false, are false arguments, passions and affections of mind, such as are desir, wrath, hatred’ (7). Although Milton’s Adam and Eve, because still unfallen, are incapable of extreme emotion, one is too diffident and the other is over-sensitive to insult. Paradise Lost’s representation of the pair may have been influenced by Protestant cautions not to injure the other when it shows Adam soothing Eve. Acontius specifically warns against contempt and insult as likely to harden an opponent in mistaken beliefs (14), and soothing heals anger generated by contempt. However, some critics believe that Adam was not sufficiently forceful,97 and Protestant marriage handbooks warn against too much soothing. William Gouge urges husbands and wives against always exercising a ‘complementall soothing of one anothers humour, and seeking mutually to please one another in al things, without respect of good or evill’ (Domesticall Duties, 143). However, strong speech requires equal virtue, and though each of the married partners is equal before God, their contract rests upon the husband’s superior place. Dod and Cleaver insist contradictorily that: ‘for so much as the husband and wife are equall, in that which is the chiefest, that is to say, in that gracious and free benefit, whereby they have everlasting life given them, though otherwise I confesse unequall, as touching the governance and conversation at home, the wife is not to be dispised, though she be weake.’98 In spite of the stipulated weakness of the wife, both spouses were supposed to counsel one another away from sin. Gouge points especially to the fall as a result where ‘the better rather yeelds unto the worse, and both runne into evill, as Adam was perswaded by his wife to trangresse against Gods expresse charge’ (Domesticall Duties, 143). Adam failed to stand fast and use corrective speech.

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Milton’s Adam and Eve walk a difficult line between the need to speak gently enough and the need to speak frankly. They are not always successful. Once Adam expresses his fear of Satan, he overstates his role in Eve’s creation, and he undervalues her powers to resist evil: ... leave not the faithful side That gave thee being, still shades thee and protects. The wife, where danger or dishonor lurks, Safest and seemliest by her husband stays, Who guards her, or with her the worst endures.

(PL IX.265–9)

As Diana Benet persuasively argues, ‘Rather than united strength, Adam now emphasizes his individual power to guard Eve.’99 Though his words are gentle and loving, he offends Eve.100 Her response to his insult follows the path Aristotle’s Rhetoric lays out when it defines anger as arising from an undeserved slight.101 When Adam makes little of Eve’s power to resist, as Acontius predicts, she becomes hardened in her wish to prove herself.102 Eve, on the other hand, goaded by the insult, overstates her powers with respect to Satan. She becomes offended when Adam fears that Satan’s fraud endangers her even though it is a perfectly rational fear: His fraud is then thy fear, which plain infers Thy equal fear that my firm faith and love Can by his fraud be shak’n and seduc’t: Thoughts, which how found they harbor in thy breast, Adam, misthought of her to thee so dear?

(PL IX.285–9)

As David Quint argues, Eve discounts the force of contingency in human affairs, affirming complete assurance in her powers of standing fast. Whereas Adam worries about temptation, Eve is overconfident.103 Earlier she defends solitary temptation with an argument that overstates the importance of independent heroism: And what is faith, love, virtue unassay’d Alone, without exterior help sustained?

(335–6)

Echoing Areopagitica’s criticism of a ‘fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d,’ Eve’s words disregard the need to test truth with others in order to challenge falsehood.104 Although her words seem to reiterate Areopagitica’s scorn for untried virtue, her proposal with respect

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to Satan differs markedly from Milton’s advocacy of the uncensored publication of books. Milton addresses a public sphere in which competing versions of truth may be argued for and against, whereas Eve proposes to face Satan alone. Though Abdiel also advocates the need for trial, he, unlike Eve, zealously declaims the truth in the public setting of debate with the fallen angels.105 In that setting, as Raphael puts it, ‘no outward aid [is] require[d]’ to withstand temptation (PL VIII.642). However, neither the example of Abdiel nor the advice of Raphael advocates that anyone seek solitude as a setting for trial against the devil, though the Son in Paradise Regained walks alone, ‘the Spirit leading ... to converse with solitude’ (PR I.189–91). Eve’s fate, unlike Abdiel’s, lies in being seduced by a quasi-lover in the form of a snake, who insinuates himself into her heart. Wood demonstrates that Eve’s defence of independent heroic trial also relies on false enthymemes to prove its case. Eve’s misuses of argument suggest that her mind is clouded with the insult and hurt that Adam triggers. Her question, ‘How are we happy, still in view of harm?’ (PL IX.326) and her conclusion that insecurity makes their happiness frail and Eden no Eden constitute sham enthymemes in which the style of a conclusion leads one to believe that the conclusion is warranted:106 Frail is our happiness, if this be so, And Eden were no Eden thus exposed.

(IX.340–1)

‘Frail is our happiness,’ and ‘Eden were no Eden thus exposed’ look genuine because they seem to be the outcome of an inferential process. Aristotle’s Rhetoric clarifies this fallacy: ‘The first, as in Dialectic, consists in ending with a conclusion syllogistically expressed, although there has been no syllogistic process ... similarly in rhetorical arguments a concise and antithetical statement is supposed to be an enthymeme; for such a style appears to contain a real enthymeme.’107 Like Satan’s false enthymemes later in the temptation scene, Eve’s questions stipulate equivalences that she has never established. Satan asks about the knowledge of good and evil: Of good, how just? of evil, if what is evil Be real, why not known, since easier shunn’d? God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; Not just, not God; not fear’d then, nor obey’d.

(IX.698–701)

Satan deliberately creates a series of false conclusions that lead Eve to

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distrust God. Eve, on the other hand, believes that mutability implies imperfection, disregarding Raphael’s and Adam’s arguments that happiness lies in their own free will, which must be held mutable in order not to fall. Eve’s stipulation of the conditions of her happiness resembles the satanic tendency to cavil at the conditions of his creation, though she has not yet fallen.108 Eve’s overestimation of her security results not only from faulty reasoning, she has also been stung by Adam’s words and ‘wishes to seek out temptation to prove to Adam that she is his intellectual equal.’109 Her heated response arises partly from her offence at Adam’s suggestion of her inferiority and partly from her tendency to seek independence. Adam claims that for Satan it would be ‘hopeless to circumvent us join’d, where each /To other speedy aid might lend at need’ (PL IX.259–60), and relies too much on the ideas of mutual help and shame in each other’s presence as safeguards against Satan, ideas that Eve resists (Excess and the Mean, 272ff., 282ff.).110 Because of Eve’s sensitivity to slight and Adam’s tendency to soothe too much, Adam and Eve are unable to debate fully the important issues of freedom and steadfastness. Joseph H. Summers puts it well when he comments that Adam ‘cannot bear to hurt Eve, even with the truth. He wishes her approval at every moment,’ a tendency that operates in his famously controversial command to Eve to ‘Go; for thy stay, not free, absents thee more’ (PL IX.372).111 Some critics have admired his comment as a defence of Eve’s liberty, but Adam weakens his strongest arguments after warning Eve concerning her obedience to God: But if thou think, trial unsought may find Us both securer than thus warn’d thou seem’st, Go ...

(IX.370–2)

Having stated his true argument unequivocally, Adam swerves his attention to what Eve thinks, giving her opinion credence instead of standing by his own arguments. He engages in something like that ‘complementall soothing of one anothers humour ... without respect of good or evil’ against which Gouge cautions. Yet one wonders how Adam and Eve might have achieved sufficient virtue and parity to consider temptation wisely, given the derivation of Eve’s being and virtue from Adam. Because Milton did not view marriage (even in Eden) as a relation of completely virtuous, similar, and equal beings, each mate must contend with himself or herself while attending to the arguments of the other.

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Adam and Eve fall as a result. Does Paradise Lost provide any remedy for this seemingly inevitable but freely chosen error? By framing their dilemma in terms of Protestant analyses of excessive emotion and a heroic model of supplication, the text opens a path to healing. It draws on terms of honour to explore the healing of shame. It redefines the idea of Christian warrior112 and stresses that reciprocal competitive relations appropriate to discerning truth can, in the fallen state, be accompanied by gestures that surrender status for the sake of a mutual recognition of honour. When Adam gets caught in endlessly despairing thoughts, Eve intervenes by throwing herself at Adam’s feet, and though he initially rejects her, her supplication reverses the categories from which Adam’s shame arises.113 Eventually her gesture establishes a new form of reciprocity between them. Paradise Lost represents reconciliation using archaic terms of honour articulated by the Odyssey and the Hebrew Scriptures, reshaping it at times in Christian terms, but without undercutting the structure of honour itself. It draws on hospitality scenes from the Odyssey to express the emotional consequences of rivalry and rewrites them in Protestant terms to represent Eve’s intervention in Adam’s despair. The text echoes the Homeric poems in describing Eve’s action: ... thy suppliant I beg, and clasp thy knees.

(X.917–18)

Milton represents Eve as a suppliant, who clasps the knees of Adam and pleads with him in a gesture like those that occur more than nineteen times in the Iliad and nineteen times in the Odyssey. 114 (Perhaps the most well-known supplications in the Iliad include Thetis’s supplication of Zeus at Iliad 1.498–527 and Priam’s supplication of Achilles at 24.508ff.) In archaic epic, by lowering oneself and clasping the knees, the suppliant abdicates his status and right to honour in order to abrogate competitive relations between himself and the other person. When Odysseus grasps Aretê’s knees, her husband, Alkinoös, takes him by the hand, indicating that he accepts Odysseus into the social group and confers honour upon him,115 so that the relationship becomes reciprocal. Paradise Lost echoes the Odyssey : when Eve clasps Adam’s knees and begs him to restore his aid and counsel, Adam loses his anger (an important effect of supplication on the battlefield in the Iliad). But the text introduces Christian terms to emphasize Eve’s repentance and Adam’s raising her up and accepting her, an act that Eve recognizes by describing herself as

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Restor’d by thee, vile as I am, to place Of new acceptance ...

(X.971–2)

By accepting one another, Adam and Eve exhibit regenerated virtue. In sacrificing status and elevating Adam, Eve opens the way for his reciprocal gesture of accepting and elevating her. Insofar as she restores his honour by her gesture, she removes grounds for his anger and shame (X.945). Paradise Lost continues to supplement the archaic model for reconciliation with a Christian one when Eve pleads that Adam not ‘exercise [on her] his hatred for this misery’ (X.927). The two discover new grounds for friendship: Between us two let there be peace, both joining, As join’d in injuries, one enmity Against a foe by doom express assign’d us, The cruel serpent.

(X.924–7)

Exchanging enmity against one another for conjoining in enmity against Satan (in line with Aristotle’s treatment of enmity [Rhetoric 2.4, 1382a] and Protestant polemics on the war against Satan), Eve defines the challenge of the Christian warrior.116 The text also stresses the Biblical and rhetorical softening of the hard heart.117 Eve’s strong capacity for feeling, her tears ‘that cease’d not flowing,’ the disorder of her hair, along with her acknowledgment of her wrong-doing ‘in Adam wrought commiseration,’ and his heart relents towards her. His softened heart permits him to surrender his anger (X.939–41). Eve’s sorrow is full of grace, and the gifts that distinguish her are to be honoured. Adam’s acceptance and forgiveness of Eve’s imperfection prepare him to make new responses to the ‘thoughts’ that in Eve’s ‘unquiet breast are risen.’ Readers may well wonder that Eve’s thoughts duplicate those that occur to Adam in his cycle of despair, and they may be puzzled that now Adam refutes the very same suggestions (that procreation has become a curse and that they ought to commit suicide) that he had recently considered himself. However, the duplication shows that Eve experiences the despair of the fallen state in terms similar to Adam’s. She benefits from his counsel once he regains his self-respect,118 and he, once his relation to her is reestablished, becomes capable of new interpretations of events and different emotions. The shift in his attitude towards suicide dramatizes what it means to be restored to Eve’s society. Earlier Adam’s wish for death leads

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only to the despair that he cannot die, whereas when Eve suggests suicide, his ‘more attentive mind’ raises better hopes. Instead of an imagination that proliferates deathly visions of misery, he counsels a ‘safer resolution ... calling to mind with heed /Part of our sentence’ (X.1029– 31), that Eve’s seed shall bruise Satan’s head. Memory of specific promises replaces the global terror under a divine voice that earlier Adam imagines ‘would thunder in my ears.’ Adam now remembers specifically ‘with what mild and gracious temper he [God] both heard and judg’d / Without wrath or reviling’ (X.1046–8). Adam’s judgments become more empirical, more sane, and more hopeful, as he remembers how God providently supplied clothes for their nakedness. Adam infers from this action that God will also teach them how to shun the inclement seasons, to use fire, and to remedy the evils that beset them. But the new reciprocity between Adam and Eve does not overcome their inequality, and the text continues to insist that Eve’s thoughts and errors must be guided and ruled by Adam’s stronger reason. Adam alone is educated by Michael in the scriptural visions and narrated hopes that provide interpretive tools for re-contextualizing apparent human disasters that might otherwise cause despair. Nevertheless, Eve’s dreams teach as fully as Adam’s visions and Michael’s explanations. Milton’s inventiveness with regard to conversation in marriage looks beyond the end of Paradise Lost to Adam and Eve’s departure with ‘Providence their guide’ as they wander ‘hand in hand’ solitary through Eden (XII.648–9). They are ‘solitary’ because unable to converse face-to-face with angels and God, but ‘hand in hand,’ as they keep company in mutual help. The text reintegrates solitude and company in the married relationship. Like Sidney’s Arcadias, Paradise Lost makes counsel possible even when inequality and differences of perspective hamper conversation. Marriage becomes the model for reciprocity after the fall, when Michael cannot be as familiar with Adam as Raphael was. The inequality between man and angel has grown. Instead of telling stories in the epic mode, as Raphael does, Michael presents Biblical visions and constantly corrects Adam’s misinterpretations. Adam practises active learning, but Michael’s words are definitive. Nevertheless, when Adam and Eve depart from Eden, deliberation and choice will still be theirs (PL XII.544–5): ‘the world was all before them, where to choose /Thir place of rest’ (XII. 645–6). Their tasks differ: Adam learns to walk ‘as in [God’s] presence,’ but for Eve, Adam ‘to me /Art all things under heaven.’ The two encounter greater challenges to conversation than before. In the face of such challenges, Paradise Lost, like Sidney’s Arcadias, seeks ways to make reciprocity do the social work of equality. The texts

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express the ethical relation of reason and emotion in terms of the married relationship of husband to wife. The Arcadias use the genre of romance boldly to show persons unequal in status or gender achieving reciprocity by exchanging roles, most palpably in their disguises. Sidney represents Pamela as an heiress: in this social space she can show manly courage and resolution. On the other hand, Pyrocles and Musidorus display excessive emotion and weakness at times, qualities conventionally attributed to women. But Pamela’s Stoic integrity and Philoclea’s humanist wisdom often correct their waverings. In these ways the text qualifies gender and social categories. Yet Sidney protects sixteenth-century English social distinctions by treating the hero’s disguises as comedy and by giving Pamela the courage to face death without granting her the ability to engage in physical combat. Like the Arcadias, Paradise Lost insists that men and women are capable of virtue and worthy to be honoured. Adam is more rational and Eve more imaginative and emotional, but the differences are those of degree. Because Adam and Eve’s gifts are in proportion, they have something to offer one another, like Sidney’s friends and lovers. However, unlike the Arcadias’ protagonists, who exchange roles, Raphael and Adam along with Adam and Eve achieve reciprocity by offering different stories of creation adapted to their proportional modes of knowing. The intellectual Raphael translates the story of the creation of the world and the fall of Satan to fit the discursive reason of Adam. Adam tells the story of his creation to Raphael and Eve her story of her developing imagination and emotional response to Adam. Reciprocity springs from the fact that no angelic or human character knows the whole story or masters all narrative possibilities. But Sidney’s characters deliberate and use dialectic to persuade one another to act and to discover the best principles for action, whereas Adam, Eve, and Raphael exchange narratives as part of their inquiries. (Angels, I have noted, think highly of their ‘fellow servant, and inquire /Gladly into the way of God with man’ [PL VIII.217, 225–6].) Dialogues between characters are occasions for teaching and learning (or deceiving and being deceived). They are also occasions for a new kind of virtue. Pamela in the Old Arcadias and Eve in Paradise Lost end cycles of shame and despair in Musidorus and Adam when they surrender honour to recognize it in the other. Characters also negotiate the contradictions between the hierarchy of merit needed for education and the equality needed to promote dialogue and friendship. The texts reshape the topoi of honour, humanism, and Neoplatonism, all inflected with a Protestant emphasis, to make comforting and inquiry possible.

Conclusion

Renaissance writers urge counsellors to correct their friends’ excessive emotion by leading them to a truer view of circumstances. But, I have asked, what grounds that truth? Psychologies, dialogues, and rhetorical analyses claim that good emotions arise from true knowledge of good and evil things, and bad emotions follow when people’s cognitions are erroneous.1 The Imperfect Friend has argued that this view, though often expressed, masks the actual multiplicity of rhetorical frameworks used to move emotions. While acknowledging the allure of a univocal epistemology of emotion for early modern writers, my argument has analysed conflicting frameworks of rhetorical topoi (whether of honour, humanism, or Neoplatonism) used to produce emotions. Though writers and literary characters correct the emotions of others by appealing to objective reasons for feeling a certain way, in fact their evaluations are influenced by their commitments to one or another framework. Friends in one framework criticize emotions experienced in terms of a different one, and, for this reason, they often fail to persuade. Tensions between frameworks and between the counsellor’s advice and the friend’s resistance create pressures towards interiority. When advisers try to persuade imperfect friends back to virtue, the latter identify with their emotions. But advisers explain emotion away or turn it to different ends, believing that rhetoric has the power to civilize subjects and rule their wills. Many writers on rhetoric aim to empower sovereigns with absolute rule over their subjects’ emotions, and writers celebrate the power of sacred rhetoric to change the mind and heart.2 But Protestants also resist the use of forceful persuasion to compel religious belief, drawing on Aristotle’s Politics to distinguish slavish rule from constitu-

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tional rule through persuasion. Writers disagree about how and when force (including forceful persuasion) should be used to achieve social harmony and about when its use would be injurious. The dialectic of force/persuasion frames searching inquiries into rhetoric’s ability to produce full assent. Each chapter of this study explores ways in which multiple frameworks of emotion complicate attempts to persuade and to discriminate between occasions that call for forceful persuasion and those that require gentle speech. These questions cannot be understood by gesturing towards the force/persuasion distinction, its definitions and ramifications. Not only do conflicting, simultaneous frameworks define subcultures and identities, but writers also understand problems and possibilities differently as historical, social, and cultural moments vary. The Imperfect Friend engages its readers in the challenges writers and characters are represented as encountering in discrete historical moments and situations. It articulates controversies concerning friends’ uses of persuasion and explores how writers reshape topoi of emotion as they encounter new social, political, and religious circumstances. The trial scene in Sidney’s Old Arcadia dramatizes the conflict between honour-based and humanist topoi of emotion, along with the differences between public vehemence and private compassionate speech. Chapter 2 argues that competition between the nobility’s allegiance to honour (which leads to pity or anger) and dispassionate humanist devotion to the common good dominates the trial. It shows that Sidney’s text analyses dangerous divisions within sixteenth-century English aristocratic culture, when the commonwealth lacked a monarch to mediate between affective claims of the nobility and the rational claims of impartial law. The text represents public speech as unable to persuade fully the participants and spectators in the trial. Full persuasion occurs only in the conversations with friends and only then with difficulty and debate. Nevertheless, Sidney’s treatment of imperfect friendships goes beyond the narrow conflict of the trial to explore alternative ideas of friendships and new kinds of honour. Even though the Old Arcadia adopts the ideal Renaissance model of friendship that emphasizes honest speech, the text also stresses the failures of vehemence in conversation between friends.3 The afflicted friend may not be able to lay aside his imperfections and his emotions. Although vehemence may be effective in the law court, it does not always work in conversation. Pyrocles rebuffs the frank speech that friendship writings celebrated as the mark of friendship, seeking a friend who will

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minister to his illness in the tradition of Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend, Stephano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation and Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholie. Furthermore, Pyrocles does not utterly disdain his own passion. He insists that his life and his identity depend on the emotion Musidorus criticizes. The conflict between emotional systems produces Pyrocles’ unstable self. Yet by resisting Musidorus’s forceful persuasion, Pyrocles defends his distinct identity. The Old Arcadia draws on Anniball’s words from The Civile Conversation that show why William must accept imperfect people as friends (I.83). It represents ways that Musidorus’s Ciceronian ideal of virtuous friendship comes into conflict with Pyrocles’ emphasis on the imperfect friend. Pyrocles’ and Musidorus’s conversation evolves towards a new form of friendship, part serious and part funny, where Musidorus serves his friend’s purposes rather than changing his mind about them. Their conversations with their beloveds also discover new forms of honour to guide their lives. I argue that the Arcadia also represents ways that opposite-sex friends negotiate gender inequalities by facilitating reciprocity. Such friends can explore the possibilities of an ‘inward honour,’ moving towards interiority as a valuable site for formulating identity. Chapter 3 shows how Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry continues the inquiry into how counsellors use rhetoric without coercing the will and emotions. Poetry acts like a physician who shames audiences for their folly and heals their diseased emotions. But the text defines a poetry that does not rely on sheer emotional force because it links emotion to cognitive strategies. Fully aware of the dangers of a rhetoric that compels and of poetry’s ‘sweet charming force,’ the text explores whether emotions can be trusted to affect action, drawing on writings of Aristotle, John Rainolds, Cicero, Quintilian, and Augustine that debate the role of emotion in law courts and sermons. Rainolds criticizes spectacles that appeal to class differences so that the innocent are found guilty and the guilty go free. He insists that one cannot rely on spectacle to produce a desired effect on an audience. A Defence also addresses the possibility that visible appearances may be dangerous by insisting that without poetic images, people may err in their judgments of particular cases, an error Calvin attributed to the fall. The text dwells on the issue of how one can present particulars so they will be rightly interpreted. It draws on Aristotle’s treatment of the fictional example to argue that examples and stories can be used as arguments and they can also be linked with precepts in a ‘speaking picture’ that guides ethical judgment. In this way, Sidney resolves the cognitive challenges to poetry. However, the problem remains that audi-

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ences may despise poetry’s admonitions, fail to connect stories to their lives, and change their actions but not their characters. Most important, audiences may recognize what they ought to do without doing it, a problem that animated Augustine and Melanchthon as well. But how can poetry change character without compelling people to beliefs that do not engage their full assent? A Defence draws on Augustine’s treatment of the grand style to heal the split between knowledge and action. Sidney’s text advocates the use of delight to lead audiences to see goodness with its proper glow, so to speak, when their fallen natures interfere with their emotional responses. De Doctrina Christiana also helps us understand why passion is central to A Defence’s treatment of poetry. A Defence asserts that the cold cannot write passionately and that without passion there is no movement towards knowledge and virtuous action. One of the most telling arguments that poetry can move without coercing audiences comes when the Defence focuses on ‘drawing’ persons to good without forceful compulsion. The good most enthusiastically celebrated by Sidney’s epideixis (excluding the praise of God undertaken by the vates) is that which heroic poetry praises; the other genres lead to shame, correction, and self-judgment. Thus, the structure of A Defence’s analysis of the genres follows the common distinction, most eloquently made by Melanchthon, between occasions when the heart expands with happiness at acquiescing to a present good and those when the heart, ‘struck by an unwelcome object,’ is pressed, trembles, and languishes with sadness. Heroic poetry lifts up, animates, and inspires. Nathan’s story, comedy, and iambic confront and lead to painful knowledge, tears, and shame. Shame helps control undesirable actions. But Sidney modifies contemporary ideas about the use of shame by setting limits on scorn; one should not gape at beggars or jest at strangers. Ultimately, he links scorn to delight and provides a mixed approach to imperfections seen as human. Scorn helps us to see our folly and delight gives us pleasure when we perceive what is human, delightfully funny, and imperfect about ourselves. While A Defence focuses on effective counsel given by the poet, chapter 4 argues that the New Arcadia re-examines counsel and friendship in the context of hospitable interchanges made necessary by civil war. When frameworks of emotion clash so that competition for honour permeates erotic rivalry, marriage negotiations suffer from faction, and friends turn into flatterers, conflict leads to civil war and hospitality takes on a greater social role as political institutions, especially monarchy, decline. In order to understand friendship, counsel, and their deteriorations into flattery,

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I have argued for the need to understand Renaissance ideas of hospitality as a social obligation and not a personal preference. The goal of hospitality was to establish friendship, understood as a reciprocal public relationship. Far from using vehement language, the friend ‘yieldeth and giveth a place ... to the just griefe of his friend.’ His feelings resonate with those of his friend. Skilful practices of giving comfort create company among friends, company being a central term from Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation and the Old Arcadia where the friend, Musidorus, keeps company with Pyrocles as he praises solitude, thereby protecting Pyrocles from the dangers of ‘solitariness.’ Company nevertheless comes under siege in the New Arcadia when hosts use feigned friendship, flattery, and rites of hospitality to enthrall their visitors. The remainder of chapter 4 shows how competition for precedence apart from achievement leads to faction and uncontrolled rage while flatterers use friendly rhetoric to manipulate others and strive for upward mobility. The mutual implication of multiple rhetorical frameworks of emotion, whether honour-based, humanist, or (erotically) Neoplatonic, increases faction. The New Arcadia revises rhetorical topoi of emotion to represent ways in which tyranny and flattery erode friendship and marriage. Characters use a distorted rhetoric of honour that creates rivalry within families; rivalry then leads to civil war. Distorted rhetoric characterizes all gestures as competitive and uses onesided topoi: it produces open-ended anger. Neither the flatterer nor the tyrant has a friend to ameliorate his excessive emotion; emotion without a counter-perspective to moderate it spins out into unlimited rage, suspicion, and envy. But friendship provides alternative views that heal distortion. Contrarily, tyrants and flatterers live in solitude that no company can overcome, incapable of attending to alternative views or other possible feelings. Paradise Lost constructs Satan as a tyrant and flatterer, in the mode established by the New Arcadia. He is driven by unlimited malice. Without friends or the willingness to accept counter-evidence to his emotions, Satan falls into one-sided solitary emotion and into deceptive thinking and speaking. This deception calls for the strong, indignant speech voiced by Abdiel. Chapters 5 and 6 argue that the epic and Milton’s prose call for public invective to unmask deception and display topoi that create open-ended emotions. These works draw on Aristotle’s treatment of anger as an emotion produced by perceived insults to a person’s honour and sense of worth. Milton adapts terms of honour to polemical debate. Anger strips away hypocrisy and illuminates truth. The

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Animadversions probes arguments that mislead the innocent so egregiously that anyone who loves them must feel ‘a well heated fervencie.’ It insists on the need for brotherly understanding of the erring but calls for just rage against euphemistic language that disguises dangerous facts. But like William Walwyn, Milton also recommends mild dialogue in the brotherly search for truth. One may gently persuade others towards healing rather than scolding or attacking them. Paradise Lost represents clashes between truth and error by drawing on the rhetoric of honour from archaic epic and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Like Milton’s prose, the poem treats anger in Aristotelian terms as an emotion caused by a perception of injustice. The debate between Satan and Abdiel is a conflict of honour; each participant thinks he or an associate has been wronged. Abdiel’s rational anger expose Satan’s vicious but hidden assumptions and ferrets out the hidden malice in Satan’s stated beliefs. Like the New Arcadia, Paradise Lost celebrates virtuous anger and criticizes uses of rhetorical topoi that lead to malice and envy. It discloses how competition for honour leads to faction and tyranny. Chapter 7 shows how Satan replaces normative social criteria for emotion with fantastic absolutist ambition and passion. Satan, his imaginings loosened from socially defined frameworks, seeks unlimited upward mobility. Searching for total domination rather than dominance over an individual in a specific battle, Satan slides into infinite revenge and immortal hate. Hating a good that would animate energy and love, he can only feed on the good things of others. He experiences a fruitless desire based on deprivation, similar in structure to the proto-capitalist definitions of desire in the New Arcadia, where rivalry defines an object as desirable independent of its substantive usefulness or ability to produce joy. The epic’s rewriting of Homeric and classical terms of honour creates a social framework in which Satan becomes metamorphosed by his rebellion. Once Satan commits himself to evil, he loses his place in the social hierarchy. Attempting to dissolve the cosmos by mingling categories, he dissolves his identity, becoming a shape-shifter who merges with Eve’s desires in order to seduce her. His indirection, disguise, and flattery lead to a fluctuating incomplete self. In addition, by removing Adam and Eve from external, socially defined circumstances of contempt and insult, Milton represents an internal shame where the self rejects itself. This shame can only be healed by a friend who cuts through the totalizing language of competition and rivalry. Paradise Lost rewrites friendship discourse to characterize married conversation as an antidote to one-sided, open-ended emotion. When

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spouses endeavour to offer friendly counsel, they encounter obstacles. Chapter 8 examines how writers strive to deal with the contradictions. My argument has two stages. First, I show how dangerous solitude appears to those who fear that it leads to treason or heresy. Then I argue that handbooks, Milton’s marriage writings, and Paradise Lost revise the humanist model of ideal friendship to provide counsel for the solitary. They also represent persons as being able to counsel themselves. Instead of making the friend another self as Renaissance friendship writings do, Cowley and Montaigne make the self another friend. But although A Mask and Paradise Regained model fruitful relationships between solitude and company with the self, Paradise Lost highlights the dangers of interiorized conversation when Satan uses a rational humanist and Protestant counselling voice to confront himself with truth while his miserable self slides into despair. His counselling voice disappears and he turns into a flatterer and hypocrite. When Adam falls into solitude, his thoughts circle around the word ‘death,’ his rational voice unable to discriminate the probable from the improbable. Then Eve approaches and turns his mind to more hopeful prospects. Milton’s representation of Eve’s approach draws on friendship and marriage writings and revises topoi of honour from archaic epic and the Hebrew Scriptures. These writings use the model of friendship to shape the relation of man to wife. However, the possibility of counsel is threatened by the fact that spouses are stipulated to be unequal in the modern understanding of the term. The wife is ‘equal’ in the sense that she is ‘fit’ for her husband. This understanding of marriage undermines the concept of the friend’s role as a speaker of truth. Instead of generating friendship from the wife’s virtue and sense of self-esteem, marriage handbooks and Milton ground marriage in man’s lack of a helpmate and his need to overcome loneliness. Milton’s divorce pamphlets argue that the sight of an unfit wife produces loneliness worse than solitude, because the husband sees in his unresponsive wife the loss of his hopes for conversation. Moreover, the disproportion in Adam and Eve’s faculties leads Adam to prefer Eve’s beauty to his own wisdom, and Eve feels slighted by her lack of authoritative reason. This imbalance provides fertile opportunity for destructive competition, which Paradise Lost represents by revising archaic and Aristotelian terms of honour and emotion. Characters in the text also ameliorate competition by redefining honour, measuring it not in terms of the comparative prowess of individuals competing verbally or physically in a social context, but in terms of God. The text emphasizes the duty to honour others and recognize their

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worth, reshaping interactions between guest and host from the Odyssey and the Hebrew Scriptures by framing Raphael’s visit to Adam and Eve as a negotiation between unequals. Paradise Lost models hospitable interactions between different orders of beings. It finds ways for unequal persons to achieve reciprocity. The different degrees of honour manifested by Raphael and Adam produce mutual admiration and inquiry. Each being has experiences to narrate which increase the knowledge of the other. Analogously, Adam and Eve bring distinct capacities and experiences to their conversations. Eve longs for greater knowledge and Adam wishes to enjoy beauty more fully. However, their differences cause conflict; each needs the freedom of the friend to speak strongly when the other swerves from virtue. Unfortunately, a distorted rhetoric of emotion leads each to feel slighted by the other. John Goodwin’s translation of Darkness Discovered warns of the dangers that lie in religious controversy, which tends to produce anger and bitterness. Adam and Eve strive to avoid these dangers by adjudicating between the need to speak frankly and the need to speak gently. But Adam soothes too much when Eve defends the need for trial too strongly. Eve does not listen with goodwill like the ideal friend, but goes off to encounter trial alone. Ultimately, the text uses the language of honour to find healing after the fall when Eve surrenders status for the sake of mutual recognition of honour. Paradise Lost draws on supplication scenes from Homer’s epics to depict Eve’s gesture in begging and clasping Adam’s knees. His gracious acceptance of her gesture ends the despairing cycle of one-sided emotions that engulfs Adam. Once restored to self-respect, Adam gives saner counsel to heal Eve’s desire to kill herself. Eve articulates new grounds for friendship as they turn enmity away from one another and towards a common enemy. Like the Arcadia, Paradise Lost develops new modes of counsel to overcome flattery and tyranny. The texts offer alternatives to a proto-capitalist competition for precedence as an end in itself. Aiming at reciprocity they strive to make gender differences fruitful. Adam and Eve achieve reciprocity by exchanging stories that promote inquiry, and the couples in the Arcadia use their differences to inform deliberation. Both make difference fruitful for discovery.

Notes

Chapter 1: Counselling the Unstable Self 1 For example, Homer, Iliad 1.357 and Odyssey 10.496–7. 2 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973),150.33–151.1 (cited hereafter in the text as OA). The Old Arcadia was probably composed between the autumn of 1579 and the spring of 1581. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 168. 3 T(imothie) Bright, ‘To his melancholicke friend: M.,’ A Treatise of Melancholie, reproduced from the 1586 edition printed by Thomas Vautrollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 5–6; Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: An English Version, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, Early English Text Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 32. Sir Thomas Elyot offers Of the Knowledge (London: Thomae Bertheleti, 1533) in the spirit of an adviser to a prince, including a hint of friendship, in The proheme. The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (1581) and Bartholomew Young (1586) (London: Constable, 1925) (cited hereafter in the text as Civile Conversation). Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie (London: T. Adams, 1618), though scientific, is a dialogue among friends. Thomas Wilson offers his consolatory speech to the mother of Henry Duke of Suffolk and his brother, Lord Charles, as an example of exhortation in The Arte of Rhetorique 1560, ed. F.H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 65. 4 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, iii ff. 5 Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique 1560, 77. 6 Katherine Rowe, ‘Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,’ Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadel-

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9

10 11

12 13

Notes to pages 4–5 phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 169, analyses how rhetoric was used to school self-governance. For seventeenth-century accounts of how to regulate emotional experience, see James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant,’ The Seventeenth Century 6(2) (Autumn 1991): 205–50, esp. 219ff. The expression ‘emotional intelligence’ comes from Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). Paradise Lost in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957), IX.906–8 (cited hereafter in the text as PL). Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 148ff., and ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric,’ Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 47–64, esp. 54ff.; Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman, 1970), 3.2.27. Philip Melanchthon, Liber de Anima (Witebergae: Simonis Groenenbergn, 1587), 228–9. ‘Ita in homine duplex est Gubernatio. Altera d’espotike, qua mens & voluntas cogunt Locomotiuam, vt externa membra vel reprimantur, vel incitentur: vt in ardentissima siti, possunt tamen mens & volantas imperare manibus, ne poculum attingant’ (228–9). ‘Secunda gubernatio in homine est ea, quae nominatur politike, cum non tantum externa membra per locomotivam cohercentur, sed ipsum cor congruit cum recta ratione, & honesta voluntate, motum persuasione’ (230). See also Liber de anima, Melanchthons Werke (Guetersloh: Guetersloher Verlagshaus, 1961), 3:318. Melanchthon evidently took this example of holding the cup seriously, for it also appears in On Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, ed. and trans. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 53. See especially Rebhorn, Emperor of Men’s Minds. Laurie J. Shannon, ‘“Soveraigne Amitie:” Friendship and the Political Imagination in Renaissance Texts’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996), 6; Janel Mueller, ‘Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism in “Sapho to Philenis”,’ in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–207, quotations on 184. See also Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10, 12, 101.

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14 Marriage writings configure marriage as a form of friendship, but the hierarchal nature of marriage makes counsel difficult. Laurie Shannon, ‘Rhetorical Husbandries and Portia’s “True conceit” of Friendship,’ Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 3–26. See also Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 54–64. 15 John Rainolds’ Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Lawrence D. Green (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 141. 16 Generals might also make excessive anger milder, but humanists seek consistently civilized emotions. 17 Juan Luis Vives, ‘Chapter 13: Anger and Annoyance,’ The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, intro. and trans. Carlos G. Noreña, Studies in Renaissance Literature 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 67; Ioannes Lodovicus Vives, ‘De Ira et Offensione,’ in De anima et vita, ed. Mario Sancipriano (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963), 3:211. 18 Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, ‘Introduction,’ Reading the Early Modern Passions, 1. 19 Douglas L. Cairns, Âidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 5–6. 20 Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson, ‘Introduction,’ Reading the Early Modern Passions, 2, p. 295 n5, and Katherine Rowe, ‘Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant’s Macbeth,’ Reading the Early Modern Passions, 177. See Daniel Gil’s comments on ‘a collision of social imaginaries’ and its consequences for intimacy and emotion in ‘Before Intimacy: Modernity and Emotion in the Early Modern Discourse of Sexuality,’ ELH 69(4) (Winter 2002), 865. Daniel Gil, Before Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 21 Among the critics who stress the Protestant side of Sidney’s writings, see Andrew Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978); Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660 (Totowa, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); and Alistair Fox, The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 114–35. 22 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, repr. 1996). I am grateful to Joshua Scodel in the English Department at the University of Chicago for drawing the relevance of this work to my attention. 23 Ibid., 466–7. 24 Ibid., 477. 25 Ibid., 452. 26 Gil, ‘Before Intimacy,’ 867.

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27 Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 28 See Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 149–50. For analyses of Aristotle’s cognitive treatment of emotion, see Stephen R. Leighton, ‘Aristotle and the Emotions,’ Dorothea Frede, ‘Mixed Feelings in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,’ Gisela Striker, ‘Emotions in Context: Aristotle’s Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoric and His Moral Psychology,’ and Martha Craven Nussbaum, ‘Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion,’ in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 206–37, esp. 205–6, 258–85, 286–302, and 303–23; William W. Fortenbaugh, ‘Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Emotions,’ Aristotle: The Classical Heritage of Rhetoric, ed. Keith V. Erickson (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1974), 205–34; and John M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 406–27. 29 Sidney translated the first two books of the Rhetoric into English and sent a long Latin quotation from Book 2 to his mentor Hubert Languet. L.B. Osborn, The Life, Letters and Writings of John Hoskyns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 155; Steuart A. Pears, ed., The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet (London: W. Pickering, 1855), 121. 30 Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 66; Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, or the Fundamental Elements of Policy in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1840), 40. 31 The word for slight is oligôria, a ‘belittling’ as George A. Kennedy translates it. Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2.2,1378b. 32 Frederick Robertson Bryson, The Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Aspect of the Life of the Gentleman (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1935), 2ff., 27ff., quotation on 28. 33 Ibid., 29. 34 John Milton, Prolusions, trans. Phyliss B. Tillyard in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–), I.284 (cited hereafter in the text as CPW ). 35 Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 241. 36 William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 290. 37 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, ed. Henry Herbert Stephen

Notes to pages 9–12

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Croft (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), II: 55–72; Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 152, 153. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, with the assistance of C. Patrick O’Donnell, Jr (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1987), V, ix, 50, p. 836. I am indebted to Roger Kuin for seeing this connection. Sir Thomas Elyot,‘Of Ire’ in his The Castel of Helth (London, 1539), III.ii. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, Englished by Sir John Stradling, ed. Rudolf Kirk (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1939), 83. Elyot, ‘Of Ire,’ III.ii. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, I: 238. Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 152, 153; Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, 131. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 46, 47. Johannis Lodovicus Vivis, De Anima et Vita (Basile: AE, n.d., repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1963), 191. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 251. Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London: Thomas Cadman, 1587), in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 3:187–307. Quotation from 208. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin Books, 1967, repr. 1986), 339, 340. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 201. Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642: The Past and Present Society (Oxford: Titus Wilson & Son, 1978), 69, argues that Sidney’s writing synthesizes honour and religion. John Rogers interprets Milton’s shift from vitalism to ‘a representation of material organization in Paradise Lost that accommodates the conservative changes rung in Milton’s theory of the state ... Raphael’s beautiful description of the scale of nature ... provides just this metaphysical justification for the saintly, if vaguely repressive, rule of the “true commonwealth” charted in Milton’s final treatises.’ The ‘crudest elements of the system find themselves hierarchically subjected to the fit few.’ The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 110–11. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, New Essays on Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 86–130, esp. 104. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical

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Notes to pages 12–14 Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, 2nd printing, 1982), 165, writes: ‘When God used angels in the spiritual warfare, he chose them without reference to any pre-existing hierarchy. He did not recognize their status, Puritans insisted, rather he appointed their offices. This opinion was apparently adopted by Milton, with all his fascination with traditional angelic lore.’ See also Carrol B. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 23 (1987): 165–96. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels.’ See also Wayne A. Rebhorn, ‘The Humanist Tradition and Milton’s Satan: The Conservative as Revolutionary,’ Studies in English Literature: 1500–1800, 13(1) (Winter 1973), 82–3. Brian Vickers, ‘‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare,’ in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 411ff., argues that Renaissance orators fail to persuade in works from Elyot to Shakespeare. Augustine De Doctrina Christiana, 4.28; Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 118; Nancy Rothwax Lindheim, ‘Vision, Revision, and the 1593 Text of the Arcadia,’ English Literary Renaissance 2 (1972), 141. Katherine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26. Jean E. Howard, ‘The New Historicism in Renaissance Studies,’ English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 13–43. Maus offers an excellent summary of the scholarly arguments that the self is socially constructed in Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance, 2–3. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 1, 134, 155. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 10, 40. Ibid., 40. John M. Steadman, Milton and the Renaissance Hero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 17. John Peter Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 52. See also 26–37, 43, 46ff. Barbara K. Lewalski and Annabel Patterson show how Milton adapts the heroic model to form his own ethos in the prose. Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 275; Annabel Patterson, ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ Milton Studies 8 (1975): 71– 101, esp. 73–5. Richard Strier, ‘Milton against Humility,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Berkeley: University

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of California Press, 1997), 267. Quotation from The Reason of Church Government (CPW I.841). Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 269–75. Arthur Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 41–2, and Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), 255–7, argue that Milton derives his idea of self-worth from Protestant ideas. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 23–30, 52. The essay appears in a modern translation of Plutarch, Essays, trans. Robin Waterfield, intro. Ian Kidd (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 61–112. Plutarch, the philosophie commonlie called, the morals, written by the learned philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea. Translated out of Greeke into English, and conferred with the Latine, translations and the French, by Philemon Holland (Printed by Arnold Hatfield, 1603), 86, 89. I am indebted to Laurie Shannon for the reference to the Holland translation. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, II.178. Arthur F. Kinney records Sidney’s ‘search for Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch’s Moralia’ in ‘Primus inter pares: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia, and the Poetic Uses of Philosophy,’ Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 244. Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship,’ in The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J.I.M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1933 [1603], 145, quoted by Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 22. B.A. Krostenko, ‘Text and Context in the Roman Forum: The Case of Cicero’s First Catilinarian,’ in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 47. Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester,’ in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 130.12. Sidney, ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester,’ 129, 130. Plutarch, the philosophie commonlie called, the morals, 107. Also quoted in Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 193, and see 191ff. Plutarch, the philosophie commonlie called, the morals, 107. E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy’ (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 5–7. For example, Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, I.93ff.; see also his treatment of undermining hypocrites and flatterers, 76ff. Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie (London: Thomas Adams, 1618), ‘Chapter Fourteen,’ 62ff. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 2nd ed. (London: John Beale, 1626),

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Notes to pages 16–20 141ff. Gouge also cautions against ‘an undue feare of offending one another by Christian instruction, admonition, reproofe, and the like’ (143). John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie forme of householde Government (London: Thomas Man, 1612), 49ff., 88ff., 149, 152ff., 162ff., 230ff. Jacobus Acontius, Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), trans. John Goodwin, intro. R.E. Field (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978), ‘To the Reader’ and 10ff., 38ff. For a valuable treatment of prudence see Victoria Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory,’ in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 373–96. Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, 1, identifies the humanists’ failure to persuade with the genre of prodigal poetry where ‘invariably the young man to whom the admonition is addressed goes out and does exactly what he has been told not to do.’ He illuminates the conflict between courtier sons and humanist fathers and comments astutely, ‘unlike the usual prodigal, neither Pyrocles nor Musidorus repents’ (138). Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Robert W. Ayers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, rev. ed. 1980), VII.261. ‘Psychologies’ may seem too modern a designation for these texts, but if one keeps in mind the reference of ‘psychê ’ in the Greek sense to the soul as an activity of the body (as in Aristotle’s peri psychê or De anima, one of the most frequently reprinted books in the Renaissance) and ‘logos’ as the ‘rational account,’ the term ‘psychology’ describes Renaissance treatises as accounts of bodily organs, faculties of the soul, and passions. For an analysis of Satan’s speech as arousing Eve’s anger against God by representing God as having contempt for Eve, see Nancy Wood, ‘Satan as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Persuasion of Eve in “Paradise Lost”’ (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1972), 141ff.

Chapter 2: Unyielding Judge or Gentle Physician? 1 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 1–79. 2 Anto Maria de’ Conti, De eloquentia dialogues, in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, ed. Bernard Weinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 2, 141–61, quotation at 160. See Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 27. 3 The Arte of Rhetorique, 1560, ed. F.H. Mair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 4; Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1958), 4.12.27; Cicero Orator

Notes to pages 20–2

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21.69. Probare necessitatis est, delectare suavitatis, flectere victoriae. ‘Flectere’ means ‘to bend,’ ‘to move,’ or ‘to persuade.’ Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 24, lines 20–3. All quotations of the Old Arcadia are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page and line number. Richard Strier argues for the positive role of passion in Reformation thought in ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Karen Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and in ‘The Heart’s Privileges: Emotion,’ chap. 7 in Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 174–217. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 49ff. The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (1581) and Bartholomew Young (1586) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925). Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as The Civile Conversation. The Civile Conversation represents a physician friend, Anniball, in dialogue with Guazzo’s brother, William. John Leon Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance: 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 42, comments that ‘As in The Courtier the undoubted major source is Cicero, so in The Civile Conversation the pervading influence is that of Plutarch.’ Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, and Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 148ff., and ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric’ in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 47–64. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 31, 42, demonstrates that ideal Renaissance friendship is founded in virtue. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 9.3.6. Critics argue that the narrator’s pity weakens his judgment. Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 64, and Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 136ff. Mary Ellen Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 74–5, attributes the text’s appeal to pity to a gender ideology which Sidney inscribes in his compassionate, because female, audience in opposition to a more critical attitude projected onto a male audience.

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12 Debora Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy: The Rape of Lucretia and The Old Arcadia,’ Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1988): 210ff. 13 Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 210ff., analyses Basilius’s faults. 14 John Rainolds’s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric,’ ed. and trans. Lawrence D. Green (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 129. 15 For the importance of Aristotle’s Politics to Sidney, see Arthur F. Kinney, ‘“Primus inter pares”: Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia, and the Poetic Uses of Philosophy,’ in Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 262ff. Kinney writes ‘from Politics 1 and 2 stems much of the political theory of the Arcadia; from the more practical consequences in Politics 3 and 4 come many of the incidents’ (262). 16 David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 31. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 246ff. 19 Aristotle The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2.2, 1370a, 177. 20 Aristotle Rhetoric 2.2–12, 1378bff. 21 Aristotle Rhetoric 2.2, 1379a. 22 For additional evidence that the text celebrates their nobility, see Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy,’ 534–5. 23 The Civile Conversation, 130ff. I am indebted to Richard Strier for suggesting the pertinence of Guazzo’s text to understanding Renaissance emotion. 24 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel: 1600–1740 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 131ff., clarifies aristocratic ideology. 25 Livy History of Rome, 2.3.2–4; translation adapted by Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy,’ 527–8, from Livy, The Early History of Rome: Books I–V of ‘The History of Rome from its Foundation,’ trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1960), 108. 26 Livy History of Rome, trans. B.O. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 2.5.8. 27 Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy,’ 528; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 119; Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), 475. 28 Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), II.61–72.

Notes to pages 27–32

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29 I thank Bradin Cormack in the English Department of the University of Chicago for stimulating my thinking on this point. 30 Rainolds, Oxford Lectures (cited hereafter in the text as Oxford Lectures), 145; Rudolph Agricola (1444–85), Rodolphi Agricolai Phrisii, de inventione dialectica libri omnes (Cologne, 1539), I. i. p. 1. 31 Rhetoric 1.13,1374a–1375a. 32 Cicero De inventione 1.8–9, 11. The controversy may be facti, nominis, generis, and actionis, 1.10. 33 Aristotle Rhetoric 1.13,1374a–b. 34 Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique 1560, 28. 35 Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, 80; David Norbrook, ‘Sidney and Political Pastoral,’ in Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 101. 36 Norbrook, ‘Sidney and Political Pastoral,’ 101, comments that as an outsider, Euarchus does not want to assume inappropriate authority. For a different view, see Shuger, ‘Castigating Livy,’ 531. 37 This resolution helps to answer charges that ‘the Arcadia makes of sympathy a trap.’ Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, 136. 38 Ann W. Astell, ‘Sidney’s Didactic Method in The Old Arcadia,’ SEL 24 (1984), 51. 39 Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, 1.23; sigs. L5v–L6; quoted in Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 287. 40 The words in quotation are from Mornay, De La Vérité de la religion chrestienne (A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion), sig. L7v, quoted in Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 287. 41 Elliott M. Simon, ‘Sidney’s Old Arcadia: In Praise of Folly,’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 12(3) (Fall 1986): 28. 42 I am indebted to Roger Kuin for challenging my previous reading of these lines and suggesting an alternative possibility. 43 Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, The True knowledge of a mans owne selfe (London: I.R. for William Weake, 1602), 144–5. 44 Augustine De Doctrina Christiana 4.12.27, 136–7. Coluccio Salutati derives his confidence from these two. Epistollario (Rome: 1891–1905), 3.15, quoted in Rebhorn, Emperor of Men’s Minds, 33. 45 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 2.23; Sir Philip Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 91. 46 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xvii.

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47 Ibid., xvii, 79. 48 Strier argues for the Reformation emphasis on passion in ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,’ and in ‘The Heart’s Privileges: Emotion.’ 49 Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 49ff. 50 See also Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 163–4, for an analysis of the need for tact. 51 Horace, Satire III, in The Collected Works of Horace, trans. Lord Dunsany and Michael Oakley (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1961), 148. I am indebted to Joshua Scodel for this reference. 52 Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie (London: Thomas Adams, 1618), 59. 53 Daniel Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civile Conversation and Castiglione’s Courtier,’ Yearbook of Italian Studies (Florence: 1971), 178–98, analyses civil conversation and the role of Guazzo’s text in Elizabethan anti-courtliness. Quotations on 183. 54 Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 55. 55 Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England,’ 182. 56 Ibid., 182–4. 57 Ibid., 195ff., and Daniel Javitch, ‘The Philosopher of the Court: A French Satire Misunderstood,’ Comparative Literature 23 (1971): 97–124. Guazzo published partly revised editions of La Civil Conversatione in Italy in 1575, 1577, 1578, and 1579. Gabriel Chappuys and Francois Belleforest published French translations in 1579, and George Pettie translated Chappuys’s French text. His translation was published in 1580. Sidney wrote the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia) between the autumn of 1579 and the spring of 1581. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 168. 58 For the concept of friendship as a utopian space see Laurie J. Shannon, ‘“Soveraigne amitie”: Friendship and the Political Imagination in Renaissance Texts’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996), esp. 5–6 and Janel Mueller, ‘Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism in “Sapho to Philenis”,’ in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–207, esp. 184. 59 Shannon, ‘“Soveraigne amitie”,’ 14 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as ‘“Soveraigne amitie”’). 60 On virtue as the basis for friendship, see Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8.3–6, 1156a20ff. Cicero De amicitia 1.6. It should be noted that Cicero does acknowledge in his treatment of beneficence that no one is perfect and that one ought not to neglect anyone who displays any sign of virtue (De officiis

Notes to pages 35–6

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1.46). Plutarch remarks that friends’ corrections will be more easily believed if the friend is ‘thought subject to the same faults’ (The philosophie, 113). See Plutarch, The philosophie, 111–12. See also La Primaudaye, The French Academie, 62–3. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 4, comments that ill humours can be understood and experienced only ‘in terms of culturally available discourses,’ whether or not these discourses are accurate. H.M. Gardiner, Ruth Clark Metcalf, and John G. Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories (New York: American Book, 1937), 138–40, show that the validity of an emotion depends on whether it follows from imagination or true judgment. William J. Bouwsma, ‘Changing Assumptions in Later Renaissance Culture,’ in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 76, points out that early Renaissance Italian rhetoric also ‘opened the way to a denial of absolutes in favor of a novel cultural relativism.’ See also Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 19–50. The idea that emotions may be relative occurs in Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, I.19, though neither the author nor the physician endorses it. La Primaudaye, The French Academie, 13, states very clearly the opinion that evil emotions arise from ‘a good falsely ... imagined.’ Compare Ronald de Sousa, ‘The Rationality of Emotions,’ in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 127–51, esp. 141. Bright explains that when a body is healthy a humour can ‘beare no sway of priuate action’; but when the body is altered, the passions ‘breaking from that regiment whereunto they should be subject, are so farre of from subjection to the disposition of our bodies, and strength of our partes, that they oppresse them’ and produce symptoms of illness (A Treatise of Melancholie, 92). Robert E. Stillman, ‘The Perils of Fancy: Poetry and Self-Love in The Old Arcadia,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 26 (1984): 1–17. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 95ff., 411. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), explains male anxiety and desire to rule women by arguing that men felt the ‘world was out of control’ because of the economic changes brought about by enclosure and the agricultural revolution (181). They found it easier to discipline their women than to affect economic circumstances. See also Lamb, Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle, 74. Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 96.

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69 ‘Which, one Crates rightly signified, who seeing a young man walke in a secrete place, asked him what hee did there so alone: the young man answered, that he talked with him selfe: I pray you (saieth hee) take heede you talke not with some naughtie fellow’ (Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, 1.46). See Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, ed. E. Phillips Barker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1.10, 26ff. 70 Neil L. Rudenstine illuminates the connections between Sidney’s and Languet’s letters and Pyrocles’ argument in Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 17ff. 71 In 1574, Sidney was charged by his mentor, Hubert Languet, for withdrawing too much into his studies. See Pears, The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, 25ff. The quotation is from 183 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as The Correspondence). 72 Rudenstine, Sidney’s Poetic Development, 17ff.; McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 54. 73 Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 17ff., 25ff., 142ff., links this speech to Sidney’s ‘forward Protestantism,’ his emphasis on constancy, and attack on the instability of love, but Worden also argues that Musidorus’s precepts ‘explode in his face.’ I argue that Sidney exaggerates and parodies Musidorus’s humanism and Pyrocles’ love mania in order to explore the intricacies of friendship and counsel. 74 Musidorus echoes Languet in ‘you let your mind fall asleep’ (13.34–5) and ‘you subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing’ (14.4–6). 75 Worden, The Sound of Virtue, 321. 76 Aristotle Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1.2, 20–1, 1254b. 77 Kinney argues persuasively that Sidney represents some characters as corrupting ‘humanist ideas, logic, dialectic, and rhetoric.’ Humanist Poetics, 284. 78 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 4.6, 11. 79 McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, comments on his ‘gushing effulgence of tears’ (63). 80 For this advice, see Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, 104, and La Primaudaye, The French Academie, 59ff. 81 McCoy attributes the Old Arcadia’s failure to take a stand to Sidney’s being ‘ultimately more interested in sympathy and indulgence than in anything else.’ Sir Philip Sidney, 64. See also Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, 136. Ann Astell, on the other hand, argues that the narrator’s combined detachment and sympathy makes him morally good. ‘Sidney’s Didactic Method in The Old Arcadia,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1800, 24 (1984), 51. A.C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cam-

Notes to pages 41–4

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bridge University Press, 1977), 38, believes that the text’s sympathy blunts moral judgment. I argue that Sidney treats emotion as what Bouwsma calls an ‘essential resource of the personality.’ See William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,’ in Itinerarium Italicum, ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brody, Jr (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 38. Winfried Schleiner, ‘Male Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance Drama,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 19(4) (1988): 605–19, analyses the link between cross-dressing and homoeroticism. See also Robert H.F. Carver, ‘“Transformed in Show”: The Rhetoric of Transvestism in Sidney’s Arcadia,’ English Literary Renaissance 28(3) (Autumn 1998): 323–52, for an extensive treatment of possible sources. Mary Sullivan, ‘Amazons and Aristocrats: The Function of Pyrocles’ Amazon Disguise in Sidney’s Revised Arcadia,’ in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean R. Brink (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 62, argues that Pyrocles’ transvestism interrogates ‘“the basis of male property rights” to the female,’ quoted in Carver, “‘Transformed,”’ 323. La Primaudaye, The French Academie, 63ff. Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, intro. and trans. Carlos G. Noreña, Studies in Renaissance Literature 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 46. Phillipe Duplessis-Mornay, The True knowledge of a mans owne selfe (London: I.R. for William Weake, 1602), 2. Stillman, ‘The Perils of Fancy,’ 9, shows how self-love causes disorder in the Arcadia. For a similar irony in George Herbert’s poetry, see Richard Strier, ‘Ironic Humanism in The Temple,’ in ‘Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne’: Essays on George Herbert (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), 33ff. Guazzo, The Civile Conversation, 1.33ff. See also Sidney’s letter to Languet in Pears, The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, 143. Javitch, ‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England,’ 188. Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles Singleton, ed. Daniel Javitch (New York: Norton, 2002), 15. ‘Nature is variable, as in other things, bestowing the light of reason on one man in one respect and on another man in another: wherefore it happens that ... each easily perceives his neighbor’s error and not his own; and we all think that we are very wise and perhaps the more so in that wherein we are most foolish’ (ibid., 15). Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 221, 223, 230, 234.

232

Notes to pages 44–7

93 Amussen, An Ordered Society, 1ff., 180ff. 94 Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour: 1485–1642,’ Past and Present, suppl. 3 (1978), attributes the synthesis of ‘honour with wisdom and religion’ to Sidney and his circle (68ff.). 95 James (ibid.) articulates the changing meanings of honour, esp. at 2ff. and 58. Ruth Kelso analyses honour in Doctrine of the English Gentleman, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1929), xiv, 47, and 101ff. See also Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 126ff. 96 Kelso, Doctrine of the English Gentleman, 97. 97 ‘From god only procedeth all honour, and ... neither noble progenie, succession, nor election be of suche force, that by them any astate of dignitie maye be so stablished that god beinge stered to vengaunce shall nat shortly resume it, and perchance translate it where it shall like hym.’ Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, 2.2. 98 Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination, 126. 99 The Moral Discourses of Epictetus, trans. Carter-Higginson (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 1.3.4., 4. Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 272 and the following pages on self-respect. 100 Aristotle Rhetoric 2. 2, 1378b; Bryson, The Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy, 27ff. 101 Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 39. 102 Duplessis-Mornay, The True knowledge of a mans owne selfe, 193ff. 103 For conscience as inward and as subject to God alone, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20. 104 Cicero, De amicitia, 46, bases friendship on masculine virtue. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics VIII.vii, 1158b believes that marriage partners can be friends but that the relationship is unequal and so imperfect. Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, II.119ff., names only masculine pairs in his list of ideal friendships. See Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 55. 105 Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 62. 106 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Friendship,’ in The Essayes of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J.I.M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1933) [1603], 147, quoted in Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 55. 107 William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 2nd ed. (London: John Beale, 1626); John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie forme of householde Government: for the ordering of private families, according to the direction of God’s word (London:

Notes to pages 47–54

108

109 110 111 112

113 114

115 116 117

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Thomas Man, 1622). Amussen, An Ordered Society, 1ff., 180ff., analyses these relationships. See Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties; and Dod and Cleaver, A godlie forme of householde Government. Protestant writers argue that men and women are equal under God but that the man rules the woman when it comes to earthly governance. I am indebted to Roger Kuin and Richard Strier for the reference to Petrarch. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 30; Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 68. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 56; Wendy Olmsted, ‘Elizabethan Rhetoric and Britomart’s Sorrow by the Sea,’ Exemplaria 14 (Spring 2002): 167–200. Because the ‘husband and wife, are two bodyes, upholding one onely mynde, and one honour: so that it behoveth either of them, to have care for their part of this common honoure: and to beare it up uprightly there must such an indifferente measure be kepte, that the one have no greater charge then the other, but that the one leave to the other their just part: taking especiall heede, that neyther of them draw this way, or that way: for if one shrinke backe any thing, it is ynough to lay the cariage in the myre’ (I. 25). Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 22.5–112. Andrew Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978) and Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England 1560–1660 (Totowa, NJ: Rutgers University Press,1983), 23ff., 37ff., 61ff. argue for the importance of Calvinism to Sidney’s thought. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 190ff. See Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Middlesex: Penguin,1972, repr. 1984), I. 26. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, 102.

Chapter 3: Poetry as Orator and Physician in Sidney’s Defence 1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman: 1962), 2.1.3 (cited hereafter in the text as Institutes). 2 Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 72. 3 Melanchthon, Corpus Reformatorum 21:98, 90, quoted in Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555, trans and ed. Clyde L. Manschreck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), xxxv.

234

Notes to pages 55–6

4 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 15 (cited hereafter in the text as Emperor of Men’s Minds). The phrase ‘emperour of mens minds’ comes from Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (1593), intro. William G. Crana (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1954), iii.v, quoted in Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 15. J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,’ in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 27. 5 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, intro. Baxter Hathaway (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1970), 23, quoted in Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 24. 6 A Defence of Poetry, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 74, lines 27–9. 7 Alan Sinfield, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Defence of Poetry,’ Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in his Time and in Ours, ed. Gary F. Waller, and Michael D. Moore (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Nobles Books, 1984), 205–6 finds a contradiction between Sidney’s ‘erected wit’ (Defence 79.25) that ‘maketh us know what perfection is ... and our infected will’ that ‘keepeth us from reaching unto it’ (79.26), a juxtaposition that ‘effects not a resolution, but a clash of rival absolutes.’ Although these contradictions reappear in the Defence’s references to emotion, I argue that the text carefully, step by step, links cognitive and emotional means to educate passion. Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 28ff.; Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defences of Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 138ff.; Peter C. Herman, Squitter-wits and Musehaters (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 61ff., 93. Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 142–62, stresses the conflict between military excellence and civic poetry. 8 Aristotle The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 1.1, 1354a. 9 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 6.2.5. 10 John Rainolds’ Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Lawrence D. Green (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 124–42 and 142–52. 11 Margaret Ferguson analyses self-love in the sense of a Freudian narcissistic

Notes to pages 57–60

12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25

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projection of the ego and argues that the text engages the reader in moral and dialogic examination of this projection. Trials of Desire, esp. 139; see also Herman, Squitter-wits and Muse-haters, 63ff. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 232 ff. Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 216, comments on the ‘torrent.’ Rainolds’s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 129 (cited hereafter in the text as Oxford Lectures). See Antonius’s speech in Cicero De Oratore 1.53. See Athenaeus 13.590E and Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 2.15.9. Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 2.15.6 (cited hereafter in the text as Institutio Oratoria). John Rainolds, The overthrow of stage-playes (Oxford: John Lichfield, 1629), 110, 112. Lawrence D. Green, ‘Introduction’ to Rainolds’s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 81. Ibid. The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London, 1604), 51, quoted in William Rossky, ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance: Psychology and Poetic,’ Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958), 51. Nosce Teipsum, in An English Garner, ed. Edward Arber (Birmingham, 1877, 1960), V:193, quoted in ‘Imagination in the English Renaissance,’ 52 (the latter is cited hereafter in the text as ‘Imagination’). Robert E. Stillman, ‘Deadly Stinging Adders: Sidney’s Piety, Philippism, and the Defence of Poetry.’ Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, 16:241, 244. While drawing on Stillman’s discovery of the centrality of Melanchthon to Sidney, I argue that Calvin’s Protestant anthropology also influences Sidney’s Defence. Stillman, ‘Deadly Stinging Adders,’ 241, 244. Melanchthon, Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, Bk. 1 (1546), in A Melanchthon Reader, trans. Ralph Keen (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 180–1. ‘Et harum notitiarum consideratio admonet nos, ex quanta dignitate deciderint homines. Transfuderat Deus imaginem suam, id est, notitiam Dei, et discrimen honestorum et turpium in mentes humanas, tanquam in speculum, et fulsissent hae notitiae multo clarius, et voluntas flagrasset amore Dei, et omnibus virtutibus ornate fuisset, si natural hominum mansisset incorrupta. Nunc vero sunt obscurae notitiae: manent tamen.’ Philippe Melanthonis, Enarrationes aliquot librorum ethicorum Aristotelis in Corpus Reformatorum, ed. Henricus Ernestus Bindseil (Halis Saxonum: C.A. Schwetschke et Filium, 1850), 16:279.

236

Notes to pages 60–3

26 See A.C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 112–13. 27 Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 87–95, links the vividness of the image to its evidentiary power. 28 Has quisquis bene conceperit, is erit in adfectibus potentissimus. Hunc quidam dicunt euphantasiôton, qui sibi res, voces, actus secundum verum optime finget; quod quidem nobis volentibus facile continget. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian 6.2.30. 29 Plato Sophist 235; Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, translation from Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H.E. Butler. ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), note on 25f. p. 202. 30 Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 91 analyses Aristotle’s scientific and poetic treatment of the image’s power to move. 31 Namque in hoc eloquentiae vis est, ut iudicem non in id tantum compellat, in quod ipsa rei natural ducetur, sed aut, qui non est, aut maiorem quam est, faciat adfectum (Institutio Oratoria 6.2.24). 32 Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 159. The internal quotation is from Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, 124. 33 An Apology for Poetry, 107, quoted in Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 168. 34 Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, 43ff. 35 Eden relates the feigned example to Aristotle’s argument by example (paradeigma). Enthymeme and example are the two kinds of rhetorical argument (166ff.). Example is further divided into historical examples, comparison (parabolê), and fables (logoi ). Aristotle comments that while the historical example is more useful for deliberative oratory because the future resembles the past, the lessons of the fictional example are easier to provide. The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.20, 1394a. 36 hen men yar esti paradeigmatos eidos to legein pragmata progegenêmena, hen do to auton poiein. 37 Aristotle The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.20, 1393a. hen do to auton poiein (cited hereafter in the text as The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric). 38 Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in SixteenthCentury England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 276. 39 Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 67–8. Internal quotation from Melanchthon, De modo et arte conciondi [1537–9] in Supplementa Melanchthoniana, ed. Paul Drews and Ferdinand Cohrs (Leipzig, 1929, repr. Frankfurt, 1968), 5.2, in Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 51. 40 Melanchthon, On the Soul, in A Melanchthon Reader, 248.

Notes to pages 63–9

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41 Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, True knowledge of a mans owne selfe, trans. A.M[unday] (London: I.R. for William Weake, 1602), 147. 42 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 67. 43 Anne Lake Prescott, ‘King David as a “Right Poet”: Sidney and the Psalmist,’ English Literary Renaissance 19(1) (Spring 1989): 131–51. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, offers a copious account of the tradition. See esp. 67 on the relationship between Augustine and Melanchthon. 44 Prescott, ‘King David as a “Right Poet”,’ 135 and ff. 45 Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), IV.xii, 27, p. 137. 46 Cicero De oratore 2.189. 47 De vero bono, 91, quoted in William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,’ Itinerarium Italicum, ed. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brady (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 38. 48 Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 39. Eric Jager, The Book of the Heart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) explores medieval understandings of the heart as a book. 49 On the Soul (1553) in A Melanchthon Reader, 244. 50 Robert Matz, Defending Literature in Early Modern England: Renaissance Literary Theory in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 58ff., offers an interpretation of the Defence in terms of profit and pleasure. He argues that Sidney defends the court from Protestantism. See also Robert Matz, ‘Sidney’s Defence of Poesie : The Politics of Pleasure,’ English Literary Renaissance 25 (1995): 131–47. 51 Neil L. Rudenstine responds to criticism by defending the decorum of Sidney’s styles. ‘Ornament and Rhetoric,’ in Sidney’s Poetic Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 53–73. See esp. 54 ff. 52 Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, 166. 53 Neil Rudenstine analyses Aristotle’s concept of energeia from Rhetoric 3 and Sidney’s expression of energeia in the Arcadias. ‘Sidney and Energeia,’ Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 210–34. 54 Sidney, ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ 165. 55 See Anne Ferry, The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 129 ff. 56 Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 39. 57 Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 38. 58 Cicero De oratore 2.189. 59 De vero bono, 91, quoted in Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 38. 60 Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 38.

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Notes to pages 69–73

61 Lorenzo Valla, De vero bono, 91, quoted in Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism,’ 38; Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.2.8. 62 Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 269. 63 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Readings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 202–3 and Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney, 48ff. Prescott, ‘King David as a “Right Poet”,’ 131–51, gives a fine analysis of the ways that writings on the Psalms inform Sidney’s poetics. 64 Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 230ff., offers the most complete articulation of Sidney’s humanism. Berry stresses Sidney’s dedication to the warrior ideal in The Making of Sir Philip Sidney, 142–62. 65 Stillman, ‘Deadly Stinging Adders,’ 254. 66 Sidney also praises wisdom and temperance in Ulysses and Diomedes (86.19), patience and magnanimity in Ulysses (90.8), and magnanimity and justice after mentioning Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tydeus, and Rinaldo (98.4). Critics have been troubled by Sidney’s humanist readings of heroic literature. Achilles, for example, hardly seems a pure exemplar of justice. Sinfield, Faultlines, 186–92, argues that Sidney’s humanist reading of heroic literature supports his radical Protestant agenda. 67 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, offers the most comprehensive study of the sacred grand style. 68 Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 1ff., notes that Alexander failed to be changed because he withdrew from watching the tragedy. 69 Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, intro. and trans. Carlos G. Noreña, Studies in Renaissance Literature (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), chap. 23, 115. Pudor uslut paedagogus quidam additus est ho mini, puer enim del adolescens consilio est invalidus, proper ignorantiam eorum quae uersantur in vita. Ioannes Lodovicus Vives, De anima et vita (Turin: Bottego d’Erasmo, 1963), 257. 70 Vives, The Passions of the Soul, chap. 23, 115 ... maxime que necessaries est omnibus, who live in communione & societate. 71 Prescott, ‘King David as “Right Poet,”’ 137ff.; Duplessis-Mornay, ‘To the Reader,’ True knowledge of a mans owne selfe. 72 Laurent Joubert, Treatise on Laughter, trans. Gregory David de Rocher (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1980), esp. 36–48, stresses the ambivalence of laughter. I am indebted to Anne Lake Prescott for drawing my attention to this work. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 57, argues that laughter arises from joy. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.12,1389b calls wit or urbanity (eutrapelia) educated hubris. Cicero De oratore 2.58, and Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique

Notes to pages 73–8

73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80

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(New York: Garland Publishing, 1982), 274ff., argue that laughter creates good will towards the speaker and relieves boredom. Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 6.3.8. Ibid. Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 201. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique 1560, 135–6. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 58. Joubert, Treatise On Laughter. See also Anne Lake Prescott, ‘The Ambivalent Heart: Thomas More’s Merry Tales,’ Criticism 45:4 (Fall 2003): 417–33. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 69.5, 6–7. I have benefitted from the discussion of scorn and delight in a Sidney session at the conference of the Renaissance Society of America in March 2006. Ferguson, Trials of Desire, 150.

Chapter 4: The Politics of Emotion in Hospitality, Rivalry, and Erotic Love 1 E.M.W. Tillyard, English Epic and Its Background (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1954, repr. 1966), 309. 2 Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour 1485–1642,’ Past and Present, suppl. 3 (1978), 69. 3 Richard McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 146, argues that the ‘the explicit parallel of Ambition and Love works with striking cogency to conflate erotic and political energy.’ 4 Daniel Gil, ‘Before Intimacy: Modernity and Emotion in the Early Modern Discourse of Sexuality,’ ELH 69(4) (2002), 865–6, focuses on the tensions between hierarchical, stable social identities and those aspiring to a ‘universal fabric of civility.’ 5 Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 216. 6 Edmund Spenser, ‘The Teares of the Muses,’ The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912, repr. 1959), 485, lines 521–2. See S.K. Heninger, Jr, Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 318. 7 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 45–57, urges the Medici to use fear (not love) but without incurring hatred.

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Notes to page 78

8 See A.C. Hamilton, The Structures of Allegory in the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 124–7, 223–4 and E.R. Gregory, ‘Du Bartas, Sidney, and Spenser,’ CLS 7 (1970): 437–49. Sidney translated the Psalms. 9 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 251. He may also have been thinking of Huguenot writers when he wrote A Defence of Poetry. Anne Lake Prescott, French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 178, argues, the ‘true opponents’ of A Defence may have been the ‘“divine”’ poets such Guillaume de Salluste, Sieur Du Bartas (1544–90), who attempted to write truth not fiction. 10 Sir Fulke Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney, intro. Nowell Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 15. 11 There are also important differences in Sidney’s fictional account and the situation in France. The civil war in Lacedaemonia is a class war that occurs in a republic in the absence of a king, thus fitting into Sidney’s attack on nonmonarchical forms of government and on weak, tyrannical kings. See Martin N. Raitiere, Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1984), 52. 12 See William Dinsmore Briggs, ‘Sidney’s Political Ideas,’ Studies in Philology 29 (1932): 534–42, and Martin Bergbusch, ‘Rebellion in the New Arcadia,’ Philological Quarterly 53 (1974): 29–41, esp. 31. Irving Ribner, ‘Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 13 (1952): 257–65, disagrees with Briggs and argues that Sidney’s views on rebellion were Tudor and orthodox. Ribner, ‘Machiavelli and Sidney: The “Arcadia” of 1590,’ Studies in Philology 57 (1950), 160–1, also argues that Sidney’s representations of political instability derive from Machiavelli rather than from the Huguenots. E.W. Talbert, The Problem of Order: Elizabethan Political Commonplaces and an Example of Shakespeare’s Art (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 89–117. Alan Sinfield, ‘Sidney, du Plessis-Mornay and the Pagans,’ Philological Quarterly 58 (Winter 1979): 26–39, traces links between Sidney, Calvin, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay. Either Languet or Mornay wrote Vindiciae contra Tyrannos which was published in Basel in 1579. Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza, & Mornay, trans. and ed. Julian H. Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 138, 142– 99. Charlotte d’Anbleste Mornay, A Huguenot Family in the XVI Century: The Memoires of Philippe de Mornay, Sieur du Plessis Marly, Written by his Wife, trans. Lucy Crump (London: George Routledge & Sons), 139, records that her husband wrote a book, ‘On the lawful power of a Prince over his people,’ that may have been the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Raitiere, Faire Bitts, esp. 53ff.,

Notes to pages 78–82

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argues for authorship by Hubert Languet. 13 Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965, 2nd printing, 1982); Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986); Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 237; Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 68–71. 14 Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 60; Marvin Hunt, ‘Consorting with Catholics: Sir Philip Sidney and the “Prayers of all Good Men”,’ Sidney Newsletter & Journal 12(1) (1992), 25. According to Duncan-Jones, Bright recalls having met Sidney ‘when they both fled from the terror,’ 60. See also n45, p. 312 and T. Bright, In Physicam Scribonii Animadversiones (1578), *4r . Malcolm William Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 121; and Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 289. See also James M. Osborn, Young Sir Philip Sidney 1572–1577 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 70. 15 A Huguenot Family in the XVI Century, 120. 16 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 97. 17 Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 4. Sidney, New Arcadia, 285. 18 Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney’s Arcadia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 70. 19 Ibid., 34. 20 Michael McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 22ff. 21 Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England, 25; Machiavelli, The Prince, 43. 22 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdman, 1970), 2.8.55. 23 Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, intro. and trans. Carlos G. Noreña (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990) (cited hereafter in the text as Passions of the Soul). 24 Pierre de La Primaudaye, The French Academie (London: Thomas Adams, 1618), 62. 25 Katherine Duncan-Jones mentions the money and ring and Sidney dispersed as gifts to friends on his trip to the continent. Sir Philip Sidney, 69–70.

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Notes to pages 83–4

26 Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 237, shows that Sidney evokes a ‘view of the Middle Ages that endures to this day’; Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England, 68. Ferguson draws on Frances A. Yates, ‘Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957): 4–25. 27 Clare R. Kinney, ‘Chivalry Unmasked: Courtly Spectacle and the Abuses of Romance in Sidney’s New Arcadia,’ SEL 35(1) (Winter 1995), 35. See also McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 182; Levao, Renaissance Minds, 242; and Kinney, ‘Chivalry Unmasked,’ 40. 28 Kinney, ‘Chivalry Unmasked,’ 44. 29 Rhetoric 2.2, 1378b. There are three kinds of slight: contempt (kataphronêsis), spite (epêreasmos), and insult (hubris). Politics 5.2, 1302b. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, 244, 274, argues that ‘Sidney’s chief authority on rhetoric is Aristotle.’ 30 Aristotle, Politics, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: 1932, repr. 1990), 5.2, 1302b (cited hereafter in the text as Politics). Arthur F. Kinney demonstrates how Aristotle’s Politics influences Sidney’s representation of tyranny and political disorder and argues that ‘from Politics 1 and 2 stems much of the political theory of the Arcadia’ and that ‘Aristotle’s Politics is meant to guide us through the Arcadia helping us to comprehend, interpret, and judge characters and events.’ Humanist Poetics, 262, 263. 31 Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 34:19–21. The word for slight is oligôreô (make small account of). ‘For he who disdains, slights, since men disdain those things which they consider valueless and slight what is of no account.’ Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 2.2, 1378b. 32 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 102, comments that elsewhere ‘the Helots are viewed as not just the common people but a whole nation who have been oppressed by foreign overlord ... The episode indicates Sidney’s anxiety about the difficult of distinguishing between controlled aristocratic uprisings and social revolutions.’ 33 David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 32, writing about Aristotle, Politics 5.3, 1304a. 34 Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions, 249 comments that though the text presents ‘an elaborate system of family relationships ... in episode after episode we ... read of a father alienated from his son, a son from his father’ and so forth. 35 René Girard, ‘Hamlet’s Dull Revenge,’ Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed.

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Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 280. Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 237–8; McCoy, Rites of Knighthood, 68–71. Sidney defended his right as a gentleman against aristocratic exclusion, but the New Arcadia valorizes Zelmane’s and Dorus’s status, excluding peasants and workmen from honour. Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion,’ Learning to Curse: Essays in Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 116ff. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 71–2. Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, 71. Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 159–61, 163. Bergbusch, ‘Rebellion in the New Arcadia,’ 30. He supports the position of Briggs, ‘Political Ideas in Sidney’s Arcadia,’ Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 137–61 and ‘Sidney’s Political Ideas,’ 534–42. Irving Ribner, ‘Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection,’ 257–62, argues that Sidney was not sympathetic to the monarchomach doctrine. See also Martin N. Raitiere, ‘Amphialus’ Rebellion: Sidney’s Use of History in New Arcadia,’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12(1) (Spring 1982): 113–31. I agree with Bergbusch’s arguments, especially his interpretation of Amphialus’s ‘true commonplaces’ (37). History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 236–7. Bergbusch, ‘Rebellion in the New Arcadia,’ 31. Sidney is a republican in Ciceronian terms, a republican being one who supports constitutional government. Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, 28–9, 66 (cited hereafter in the text as Law, Violence). Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, 28, analyses the treatment of this phenomenon in Aristotle’s Politics. Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1929), 103. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.2, 1378b, 2.3, 1380a. Frederick Robertson Bryson, The Point of Honor in Sixteenth-Century Italy: An Aspect of the Life of the Gentleman (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1935), 40. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,’ Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 179. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male

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Notes to pages 87–9 Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), extends the structure of the ‘male traffic in women,’ combining it with a historicist account of male homosociality as structuring men’s relation to women in nineteenth-century English novels. Daniel Juan Gil, ‘At the Limits of the Social World: Fear and Pride in Troilus and Cressida,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 52(3) (2001), 336–9, argues that Troilus and Cressida represents weariness with ‘homosocial bonds secured’ in the ways Sedgwick describes. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), 7. I take the phrase ‘structure of positions’ from Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), 93. Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women,’ 172, 173. The former idea comes from Marcel Mauss, Essay on the Gift, and the latter from Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969). See Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter, 7–8. Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 115; quoted in Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women,’ 174. Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 237, clarifies the relation of these scenes to the ‘Elizabethan neo-medieval revival’ and to actual conditions of warfare in the period. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 263. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,’ Itinerarium Italicum, ed. Heiko A. Oberman with Thomas A. Brody, Jr (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1975), 38. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), also uses ‘heart’ in a Stoic sense that emphasizes courage and rationality (370.2–4). Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 1:51, shows that the ancient Stoa taught, ‘all of man’s faculties are activated by ... the rational logos.’ I am indebted to Bradin Cormack in the English Department at the University of Chicago for stimulating my thinking this passage. Daniel Juan Gil analyses tensions between sexual longing and homosocial competition, ‘At the Limits of the Social World.’ See chapter 1 of this volume and Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 30–8. As a royal ward, Penelope Rich, Sidney’s ‘Stella’ in ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ was probably married against her will and may have protested the marriage at the wedding itself. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 217. ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ Sonnet 37.

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60 Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950), 16. 61 Pierre La Primaudaye, The French Acadamie. 62 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and The Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) 71, 218 analyses the figure of Hercules, the orator, whose tongue is chained to the ears of his audience. 63 Julian Pitt-Rivers, ‘Honour and Social Status,’ in Honour and Shame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 22. 64 Ibid., 23. 65 Gil, ‘Before Intimacy,’ 865. 66 Sidney was disappointed in his hopes for greater status by the birth of Leicester’s son, Robert Dudley. Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 93. Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 194. 67 The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (1581) and Bartholomew Young (1586) (London: Constable, 1925), 82 (cited hereafter in the text as The Civile Conversation). 68 The Philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, 87. 69 The wooing ends disastrously because Amphialus is too good at moving Helen’s emotions, and she comes to love him. New Arcadia, 62ff. 70 According to Montaigne, true friends have ‘all things ... common between them,’ but by admonishing, the friend shows that ‘he is not merged in your desire.’ Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Montaigne: John Florio’s Translation, ed. J.I.M. Stewart (New York: Modern Library, 1933), 149–50, quoted in Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 49. The second quotation is from Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 50. 71 Ronald de Sousa, ‘The Rationality of Emotions,’ in Explaining Emotions, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 137. 72 Ibid. 73 McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 148. 74 Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 221. 75 Philip Melanchthon, Liber de Anima (Witebergae: Simonis Groenenbergn, 1587), 228–9; Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, The True knowledge of a mans owne selfe, trans. A. M[unday] (London: I.R. for William Leake, 1602), 141–7. 76 Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 233, emphasizes the use of cavalry by the Huguenots in France and Sidney’s training in horsemanship. Sidney’s use of the ‘allegoria’ of horseman and horse recalls Plato’s identification of the horse with passion in Phaedrus 254. But Musidorus’s perfect

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Notes to pages 98–104 integration of reason and desire bespeaks Aristotelian harmony of reason and desire (Nicomachean Ethics 1102b–1103c). Translated by and commented upon by James Redfield, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 54–5. The Office and Duetie of an Husband, sigs. Kviii(half v)–Li, quoted in Juliet Dusinbierre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: MacMillan Press, 1975), 78. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1626), 171ff. Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 128. The internal quotation is from Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 295. The italics are his. Shakespeare, Othello, v.ii.197. Richard Strier, ‘Shakespeare and Disobedience,’ in Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 165–202, analyses Protestant opinions about warranted disobedience in Shakespeare’s King Lear and its contexts. NA 359–63. See Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 263. Smith, De Republica Anglorum, I.10. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 220ff., considers the analogy between the political body and marriage in the composite Arcadia. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.8, 1386a; Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 46. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), ed. Henry Herbert Stephen Croft (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1883), I:xxi, 236–8. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 223. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney, 209, comments on the delight and laughter that Pyrocles’ love engages. David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. 3ff. Barbara Brumbaugh, ‘Jerusalem Delivered and the Allegory of Sidney’s Revised Arcadia.’ Modern Philology 101, 3 (February, 2004), 365–70. Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century, 104. Margaret M. Sullivan, ‘Amazons and Aristocrats: The Function of Pyrocles’ Amazon Role in Sidney’s Revised Arcadia,’ in Playing with Gender: A Renaissance Pursuit, ed. Jean R. Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitc, and Allison P. Coudert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 62, argues that ‘socially imposed gender restrictions’ limit the exercise of valour by women. On heroic dying, see Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Countess of Pembroke and the Art of Dying,’ in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Histori-

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cal Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985), 209. For the contradictions in Desdemona’s fatal ‘wifely heroism,’ see Rose, The Expense of Spirit, 152. Pamela and Philoclea go beyond courageous patience. 94 Michael McCanles, The Text of Sidney’s Arcadian World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 43, argues that such characters try undialectically to suppress an opposite that later returns to confront them: ‘Sidney assigns blameworthy or incompletely evolved characters nondialectical texts and sympathetic and complete characters dialectical texts.’ Chapter 5: Anger as an Instrument of Justice 1 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:899–900 (cited hereafter in the text as CPW ). 2 Nancy Hagglund Wood, ‘Satan as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Persuasion of Eve in Paradise Lost’ (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1972). 3 See Thomas Kranidas, ‘Style and Rectitude in Seventeenth-Century Prose: Hall, Smectymnus, and Milton,’ The Huntington Library Quarterly 46(1) (Winter 1983), 237 n4. 4 Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 241. 5 Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 132, 133, 136, 152, 158, analyses Paradise Lost’s representation of Satan’s fraud. 6 Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 65, 52–89, analyses the ‘affective rhetoric’ of these ‘startling images.’ 7 Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27, 50ff., 101–2, 138, 145, argues for the importance of the right kind of anger (orgê) to justice in classical Athens. 8 Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against Smectymnuus, I. 663–4; An Apology against a Pamphlet (April 1642), CPW I.862–953. 9 Kranidas, ‘Style and Rectitude in Seventeenth-Century Prose,’ 237 and n4. Thomas Kranidas, The Fierce Equation: A Study of Milton’s Decorum (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965), 53ff., and ‘Milton and the the Rhetoric of Zeal,’ 423–2 analyses the decorum of Milton’s zealous rhetoric. 10 Kranidas, ‘Style and Rectitude in Seventeenth-Century Prose,’ 237. See note 9 above and Diane Parkin Speer, ‘Milton’s Defensio Prima: Ethos and Vitupera-

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14 15 16

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Notes to pages 108–9 tion in a Polemic Engagement,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 277–83, which compares Milton’s military ethos with Cicero’s ethos in the Philippics. Mary Anne McGuire, ‘“A Most Just Vituperation”: Milton’s Christian Orator in Pro Se Defensio,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 10(2) (1977): 105–11 analyses Milton’s defence of the decorum of his vituperative style. I am indebted to Victoria Kahn of the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley for this reference. Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against Smectymnuus, CPW I.663–4; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 131; Joel Morkan, ‘Wrath and Laughter: Milton’s Ideas on Satire,’ Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 475–95. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 172. The quotations are from George A. Kennedy’s translation, Aristotle On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2.2,1378a, p. 24; Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 175. Allen, The World of Prometheus, 27, 50ff., 101–2, 138, 145. Fisher, The Vehement Passions, 173. Wood, Satan as Orator, 23ff., argues strongly for the influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric on Milton. The first Latin edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England, Versio Latina et Paraphrasis in Aristotelis Rhetoricum, appeared in 1619. Marvin T. Herrick, ‘The Early History of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England,’ Philological Quarterly 5 (1926), 257. Milton probably studied the Rhetoric at Cambridge. Harris F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956), 2:40, 41. Milton recommends the rhetorical works of Aristotle and Cicero in Of Education, CPW II:402–3. ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ Milton Studies 8 (1975): 71–101, stresses Milton’s affinity with Cicero; Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 20, 28, 138, 346, shows the importance of Aristotle and Cicero to Milton’s education and views on rhetoric. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 121ff., 129ff., 137ff., 141ff., 153ff., comments on Milton’s use of invective in the anti-prelatical pamphlets. Don M. Wolfe, ‘Introduction,’ in CPW I.79. See also 85, 113. Maureen Thum, ‘Milton’s Diatribal Voice: The Integration and Transformation of a Generic Paradigm in Animadversions,’ Milton Studies 30 (1993), 12ff., explains analogous ‘earthy’ expressions in Animadversions as one of the strategies characteristic of the genre of diatribe. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Betwixt Jest and Earnest’: Marprelate, Milton, Marvell, Swift & the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

Notes to pages 109–13

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1979), 61–93, traces the influence of the Marprelate tracts on Milton’s attitude towards laughter. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, repr. 1996), 159, 455ff., 478–9, 483. See Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic, 241, on battle. The Smectymnuans included the Presbyterian authors of a treatise written in reply to Bishop Hall’s Humble Remonstrance along with those who accepted the authors’ views. Milton probably helped with the treatise and defended ‘Smectymnuus’ in Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England. The Philosophie, commonlie called, the morals written by the learned Philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea, trans. Philemon Holland (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1603), 109. Jacobus Acontius, Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), trans. John Goodwin (London: 1651; New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978), 38. T(imothie) Bright, ‘To his melancholicke friend: M.,’ A Treatise of Melancholie, reproduced from the 1586 edition printed by Thomas Vautrollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 184ff. John Downame, The Christian Warfare: Wherein is first generally shewed the malice and politike stratagems of the spirituall enemies of our salvation (London: Felix Kyngston, 1604), ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie,’ 2 (cited hereafter in the text as Christian Warfare). Downame, The Christian Warfare, ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie,’ 3. Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), 128 (cited hereafter in the text as Birthpangs). David Quint analyses controversies concerning Calvinist under-assurance and over-assurance in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 286ff. John Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Brewster, 1657), 175 (cited hereafter in the text as Treatise). Downame, ‘Preface,’ The Christian Warfare, 4. According to Quint, Epic and Empire, 284ff. Adam suffers from lack of assurance, whereas Eve is overconfident. William Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritane, 2nd ed. (London: n.p., 1644), 58, repr. in Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution 1638–1647, ed. William Haller (New York: Columbia University Press: 1933), 3:93. Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, A Discourse Opening the Nature of ... Episcopacie (2nd ed., 1642), 115, reproduced in Haller, Tracts 2, quoted in CPW II.fn.289, p. 565.

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Notes to pages 113–16 Walwyn, Compassionate Samaritan, 59–60, in Haller, Tracts 3, 94. Theomachia (London: Henry Overton, 1644), 33, in Haller, Tracts 3, 39. Patterson,‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ 72–3. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 174, characterizes the argument of Areopagitica. David Loewenstein, ‘Samson Agonistes and the Culture of Religious Terror,’ in Festschrift for Stanley Fish (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 20ff. analyses the mid-seventeenth-century English representations of a ‘terrifying God ... that was invoked and repeatedly exploited in the writings of a wide range of godly contemporaries’ (20). Michael Lieb, ‘“Hate in Heav’n”: Milton and the Odium Dei,’ 53(3) (Fall 1986): 519–39, analyses the wrath of God as arising from his love (520). Lieb argues that ‘given the nature of the theodicy that Milton’s epic embraces, the association of a God of love with a God of wrath is quite understandable’ (521). Lieb, ‘“Hate in Heav’n,”’ 520ff., is a notable exception. Kranidas, ‘Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal,’ 423, relates the radical Protestant tradition of reading Chapter I of Revelation, which emphasizes ‘Christ’s violent rejection of lukewarmness and deduces from that rejection the necessity for zeal in religion’ (428–9). (Revelation 3:16 reads ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth,’ ‘spew’ meaning to ‘vomit.’) (424.) Kranidas, The Fierce Equation, 53. Speer compares the invective of Milton’s Defensio Prima to Cicero’s in the Philippics especially the second one, ‘Milton’s Defensio Prima,’ 277–83, esp. 279ff. Patterson argues that in the prose Milton ‘develops a modification of the heroic ethos which differs substantially from the passive fortitude of the mature poems,’ namely a Ciceronian ‘civic fortitude.’ ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ 72. The translation of the last sentence is from Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, repr. 1975), 3.7, 1408a. See Allen, The World of Prometheus, 27, 50ff., 101–2, 138, 145. For a distinctly English Protestant understanding of glory and its influence on Milton’s Of Reformation, see Janel Mueller, ‘Embodying Glory: The Apocalyptic Strain in Milton’s Of Reformation,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9–40. Of Reformation (May 1641), CPW I:514. For a defence of Milton’s satire, see J. Milton French, ‘Milton as Satirist,’ PMLA 51(2) (June 1936): 414–29.

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50 Wolfe, ‘Introduction,’ CPW I.28ff. and 81ff.; Rudolf Kirk, ‘Preface’ to the Animadversions, CPW I.653; Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 128. 51 Kirk, ‘Preface,’ 654. Thum, ‘Milton’s Diatribal Voice, 3–25, is among the notable exceptions. 52 Wolfe, ‘Introduction,’ CPW I.123. 53 Ibid., 78, 79. 54 Morkan, ‘Wrath and Laughter,’ 475–95. 55 Cicero, De oratore, trans. E.W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.237. 56 Stephen N. Zwicker, ‘Habits of Reading and Early Modern Literary Culture,’ in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 191. 57 Patterson analyses Milton’s chivalric metaphors in Of Reformation, 76ff., 80ff., Apology for Smectymnuus (1642) 82ff.; Areopagitica, 85ff., 93, and his renunciation of chivalry in Eikonklastes, 88ff., The Second Defence of the English People, 90ff., and the Pro Se Defensio, 96ff., ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose.’ 58 Cicero, De amicitia, in De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (London: William Heinemann, 1923), 65. 59 Patterson, ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ 96–7. 60 Cicero recommends insinuation in De inventione when a speaker needs to address a hostile audience. De inventione, trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 20, 21. ‘Insinuation is an address which by dissimulation and indirection unobtrusively steals into the mind of the auditor. Insinuatio est oratio quadam dissimulatione et circumitione obscure subiens auditoris animum’ (I.20). Paradise Lost in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957), 9:665–9, parodies insinuation. 61 Aristotle Rhetoric 2.9, 1386b treats indignation as the opposite (antikeimenon) of pity, because being pained at undeserved good fortune is the opposite of pitying undeserved bad fortune. Cicero imagines the one who suffers undeservedly to be the victim of one who is undeservedly powerful so that compassion increases indignation. Woe and indignation are expressed in the word dolor. 62 Cicero Orator 69 and De oratore 2.128–9. 63 B.A. Krostenko, ‘Text and Context in the Roman Forum: The Case of Cicero’s First Catilinarian,’ in Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003), 38. Cicero Orator 99. 64 Krostenko, ‘Text and Context in the Roman Forum,’ 39.

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65 Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 44. 66 Augustine De Doctrina Christiana IV.iv.6, v.7–8, xii.27–8.xiii.39. 67 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 265ff. 68 Milton was apparently not choleric as a personality. Irene Samuel, ‘Milton on Comedy and Satire,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 35(2) (February 1972), 121, comments ‘where no crying issue is involved, say in the The History of Britain, lighthearted jests flow easily from Milton’s ranging wit.’ 69 Proverbs 21.11. 70 A Modest Confutation, 8, quoted in CPW I.913, n3. 71 Don M. Wolfe, ‘Appendix E: The Oath Ex-Officio,’ CPW I.999. 72 ‘Preface’ to The Reason of Church-Government, CPW I.737, quoted in Kranidas, The Fierce Equation, 56. 73 Kranidas, The Fierce Equation, 57, argues that Milton follows a principle of decorum (harmony of the inner and outer), using bodily imagery to attack what damages the wholeness of truth. If ‘these [bodily] disarrangements strike us as shocking, we must remember that they are derived from the traditional use of the body as metaphor for disorder.’ 74 Walwyn, Compassionate Samaritane, 55–6, quoted in CPW II.n. 270, p. 563. 75 Milton’s treatment of heresy is relevant here. Janel Mueller, ‘Milton on Heresy,’ in Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38. Areopagitica is particularly relevant to my argument where it claims a ‘man may be heretick in the truth; and if he believe things only because his Pastor sayes so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing their reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie.’ CPW II.543, quoted on 28. See also Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 120–1, 135. Chapter 6: Emotion as Defined by the Discourse of Honour 1 John Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, in Complete Prose Works [CPW ], rev. ed., ed. Robert. W. Ayers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), VII.849. 2 Paradise Lost in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957) (cited hereafter in text as PL). 3 Barbara K. Lewalski’s characterization of truth in Areopagitica is apt here as well. ‘Truth is best advanced by a constant clash of opinions that promotes arduous intellectual struggle and individual choice.’ The Life of John Milton: A

Notes to pages 128–31

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Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 174. Paradise Lost represents such clashes in terms of the discourse of honour from archaic epic. John Peter Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 52. See also 26–37, 43, 46ff. C.S. Lewis offers another view of divine glory; see ‘The Weight of Glory,’ in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1976, rev. 1980), 25–46. Victoria Kahn, ‘Machiavellian Rhetoric in Paradise Lost,’ in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 227. Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), 175. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a30–1378b. See also Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), esp. 18–24. Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V, ‘Argument,’ quoted in Jack Goldman, ‘Insight into Milton’s Abdiel,’ Philological Quarterly 49(2) (April 1970), 250. Mason Tung, ‘The Abdiel Episode: A Contextual Reading,’ Studies in Philology 62 (July 1965): 595–609, interprets Abdiel as ‘an exemplum of the “one just man”’ (595) who points out Satan’s error (602). He is a ‘positive example of the sufficiency of free will to choose to stand firm’ (605). Tung links Abdiel to Areopagitica’s praise of one that can ‘apprehend and consider vice ... and yet abstain’ (607). Joan S. Bennett, ‘God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton’s Royal Portraits,’ PMLA 92 (1977), 452–3, calls him ‘the true Miltonic revolutionary.’ A.J.A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 71ff., argues that Abdiel gives the ‘official’ view whereas Satan, who is at a disadvantage, makes rather good arguments. See Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric in From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 209–14, 220–3. Annabel Patterson, ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ Milton Studies 8 (1975): 71–101, esp. 73–5, analyses Milton’s epic, chivalric, and anti-chivalric roles. Lewalski emphasizes his epic and prophetic voices in The Life of Milton, 202–3, 255ff., 266, 271ff., 307ff., 301. See also Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 51. Michael Lieb argues that ‘divine love must be viewed within the context of its apparent opposite, divine hate.’ ‘“Hate in Heav’n”: Milton and the Odium Dei,’ ELH 53(3) (Fall 1986): 519–39, quotation from 535. Michael Wilding, Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 175, 173ff., argues that ‘Milton’s epic rejects the heroic grandeur of Satan’s Hell in favour of the domestic simplicities of Adam and Eve’ (203). See also Michael Wilding, Milton’s Paradise Lost

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Notes to pages 131–5 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1969), 14–78; James A. Freeman, ‘Milton and Heroic Literature,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51–64; Robert Fallon, Captain or Colonel (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 202–34. Allen, The World of Prometheus, esp. 18–24, analyses relations between revenge and just punishment in classical Athens. Recogn. 2. 56, quoted in Lactance, La Colère de Dieu, ed. and trans. Christiane Ingremeau (Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 1982), 21. William Empson, Milton’s God (London: Chatto & Windus, rev. ed., 1965), 96–7. Rumrich, Matter of Glory, 15, 14. C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 131. John 2:11, 8:54, 11:4, 12:28, 14:13, 17, Romans 8:30, 9:23, 2 Corinthians 4:17, Philippians 3:21, Hebrews 2:9. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature, or The Fundamental Elements of Policy. Being a Discovery of The Faculties, Acts, and Passions, of The Soul of Man, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, ed. Sir William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1860; repr. Germany: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1966), 46. See also Leviathan, or the Matter form, and Power of a Commonwealth, EW, III, vi, p. 46. Hobbes, Human Nature, 46, 40 (cited hereafter in the text as Human Nature). Aristotle discriminates the moral and aesthetic connotations of words in his analysis of clarity (saphê) (Rhetoric 3.2). Puttenham analyses paradiastole : ‘then doth everie man praise or dispraise according to his fancie, always covering a vice with the name of the next vertue to it, and a vertue with the name of the next vice.’ The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 102. See also Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 42. Francis C. Blessingon, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Classical Epic (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 9, 10. Ibid., 1ff. Aristotle Politics, trans. J. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5.2, 1302b. Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 132, calls jealousy a ‘symptom of hypercivility.’ See also 132–5. David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64–6.

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27 James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 33. 28 Blessington, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic, 8ff., lists many ways in which Satan parodies Achilles. 29 David Quint compares Adam and Eve’s fall to the ‘Fall of the English Commonwealth to the Restoration’ in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 271, 281ff. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 110ff., stresses Milton’s resignation to the people’s unruliness and the need for a ‘worthy minority’ to enforce freedom in The Readie and Easie Way. 30 M.L. Donnelley ‘“Ostentation Vain of Fleshly Arm”: Milton’s Revaluation of the Heroic Celebration of Military Virtue,’ The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Clyde J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 202–23, argues that Milton rejected ‘the heroic celebration of warfare’ (216). See esp. 218. For the relationship between actual war and represented war in epic, see Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). ‘Paradise Lost is a poem in which all the wrong people glorify heroic activity’ (1). Nevertheless, he adds, Milton represents a ‘militarized heaven’ (136). 31 Cicero De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913, repr. 1997), 1.80. 32 Patterson, ‘The Civic Hero in Milton’s Prose,’ analyses the Ciceronian heroic model of temperance in this text. 33 John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), CPW II.224. 34 For the important point that Milton chose epic because of its focus on the individual hero, see James A. Freeman, ‘Milton and Heroic Literature,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 55ff. Wilding, Milton’s Paradise Lost, 14ff. 35 Diana Benet observes that Adam uses chivalric language and emphasizes shame, viewing himself as Eve’s champion. ‘Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,’ Milton Studies 8 (1983), 135. 36 Mervyn James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour: 1485–1642,’ Past and Present, suppl. 3 (1978), 84, quoting Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 10, also quoted in Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 205–6. W. Lee Ustick, ‘Changing Ideals of Aristocratic Character and Conduct in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Modern Philology 30 (1933), argues that from Brathwaite’s The English Gentleman (1630 ) ‘down, the English gentleman as portrayed in the literature of conduct has a strong tincture of that spirit of Christianity which

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Notes to pages 138–40 seeks to do good to others and accepts the self-imposed obligation to live a life of usefulness’ 166. (See also 154ff.) James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour,’ 84. Milton’s lines do not imply that Adam and Eve are equal. Michael Lieb, ‘“Two of Far Nobler Shame”: Reading the Paradisal Text,’ in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Trevino Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 117ff., 128ff., and chapter 8 below. Josh Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 272ff., illuminates Milton’s idea of self-respect. Stephen M. Fallon, ‘Elect above the Rest: Theology as Self-Representation in Milton,’ in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104. I. Downame warns his readers that temptations ‘on the one side ... allure us to security and presumption, and on the other side, draw us to doubting and desperation’ ‘The Epistle Dedicatoric,’ 2. He intends The Christian Warfare to express and answer these temptations. The Christian Warfare: wherein is first generally shewed the malice, power and politike stratagems of the spirituall enemies of our saluation (London: Felix Kyngston, 1604). See Quint on under- and overassurance, Epic and Empire, 281ff., and Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 255ff. Stella P. Revard, ‘Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,’ PMLA 88(1) (January 1973), 69ff., 71, makes the important point that Milton usually assigns guilt to both, but Adam blames Eve. ‘Epistle to the Reader,’ Darkness Discovered. Darkness Discovered, 7. John Goodwin, an Independent defender of tolerance and intellectual freedom, whose Treatise of Use and Custom (1639) Milton refers to in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, warned his readers against vitriolic religious controversy in Theomachia; or, the grand imprudence of men running the hazard of fighting against god (1644). Stella P. Revard, ‘The Heroic Context of Book IX of Paradise Lost,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (1988): 329–41, offers a nuanced account of the Son as ‘a Classic and Christian hero made one.’ James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour,’ 90, quoting Richard Brathwaite, A Survey of History; or, A Nursery for Gentry (London: I. Oakes, 1638) S.T.C., 3583a. James, ‘English Politics and the Concept of Honour,’ 89–90. W. Lee Ustick argues that ‘the tendency toward viewing the gentleman more as the good Christian than as the Magnanimous Man of the ancients or the complete personality of the Renaissance writers is reflected in the literature of courtesy and conduct throughout the whole of the seventeenth century.’

Notes to pages 140–6

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‘Changing Ideals of Aristocratic Character and Conduct in SeventeenthCentury England,’ 158. Clement Ellis, The Gentile Sinner, or England’s Brave Gentleman, 4th ed. (Oxford: Henry Hall, 1668), 144. Brathwaite, The English Gentleman (London: Robert Bostock, 1630), 46. John Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Brewster, 1657), 118– 19. Bennett argues for the connection between Satan, the tyrant, and Charles I, ‘God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton’s Royal Portraits,’ PMLA 92(3) (May 1977): 441–57. Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, intro. and trans. Carlos G. Noreña (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 81, 80. Ibid., 80. Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), II.12,83. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 91. Michael Lieb, ‘Milton’s “Dramatick Constitution”: The Celestial Dialogue in Paradise Lost, Book III,’ Milton Studies 23 (1987), 228ff., analyses the conflicts and challenges in the dialogue in detail. John Peter Rumrich identifies glory with weight and substance. Matter of Glory: A New Preface to Paradise Lost (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 15, 14. This line applies to Achilles as well as to Satan. Achilles’ anger, because his honour is not recognized, becomes so huge that he eventually fights against the god of the river. But he does not oppose a metaphysical principle of goodness and being. H.M. Gardiner, Ruth Clark Metcalf, and John G. Beebe-Center, Feeling and Emotion: A History of Theories (New York: American Book Company, 1937), 129–30. Philip Melanchthon, On the Soul: A Melanchthon Reader, trans. Ralph Keen (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 243. Melanchthon, Liber de Anima (Witebergae: Simonis Groenenbergn, 1587), 228–9.

Chapter 7: Seventeenth-Century Protestant Rhetoric 1 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), VII:562, 563, and rev. ed., ed. Robert W. Ayers (1980), VII:261 (cited hereafter in the text as CPW ).

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2 John Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Brewster, 1657), 181. 3 Nancy Hagglund Wood, ‘Satan as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Persuasion of Eve in Paradise Lost’ (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1972) shows in her insightful analysis how Milton uses Aristotle’s topoi of emotion in his representation of Satan’s seduction of Eve. 4 The fantasies have been the subject of much critical commentary focused mainly on Eve’s dream. Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 92. Murray W. Bundy, ‘Eve’s Dream and the Temptation in Paradise Lost,’ Research Studies, State College of Washington 10 (December 1942), 273ff., analyses seventeenth-century understandings of phantasia and its role in Eve’s dream. William B. Hunter, Jr, ‘Eve’s Demonic Dream,’ ELH 13 (1946), 255ff., analyses the dream in terms of contemporary works on demonology and illuminates relationships between representations of imagination, the humors, and the devil. William B. Hunter, Jr, ‘Prophetic Dreams and Visions in Paradise Lost,’ Modern Language Quarterly 9(1) (March 1948): 277–85; James A. Freeman, ‘Milton and Heroic Literature,’ The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 53. Freeman quotes Nicholas Remy, Demonolatry (London, n.p., 1595), 1. 5 Henry Lawrence, Of our communion and warre with angels (London: Giles Calvert, 1646), 1. 6 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas D. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), I, 243 (cited hereafter in the text as The Anatomy of Melancholy). 7 Lawrence, Of our communion, 35, 72. 8 John Milton, Paradise Lost in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957) I, 142 (cited hereafter in the text as PL). 9 The British Museum Catalogue of Printed Books (London: British Museum, 1965), VIII:502–3 lists fourteen editions between 1470 and 1670. 10 Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 121ff. 11 R. Barckley, The Felicitie of Man or His Summum Bonum (London: R[obert] Y[oung], 1631), 489. 12 E. Patricia Vicari, The View from Minerva’s Tower: Learning and Imagination in The Anatomy of Melancholy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 5, argues that Burton provides ‘medical lore’ and offers preaching, persuasion, and religion as cures. 13 For an excellent account of imagination (phantasia) in Aristotle’s natural philosophy, poetics, and in the history of legal evidence, see Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

Notes to pages 150–9

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University Press, 1986). I concentrate on rhetorical and religious/psychological representations of the faculty. Hobbes, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, in The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), II.6, p. 75. These categories reiterate Aristotle’s terms for producing anger (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378b). Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 62ff., 75ff., 91ff., links phantasia (imagination) to judgment. The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), VI.ii.29–30. Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: The Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Noreña, Studies in Renaissance Literature 4 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 101–2. John Ball, A Treatise of Faith, 174, argues that ‘we commit no small errors in the time of temptation, the mind being clouded with the mists of Satan’s suggestions, and the heart so distempered with fear, and we cannot discern the graces of God in us.’ See also 177 and Barckley, The Felicitie of Man, 489. Vives, quoted in Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 253. William Perkins, ‘A Faithful and Plain Exposition upon the Two First Verses of the 2 Chapter of Zephaniah,’ in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward (Appleford, England: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 285 (cited hereafter in the text as Work). Merritt Y. Hughes, ‘“Myself am Hell”,’ Modern Philology 54 (1956): 80–94, repr. in Ten Perspectives on Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 136–64, esp. 142, argues that hell is physical, moral, and psychological. Victoria Kahn, ‘Machiavellian Rhetoric in Paradise Lost,’ in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 241 (cited hereafter in the text as ‘Machiavellian Rhetoric’). See Francis C. Blessingon, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Classical Epic (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 9, 10; John Peter Rumrich, Matter of Glory: A New Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 26–37. John M. Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 20ff., 110ff. emphasizes Milton’s revision of Homeric epic. See also David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 282, 308. James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 33.

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25 Blessington, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Classical Epic, 8ff., lists many ways in which Satan parodies Achilles. 26 Jules David Law, ‘Eruption and Containment: The Satanic Predicament in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 16 (1982): 35–60, analyses Satan’s tendency to overrun boundaries. 27 Aristotle The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a. I use Cope’s translation of phainomenên as ‘manifest.’ Danielle S. Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 53–4, emphasizes that Aristotle defines anger (orgê) in terms of ‘the language of quarrels and punishment.’ 28 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Envy,’ in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 355 (cited hereafter in the text as ‘Of Envy’). 29 A Melanchthon Reader, trans. Ralph Keen (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 244–5. 30 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 238, lines 28–31. 31 Catherine Gimelli Martin, ‘Self-Raised Sinners and the Spirit of Capitalism: Paradise Lost and the Critique of Protestant Meliorism,’ Milton Studies 30 (1993): 109–33, revised in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin Pruitt McColgan (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 31–46, argues that Milton disapproves of accumulating surplus value and of Protestant meliorism which believes that all things work for good in the lives of the elect. 32 See chapter 6 above. 33 John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 110ff., analyses the hierarchy expressed in the scale of nature. 34 Wendy Olmsted, ‘On the Margins of Otherness: Metamorphosis and Identity in Homer, Ovid, Sidney, and Milton,’ New Literary History 27(2) (Spring 1996), 179. 35 David Cohen, Law, Violence and Community in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 103, 120–5. 36 Allen, The World of Prometheus, esp. 60ff. 37 Kahn, ‘Machiavellian Rhetoric,’ 241. 38 Olmsted, ‘On the Margins of Otherness,’ 171, discusses other ways that the gods’ adaptations of new forms produce cosmic change. 39 Olmsted, ‘The Margins of Otherness,’ 179. John M. Steadman, Milton’s Epic Characters: Image and Idol (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959, repr. 1968), 202ff., analyses Satan’s disguise and his apparent prudence. He also offers an interpretation of Satan’s metamorphoses in terms of the heroic tradition at 207ff., 281–97, and in ‘Satan’s Metamorphoses and

Notes to pages 165–7

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41 42

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the Heroic Convention of the Ignoble Disguise,’ Modern Language Review 3 (1957), 81–5. Michael Lieb, ‘Milton’s “Dramatick Constitution”: The Celestial Dialogue in Paradise Lost, Book III,’ Milton Studies 23 (1987), 228ff. (cited hereafter in the text as ‘“Dramatick Constitution”’). Lieb cites J.B. Broadbent, Some Graver Subject: An Essay on ‘Paradise Lost’ (New York, 1967), 144–57. Scholars rightly interpret Milton’s hierarchy as a meritocracy. Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 93, identifies an emphasis on individual merit with Independency. Mary Ann Radzinowicz, ‘The Politics of Paradise Lost,’ in Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 204–29, esp. 211ff. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 110ff., argues that the stratification of the chain of being justifies ‘Milton’s pained political resignation to a doomed politics of minority rule’ (111). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 19. Olmsted, ‘On the Margins of Otherness,’ 179. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and The Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 110. Joan de Guzman, quoted in Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 111. John M. Steadman, Milton’s Epic Characters, 201, 231ff., analyses Satan as a deceiver and producer of illusion. Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 132, 133, 136, 152, 158, emphasizes Satan’s use of fraud. Richard Rainolde, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) (Amsterdam: Da Capo, 1969), xlvii v, quoted in Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 113–14. George Puttenham, The Arte of of English Poesie (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968), 206; Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, 92. Cypriano Soarez, De Arte, 327, quoted in Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 150. See also IX.732. Milton implies a love of knowledge akin to that referred to by Cicero, De finibus bonorum e malorum, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 5.18.48. Cicero, De oratore, trans. E.W. Sutten (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 2.186. Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 6.2.436–7. For an analysis of Satan’s speech as

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Notes to pages 167–73 arousing Eve’s anger against God by representing God as having contempt for Eve, see Wood, Satan As Orator, 141ff. Wood, Satan as Orator, 155–6, writes that Satan shows his motives ‘are the same as hers’ and that he is her friend as Aristotle defines a friend. Aristotle Rhetoric 2.4. Plutarch, ‘How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend,’ Essays, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 52A. Bacon, ‘Of Envy,’ Francis Bacon, 354–5. Wood, Satan as Orator, 141ff. Ibid., 142; Rhetoric 2.2, 1378b. McColley, Milton’s Eve, 191ff., analyses Eve’s response to Satan. ‘A Dreame,’ in The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), l.232, p. 57. Parker, Inescapable Romance, 132, and Quint, Epic and Empire, 304. David Robertson, ‘Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems,’ in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P.G. Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 59–77, esp. 63ff. Stella P. Revard, ‘Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,’ PMLA 88(1) (January 1973), 76. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 114. Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 271–2ff. See also Richard Strier, ‘Milton against Humility,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 268. Arthur Edward Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942), 41–2, and Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), 255–7, argue that Milton’s concept of self-respect derives from Protestantism. Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 272 and n50, p. 348. Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 273; Seneca Âepistulae morales, 11. Vives, The Passions of the Soul, 114. Douglas L. Cairns, Âidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 13, analyses the nature of shame. Cairns cites C.C.W. Taylor’s argument from Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 70. Gerhard Piers and Milton B. Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1953), 30, comment that

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‘the all-seeing, all-knowing eye ... is feared in the condition of shame, God’s eye which reveals all shortcomings of mankind.’ Chapter 8: Marriage as a Site of Counsel in Marriage Handbooks, Milton’s Divorce Pamphlets, and Paradise Lost 1 Golda Werman, ‘Repentance in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 21 (1986): 121– 40, provides a theological and religious context for repentance and argues that Eve’s emotional ‘plea reawakens Adam’s love for her’ (134). 2 Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 210, 51–7. See also Michael C. Schoenfeldt, ‘Gender and Conduct in Paradise Lost,’ in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 310–38; and Richard Strier, ‘Milton against Humility, in ’Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 273. 3 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Friendship,’ in Francis Bacon: Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 391. 4 Laurie J. Shannon, ‘“Soveraigne Amitie”: Friendship and the Political Imagination in Renaissance Texts’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996), 8. See also Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 194–9 on Bacon, friendship, and counsel. 5 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: University Press, 1957, paperback ed. 1965), 177. 6 Mary Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,’ in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions (London: Methuen, 1987), 99–127, esp. 99ff., 105ff. 7 Bacon, ‘Of Friendship,’ 391. 8 T[imothie] Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, reproduced from the 1586 edition printed by Thomas Vautrollier (New York: Published for the Facsimile Text Society by Columbia University Press, 1940), 237. 9 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kissling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 243. 10 See chapter 6 above, 12ff. and Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 252. 11 J. Downame, ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie,’ The Christian Warfare (London, 1604), 7. 12 John Ball, A Treatise of Faith (London: Edward Brewster, 1657), 181. See chapter 6 above.

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13 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 283–99. 14 Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 255–84, quotation from 255 (cited hereafter in the text as Excess and the Mean). See also John Guillory, ‘Milton, Narcissism, Gender: On the Geneology of Male Self-Esteem,’ in Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (New York: G.K. Hall, 1995), 194– 234, and Richard Strier, ‘Milton against Humility,’ 258–86. 15 Aristotle Politics 1.1,1253a3ff.; Bacon, ‘Of Friendship,’ 390–1. 16 John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), II.245, 246 (cited in the text hereafter as CPW ). 17 Mary Beth Long, ‘Contextualizing Eve’s and Milton’s Solitudes in Book 9 of Paradise Lost,’ Milton Quarterly 37(2) (May 2003): 100–15, analyses the moral value of solitude in the seventeenth century. 18 Cicero De republica I.27. 19 Brian Vickers, ‘Leisure and Idleness in the Renaissance: The Ambivalence of otium,’ Renaissance Studies 4(1) (1990): 1–37 and 4(3) (1990): 107–54 writes a history of classical and Renaissance attacks on idleness in solitude. See also Herbert G. Wright, ‘The Theme of Solitude and Retirement in Seventeenth Century Literature,’ Études Anglaises 7 (1954): 22–35. 20 Wright, ‘The Themes of Solitude,’ 22–35. 21 John Milton, A Mask (Comus), in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Simon & Schuster, 1957), 99, line 384. 22 Abraham Cowley, ‘Of Solitude,’ in The Complete Works of Verse and Prose, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 2.317. 23 The Complete Essays of Montaigne, 177. 24 The Civile Conversation of M. Steeven Guazzo, trans. George Pettie (1581) and Bartholomew Young (1586) (London: Constable and Co., 1925), 48–9. 25 ‘Of Solitude,’ 79. The Civile Conversation, 33. 26 ‘Of Solitude,’ 79. 27 The Prayse of Private Life, in The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington together with The Prayse of Private Life, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), 339. 28 Milton distinguishes the ‘quiet and still air of delightfull studies’ from the ‘dim reflexion of hollow antiquities,’ the favourite source of arguments for the Episcopal party. CPW I.821–2. 29 Letter 5, ‘To a Friend,’ 1633, CPW I.319–20. 30 John Milton, Paradise Regained, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt

Notes to pages 184–7

31 32

33

34

35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43

265

Y. Hughes (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1957), 483–530 (cited hereafter in the text as PR ). John Milton, A Mask (Comus), in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, 98, line 349. Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580–1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1951), 178–80, discusses Milton’s indebtedness in Il Penseroso to the ‘scholarly, philosophic, and pious melancholy’ in the ‘tradition of Aristotle and Ficino.’ The quotation is from 178. Peter C. Herman, Squitter-wits and Muse-haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 196, shows that such thoughts come from imagination, which the Lady in Comus rejects, commenting, ‘These thoughts may startle well, but not astound the virtuous mind’ (II.210–12). See also 193–4. David Robertson, ‘Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems,’ in Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. P.G. Stanwood (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995), 59–77, esp. 63ff., argues that Satan uses the evil self to suppress the other private self. Robertson, ‘Soliloquy and Self in Milton’s Major Poems,’ esp. 63ff. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 49. See Abdiel’s vehement argument, confronting the fallen angels with the fallacy of their idea of self-creation. Paradise Lost in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, 5:809ff. A.J.A. Waldock, Paradise Lost and Its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 86. A Treatise of Faith, 174. Keith Stavely, ‘Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 25 (1990): 125–39, esp. 134–5. Quotation from 135. See note 40 above. We ought not to infer from this that Milton discredits rhetoric, as Stanley Fish argues in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 59–91. John M. Steadman, Milton’s Epic Characters: Image and Idol (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959, repr. 1968), 241–62, and Barber Kiefer Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 22ff., 232, argue that Satan prefers soliloquy or rhetoric to dialogue, because the former preclude ‘genuine interchange.’ See James A. Freeman, ‘Milton and Heroic Literature,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University

266

44

45 46

47

48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55

56

57

Notes to pages 187–91 Press, 1989), 51–64; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 169. David Aers and Bob Hodge, ‘“Rational Burning”: Milton on Sex and Marriage,’ Literature, Language and Society in England: 1580–1680, ed. David Aers, Bob Hodge, and Gunther Kress (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981), 39. Shannon, Sovereign Amity, 195ff. emphasizes the medical aspect. Shannon, ‘Soveraigne Amitie,’ 25. Cicero De Amicitia 188–9. ‘In proposing that agreement and similarity are the essence of friendship, Cicero’s argument requires that, in friendship, the other is not ‘other,’ but is, instead, the same. As a consequence, the first person, the self, becomes our measure of the eligibility of the other as a friend.’ ‘Soveraigne Amitie,’ 23–4. See Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 9.4, 1166a for the saying that the friend is ‘another self’ (‘ho philos allos autos’). Cicero De amicitia 27.102. The translation of the second phrase comes from Cicero: De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 209. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 266–92. Shannon, ‘Soveraigne Amitie,’ 8. David Aers and Bob Hodge argue that Milton’s loneliness arises from ‘the psychic consequences of middle class individualism,’ ‘“Rational Burning”,’ 126. See the whole essay on marriage as the ‘cure for “loneliness”,’ 127. Tetrachordon, CPW , II:600; Paradise Lost, CPW VIII.50. Chaplin, ‘Friendship and Miltonic Marriage,’ 279. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1626), 159 (cited hereafter in the text as Domesticall Duties). John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony: A Study of the Divorce Tracts and Paradise Lost (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 53ff., 109, 120ff., 134, stresses the importance of harmony in Milton’s concept of marriage. See also McColley, Milton’s Eve, 22. Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,’ 99ff., forcefully articulates the costs for equality of Milton’s emphasis on harmony. Chaplin, ‘Friendship and Miltonic Marriage,’ 280, argues that Milton’s ideal marriage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce is ‘closer to the classical idea that two compatible souls can unite and become one soul in two bodies.’ John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie forme of householde Government: for the Ordering of Private Families, according to the direction of god’s word (London, 1612), 219ff. Perkins also emphasizes that man and wife should bond together ‘as two bords are ioyned together with glue.’ Christian Oeconomie, in Workes, trans.

Notes to pages 191–4

58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70

71 72

267

Thomas Pickering (Cambridge, 1618), 3:671, 26. McColley comments that this image of marriage is ‘wholly at odds’ with the ‘apt and lively conversation that Milton sought in domestic life’ (Milton’s Eve, 26), but Adam seems to want Eve by his side. Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 109. Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (London, 1615), 164. Janet E. Halley, ‘Female Autonomy in Milton’s Sexual Poetics,’ in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 247, notes that though Adam had originally asked God for an ‘equal,’ later he stresses ‘Eve’s “sweet compliance”.’ Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,’ 111, argues that Tetrachordon specifies ‘a desire that only “woman” can satisfy.’ Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,’ 99–127, argues that Eve’s gender and subjectivity (especially her longing for Adam and for the role of wife) emerge from Adam’s desire. Chaplin, ‘“One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul”,’ 288ff., argues that the derivative status of the wife appears only after Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. It appears in response to An Answer to a Book, intituled, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. See William Riley Parker, Milton’s Contemporary Reputation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1940), 170–217. Tetrachordon, CPW II.589. See Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity,’ 99–127, esp. 107ff. Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, CPW II.235–6. Cf. Christian Doctrine I.xxxiii, CPW VI.628. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 156ff., 163ff. Chaplin, ‘“One Flesh, One Heart, One Soul”,’ 269ff. Aers and Hodge, ‘“Rational Burning,”’ 139. McColley, Milton’s Eve, 22, defends the advantages of Adam and Eve’s differences of talent and sex and their ‘mutual completion,’ involving not ‘unison but ‘harmonie.’ See OED, ‘equality’; ‘the condition of being equal’: Eden, Decades W. Ind. III. III. (Arb.) 147. Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, 164. For the advice that one spouse ought to suffer and endure when the other is ‘testie and hastie to wrath,’ see Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, 241, and Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988),123ff. See note 54 above. Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 152ff. Lana

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74 75

76 77 78

79 80 81

82

83

84 85

86

Notes to pages 195–8 Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 5, 7, shows how images in Paradise Lost may tie the mind to a physical place or to a certain configuration of marriage rather than leading beyond themselves to God. Stella Revard, ‘Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,’ 74. But Eve is created in the image of God through Adam, and Michael Lieb finds many tensions and indeterminacies in the relation between this view and the one I cite. ‘“Two of Far Nobler Shame”: Reading the Paradisal Text,’ in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context, ed. Diana Trevino Benet and Michael Lieb (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1994), 117ff., 128ff. Carroll B. Cox, ‘Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 23 (1988): 176ff. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 207, notes the relevance of ‘Abraham’s entertainment of three angels in his tent at Mamre’ (Gen. 18:1–11). Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 1–5. See chapter 4 above, p. 8. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 207. See Wendy Olmsted, ‘On the Margins of Otherness: Metamorphosis and Identity in Homer, Ovid, Sidney and Milton,’ New Literary History 27 (1996): 167–84. See Hughes, ed., John Milton, n.272, 308–9. Homeri, Opera, ed. Thomas W. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908, repr. 1965), 13.1–2. George B. Walsh, The Varieties of Enchantment: Early Greek Views of the Nature and Function of Poetry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), analyses the Phaeacians’ response, 3–5. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ‘Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,’ New Essays on Paradise Lost (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 86–130, esp. 104; Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 208. See also Teresa Michals, ‘“Sweet gardening labour”: Merit and Hierarchy in Paradise Lost,’ Exemplaria 7(2) (Autumn 1995): 499–514. Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, 151ff., argues for the importance of Boethian dialogue between angels and between man and angel. See also John Milton, An Apology against a Pamphlet, CPW I.899–901. Jameela Lares, Milton and the Preaching Arts (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001), 80–95, argues for the important influence of Chappell on Milton’s writings. William Chappell, The Preacher (1656), in English Linguistics: 1500–1800, ed.

Notes to pages 199–201

87 88 89

90

91

92

93

94

269

R.C. Alston, No. 295 (Menston, England: Scolar Press Limited, 1971), 193– 4. Kristin Pruitt McColgan, ‘Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in Paradise Lost,’ South Central Review, 11(1) (Spring 1994), 80ff. McColgan, ‘Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in Paradise Lost,’ 81. Lewalski, ‘Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,’ 116–17, emphasizes Paradise Lost’s dynamism. For the point about fusion, see Marilyn Farwell, ‘Eve, the Separation Scene, and the Renaissance Idea of Androgyny,’ Milton Studies 16 (1982), 12. For an analysis of the humanist balance that permeates their unfallen lives, see Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature, 255ff., esp. 277. Millicent Bell argues that a flawed Eve fell before the ‘official fall.’ ‘The Fallacy of the Fall in Paradise Lost,’ PMLA 68 (1953): 863–83. I believe that Adam and Eve fall only when they make a conscious choice and eat the fruit. Halley, ‘Female Autonomy in Milton’s Sexual Poetics,’ 248, argues that she ‘internalizes the utterance of the “voice and of Adam”’ to achieve her identity. The separation scene has been widely discussed. Fredson Bowers, ‘Adam, Eve, and the Fall in “Paradise Lost”,’ PMLA 84 (1969) 266, 269–73. Don Perry Norford, ‘The Separation of the World Parents in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies, 12 (1978): 3–24; Diana Benet, ‘Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,’ Milton Studies 18 (1983): 129–43; Joan S. Bennett, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 94–118 (see 95 and 216 for further references); Quint, Epic and Empire, 292ff.; and Mary Nyquist, ‘Reading the Fall: Discourse in Drama in Paradise Lost,’ English Literary Renaissance 14 (1984): 206– 14. Joshua Scodel, ‘Paradise Lost and Classical Ideals of Pleasurable Restraint,’ Comparative Literature 48(3) (Summer 1996), esp. 199 ff., offers a thoughtful, erudite treatment of the roots of Milton’s praise of variety in representing Adam and Eve in Eden. Scodel’s treatment of the concept of satiety in conversation is especially pertinent to my argument (196ff.). See also Excess and the Mean, 255ff. Fredson Bowers criticizes Adam for failing to use his authority as a husband to enforce his advice, ‘Adam, Eve, and the Fall in “Paradise Lost”,’ 266, 269– 73. Benet perceive Adam as swayed by his own characteristic desire to protect Eve, ‘‘Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,’ 131ff. Stella P. Revard, ‘Eve and the Doctrine of Responsibility in Paradise Lost,’ PMLA 88 (1973), argues that it would have been better for Adam to ‘overcome his own feelings

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96 97 98 99 100

101

102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Notes to pages 270–4 of rejection’ and voice ‘the loving plea which might have won his wife’s consent. Thus he would have led her to choose wisely, not merely left her free to choose’ (73). Norford, ‘The Separation of the World Parents in Paradise Lost’: 10, argues that her ‘latent feelings of inferiority, injured pride, and resentment’ lead to her departure. Nancy Hagglund Wood, ‘Satan as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Persuasion of Eve in Paradise Lost’ (PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 1972), also emphasizes Eve’s response to insult. Jacobus Acontius, Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), trans. John Goodwin (London: 1651, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1978). Bowers, ‘Adam, Eve, and the Fall in “Paradise Lost”,’ 269ff. Dod and Cleaver, A godly Forme of Household Government, 160. Benet, ‘Abdiel and the Son in the Separation Scene,’ 131. Deborah A. Interdonato, ‘“Render Me More Equal”: Gender Inequality and the Fall in Paradise Lost 9’ Milton Quarterly 29(4) (December 1995), comments on Eve’s ‘keen sense of injury’ (97–8). Wood offers detailed analyses of how Aristotle’s Rhetoric illuminates scenes of persuasion in Paradise Lost, and especially how Satan represents God as insulting Eve in Satan as Orator. Norford, ‘The Separation of the World Parents in Paradise Lost,’ 10. Quint, Epic and Empire, 281ff., esp. 293ff. John Milton, Areopagitica, CPW II:515. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, 184, argues that she assumes a ‘heroic posture.’ James A. Freeman, ‘Milton and Heroic Literature,’ The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 51–64, analyses the solitariness of Milton’s heroes. See note 37 above. Wood, Satan as Orator, 174, analyses Satan’s sham enthymemes in light of Aristotle’s Rhetoric 2.24. Aristotle The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 2.24, 1401a. Moloch, Paradise Lost II. 47–8, Satan, IV.49–50, 58–61. Joseph H. Summers, The Muse’s Method: An Introduction to Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 173. In making this point, Benet argues that the community of the angels did not prevent some from falling because of the suggestions of Satan. Summers, The Muse’s Method, 171–2. Joan S. Bennett argues that Adam’s comment undermines Eve’s freedom, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 110, 112–13.

Notes to pages 205–10

271

112 Stella P. Revard, ‘The Heroic Context of Book IX of Paradise Lost,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 87 (1988), 338–9. 113 Schoenfeldt, ‘Gender and Conduct in Paradise Lost,’ 319–20, 332ff., argues that Eve solves problems creatively: ‘This remarkable moment ... supplies the consummate example of Eve’s unequalled social and verbal imagination’ (333). 114 John Gould, ‘Hiketeia,’ Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 (1973), 76. The numbers reflect the number of times the phrase labê gounon (take by the knees) appears (with variation in the verb). ‘The verbs gounoumai and gounazomai (clasp the knees) occur in Homer 15 times in all, again always in descriptions of supplication.’ 115 Gould, ‘Hiketeia,’ 79. 116 The Rhetoric argues that ‘friends love the same people and hate the same people’ (2.4, 1381a). Revard, ‘The Heroic Context of Book IX of Paradise Lost,’ 338, shows that Christ is the ‘greatest of all warriors, exacting revenge for the defeat of Eve and Adam.’ Milton ‘exploit[s] ... heroic context ... in narrating the ... victory over Satan’ (339). 117 In the Bible, God hardens hearts (Exodus. 7:3, 7:22, 8:15, 8:19, etc.). Sidney draws on the Bible and the rhetorical tradition when he writes of ‘that which might mollify his hardened heart.’ ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 97.1–2. 118 Strier, ‘Against humility,’ 272–3, emphasizes rational Adam’s superiority to Eve. 119 Lewalski, Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms, analyses the multiplicity and kinds of literary forms. Conclusion 1 John Rainolds’ Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. and trans. Lawrence D. Green (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 141. 2 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). Debora K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 148ff. and ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Sacred Rhetoric,’ Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 47–64, esp. 54ff. 3 Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), articulates the ideals of Renaissance friendship writings.

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Index

Acontius, Jacobus, 111, 112; Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), 15, 110, 118, 201, 224n76, 249n26, 256nn42, 43, 270n96; religious controversy, 139–40 action, 64, 68, 74; creating good and glory, 132; represented, 72; right, 54, 55, 62, 63, 64, 66, 91, 143, 212; wrong, 73, 74 active life, 34; solitude versus action in the world, 179–83; solitude as preparation for action, 182 admonition, 14, 16, 64, 66, 198 Aers, David, 266nn44, 50, 267n67 Africanus Major (Scipio’s grandfather), 179 Agricola, Rudolph, 28, 227n30 Alexander of Pherae, 68, 71 Allen, Danielle S., 220n28, 247n7, 248n14, 250n46, 253n6, 254n14, 260nn27, 36 Amadis de Gaule, 85 Ambrose, Saint, 71 Amussen, Susan Dwyer, 229n67, 232n93, 233n107 Amphion, 55 Anabaptists, 126

Anbleste, Mornay, Charlotte d’: A Huguenot Family in the XVI Century, 78–9, 240nn11, 12, 241n15 androgyny, 95 anger, 4, 6, 8–10, 18, 21–5, 39, 46, 55, 58, 85, 86, 92, 111, 113, 115–16, 140, 144, 199, 201, 206–7; Achilles’ anger at insult, 162–3, 202–3; angry rhetoric, 17, 71, 107; and contempt or disdain, 8, 9, 24, 25, 46, 48, 85, 87, 94, 124, 168, 170; culturally specific nature of, 107–8; disdain as chastity, 88; disdain and scorn, 130; disdain versus pity, 103; divine, 131; enmity and affinity, 86; and faction, 135; at fraud, 123; versus friendship, 92; God’s anger as just, 131, 163; and grim laughter, 109; hatred of good, 185, 188; and hatred or enmity, 9, 15, 18, 31, 52, 54, 57, 63, 79, 90, 93, 114, 116, 124, 130, 135, 144, 201, 216; and honour, 110, 114, 129, 143; and indignation, 9, 15, 16, 107, 123, 126; infinite wrath, 158, 201; and injury, 23, 85, 89, 107, 162, 194, 201; injury to self-respect, 108, 115,

274

Index

162, 213; at insult, 8, 24, 28, 92, 94, 103, 107, 139, 201–2, 142, 143, 170–1; as an instrument of justice, 106, 108, 163; and just rage, 214; limitless, 146–66; limitless rage, 213; versus love, 78, 93; and mildness, 92, 104, 106, 114; in Milton and Cicero, 121; moral force of, 114–23, 130, 133; and rage, 67, 78, 83, 86, 92, 102, 109, 213; and rage against deception, 109; rational, 214; and religious warfare, 140; righteous, 128; righteous indignation, 128; Satan’s disdain, 144, 159, 170; Satan’s injured merit, 144, 159; Satan’s revenge, 143; Satan’s spite against God, 143; and scorn, 114, 119; and shame, 107, 170–1; at slights, 46; transformed in PL, 143– 5, 159, 163; and truth, 106, 127; at undeserved dishonour, 114, 115; and unjust insult, 24, 103, 114, 115, 117, 124, 129, 143; at unjustified slights, 108, 128, 194, 202; useful, 122, 123, 129; and vengeance, 9, 23, 25, 29, 46, 86–7, 93, 108, 157, 214 Anglicans, 116, 123, 125 Anselment, Raymond A., 248n21 Aquinas, Thomas, 145, 159 arguments on two sides, 106 Arminianism, 139, 186 Aristotle, 8, 9, 10, 23, 39, 55–6, 72, 81, 85, 92, 99, 100, 115–7, 118, 248n17; akrasia, 60; anger and, 108, 115–16, 129, 213; Aristotelian topoi of emotion, 8, 143–7; definition of shame in, 171; desire (horexis), 159–60; discourse of honour, 128,

142, 158–64; and emotion, 150; emotions and imagination in, 150; envy and emulation, 135, 142; friendship with the self, 176; hatred, 144; and Hobbes’s ‘briefe,’ 142; imagination, images, phantasiae, 147, 150; indignation, 109; Nicomachean Ethics, 137, 228n60, 232n104, 246n76; against outrage, 115; pathos, 60; Politics, 8, 23, 84, 86, 95, 98, 178, 226n15, 230n76, 242nn29, 30, 33, 243n47, 254n24, 264n15; Rhetoric, 8, 23–4, 62, 73, 84, 86–7, 93, 100, 104, 109, 128, 133, 135, 202–3, 211, 214, 226nn19, 20, 21, 227n33, 232n100, 234n8, 236nn35, 36, 37, 238n72, 242nn29, 31, 243n48, 246n86, 250n45, 251n61, 253n6, 254n21, 260n27, 262n53, 270nn106, 107, 271n116; rhetoric of emotions, 108, 114, 123, 150; solitary human, 177 assent, 64, 66; and choice, 68; as a danger, 121; failure of, 66; genuine or full, 5, 16, 17, 209; and heart/ head, 69 Astell, Ann W., 227n38, 230n81 assurance, 139, 202 Athanasius, 64 Athenaeus, 235n16 Augustine, 31, 63–7, 89, 122, 127, 211; Augustinian persuasion, 63– 71; Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, 233n116; Confessions, 148; De Doctrina Christiana, 64–8, 212, 222n55, 227n44, 252n66; economy of emotion, 159; grand style, 71, 237n43; On Christian Doctrine, 224n3, 237n45

Index Ayers, Robert W., 224n79 Babb, Lawrence, 265n32 Bacon, Sir Francis, 160, 188; Advancement of Learning, 122; envy, 168; friendship not company as antidote to solitude, 177–9; ‘Of envy,’ 160, 168, 260n28, 262n55; ‘Of friendship,’ 175, 176, 177, 187–8, 252n67, 263nn3, 7, 264n15; solitude as lack of true friends, 176–9; true friendship, 175–6, 187 Ball, John, 112, 141; A Treatise of Faith, 154, 249n32, 257n49, 258n2, 259n18, 263n12; fallen conscience, 186; fear in the fallen, 154; resistance to fear through rhetoric, 178 Barckley, R.: The Felicitie of Man or His Summum Bonum, 149, 258n11 Barker, Arthur Edward, 223n64, 262n63 Barker, E. Phillips, 230n69 Basil, Saint, 64 Bayrus, Peter, 153 beauty, 10, 11, 51, 58, 69, 87, 88–9, 92, 216; Eve’s beauty as an emblem of wisdom, 193; Philoclea, 78; as a sign of honour, 87, 89; of Urania, 77; and use, 80; versus wisdom, 215 Beebe-Center, John G., 145, 229n64 Bell, Millicent, 269n90 Benet, Diana, 202, 255n35, 269nn92, 94, 270nn99, 110 Bennett, Joan S., 253n8, 257n50, 269n92, 270n111 Bergbusch, Martin, 78, 240n12, 243nn41, 43 Berry, Edward, 234n7, 238n64

275

Beza, 60, 240n12 Bible, 122, 155, 192, 194, 195–7, 207; Hebrew Scriptures, 205–6 Blessington, Francis C., 128, 254nn22, 23, 255n28, 259n23, 260n25 Bouwsma, William J., 68, 89, 229n64, 231n81, 237nn47, 48, 56, 57, 59, 60, 238n61, 244n56 Bowers, Fredson, 269nn92, 94, 270n97 Brathwaite, Richard: A Survey of History, 256n45; The English Gentleman, 255n36 Briggs, William Dinsmore, 78, 240n12, 243n41 Bright, Timothie, 3, 32, 46, 111, 149, 154, 217nn3, 4, 229n66; A Treatise of Melancholie, 50, 147, 211, 232n101, 233nn115, 117, 249n27, 263n8; on causes and boundaries of emotion, 151–2; imagination and memory, 157; In Physicam scribonii Animadversiones, 241n24; solitude, 177 Brink, Jean R., 231n82 Broadbent, J.B., 261n41 Brownists, 126 Brumbaugh, Barbara, 246n91 Bryson, Anna, 228nn50, 54, 230n100 Bryson, Frederick Robertson, 8, 220n32, 243n49 Bundy, Murray A., 258n4 Burton, Robert: The Anatomy of Melancholy, 32, 147, 148–9, 154–5, 157, 162, 258nn6, 10, 259n19, 263nn9, 10; causes and boundaries of emotion, 151–2; of evil, 154; copious exempla in, 152; glory versus cursedness, 154; imagina-

276

Index

tion, 152; imagination and memory, 157–8; need for counsel, 157; solitude, 177 Bushnell, Rebecca W., 238n68 Cable, Lana, 247n6, 252n75, 267n72 Cairns, Douglas L., 219n19, 262n67 Calvin, John, 31, 59, 63, 69, 70, 89, 211; Calvinist(s), 50, 53, 75; fallen conscience, 172–3; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 5, 42, 50, 97, 218n10, 227n45, 233n1, 241n22 Carbone, Lodovico, 8 Carver, Robert H.F., 231n82 Castiglione, Baldesar, 73; The Book of the Courtier, 10, 34, 43, 47, 221n47, 225n8, 231nn90, 91 Chaplin, Gregory, 266nn52, 55, 267nn62, 66 Chappell, William, 198–9, 268n86 Charles II, 180, 183 chivalry, 78, 83, 84; chivalric model, 96; chivalric tales, 131 Christian terms, 51, 64, 65, 68, 96, 115, 205, 255n36; Antichrist, 112; Christ, 113, 117; Christian warfaring, 137, 205–6; Christocentrism, 112; dualism, 147–9; ethical truth, 70; extreme happiness and misery, 147–9; formulations of emotion, 144; hospitality, 196–7; in Milton’s works, 141, 147; piety, 140; selfhood, 140; soldier of Christ, 152; warfare, 139, 177–8 Cicero, 28, 35, 39, 65, 67, 120–1, 127, 185, 200, 211, 225n8, 248nn17, 18, 251n61; angry style, 71; Ciceronian model, 34, 41; De amicitia, 14, 189, 228n60, 232n104, 251n58, 266nn46, 47; De finibus, 261n50, De

inventione, 28, 227n32, 251n60; De officiis, 46, 80, 136; De oratore, 119, 121, 125, 166–1, 235n15, 237nn46, 58, 238n72, 251nn55, 62, 261n51; De republica, 200, 264n18; defence of wit, 118, 124; emotion, 114, 115, 116; foresight and magnaminity, 137, 228n60, 255n31; friendship, 34; laughter, 72; Orator, 224n3, 251n62; Satan as Ciceronian orator, 167; Tusculan Disputations, 230n77 civility, 3, 4, 16, 32, 40, 127; civil life, 19; civil wildness, 76 civil society, 77; and conversation, 83; and faction, 73 civil war, 85, 86 classical beliefs: about anger, 108; about honour, 135; versus modern beliefs, 108 classical epics, public deliberation in, 179–80 classical friendship, 192; laughter in, 72–3; ridicule and scorn in, 73 classical philosophy, 172 classical rhetoricians, 20, 60 classical topoi, 147 classical writers, 14, 60, 68; classical Athenians, 107 Cleaver, Robert, 190, 201, 224n76, 232n107, 266n56, 270n98 Cohen, David, 85–6, 226nn16, 17, 242n33, 243nn45, 46, 254n26, 260n35 coincidentia oppositorum, 95, 101; and disguise, 100, 102; and gender, 101, 102; ruler and servant, man and woman, 100, 102 Colish, Marcia L., 244n56 Collinson, Patrick, 111, 112, 249n30

Index company, 18, 42, 53, 76, 82, 95, 313; companionate marriage, 189–91, 207; company of one’s own countrymen, 94; company and solitude, 36, 39, 183; diminished by Bacon, 179; in solitude, 18, 76, 184; overvalued by Adam, 200; Urania as company, 184 compassion, 9, 22, 25, 35, 42, 51, 52, 55, 58, 82, 102, 111, 112, 121; compassionate comedy, 98; compassionate love, 89; and disdain, 103; and likeness, 100; pity, 65 competition, 214; destructive, 215; for precedence, 92, 213, 216. See also honour, competition for; rivalry, rivals; discourse, of honour conflict, verbal, 114, 128 compulsion: versus draw, 122; by reason, 12; by a state church, 110. See also force conscience, 50, 51, 113, 118, 126; in Calvin, 172–3; Calvinistic influence on Paradise Lost, 173–5; in Adam and Eve, 172–4; in Eve, 163; fallen conscience, in Adam, 153–4; in Satan, 144, 158, 186 constancy, 9, 46, 58, 99, 101, 133, 136–7, 140, 204 contest or trial, 93, 136; for Adam and Eve, 137; in Protestant texts, 140; trial of truth, 136 Conti, Anto Maria de’, 20, 224n2 conversation, 18–19, 31, 32–5, 41, 42– 53, 73, 82; between Adam and Eve, 201–5, 216; civil, 34, 75; and differences, 95; failure of vehemence in, 210; humanist and Protestant models of, 199–200; internal, 106, 184, 215; Satan’s loss of internal, 106,

277

184, 215; in solitude, 183; that transforms emotion, 182 Cooper, John M., 220n28 Corinthians, 179, 254n18 Cormack, Bradin, 227n29, 244n57 counsel, 4, 17, 41, 46, 52, 94, 131, 136; Adam’s, 193, 206–7; counseling oneself, 185–6; counsellor, 16, 21, 22, 32, 43, 55, 71, 81, 110, 111; — of emotional persons, 209, 211; — as surgeon or physician, 15–16, 55, 71, 211 (see also physician); friendly, 183, 212, 215; good counsel and imagination, 149; inventive, 76, 108; literature of, 132; mutual, 17, 92; moderate, 112; need for, 176 court, courtly, 7, 33, 44, 83; courtier, 13, 138; courtly love, 44 courtship, 87, 90, 97 Cowley, Abraham, 176, 180–1, 264nn22, 25, 26; friendship with the self, 176, 181, 215; solitude, 180–1 Cox, Carroll B., 222n53, 268n74 Cyprian, 71 Cyrus, 70 Davenant, William, 180 David, 63, 64, 69, 70, 72; as ‘right poet,’ 70 Danielson, Dennis, 255n34 Davenant, Sir William, 218n6 Davies, Sir John, Nosce Teipsum, 59, 235n22 deception, 124, 213; and hidden assumptions, 138, 139; Satan’s, 182 delight, 66; delightful teaching, 73–4; to exercise the mind, 66; and joy, 74; and laughter, 74; and love, 102; and scorn, 212 desire, 86–7, 89, 90, 93, 201; competi-

278

Index

tive, 90, 214; and competition, 91; emotion defined by, 159–62; insatiable, 106, 159; Neoplatonic, 161– 2; vitiated competitive, 161 dialogue, 16, 44, 50, 187; dialogic self, in Satan, 185–7; dialogic truth, 214; mild, 214; between Raphael and Adam, 198–9, 208 differences, 94, 132; between Adam and Eve, 177, 216; class, 211; differentiation favoured by Eve, 202; between married persons, 195. See also diversity discernment, 135, 169; abstain and discern, 137; failure of, 139, 169 discourses, 13; of honour, 17, 30, 140, 163; of honour and humanism, 30; metadiscourses of honour and marriage, 88; multiplicity of, 6; proto-capitalist, 90 Diodati, Charles, 190 disguise, 97, 101–3, 133, 125, 208; Satan’s use of, 146, 164–8, 214 diversity, 44, 105, 122, 126; diverse nations, 94; diverse characters, 106, 109; diverse styles, 106, 122; exaggeration of small differences, 112. See also differences Dod, John, 201, 224n76, 232n107, 266n56, 270n98 Donnelley, M.L., 255n30 Dorsten, Jan van, 223n71, 227n45 Downame, John, 249nn28, 29, 33, 256n40; The Christian Warfare, 111, 141, 177–8, 263n11; rhetorical consolations, 178; strong speech, 112 drawing, 55, 69, 122; pleasing and, 66; versus compelling, 17, 122 Du Bartas, Seiur, Guillaume de Salluste, 240nn8, 9

Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 15 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 217n2, 221n45, 223n71, 227n45, 228n57, 235n12, 240n9, 241nn14, 25, 244nn55, 59, 245n66, 246n83 Duplessis-Mornay, Philippe, 99, 240n12; A. Munday, ‘To the reader,’ 238n71; The True knowledge of a mans owne selfe , 42, 46, 63, 130, 149, 151–2, 232n102, 237n41, 245n75; A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the christian Religion, 221n46, 227n43, 231n85; De la Vérité de la religion chrestienne, 10, 11, 78, 227n40; Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (?), 85 Dusinbierre, Juliet, 246n78 Eden, Kathy, 61–2, 236nn27, 32, 33, 35, 258nn13, 15 Eden, Richard: Decades, 193, 267n69 effeminacy, 30, 36–7, 40, 41 Elias, Norbert, 7, 32, 109, 219n22, 249n22 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 9, 13 Ellis, Clement: The Gentile Sinner, 140, 257n47 eloquence, 20, 34, 39, 56, 64, 65, 67, 89, 115; grand eloquence, 64 Elyot, Sir Thomas, The Boke Named the Governour, 29, 30, 101, 220–1n37, 223n68, 226n28, 227nn35, 39, 232nn97, 104, 246n87; The Castel of Helth, 221n39; Of the Knowledge, 217n3 emotion(s), 4, 6, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 34, 40, 49, 56, 60–9, 74, 95, 104, 106, 109, 133, 150, 159–60, 199, 208; conflicting, 17, 18; defined by

Index desire, 159–62; diseased, 21, 32, 33, 211; excess, 56, 205, 209; extreme, 10; faction and, 76–105, 107; fallen, 146–57; ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ 5, 145, 209; healing, 55, 63, 64; one-sided, 33, 57, 63, 76, 86, 94, 115–16, 146–57, 185–9, 214, 216; passion and, 3, 7–8; versus passion, 7–8; politics and, 76–105; producing war, 76, 83–105; rivalrous, 8. See also passion Empson, William, 131, 254n16 emulation, 77 enargeia, 61 energeia, 67 envy, 14, 90, 93, 107, 135, 142, 149; in Aristotle and Bacon, 160–2, 168; based on competition, 142; cognitive errors in, 142; and emulation, 135; envious desire, 161; in Satan, 141, 143; tyrant’s, 142, 213; unbounded, 146, 159, 186, 214 epic, 114, 119, 127, 197, 207; archaic epic and honour, 128, 198; argument, 131 Epictetus: The Moral Discourses of Epictetus, 45, 51, 232n99 Episcopal, 113, 120; Episcopacy, 124; Episcopal Church, 116 equal/equality, 34, 52, 92, 100, 129, 130, 176, 204; and counsel, 97, 215; in Eve, 120; in friendship, 208; love, 185, 201; versus reciprocity, 97, 107–8; of Satan and God, 162; of spouses, 97, 100, 191–5, 197, 204; versus superior, 34; versus unequal, 47, 189 Erasmus, 32; Enchiridion Militis Christiani, 10, 32, 152, 217n3, 221n43 Erickson, Keith V., 220n28

279

error, 138, 167, 169, 205, 207. See also truth Estienne, Henri (Stephanus), 69 example, 62, 63; argument by, 62; counter-example, 62; fictional versus historical, 62 evil, 156, 158, 160, 165, 186 Fallon, Robert, 254n13, 256n39 faction, 18, 19, 23, 77, 78; stasis, 84, 85; and war, 16, 76, 83–106, 212 faith, 5, 112, 154, 183 fall, 69, 147–50, 154–5, 156, 186–7 Fallon, Stephen M., 138–9 Farwell, Marilyn, 269n89 fear, 9, 10, 31, 37, 39, 51–5, 57, 86, 90, 94, 141, 147, 149, 173, 178, 207; and confidence, 104; definition of, 150; discourses or topoi that increase fear, 78, 104; and dread, 147, 183; and evidence, 93; excessive, 112; and hope, 106; imagination or fancy and, 153, 156, 158; rational, 139, 202; rhetoric and, 141, 178; servile, 4; in tyranny, 78, 87, 93, 106; unbounded, 146, 148, 158 feeling, 69, 90, 200; ‘feel not the inward reason,’ 66 Ferguson, Arthur B., 78, 220, 241n13, 242n26 Ferguson, Margaret W., 56, 74, 75, 234n7, 234–5n11, 239n80 Ferry, Anne, 67, 237n55 Fish, Stanley, 265n42 Fisher, Philip, 108, 248nn12, 15, 253n6 flatterer(s), 8, 14, 42, 90, 91, 92, 120, 212, 215; and friendship, 213 flattery, 214; versus friendship, 14, 38,

280

Index

95, 139, 216; self-love and, 42; and tyrants, 8, 16–17, 94, 95, 213 Fletcher, Anthony, 32, 227nn46, 47, 229nn67, 68, 232n98 Fletcher, Harris F., 248n16 Floyd-Wilson, Mary, 6, 217n6, 218n18, 219n20, 225n5, 254n25 force, 7, 12, 96, 103, 126; coercion versus drawing or persuading, 17, 209; versus consent, 98, 99; persuasion and, 83, 96; persuasion as, 20, 63, 209 frameworks of emotion, multiple, 12, 14–31, 45, 77, 209–10, 213; conflicting, 14, 17, 21–30, 77, 104, 212; differences between, 12; social, 78; — conflicts between, 89 Fortenbaugh, William W., 220n28 Fox, Alistair, 219n21 Fraunce, Abraham, 90, 245n60 Frede, Dorothea, 220n28 free speech, 216 free will, 185 freedom, 126, 128, 138, 204; liberty, 126–7 Freeman, James A., 254n13, 255n34, 258n4, 265n43, 270n104 French, J. Milton, 250n49 friendship, 14–16, 18–19, 21–2, 31– 53, 70, 72–4, 89, 93, 94, 97, 176, 178, 185, 194–9, 214; counsel in, 98, 175, 185, 196–9, 212; false, 104; frank versus gentle speech in, 201, 216; friend as another self, 174, 181, 215; guest, 22, 76–83, 196–9, 213; honest speech in, 14, 34, 49, 51, 104, 185–7, 198–9; ideal Renaissance, 14, 21, 37, 40, 175–6, 190, 196, 215–16; imperfect friend, 95,

210, 211; and inner dialogue, 184; law of, 76; versus law, 5; as model for marriage, 189–92; newly begun, 41, 211, 216; with the self, 176, 181–5; writings, 194–9; virtuous, 21–2, 34, 35, 42, 93 Gager, William, 58 Gardiner, H.M., 145, 229n64, 257n58 gender, 3, 24, 32, 34, 36–7, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 48, 72, 92, 95–104; and coincidentia oppositorum, 97, 101; defined by force or rape, 96; defined by martial valour, 103–4; and friendship, 47, 49; man/woman as reason/passion, 95; princely women, 104; and prudence, 98–9; and rule, 17, 95; and tears, 3, 44 Genesis, 172, 196–7 genres: elegiac poetry, 65, 68, 70; heroic poetry, 70, 74, 212; iambic, 71, 72; satire, 71, 72, 73; tragedy, 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78. See also epic gentle speech, 15–17, 20–1, 31–3, 49– 50, 54, 56, 78, 126–7, 210; versus strong or vehement speech, 15–17, 20–1, 32–3, 36–44, 54, 110, 112, 113–14, 125–7, 202–4, 216 Gil, Daniel Juan, 7, 77, 92, 219nn20, 26, 239n4, 244nn50, 57, 245n65 Girard, René, 84, 242n35 glory, 129, 131, 133–4, 143, 160; Adam as ‘glory of that glory,’ 154; and competition, 133–4; desired by the envious, 142; God’s, 132, 141; just versus fictional and false, 133– 4; kabod, 132; loss of, 136; and pride, 133

Index God, 51, 56, 60, 70, 99, 112, 121, 122, 123, 138–9, 159, 185; as giver, 198; God’s glory, 133; God’s justice, 155; God’s servants, 111; as inspiration, 70; as judge, 172–3; laughter, 131– 3; obedience to, 140; wrath, 111, 131–2, 188 Goldman, Jack, 253n7 Goleman, Daniel, 218n7 good, 16, 31, 39, 46, 54, 56, 60, 63, 65, 69, 91, 161, 193, 214; common, 14; and envy, 160; and evil, 10, 60; — as object of emotion, 145, 209; as implied by desire, 169–70; knowledge of good and evil, 155, 203; Neoplatonic, 160; Satan’s hatred of, 144–5; social, 14 Goodwin, John, 250n37; trans. Darkness Discovered (Satan’s Stratagems), 110, 201, 216; Theomachia, 113; Treatise of Use and Custom, 256n43 Gospel, 124; of John, 132 Gouge, William, 98, 204, 223n76, 232n107, 233n108; Of Domesticall Duties, 99, 201, 246n79, 266n53, 267nn58, 70; on marriage, 190–2 Gould, John, 271nn114, 115 grand style, 14, 67, 71. See also gentle speech Green, Lawrence D., 58, 235nn20, 21 Greenblatt, Stephen, 243n37 Gregory, E.R., 240n8 Gregerson, Linda, 194, 267n72 Greville, Fulke, 78; Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 138, 240n10, 255n36; Poems and Dramas, 59 Greville, Robert, Lord Brooke, 113, 138, 249n35 grief, 3, 77, 79, 81, 97, 105

281

Guazzo, Stephano (M. Steeven), 53, 56, 95, 98–9, 102, 106, 200; Anniball, 18, 25, 32, 33, 34–6, 43, 47, 48, 49, 53, 92, 94, 225n8; versus Bacon 177, 211, 213; The Civile Conversation, 4, 18, 21, 25, 32, 33–6, 39, 42– 3, 94, 122, 217n3, 223n76, 225nn7, 8, 226n23, 229n64, 230nn69, 80, 231n88, 245n67; solitude as an aid to company, 181; solitude versus company, 177; William Guazzo, 4, 32, 33, 34–6, 225n8. See also solitude, and company Guillory, John, 264n14 Halkett, John, 266n54 Hall, Joseph, 108, 109, 116, 118, 120, 124–5; A Short Answer to the Tedious Vindication of Smectymnuus, 116 Hall, Robert, 124 Haller, William, 220n36, 249n35 Halley, Janet E., 267n60 Hamilton, A.C., 230n81, 236n26, 240n8 Hamlet, 242n35 Harington, Sir John (the Younger), 181 hatred, enmity. See anger Haug, Ralph A., 124 Heal, Felicity, 21, 79, 196, 241n17, 268n76 healing, 64 heart(s), 3–5, 7, 18, 21, 31, 40, 43, 49, 55, 60, 64–5, 67–9, 70, 71, 74, 89, 90, 92, 94, 244n56; expanding versus contracting, 212; hard, 68–9, 71; heart-ravishing knowledge, 69; versus reason or ‘head,’ 40; and will, 69 Hebrews, 254n18

282

Index

Helen, 96 Helgerson, Richard, 13, 222n59, 224n78, 225n11, 227n37, 230n81 Heliodorus: An Aethiopian History, 23 Helots, 83, 242n32 Heninger, S.K., 239n6 Hercules, 36, 70, 74, 102; Herculean figure, 37 Herman, Peter C., 234n7, 235n11, 265n33 hermeneutics of suspicion, 124 heroism, 13, 14, 97, 114, 137, 202; combat, 128–9; ethos (Milton), 128; fervour, 109; heroic trial, 203; model of supplication, 205–6; poetry, 60, 74, 132, 212; in temptation, 137 Herrick, Marvin T., 248n16 Herrick, Robert, 180 Hill, Christopher, 223n64, 262n63 historical specificity, 13 Hobbes, Thomas, 8, 133–4, 218n6; A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, 132, 142, 150, 257n53, 259n14; Human Nature, 8, 133–4, 220n30, 254nn19, 20; Leviathan, 254n19 Hodge, Bob, 266nn44, 50, 267n67 Holland, Philemon, 14, 33, 223n67 Homer, 3, 13, 120, 217n1, 268n80; Achilles, 13, 70, 128, 131, 134, 136, 146, 205; competition for honour, 92, 116; discourse of honour, 128, 130; glory, kleos, 128; Homeric anger, 108, 116, 117; Homeric/ Aristotelian terms of honour, 6–7, 158–60; Homeric topoi of honour, 143–7; Iliad, 14, 134, 136, 156, 205, 216; The Odyssey, 196–7, 205, 216; — hospitality in, 195–8; PL’s rewriting of classical terms of honour,

175, 177, 195, 197–8, 205, 214; Satan and Achilles, 159 honour, 2, 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27, 43, 44, 45–53, 54, 76–7, 91–2, 102, 114, 138, 140, 141, 160, 163, 171, 194, 195, 199, 205–6, 208, 214, 215, 216; and anger, 107, 110, 129, 143, 146, 170–1, 198; based on birth, 15, 25, 29, 57; based on humanist virtue, 136; competition for, 12, 14, 15, 45, 46, 56, 76–128, 129, 136, 140, 141, 147, 158, 159– 61, 170–1, 212; as a construct of imagination, 83–4; as chastity, 48; dishonour, 52, 53, 139; versus erotic love, 77; and faction, 135; false, 102, 133–4; honour, humanism, Neoplatonism, 8–12, 17, 21– 31, 77, 210; honour, shame, and laughter, 71; and injury, 23, 30; and insult, 23, 136, 162–3, 170–1; inward, 31, 45–53; and justice, 106–7; and love, 43; in marriage, 48, 49; and merit, 9, 15, 107, 138; and rage, 136; and religious conflict, 115; and revenge, 36, 162; and truth, 108, 109 Horace, Satire III, 33, 228n51 hospitality, 18, 76–83, 100, 104, 212, 213, 216; and humanism, 80; law of, 79; of strangers, 79; threatened, 76 host, 25, 30, 76–83, 216 Hotman, 240n12 Howard, Jean E., 13, 222n57 Howell, Roger, 245n66 Hughes, Merritt Y., 218n7, 259n21 Huguenot(s), 11, 129, 240n12, 245n76; noblemen, 84; theory of right to resistance, 78

Index humanists, 5, 6, 13, 14, 22–4, 26–7, 34–7, 40, 43, 45–6, 49, 51, 55–6, 76– 8, 103, 109, 122, 178, 198, 200, 208, 215; humanism, 8, 9, 17, 39, 42, 77, 136; humanist and Protestant writings, 14, 18, 21, 30, 86, 178, 189–93, 201–5; humanist contrasting topoi, 77, 94, 102, 106; and moderation, 78, 178 humour(s), 36, 38, 43, 53, 93; foundation of human gifts, 122 Hunt, Marvin, 241n14 Hunter, William B., Jr, 258n4 Hutson, Lorna, 87, 244nn51, 52 identity, 16, 20–1, 43, 91, 94, 99, 120, 128, 133, 140; gendered, 32, 42; socially defined, 34, 42, 44–5, 88, 91 idleness, 33, 61 imagination, 17, 61, 57, 59, 61, 63, 72, 150–4. 200; and emotion, 150–3, 200, 207, 208; and the fall, 150–8, 188; fancies and fantasies in, 36, 41, 53, 57, 59, 61, 105, 147–8; fancy open to persuasion, 147; images in, 18, 36, 55–64, 103, 104, 147–8, 194, 211; and the monstrous, 152–3; and metamorphic power, 152–4; social imaginary, 77 imperfection, 17, 20, 32, 35, 40–1, 102, 109, 212; and difference, 109; of friend or spouse, 98, 206, 210, 211 Independents, 110, 112, 125 interiority, 13, 89, 209, 211, 215; inner despair, 187; inner experience, 90; interiorized rhetoric and emotion, 107 invention, discovery, 62, 67, 81–2, 105, 123, 207, 216

283

insincerity and hypocrisy, hatred of, 124 Interdonato, Deborah A., 270n100 invective, 15, 107, 112, 115–16, 120, 123, 127–8, 213; versus mildness, 112 inwardness, 13, 18 Jacob, James R., 218n6 Jager, Eric, 237n48 James I, King, 138 James, Mervyn, 77, 140, 221n4, 232nn94, 95, 239n2, 255n36, 256nn37, 45, 46; Concept of Honour, 77 Javitch, Daniel, 33, 34, 228nn53, 55, 56, 57, 231n89 Jesus, 122; bitter rebukes and mild speech of, 122; different persuasive styles of, 122 John (book in Bible), 254n18 John, Saint, 123 Jordan, Constance, 44, 95, 101, 231n92, 233n110, 245n74, 246nn85, 88 Jost, Walter, 223n70, 225n9 Joubert, Laurent, 74, 238n72, 239n78; Treatise on Laughter, 74 joy, 65, 74; lack of, 160–1 judge, 55, 57–9, 95, 200 judgment(s), 43, 51, 53, 59, 72, 73, 91, 115, 141, 155; versus affection, 38, 41; comparative, 194; and emotion, 93; fallen, 149; moral, 102, 207; passion as source of, 99; versus sympathy, 54, 70 Kahn, Victoria, 128, 163, 224n77, 248n11, 253nn5, 10, 259n2, 260n37

284

Index

Kelley, Donald R., 229n64 Kelso, Ruth, 85, 232n96, 243n47, 246n92 Kennedy, George A., 220n31, 248n13 King, J.E., 230n78 Kinney, Arthur F., 30, 63, 223n68, 226nn15, 18, 227nn39, 40, 230n77, 236n38, 238nn62, 64, 241n14, 242nn29, 30 Kinney, Clare R., 83, 242nn27, 28 Kirk, Rudolph, 116, 251n51; ed., Animadversions, 108 knowledge: desired by Milton’s Eve, 169–70, 216; of God, 149–50; of good and evil in Paradise Lost, 163 Kranidas, Thomas, 108, 247nn3, 9, 10, 250nn42, 43, 252nn72, 73 Krostenko, B.A., 14, 121, 223n70, 251nn63, 64 Kuin, Roger, 221n38, 227n42, 233n109 Lacedaemonians, 83–4 Laconia, 76 Lactance, 254n15 Lactantius: De ira dei, 131 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 225n11, 229n67, 246n93 lamentation and gender, 3, 24–5 Languet, Hubert, 5, 37, 60, 220n29, 230nn71, 74, 231n88, 240n12; correspondence, 37; Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, 85 Lares, Jameela, 268n85 Laud, Archbishop, 116 laughter, 53, 73, 102; and consciousness of worth, 132; and delight, 74; and derision, 129–32; and glory, 132–3; grim, 118; harsh, 123; and honour and shame, 73; and joy, 74;

and pleasure, 73; and ridiculous things, 73; righteous, 128, 132; scornful, 114, 131 law, 16, 22–9, 56, 57, 59, 84, 99, 129; court, 23, 55; divine, 50, 163; of friendship, 76; natural, 63; persuasiveness of, 4, 21, 25–6 Law, Jules David, 260n26 Lawrence, Henry, 258nn5, 7; and Christian warfare, 147; Of our communion and warre with angels, 147–8 Leighton, Stephen R., 220n28 leisure, 36–8; and idleness 36–7, 38 Lemnius, 157 Levao, Ronald, 235n13, 239n5, 242n34 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 244nn52, 53; Elementary Structures of Kinship, 87 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 12, 108, 114, 221n51, 222n63, 248nn11, 18, 250n39, 251n50, 252n3, 253n11, 265n42, 266n43, 267n66, 268nn75, 77, 82, 83, 269n89, 271n119 Lewis, C.S., 131, 253n4 liberty of speech, 117 Lieb, Michael, 165, 250n40, 253n12, 256n38, 257n55, 261nn40, 41, 268n73 Lievsay, John Leon, 225n8 Lindheim, Nancy Rothwax, 80, 222n55, 241nn18, 19 Lipsius, Justus, 9, 221n40 Livy: The Early History of Rome, 25, 226n25 Loewenstein, David, 250n40 Long, Mary Beth, 264n17 love, 31, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 52, 96, 99, 108, 121, 141; and delight, 74, 102; of the divine, 65, 68; ‘effeminate,’ 37, 39; erotic, 4, 10, 11, 27, 39–42,

Index 65, 76–105, 200; of God, 60; and hate, 124; as hateful, 102; heavenly, 34, 43, 69, 185; for kin, 92; love, scorn, and laughter, 102; lovesickness, 41, 87; as opposite to hate, 78, 92, 93; rooted in loneliness, 190; as source of contempt and anger, 124 Lucretia, 58 Luther, Martin, 123; tart rhetoric of, 123 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 128, 239n7, 240n12; The Prince, 80, 241n21; virtù, 132 Maclean, Ian, 232n105 Mair, F.H., 224n3 malice, 14, 15, 107–8, 131; of Satan, 137, 143–4, 147, 185, 186, 214 marriage, 17, 18, 27, 29, 44, 47, 49, 87, 88, 94, 96, 97–100, 101, 204; and counsel, 98, 99, 176, 177; designed for conversation, 192, 207–8; equality of spouses under God, 98; as friendship, 47, 49, 175, 189–92; harmony and subordination in, 176–7, 189–95; husband distinguished from master, 96, 97; and political rule, 98; privileged over friendship, 191 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 260n31 master, mastery, 40, 48, 49, 51, 90, 96, 102, 104; despotic rule, 63; despotic rule versus political rule, 39, 95 Matz, Robert, 237n50 Maus, Katherine Eisaman, 13, 222nn56, 58, 232n103 Mauss, Marcel, 244n52; Essay on the Gift, 87

285

McCanles, Michael, 80, 241n20, 247n94 McColgan, Kristin Pruitt, 200, 269nn87, 88 McColley, Diane Kelsey, 175, 258n4, 262n58, 263n2, 266nn54, 57, 267n68 McCoy, Richard, 13, 222nn55, 60, 61, 225n11, 230nn72, 79, 81, 239n3, 241n13, 245n73; on laughter and delight, 246n89 McEachern, Claire, 222n64, 262n63 McGuire, Mary Anne, 248n10 McKeon, Michael, 226n24 Medici, Catherine de’, 88 melancholy, 31–3, 36–7, 119, 179 Melanchthon, Philippe, 5, 60, 65, 212, 218n11, 233n3, 237n43, 257n59, 260n29; on joy and sadness, 145; Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, 235n25; Corpus Reformatorum, 235n25; De modo et arte conciondi, 63, 236n39; Loci communes, 69; On Christian Doctrine, 69; On the Soul, 65, 236n40, 237n49, 245n75 Menelaos, 96 mercy, 23, 29, 30, 49–50, 61, 102; as feminine, 103 merit, 18, 138, 143, 164, 195, 197 metamorphosis, 163–4 Metcalf, Ruth Clark, 145, 229n64, 257n58 Michals, Teresa, 268n82 mild speech, 15, 17, 20–1, 49, 107, 108, 122, 126. See also gentle speech mildness, opposite to anger, 114 Milner, Andrew, 261n42 Milton, John, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14–19, 193, 252n68, 264nn28, 29; early writings, 106–27; ethos, 248n10;

286

Index

marriage writings, 17, 215; solitude and the ‘unconversing wife,’ 179 – WORKS: An Apology against a Pamphlet, 17, 106, 108, 114–16, 121–5, 129, 268n84; Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence, Against Smectymnuus, 17, 108, 115–24, 247n8, 248nn11, 20; Apology for Smectymnuus, 251n57; Areopagitica, 110, 112, 113, 117, 125–7, 137, 202, 251n5, 252nn75, 3, 270n104; De Doctrina Christiana, 138, 192, 267n65; Defensio Prima, 250n44; Defensio Secunda, 130; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 137, 178, 255n33, 264n16, 267nn62, 64; Eikonklastes, 119, 251n57; A Mask (Comus), 182, 183–4, 215, 264n21, 265n31; Of Education, 108, 248n17; Of Reformation, 125, 250n49, 251n57; Paradise Regained, 203, 215, 264n30; — solitude and the Son in, 179, 182–3; — Satan in, 165; Pro Se Defensio, 248n10; Prolusions, 9, 220n34; A Readie and Easy Way, 136; The Reason of Church Government, 171–2, 173, 182, 252n72; Second Defense of the English People, 251n57; ‘Sonnet XX,’ 196; ‘Sonnet XXI,’ 196; Tetrachordon, 193, 266n51, 267n63; A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, 17, 128, 146, 252n1 – Paradise Lost, 4, 9, 11, 12, 17, 18–19, 106, 110, 114, 121, 126, 127, 128– 217, 224n81, 251n60, 252n2, 258n8, 266n51; clash between truth and error, 214; extreme misery, 157–8; friendly counsel, 175; honour based on humanist virtue,

138; monism, 161–2; rhetoric and imagination, 153–8; spiritual elect, 138–9 – Paradise Lost, characters: Abdiel, 9, 17, 107, 128–30, 137, 139, 185, 203, 214; Adam, 4, 9, 12, 14, 15, 106, 107, 138–9, 163, 183, 196–9, 203; — fall of, 156–7; — changes in emotion of, 150, 154–7; — and imagination, 154–7; — counsel of, 185–7; — education of, 146–50; — and Satan, 186, 188–9, 200–2; — on solitude and society, 181; — loneliness of, 193–4; — reason of, 207, 208; Beelzebub, 136; Belial, 157; Eve, 4, 9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 106, 107, 121, 137, 138–9, 140, 143, 147, 149–50, 163–70, 175–6, 200, 208; — desire for knowledge, 169; — desire for wisdom, 169–70; — adoption of Satan’s reasoning, 169–70; — as friend to Adam, 175; — and Satan, 207; — differences between Adam and, 177; — before and after the fall, 178; — in marriage, 190–1; God, 9, 12, 17, 18, 114, 121, 128, 131–3, 136, 139, 143, 155, 159, 203–4; — in dialogue with the Son, 165; Moloch, 157; Michael, 140, 149, 207; Raphael, 11–12, 139, 177, 192, 195, 216; — dialogue with Adam, 196–9, 203; Satan, 9, 12, 14, 17, 18, 106, 107, 121, 128–31, 134–5, 136, 139, 140– 2, 144–5, 163, 165, 182, 185–6, 200, 214, 224n81; — and Achilles, 136; — counselling himself, 185–7; — desire for revenge of, 159; — empty desire of, 161–2; — in disguise, 146–7, 162, 164–8, 182; —

Index distorted topoi of emotion of, 147, 161–8; — envy of, 142, 161–2; — fallen imagination in, 155–8, 182; — as flatterer and false friend, 167–8, 213; — malice of, 137; — one-sided topoi of, 213; — as orator or rhetorician, 166–9; — relentless torment of, 158; — seeking precedence apart from achievement, 142, 161; — as tyrant, 158, 213; Son, 9, 17, 18, 114, 128, 131–3, 135; — envied by Satan, 143, 155; — and honour, 159; — incarnation of, 164; — in dialogue with the father, 164–5 moderation, 3, 6, 123; in emotion, 77; through friendly counsel, 178; humanist, 77–8; in Paradise Lost, 180; of the passions, 46; in use and misuse of topoi, 77–8 Modest Confutation, A, 123–4, 252nn70, 71 Milton, Mary Powell (John Milton’s first wife), 179 Montaigne, Michel de, 14, 47, 223n69, 232n106, 245n70, 263n5; on friendship with the self, 176–83, 215 Mora, Domenico: Il cavaliere, 8 Morkan, Joel, 248n11, 251n54 moving the emotions, 31, 54–8, 60, 64, 65, 69, 75, 212; being moved, 43, 44, 49, 64, 111; — to action, 66; — by eloquence, 64; Eve moving Adam, 200; feeling emotion to invoke it in others, 121; moving power of poetry, 63–9, 75; move, teach, and delight, 64, 66; to move to virtue, 70; to stir passions, 90 Mueller, Janel, 218n13, 228n58, 250n47, 252n75

287

Murrin, Michael, 78, 85, 107, 220n35, 241n13, 242n26, 243nn36, 42, 244n54, 245n76, 247nn4, 5, 249n23, 255n30, 261n46 music, 43; instruments, 36; musicians, 36, 39; songs of Percy and Douglas, 70 Nathan, 62–4, 70, 72 Neoplatonism, 11, 45, 66, 69, 77, 161–2; Neoplatonic emotions, 7; Neoplatonic idealism, 77; Neoplatonic love, 77, 199; Neoplatonic tradition, 10, 69 Nero, 87 Niccholes, Alexander, 191–2, 193, 199, 267nn59, 70; equality in marriage, 191 Norbrook, David, 227nn35, 36, 242n32 Norford, Don Parry, 201, 269n92, 270nn95, 102 Nussbaum, Martha Craven, 220n2 Nyquist, Mary, 263n6, 266n54, 267nn61, 62, 63, 269n92 obedience, 199, 204; in marriage, 98, 99 Olmsted, Wendy, 223n70, 225n9, 233n111, 260nn34, 38, 39, 261n44, 268n78 Omphale, 74, 102 oration, 43; Greek and Roman, 115 orator(s), 14, 109, 121; debased image of, 158; Milton’s Satan as, 146, 166–7; and poet, 73 Orpheus, 55 Osborn, James M., 241n14 Osborn, L.B., 220n29

288

Index

Ovid: Metamorphoses, 163–6, 261n43; Paradise Lost reversing Ovidian metamorphosis, 164–6 Oxford, Earl of, 84 Palladius (Musidorus in disguise), 53 Parker, Archbishop Matthew, 64 Parker, Patricia, 224n77, 243n35, 262n59 Parker, William Riley, 267n62 Parliament, 127 passion(s), 7, 9, 22, 24, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 48, 49, 53, 56, 58, 60, 65, 109, 133, 140; dangers of, 199; diseased, 4, 36, 41, 56, 59, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 173–4; early modern, 6; enslaving, 48; healing, 65, 189; and Plato, 96; release of, 176, 188; shameful, 35; source of judgment, 99; unleashed by fall, 148–74, 214 Paster, Gail Kern, 6, 217n6, 219n18, 219n20, 220n27, 225n5, 229n63; Reading the Early Modern Passions, 6 patience, 131; Christian, 140 patristic thought, 55, 64, 172 Patterson, Annabel, 108, 114, 121, 222n63, 248nn18, 38, 250n44, 251nn57, 59, 253n11, 255n32 Paul, Epistle to the Romans, 129, 132 Peacham, Henry, 234n4 Pears, Steuart A., 220n29, 230n71 Pebworth, Ted-Larry, 255n30 Perkins, William, 155, 266n57; fear, 153, 259n20; imagination versus sight, 153–4, 188 persuasion, 12, 16, 20–1, 31, 43, 56, 57, 64, 68, 98; that ‘draws’ and doesn’t compel, 122; and force, 95, 209; as force, 83, 99, 210; full, 5, 69, 209; gentle, 4, 5; versus teaching

and delighting, 64; through the emotions, 18, 58, 64, 104, 105, 210 I Peter, 141 Petrarch: Secretum, 47, Petrarchism, 69 phantasiae or visions, 61; euphantasiotos, 61 Philippians, 254n1 Phryne, 58 physician, 32, 35, 38, 41, 55, 57, 71; versus counselor, 40; poet as, 73 Piers, Gerhard, 262n68 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 245nn63, 64 Pilate, 124 pity, 22, 26, 29, 36, 40, 53, 65, 68, 71, 100–1; and difference, 101; extreme, 148; feminine, 102; indignation and, 121; and likeness, 100; pitiless laws, 22, 29, 32, 81; stirring, 96 plain-speaking versus euphemism, 124 Plato, 61, 85; and anger, 108; Phaedrus, 184, 193, 245n76; platonic ascent to ideas, 69; Republic, 86, 100, 129; Sophist, 236n29; Symposium, 190 Platonic/Aristotelian framework of emotion, 159 Pliny, 149, 155 Plutarch, 15, 31, 32, 35, 38, 39, 56, 167–8, 185, 223nn66, 67, 73, 74, 225n8, 229n61, 245n68, 249n25, 262n54; ‘How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend,’ 14, 33, 110, 211; The philosophie commonly called the morals, 14, 33, 35, 38, 42 Pocock, J.G.A., 234n4 poetry, poet, 55–75; versus divine, 69, 70; English, 67; healing or killing,

Index 57; heavenly, 69; to make poiein, 62; and orator, 73; as physician or counselor, 16, 55, 73; ‘right’ poet, 55, 69, 70, 74; use and abuse of, 55; sick, 55, 67 politics of emotion, 76–105 Polypus, 92–3 precept, 62–3 Presbyterian(s), 110, 112, 115–16, 125 Prescott, Anne Lake, 64, 237nn43, 44, 238nn71, 72, 239n78, 240n9 Primaudaye, Pierre de La, 31, 56, 81, 91, 149, 185; on causes and boundaries of emotion, 151–2; The French Academie, 15, 33, 35, 38, 217n3, 223n76, 228n52, 229n64, 230n80, 231n82, 241n24, 245n61 Protestant ‘office,’ 12 Protestants, 7, 12, 13, 15, 21, 30, 33, 34, 42, 51, 55, 57, 60, 63, 110, 112– 14, 120, 126, 155, 157, 205, 209; beliefs, 5, 63; counsel, 157, 215; discourse of honour, 171, 199; English, 7, 11, 12, 15, 109, 111–15, 147; extreme happiness or misery, 148–9, 157; and fallen conscience, 186–7; and humanists, 14, 15, 18; versus humanists 30, 42; ideals of, 99; and imagination 147–8; and marriage, 175–6, 199–200, 201; in sermons, 141; writers, writings, 4, 5, 31, 98, 139, 140, 141, 189–96, 201 Proverbs, 252n69 Providence, 30 Puttenham, George: The Arte of English Poesie, 133, 234n5, 254n21, 261n47 Quint, David, 178, 202, 202, 224n77,

289

243n35, 246n90, 249nn31, 33, 255n29, 256n40, 259n23, 262n59, 264n13, 269n92, 270n103 Quintilian, 56, 58, 61–2, 67, 73, 211; fantasies (visiones), 147, 151, 156; Institutio Oratoria, 234n9, 235nn16, 17, 236n28, 239nn73, 74, 259n16, 261n52; on orator’s identification with the audience, 167 Radzinowicz, Mary Ann, 261n42 Rainholde, Richard, 261n47 Rainolds, John, 27–8, 56, 57, 211, 219n15; John Rainolds’s Oxford Lectures on Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric,’ 23, 28, 58–9, 226n14, 227n30, 234n10, 235n14, 271n1; The overthrow of stage-playes, 58, 235n18 Raitiere, Martin N., 240n11, 241n12, 243n41 Raylor, Timothy, 218n6 reason, 39, 40, 50, 56, 68, 193, 199– 200, 207, 209, 215; and emotion, 39, 66, 199; and passion, 44 Rebholz, Ronald A., 255n36 Rebhorn, Wayne A., 4, 20, 55, 218n12, 224n1, 225n9, 227n44, 234n4, 245n62, 261nn45, 47; The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 55, 271n2 Redfield, James, 135, 246n77, 255n27, 259n24 Reformation and zeal, 123 religion, 77; controversy, 9, 110, 216; in France, 79; religious conflict and honour, 115; religious warfare, 19 Remy, Nicholas, 258n4 Revard, Stella P., 256nn41, 44, 262n61, 268n73, 269n94, 271nn112, 116 rhetoric, 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23,

290

Index

27, 39, 40, 55, 59, 63, 64, 65, 73, 84, 94, 104, 106, 107, 110, 115, 121, 146–57, 170, 174, 178, 211, 214; classical, 60; and force, 4, 5, 88. See also Aristotle; Cicero; Quintilian Ribner, Irving, 240n12, 243n41 Rich, Penelope, 244n59 ridiculous or scornful, the, 72–4, 123, 124. See also laughter Ringler, William A., Jr: The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 221n48 rivalry, rivals, 77, 87–8, 89, 91, 107, 214; emotion and, 91, 94, 205–6, 213. See also faction; honour Robertson, D.W., Jr, 224n3 Robertson, David, 262n60, 265nn34, 35 Robertson, Jean, 225n4 Rogers, John, 221n50, 255n29, 260n33, 261n42 Roman Catholic Humanists, 15, 111 Roman(s), 71, 115, 117, 254n18 Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg, 220n28, 229n65 Roscius, 28 Rose, Mary Beth, 246n80, 247n93, 267n70 Rossky, William, 235n21 Rowe, Katherine, 6, 217n6, 218nn18, 20, 225n5; Reading the Early Modern Passions, 6 Rubin, Gayle, 243n50, 244nn52, 53; ‘The Traffic in Women,’ 87–8 Rudenstine, Neil L., 37, 230nn70, 72 ruler/ruled, 17, 25, 44, 46, 99; despotic versus political, 95; in marriage, 95, 98, 100 Rumrich, John Peter, 13, 128, 132, 222n63, 237n51, 253nn4, 11, 254n17, 257n56, 259n23

Sadducees, 113 Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 79 Samuel, Irene, 252n68 Satan: belief in, 111, 142, 146, 147; danger of, 198; in sorrow, 192; as tempter, 148 Scipio, 179 Schleiner, Winfried, 231n82 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 262n2, 271n113 Scodel, Joshua, 6, 14, 45, 204, 219n22, 223n64, 232n99, 243n40, 256nn38, 40, 262nn63, 64, 65, 264n14, 269nn89, 93; on Adam and Eve’s lack of a proper sense of self-worth, 178, 180; on moderate pleasure, 196; on shame and selfrespect, 171–2 scorn, 129, 212; and delight, 212; and righteousness, 131, 133 Sedgewick, Eve, 87–8, 243n50 self, 6, 12, 13, 16, 18, 31, 33, 55, 96, 147, 167, 172–4, 175, 214; autonomous self-hood, 90, 97, 99; boundaries of, 147; as company, 181–4, 185; as contested site, 21; dialogic, 94; fluctuating, 214; as friend, 181, 205; as hell, 156, 158; self-division, 170, 175, 187; self-esteem, 14, 192; self-knowledge, 42, 46, 54, 70, 72, 149–50, 155, 185; self-love, 42, 54, 56, 57, 59, 74, 168; self respect, 45– 6, 172; as source of honour, 45–6 Selincourt, Aubrey de, 226n25 Seneca, 172, 230n69 service, 96–7, 102; versus servitude, 83 Servius Sulpitius Galba, 58 Shakespeare, William: King Lear, 93, 246n82; Othello, 98, 246n81 shame, 6, 14, 35, 46, 47, 50, 56, 63, 65,

Index 71–2, 73, 74, 115, 204, 211; Adam’s, 171–4; in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, 171; cycles of shame and despair, 208; Eve’s, 147, 171–4; healing of, 206– 7; inward, 51, 171–4, 214; linked to embarrassment (Vives), 171; and loss of virtue, 173; and phantasia about dishonour, 171; Satan’s dread of, 182; as self-rejection, 171; and self-respect, 172; unbounded, 146 Shannon, Laurie, 14, 21, 34, 176, 218n13, 219n14, 223nn65, 67, 69, 225nn6, 10, 228nn49, 58, 59, 232nn104, 106, 233n111, 244n58, 245n70, 263n4, 265n36, 266nn45, 46, 49, 271n3 sharp speech, 35 Shuger, Debora K., 4, 22, 25–6, 63, 218n9, 222n64, 225n9, 226nn12, 22, 27, 227n36, 236n39, 237nn42, 43, 238n67, 252n65, 262n63, 271n2 Sidney, Mary [Herbert], Countess of Pembroke, 53 Sidney, Sir Philip, 3, 4, 7, 11, 12–19, 34, 55–75, 106, 185, 220n29, 230n71, 231nn81, 88, 232n94, 240nn8, 11, 12, 241n14, 242n30, 243n37; and birth of Leicester’s son, 245nn66, 76; as republican, 243n44 – WORKS: Arcadia(s), 11, 19, 107, 137, 175, 179, 184, 187, 208, 216; ‘Astrophil and Stella,’ 67–8, 237n54, 244n59; The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Old Arcadia), 3, 8, 12–13, 16, 20–53, 54, 57, 59, 69, 76, 97, 99, 101, 107, 210, 213, 217n1, 225n4, 226n27, 228n57, 230nn73, 81, 233n113, 244n56; — trial scene in, 56, 57, 203–4, 210;

291

The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (New Arcadia), 8, 9, 16, 17, 18, 48, 57, 58, 74, 76–105, 121, 133–5, 141, 146, 157, 161, 212, 214, 239n79, 242nn30, 31, 243n37, 246nn83, 91, 260n30; ‘Defence of the Earl of Leicester,’ 15, 107, 223nn71, 72; ‘A Defence of Poetry,’ 16, 54–75, 77, 102, 227n45, 234n5, 236n33, 238n66, 240n9, 271n117; — imagination in, 17, 147, 211, 212; Sonnets, 90 – CHARACTERS: Amphialus, 78, 79, 83, 87, 89, 92, 96, 100; — fallen memory of, 157, 243n41, 245n69; Anaxius, 58, 102, 103; Andromana, 83, 93, 141; Argalus, 83, 84, 86, 88– 9, 99; Artaxia, 83; Astrophil, 67; Basilius, 12, 22, 26, 28–31, 37, 40, 42, 48–50, 77, 88, 91, 92, 96, 97, 101, 104; Cecropia, 78, 83, 88, 91– 2, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102, 134; — and envy, 142; Chremes, 83; Cleophila (Pyrocles), 30, 37, 39, 41, 42; Clinias, 93, 95; Daiphantus (Pyrocles), 97; Daiphantus (Zelmane), 96, 97; Dametas, 48, 57; Demagoras, 84, 86, 88, 89, 99; Dido, 83, 90–1; Euarchus, 12–13, 22, 29, 59, 60, 101; Gynecia, 18, 25, 28–9, 42, 48–50, 97, 101; — fallen memory of, 157; Helen, 93; Kalender, 77, 79–82, 97, 104; Kalodoulos, 12, 26; Kerxenus, 13, 22, 25, 27, 29, 83, 97; King of Iberia, 93; King of Phrygia, 104; Lady Artesia, 87–8; Leonatus, 93; Lycurgus, 102–3; Miso, 57; Mopsa, 57; Musidorus, 12–13, 16, 20–2, 24, 25, 27–8, 32, 51–3, 57, 59, 65, 76–7, 81–3, 85, 86, 96, 97, 102–3, 104–5, 208, 211, 213, 245n76; Palladius,

292

Index

80; Pamela, 24, 26, 28, 42, 46, 47, 51–3, 58, 68, 92, 96, 97, 99, 102; Pamphilus, 91, 161; Parthenia, 83, 84, 86, 88–9, 99, 103; Phalantus of Corinth, 87; Philonax, 12, 13, 18, 21–2, 24, 26, 48, 57, 104; Philoxenus, 83, 93; Plangus, 93–4; Plexirtus, 93, 96; Pyrocles, 12–13, 20, 21, 22, 24–9, 31, 36, 51–3, 57, 65, 68, 76–7, 85, 86, 96, 97, 101, 102–3, 208, 211, 213; Strephon and Claius, 77, 81–2, 97, 100, 105; Sympathus, 27, 212; Timautus, 21; Zelmane (Pyrocles’ page), 97, 103; Zelmane (Pyrocles disguised), 83, 97, 101–3 Simon, Elliott M., 227n41 Sinfield, Alan, 219n2, 233n114, 234n7, 238nn63, 66, 240n12 Singer, Milton B., 262n68 Skinner, Quentin, 239n75 slight, 242nn29, 31 Smectymnuuns, 110, 125, 249n24 Smith, Sir Thomas, 100, 246n84 Soarez, Cypriano: De Arte, 166, 261n48 society. See solitude solitude, 2, 8, 17–18, 33–43, 44, 106, 107, 178, 179–84, 200, 206, 207, 213; and company, 16, 39, 76, 184, 207; and conversation, 18–19; versus conversation, 174; discourse of solitude and society, 42, 181, 200–1; and friendship, 176; for the learned, 181–2; and loneliness, 176–7; and marriage, 179, 190–4; miserable, 104, 185; radical, 147, 178–9, 185, 187, 188, 192, 213, 215; as space for deep thoughts, 181–4; and temptation, 202–3, 215; and wisdom, 184; Solomen, 117, 123

sorrow, 31, 38, 41, 43, 65, 77, 82, 105, 157; at loss, 192–3; sadness versus joy, 65 Sousa, Ronald de, 229n65, 245nn71, 72 speaking picture, 62, 98 spectacle, 57–9, 72, 211 Speght, Rachel, 169–70, 262n59 Speer, Diane Parkin, 247n10, 250n44 Spenser, Edmund, 11, 120, 240n8; The Faerie Queene, 9, 48, 59, 144, 221n38; ‘The Teares of the Muses,’ 239n6 Stavely, Keith, 186, 265n40 Steadman, John M., 13, 222n62, 259n23, 260n39, 261n46, 265n42 Stillman, Robert E., 60, 70, 229n66, 231n86, 235n23, 238n65 Stoic thought, 9, 12, 46, 51, 52, 68; apatheia, 97; integrity, 208; magnanimity, 97; Neostoicism, 45; proper shame, 172 Stone, Lawrence, 241n16 Strier, Richard, 6, 14, 175, 222n64, 225n5, 226n23, 228n48, 231n87, 233n109, 246n82, 262n63, 263n2, 264n14, 271n118 Striker, Gisela, 220n28 Stuart, Mary, 9 styles, 121; appropriate to topic and objective, 121; diversity of styles and persons, 122; grand, 64; Sullivan, Margaret M., 246n93 Sullivan, Mary, 231n82 Summers, Clyde J., 255n30 Summers, Joseph H., 111, 204, 270n109 supplication, 205–6, 216 suspicion, 48, 57, 94, 213 sympathy, 10, 42, 82; versus judg-

Index ment, 54, 70; Sympathus, New Arcadia, 22 Talbert, E.W., 240n12 Tambonneau, M. and Mme, 79 Tarquin, 58 Taylor, C.C.W., 262n67 teaching, 60; delightful, 73–4; teach, delight, and move, 60, 66, 122 temptation, 139, 203–4 Thum, Maureen, 248n20, 251n51 Tillyard, E.M.W., 239n1 Todd, Margo, 266n48 tolerationists, 110, 112, 123 topoi, 12, 16–17, 23–4; distorted, 147, 168–9, 186; of emotion, 6, 8, 9, 16, 18, 24, 106, 141, 187, 209, 210, 213, 214; Homeric and Aristotelian, 143–5, 208, 215; moderating, 112; versus one-sided use of, 17, 18, 105; reshaped by writers, 210, 213; twosided contrasting, 77, 80, 210 truth, 43, 50, 54, 55, 60, 62, 63, 64, 117, 120, 127, 163, 186, 187, 203; and emotion, 5, 63; competition for, 108, 114, 128, 185, 199–203; and error, 75, 112, 113–14, 125–7, 128, 205; and lies, 115; and rivalry, 107; vigorous debate and, 125–45, 198, 203; need to test, the, 139, 202–3 Tung, Mason, 253n7 Turner, James Grantham, 218n13, 228n58 Turner, Victor, 244n5

293

Vickers, Brian, 222n54, 264n19 Vives, Juan Luis, 259n19; Ioannes Lodovicus Vives, De anima et vita, 238n69; The Office and Duetie of an Husband, 246n78; The Passions of the Soul, 219n17, 220n30, 221n44, 231n84, 238nn69, 70, 72, 239n77, 241n23, 246n86, 257nn51, 52, 54, 259n17, 262nn62, 66 Waldock, A.J.A., 253n9, 265n38 Wallace, Malcolm William, 241n14 Walsh, George B., 268n81 Walwyn, William, 214, 249n34, 250n36, 252n74 Walzer, Michael, 221n52, 233n2, 241n13, 243nn38, 39 Weinberg, Bernard, 224n2 Weiner, Andrew, 219n21, 233n114, 234n7, 236n34, 238n63 Werman, Golda, 262n1 Wilding, Michael, 253n13, 255n34 Wilson, Sir Thomas: The Arte of Rhetorique, 217n1, 224n3, 227n34, 238n72 Wolfe, Don M., 248n20, 251nn50, 52, 53 Wood, Nancy Hagglund, 168, 203, 224n81, 247n2, 248n16, 258n3, 262nn52, 53, 56, 57, 270nn95, 101, 106 Worden, Blair, 226n13, 230nn73, 75 Wright, Herbert G., 264nn19, 20 Wright, Thomas: The Passions of the Minde in Generall, 235n21

Ustick, W. Lee, 257n46

Yates, Frances A., 242n26

Valla, Lorenzo, 238n61 Vicari, E. Patricia, 223n75, 258n12

Zwicker, Stephen N., 251n56