Erasmus called them “little moons” and George Puttenham praised them as “figures of tolerable disorder” (if used not too often “nor too thick”). For Philip Sidney, they were simply indispensable. Florence Hazrat introduces us to the uncontested early modern king of brackets and to his romance _Arcadia_, which abruptly ends, like its author’s life, hanging on a parenthesis.
Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Portrait of Philip Sidney after a 16th-century work by Antonis Mor, ca. 18th century — Source. On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come.
My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead.
Sir Philip Sidney, courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about errant knights, which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle. He left the action hanging on a parenthesis. > Anaxius lept away.
Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life) Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished. Even so, Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, and using the parenthesis as a memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again.
Yet considering how his own life was cut short at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen. Irrespective of his death in parentheses, Philip Sidney wielded the two typographical boomerangs with aplomb in his brilliantly stylish and dizzyingly chaotic _Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia_. Two princes meet two princesses, and much drama ensues, including multiple disguises, poetry competitions, shipwrecks, abductions, a climactic court case, war, and the most dangerous adventure of all: love.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
