Elizabethan Paragon

ASTROPHEL--Alfred H. Bill--Farrar & Rinehart ($3.50). ~

I shall not want Honour in Heaven

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.

--T. S. Eliot Permitted to meet the 350-year-old ghost of Sir Philip Sidney, most moderns would aim chiefly at finding out: 1) how in his own lifetime that Elizabethan poet-statesman-soldier acquired his extraordinary fame, and 2) why. despite the fact that his prose (Arcadia, Defence of Poesie) and poetry (Astrophel and Stella) are today practically unread and unreadable, and his career no more interesting than that of half a dozen forgotten contemporaries, the aura of that fame has clung intact to his name ever since. Biographers have carefully recorded the facts of his career (better documented, less clouded by legend than most Elizabethans), have noted that his death inspired more than 200 elegies exhausting the superlatives of friends and enemies alike. W?here biographers have struck a snag has been in trying to make convincing a personality to justify these tributes. Latest try is Alfred H. Bill's Astrophel. Written in a half-scholarly, half-popular vein, it adds only the most cautious speculation to the known facts; its main contribution is a closely-woven background of the times, the author's enthusiasm for his subject.

Grandson of the powerful Duke of Northumberland (beheaded 15 months before Philip's birth), nephew of the Earl of Leicester (rumored lover of Queen Elizabeth), godson of Philip of Spain, Sir Philip Sidney minimized his royal connections by taking as motto: Hardly do I call these things ours. A frail, handsome, serious child, he was early accustomed to "plots, conspiracies, attempted assassinations, rebellions, mutilations, headings and hangings . . . burnings at the stake." As Queen Elizabeth's Lord Deputy in Ireland and Lord President of Wales, his own father, a Polonius-like stalwart who advised Philip to "pray and wash with regularity," duplicated for the Irish and Welsh the dirty deals his family had received.

Against this background Philip's virtues were bound to make a brilliant showing. Possessed of great personal grace, gentle, straightforward, courageous, scholarly, witty, accomplished at tennis, dancing, horsemanship, his only imperfection appears not yet to have been discovered. Traveling abroad between the ages of 17 and 20, young Sidney captivated royalty, diplomats, scholars; the only criticism voiced was that he drank too much water, ate too much fresh fruit. In Paris, as guest of Francis Walsingham (later head of England's unexampled secret service, and Philip's future father-in-law) Philip witnessed the slaughter of St. Bartholomew's Day, conceived for Spain and the Papacy the only ungentle attitude in his makeup.

Although the love sonnets of Astrophel and Stella were addressed to a beautiful, blonde, black-eyed married woman (daughter of the Earl of Essex), contemporaries were satisfied that Sir Philip Sidney's love-making remained a strictly literary affair. The single criticism ever to touch his reputation on that score came from Queen Elizabeth, who, always furious at the slur to her own magnetism whenever her young men married, acted when "my Philip" married as though he had gone the limit in Elizabethan sensuality.

It was Queen Elizabeth also who strained Sir Philip Sidney's "sweet reasonableness" to the point where he abandoned politics long enough to write his romantic novel Arcadia (a bestseller for 50 years, one of the first English books translated into French). Disgusted by her stingy, domineering, perverse attitude toward his own and his father's political career, he paid a long visit to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, wrote Arcadia to amuse her while she awaited the birth of a baby, who, says one version, grew up to be the "W. H." of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Like all gentlemen in his day, Sir Philip remained an amateur of literature (his books circulated only in manuscript in his lifetime), preferred to win glory as statesman or soldier. Having abandoned his plan to colonize a 3,000,000-acre grant in North America, he finally wangled an appointment as Governor of Flushing during the Netherlands campaign against Spain. Proving himself more brilliant than most, he was still not good enough to make his penny-pinching Queen pay him back the heavy sums he advanced out of his own pocket for the campaign. Co-author of the brilliant strategy which crushed Spain's power in the defeat of the Armada, Sir Philip Sidney met his end, at the age of 32, through a gesture romantically Arthurian. At the battle of Zutphen, throwing away his leg-armor because the commander had left his at home, he accompanied a charge of lancers against a hopelessly superior enemy force, received the fatal hip wound his armor would have prevented. His last literary work, a gay little song called The Broken Hip, was written while he lay for 25 days slowly rotting with gangrene.

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