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Against Friendship: An Essay by the ‘Wizard’ Earl of Northumberland [with text]

This essay presents an unpublished meditation on friendship by Henry Percy (1564–1632), ninth Earl of Northumberland. In contrast to early modern writers who celebrated an idealized vision of perfect friendship inherited from Aristotle and Cicero, Northumberland’s vividly autobiographical essay recounts his youthful disappointments in finding true friends and his eventual realization that the perfect friendship extolled by poets and philosophers is in fact a chimera that precludes human happiness. A semi-diplomatic transcription of the essay is preceded by an account of Northumberland’s life and other writings in addition to a consideration of the essay’s philosophical sources, its composition date and genre, and its treatment of the literary. Indeed, not only does Northumberland’s essay both accept and critique the Horatian-Sidneian theory of poetry’s edifying power, his specific examples of indoctrinating literature (a ballad about Damon and Pythias and a pedagogical performance of the Nisus and Euryalus story) may well have come from his own life. [M.T.]