ABSTRACT
The American new historicists oddly never formed a coherent or consistent view of the politics of the Sidneys. Their contemporaries, British cultural materialists, tended to find in Philip Sidney’s writings a dissonance between Calvinist politico-religious ideology and a desire for autonomy. Cultural materialists’ work informed some grand narratives teleologically bound to the Civil Wars of the 1640s, such as David norbrook’s influential Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, which suggests that “a direct line of succession” links the political thought of Philip Sidney (1554-86) to that of his distant kinsman, the republican theorist and apologist for the regicide of Charles i, Algernon Sidney (1623-83). in some ways this work builds directly on the foundations laid by J. g. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner in the late 1970s. But politically-focused literary criticism has all too often failed to engage sufficiently with developments in the historiography of early modern england
and early modern europe. The empiricist, revisionist historiography of the 1970s and 1980s hardly registers among literary historians and critics. in its aftermath, the historiography of early modern Britain has been fragmented and displaced by more localized histories and histories of what used to be considered marginal social and cultural activity (Braddick 1). One upshot reached prominence in Patrick Collinson’s article “The Monarchical Republic of Queen elizabeth i,” itself indebted to Pocock and Skinner’s well-known expositions of the emergence of the modern state. Collinson demonstrates that, in spite of their sometimes very sharp differences, Robert Dudley and William Cecil cooperated on many occasions. Collinson argues, pointedly, that “the Privy Council, with whatever futile consequences on some occasions, was in a position to contemplate the world and its affairs with some independent detachment, by means of its own collective wisdom and with the queen absent: headless conciliar government” (406). The circumstances in which such “conciliar government” appeared and disappeared, and what exactly constitutes the “public” and the “political,” have been addressed with nuance in the past fifteen years or so (Lake and Pincus; Alford; Pincus; Lake and Questier). Lake and Pincus explicitly angle for a rapproachment between the revisionist historiography that arose in the 1970s and “Whiggish” neo-Marxist narratives against which revisionism reacted (“Rethinking the Public Sphere” 1-30). They seek to preserve revisionism’s return to archival sources and its narrative caution, but they would remedy what, in Annabel Patterson’s estimation, is revisionism’s failure to account for the causes of the english Civil Wars (389). Lake and Pincus would replace Whiggish narratives of an inexorable path to revolution, which have profited from the push to identify public spheres in england as early as the sixteenth century, with a limited, contingent account of the “post-Reformation public sphere [that] began as occasional and opportunistic openings and shuttings-down of debate on a limited set of issues” and that, far from being ubiquitous or all-inclusive, appeared in “shifting geographic and social location[s]” (“Rethinking the Public Sphere” 19).
