Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney
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voluptuously, and at other times wittily. But it is much more than a mere love story, for it deals also with kingship and its duties, the proper conduct of public affairs, and vexed problems of personal ethics. Basilius, the Duke of Arcadia, is a ruler who shirks his duties; Euarchus of Macedon is the perfect pattern of the just judge and righteous king. The heroes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, and the heroines, Philoclea and Pamela, struggle with the demands of personal desire and rational conduct, the avoidance of consequences and the maintenance of personal integrity. It is a fundamentally serious romance, concerned with problems of conduct in both public and private life, but fraught with emotion and humour—full of ‘delightful teaching’.” (xxxvi-xxxvii)
Ringler, W. A. Jr. “Sir Philip Sidney: The Myth and the Man.” In Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend. Ed. Jan van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, Arthur F. Kinney. 1986.
Sidney “tried to sail to the Indies with Sir Francis Drake, but the Queen peremptorily called him back. … Neither Leicester nor Burghley, Ralegh nor Drake, among the statesmen and soldiers; neither Spenser nor Shakespeare among the poets, received as much or as high praise from their contemporaries as did Sidney. His attraction and greatness were personal, a matter of character, immediately perceptible to those who came in contact with him. … But this man was not loved and admired by the Elizabethans because he was the epitome of impossible perfections, because he was, as Shelley would have us believe, ‘sublimely mild, a spirit without spot.’ Mild is probably the least appropriate adjective to apply to him. His charge at Zutphen through the entire array of Spanish foot soldiers shows his fiery courage. … Nor was he entirely without spot, at least in words. His sister and some of his friends appear to have been disturbed by his passionate sonnets to Stella; they at first tried to prevent their circulation, and failing that, countenanced the evidently false interpretation of them given in Spenser’s Astrophil. … The impractical story-book hero into which Sidney has been turned is in part … the result of the well-intentioned misstatements of his friend Fulke Greville. Greville, and Greville alone, is responsible for the story of his quixotically casting off his cuisses in order to expose himself to as great a risk as a less-well armed companion, and for the incident of the bottle of water.” (5-8)
Rowse, A. L. The Elizabeth Renaissance: The Cultural Achievement, 1972:
“There is everything in it: prose and verse, both alike exquisite, pastoral and romance, stories, some of them sensational, ethical discussion and moral guidance. Overriding everything is the book’s message: discipline of mind and heart, control of passion and desire: only a right rule of conduct can carry one through the evils and storms of life. In one sense, the main story of the book is a parable. Arcadia is no remote, romantic kingdom; in a way it is an idealized England, with moral and political implications for it. … Other poets rifled it, notably Shakespeare, and not only shipwrecks, the blind Paphlagonian king, touches in The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, but verbally. … Elizabethan ideals and values are given their proper expression: not only the highest conceptions of love and friendship, duty and conduct, a refined aristocratic notion of women (as against the Puritan view of them simply as housewives), but their ideas of countryside, architecture, the usual English inexpertness at the beginning of wars, premonitions of the war in the Netherlands. In an aside, we are let into Sidney’s most intimate religious belief, ‘I would then have said, the heavenly powers to be reverenced and not searched into, and their mercies rather by prayers to be sought than their hidden counsels by curiosity’ [1.4]. … The book has an overwhelming sense of visual beauty: sometimes one sees the flowery meadows of Wilton or the woodland of Penshurst, where it was written, or pictures are conjured up with all the clarity of Botticelli, or again the scene moves like a tapestry moved by the wind. Or there is the sheer music of the prose, like the evocation of silver trumpets echoing against castle-walls. There is complete harmony of atmosphere throughout the book, the harmony of Sidney’s achieved nature, along with delightful touches of humour, and a graceful irony, an aristocratic quality. He was satirical about goddesses—remember that he had not been afraid to address a personal remonstrance to the Queen against her marrying Anjou. The Queen of Laconia is described as seeming born only on the boundaries of beauty’s kingdom, ‘for all her lineaments were neither perfect possessions thereof, nor absent strangers thereto. But she was a queen, and therefore beautiful’ [1.16]. Philip Sidney was no sycophant. Early on in the book occurs the phrase, ‘if I die, love my memory’ [1.10]. These were the words he uttered on his death-bed. How they all cherished his memory!” (51-52).
Tillyard, E. M. W. The English Epic and Its Background. 1954.
“Arcadia, in fact, is not generally read, at least in bulk; and I believe mainly for the simple and sufficient reason that there is no really readable modern edition.” (295)
Wilde, Oscar. Pall Mall Gazette. December 11, 1886:
“England … had the good fortune to receive the Reformation and the Renaissance at the same epoch, and Sidney may be said to have summed up in himself all that in each movement was finest and most noble, taking from the one a certain gravity of mind and lofty independence of thought, and from the other culture, chivalry, statesmanship, and urbanity. Graceful writer though he was of sonnet and lyric, master of delicate and refined prose, yet “his end,” as Fulke Greville tells us, “was not writing, even while he wrote.” The whole tenor of his career shows his determination “to subordinate self-culture to useful public action,” and the most perfect of all his poems was his own life. Three centuries have passed since he died at Arnhem, yet we can still feel the fascination of his gracious personality, and catch something of the charm that made all men love him. New ideas may have come before our eyes, and life has perhaps been made more complex and more difficult for us that it was for him, but it is well to keep him in our memory, the courtly Elizabethan hero, the writer of the sonnets to Stella, the Christian gentleman who gave the cup of water to the wounded soldier at Zutphen.”
Wilson, A. N. The Elizabethans. 2011.
The revised Arcadia “is a much richer, more complicated, more satisfying reading experience than the simpler version (known as the Old Arcadia). [Sidney] purged the story of improprieties—Pyrocles does not, as in the old version, sleep with Philoclea, nor is Musidorus tempted to rape Pamela. The comedy is still there; the inherent absurdity of the older characters, Basilius and his wife Gynecia, both being in love with Pyrocles in drag is exquisitely worked out. And the scene in which Basilius thinks he is sleeping with ‘Zelmane,’ but in fact makes love to his own wife in the dark, is both hilarious and deeply touching. The device, taken up and imitated by Shakespeare in his comedies, of Zelmane, disguised as a pageboy and loving Pyrocles, is extremely affecting: her death one of the finest things in English literature. To the old version is added a much sharper sense of menace, especially in the character of wicked Cecropia. … You never feel the emotions in the Arcadia are fake. These are real young people with real passions, real sexual frustrations, and real anguish in a grown-up world not of their making. … It is a book aware of the realities of the sordid political world: spies are ‘the necessary evil servants to a King’ … —and the multifaceted and variegated prose is interrupted at regular intervals with verse of dazzling proficiency.” (213-214)
Woolf, Virginia. “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” The Second Common Reader. 1932.
“In the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” (Collected Essays 1 [1996] 27)
Maps
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
1593
T0
My Dear Lady And Sister,
The Countess Of Pembroke
Most dear—and most worthy to be most dear—lady:
You have here this idle work of mine which,