Journal Article

After Sidney and Before Wroth: Harington's English Orlando and Christendom

Stillman, Robert E

2025

Overview

John Harington’s English Orlando is both a translation and a new heroic fiction belonging to the cultural moment of its making. It pursues a recognizably Sidneian end, the imaginary restoration of Christendom, and anticipates Mary Wroth’s engagement with Sidney family politics and piety in her Urania. My argument begins by showing that Harington encouraged the present-tense reading of the English Orlando undertaken here in an allegoresis of his own Orlando in his Tract on the Succession (1602), written a decade later to support James VI’s claims to the throne. In my essay’s second part, I argue that Harington’s post-Reformation politics shaped a poetics at once indebted to Sidney’s in its moral and religious earnestness and importantly different in its pragmatic attunement to the present-tense “uses” of fiction-making. The argument’s main focus turns then to clarifying the impact of Harington’s post-Reformation politics on the English Orlando’s fiction-making, first by exploring its provision of a hospitable world for readers of every confessional variety, and second by pursuing its narrative designs to fill the empty space of Christendom’s loss. While those goals recall Sidney’s politics of Christendom, they are important anticipations of the closeted, aconfessional piety of Wroth’s Urania and her fascination with imperial and world harmony. In short, Harington’s Orlando points to new continuities in the Sidney family history that merit further exploration.

• Publisher: Sidney Journal
• Subject: Apologies / Attention / Christian Islamic relations / Christianity / English literature / Epic literature / Fiction / Harington, John, Sir (1560-1612) / Literary criticism / Literary translation / Narratives / Oral reading / Poetics / Poetry / Reading / Wroth, Mary (Lady) (ca 1586-ca 1640)