Unusual Endowments

Letters

Vol. 22 No. 9 · 27 April 2000

From Katherine Duncan-Jones

Patrick Collinson praises Alan Stewart's biography of Philip Sidney (LRB, 30 March) for containing 'only a few egregious errors for pedants to pick on'. It may seem churlish, therefore, to observe that his own review also contains a few 'egregious errors' for people like me to pick on, in addition to some worryingly vague assertions. To begin with the smallest, Sidney is claimed to have written that 'the very common people will know' that the Queen's suitor Anjou was a son of 'that Jezebel' Catherine de'Medici: the correct reading here is 'well know'. Sidney's father mutates from the correct 'Sir Henry' in the fourth paragraph to a deeply confusing 'Sir Robert' by the end, but this may be a simple lapsus calami. More substantially erroneous is the claim that Sidney completed 'his epic romantic fiction The Arcadia at Wilton in the summer of 1580'. According to a letter to his brother Robert written from Leicester House, not Wilton, in October 1580, Sidney hoped to complete his 'toyful book' by February 1581 (New Style). We don't know whether he actually met this deadline. Nor is Collinson's epithet 'epic' at all appropriate to the first and altogether far more 'toyful' version of Sidney's romance, which is, for instance, very much shorter than Blair Worden's recent book about it. In his account of the outlines of Sidney's life Collinson leaves no space for the huge labour Sidney undertook in expanding the 'toyful book' into the later, 'New', version, which may indeed be called 'epic' both in length and scope, and thereby fails to indicate the true weightiness of Sidney's commitment to 'poesy'.

As for vague assertions, I'm not sure to what extent I should feel wounded by Collinson's claim that Stewart's is 'only the second biography in almost fifty years', since it's not clear to what predecessor he refers. Perhaps he has in mind J.M. Osborn's Young Philip Sidney (1972), which he mentions in the next sentence; or Mona Wilson's Sir Philip Sidney (1931); or Roger Howell's excellent The Shepherd Knight (1968). I don't think he can be thinking of my own Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, enthusiastically reviewed by Blair Worden in the LRB (25 June 1992), since he would surely not in that case have used the phrase 'in almost fifty years'. Several other reviewers have felt that Stewart's biography owes something to mine and I myself am flattered by the extent to which his book is modelled on the structure of my own, for instance in being composed of 12 chapters followed by an epilogue, and in closing with the same quotation that I chose to describe the immediate impact of Sidney's death. Either Collinson is entirely unaware of my book or he doesn't regard it as worthy of being called a 'biography'. In either case, I think I am entitled to feel that I have been ill-used by a distinguished historian whose work I greatly admire.

Katherine Duncan-Jones
Somerville College, Oxford

Patrick Collinson writes: The moral would seem to be, stick to your last. Dr Duncan-Jones has had little difficulty in establishing that Sidney is not my last. We have been introduced, of course, but Dr Duncan-Jones, an authority, has had the advantage, in a manner of speaking, of living with this fascinating person for more than thirty years. If I were to make such egregious errors in writing about, for example, the Puritans, I hope that I would do the decent thing: end it all. But I am glad that some of the errors are no worse than reading 'will' for 'well'. I thought that I was a good proof-reader. For even I know that no one in the 16th century would write that 'so-and-so will know such-and-such,' which is to say, 'should know such-and-such'. In my own defence, I was asked to write a piece on Philip Sidney, and the implication was that Alan Stewart's book was the hook on which to hang it. My brief was not to compare the scholarly literature on Sidney. And I wrote in my rural retreat, far from libraries. So while of course I know of Katherine Duncan-Jones's work, it was not immediately available for reference. If it had been I would no doubt have noticed a certain uncanny resemblance between Stewart's book and Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. In the words of Private Eye, shurely shome mishtake (on my part). 'Only the second biography in almost fifty years' was forgetful of Howell, not intended to include Osborn, but did have in mind Duncan-Jones, whose mutual admiration society I am more than happy to join.