Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis

On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. 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. There are shepherds, pirates, kings, queens, and love triangles (polygons?) en masse, including amorous escapades involving men dressed up as Amazons. What’s not to like?

To make matters messier for Arcadia’s characters, readers, and future editors, Sidney produced two substantially different versions of the story, one between 1577 and 1581 and a revised (some would say completely new) work between 1581 and 1584. In 1590, four years after Sidney’s death, his best friend, Fulke Greville, published the “new” Arcadia with its abrupt cutoff. In 1593, Sidney’s beloved sister Mary brought out a rival work in a bigger and more luxurious format, starting with the “new” version and attaching a heavily edited finale drawn from the old version, resulting in a clumsy, incongruent centaur nobody liked. Crucially, though, in the parts of the new and old Arcadias that correspond, nearly all 2,400 brackets are identical. We don’t have a definitive Sidney autograph (a manuscript written by himself) of one fused final version, so this is as good as it gets concerning his own punctuation. Sidney was clearly an enthusiastic bracketeer.

While there were contemporary writers who also heavily implemented parentheses, none did so as much or as well as Sidney did. The popularity of his Arcadia helped spread both the use of brackets and the perception of their sophistication. After all, the Renaissance loved intricate structures of all kinds, from architecture to fabric patterns to language. Philip Sidney’s brackets provided a blueprint for elevated expression, and writers loved imitating him. Some, in fact, felt so inspired by the provocative unfinished sentence that they picked up the narrative thread of the new Arcadia from where Sidney had left off. Gervase Markham published an ending in 1607, and Sidney’s niece Lady Mary Wroth (the Sidney family was amazingly literary) wrote a long, two-part prose novel called Uranian in the 1620s, which also employed her uncle’s trademark parentheses as a claim to his legacy.

When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis, nearly 200 years before Sidney perfected it, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. But one suspects that there is a limit for how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay. It makes sense, then, that Sidney’s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, writes in his Directions for Speech and Style (1600) that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech”.

This paradoxical potential created a certain nervousness in style recommendations. In his 1589 Art of English Poetry, George Puttenham offers an exaggerated example, commenting, “This insertion is very long and utterly impertinent to the principal matter, and makes a great gap in the tale, nevertheless is no disgrace but rather a beauty and to very good purpose, but you must not use such insertions often nor too thick, nor those that be very long as this of ours, for it will breed great confusion to have the tale so much interrupted.” On the one hand, the parenthesis is disposable. It’s useless. Stuff. Waste. Thrust into the middle for want of wit, somewhere, anywhere. On the other hand, it is “grafted” onto the host sentence, as Puttenham continues, as if it were a branch of another tree that improves on its new stem precisely because it is foreign. The question is not so much if a parenthesis intrudes on a sentence — it does; there’s no denying it. We should rather ask how?

In The Garden of Eloquence, Puttenham’s fellow rhetorician Henry Peacham believes meandering on the syntactic and narrative line is permissible provided that one is “going out from order, but yet for profit of some pertinent sense”. He continues, “We must have a perfect way provided aforehand, that we may go fourth aptly, and making no long tarrying return in again cunningly.” Inserting the insertor requires fore-conceit, an inkling of how a sentence or a plot is going to develop. If a writer is going to stray, they should stray strategically, spanning the internal parenthesis like an arch. The parenthesis cuts, but it also stitches the before and after together again, unfolding left and right from the typographical boundaries of the punctuation mark.

At the beginning of Arcadia, one of the princes, Musidorus, courts Pamela, one of the sister-princesses, by communicating to her that his shepherd apparel is just a disguise. Or at least, he’s trying to tell her as much:

In the country of Thessalia, (alas why name I that accursed country, which brings forth nothing, but matters for tragedies? but name it I must) in Thessalia (I say) there was (well may I say, there was) a Prince (no, no Prince, whom bondage wholly possessed; but yet accounted a Prince, and) named Musidorus.

Why all these parentheses? He could have just said, “In the country of Thessalia there was a prince named Musidorus.” Instead he interrupts himself almost obsessively, trapped in his fake identity, not only in the story but in the sentence too. The bracket interruptions perform the delays he is experiencing in his own life due to his love for Pamela and the disguise he upholds to be able to court her.

Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney’s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.

There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.

Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that’s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:

Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.

Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (“like the spider’s web” and “as the cruel fathers”), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (“most dear Lady”). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket — the words inside are never left out in the cold.