Cecropia and the Church of Antichrist in Sir Philip Sidney's 'New Arcadia.'

 

by Barbara Brumbaugh

 

Sir Philip Sidney, all agree, actively championed the formation of an international Protestant political and military league throughout his political career and died fighting on behalf of the Protestant "Cause." Yet, the extent to which issues specific to Protestantism (or even to Christianity) receive sustained attention in his most mature and expansive work of original fiction, the revised ("New") Arcadia, remains a subject of controversy among his critics, with most recent scholars concluding, largely on the basis of the book's nominally pre-Christian setting, that they are not direct or central thematic concerns.(1) This article, part of a larger project maintaining the contrary position,(2) argues that in book 3 of the revised Arcadia, Sidney associates his villainess, Cecropia, with the papal church.(3)

 

Edwin Greenlaw and Martin N. Ratiere have discussed at length parallels between Cecropia and Catherine de Medici and between their sons Amphialus and Francois d'Anjou et d'Alencon.(4) I agree that Sidney establishes such correspondences; I simply wish to suggest that he uses these characters to comment in a more general manner upon contemporary religious disputes as well. Indeed, it should not be surprising that Sidney might link a single character to both Catherine de Medici (whom he designated "that Jezabel of our age")(5) and the Church of Rome. Sidney, of course, famously opposed the possible marriage of Queen Elizabeth to Alencon. The argument in his tactful yet outspoken letter advising the queen against the marriage is based largely on religious grounds,(6) with Sidney posing early in his epistolary address that Elizabeth's subjects "are divided into two mighty factions & factions bound upon the never ending knott of religion." The side constituting "[her] chefe, if not sole, strenght," are those "to whome [her] happy governement hath granted the free exercise of the eternal truth" (i.e., the Protestants). The hearts of these faithful subjects would be "galed, if not alienated" to see her take as a husband Alencon; indeed, "all the truely religious" would "abhorre such a master," not only because he is "a frenchman & a papist," brother and son to perpetrators of the Bartholomew Day massacre, but still more specifically because he personally has demonstrated his unfaithfulness by breaking his promise to and betraying the loyalty of the Huguenots, by whom he "had his liberty & principall estate," when he sacked towns in which the Protestants had been granted refuge.(7)

 

Despite past observations of the Cecropia-Amphialus and Catherine de Medici-Alencon parallels, and despite the connections between papism and the French mother and son in Sidney's letter to the queen, few Sidney critics have considered the possibility that he comments upon contemporary religious disputes through his characterizations of Cecropia and Amphialus.(8) Symbolic links between Cecropia and the Church of Rome are most apparent in a family history she discloses to her son, Amphialus, at the outset of the "captivity episode" in book 3, just after informing him of the kidnappings and her motives in ordering them? This family history,(10) when compared to polemical Protestant criticisms of the Roman Church by Sidney's contemporaries, allegorically connects Cecropia quite clearly to the establishment, practices, rise, and decline of that church in England. Cecropia confides that her father, the king of Argos, had consented to a marriage between herself and Basilius's brother because, with Basilius at nearly sixty years of age still "'protesting his bachelorly intention,'" his only brother was considered Arcadia's "'undoubted successor.'" Cecropia and her father had consented to the marriage with this unnamed brother only because he possessed "'place and estimation as heir of Arcadia . . . for else, you may be sure, the king of Argos, nor his daughter, would have suffered their royal blood to be stained with the base name of subjection.'" Basilius's brother evidently rivaled Cecropia in pride, being, according to his widow, "'indeed a man worthy to reign, thinking nothing enough for himself'" (p. 318). Cecropia actually perceives her former husband as having merited sovereignty because of his arrogance and rapacity for personal power.

 

Upon her arrival in Arcadia as "'apparent princess,'" Cecropia maintained the "'port and pomp'" that, according to her, befitted "'a king of Argos' daughter.'" She recounts with relish her effects upon the Arcadian women: "'In my presence, their tongues were turned into ears, and their ears were captives unto my tongue. Their eyes admired my majesty; and happy was he or she on whom I would suffer the beams thereof to fall.'" Not only did the inhabitants of her adopted country adore Cecropia, but according to her account, the gods themselves required her presence to be worshipped properly: "'Did I go to church? It seemed the very gods waited for me, their devotions not being solemnized till I was ready.'" The "principal persons" of Arcadia who crowd about the gate of her home endeavor to purchase her favor, being "'glad if their presents had received a grateful acceptation.'" Even decades later, she revels in rehearsing the attention she received when walking abroad: "'my walking was the delight itself, for to it was the concourse, one thrusting upon another who might show himself most diligent and serviceable towards me'" (p. 318).(11)

 

The king of Argos's role as a figure for the papacy becomes apparent when Cecropia's account of the populace's fascination with her and of her position in the limelight is considered alongside passages such as the similar report of Pornopolis ("whore city," i.e., Rome, or the "whore of Babylon") in John Foxe's Christus Triumphans. Pornopolis delineates (from the Protestant perspective of Foxe and his audience) the superstitious awe purposely instilled within the laity for high-level clergy of the "Babylonian" Romish church by that church's "traditions" as well as its reliance upon external displays, such as the vestments, and ritual. Like Cecropia, Pornopolis glories in her power to command public attention as she promenades through the city streets: "As I was leaving my gates to come to you, it seemed a good idea to take the main street. As soon as I was seen there, people crowded all around me as if I were a god. The forum and all the streets were blocked by the mob. They stood in wonderment."(12) Upholders of Foxe's representative of the Babylonian Whore inform the people that she is "the Ecclesia of almighty God, bride of the lamb, supporter of truth." Upon hearing this claim, evidently without further scrutiny, the people, as Pornopolis recalls with satisfaction, "Then and there . . . all fell down and adored me exceedingly."(13) "Mob" veneration of both Cecropia and Pornopolis is presented as resulting largely from skillful exhibition of exterior spectacle and splendor. The "'port and pomp'" by means of which Cecropia captures the limelight, both in church and on the streets, recollect Pornopolis's exclamation, upon first returning from her walk: "how delightful this form and splendor is!" as well as her displacement of the deity as the center of the people's attention,(14) as indicated in her previously quoted remark that the mob "crowded all around me as if I were a god." Like that of Pornopolis, Cecropia's vainglorious boasts of the wonder she elicits among the people merely by strolling the city streets implicitly criticizes, I believe, what John Bale labeled the "presumption, pride, and ambition" of the Romish clergy as "they sought the highest places in the synagogues, and salutations of reverence in the streets."(15)

 

Cecropia's boast that the gods' "devotions'" are dependent upon her presence and preparedness echoes Protestant charges that the Roman churches' emphasis upon clerical intervention debases the all-sufficient satisfaction wrought by Christ's crucifixion: Bale, for instance, charges that in requiring its members to "believe under pains of death and damnation" that its masses constitute "satisfactory sacrifices, profiting both the quick and the dead," the Church of Rome makes of Christ "an unsufficient Saviour without their daily doings."(16) Protestant deprecations of the schemes by which the papacy had usurped temporal power are also suggested by Cecropia's deliberately positioning herself to gain authority in Arcadia through an expedient marriage to its apparent heir. Perhaps also satirized is the pope's bid to further enlarge his secular prerogatives against those of the Germanic emperors and other political leaders by proclaiming "Himself as heyre apparent to the Empire of right, / Whereto he hath persuaded kinges, and men of eche degree."(17) Basilius, the Arcadian king, willingly assented to the arrangement through which Cecropia acquired her prestige and sway in his land as European monarchs had for centuries, by and large willingly, submitted themselves to the papacy's subjugation.

 

Additional details within the allegorical family history in which Cecropia is on one level connected to the papal church in England allude to the crest, then sudden fall and steady decline, of the papacy's power in England. Amphialus was, his mother assures him, born into such "'felicity'" that "'the very earth submitt[ed] itself unto thee to be trodden on, as by his prince.'" Yet, her husband, the heir apparent, died suddenly, "'when he breathed nothing but power and sovereignty,'" while their son, Amphialus, was still young. His death marks a sudden plummet in the papacy's prestige and dominion within England, perhaps with Henry VIII's declaration of himself as the supreme head of the Church of England. Yet, for as long as the people's "'expectation'" of Amphialus's "'succession did bind dependencies'" to herself and her son, Cecropia remained hopeful that her son would know "'the sweetness of authority'" (p. 318). Her continued hopes may allude to the continuation of primarily conservative positions on religious doctrine and church ritual during most of Henry's reign, even after the Acts of Succession and Royal Supremacy (1534), so that even though the pope's personal authority no longer prevailed, papist assumptions and modes of worship remained prevalent within the Church of England. When, however, Basilius in his old age married Gynecia, and the two (in what Cecropia labels "'the grief of grieves'") produced immediate heirs to the throne (Pamela and Philoclea),(18) "all hope of" Amphialus's succession was "'cut off'" and with it his mother's sway over the Arcadian people. As she laments, "'the guess of my mind could prevail more before than, now, many of my earnest requests'"; the "'multitude of followers'" thronging her gate was replaced by "'silence'"; and Amphialus became "'by the fickle multitude, no more than an ordinary person born of the mud of the people, regarded'" (p. 319). Still, though, Cecropia has continued to plot against the Arcadian royal family, for example, through her release of the ravenous bear and lion upon them in book 1 and the riot instigated by her agent Clinias in book 2; she admits to these schemes only during this family history, so that the various characteristics tying her to the papacy are presented to readers within a short interval, reinforcing one another. Cecropia's intrigues against the Arcadian monarch refer in all probability to the widespread belief that the papacy plotted against Protestant sovereigns such as Queen Elizabeth. Cecropia's remark that just before her husband's death his "'virtue by my good help within short time brought it, with a plot we laid, as we should not have needed to have waited the tedious work of a natural end of Basilius'" suggests repeated Protestant accusations that the papacy had often resorted to murder as part of its schemes to usurp power from secular political rulers. Protestant charges that the papacy viewed even God as a rival whose rightful preeminence it coveted may be indicated by Cecropia's attribution of her husband's death to "'the heavens . . . envying my great felicity'" (p. 318). The previously mentioned extravagant pride of Cecropia, her father, and her husband, along with her husband's unhesitating willingness to poison his brother to advance his own personal power, is in keeping with Protestant characterizations of the pope as "'the king of pride; that he is Lucifer, which preferreth himself before his brethern.'"(19)

 

Cecropia's name may relate to accusations by Reformers that papal authority and many of the Roman church's traditions resulted from its own "inventions" rather than Scriptural injunctions. Because Cecrops, the first Athenian king, was said to have sprung from the earth, the city's residents could "boast that they were autochthonous, that is, that they were not descended from any invaders of Attica." As would befit a figure whom I am suggesting Sidney uses as an emblem for the self-sufficient pride that characterizes the villainess Cecropia, King Cecrops names the city he founds Cecropia, after himself.(20) Like John Milton's Sin and like Edmund Spenser's Errour, one of whose many associations is with the Roman Church, as I am arguing is the case with Cecropia as well, the classical King Cecrops's lower body is shaped like a serpent. As critics have often observed, Sidney, unlike Spenser, does not create within his fiction supernatural monsters with physical characteristics that directly signify allegorical qualities. Yet, Cecrops's serpentine physical appearance, together with his boasts of autonomy, fit well with the Satanic nature Sidney critics have long recognized in Cecropia.(21)

 

The imagery of the papacy as a monstrous beast arising, Cecrops-like, from the earth and of dubious and Satanic origins appears in numerous Protestant attacks upon the institution. Thomas Kirchmeyer, in a work translated into English by Barnabe Googe in 1570 as The Popishe Kingdome or Reigne of Antichrist, speculates, for example, that the papacy originated when "from the Stygian flouds he raysed himselfe so hye," having been "[c]reated first by Sathah, and the spirites that damned lye, / To be a plague to Christian fayth." He envisions the beast as a "monstrous shape, that doth from doubtfull parents rise."(22)

 

The Athenian Cecrops was linked (though in an unpublished work) by a British Protestant contemporary of Sidney, William Harrison, to the False Church and to idolatry, despite the fact that Harrison discussed the king in the context of his supposed historical era, around 1556 B.C., far prior to the institution of the papacy. Harrison views the political precepts devised by Cecrops for his kingdom as having been inspired by Satan - in contrast to the laws received by Moses directly from God - so that the Gentile political system consstitutes, in G. J. R. Parry's summary, "a satanic parody of the True Church and its godly polity." Cecrops instituted idolatry, according to Harrison, to diminish God's glory in one locale "'whilest the lord by his servant Moses was as diligent in therection of true relligion in the wildernesse of Sinai in another.'" Thus, Cecrops and his kingdom, even during their own historical era, were fixed by Harrison, in Parry's summary, "firmly on the wrong side in the struggle of the Two Churches."(23) The fact that Harrison viewed Cecrops as exemplifying "human readiness to decline into idolatry and tyranny" during a period in which Israel was recovering its status as "the pristine godly commonwealth through one of the series of reformations which punctuated the history of the True Church" may suggest another reason why Sidney would choose to associate his antagonist with Cecrops.(24) The papacy, with which Cecropia has been linked by her allegorical family history, constitutes an enemy of the True Church during the Reformation (the period following the death of Cecropia's husband and the birth of Basilius's immediate heirs), a time in which the Church is, from a Protestant perspective, once again undergoing major regeneration and purification by the covenant line.(25)

 

The garb of Cecropia's six maids, who kidnap the princesses and the disguised Pyrocles and spirit the three away to their mistress's castle near the opening of book 3, also links the aunt to papism. They are dressed "all in one livery of scarlet petticoats which were tucked up almost to their knees . . . their legs naked, saving that above the ankles they had little black silk laces upon which did hang a few silver bells - like which they had a little above their elbows upon their bare arms; upon their hair they ware garlands of roses and gillyflowers . . . their breasts, liberal to the eye" (pp. 314-5). The scarlet clothing and exposed breasts of Cecropia's agents readily suggest the Whore of Babylon, "the Antichrist, that is, the Pope with the whole bodie of his flithie creatures . . . whose beautie onely standeth in out warde pompe & impudencie and craft like a strumpet."(26) The Babylonian "Whore" is said in Rev. 17:3-4 not only to be "araied in purple & skarlat" but also to sit upon a scarlet beast, whose color, according to the Geneva gloss, signifies the "crueltie and blood sheding" of "the Papistrie."

 

Protestants frequently mention bells when exemplifying the superstitious practices and "fleshly" rituals prevalent within the Roman Church, designed to please human senses, rather than being founded upon Scriptural directives.(27) As with the symbolic apparel of Cecropia's maids, the wanton enticements of the "false" Roman church, including bells, are linked to the Whore of Babylon by, for example, the Protestant martyr George Marsh, who wrote from prison before his death in 1555 that God had removed him from the modern "glorious Babylon" of the Roman church in order that he "should not taste too much of her wanton pleasures." Only when separated from this "Babylonian" church could he attain true "inward rejoicing in the cross of his Son Jesus Christ; the glory of whose church . . . standeth not in the harmonious sound of bells and organs . . . (as the blind papists do judge it), but in continual labours and daily afflictions for his name's sake."(28)

 

Once Cecropia's agents arrive at the princesses' cabins, they lure them out with polyphonic music, another prominent mode of worship within the "Church of Antichrist" of which many Protestants disapproved. Each of the six women holds "an instrument of music . . . which, consorting their well-pleasing tunes, did charge each ear with unsensibleness that did not lend itself unto them. The music entering alone into the lodge, the ladies were all desirous to see from whence so pleasant a guest was come" (p. 315).(29) Sidney emphasizes the prominent role of this seductive music in effecting the abduction: Pamela, Philoclea, Pyrocles, and Miso depart with Cecropia's "nymphs, conquering the length of the way with the force of music . . . so well were they pleased with the sweet tunes and pretty conversation of their inviters" (p. 316). John Calvin both banned all musical instruments from the worship service and permitted only monody, not polyphony, "in his reformed liturgy so that worshippers could hear and understand the full force of the unimpeded text."(30) Protestant strictures against ornate polyphonic music formed part of a larger complaint that more attention and time were devoted to music than to preaching of the Word within the pope's and other inadequately reformed churches, in which "all is so filled with chanting and piping, that there is no time left for preaching, whereby it commeth to passe, that the people depart out of the church full of Musicke and harmonie; but touching heavenlie doctrine, fasting, and hunger starved."(31)

 

Polyphonic vocal music is similarly a favored courting technique of Cecropia's son, Amphialus, who repeatedly endeavors to gain Philoclea's grace with complicated musical compositions of the polyphonic variety favored by Cecropia's maids. On the night of Anaxius's arrival, Amphialus "caused in boats upon the lake an excellent music to be ordered - which, though Anaxius might conceive was for his honour, yet indeed he was but the brickwall to convey it to the ears of the beloved Philoclea" (p. 392). The language chosen to describe this elaborate multipart music emphasizes its intricacy and sensuality and its origins in Amphialus's self-pride and his attempts to satisfy his own "passions": "The music was of cornets, whereof one answering the other (with a sweet emulation striving for the glory of music) and striking upon the smooth face of the quiet lake, was then delivered up to the castle-walls, which with a proud reverberation" radiate it forth through the air in such a fashion that "before the harmony came to the ear that it had enriched itself in travel, the nature of those places adding melody to that melodious instrument." Afterwards, "an excellent consort straight followed of five viols with as many voices, which all (being but orators of their master's passions) bestowed this song upon her [Philoclea] that thought upon another matter [Pyrocles]" (p. 392; emphases added). Sidney's repeated references to Cecropia and Amphialus's reliance upon lush, sensual music in their endeavors to attract the princesses, as well as his precise specification of the polyphonic style they favor, argue that the details are not merely casual but are thematically significant. While an author's indication of such musical styles need not, of course, necessarily refer to religious controversies, the context created by the history and behavior of Cecropia and her family in Arcadia, related in close juxtaposition to the kidnapping episode, as well as by Cecropia's name and by the scarlet clothing of her maids and so forth, suggest that the details in these cases do allude to contemporary disputes over music in the worship service.

 

Given persistent sixteenth-century conflicts over the Eucharist, it seems quite significant that, after the Arcadian crew has been led to "a little square place . . . beautified with the pleasantest fruits that sunburned autumn could deliver unto them," situated "in the midst of the thickest part of the wood," their only activities are to drink wine and to eat of the "swelling grapes," offered by Cecropia's agents, "which seemed great with child of Bacchus, and of the divers-coloured plums, which gave the eye a pleasant taste before they came to the mouth." As soon as the Arcadians sip from the "cool wine" offered them by Cecropia's maids, "twenty armed men" rush upon them from the wood and take them captive (p. 316). Previously discussed links between Cecropia and the Roman church make it seem highly improbable that Sidney would settle upon wine drinking as the act immediately preceding the abduction for no particular reason. Within the Roman church, moreover, the Mass was preceded by the ringing of a bell, as the Arcadian princesses hear the bells worn by Cecropia's maids before drinking of their wine.(32) The association of Cecropia's scarlet-clad maids with the Whore of Babylon suggests that their wine should probably also be linked to the cup of "abominations, and filthines of her fornications" (glossed "false doctrines & blasphemies" by the Geneva editors, Rev. 17:4) carried by the Apocalypse's spiritual "whore" and to "the wine of the wrath of her fornication" (Rev. 17:1, Rev. 18:3).(33) The allusions to Bacchus and the decorative, visually appealing fruits may echo charges by earnest Reformers that, even within the Church of England, religious ceremonies were not regarded with sufficient sobriety: in 1566 John Gough, rector of St. Stephens, castigated those who made Christmas "'rather a feast of Bacchus than a true serving of the memory of Jesus Christ,'" citing in support of his charge "the decking of the churches with holly."(34)

 

Cecropia's maids are able to abduct Pyrocles and the princesses with so little difficulty because the negligent prince Basilius has entrusted his daughters to the custodianship of Dametas and Miso, characters presented by Sidney in both versions of the Arcadia as unfit guardians, as nearly all critics of the works have recognized.(35) Pamela and Philoclea initially hesitate to accept the invitation of their soon-to-be abductresses to accompany them to a nearby area of the woods to behold some "'rural sports,'" fearing (probably needlessly, given his own increasing moral laxity and lack of caution) the anger of their father. Yet, Miso, fit prey for the sensory tactics upon which Cecropia's agents rely, with her "great desire to lead her old senses abroad to some pleasure, told them plainly, they should nor will nor choose, but go thither, and make the honest country-people know that they were not so squeamish as folks thought of them"; the princesses accordingly, "glad to be warranted by her authority" (pp. 315-6), follow her lead.

 

This abduction episode shares a number of significant parallels with the May eclogue of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, a pastoral allegory with which Sidney was, of course, familiar, writing in the Defence that the poem "hath much poetry in his eclogues, indeed worthy the reading, if I be not deceived."(36) I am not suggesting a source argument; however, the correspondences between the scene from the New Arcadia and this ecclesiastical eclogue provide additional support for my interpretation of the former. The techniques relied upon by the Foxe to kidnap the Kidde in Piers's tale resemble in several ways those through which Cecropia's maids capture the Arcadians, including the use of alluring bells and of initial ingratiation dependent upon disguise and hypocrisy (in the absence of the victims' parents), rapidly followed by strong-arm captivity in which the abductees are deprived of their capacities to see or to move freely. E. K. explains that in Piers's tale the Kidde represents "the simple sorte of the faythfull and true Christians"; that "[b]y hys dame," one should understand "Christe, that hath alreadie with carefull watchewords . . . warned his little ones, to beware of such doubling deceit"; and that the Foxe stands for "the false and faithlesse Papistes, to whom is no credit to be given, nor fellowshippe to be used."(37) Piers's Foxe, a "maister of collusion," like Cecropia's maids, arrives disguised, "as a poore pedler," porting upon his back a bundle of "tryfles" including "bells, and babes."(38) E. K.'s gloss to the line explains, "by such trifles are noted, the reliques and ragges of popish superstition, which put no smal religion in Belles: and Babies .s. Idoles . . . and such lyke trumperies."(39) Fascination with the Foxe's "merchandise" causes the Kidde to admit the disguised Foxe into his home, despite his mother's explicit warnings not to open their door to this crafty and treacherous foe.(40) The Foxe abducts the gullible youngling immediately upon inspiring him to desire a bell, "which he left behind / In the basket for the Kidde to fynd,"(41) after having displayed before him all his other ware. As soon as the Kidde reaches for the bell, the Foxe locks him into his basket and runs "awaye with him in all hast."(42) As has been mentioned, Cecropia's maids also arrive to the Arcadian lodges disguised and wearing bells. In both cases, too, the captors' hypocrisy involves a pretense of harmlessness. Not only does Foxe of The Shepheardes Calendar fake poverty, appearing to the Kidde "[n]ot as a Foxe, for then he had be kend, / But all as a poore pedler"; he also counterfeits weakness, presenting himself as "starke lame" and hiding his give-away tail.(43) Cecropia's maids induce the princesses to venture into the woods with them by arguing "the goodness of their intention and the hurtlessness of their sex" (p. 315). As the Foxe in the May eclogue departs hastily once he has forcefully restrained the kid within his dark basket, so the "twenty armed men" in the New Arcadia, immediately upon covering their young victims' heads with hoods and "muff[ling]" them, whisk them off on horseback to Cecropia's castle (p. 316).

 

Another correspondence between the May eclogue and the abduction episode in Sidney's book appears in the arguments of Miso and of Piers's debating opponent, Palinode. At the outset of this eclogue, Palinode endeavors to persuade Piers to participate in rural festivities, asking why he and Piers should not join the country folk in their merriment:

 

Is not thilke the mery moneth of May, When love lads masken in fresh aray? How falles it then, we no merrier bene, Ylike as others, girt in gawdy greene?(44)

 

His arguments recall Miso's attempt to induce the princesses to attend what the Arcadia's 1590 editors label "the country wenches' sports" by urging them to "make the honest country-people know that they were not so squeamish as folks thought of them" (p. 315 n; pp. 315-6). The young folks' decking of the May posts and church pillars "[w]ith Hawthorne buds, and swete Eglantine, / And girlonds of roses,"(45) a part of the May festivities Palinode describes, calls to mind the "garlands of roses and gillyflowers" in the hair of Cecropia's maids (p. 314). The tendency of more zealous Protestants to link many traditional rural customs and rituals to the "superstitions" of papism may not be irrelevant. Certainly, Miso's sanction of the nonparentally supervised "rural sports" (arising from a desire to gratify her "old senses") should not be equated with Sidney's own.

 

Like Spenser's Foxe, whose methods resemble their own, Cecropia's maids should therefore be interpreted as papists. The seemingly innocent allurements through which they capture their victims unawares, ultimately by overpowering coercion, furnish, I believe, a fictional analog to an admonition issued by Sidney to "German Princes" encountered during his service as Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to Emperor Rudolph II.(46) According to Fulke Greville, who accompanied him on this mission, Sidney warned these princes of "the danger which threatned them hourely," as a result of a "fatall conjunction of Rome's undermining superstitions, with the commanding forces of Spain," a "brotherhood in evill" combining secular and spiritual tyranny.(47) Sidney predicted that these foes would proceed not through "open war by Proclamation; but craftily (from the infusion of Rome) to enter first by invisible traffique of souls; filling peoples minds with apparitions of holines, specious Rites, Saints, Miracles, institutions of new Orders, reformations of old, blessings of Catholiques, cursings of Heretiques, Thunderbolts of Excommunication under the authority of their Mother Church."(48) After they had "by these shadows . . . gotten possession of the weak," their guiles would be followed by those of "the Spanish, less spirituall, but more forcible Engines, viz. practice, confederacy, faction, money, treaties, leagues of traffique, alliance by marriages, charge of rebellion, war."(49) According to Sidney, the Church of Rome first ingratiated itself to the gullible or unsuspecting through seductive and seemingly harmless but deceptively dangerous displays and rites, then forcefully deprived its victims of personal and political, as well as religious, freedom, precisely the methods employed by the abductors in the May eclogue and the New Arcadia. Sidney, of course, believed that this combined Spanish-Roman threat "could now be withstood, or ballanced by no other means, than a general league in Religion," ready to protect both "Religion, and Liberty."(50) Perhaps the success of Cecropia's agents in abducting the Arcadians should be read as a warning of the menace posed to the Protestant "Cause" by the refusal of Queen Elizabeth and other rulers to support it at a level considered satisfactory by devotees such as Sidney, Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, and Hubert Languet.(51)

 

An allegorical association between Cecropia and the Church of Rome would draw upon the traditional assumption in biblical exegesis that women in Scripture - for example, the Apocalypse's Whore of Babylon and woman clothed with the sun - many times represent churches. Commenting upon the latter, who appears in Rev.:12, Heinrich Bullinger explains: "under the type or figure of a woman, he describeth the Church of God at all tymes. Neither is it a straunge or rare thyng, since at the first begynnyng of thinges the woman began to represent the type of Christes spouse the Church, as is to be sene in the .2. of Genes. And so hath the Apostle expounded the type in the .5. chapter to the Ephes. I neede not now to recite, that Esay hath oftener than once resembled Gods Church under the type of a woman."(52) Of course, such symbolism was transferred from the Bible itself to biblically inspired literature, as the examples of Spenser's Una and Duessa well attest.

 

Papist characters created by Protestant writers and authors of Protestant treatises who claim to represent the attitudes and opinions of the "Romish sort" frequently repeat the commonplace metaphor of the Roman Church as a "mother" (employed in the report of Greville, cited above, on Sidney's own supposed comments), a metaphor that, of course, builds upon and presupposes the churches-as-women principle. Greville elsewhere enumerates the "false heades of holie mother see [Rome]."(53) Philips von Marnix's Beehive of the Romishe Church, the English translation of which was dedicated to Sidney (1579), employs the metaphor often in ironically giving voice to papist beliefs concerning and love for "our dearly beloved mother, the holy Church of Rome."(54)

 

Cecropia may be associated allegorically not only with the Church of Rome generally but with a central sacrament within that church: the Mass. Here, her status as the only mentioned daughter of the king of Argos (whom I argued earlier in this article functions as a figure for the papacy) suggests a common metaphor for this rite and/or the doctrine of transubstantiation that it assumes. In the prefatory poem to William Turner's The Huntyng of the Romysh Wolfe, the "Romyshe Foxe" (the pope) speaks of "My doughter Masse."(55) "Mistress Missa" (a personification of the Mass in sixteenth-century Protestant satire) is "the eldest daughter of the pope and Dame Avaritia" or, in the writings of John Bradford, "the daughter of Idolatry (the devil's daughter) and of the Pope and his 'shavelings.'"(56) A stereotypical papist in the Beehive refers to "the dearelie beloved and eldest daughter of our deare mother the holie church of Rome as yet borne, to wit, Transubstantiation."(57) Of course, Cecropia could without contradiction be associated with the Church of Rome, the Mass, and the Whore of Babylon, as has been argued is the case, for example, with Spenser's Duessa. As Douglas D. Waters observes in the most thorough argument for Duessa's role as a personification of the Mass, "Protestant polemicists used synecdoches and metonymies such as . . . the Mass for the Church and vice versa, and the whore as a symbol of the Church or the Mass or both simultaneously."(58) A symbolic connection between Cecropia and the Mass would provide an additional explanation for the persistence of her hopes for continued power for a brief interval between the sudden death of her husband and Basilius's marriage to Gynecia and the birth of their daughters, since the Mass and the doctrine of transubstantiation were maintained within the Church of England for some time after Henry VIII had rejected the authority of the papacy.(59)

 

An allegorical association between Cecropia and the Mass would elucidate a number of emphases in her characterization, especially in her relationship to Amphialus after his return to her castle. In a play (albeit a serious one) upon the "Petrarchan" notion of worshipping the beloved, Sidney in book 3 recurrently employs Amphialus's behavior toward Philoclea to examine and comment upon a religious devotee's attitude and actions toward God. Amphialus's approach to Philoclea as he visits her chamber in Cecropia's castle is, for instance, analogized to a priest's advance to the altar, when he is said to send the princess "daily presents (as it were, oblations to pacify an angry deity)" (p. 334). This analogy between Amphialus's gifts to Philoclea and a worshipper's "oblations" to the "deity" is explicit and indisputable. Sidney could have assumed that the narrator's reference to "daily presents" intended "to pacify an angry deity" would have called to the minds of his contemporaries the Roman Mass, traditionally regarded as a daily sacrifice to placate God's anger.(60) I argue more extensively elsewhere that through Amphialus's courtship of Philoclea Sidney criticizes forms of worship presented as inappropriate.(61) For now, we may simply note that the narrator explicitly discommends Amphialus's offerings, labeling them "so many stories of his disgraces and her perfections, where the richness did invite the eyes, the fashion did entertain the eyes, and the device did teach the eyes the present misery of the presenter himself" (p. 334).

 

Sidney repeatedly highlights Amphialus's reliance upon his mother's intervention to win Philoclea's favor and upon his high level of expectations for such efforts. Upon the failure of his own unaided attempts to beg or earn Philoclea's love, the strategy to which he resorts throughout book 3 is "beseeching [Cecropia] to try what her persuasions could do with [Philoclea]" (p. 324), "still craving his mother's help to persuade her" (p. 352), for "his wit could find out no other refuge but the comfort and counsel of his mother, desiring her . . . to use for his sake the most prevailing manners of intercession" (p. 329). Particularly tellingly, after his nearly fatal battle with Musidorus, he "prayed his mother, as she tendered his life, she would procure him grace" (p. 414, emphases added).

 

That Cecropia's intervention only impairs Amphialus's standing in Philoclea's estimation underscores the Protestant conviction that "the Mass-hearer's foolish confidence in meriting grace through hearing the Mass" was a false and futile hope.(62) Sidney, I believe, suggests that the high expectations ascribed by papists (according to Protestant critics) merely to hearing and attending Mass are illusory by having Cecropia repeatedly falsify reports to her son on the outcome of her efforts to persuade Philoclea to accept him as a husband, painting his prospects as considerably more rosy than they in fact are. Cecropia begins extending to Amphialus groundless assurances that he will attain Philoclea's love even before she has discussed the matter with the princess. After Amphialus informs his mother of his own utter failure toward this end during his initial visit with the captive Philoclea and, consequently, solicits her mediation, Cecropia "bad him quiet himself, for she doubted not to take fit times, but that the best way was first to let [Philoclea's] passion a little tire itself" (p. 324). As the book progresses, Cecropia, well aware of the absolute sterility of her first endeavors to entice, flatter, and inveigle Philoclea to marry her son (pp. 330-4), as well as of her son's increasing despair, "sought to mitigate his mind with feigned delays of comfort" (p. 364). Later, having been placed by Cecropia, at her son's request, at a window to witness his defeat of Phalantus in single combat, Philoclea states upon his victory that she deems it rather "'hateful'" than admirable to have those fighting on her father's side "'destroyed.'" After responding angrily to the princess "that if her son would follow her counsel, he should take another course with her" (rape), Cecropia nevertheless "framed to him a very thankful message, powdering it with some hope-giving phrases," concealing Philoclea's unfavorable reaction, which - she knows only too well - would simply exacerbate Amphialus's "desperate melancholy" (p. 370). Philoclea's consistent indifference to Amphialus's conquests in successive rounds of single combat staged to impress her "would have made him renounce all comfort, but that his mother with diversity of devices kept up his heart" (p. 379). When Amphialus finally complains "unto his mother the little success of her large-hoping promises," assuming "a desperate deafness to all delaying hopes," Cecropia is forced to acknowledge "plainly that she could prevail nothing," advising him to take the princess by force (rape) rather than by relying on "prayer" (p. 401). If Cecropia is being associated allegorically with the Mass, the obvious implication would be that those who place their confidence in this rite are similarly deluded.(63)

 

Other possible connections between Cecropia and the Mass, as well as her essentially and pronouncedly anti-Christian nature, appear during her initial endeavor to prevail upon Philoclea to marry her son. One densely metaphoric segment of this casuistic speech perverts biblical metaphors for Christ, reapplying them to the destination toward which Cecropia would guide the princess. She asks her niece to suppose "'that some heavenly spirit should appear unto you and bid you follow him through the door that goes into the garden, assuring you that you should thereby return to your dear mother, and what other delights soever your mind esteems delights.'" Would Philoclea consider refusing to follow this spirit, her wicked aunt asks, or object "'that, if he led you not through the chief gate, you would not enjoy your over-desired liberty?'" Cecropia proceeds without pause to answer her own query for Philoclea (of course she would follow the spirit), then explicates her own brief, duplicitous allegory. The niece should "'imagine'" that Cecropia herself is "'that same good angel,'" which, witnessing and in sorrow for Philoclea's "'grief . . . am come to lead you not only to your desired and imagined happiness, but to a true and essential happiness; not only to liberty, but to liberty with commandment.'" The finale to this speciously seductive line of reasoning underscores the distorted misapplication of Gospel imagery in Cecropia's speech: "'The way I will show you, which, if it be not the gate builded hitherto in your private choice, yet shall it be a door to bring you through a garden of pleasures as sweet as this life can bring forth - nay, rather, which makes this life to be a life'" (p. 331).

 

The "'way'" in which Cecropia would conduct Philoclea, toward a "'garden of pleasures'" constituting for her the chief and most desirable fruits of this life, recollects Christ's statement, "I am the Way, and the Trueth, & the Life. No man commeth unto the Father, but by me" (John 14:6). That Cecropia's way will not, like Christ's, lead to "the Father" is reinforced by another Gospel allusion, to the Parable of the Good Shepherd (John 10:1-16). Christ there warns, "He that entreth not in by the dore into the shepefolde, but climeth up another way, he is a thefe and a robber" (John 10:1). Cecropia would coax Philoclea through a door other than the "chief gate" she assumes her niece has hitherto preferred. Christ later in the parable explains, "I am the dore of the shepe" (John 10:7). The "dear mother" to which Cecropia would have Philoclea return through the "door" she recommends recalls the link between Cecropia and the Church of Rome as "mothers" for which I argued earlier, so that her remarks in this context likely suggest that that church endeavors to bring its followers to bliss or salvation through a door and by a way other than Christ. The Mass itself (to which I have suggested Cecropia is being linked) was sometimes presented by sixteenth-century Protestants as the "way" opposed to that of Christ. Whereas "Christ's doctrine is, that he is 'the way,'" wrote John Bradford, the papists's Mass "doctrine maketh the massing-priest the way: a way indeed it is, but to hell and to the devil."(64) The primarily sensual appeal of Cecropia's way would echo Protestant criticism of the "fleshly," externalized worship predominating within the Roman Church. Cecropia's garden of sensual pleasures replaces the central fold, or church, that true believers enter through the door of Christ but into which the thieves and robbers of the Parable of the Good Shepherd attempt to climb through another entrance.

 

The alternative "gate" and "way" advocated by Cecropia might also allude to Matt. 7:13: "Enter in at the streicte gate: for it is the wide gate, and broad waye that leadeth to destruction." In this verse, too, the dominant issue is the choice of gates and the contrasting "ways" of life that lead to them. The Geneva gloss to the verse, "We must overcome and mortifie our affections, if we wil be true disciples of Christ," again highlights the opposing natures of this path and the one sanctioned by Cecropia. The dense concentration of biblical imagery (for example, the allusions to the "way," the "gate," and the "door") within this single short speech of Cecropia reinforce the interpretation I have been offering. Any one of these references of itself need not carry this particular thematic significance, but the repetition of several biblical metaphors for Christ in such close proximity to one another increases the probability that together they do, particularly in light of Cecropia's prior association with the False Church and of the precise manner in which her use of the figures parodies their meaning to Christians.

 

It is essential to bear in mind, however, that Sidney presents Cecropia's essential Anti-Christianity as manifesting itself within the particular historical developments within Christendom suggested by her family history. Sidney's own tendency to view the religious controversies of his time in terms of an apocalyptic struggle between the True and False Churches is strongly suggested by a long and evidently strikingly effective oration that, as lord governor of Flushing, shortly before his death, he addressed to "so many of his souldiers . . . as could heare him." According to John Stow, Sidney roused his men for the battle by declaring to them the "cause they had in hande, as Gods cause, under, and for whom they fought, for hir Majestie"; he proclaimed to the troops "that he needed not to shewe, against whom they fought, men of false religion, enimies to God and his church: against antichrist, and against a people whose unkindenes both in nature and in life did so excell, that God woulde not leave them unpunished."(65)

 

NOTES

 

1 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 342; John F. Danby, Poets on Fortune's Hill: Studies in Sidney, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), pp. 52-3; and E. M. W. Tillyard, The English Epic and Its Background (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), p. 309, writing in the 1950s, found no conflict between the New Arcadia's pre-Christian setting and a concern with specifically Christian issues within the work. Walter R. Davis claimed that while the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean provides the moral standard in the first two books, a "Christian ethic takes over" with the captivity episode in book 3 (A Map of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance in Its Tradition, in Sidney's Arcadia, Yale Studies in English, ed. Benjamin Christie Nangle, vol. 158 [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965], pp. 76-7). Since Davis's study, Jon S. Lawry, Sidney's Two "Arcadias": Pattern and Proceeding (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), and Myron Turner, "The Disfigured Face of Nature: Image and Metaphor in the Revised Arcadia," ELR 2, 1 (Winter 1972): 116-35, have maintained without qualification that specifically Christian themes receive sustained attention in the revised Arcadia. Nancy Lindheim, The Structures of Sidney's "Arcadia" (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 10, and Dorothy Connell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker's Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 21, are among the majority of recent critics who deny that explicitly Christian issues are central to the work. Lindheim and Connell, though, are unusual among recent critics in not connecting their discussions of religion in the New Arcadia to D. P. Walker's influential article "Ways of Dealing with Atheists: A Background to Pamela's Refutation of Cecropia" (BHR 17, 2 [1955]: 252-77, reprinted in modified form as "Atheism, the Ancient Theology, and Sidney's Arcadia," in his Ancient Theology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972], pp. 132-63), which has caused most critics of the New Arcadia to begin their considerations of religious concerns in the work with the premises that Sidney's characters are literal "pagans" only and/or that any theological issues raised in the work are either directly related to the prisca theologia controversy or involve broad moral issues not specific to Christianity. Linking the New Arcadia and Sidney's friend, Phillippe du Plessis-Mornay's De la verite de la Religion Christian (A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion), trans. Sidney and Arthur Golding (1587; Delmar NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1976), which Sidney translated, at least in part, from the original French, to the prisca theologia or "ancient theology," and reading Sidney's pre-Christian setting literally only, Walker concluded that several of Sidney's characters were "saved pagans" (p. 163) and that one might "reasonably suppose that Sidney approved of the Ancient Theology" (Ancient, p. 135; see also p. 146). Walker's approach was followed by William R. Elton, who also judged that Sidney "appeared to believe in the salvation of such heathens" ("King Lear" and the Gods [San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1968], p. 38). Even critics who, counter to Lindheim and her supporters, acknowledge that religious issues are thematically central to the revised Arcadia, continue to be influenced by Walker's suppositions. See, for example, Joan Rees, Sir Philip Sidney and "Arcadia" (Rutherford NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 48, 134; Thelma N. Greenfield, The Eye of Judgement: Reading the "New Arcadia" (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 180, 183; M. J. Doherty, The Mistress-Knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney's "Defence of Poesie" and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance (Nashville: Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1991), p. 122; and Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991), p. 263. See Alan Sinfield, "Sidney, du Plessis-Mornay, and the Pagans," PQ 58, 1 (Winter 1979): 26-39, and Andrew D. Weiner, "Expelling the Beast: Bruno's Adventures in England," MP 78, 1 (August 1980): 1-13, for criticism of Walker's study.

 

2 Barbara Brumbaugh, "'The Great Work Indeed in Hand': Apocalyptic History and the Protestant Cause in Sir Philip Sidney's New Arcadia" (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1997), currently being revised and expanded into book form. I am extremely grateful to David Frantz, John King, and Lisa Klein for helpful comments on the section of my dissertation upon which the current article is based.

 

3 My dissertation argues that one important function of Sidney's characterization of Cecropia's son, Amphialus, is to criticize the Church of England for remaining merely "half-reformed."

 

4 Cecropia's general resemblances to Catherine de Medici were commented upon at least as early as the mid-1800s by William Stignant, "Sir Philip Sidney," Cambridge Essays 4 (1858): 111. Edwin Greenlaw writes, "Cecropia, dark, sinister, with something of the serpent about her, whose coup is in a sense the climax which arouses Basileus to a sense of his peril, is the Queen Mother of France. Her plot is to force a marriage with her son, just as Catherine sought to entrap Elizabeth into a marriage with Alencon . . . Her subtlety, her atheism, her worldliness, the suggestion of almost demonic personality, her plot to gain control of the realm of Basileus by means of this marriage, are parallels too close to escape notice" ("The Captivity Episode in Sidney's Arcadia," in The Manly Anniversary Studies in Language and Literature [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1923], pp. 54-63, 57-8). Martin N. Raitiere expands upon Greenlaw's observation as to "the resemblance of the mother-and-son teams Cecropia-Amphialus and Catherine de' Medici-Anjou" (Faire Bitts: Sir Philip Sidney and Renaissance Political Theory [Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1984], p. 27). William Dinsmore Briggs has compared Cecropia's plotting against Basilius to that of Mary Queen of Scotland against Elizabeth, adding that "the parallel, if Sidney intended it, is only remote" ("Political Ideas in Sidney's Arcadia," SP 28, 2 [April 1931]: 137-61, 139).

 

Other critics in addition to Greenlaw have commented upon Cecropia's demonic nature. Lindheim, for example, calls her the New Arcadia's "chief sinner in a hierarchy of vice" (p. 152). Danby labels Cecropia "the queen-villain of the Arcadia, something like Lady Macbeth . . . ambitious, envious, passionately material, and her son's evil genius" (p. 61). Neda Jeny, discussing Cecropia's "Satanic" disposition, writes that "[s]he is not only the enemy of the good characters, but also their tempter, and the nature of her temptation is not sexual, but intellectual; she tries to awaken pride, the original sin" (Notable Images of Virtue and Vice: Character Types in Sidney's "New Arcadia" [New York: Peter Lang, 1989], p. 163).

 

Tillyard, who observes that Cecropia "is un-Aristotelian in her complete badness" (p. 306), recognizes that Sidney's creation of Cecropia and Amphialus during his revision of the Arcadia "serves to alter the whole balance and tone of the novel . . . In Old Arcadia no major character was a villain; by adding the villainous Cecropia to the major characters Sidney almost added a new dimension to his novel." The evil aunt's physical and psychological torture of her captive nieces, along with acts such as her attempt "to argue Pamela out of her religion," Tillyard argues, introduce in the revised Arcadia "a new and different type of seriousness," making it "a different kind of novel, one dealing principally with the ultimate problems of man's destiny and in its scope competent to be an epic" (p. 298).

 

5 Sidney, "A Discourse of Syr Ph. S. to the Queenes Majesty Touching Hir Marriage with Monsieur," in The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1923), pp. 51-60, 52.

 

6 Near the letter's conclusion, Sidney summarizes his advice with the recommendation: "if you make that religion upon which you stand to carrye the onely strength & have abroade those who still mainteine the same cause . . . your Majesty is sure enough from your mightiest ennemies" ("Discourse to the Queenes Majesty," p. 60). Sidney's personal fervor for the "Cause" and the level of the threat he believed the French marriage would pose to its success are evident when, early in the letter, he asserts that the "most important matter" constituting his subject "import[s]" not only "the continewance of [the queen's] safety," but also "as I know the joyes of my life" (p. 51).

 

7 Sidney, "Discourse to the Queenes Majesty," p. 52. See the commentary on this passage in Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 182 nn.

 

8 Blair Worden, whose excellent study of the Old Arcadia I encountered only after this article had been accepted, argues that Cecropia is associated with another woman feared by British Protestants of the era: "Scheming, unscrupulous, diabolical, determined to topple the legitimate ruler from the throne, [Cecropia] conforms to the forward Protestant image of Mary Stuart" (The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney's "Arcadia" and Elizabethan Politics [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996], p. 173). As Worden's book makes abundantly evident, political concerns relating to the Protestant "Cause" are crucial to the Old Arcadia, as I believe they are to the New Arcadia, as well. My dissertation argues that in revising the original Arcadia Sidney introduced an overarching apocalyptic church history into the work. As he revised the work, Sidney, I argue, created a series of new episodes and characters that transformed the Arcadia into an apocalyptic and intermittently but extensively allegorical epic.

 

I disagree with Worden that Cecropia is a figure for Mary Stuart. Rather, I believe that Artesia, another character new to the revised Arcadia, is linked to that queen. As Mary Stuart was raised in the court of Catherine de Medici, Artesia is brought up by Cecropia (p. 92). Cecropia uses Artesia to advance her plots within Arcadia against its royal family (pps. 319, 386), as Mary Stuart was at the center of Catholic conspiracies against Queen Elizabeth within England. Sidney has Artesia beheaded in book 3 (pp. 425-6, 436), the punishment that ultra Protestants wished to inflict upon Mary Stuart.

 

9 Both Cecropia and Amphialus are characters new to the revised Arcadia, (1590) as, indeed, is nearly all of book 3. Whether Sidney deliberately stopped his revisions at the point at which this edition concludes or whether he intended the extensively reworked (truly "New") Arcadia to contain five books, as had the original ("Old") Arcadia, remains a subject of critical dispute.

 

10 Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 317-20. All further citations of the New Arcadia are to this edition and appear parenthetically in the text.

 

11 "Concourse" defined as "assembly" by Skretkowicz in his edition's glossary.

 

12 John Foxe, Christus Triumphans, in Two Latin Comedies by John Foxe the Martyrologist: "Titus et Gesippus," "Christus Triumphans," ed. and trans. John Hazel Smith, Renaissance Text Series 4 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press in association with the Renaissance Association of America, 1973), IV.viii, p. 327. Original Latin on pages facing the quoted English.

 

13 Foxe, Christus Triumphans, IV. viii, p. 329.

 

14 Foxe, Christus Triumphans, IV. viii, p. 327.

 

15 John Bale, "The Image of Both Churches," in Select Works of Bishop Bale, ed. Henry Christmas, Parker Society Publications, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1849), pp. 249-640, 355.

 

16 Bale, p. 393.

 

17 Thomas Kirchmeyer, The Popish Kingdome or Reigne of Antichrist, trans. Barnabe Googe, ed. Robert Charles Hope (1570; rprt. London: Charles Whittingham, 1880), sig. 4r. Interestingly, Sidney also warns Queen Elizabeth that, since Alencon "cannot be content to be second person in France & heire apparant," it is unlikely that he would be "conteined in the limites of" any "conditions" she might impose upon him as part of a marriage agreement or to be "second person" in her kingdom ("Discourse to the Queenes Majesty," p. 54).

 

18 I will argue on a later occasion that Pamela and Philoclea are associated, at certain points in Sidney's narrative, with the Law and Gospel of Christian Scripture, respectively, parallels that would suggest a possible allusion through their birth to the availability of vernacular translations of the Bible and/or to the reassertion of a central position for Scripture within the Church of England.

 

19 John Jewel, Apology of the Church of England, quoted in Paul Christianson, Reformers and Babylon: English Apocalyptic Visions from the Reformation to the Eve of the Civil War (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1978), p. 32.

 

20 Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 2d edn. (New York: Longman, 1977), p. 376.

 

21 Jeny, who links Cecropia to the Edenic "serpent who tempts the virtuous human beings to the sin of pride," remarks that the aunt's "name calls in mind Cecrops, the man-snake of the classical mythology; she reminds the reader of Spenser's Errour, a monster who is half woman and half snake" (p. 164).

 

Sidney's contemporaries attributed serpentine qualities to Catherine de Medici, one of the historical figures with whom Cecropia has been linked, as well. Exemplifying his assertion that "Since Bartholomew, Englishmen had looked upon Catherine de Medici as a monster," Greenlaw notes that one English correspondent entitled her "'Mad. de la Serpente'" and that Sir Francis Knollys wrote in a 1580 letter to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, that the prospective French marriage for Queen Elizabeth had been "'plotted out by the serpentine subtlety of the Queen mother's head'" (p. 56).

 

22 Kirchmeyer, sig. 1V.

 

23 G. J. R. Parry, A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), p. 213. 24 Parry, p. 214.

 

25 Christopher Martin's suggestion that Cecropia's name refers primarily to the fact that Cecrops was "credited in legend as the founder of the institution of matrimony" seems to me quite unlikely ("Misdoubting His Estate: Dynastic Anxiety in Sidney's Arcadia," ELR 18, 3 [Autumn 1988]: 369-88, 386). He observes that, because Cecropia endeavors to "reestablish Amphialus' claims to the throne" by marrying him off to one of Basilius's daughters, "she stands forth in a grotesque way as one of the romance's principal advocates of marriage" (pp. 386-7). Yet Cecropia as willingly counsels her son to rape as to marriage. William Blake Tyrrell, in Amazons: A Study in Athenian Mythmaking (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1984), a source cited by Martin, observes that Cecrops's identification as the founder of marriage is a postclassical tradition for which no evidence is available prior to the first century B.C., in the writings of the Roman scholar Varro; Tyrrell concedes, however, the unlikelihood "that Varro" merely invented this role for Cecrops (pp. 28-9).

 

26 Geneva Bible (1560; Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1969), gloss to Rev. 17:4. All further biblical citations refer to this version and appear parenthetically in the text.

 

27 For example, in "A viewe of Antichrist, his lawes and ceremonies, in our English Church unreformed," an anonymous and undated tract clustered with documents from the early 1570s in the Puritan collection A Parte of a Register (1593; New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), p. 65, bells are said to have been introduced into the Christian church by Pope Sabinian in 603 because they were "falslie" believed to "stirre men to devotion," to "keepe the mindes and bodyes of the faythfull from all daungers," to "put to flight the hoastes of our enimies, and dispatch all the subtilties of their evill willers," to "cause the boysterous windes, hayle, and all sharpe stormes, and terrible tempestes to cease," to "drive away all evill spirites," and so forth.

 

28 George Marsh, quoted in Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 8 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 7:54.

 

29 Skretkowicz defines "consort" as "combine in musical harmony" in his edition's glossary.

 

30 Peter Auksi, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Montreal: McGill-Queens Univ. Press, 1995), p. 219.

 

31 Peter Martyr, The Common Places, trans. Anthonie Marten ([London], 1583), part 3, p. 314. As John N. King points out, by "the eve of the Reformation, elaborately polyphonic song had become the preserve of the clergy and choir who sang in procession behind the rood screen in a language incomprehensible to the laity," a trend that Robert Crowley attempted to counter by basing the musical settings in his Psalter upon simple harmonies. His Psalter, consequently, "functions as a musical analogue to Edwardian iconoclasm" (English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982], pp. 222-3). See also M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: A Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 431-4, who points out that such objections were not generally applied to music performed outside the worship service (p. 433); and William P. Haugaard, Elizabeth and the English Reformation: The Struggle for a Stable Settlement of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), p. 168, who observes that Queen Elizabeth's "injunction on music plainly called for the continuation of choirs of men and boys with their plainsong and polyphonic music." Wyclif and the Lollards had also objected to polyphonic church music (Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1986], p. 28).

 

32 A bell traditionally signaled "that there is a popish mass ready at hand" (Thomas Becon, "The Displaying of the Popish Mass," in Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, S. T. P., ed. John Ayre, Parker Society Publications, vol. 4 [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1844], pp. 251-86, 256).

 

33 Dire consequences of participating in the Mass such as those suggested by the enforced captivity of Sidney's narrative are predicted by contemporary gospellers. The Marian martyr, John Careless, advises a "godly faithful Sister": "fly from [the 'idolatrous mass'] both in body and soul, as you would fly from the very devil himself. Drink not of the whore of Babylon's cup by any means; for it will infect the body and poison the soul" (Foxe, Acts, 8:192).

 

34 John Gough, quoted. in Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 75.

 

35 I will argue on a later occasion that Dametas and Miso are allegorically connected to the undereducated and under-reformed elements within the Church of England.

 

36 Sidney, Defence of Poetry, ed. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 64.

 

37 E. K., commentary on "Maye," in The Shepheardes Calendar, by Edmund Spenser, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 102-3.

 

38 Spenser, "Maye," in The Shepheardes Calendar, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, lines 219, 238, 239, and 240.

 

39 E. K., p. 104 n.

 

40 Spenser, "Maye," line 298.

 

41 Spenser, "Maye," lines 288-9.

 

42 Spenser, "Maye," line 293.

 

43 Spenser, "Maye," lines 237-8, 279.

 

44 Spenser, "Maye," lines 1-4. David Norbrook compares Palinode's arguments to those through which "the devil's advocate," a character named Custom, aims to deceive Veritie in a contemporary dialogue by Thomas Lovel (Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984], p. 64). See also Norbrook's discussion of Robert Crowley's opposition to many traditional rural rites and festivals (p. 51). Jewel declared that the Roman Mass "'turned the remembrance of the death of Christ into a May-game'" (quoted in Douglas D. Waters, Duessa as Theological Satire [Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1970], p. 82).

 

45 Spenser, "Maye," lines 13-4.

 

46 Sidney's assigned role was "to condole the death of Maximilian, and congratulate the succession of Rodolph to the Empire" on Elizabeth's behalf (Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney [1652; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907], p. 41). See Duncan-Jones, Courtier Poet, pp. 120-30, on Sidney's role as an ambassador to Emperor Rudolph II.

 

47 Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, pp. 42-3.

 

48 Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 43.

 

49 Ibid.

 

50 Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, p. 44.

 

51 Sidney's correspondence with Hubert Languet amply reveals their frustration with what they viewed as the queen's inadequate funding of the "Cause." For example, in a letter written from court in March of 1578, Sidney complained of Elizabeth's "tardiness in executing her designs, against Leicester, Walsingham, and others, who had persuaded her to a more active course; which I much regret," adding, "My friend Du Plessis will, I believe, shortly quit us, without being able to obtain what would have been most advantageous to a Christian government. For my part, unless God powerfully counteract it, I seem to myself to see our cause withering away, and am now meditating with myself some Indian project" (10 March 1578, The Correspondence of Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet, ed. William Aspenwall Bradley [Boston: Merrymount, 1912], p. 163).

 

52 Heinrich Bullinger, A Hundred Sermons upon the Apocalipse of Jesus Christ, trans. John Daus (London, 1573), sig. 159r. See also V. Norskov Olsen, John Foxe and the Elizabethan Church (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 115, on Foxe's discussion in Eicasmi of the True and False Churches as both women and mothers.

 

53 Greville, A Treatise of Religion, in The Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, ed. G. A. Wilkes (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 203-31, st. 29.

 

54 Philips von Marnix, The Beehive of the Romishe Church: A Commentarie upon the Sixe Principall Pointes of Master Gentian Hervert, a Romish Catholike, trans. George Gylpen the Elder (London, 1579), sig. 14r. See Van Dorsten, Poets, Patrons and Professors: Sir Philip Sidney, Daniel Rogers and the Leiden Humanists, Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, ed. A. G. H. Bachrach, 2 (Leiden: Leiden Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 33, 58, on Marnix and the English Beehive.

 

55 William Turner, The Huntyng of the Romysh Wolfe [Zurich, 1554], sig. A3v.

 

56 King, p. 289, paraphrasing the genealogy traced in A Briefe Recantacion of Maystres Missa (which King believes was authored by John Mardeley); Waters, p. 15. See also King, pp. 265-8, on the Mistress Missa topos.

 

57 Von Marnix, sig. 238r.

 

58 Waters, p. 105.

 

59 Protestant propagandists sometimes characterized the Mass itself as a "Mother," presumably when they wished to underscore its status not as a child of the papacy or the mother Roman Church but as "the mother of all mischief." (A new dialogue called the endightment agaynste mother Messe [1548], quoted in Susan Brigden, London and the Reformation [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], p. 436). Another polemicist has Mistress Missa bemoan her fallen estate in a passage that recalls Cecropia's pride, former glory and preeminence, and plots for the Arcadian throne:

 

I was as proud as Lucifer that fell Which did presume to the almighty throne So on earth compared to me was none I thought myself with God to be all one.

 

(quoted in Brigden, p. 437)

 

60 The Protestant Thomas Becon, for instance, cites Thomas Aquinas's "'second cause'" justifying the Mass: "'as the body of the Lord was once offered on the cross for original sin, so likewise it should be offered continually for our daily sins upon the altar, and that the church should have in this behalf a gift to pacify God'" (p. 377). Cf. Spenser, The Fairie Queene, 5.11.19.

 

61 See chapter 6 of my dissertation.

 

62 Waters, pp. 68, 55. All of the drastic tactics through which Cecropia endeavors to frighten and force the princesses to accept Amphialus merely leave her "still farder off" from her purpose, "for where at first she might perchance have persuaded them to have visited her son and have given him some comfort," especially since they know he is mortally wounded, her methods so repel them that they inform the aunt "that they would never otherwise speak to him than as to the enemy of most unjust cruelty towards them, that any time or place could ever make them know" (p. 423).

 

63 The dissertation chapter from which this article is drawn argues that Cecropia is also linked to another Roman sacrament, auricular confession. Since that chapter was composed, I have encountered John Michael Archer's Sovereignty and Intelligence: Spying and Court Culture in the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1993), which argues, "Without being precisely an allegorical figure like Spenser's Duessa or Lucifera, Cecropia gives form to fears about England's invasion by Jesuits and secular priests, which increased during the years in which Sidney composed his revision" (p. 61). Archer notes Cecropia's "inquisitorial prying" and her "deft control of spectacular effects and the fear they induce" (pp. 60, 61).

 

64 John Bradford, quoted in Waters, p. 58.

 

65 John Stowe, The Annales of England (London, 1592), pp. 1244-5.

 

Barbara Brumbaugh is an instructor at Auburn University.