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The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance about the pastoral exploits of the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles (aka Zelmane the amazon) remains one of the defining works of English fiction. The New Arcadia – the revised, unfinished version first published in print in 1590 – differs from its more widely known cousin the Old Arcadia, which circulated in manuscript during Sidney’s lifetime, in two major points. The first of these is its ambitious, non-chronological approach to the narrative, resulting in crucial plot details (and even the true identities of the main protagonists) being initially withheld from the reader. The second difference is in the New Arcadia’s rhetorically elaborate style, which consolidated Sidney’s reputation most skilled prose stylists of the English Renaissance. This edition of the New Arcadia is the first in 37 years and combines the text of Victor Skretkowicz’s seminal 1987 edition with a substantially expanded commentary and additional long notes on the book’s history in print and Sidney’s use of rhetorical devices.
MS Harl. 6057, ff. 10v –11v ; and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, MS 1. 3. 16, ff. 4–5v (W. A. Ringler, ‘Poems Attributed to Sir Philip Sidney’, SP xlvii (1950), 126– 51). Another adaptation for a poem on Besse Griffin is in Bodleian Library MS Eng. Poet. f. 27, pp. 99–101 (Robertson, 424). 9. verse. Parodying popular taste, Sidney uses the metre so desperately described by George Gascoigne, Certain Notes of Instruction, in Works, ed. J. W. Cunliffe (Cambridge, 1910), i. 472: ‘the commonest sort of verse which we use nowadays (viz. the long verse of twelve and
vertue”—lumps together “Poets, Pipers, Plaiers, Jesters, and such like Caterpillers of a Commonwelth.” Gosson’s rhetoric is typical of antitheatrical writers, yet the responses their work received suggests that his assumption about the common cultural work of poets and players is shared by those with a positive view of poetry and theater, including Gosson’s poorly chosen dedicatee, Philip Sidney
virtue so; and this say I because it may be ever so; or, to say better, because it will be ever so. Read it then at your idle times, and the follies your good judgement will find in it, blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuff than, as in an haberdasher’s shop, glasses or feathers, you will continue to love the writer who doth exceedingly love you, and most most heartily prays you may long live to be a principal ornament to the family of the Sidneys. Your loving brother, Philip Sidney
Shortly after Philip Sidney's death, an epitaph appeared in St. Paul's; as quoted by John Elyot in his Ortho-epia gallica (1593), it begins, England, Netherland, the Heavens, and the Arts, The Souldiors, and the World, have made six parts Of the noble Sydney: for none will suppose, That a small heape of stones can Sydney enclose. (sig. X2
This revisionary biographical study documents that Spenser was the protégé of a circle of churchmen who expected him to take holy orders, but between 1574, when he left Pembroke College, and 1579, when he published the Shepheardes Calender, he decided against a career in the church. At Pembroke College and in London, Spenser watched the Elizabethan establishment crack down on independent thinking. The sequestration of Edmund Grindal was a watershed event in his early life, as was his encounter with Philip Sidney, the dedicatee of to the Shepheardes Calender. Once Spenser exchanged the role of shepherd-priest for that of shepherd-poet, he understood that his role was not just to celebrate the victories of Protestant England over the Spanish empire, immortalize in verse the virtues of Gloriana’s knights, but also to ‘fashion a noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. The received biography of the early Spenser emphasizes Gabriel Harvey, who is reported to have been Spenser’s tutor. Brink shows that Harvey could not have been Spenser’s tutor and argues that Harvey published Familiar Letters (1580) to promote his ambition to be named University Orator at Cambridge. Brink shows that Spenser had already received preferment. His life is contextualized by comparisons with contemporaries including Philip Sidney, Lodowick Bryskett, Shakespeare, and Sir Walter Ralegh. Brink’s provocative study, based upon a critical re-evaluation of manuscript and printed sources, emphasizes Philip Sidney over Harvey and shows that Spenser’s appointment as secretary to Lord Grey was a preferment celebrated even years later by Camden.
Relatively late manifestations of the European philhellene revival of Greco-Roman letters presented to readers complex, extended prose fiction in which the trials of love mask an implicit moral and political allegory. Inevitably, coming during the Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, this cultural phenomenon was not without its religious and political dimensions. Longus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus were the three principal English exponents of rhetorically conscious Greco-Roman erotic romance. This book enhances the understanding of the erotic romances of Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, and Lady Mary Sidney Wroth by setting them within an integrated political, rhetorical, and aesthetic context. It investigates how Renaissance translators alter rhetorical styles, and even contents, to accord with contemporary taste, political agendas and the restrictions of censorship. Particular attention is paid to differences between the French courtly style of Jacques Amyot and François de Belleforest and the more literal translations of their English counterparts. Valuable perspective on the early translations is offered through the modern English versions in B.P. Reardon's Collected Ancient Greek Novels. The book considers the three texts of Sidney's Arcadia, as a political romance sharing many of the thematic and rhetorical concerns of the ancients. It focuses on a narrow range of Shakespeare's plays including Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. The book identifies Mary Sidney Wroth's masque-like prose allegory, The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, as philhellene Protestant political propaganda.