ABSTRACT
Among Sidney’s great gifts to his contemporaries were his respect for tradition and his willingness to experiment. It is unfortunate, though, that he was preoccupied at this time with quantitative verse in English and so perhaps muted Spenser’s reactions to the strange music he created in hexameters (Old Arcadia 13) or asclepiads (OA 34). He had a better grasp of the sestina than Spenser and ambitiously achieved a double sestina (OA 71). When he handled the singing match (OA 7), he made it a metrical contest between two shepherds, whereas Spenser was content with a duet and refrain. On the other side, Spenser had almost completed The Shepheardes Calender when he joined the Sidney circle, and it is more than likely that the few archaisms in the beast fable Sidney wrote to honor his old tutor, Hubert Languet (OA 66) owe something to Spenser’s eclogues. Possibly Sidney, who is sparing in his use of unusual words-though credited by Joseph Hall with the introduction of compound epithets-drew a distinction between this flavoring and what he later called ‘that same framing of his style to an old rustic language’ (ed 1973b:112), which he dared not allow in The Shepheardes Calender. Still this was selected among the handful of English works Sidney felt able to praise in A Defence of Poetry.
