Author pays tribute to ‘Bob Dylan of the English Renaissance’

LAWRENCE — Jonathan Lamb likes to think of Philip Sidney as “the Bob Dylan of the English Renaissance.”

Not only does the University of Kansas associate professor of English make the comparison because Sidney was so facile with words, but because he often confounded his audience’s expectations.

Lamb’s chapter, titled “Sentences,” is part of the new publication “The Oxford Handbook of Philip Sidney” (Oxford University Press). It’s in the section on Sidney’s poetic craft.

The KU scholar writes that in the late 1500s, when the rules of written English were not so fixed as they would later be, Sidney’s sentences were organized around rhetoric, rather than grammar.

“His characters do not offer purely internalized soliloquies, for example,” Lamb said. “Even when they talk to themselves, they're imagining talking to someone else. They are always imagining a rhetorical situation. And I think that's really important, because it's so easy to divorce our sense of ... good writing from the audiences a writer addresses, as if writers are somehow writing to the ether and not to real human beings. But Sidney was always aware of the rhetorical situations to which his writing is addressed.”

The approach proved wildly popular with Sidney’s contemporaries, Lamb said, and, from today’s vantage point, remains an important development.

“Until Shakespeare took over in the century after his death. Sidney was the best known, best loved, most celebrated writer of the English Renaissance,” Lamb said. “He lived about a generation before Shakespeare. Besides being a writer, he was a courtier, an aristocrat, a soldier, and was remembered as an ideal Christian humanist.

“He wrote all kinds of things. He wrote what some people say is the second-best set of sonnets in English — Shakespeare's being the first — and it's fantastic. He also wrote a prose romance called the ‘Arcadia.’ Some people have said it's the first novel, but whether or not that’s true, it is a phenomenal piece of writing.

“He also wrote one of my favorite texts to teach and to read. It's called the ‘Defense of Poesy,’ or the ‘Apology for Poetry,’ a treatise arguing for the importance of what he calls poetry and we would call creative writing — fiction, poetry, plays.

“He also translated the Psalms with his sister. He also was known for writing letters. So that's why I call him the Bob Dylan of his time. In the same way that a songwriter like Dylan has produced a massive range of musical expression, Philip Sidney’s prodigious use of sentences helped him write himself into literary history.”