Sidney, Gascoigne, and the "bastard poets"

Robert W. Maslen

pp. 215-233

in: Constance C. Relihan, Göran V. Stanivukovic (eds), Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

In this essay I shall argue that Sidney imitated, in the Old Arcadia, one of the most influential and controversial English texts of the 1570s: George Gascoigne's erotic prose fiction The Adventures of Master F. J. (1573).¹ I shall also suggest that he may have had a number of specific reasons for wanting his own prose fiction to be linked with the work of a writer who was regarded with some ambivalence by his contemporaries. E. K., for instance— the scrupulously pedantic commentator on Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579)—describes Gascoigne as "a wittie gentleman, and the very chefe of our late rymers, who, and if some partes of learning wanted not (albee it is well knowen he altogyther wanted not learning) no doubt would have attayned to the excellencye of those famous Poets. For the gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse appeare in hym aboundantly."² Sidney, it seems to me, would have been profoundly interested in a soldier-poet who showed abundant "gifts of wit and naturall promptnesse"—gifts that prompted Sidney's uncle, the earl of Leicester, to employ him as the chief deviser of his elaborate entertainments for the queen at Kenilworth in 1575. E. K.'s assessment of Gascoigne offers the perfect illustration of the current state of English imaginative writing as Sidney describes it in An Apology for Poetry: bursting with raw promise but stubbornly resistant to the "artificial rules' and "imitative patterns' imposed by classical precedent or pedagogic authority (133/3–4).³