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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By Alan Hager. Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1991. Pp. 222; 2 illustrations. $36-50.
Alan Hager's Philip Sidney is protean--an artist whose personae, perspective, and presentation keep forever shifting, avoiding the sophistry of his day by alternately practicing it and undermining it, so that he forces the active participation of his readers and thus insures what he sees as the moral and educative task of all poetic writing. In current parlance, Sidney thus negotiates between the old historicism and the new, between writing as a humanist "in the tradition of idealist and sometimes jingoist Renaissance English interpretation" and writing as "self-fashioned rebel,. .. albeit unsuccessful" (pp. 8-9). Sidney never stands still. He is inside his characters and outside them. His Muse tells him, as it tells Astrophil, to write from the heart, but he finds no words there and so distances himself from the heart's knowledge while embracing its passions and its immediacies. Every rhetorical ploy is for Sidney a possibility for doubling or developing. Often, as with his sonnet sequence, Sidney as rhetor "confines his argument to the patterns required by sophistic training for formally consistent orations, [but] that argument so confined often becomes mock sophism, dazzling rhetorical displays that ironically conceal, behind all the verbal devices, superior knowledge" (p. 106). Hager's own prose, like the Sidney he envisions, is compacted exegesis, dancing among puns and presences, constantly turning to one idea or another and then swinging back again. By making his own exegesis illustrate his subject as much as explain it, Hager has written one of the most...
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