The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on July 7, 2007
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgm039
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press 2007; all rights reserved
‘Like a Hand in the Margine of a Booke’: William Blount's Marginalia and the Politics of Sidney's Arcadia1
Newcastle University
This article examines an unusually full set of contemporary manuscript marginalia in a copy of the 1593 edition of Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia in the Folger Shakespeare Library, most likely written by William Blount, seventh Lord Mountjoy. The marginalia demonstrate a considerable interest in the political dimension of the Arcadia, particularly in relation to Tacitus's histories, which were associated with the circle of the Earl of Essex in the 1590s. Nowhere, however, do they make an explicit connection between Sidney's work and contemporary politics. Moreover, the annotations indicate that Blount's interest in the Arcadia was by no means confined to politics and that he considered other themes independently of it. The largest group of marginalia in fact concerns ethics, and many deal with love. Blount used narrative parallels, particularly from the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid, to explore the feelings of characters, especially women, but he was also enthused by erotic passages and included some misogynist comments. This response of a contemporary of Sidney complicates and questions recent critics’ accounts of the politics of Sidney's Arcadia and suggests an interpretation that highlights the rich variety and complexity of the work.
To the unsuspecting reader Sir Philip Sidney's pastoral romance, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, may at first appear to be a simple escapist fiction, presenting, as it does, an idealised bucolic world, a sanctuary from the troubles of everyday life, with love and poetry the main pursuits. As critics since Edwin Greenlaw at the beginning of the last century have been at pains to point out, however, the events of the public or political world are never far from the surface. Exactly what the nature and importance of these political concerns are has remained a moot point. Greenlaw himself, followed more recently by Blair Worden, pointed towards the relation between the characters and events of Sidney's romance and the political situation in England around the time of its composition (c. 1580), specifically the proposed marriage of Queen Elizabeth with the Catholic French nobleman François, duc d’Alençon, which was vehemently opposed by Sidney.2 In particular, they argued that Basilius's neglect of his duties as a ruler is intended as a parallel to Elizabeth's failure to support the Protestant cause on the Continent. Many other critics have instead focussed on the attitude of the work towards various forms of resistance and rebellion. While it has been maintained by some that the Arcadia embraces the orthodox Tudor view that rebellion to a ruler is illegal under any circumstances,3 the majority have argued that it reflects the position of the French Huguenots (with many of whom Sidney was in contact), which condoned resistance under certain circumstances.4 Whatever their exact views on the politics of the Arcadia,5 these critics have implicitly or explicitly asserted its importance to our understanding of the work, and the focus of both criticism and teaching has increasingly been on its political import.6 The most successful interpretations of the Arcadia have always been sensitive to other aspects of the work and have attempted to relate them to its political theme. Nevertheless, they too have maintained that politics are, in the words of one critic, ‘the guiding thread’ of Sidney's fiction.7
To support their claim that politics are central to the Arcadia, and (to a lesser extent) to discover the nature of its public concerns and its relation to the other themes of the work, critics have frequently turned to the comments of Sidney's contemporaries, particularly those of his lifelong friend and companion Fulke Greville, who strongly emphasised the political dimension of the work in ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’ (c. 1610–12).8 More recently, Blair Worden has added to Greville's remarks the responses of three other contemporaries, which, he argued, ‘disclose an alertness to the political dimension of the work’: a description of the state of England just before the death of Queen Mary in 1558 in the history of the first 4 years of the reign of Elizabeth by Sir John Hayward (written c. 1611), which is based on Sidney's account of the situation of Arcadia after the supposed death of King Basilius; a manuscript commonplace-book with extracts from the Arcadia and classical and humanist historians and poets belonging to a close relation of Sir Philip Sidney's brother Robert, surviving among the Sidney family papers; and a copy of the 1593 edition of the Arcadia with contemporary manuscript marginalia now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.9 What Worden does not mention in his brief survey of these sources is that the Folger volume is one of the most heavily annotated copies, not just of Sidney's Arcadia but of any literary text in the vernacular of the period. As such it promises a unique insight into the response of a contemporary of Sidney to the work. In particular, this rare survival might offer us a new perspective on the exact nature of the politics of Sidney's romance and their importance to the design of the work as a whole, as well as on the various other aspects of the work and their relation to its public concerns.10
The Folger Arcadia has annotations in the margins throughout, mainly consisting of quotations from classical authors in Latin, but with passages in English, Greek and Italian as well. The large majority of marginalia are in a single small but neat italic hand, although there are a few in different, apparently later, hands. The passage in the text to which a note refers is often marked with an asterisk, and other signs, including flowers and manicula (pointing hands), and underlinings are also used.11 In addition, there are two indices at the end of the book in the same hand as the majority of the marginalia: an ‘Index rerum’, or general index to the characters and themes of the work, and an index listing the first line of each poem in the order in which it appears in the work, under the title ‘The beginning of euerie poeme’.12 The volume has a number of different ownership marks, including ‘Dorothy Wylde’, ‘Mary Wylde’, ‘John Wylde’, ‘dorothye hales’ (crossed out) and ‘Bridget Shepheard’.13 It seems, however, that the author of the annotations was called ‘W. Blount’, for that name appears in the centre of the title-page in the same hand as the marginalia (Fig. 1).14 Blount's name is found under the Latin phrase ‘Ter pulcrum est, quod ter lectum placet’ (what pleases read thrice is thrice beautiful), apparently an adaptation of the proverb ‘Bis, ac ter, quod pulchrum est’ (what is beautiful, should be repeated twice or thrice) and its discussion in Desiderius Erasmus's Adagia (1500–1536), a work that is also quoted elsewhere in the marginalia.15 The quotation clearly expresses Blount's admiration for the work, as do the marginalia and the index, which reflect a careful, and indeed multiple, reading of the work.
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The marginalia quote from and refer to at least seven books published in the 1580s and early 1590s, but not apparently to any printed after 1592.16 This strongly suggests that they were made shortly after the publication of the volume in 1593.17 It is possible therefore that ‘W. Blount’ was William Blount, seventh Lord Mountjoy (c. 1561–1594). Mountjoy came from a family known for its interest in books and its support of humanist learning.18 In particular, Samuel Daniel in A Funerall Poem Vppon the Death of the late noble Earle of Deuonshyre commends his younger brother Charles for his habit of annotating books:
thou hadst not bookes as many haueCompared to the other members of his illustrious family very little is known about the seventh Lord Mountjoy. Like his brother, and many other noblemen of the period, he may have attended Oxford for some time without gaining a degree, although there is no evidence that, like Charles, he attended one of the Inns of Court afterwards. William was certainly already in London and well established at court when Charles arrived there towards the end of the 1570s.20 He apparently lived a life of debauchery: Camden claimed he died ‘hauing too much weakened his body by his vntemperate youthfulnesse’.21 But there is some evidence that he shared his family's enthusiasm for literature in a surviving copy of Henry Estienne's Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus's classic of ancient scepticism,For ostentation, but for vse ...
Witnesse so many volumes whereto thou
Hast set thy notes vnder thy learned hand,
And markt them with that print as will shew how
The point of thy conceiuing thoughts did stand.19
(1562). This volume has the name ‘William Blounte’ on the front fly-leaf and ‘Carolus Blounte’, evidently his brother, on the title-page.22 The volume contains some marking and underlining, for which William may have been responsible, if—as is quite likely—he originally owned the book and then left it to Charles.23 Whereas many of the individual letter forms of the quotations on the front fly-leaf are similar to those of the marginalia in the Sidney volume, the general style of the handwriting and a few letters, as well as the signature itself, are significantly different. The size of the writing sample is very small, however, and it is impossible to know at which times and under what circumstances the two sets of writing were created and how Blount's hand might have developed.24 We cannot be certain of Lord Mountjoy's authorship of the annotations, then, but in the absence of more plausible alternatives he remains the most likely candidate.25 Turning from the question of the authorship of the marginalia to their content, it is clear that Blount was indeed quite attentive to the politics of Sidney's Arcadia. Some of the most densely annotated sections are those dealing with political themes, and throughout the text Blount responds to descriptions of the actions of princes, the behaviour of subjects and courtiers, and the state of the commonwealth. In the index too he lists several aspects of the government of Arcadia and other Greek states, for example Helen ‘her admirable gouerment’, ‘The enuious Counceller of the King of Pontus’ and ‘Diuisions amongst the Arcadians’.26 Three sections of the book in particular attracted his comment: the description of an ideal king in Euarchus, the following portrayal of evil rulers in the kings of Phrygia and Pontus, and the rebellion of the Arcadian people. Book five also has a significant number of political notes. It deals with the civil disorder following the apparent death of Basilius; the entry of Euarchus, king of Macedon and father of Pyrocles, into Arcadia; the trial of Pyrocles, Musidorus and Gynecia, at which Euarchus sits as a judge; and the conviction of the defendants and their subsequent acquittal when Basilius revives.
Blount's notes are drawn from a variety of sources, and he clearly found no contradiction in taking authoritative statements on politics from what may appear unlikely sources to modern readers, such as Ovid's collection of verse letters Epistulae ex Ponto.27 The great majority, however, derive from histories. Blount quotes a few passages from Livy and a single one from Sallust and from the late fifteenth-century Italian historian Paulus Aemilius Veronensis, but by far most are taken from Tacitus. Rather than quoting from that author's more famous and compendious Annals, Blount confines himself entirely to the first and fourth books of the Histories and the Agricola. His choice is readily explained by a mention of ‘Sauill in his notes vppon Tacit.’ in one of the marginalia, referring to the translation and commentary of the first four books of Tacitus's Histories and the Agricola published by the Oxford scholar Sir Henry Savile in 1591.28 Blount usually quotes from the Latin text, which he evidently read alongside Savile's version.
His choice to apply the work of Tacitus and his modern commentator to Sidney's Arcadia is significant. In contrast to most other classical authors, Tacitus had been relatively neglected during the revival of classical literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but there was a sharp change in his reputation around 1580.29 The most influential figure in this transformation was the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius, who published an edition of Tacitus in 1575 and a book of political philosophy indebted to that author, Politicorum, sive civilis doctrinae libri sex—also quoted by Blount30—in 1589. In England interest in Tacitus reached its zenith in the circle of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, in the last decade of the sixteenth century. Savile was a protégé of Essex, and it was claimed that the Earl composed the letter to the readers of his translation of Tacitus. It is not surprising therefore that Savile's work reflected and influenced the political views and actions of the Earl of Essex and his followers in a number of ways.31 Tacitus's revelation of the secret political scheming of courtiers may have contributed to Essex's increasing distrust of his rivals at the court of Queen Elizabeth. Savile's sympathetic portrayal of Julius Vindex, the instigator of a successful rebellion against Nero, the legitimate ruler of the Roman Empire, in his addition to Tacitus's history, ‘The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba’, further shows the interest in theories of resistance and tyrannicide in the Essex circle in the early 1590s, whatever its exact relationship to Essex's own failed rebellion against Elizabeth in 1601. And in its portrayal of Vindex and Julius Agricola the Savile volume explored the heroic combination of military strategy and political nous that allowed these military leaders to take control in a state of anarchy. This picture of the noble and successful military leader who combines resourcefulness with energetic action surely appealed to the politician and general Essex. Moreover, Essex was the successor of the Earl of Leicester as the leader of the forward Protestant faction in England and heir to Leicester's nephew Philip Sidney as the ‘knightly champion of England's participation in the defence of international protestantism’.32 As a result, many of the interests and concerns of the Essex circle, as reflected in the Savile volume, were also shared by Sidney and Leicester. Sidney was in fact one of the first people in England to show an interest in Tacitus and the new ‘politic’ history, and some critics have detected their influence on the Arcadia.33 A suspicion of the court, the cult of the aristocratic hero, and an interest in theories of resistance were shared by Sidney, Leicester and their followers, and these preoccupations undoubtedly left their mark on the Arcadia.
Blount's quotations from Tacitus in the margins of Sidney's Arcadia reflect a number of the themes of the Savile volume. When he encounters descriptions of dissembling and flattering courtiers in the Arcadia, he frequently quotes similar passages from Tacitus's narrative. Most notable is his reference to Savile's note on Tacitus's phrase ‘The most capitall kinde of enemies, commenders’, which is written in the margin of Sidney's account of Andromana.34 By praising her stepson Plangus's majesty, his fitness to rule, and his esteem with the people of the country Andromana falsely insinuated that he intended to overthrow the government of his father, the king of Iberia. Tacitus uses the oxymoronic expression to which Blount refers to describe the actions of courtiers who provoked Domitian's jealousy by highly praising Agricola, who had pacified the Roman province of Britain, for qualities which the emperor himself notably lacked. Savile explained:
aboue all other kindes of commendations, that toucheth most nearly, & worketh most danger, where the quality commended breedeth not onely loue, but admiration also generally among the meane people; as militar [sic] renowne, magnanimity, patronage of iustice against al oppressions & wrongs, magnificence & other Heroical vertues properly belonging, or chiefly beseeming the Princes person ... there it worketh both most speedily, and dangerously, where the Prince ... is a witnes to himselfe of his owne weaknes.35This had a particular resonance for Essex, a powerful military leader who blamed the Queen's distrust of him on the machinations of courtiers jealous of his nobility and heroism.36 It is noticeable, then, that Blount should find these issues reflected in Sidney's fiction, even if criticism of the duplicity and scheming of courtiers was a common topic in sixteenth-century England and specific neither to Tacitus and ‘politic’ historians nor to Essex and his followers.
On a number of occasions Blount applies Tacitus's descriptions of dynamic military leaders who take control of a situation of civil unrest through vigorous military and political action to Sidney's narrative. In the margin of Sidney's description of the lawlessness and anarchy of Macedon before Euarchus came to the throne, for example, Blount quotes Tacitus's comment on the situation of Britain when Agricola first came to the island.37 Agricola quickly reduced an ungovernable country to order through decisive action, just as Euarchus did. While Agricola was a soldier, however, Euarchus was a monarch, who established his authority through the application of justice rather than military force. Furthermore, when Blount quotes a passage describing a similar situation elsewhere, ‘Mucianus entered the city and took everything into his own hands’, it is not only once more in allusion to Euarchus (who has by this time been appointed regent of Arcadia following the apparent death of Basilius) but also refers to an opportunistic and morally flawed character.38 Blount's interest in the qualities and actions of military commanders is, moreover, not confined to his quotations from Tacitus. His most sustained engagement with the office of a general comes in the passage that describes Amphialus preparing to lead an army into battle. Quoting from Livy, Martial and Plato, he explores the different dispositions of soldiers and the need to fit the office to the inclination, the consequent need for a commander to know his men well, and the proper behaviour of a leader in front of his subordinates.39 The dubious moral probity of Amphialus and Mucianus and the lack of agreement between the descriptions of the military commanders of Tacitus's history and the monarchs of Sidney's romance suggest that Blount was more interested in the actions of military and political leaders per se than in the connection of their actions with honour and heroism in Sidney's romance. These facts also question the extent to which he believed the characters of the Arcadia to be the kind of bold military hero that Sidney was portrayed as and which Essex aspired to be.
Perhaps the most striking notes in Blount's commentary are those which commend Pyrocles and Musidorus slaying the tyrants of Phrygia and Pontus. In the first episode, Musidorus is on the scaffold waiting to be executed at the command of the king of Phrygia when the servant of the executioner unveils himself as Pyrocles. The two princes fight against the guards to deliver themselves from captivity. In the resulting confusion a rumour spreads that the king is slain, and the people cry ‘Libertie’ and turn on the guards and soldiers ‘as chiefe instruments of Tyrannie’.40 They make Musidorus their captain, and when they discover that the king is still alive, they march against him with Musidorus at their head. In the ensuing battle Musidorus kills the king, drawing the response from Blount (quoting Tacitus) that ‘the first day after the death of an evil ruler is best’ (Fig. 2).41 Immediately afterwards the princes raise an army against the king of Pontus, who has executed their servants Nelsus and Leucippus. They conquer the country and slay the king on the tomb of their servants. Most of the people revolt in support of the princes, and they offer Pyrocles the throne. Blount comments, quoting Seneca: ‘no liquid more welcome could have stained the altars; hardly any greater or more glorious victim can be sacrificed to Jupiter than an unjust king!’.42 It is important to emphasise how unusual it was for anyone in Tudor England to defend rebellion against a legitimate ruler and how far Blount's comments differed from the official line of the regime.43
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Blount did not apparently interpret the Arcadia as supporting armed resistance under all circumstances, however, and his views in fact seem to have been rather conflicted. He consistently reinforces the critical portrayal of the armed rising of the commons against Basilius at the end of the second book, quoting from Tacitus's Histories to emphasise the point that the rebels simply wanted a change of regime rather than having a principled preference for one governor over another and observing that in situations of civil disorder the worst men have the greatest power.44 He particularly criticises the fact that it was a popular rebellion, underlining Clinias's rhetorical question ‘O weake trust of the many-headed multitude, whom inconstancie onely doth guide to wel doing: who can set confidence there, where company takes away shame, and ech may lay the fault on his fellow?’ and quoting Cicero's reflection that ‘the common people lack deliberation; they lack reason; they lack insight; they lack industry’.45 He thus appears to follow suggestions in the text to draw a distinction between orderly rebellions under the leadership of the nobility, which could be justified, and unorganised popular rebellion, which could not.46 Yet, one of Blount's later comments seems not so much to qualify the idea that he read Sidney's Arcadia as a defence of rebellion and tyrannicide as to contradict it. In the margin of the description of Pyrocles and Musidorus as ‘Princes absolute, a sacred name’ Blount has recorded Plutarch's observation that ‘princes are the ministers of God on earth for the care of the people's health and happiness, to distribute and protect God's gifts to them’.47 This elaboration of Sidney's statement puts a much stronger emphasis on the divine nature of kingship, and thus seems to imply that rulers are beyond reproach by their subjects. This is diametrically opposed to the position that subjects can revoke the power they have delegated to their ruler under certain circumstances.
Whatever Blount's exact view on the legitimacy of resistance and tyrannicide in the Arcadia, it is clear that his charge against the kings of Phrygia and Pontus, who he calls ‘evil’ and ‘unjust and wicked’, is wholly moral, not political. As David Womersley has pointed out, Savile's ‘The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba’ is unusual in presenting a case against the Emperor Nero that is based not so much on his cruelty as on the weakness of his government.48 While he presumably read Savile's addition to Tacitus's history, Blount nowhere quotes from it. In fact, his interpretation of the politics of Sidney's work is thoroughly moral throughout. Besides the accounts of the kings of Pontus and Phrygia, one of the few sections dealing with political issues which Blount heavily annotates is the one dealing with the exemplary good king Euarchus (Greek for ‘good ruler’).49 He also condemns war for the bloodshed it causes to a prince's subjects (even if he condones ‘just’, i.e. morally justified, and ‘necessary’ war) and criticises the use of terror to induce fear rather than justice to engender love in subjects.50 This moral conception of politics is further reflected in some of the texts from which Blount quotes, such as Erasmus's In principe requiri doctrinam (That education is essential to a ruler), a Latin version of one of the essays from Plutarch's Moralia.51 In analysing the politics of Sidney's Arcadia Blount appears to have subsumed the pragmatic view of politics of Savile and Tacitus (who is more concerned with analysing the causes of historical events than with apportioning praise or blame) under the ethical conception of politics of the humanists of the early sixteenth century. In fact, Tudor readers did not necessarily see a contradiction between the two: it was commonly believed that Tacitus, and even Machiavelli, intended to expose the stratagems of evil rulers, and thus had a moral thrust as well.52
Finally, it is important to note what Blount did not comment on in his marginalia. In particular, he fails to respond to the political allegory of the beast fable ‘On Ister Bank’, which has played a central role in recent critical discussion about Sidney's attitude to tyranny and rebellion.53 Even more remarkable is that Blount nowhere notes a contemporary figure, event, or date in the margin. It was not unusual for readers of the period to identify references to contemporary politics in the margin of works of literature. Annotations in a number of early editions of the other major Elizabethan epic, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590–1596), note the historical allegory of that poem, particularly in Book V, revealing for example that Una and Gloriana stand for Queen Elizabeth, Duessa is Roman Catholicism, the trial of Duessa at the court of Mercilla refers to the trial of Mary, queen of Scots, etc.54 Other works attracted similar annotations. One reader of the 1625 quarto edition of George Chapman's two-part tragedy The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, for example, drew analogies between the characters and events of that play and contemporary affairs.55 But readers of the Arcadia failed to note such analogies in Sidney's work. Apparently not one of the annotators in Heidi Brayman Hackel's survey of 151 surviving copies with marginalia by early readers identified characters in Sidney's romance with particular contemporary political figures or events.56 In fact, those few early modern readers who interpreted the work analogically did so with reference to the personal circumstances of the author, particularly his love life, not the political situation of Elizabeth's reign. In a manuscript commonplace-book Sir Francis Castillion, the son of Queen Elizabeth's Italian tutor John Baptist Castiglione, for instance, identified Pyrocles as Sidney, Musidorus as his friend Sir Edward Dyer, Philoclea as Penelope Rich (née Devereux), the ‘Stella’ of Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, and Pamela as her sister Dorothy.57 John Aubrey similarly revealed Pamela to be Dorothy and Philoclea Penelope, but he believed Musidorus and Pyrocles to stand for the two ladies’ husbands, the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Rich.58 That Blount did not view Sidney's romance as an allegory of the political situation around the time of the writing of the Arcadia, finally, is confirmed by his index entry for Basilius, which gives little sense of a ruler who puts his country in danger by indulging in private affection and failing to take action (rather than simply an unsuccessful lover, who happens also to be a king) and by his designation of Basilius as a ‘good king’ in one of the very few instances where he includes any words of his own in the annotations (rather than quoting others’) (Fig. 3).59
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Blount's notes reveal the nature and extent of the engagement of a contemporary of Sidney with the politics of the Arcadia. But they also show that his interest in the work was by no means confined to its political dimension. The single largest group of annotations is, in fact, concerned not with the organisation of the state or the acts of its ruler but with people's behaviour as private individuals. Ethics was of course, in various ways, related to politics. Both were part of what renaissance scholars understood as moral philosophy.60 As we have already seen, the good of the state was seen to depend on the character and behaviour of the prince. Likewise, the good of the commonwealth was considered to be the outcome of the virtuous behaviour of its citizens. This view is reflected in Blount's comment when Basilius is first introduced in the Arcadia: ‘It is easy to rule good subjects.’61 According to Blount's interpretation, the opposite was also true: failed states are characterised by the morally depraved behaviour not only of princes and their servants but also of private citizens. Thus, in Sidney's description of the general anarchy to which Macedon was subject prior to the accession of Euarchus Blount highlights the point that old men ‘long nusled in corruption, scorn[ed] them that would seeke reformation’ by quoting some verses from Horace's Epistles about the unwillingness of old men to accept change.62
Not all ethical annotations were related to politics, however. General truths and wise sayings on a wide variety of moral subjects are quoted. While some appear to derive directly from classical texts, including the moral works of Seneca, Cicero, Plutarch and Horace, as well as the less morally sound poetry of Ovid, Martial and Tibullus, many are clearly taken from printed commonplace-books such as Erasmus's Adagia, and they cover the whole range of topics usually treated in these compilations: virtue, poverty, justice, misfortune, faithfulness, etc.63 When, for example, Sidney describes one of the Arcadian gentleman Kalander's servants welcoming the shepherds Strephon and Claius ‘as men, who though they were poore, their maister greatly fauoured’, Blount quotes Seneca's statement that poverty is honest.64 Similarly, he accompanies Sidney's sententia (marked as such by inverted commas printed in the margin) ‘Hope is the fawning traitour of the mind, while vnder colour of friendship, it robbes it of his chiefe force of resolution’ with the comment ‘Plato said hopes are the dreams of those who are awake.’65 Naturally, some subjects are more prominent than others. There are several comments, for instance, about children and their relationship to their parents, which call attention to the centrality of filial relationships in both the main narrative and many of the subplots of the Arcadia. The notes also indicate the importance of the theme of friendship in Sidney's work. And Blount seems to have been particularly interested in old age, of which both the positive and negative attributes are explored at various points in the story of the Arcadia, and death, particularly in relation to the deliberations of Philoclea and Pamela when they are imprisoned by Cecropia and those of Musidorus and Pyrocles before their trial.66 The annotations also emphasise a stoical indifference to the adversity of fortune and the need to limit our desires, even if Blount seems to reject the notion of the Stoics that all sins are equally bad.67 Some of these themes clearly have political ramifications in the story of the Arcadia, but Blount rarely highlights this. In fact, it seems that he, in common with many other readers of the period, considered these pieces of moral wisdom largely in isolation from the contexts in which they appeared. By detaching them from their original framework in Sidney's romance he turned them into general truths that could be applied to his own life.68
The most prominent theme of the annotations, love, was often found in commonplace-books as well, and a number of annotations treat it in the context of its relationship to virtue and vice. In Musidorus's speech admonishing Pyrocles for his weakness and disregard of his duty in falling in love with Philoclea, Blount underlines the claim that love is ‘a passion, and the basest and fruitlessest of all passions’ and quotes from the discussion of the figure antitheton (‘the Quarreller’) in The Arte of English Poesie in the margin of Musidorus's denigrating description of the effects of love: ‘<A>nd as one wrate excel<l>entlie well. <H>is bent is sweete his loos is somewhat howre. <I>n ioy begunne ends oft in wofull howre. allegoricallie comparinge loue to a bowe’.69 In the same speech Blount also emphasises Musidorus's arguments about the public effects of Pyrocles's private affection by quoting two passages from the Roman military leader Scipio Africanus Maior's oration to his ally Masinissa, rebuking him for hastily marrying the wife of the defeated Numidian king, Sophonisba, to keep her out of the hands of the victorious Romans.70 Both Musidorus and Scipio argue that the temptations of love are like a hostile army attempting to overthrow our reason, and that men of such merit should not be overcome by such a weak threat. Blount's very first annotation to the text similarly draws attention to the harmful effects of love in the Arcadia, particularly on public affairs. When the shepherds Claius and Strephon ask rhetorically, ‘hath in any, but in [Urania], loue-fellowship maintained frindship between riuals’, he comments:
what the enmitie of riuals is, is shewed in many places of this book as betweene Pyrocles an<d> Amphialus Philox<e>nus & Amphialus, G<i>necia & her daughte<r> Philoclea &c. Howe odious it was in Tullies tyme. [Latin quotation from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations] Theagenes in Heliodorus had rather dye then suffer a riuall. [Greek quotation from Heliodorus's Aethiopica]71The destructive power of love is well illustrated in the mental anguish of Gynecia, who fruitlessly competes for Zelmane's (Pyrocles's) love with her own daughter, and in the death of Philoxenus, who challenges his companion Amphialus after he discovers that Queen Helen has fallen in love with him instead. But it is the case of Amphialus, whose love for Philoclea results in his rebellion against Basilius, which illustrates the potentially disastrous consequences of one person's love for the whole commonwealth.
If Blount's last note draws attention to the public consequences of love, it also shows an interest in the more private aspect of love in Sidney's exploration of its effect on the feelings of Philoxenus and Gynecia. And in its reference to Gynecia, it illustrates the focus of the notes on the effects of love on women in particular. This aspect of Blount's annotations is developed particularly in a series of references to Virgil's Aeneid. When Gynecia declares the contrary effects of Zelmane on her, for example, Blount quotes a description of the thoughts of a similarly perplexed character (Aeneas's rival Turnus) from a very different context in book 12 of Virgil's epic.72 The majority of quotations exploring female subjectivity, however, are derived from book 4 of the Aeneid, which deals with the love relationship of Dido and Aeneas. Despite the imperative of the story that Aeneas fulfil his destiny and the will of the gods by leaving Dido to found the new city of Rome, narrative sympathy is very much on the side of the queen, who eventually commits suicide, and the book offers a powerful exploration of the feelings of a woman in love. Quotations from Dido's speech at the opening of the fourth book of Virgil's epic are applied to the two princesses at crucial points in the narrative of the Arcadia. In the margin of Pamela's rhetorical question to her sister, Philoclea, ‘tell me whether you did euer see any thing so amended as our Pastorall sports be, since that Dorus [i.e., Musidorus] came hether?’ Blount cites Dido's exclamation to her sister, Anna: ‘What man is this new guest who has entered our home! Doesn't he bear himself well! How brave is he, and how skilled in fighting!’ (Fig. 4).73 Despite their wish to hide the full force of their attachment, perhaps as much from themselves as from their sisters, love forces the women to reveal the depth of their feelings through their extravagant praise of the object of their desires. Next to Philoclea's vow of virginity, written in the shape of a poem on a marble stone just before she first meets Zelmane, Blount quotes Dido's oath not to remarry despite her feelings for Aeneas.74 Both women subsequently break their vows, but while it was possible to read the episode as an instance of the changeability of women—as Philoclea's poem of retraction, with the refrain ‘how ill agree in one, / A womans hand with constant marble stone’, seems to encourage—the sympathetic and complex exploration of women's feelings that follows seems to support an interpretation in terms of the intense emotional impact of love on the women instead.
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The most sustained parallels between book 4 of the Aeneid and the Arcadia, however, are found in the story of Argalus and Parthenia. Blount's first quotation, from Dido's impassioned speech accusing Aeneas of faithlessness when she discovers that he is preparing to depart, is applied to Parthenia's similarly ardent plea with her husband Argalus not to risk his life and their happiness by accepting the challenge to fight with Amphialus in single battle.75 Then, Argalus's determination to go to battle despite her tears is paralleled with Aeneas's ‘unmoved will’ in response to Dido's tearful pleas.76 In the next two quotations, in contrast, Argalus is compared with the dying Dido and Parthenia with Dido's sister Anna, who attempts to comfort her. First, Parthenia takes the dying Argalus on her lap and attempts to stem his bleeding with pieces torn from her clothes, just as Anna embraces her sister and tries to stop the blood flowing out of her body with her cloak.77 Then, Argalus ‘lift[s] vp his languishing eyes ... seeing her, in whom (euen dying) he liued’, while Dido unsuccessfully tries to raise her eyes to see her sister one more time.78 By drawing a parallel between the women of the Arcadia (Philoclea, Pamela and Parthenia) and Virgil's Dido, Blount demonstrates his interest in Sidney's sympathetic portrayal of the feelings of women in love. At the same time, he seems to imply a comparison—albeit one that is much less well developed—between the heroic male characters of the Arcadia (Pyrocles, Musidorus and Argalus) and Aeneas, the male protagonist of Virgil's poem. The epic context of Virgil's narrative draws attention to the public repercussions of the private actions of the individual. This seems particularly relevant in the case of Argalus, whose public, and specifically military, duty draws him away from his beloved and is responsible for the destruction of their love. To some extent, however, the same is true for the two princes, who neglect their public duty by indulging in private affections (as Musidorus points out to Pyrocles, before falling victim to the same affliction). The parallels with the Aeneid thus seem to indicate that Blount was sensitive to the wider repercussions of the love theme of Sidney's romance (particularly in relation to the male characters).79 Nevertheless, his main focus was undoubtedly on the more personal and psychological aspect of love, especially in relation to women.80
Blount's perhaps surprising responsiveness to the portrayal of women as subjects in Sidney's romance was matched by a tendency to turn women into objects of male desire and by a penchant for misogyny. He, for example, underlines Sidney's description of Cecropia's nymphs’ ‘breasts liberall to the eye’ and twice quotes Ovid's titillating description of Apollo gazing on Daphne, ‘what is hidden he reckons even better’, when Sidney refers to those parts of women's bodies hidden from view by their clothes.81 The most extended evidence of this tendency to turn women into objects comes in his annotations to Sidney's blazon ‘What toong can her perfections tell’, apparently the most popular poem of the Arcadia in the period.82 Blount parallels Zelmane's itemisation of the parts of Philoclea's body with similar descriptions of Queen Elizabeth's forehead, hair, eyes, lips, tongue and breasts from Puttenham's Partheniades, as quoted in The Arte of English Poesie (where the two passages are likewise coupled, as examples of the figure icon or ‘Resemblance by imagerie’).83 As feminist scholars have pointed out, blazons not only form part of a discourse between men that turns women into speechless objects but also assert control and ownership of them by inventorying the parts of their bodies and displaying them as objects for sale.84
The misogyny encoded in the blazon is displayed more overtly elsewhere in the marginalia, for instance in Blount's comments on the account of one of the knights challenging Amphialus, who kept the princesses imprisoned because of his love for Philoclea. This knight, Sidney relates, ‘would make the cause of his quarrell the causers of loue, and proclayme his blasphemies against womankinde; that namely that sex was the ouersight of Nature, the disgrace of reasonablenes, the obstinate cowards, the slaue-borne tyrants, the shops of vanities, the guilded wethercocks; in whome conscience is but peeuishnes, chastitie waywardnes, and gratefulnes a miracle’. After comparing women to several kinds of animals, Blount quotes Saint Jerome as saying that ‘if women live with men, there will be no lack of birdlime of the devil’ and Cato that ‘if the world could be without women, our way of life would not be godless’.85 Even more crass is the anecdote that he cites in the margin of the shepherd Histor's song arguing that ‘A better life it is to lye alone’:
Pacuvius said crying to his friend Arius: ‘My friend, I have an unlucky tree in my garden, from which my first wife hung herself; afterwards the second; and now the third.’ Arius replied: ‘... My friend, give me shoots from that tree to plant.’86These quotations clearly respond to passages in the Arcadia. However, in Sidney's romance they are in almost all cases framed or qualified by the speaker (who is often blatantly unreliable) or the situation (which frequently proves such statements wrong). The remark of the knight who challenges Amphialus, for example, is immediately followed by his death and that of his fellows and the comment of the narrator that ‘some by death taught others, though past learning themselues; and some by yeelding gaue themselues the lie for hauing blasphemed’.87 The shepherd Histor, we are told, ‘hauing bene long in loue with the faire Kala, and now by Lalus ouergone; was growne into a detestation of mariage’.88 And his arguments are answered at length by Geron, who praises marriage and has the last word in their disputation. By not balancing his quotations with statements that are more positive about women, Blount demonstrates how Sidney's relatively positive representation of women could be appropriated to a more traditional misogynist frame of interpretation.89
Finally, there is a group of marginalia that does not engage with either the private or the public actions of the characters. They fall in two main areas. In the first place, there are a good number of notes that respond to the literary and rhetorical qualities of the Arcadia. Blount uses underlining, flowers, manicula and quotations from other literary authors to highlight Sidney's use of rhetorical effects, although he does not seem to have been interested in identifying individual figures like his contemporary John Hoskins, who marked them in the margins of a copy of the Arcadia for a student at one of the Inns of Court.90 From his reading of The Arte of English Poesie, if nowhere else, Blount must have learned that one of the functions of rhetorical figures is to express emotion and that they have significant moral and political implications, but he seems to be mainly interested in their use as an ornamental feature.91 He is particularly attentive to descriptions, and frequently highlights phrases that express some form of contrast or paradox, often through the use of the figures contentio (joining opposed phrases) and antimetabole (turning a sentence back on itself by inverting its order), for example ‘the one wanting no store, th’other hauing no store but of want’ and ‘the losse of such a Mistresse will prooue a great gaine’.92 In the second place, there are quite a few notes which explain references to classical mythology and natural history, including mythological figures, such as Atalanta; places, for example, the town of Cardamila; and creatures, the sepia and the torpedo among them.93 On some occasions Blount derived this information directly from classical literature, particularly the Elder Pliny's Natural History and Ovid's Metamorphoses, but in most cases he relied on a single modern compendium of ancient mythology, which itself takes the form of explanations of Ovid's fables: Abraham Fraunce's The third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch: entituled, Amintas dale. Wherein are the most conceited tales of the pagan gods in English hexameters: together with their auncient descriptions and philosophicall explications (1592).94 Related to the accounts of ancient myth are a number of annotations that provide parallels for the imprese worn by characters in the story, taken from Samuel Daniel's translation of Paolo Giovio's Discourse of Rare Inuentions, Both Militarie and Amorous Called Imprese (1584).
William Blount's marginalia, then, vindicate the recent focus on the politics of Sidney's Arcadia by showing the depth and sophistication of the engagement of a contemporary of Sidney with the political aspects of the romance. At the same time, they complicate and question some of the emphases of critics who have examined the political implications of the work. Blount's marginalia (and other evidence) suggest that if any parallels with the Alençon marriage negotiations and other political events in England around 1580 existed, they were lost on contemporaries. The annotations do confirm the significance of rebellion and resistance in the work, albeit not always in exactly the ways in which modern interpreters of the work have conceived them. Blount's interpretation of these issues seems to have been more complex and conflicted than the systematised accounts of recent critics suggest. More importantly still, the marginalia direct attention to the numerous other concerns of the romance. Blount responded enthusiastically to the formal literary and rhetorical qualities of Sidney's work and its engagement with classical antiquity and heraldry. He was especially attentive to the moral dimension of the actions of the characters of Sidney's romance. Some of his most profound engagements with the text, however, were reserved for the role of love and its impact on the thoughts and feelings of the characters, especially women. On some occasions, Blount related these private concerns to the public affairs of the fictional world of the Arcadia; in many cases, he did not. Politics was by no means the interpretative centre of the Arcadia for Blount, then—but nor was any other single aspect. He clearly considered the Arcadia a multifaceted work, in which different concerns come into play at different times, combine with each other every now and then, and then move in different directions once more. It is a view that has much to commend itself to modern readers of Sidney's work as well.
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Acknowledgements |
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Research for this article was supported by a Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library; an IPP Writing Bursary from Newcastle University expedited its completion. I am grateful to Mike Pincombe and Gavin Alexander for their comments
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Notes |
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 Top Notes |
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1 Sir Philip Sidney, The Covntesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1593), 36r.
2 E. A. Greenlaw, ‘Sidney's Arcadia As an Example of Elizabethan Allegory’, in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (New York, 1913; repr. 1967), 327–37; id., ‘The Captivity Episode in Sidney's Arcadia’, The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature (Chicago, 1923); B. Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven, 1996). See also W. G. Zeeveld, ‘The Uprising of the Commons in Sidney's Arcadia’, Modern Language Notes, 48 (1933), 209–17. R. E. Stillman, ‘The Scope of Sidney's Defence of Poesy: The New Hermeneutic and Early Modern Poetics’, English Literary Renaissance, 32 (2002), 355–85: 384, in contrast, argues that ‘Sidney, among all the major Renaissance poets, ... is the least topical, the least likely to load his fictions with allusions to specific historical persons or events’ and proposes a different model of the role of politics in Sidney's fiction.
3 I. Ribner, ‘Sir Philip Sidney on Civil Insurrection’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 13 (1952), 257–65.
4 W. D. Briggs, ‘Political Ideas in Sidney's Arcadia’, Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 137–61; M. Bergbusch, ‘Rebellion in the New Arcadia’, Philological Quarterly, 53 (1974), 29–41; W. R. Drennan, ‘ "Or Know Your Strengths": Sidney's Attitude toward Rebellion in "Ister Banke" ’, Notes and Queries, 231 (1986), 339–40; Worden, Sound of Virtue, 266–94. M. N. Raitiere, Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory (Pittsburgh, 1984) argues that Sidney commented on Protestant resistance theory only to reject it and denies any topical historical allegory in the ‘Ister Bank’ poem.
5 Other important approaches to the politics of the Arcadia include A. Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge, 1994), 154–69; D. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. (Oxford, 2002), 82–96.
6 In addition to the works cited above, see R. E. Stillman, ‘The Politics of Sidney's Pastoral: Mystification and Mythology in The Old Arcadia’, English Literary History, 52 (1985), 795–814: 796; A. Hadfield, The English Renaissance, 1500–1620 (Oxford, 2001), 134–6.
7 Worden, Sound of Virtue, xx.
8 The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. J. Gouws (Oxford, 1986), 10. G. Alexander, Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford, 2006), 227–30, however, questions the extent to which Greville's account reflects Sidney's intentions rather than his own preoccupations.
9 Worden, Sound of Virtue, 21, 370–1; Maidstone, Centre for Kentish Studies, MS U1475/Z1/11; Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, shelfmark STC 22540 Copy 1 (hereafter F). While the first two sources confirm that the Arcadia was read in the context of historians and political theorists, particularly ‘politic’ ones, and that readers of the period were attentive to the political dimension of the work, neither supports the specific connection between Sidney's work and the historical events and characters of Elizabeth's reign made by Worden. Hayward applied a description from the Arcadia to the state of England at the time of Mary's death in 1558 (not the later history of Elizabeth's reign) and in the commonplace-book associated with the Sidney family the quotations from Sidney's letter to the queen against the Alençon marriage come under ethical, not political, headings and no link is made between the argument of the two texts.
10 This discussion will of necessity focus on the version of the Arcadia printed in the 1593 and subsequent editions of the work, which combined the revised but unfinished New Arcadia with the ending of the earlier version, or Old Arcadia. See H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1996), 299–355.
11 It is difficult to be certain that the symbols and underlinings were made by the same reader as the marginalia. I will, therefore, only refer to them in my argument when they illustrate points that are independently evidenced in the annotations.
12 A similar index rerum was printed in the 1655 edition of Sidney's Arcadia. See P. Lindenbaum, ‘Sidney's Arcadia as Cultural Monument and Proto-Novel’, in eds C. C. Brown and A. F. Marotti, Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1997), 80–94: 82–4; H. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge, 2005), 169.
13 F, front fly-leaf, title-page, 163v. Brayman Hackel, Reading Material 169 suggests that the notes might have been written for Dorothy Wylde, who dates her signatures 1645 and 1655, but this is contradicted both by the date (see below) and the nature of the annotations, which do not appear to be didactic in character or written for a specific person or occasion.
14 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 168, n. 106 argues that ‘W. Blount’ is merely the ascription of the quotation, but the quotation is adapted from Erasmus's Adagia (see below) and no author named W. Blount who could have been thought to have written these lines exists.
15 D. Erasmus, Adagia, I. ii. 49, in eds F. Akkerman and others, Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami (Amsterdam, 1969–), II. i, 264–6.
16 Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata (1581); Paolo Giovio, A Discourse of Rare Inuentions, Both Militarie and Amorous Called Imprese, trans. Samuel Daniel (1585); Justus Lipsius, Politicorum, sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589); George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589); Tacitus, The Ende of Nero and Beginning of Galba, trans. Henry Savile (1591); Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Sir John Harington (1591); Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch: Entituled, Amintas Dale (1592). Blount's Italian quotation ‘Iddio perche e vecchio / Fa suoj al suo essempio’ (F, 51v l. 14) is Thenot's emblem in the February eclogue of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579).
17 It is impossible to date the hand with the same precision, but it broadly points in the same direction.
18 See J. P. Carley, ‘Blount, William, fourth Baron Mountjoy (c.1478–1534)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2702, accessed 21 February 2006] (hereafter Oxford DNB); id., ‘Blount, Charles, fifth Baron Mountjoy (1516–1544)’, Oxford DNB [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2682, accessed 16 February 2006].
19 S. Daniel, A Funerall Poeme Vppon the Death of the late noble Earle of Deuonshyre (1606), A3r.
20 C. Maginn, ‘Blount, Charles, eighth Baron Mountjoy and earl of Devonshire (1563–1606)’, Oxford DNB [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2683, accessed 21 February 2006].
21 W. Camden, Tomus alter, & idem; or, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that Famous Princesse, Elizabeth, trans. Thomas Browne (1629), P3r.
22 Oxford, Bodleian Library, shelfmark 8° S 52 Art. Seld.
23 W. Boutcher, ‘Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne's Essais’, in ed. J. Woolfson, Reassessing Tudor Humanism (Basingstoke, 2002), 243–68: 261.
24 Blount's contemporary Gabriel Harvey used different authorship marks at different times in his life and a variety of hands in annotating books. See V. F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia, and Library (Oxford, 1979), plates A–H.
25 Another William Blunt was receiver (treasurer) for Sir Henry Sidney from 1567 to 1573 and is recorded as indebted for £300 with Philip Sidney and Robert Walker (Sir Henry's receiver from 1575 to 1581) in 1577, but there is no record of him after this date (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord De L’Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, 6 vols. (London, 1925–66), i, index s.n. ‘Blunt, William’; M. W. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge, 1915), 196 n. 3). There are also a few William Blounts who attended Oxford and Cambridge around this time, but there appears to be no further information about them (J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891–2), i, 141; J. Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900, 10 vols. (Cambridge, 1922–54), I. i, 170).
26 F, [245]r, [244]v. Contractions and abbreviations have been expanded and are printed in italics. Gaps in the text (caused by the cropping of the margins) have been supplied in angled brackets; other authorial additions are in square brackets. All translations are my own unless stated otherwise.
29 See P. Burke, ‘Tacitism’, in ed. T. A. Dorey, Tacitus (London, 1969), 149–71.
31 I am drawing here on D. Womersley, ‘Sir Henry Savile's Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts’, Review of English Studies, 42 (1991), 313–42 and M. Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630’, in eds K. Sharpe and P. Lake, Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 1993), 21–43: 25–30.
32 P. E. J. Hammer, ‘Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex (1565–1601)’, Oxford DNB [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7565, accessed 20 May 2006].
33 E.g. Worden, Sound of Virtue, 257–60.
34 F, 82v l. 6 (Savile, Ende of Nero, 2D4v–2D5r).
35 Savile, Ende of Nero, 2D5r.
36 Smuts, ‘The Uses of Roman Historians’, 28–30.
37 F, 63r l. 33 (Tacitus, Agricola, 18).
38 F, 223r l. 20: ‘Talj rerum statu cum discordia inter partes [sic for patres] nulla aucthoritas non leges non princeps essent Mutianus ingressus &c.’ (Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 11).
39 F, 127r l. 44 (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, xxii. 29), 127r l. 46 (ascribed to Plato), 127v l. 4 (Martial, Epigrammata, VIII. xv. 8), 127v l. 19 (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, xxi. 4).
41 F, 68r l. 6: ‘Optimus est post malum principem dies pr[i]mus’ (Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 42).
42 F, 68v l. 31: ‘gratior nullus liquor / Tinxisset aras, victima haud vlla amplior / Potest magisque optima mactarj Iouj. / Quam rex iniquus’ (Seneca, Hercules furens, 921).
43 Womersley, ‘Savile's Translation of Tacitus’, 318. See more generally Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), ii, 189–348.
44 F, 103v l. 40 (Tacitus, Historiae, i. 13), 106r l. 39 (Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 1).
45 F, 105r l. 7, 106v l. 10: ‘Non est enim consilium in vulgo non ratio non discrimen, non diligentia &c.’ (Cicero, Pro Plancio, 9).
46 As modern critics have argued Sidney does, e.g. Bergbusch, ‘Rebellion in the New Arcadia’. See also Blount's index entry, ‘The mutinous hurly burly of the clownish Rebels’ (F, [246]r).
47 F, 239v l. 7: ‘verum enim est principes ministros esse dej ad curam ac salutem [sic for salutatiem] humanam, vti bona qu[a]e deus illis largitur partim destribuant [sic] partim seruent’ (Opera omnia Desiderii Erasmi, IV. ii, 218 (trans. Plutarch, 
, 780d)).
48 ‘Savile's Translation of Tacitus’, 320–6.
50 F, 62v l. 32 (ascribed to Lipsius's Politica), 62v l. 40 (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, ix. 1), 63r l. 43 (Ovid, Epistulae ex Ponto, iii. 105–6).
51 F, 5v l. 5, 92v l. 15, 239v l. 7.
52 Worden, Sound of Virtue, 261.
53 F, 197v–99v; see references in notes 3 and 4.
54 See G. G. Hough, The First Commentary on ‘The Faerie Queene’ ([n.p.], 1964); ‘MS Notes to Spenser's Faerie Queene’, Notes and Queries, 202 (1957), 509–15; J. Manning, ‘Notes and Marginalia in Bishop Percy's Copy of Spenser's Works (1611)’, Notes and Queries, 229 (1984), 225–7.
55 A. H. Tricomi, ‘Philip, Earl of Pembroke, and the Analogical Way of Reading Political Tragedy’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 85 (1986), 332–45.
56 Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 158–69. Of course not every literary work containing references to contemporary political events has evidence of readers identifying these analogies. The omission is significant for the Arcadia, because (unlike almost any other literary work of the period) it attracted large numbers of annotations and other early responses. The only contemporary work it can be compared with in this respect is The Faerie Queene.
57 New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Library, MS Osborn Shelves fb 69, 203.
58 Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), ii, 250–1. See also J. A. Roberts, ‘The Imaginary Epistles of Sir Philip Sidney and Lady Penelope Rich’, English Literary Renaissance, 15 (1985), 59–77: 65, 69, 73.
59 F, [244]r, 207r l. 32: ‘Optimus est post malum princepem [sic] dies primus. pessimus post bonum’. The first part of the quotation is from Tacitus, Historiae, iv. 42.
60 J. Kraye, ‘Moral Philosophy’, in eds C. B. Schmitt and others, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 303–86: 303–05.
61 F, 5v l. 5: ‘Facile est imperium in bonis’ (Plautus, Miles gloriosus, 611).
62 F, 63r l. 25 (Horace, Epistulae, II. i. 83–5).
63 Similar subjects are also listed in the index, for instance ‘Iealousye’, ‘Modestie’, and ‘Old age’ (F, [245]r, [245]v).
64 F, 4r l. 29 (Seneca, Epistulae, ii. 6).
65 F, 168r l. 14: ‘Plato dicebat spes vigilantium hominum esse somnia’.
66 F, 161r l. 12 (Suetonius, Nero, 47), 166v l. 10 (ascribed to Plutarch, De liberis educandis (in Latin)), 166v l. 19 (ascribed to Plutarch, Consolatio ad Apollonium), 229v l. 3 (Suidae Lexicon, Graece et Latine, eds T. Gaisford and G. Bernhardy, 2 vols. (Halle, 1853), i, 525), 230r l. 16 (Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes, ii. 43; Plato, Apologia, 29a).
67 F, 199r l. 43 (Cicero, Pro Murena, 61).
68 On the habit of taking passages from texts for the use of the reader, associated with the practice of keeping a commonplace-book, see S. Roberts, Reading Shakespeare's Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2003), 91–101, 129–42; Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 175–95.
69 F, 23v ll. 18, 27 (G. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, eds G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 210). When he quotes from the anonymously published Arte elsewhere in the annotations, Blount ascribes the passage to a certain ‘M. S.’ (200r). I have been unable to identify anyone with those initials who could be thought to have written the text. It may be that ‘M’ stands for ‘Master’, in which case the ascription could refer to anybody with a surname starting with ‘S’.
70 F, 23v ll. 4, 44 (Livy, Ab urbe condita libri, xxx. 14).
72 F, 51r l. 30 (Virgil, Aeneid, xii. 666–8). The index also refers to this passage, under the heading ‘Gynecia ... her extasie’, just as it picks up on the above note on ‘the enmitie of riuals’ by including an entry ‘Gynecia ... iealous ouer Philoclea’ (F, [245]r).
73 F, 60r l. 30: ‘quis nouus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes / quam sese ore ferens? quam fortj pectore et armis?’ (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 10).
74 F, 58v l. 38 (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 24–7).
75 F, 142r l. 43 (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 314–6).
76 F, 142v l. 12: ‘Mens immota manet lacrimae voluuntur inanes’ (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 449).
77 F, 144r l. 6 (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 686–7).
78 F, 144r l. 20 (Virgil, Aeneid, iv. 688–9).
79 In the context of a possible link with Elizabeth it is, however, noticeable that he does not explore this theme in relation to Basilius.
80 The index, which is largely organised according to the names of the characters of the Arcadia, further demonstrates Blount's interest in character. See Brayman Hackel, Reading Material, 170–2.
81 F, 123r l. 39, 6r l. 29, 27v l. 3: ‘Si quae [sic for qua] latent meliora putant [sic for putat]’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, i. 502).
82 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. A. Ringler (Oxford, 1962), 410. See also P. Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 4 vols. (London, 1980–), i, SiP 155–63.
83 F, 73r l. 30, 73r l. 40, 73v l. 15, 73v l. 22, 73v l. 31 (Puttenham, Arte, 243–4).
84 See N. Vickers, ‘ "The Blazon of Sweet Beauty's Best": Shakespeare's Lucrece’, in eds P. Parker and G. Hartman, Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (London, 1985), 95–115; P. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London, 1987), 126–54; H. Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 2000), 116–20.
85 F, 141v l. 44: ‘Ego (inquit Hieronimus) ita censeo si cum viris habitent foeminae viscarium non deerit Diabolj. Illud Catonis bracteatum est. Si absque foemina (inquit) posset esse mundus conuersatio nostra non eset [sic] absque dijs’ (the second quotation is from Walter Map, De nugis curialum: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, rev. C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 302; Map's Dissuasio Valerii ad Ruffinum philosophum ne uxorem ducat, from which this passage derives, was often printed with St Jerome's works (ibid., xlvii)).
86 F, 200r l. 35: ‘Pacuuius flens Arjo amico suo ait Amice, arborem habeo in horto meo infoelicem de qua prima vxor mea se suspendit. postmodum secunda iamnunc tertia. cuj Arius miror te in tot successibus lacrymas inuenisse. et iterum Dij bonj quot tibj dispendia arbor illa suspendit et tertio Amice dede mihj ex arbore illo [sic for illa] quos seram surculos’ (Map, De nugis curialum, 302; ascribed to ‘C. R.’, possibly Cuthbert Ridley, who donated a manuscript of Map's work to the Bodleian Library in 1601 (ibid., xlix)).
89 On the representation of women in the Arcadia, see Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction, 116–29.
90 J. Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. H. H. Hudson (Princeton, 1935), xv. Blount's quotations from The Arte of English Poesie consist of passages on similar subjects rather than instances of the same figure (although on some occasions the two coincide). Blount thus seems to approach it more as a poetic miscellany than as a rhetorical handbook.
91 See B. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1988), 331–4; W. A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men's Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric (Ithaca, 1995), passim; Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 99–125.
92 F, 3v ll. 33–4, 34r ll. 1-2. Blount's interest in descriptions is also evidenced in the index, which frequently refers to them.
93 F, 5r l. 8 (reference to Ovid, Metamorphoses, x. 560–707), 11v l. 33–4 (reference to Homer, Iliad, ix. 150, 292), 32v l. 29 (Pliny, Naturalis historia, ix. 84; Cicero, De natura deorum, ii. 127), 140v l. 14 (Pliny, Naturalis historia, ix. 143).
94 For instance, F, 73v l. 1, 101r l. 5, 108r l. 8 (Fraunce, Amintas Dale, I4r, M1r, I4v). Blount's reliance on Fraunce is identified in Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. V. Skretkowicz (Oxford, 1987), xx n. 21.
