I've always
admired the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, though his great work of literary and
dramatic criticism, The Defense of Poesy,
still makes him sound to me like a bit of a wet blanket.
Sidney wrote the
essay around 1579, so it was before most of the great works of the Elizabethan
era had been composed. Shakespeare's plays were still a good ten years off at
the time, and even Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd hadn't begun to pen
dramas.
The one English
play Sidney singles out as worthy is Gorboduc
by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. That play, which was first performed in
1561 and later published in 1565, bears remarkable resemblances to the later King Lear by Shakespeare. Both involve
the division of the Kingdom of Britain by an elderly monarch amongst his
children, and both feature a Duke of Albany and a Duke of Cornwall.
What Norton and
Sackville did that was truly innovative was introduce the use of blank verse to
English drama. By writing the play in unrhymed iambic pentameter, they set a
precedent used by most later Elizabethan dramas. Sidney called Gorboduc "full of stately speeches
and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca's style."
Still, he claimed it was "faulty both in place and time" since "the
stage should always represent but one place" and "but one day"
at the most.
Sidney's
railings against improbability seem to be answered with a Bronx cheer from
Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale.
Sidney objects to plays "where you shall have Asia of the one side, and
Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he
cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is." The Winter's Tale begins with two lords discussing the kingdoms of
Bohemia and Sicilia, and when the action moves from Sicilia to the sea coast of
(the notoriously landlocked) Bohemia, Antigonus declares "Thou art perfect,
then, our ship hath touched upon / The deserts of Bohemia?"
Offending
against the unity of time is an even worse offense for Sidney. He complains how
in English plays "ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love;
after many traverses she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy, he is
lost, groweth a man, falleth in love, and is ready to get another child,--and
all this in two hours' space." Well, yes, that sounds like The Winter's Tale, too! The child born
in Act II is shown getting engaged to be married in Act IV. As if to thumb his
nose at critics like Sidney, Shakespeare has the character of Time come forth
as a chorus at the beginning of Act IV to beg, "Impute it not a crime / To
me or my swift passage that I slide / O'er sixteen years."
