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3. Spenser's Muiopotmos Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Emma Marshall Denkinger*
Affiliation:
Brookline, Massachusetts

Abstract

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Type
Comment and Criticism
Information
PMLA , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , March 1931 , pp. 272 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1931

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References

page 272 note 1 PMLA, XLV, 732 ff.

page 272 note 2 Fénelon: Correspondence diplomatique, VI, 107.

page 272 note 3 Lemmi, op. cit., 732.

page 272 note 4 idem, 735.

page 272 note 5 Muio., I. 151.

page 272 note 6 idem, l. 159.

page 272 note 7 idem, l. 161.

page 272 note 8 idem, l. 179.

page 272 note 9 idem, l. 207.

page 272 note 10 Some of these discrepancies he admits, acknowledging for instance that identifying Aragnoll with Anjou gives to Sidney an unjustified importance in preventing the French match, and makes Anjou responsible for the death of a man whom he predeceased by two years. But he disposes of the first objection by invoking “poetic licence” (op. cit., 736) and of the second by “not tak[ing] the allegory too literally” (loc. cit.) with the alternative explanation that Spenser “symbolizes Alençon's intentions as well as his actions.” (op. cit., 738).

page 272 note 11 Lemmi, op. cit., 745.

page 272 note 12 He would have found that the document printed by both Pollard (Astrophel and Stella, xi) and Wallace (The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, 246) admits no such construction.

page 272 note 13 Wallace, op. cit., 245; and cf. Pollard, op. cit., xxi.

page 272 note 14 Lemmi, op. cit., 246.

page 272 note 15 Lansdowne Mss. xxx, 40.

page 272 note 16 Lemmi, op. cit., 746 (quoting Wilson's Queen Elizabeth's Maids of Honor, 126).

page 272 note 17 “It will be matter of surprize if the date proves to be later than first or second week in April,” (op. cit., xxiii). Wallace thinks the marriage took place “probably without delay” (op. cit., 247)

page 272 note 18 Sidney's Works, ed. Feuillerat, III, 135.

page 272 note 19 Mendoza had wind of the preparations as early as April 6th; see State Papers Spanish, III, 91.

page 272 note 20 They landed at Dover on 16 April, but the time of their coming was uncertain as they had been ready to leave France since 18 March (Wright: Queen Elizabeth and her Times, II, 130)

page 272 note 21 Wallace, op. cit., 247

page 272 note 22 See letter from Waterhouse to Sir Henry Sidney, dated 14 Nov. 1576 in Sidney Papers, I, 147.

page 272 note 23 Sidney's Works, III, 116, 120. Pollard's theory that Sidney was in love with Stella during this period (on which Lemmi may be grounding his contention, though he does not say so) rests on identifying with Stella the lady referred to in Sidney's letter of 7 March, 1578: “De illa quâ quam indignus sum facile agnosco.” Clearly, however, the person alluded to is the Orange Princess.

page 272 note 24 Wallace, op. cit., 246.

page 272 note 25 Lemmi, op. cit., 743.

page 272 note 26 Represented by my italics.

page 272 note 27 Hist. MSS. Com. Reports, Salisbury MSS, sub 1585; quoted by Wallace (op. cit., 294) who assigns it to the year 1583.

page 272 note 28 The writer of the letter was certainly inaccurate in his judgment of Sir Philip whom he hoped to win to the cause of the Scottish Queen!

page 272 note 29 Op. cit., 293–4.

page 272 note 30 Her desire to have Sidney at court may well have sprung from the feeling that it was well to have the ambitious scion of an ambitious house under her eye.

page 272 note 31 Lemmi, op. cit., 748.

page 272 note 32 Devereux, The Devereux Earls of Essex, I, 155.

page 272 note 33 He calls it “most untrustworthy,” and notes that its “value … as evidence is enormously diminished” by the fact of its derivation (op. cit., xxiii); nevertheless he gives it “at least qualified credence,” and refers (op. cit., 187) to “the enforced marriage.”

page 272 note 34 Since it is agreed that the first thirty-two sonnets antedate Penelope's marriage.

page 272 note 35 Op. cit., 256.

page 272 note 36 The suggestion is made tentatively by W. L. Renwick in his edition of Daphnaïda (191): “Either Spenser tacitly puts Lady Sidney into the place of Stella; or the gossip that connected Sidney with Lady Rich is much exaggerated; or it was understood that Sidney's love for Lady Rich was a purely literary amour courtois.” In the light of the 1598 edition of Astrophel and Stella, it is difficult to see the later sonnets and songs as “purely literary.”

page 272 note 37 Wallace (op. cit., 213) thinks Walsingham was among those present at the Baynard's Castle meeting recorded by Mendoza on 25 August, 1579 (S. P. Spanish, II, 693). For the idea that Francis Walsingham may have suggested arguments in Sidney's famous letter to the Queen, see Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Walsingham, II, 20.)

page 272 note 38 Penelope, Lady Rich, was of course in England. But Lady Sidney was in the Low Countries whither she had come in the latter part of June, Sidney to Sir Francis, in Works, ed. Feuillerat, III, sub 28 June. She nursed her husband devotedly through his fatal illness.

page 272 note 39 They were reserved for Stella and Sidney's sister, in the opinion of Wallace (op. cit., 255); Pollard thinks for the Countess of Pembroke alone (op. cit., xxxvii). The poems to Penelope which Sidney “did not keep” for “his own reading” were not as Lemmi's words infer (op. cit., 744) these intimate sonnets, with the punning clue to the lady's married name, but the earlier Petrarchian sonnets. With the exception of the punning invective of No. xxiv, these would have told nothing; for Pollard's theory that this sonnet is “misplaced” with intention, see his introduction to Astrophel and Stella, xxii and Wallace, op. cit., 249.

page 272 note 40 By Renwick's theory (Daphnaïda, 236) of an earlier, possibly a quasi-private edition of Astrophel, the possibility of Spenser's hearing London gossip would be removed, unless it came to him, second-hand, in Ireland.

page 272 note 41 C.C.C.H.A., 11.532–536

Ne lesse praisworthie Stella do I read,

Though nought my praises of her needed arre,

Whom verse of noblest shepheard lately dead

Hath prais'd and rais'd aboue each other starre.