Gavin Alexander

Renaissance figures of speech

Introduction: the figures in Renaissance theory and practice Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander and Katrin Ettenhuber 1. Synonymia: or, in other words Sylvia Adamson 2. Compar or Parison: measure for measure Russ McDonald 3. Periodos: squaring the circle Janel Mueller 4. Puns: serious wordplay Sophie Read 5. Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure Gavin Alexander 6. Ekphrasis: painting in words Claire Preston 7. Hysteron proteron, or the preposterous Patricia Parker 8. Paradiastole: redescribing the vices as virtues Quentin Skinner 9. Syncrisis: the figure of contestation Ian Donaldson 10. Testimony: the artless proof R. W. Serjeantson 11. Hyperbole: exceeding similitude Katrin Ettenhuber 12. Metalepsis: the boundaries of metaphor Brian Cummings 13. The vices of style William Poole.

Writing after Sidney : the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586-1640

Introduction 1. Philip Sidney: Dialogue and Incompletion 2. Elegies and Legacies 3. Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: The Last Word 4. Families and Friends 5. Robert Sidney: Finding and Making 6. Lyric After Sidney 7. Fulke Greville: Life After Sidney 8. Versions of Arcadia 9. Mary Wroth: The Constant Art Postscript Bibliography

Fulke Greville and the Afterlife

The difference which I have found between times, and consequently the changes of life into which their natural vicissitudes do violently carry men, as they have made deep furrows of impressions into my heart, so the same heavy wheels cause me to retire my thoughts from free traffic with the world and rather seek comfortable ease or employment in the safe memory of dead men than disquiet in a doubtful conversation among the living; which I ingenuously confess to be one chief motive of dedicating these exercises of my youth to that worthy Sir Philip Sidney, so long since departed.

Loving and Reading in Sidney

In The Defence of Poesy Sidney aligns learning from the exemplary images of fiction with falling in love. What may appear to be a lazy commonplace is more than that. Sidney’s Neoplatonic understanding of love is bound up with his Neoplatonic theory of reading. In both models the object is the idea that lies behind appearances. A reader must apprehend the “idea or fore-conceit” of the poet in order not only to admire his fictional characters but to understand “why and how” the poet made them, and thus to move from this gnosis to imitative praxis. Similarly, a lover climbs the Platonic ladder of love, from the beauty of the beloved to an idea of beauty and ultimately to the divine maker of that idea. In the Platonic tradition loving, writing, and reading are never far apart, because they share so much common ground. With this background in mind, Sidney’s representation of love in Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadia as a sort of readerly activity begins to look less casual. This article examines the sources and uses of Sidney’s imagery of loving reading and writing—which in the Arcadia cluster around Sidney’s representations of Argalus and Parthenia, and of Pyrocles and Philoclea. It suggests that Sidney is not only using his models of idealizing reading to add color and depth to his depiction of love but is—if we turn things round—thinking in a more subtly worked-out manner than in the Defence about the mechanisms through which his readers will read, be delighted, learn, be moved, and ultimately find themselves transformed.