The Bracket Wars: Why Sidney's Parentheses Still Matter

By Andy — 2026-08-18 — Literary News

I was ordering a used copy of Sidney's Arcadia last week when I realized I'd never actually looked at the thing.

Just opened it.

The brackets are everywhere. They're not shy about it.

Here's what nobody tells you: the parenthesis was almost nobody's idea. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian had called this move "interpositio"—putting something inside something else—but it was all mouth, no mark. Nobody actually printed it until Coluccio Salutati, an Italian scholar, decided to get visual about it in 1399. He was writing a treatise on medicine and law, needed to clarify a thought, and just... made the shape. Curved lines, sitting in the margins like afterthoughts with architecture.

But it didn't really catch on until about 200 years later.

Enter Sir Philip Sidney, who walked into the Renaissance and decided parentheses were his entire personality. He died in 1586 at thirty-one, fighting in the Netherlands—shot in the thigh, actually—and left behind a work so crammed with brackets that scholars now count approximately 2,400 of them in Arcadia. Two thousand four hundred. Not a typo. Not decorative excess. Each one doing something.

The wild thing is that Sidney essentially stopped writing mid-sentence. Mid-plot. Mid-bracket, actually. He left the story tangled and open-ended—which meant other writers couldn't leave it alone. His niece Mary Wroth later wrote her own continuation, Uranian, and I need you to understand: she used parentheses exactly like he had. Not because the form demanded it. Because she was claiming him. The bracket was his fingerprint.

This matters, more or less, because Sidney didn't invent any of this.

What he did was make it fashionable. The Renaissance loved intricate structures of all kinds—architecture, fabric patterns, language—and Sidney's brackets provided a blueprint for elevated expression. Complexity became taste. Asides became art. Suddenly, writers who wanted to be taken seriously started adding thoughts-within-thoughts, digressions-within-digressions, and the page itself became something you could navigate like a conversation, with voices layering over each other.

The parenthesis, when you actually look at it, is either useless or essential.

There's no middle ground. The *Arcadia* is a long prose romance with disguises, poetry competitions, shipwrecks, abductions, court cases, war, and more love triangles than you can count. It's chaotic. It's supposed to be. And the brackets? They're not clarifying anything. They're creating space for the reader to breathe, to hesitate, to know that there's a voice whispering something extra into the sentence that the main narrative isn't saying.

Actually, that's not quite right. They're creating space for Sidney to have it both ways. To tell you the story and comment on the story and digress from both at the same time. To be serious and ironic and sentimental all in the same line.

We don't really do that anymore—not on the page, anyway. We've moved the asides to footnotes and endnotes, put them in separate columns, or just truncated them into emoji and hashtags. But if you read anything written after 1590 with any ambition to it, you're walking through a door Sidney opened. You're living in the space he made when he decided that a sentence didn't have to be a straight line from capital letter to full stop.