Arcadia: A Romance

Preface

Very little is known about Shakespeare between his marriage in 1582, when he was eighteen, and his emergence as an actor and playwright in 1592. But if he was anywhere near London, he knew about the courtier and war hero Philip Sidney, who died on October 17, 1586, three weeks after a bullet hit his thigh as he charged a supply line of Spanish troops bringing gunpowder to Zutphen in the Netherlands. His London funeral on February 16, 1587, just before that of Mary, Queen of Scots, was unmatched in lavishness for a non-royal until 1962, when Winston Churchill died.

Three years later, England’s war hero was recognized as an author when his name appeared on the title page of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Shakespeare read every word, as can be seen in his earliest plays by the way he imitates Sidney’s obsession with tears and water drops, at times in a baroque or metaphysical manner—Tears, drown yourselves (Arcadia 3.34); And every drop cries vengeance (3HenryVI 1.4.148). In 1591, Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella appeared in a defective edition (the title character’s named should be spelled Astrophil) that obscured the story of a lover who suffers for stealing a kiss. Shakespeare again followed Sidney’s lead. He wrote a sequence of sonnets and, imitating his model, did not bother to provide a single narrative to connect the friend, the rival poet, and the dark lady. He also borrowed Sidney’s paradoxes—that Stella’s eyes are dark but bright, that the further away from her Astrophil finds himself, the more he loves her—for his own dark lady and lover.

In 1593, Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke, published a new edition of the Arcadia, now in five books instead of three, that completed the narrative left suspended in 1590. From either version Shakespeare could have borrowed the story of the blind Paphlagonian king in Book 2, which became the basis for the Gloucester subplot in King Lear. But a hitherto unnoticed connection between A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, where four lovers chase each other through the forest outside Athens, and a game of tag in the Barley-Break poem (Lamon’s Song) that Sidney’s sister added to the First Eclogues, shows that Shakespeare kept up to date with the new edition of Sidney’s work.

In 1595 there appeared a pirated edition of an essay titled An Apology for Poetry, reprinted in 1598 under the title The Defense of Poesie when Mary Sidney put her brother’s complete works into a single volume. In this classic essay Sidney argues that poetry, by which he means prose fiction and drama as well as lyric poetry, is better able to teach moral virtue than either history or philosophy. History is too tied to actual events, and philosophy is too dry and difficult to understand. But poetry creates its own world. Having died before the great achievements of the English Renaissance stage, Sidney has little good to say about drama, but he urges English writers to produce literature that will surpass the best of France and Italy.

People often wonder what made Shakespeare great. How could he write popular plays that are still studied today? Why did he write in verse; indeed, why did he write complex drama and not just settle for bawdy jigs? The question of genius aside, Sidney’s challenge provides no small part of the answer. Echoes of the Arcadia abound in Shakespeare’s work, from Romeo and Juliet and Othello to the pastoral play The Winter’s Tale. Sidney was also a master of the art of oratory; his character’s speeches and letters offer lessons in subtle persuasion and ethical appeal that Shakespeare deploys so effectively. So great was Shakespeare’s debt, not just to Sidney’s work but to the whole conception that a great nation must have great writers, that it is hard not to hear a tribute to Sidney in the opening line of Shakespeare’s most patriotic play, Henry V, when the Chorus asks for a muse of fire! The name of one of Sidney’s heroes is Musidorus, which means gift of the muses, and the other is Pyrocles, whose name derives from the Greek word for fire.

Shakespeare’s jingoistic but at the same time unblinkered play courts comparison to Sidney’s fable about two young men so carried away by their romantic idealization of two royal sisters, Pamela and Philoclea, that they literally and unlawfully try to carry them away. At trial after they are caught, they display the dazzling ability to make speeches that characterizes the whole Arcadia. Sidney’s women also think logically and can express strong emotion in equally well-chosen words. Philoclea is only sixteen in the story and uncertain in love, but her strength of mind is apparent when she argues against Pyrocles’ wish to kill himself. Dignified Pamela composes a prayer that England’s King Charles I is said to have recited before he put his head on the chopping block in 1649. Queen Gynecia puts her own tormented passion for a man not her husband into eloquent speeches of self-reproach. The Arcadia contains plenty of comedy too, but it is thoughtful comedy, not slapstick, created by characters who sound ridiculous because their thoughts are ridiculous.

Our restoration of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia is presented in a newly edited, readable edition based on the complete 1593 text. Spelling, punctuation, and occasionally words and grammar have been modernized for clarity. Titles and summaries have been added to the chapter divisions found in the 1590 edition but dropped in 1593 and subsequent editions.

Charles Stanley Ross

Purdue University

Joel B. Davis

Stetson University

Some Common Names

Amphialus (am-FYAH-lus)

Argalus (AR-gah-lus)

Basilius (bah-SIL-i-us)

Claius (KLIE-us)

Clitophon (KLITE-o-fon)

Dametas (Da-MEET-as)

Demagoras (De-MAHG-o-ras)

Gynecia (ji-NEE-shi-a)

Kalander (ka-LAN-der)

Lacedemon (lah-see-DEEM-on)

Laconia (lah-KOH-ni-a)

Musidorus (myoo-si-DOR-us)

Pamela (PAM-e-la)

Philanax (fi-LAN-aks)

Philoclea (fi-LOH-clee-a)

Pyrocles (PYR-o-cleez)

Strephon: (STREH-fon)

Urania (you-RAY-nee-a)

Zelmane (ZEL-mah-nay)

Introduction

Charles Stanley Ross and Joel B. Davis

When Virginia Woolf wrote that in The Countess of Pembroke ’ s Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent, she meant that Sidney’s story brings readers a whole new world, what Sidney in his Defense of Poetry called another nature. In such a golden world the writer makes things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature. Poetry, by which Sidney meant all creative writing, teaches ethical and political understanding. That is why, for example Xenophon wrote his Cyropaedia , to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses. Not that Sidney’s fictional characters are meant to be perfect, but their situations and understanding should be attractive enough to further the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only.

The Arcadia is an ars poetica on a grand scale. Its narrative, its interspersed poems, and its euphonious style make it the most important work of English fiction before the eighteenth century. Many of its lyrics, composed between 1577 and 1580, are metrical experiments that prepared the English language for Marlowe’s mighty line and Shakespeare’s sonnets and verse. They include the first madrigal in English, the first epithalamion, the first sestina, the first double sestina, and the first extensive use of the sonnet form. Sidney invented the name that Samuel Richardson borrowed for the title character of his novel Pamela (1740). In 1619 the Bodleian Library at Oxford hung Sidney’s portrait alongside the greatest writers from Homer to Dante and Petrarch. Chaucer was the only other English writer represented. The Arcadia was translated into French, Italian, German, and Dutch before the works of any of his contemporaries, including Shakespeare. Sidney’s niece Mary Wroth reimagined the Arcadia from a woman’s point of view in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621).

In letters to his brother Robert and his friend Edward Denny, Sidney asserted that it is necessary to grasp a work as a whole, and the circumstances and contexts of events narrated therein, before worrying about particular details. The 1593 Arcadia has unity of action and an epic concern for the fate of a people and their response to government. The opening page begins in medias res, in the aftermath of a fiery shipwreck that concludes events narrated in Book 2. Just as Homer’s Odysseus charms listeners with stories about lotus eaters and a one-eyed Cyclops and Virgil prefigures Rome’s greatness in the tales that Aeneas tells Queen Dido of Carthage, so Musidorus tells how he and Pyrocles sought to bring stability to various kingdoms in Asia Minor. Here, as elsewhere, Sidney’s keen interest in politics shines through, and the long and ultimately unsuccessful work of his father as governor of Ireland shadows the failure of Musidorus and Pyrocles to provide a permanent peace.

Within this political framework the Arcadia contains a wide cast of characters, most of them related or sexually attracted to one another. There are deeds of chivalry, slapstick comedy, pensive meditations, emotional exclamations, debates, hunting, hawking, duels, tournaments, love letters, nude bathing, and a trial. For the most part the Arcadia tells how Pyrocles and Musidorus fall in love with Pamela and Philoclea, princesses in the Greek province of Arcadia. Their father, having heard an oracle predicting that his daughters will be ravished, rusticates his family, moving to a hunting-lodge in the desert forest. Cast ashore in a shipwreck, Musidorus disguises himself as a shepherd to gain access to Pamela. Pyrocles dresses himself as an Amazon queen and takes the name Zelmane to be near Philoclea. But the course of true love does not run smooth. King Basilius falls in love with the Amazon at the same time that Queen Gynecia, seeing through the disguise, is gripped by her own illicit passion.

In its politic interests and perhaps in its dramatic situations, the Arcadia follows some of the contours of Sidney’s life. Amphialus is disappointed of rule when his father dies and his uncle Basilius becomes king, making Pamela and Philoclea, not himself, heirs apparent, just as Sidney lost his great expectation (Astrophil and Stella 21) when a late marriage and son disappointed his hope to inherit the title of his uncle, the earl of Leicester. Basilius is much older than his wife Gynecia, just as Sidney’s sister Mary was married to a man twenty-four years her senior. Parthenia’s face is ravaged by an ointment; small pox destroyed the looks of Sidney’s mother. Queen Helen of Corinth, whose livery colors are the same black and white as Queen Elizabeth’s, plays a game of politics and matrimony that may reflect how Sidney saw Queen Elizabeth manipulate servants and suitors.

A New Historicist reading of the Arcadia must be intrigued by these shadows, but Sidney was interested in issues and human behavior, not allegory’s curious frame (Astrophil and Stella 28). His poems for Penelope Devereux, another man’s wife, which make up Astrophil and Stella, cannot be made to reflect a calendar of factual events. In the same way we may learn what Sidney was capable of imagining, not what he personally believed, when Pyrocles and Musidorus, while in prison, discuss whether memory can exist in the afterlife. Sidney translated Of the Trueness of the Christian Religion by Philip of Mornay, Lord of Plessy Marly, but the Arcadia goes beyond politics and Protestant theology; it contains everything, from an incomparable description of ships under sail to details of dueling on horseback. There are discussions of the art of painting portraits, how to dress, how to manage a great house, what it means to die a coward’s death, and what it feels like to fall in love.

The Arcadia narrates the attempt of Musidorus and Pyrocles to save Pamela and Philoclea by marrying them. Before they can act, in Book 3 Cecropia kidnaps and tortures the princesses to make one of them (either will do) wed her son Amphialus. Perhaps the most puzzling character in the Arcadia, Amphialus has lost his claim to the throne when his father died and the election lit on his uncle. Although less concerned about power than his mother, he refuses to free the princesses, so desperate is he to have Philoclea near him. The result is a siege of his castle that Sidney left unfinished when he took up his post in the Netherlands in 1585. Here the 1590 edition breaks off in the midst of a sword fight on which hangs the fate of the princesses and Zelmane.

In 1593 a new edition, the basis of all subsequent printings, continued the story through Books 3, 4, and 5 (as in a five act play) because Sidney’s sister, who owned a copy of an earlier completed draft, had the good sense to publish it. Her husband’s secretary Hugh Sanford says in his preface that the Countess of Pembroke began in correcting faults, ended in supplying defects, based on her brother’s intentions. Hers is the version of the Arcadia reprinted and known to everyone until Bertram Dobbell in 1907 and 1908 found three manuscripts of what is now known as the Old Arcadia. Hers is the version our edition seeks to restore.

The Old Arcadia is much smaller in scope and geography than the New Arcadia. But Sidney’s sister wisely used its second half because she was unsatisfied with what we now know was an incomplete revision. This incomplete revision, printed in 1590, brings events to no resolution. The second half that she added includes new details about the preparations made by Pyrocles’ father, Euarchus, against an invasion by the Latins, as well as the poem Lamon’s Song, which is set in Wiltshire but which Mary Sidney placed at the end of the first Eclogues, probably to help make sense of the glory days of Urania recalled by Strephon and Claius. This is the Barley-Break poem that caught Shakespeare’s eye.

The 1593 edition is the book that endured, not least because Pamela, Philoclea, and Gynecia are the most complete, rounded, and complex female characters in English literature until the eighteenth century. Although Sidney employed romance features such as shipwrecks and oracles that can be found in Heliodorus’ Theagenes and Chariclea (translated by Thomas Underdown from a Latin version of the Greek in 1569), Pamela and Philoclea are much more finely drawn than Heliodorus’ heroine Chariclea, who defends herself against Egyptian pirates with a quiver of arrows on her back and a stiletto constantly ready to plunge into her breast should her virtue be threatened. Sidney’s sisters are models for Shakespeare’s Juliet (see 2.17), Hermione, and Gertrude. Cecropia has no little influence on Lady Macbeth, and Andromana is an early Iago.

Less finely drawn than the ladies, though admirable, are the princes Musidorus and Pyrocles. Having lost his father when he was young, Musidorus seeks adventure at all cost. He establishes his reputation righting wrongs in Asia Minor, but he pays a penalty for his behavior when he steals a kiss from Pamela. She freezes him out, and he remains in exile and despair until the middle of Book 3, where a note in the text explains that it is altogether unknown how he finds his way back into Pamela’s good graces. Perhaps she rewards his military valor that helps save her from Amphialus. The upshot is that the man whose name means gift of the muses is given another opportunity to steal more than a kiss when, in Book 4, he carries away Pamela, whose name means all sweetness.

Pyrocles (fiery glory, as Hercules is the glory of Hera or Cleopatra the glory of her forefathers) excels at public speaking. He pursues Philoclea (the lover of glory), first by dressing as a powerful woman and then revealing his true identity. Philoclea kisses more willingly than her older sister, but to keep Pyrocles’ hands from wandering too far, she adds new wrinkles to the on-going tale of Erona of Lydia. Her narrative about a woman who misunderstands Cupid imitates life by becoming more and more frantic as Book 2 draws to a close. A little later Sidney’s narrator admits to Philoclea that it is to your memory principally all this long matter is intended (3.4). Perhaps as a badge of honor, he gives Pyrocles a symbolic moment appropriate to a romance of chivalry, a genre in which literary convention a woman’s virtue is often represented as a castle under siege. With perfect propriety chivalrous Pyrocles defends the princesses against the molestations of Anaxius and his two brothers from inside Amphialus’ besieged castle, where in the last scene that Sidney wrote, he stops the villains cold. In real life Sidney was not as lucky as his hero. A bullet unchivalrously shattered his thigh during a charge against a Spanish supply train outside Zutphen, and he died of gangrene three weeks later, on October 17, 1586.

It may be that Sidney’s narrator plays with our wish to find something true about Sidney in his picture of Pyrocles and Philoclea. But Sidney himself is formal and exact. He saw degrees and shades of color, not just simple reds, blues, and golds. When he describes a duel, on foot or horseback, the correct foot is forward, the movement of hands exact. He does not lose track of minor characters or where Musidorus stables his horse. The physical movements of the characters make sense on a map. The back-story holds together, rewarding efforts to follow its deliberately interlaced patterning. The taste of the times encouraged complex plots. The story is meant to be difficult but not impossible to follow.

Although the Arcadia starts in medias res, chronologically it begins when Euarchus, king of Macedon, sends his son Pyrocles to Thessaly to be raised by his sister and have the companionship of Musidorus, who is three years older. Euarchus (whose name means good ruler) then fights a war on his eastern frontier and occupies Byzantium. When Pyrocles is old enough, he and Musidorus board a ship to visit, but a storm shipwrecks them on the coast of Phrygia. From there they overthrow tyrants, excite amorous feelings, and cross paths with an unfortunate young man named Plangus, the displaced heir apparent to the king of Iberia, a country Sidney locates in modern Turkey but which doubles as a pun for both Spain (the Iberian Peninsula) and Ireland (Hibernia). A former mistress runs Plangus out of his country after she marries his father. He then winds up working with the wickedest man in the story, King Plexirtus (Shakespeare’s Edmund). This bad man happens to have a daughter named Zelmane who looks like Philoclea. She dies of unrequited love for Pyrocles, and he adopts her name to honor her when he becomes an Amazon. At the end of Book 2, the princes set sail for Macedon but are betrayed by Plexirtus. Their ship is also beset by pirates and eventually destroyed by fire. Musidorus and Pyrocles, now calling themselves Palladius and Daiphantus, wash ashore in Laconia, where a civil war simmers between the local population (the Helots) and their foreign overlords (the Lacedemonians, a name for Spartans). These adventures precede the opening of what the 1593 title page calls The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.

A Note on This Edition

Sidney’s Arcadia is a complex mixture of prose and verse told in language that uses the full resources of rhetoric, figures of speech, metaphors, and balanced words and phrases. As such it has become like an old picture whose beauty is hidden by layers of grime. It has grown dim to our eyes. It needs restoration. But the Arcadia is also a work of genius. One hesitates to touch a syllable, to change a word, to alter the syntax of a sentence so as not to disturb some hidden beauty or lost meaning. Twentieth-century editors have modernized punctuation and spelling for Shakespeare and even the King James Bible. Arcadia needs such touching up, and more. There are so many places, from the first page on, where you cannot read without re-reading, where the sense is lost, or all seems dark. Trying to recompose sentences into modern English, one cannot help thinking how much of the Arcadia has simply never been read.

Part of the problem is that Sidney conveyed ideas, but not necessarily in sentences as we know them. Today most English sentences convey a single idea. Sidney wrote rapidly and at length, with little or no punctuation, often signaling the beginning of a new train of thought with But. In his letters (there are no manuscripts of Arcadia in his own hand) he often wrote the word as B/. To add to the confusion, the word often means nothing more than and. Quotation marks were unknown until the eighteenth century. Hence Sidney often starts a quote with a word or two and then said he before continuing. It gets annoying.

Another problem is that Sidney also overuses passive constructions and weak verbs like to be and to have in all their forms. He made frequent use of litotes, a double negative, as in the phrase being a man of no few words. Far too often he uses the wordy phrase as it were to signal a metaphor. Modifiers dangle. Tenses shift. Some verbs have no subjects. And all the while participles extend the Arcadia’s lengthy prose periods. In the first sentence of Book 1, for example, the sun is running while Strephon is viewing and casting his eyes and setting down in his countenance what he would say. He remembers the nourishing beauty of Urania and worries about his languishing remembrance of her. Sidney sentences often start with a pronoun or proper name followed by a participial phrase, as in "There she sat, vouchsafing my cloak (then most gorgeous) under her before going on to designate a hill or slope as a rising of the ground." These constructions occur because Sidney used the –ing form for continuous action verbs and also to form adjectives and nouns. The style was typical for mid-sixteenth century England, when Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1553) could call a conclusion a lapping up.

Contemporary versions of Shakespeare are filled with subtle changes to help actors and audiences. To take one example, Al Pacino, who plays Shylock in the 2004 film version of The Merchant of Venice, regularly substitutes modern English for Shakespeare’s words. He says informed your grace for possessed your grace, human flesh for carrion flesh, by a rat for with a rat, master of passion for mistress of passion, this losing suit for a losing suit. Sidney’s Arcadia deserves as much, and probably even more, as in this passage on the good government of King Euarchus (whose name means good ruler, as something euphonius has a pleasing sound):

And therefore, where most Princes (seduced by flatterie to builde upon false grounds of government) make themselves (as it were) an other thing from the people; and so count it gaine what they get from them: and (as if it were two counter-ballances, that their estate goes hiest when the people goes lowest) by a fallacie of argument thinking themselves most Kinges, when the subiect is most basely subiected: He contrariwise, vertuouslie and wisely acknowledging, that he with his people made all but one politike bodie, whereof himselfe was the head; even so cared for them, as he would for his owne limmes: never restrayning their libertie, without it stretched to licenciousnes, nor pulling from them their goods, which they found were not imployed to the purchase of a greater good: but in all his actions shewing a delight in their wellfare, brought that to passe, that while by force he tooke nothing, by their love he had all.

Our version sacrifices some of the rhythm, diction, and syntax of the original for clarity:

Most princes, seduced by flattery, build upon false grounds of government and consider themselves as if they are another thing from the people. They count as their gain what they get from the people. By a fallacy of argument, they think themselves most kingly when their subjects are most basely subjected. Like a counter-balance, as it were, their estate goes highest when the people go lowest.

King Euarchus held the contrary view. He virtuously and wisely acknowledged that together he and his people made but one politic body, of which he was the head. He cared for them as he would care for his own limbs and never restrained their liberty, except when it stretched to licentiousness. Nor did he pull from them their goods, except where he employed them to purchase a greater good. In all his actions, he showed a delight in their welfare and brought it to pass that that while he took nothing by force, by their love he had all.

As the example shows, we have been sparing in moving words around, except in those places where phrases squint in several directions or re-reading is necessary to make sense of a passage. Elsewhere, when characters are speaking in stressful situations, Sidney’s suitably jumpy syntax has been retained. Long sentences that imitate a sequence of physical actions deserve a restorer’s respect. We have tried to stay as close to the original text as possible because Sidney’s rhetorical medium is part of his message. But our intention has been to make the 1593 text accessible, not to remain slavishly tied to inessentials at the cost of clarity. A translator, including one translating from English to English, has an obligation to be clear, and this obligation extends to syntax because reading is a sequential act. Anything that forces the reader backwards works against the intention of the author. Phrases that seem to go with the wrong words may be moved to bring referent and modifier close together for the reader’s convenience. Often the most complex sentences can be made clear by replacing pronouns with proper names, something any translator of a foreign language into English will do to avoid confusion. Sentence structure, repetitious syntax, the use of participial and correlative constructions, and passive verbs need not be left untouched, any more than spelling and punctuation. A word can be saved by changing did see to saw. It often makes sense to remove unnecessary negatives.

The second person pronominal forms thou, thee, thy, and thine were disappearing in Sidney’s lifetime. Shakespeare uses them as well as endings in –eth (hath, doth) deliberately to add formality to his plays. After much debate and despite objections from undergraduates, we retain thou and its forms. Thou can be found in Hemingway when he imitates Spanish or French. And Sidney’s usage is exact. Thou indicates familiarity or inferiority, except when a character is in an excited state or for special emphasis. Pyrocles addresses his social inferior Philanax as thou while Philanax uses the respectful you. Pyrocles switches to you when he agrees to be arrested, as they are then equals (4.5). Young Strephon uses both forms when passionately addressing his elder Claius. The distinction seems significant enough for us to leave these pronouns alone.

Sidney’s poems present a different set of problems for restoration. If left intact, they threaten our goal of making the 1593 edition that Shakespeare read available to a global audience. But it is often impossible to modernize or move a word without destroying the integrity of the lyric line. Our solution has been to respect the iconic aspect of the poems, to leave their language untouched, but to use footnotes and extensive punctuation to make it as easy as possible to follow their thought. Fortunately, Sidney is a very dramatic poet, by which we mean that his poems were written for particular characters in particular situations in the story. Often the lovers are signaling their true identities beneath their disguises, Musidorus as a shepherd and Pyrocles as an Amazon. Everything is in iambic pentameter, except where noted. The most difficult poem, written in quantitative meter, is Musidorus’ long elegiac lament to Pamela to pardon him for kissing her (3.1). It proved no less challenging in a prose summary. Left as it is, at least you can sing it, as Edward Plough, who has composed contemporary musical settings for each poem, explains in an appendix to this edition.

Though it may not seem obvious from the quantity of notes we felt necessary for the lyric poems, Sidney’s vocabulary is not particularly archaic or difficult. But some words have changed their meaning enough to become false friends. These are words you think you know the meaning of, but don’t. For example, when Sidney uses conceit, it means conception or imagination and not vanity, as in the contemporary sense. Want usually means lack in the Arcadia, not desire. Sidney uses desire as a verb where we would say want. A clown is someone of the lower classes, not a funny man in a circus. Silly means innocent, not inane. To stay is to pause. To do something straight is to do it immediately. Stuff refers to cloth and weeds to clothing. Sweet applies to what is charming, agreeable, or pleasurable, not necessarily sugary. Not to change false friends invites misunderstanding, but too many footnotes can be distracting. Our practice with regard to modernizing false friends is therefore eclectic. Sometimes we amend them, sometimes not.

Our restoration of Sidney’s Arcadia is therefore consistent, as Sidney might say, in its inconsistency. We tend to edit more at the beginning of the story than at the end on the assumption that readers who make it that far will have grown accustomed to Sidney’s style. It would be easy enough always to modernize Sidney’s now slightly archaic heroical to heroic and tragical to tragic, but we treat each instance separately, balancing the needs of the reader against the possible loss of flavor and rhythm.

The result is a text that on every page could probably be edited differently. The project began with the idea of using the 1674 edition on the theory that seventeenth-century editors would have corrected and clarified any cruxes. It turned out that new problems outweighed any fixes. We have therefore remained focused on the 1593 edition from which all others derive. We leave more extensive editorial apparatus, including a comparison of subsequent editions and notes, for our website. Scholars can compare texts and cite the original 1593 edition according to their needs, using the folio and line numbers we have included at the start of each chapter.

A five-hundred-page novel is not a play. There are no actors to use phrasing or gestures to make Sidney’s language comprehensible. Our experience is that modern readers want frequent paragraphing, modern spelling, more digestible sentences, and no footnotes. We have not gone that far, but we occasionally substitute synonyms for difficult or archaic words unless there is a particular reason to retain them, such as a pleasing sound or deliberate strangeness. There were no chapter divisions in 1593 or in later editions, but we have kept them as guides, because Sidney wrote in scenes (as Shakespeare did) based on what characters do in response to developing situations. We have replaced the eclectic, if not confusing, 1590 chapter summaries with our own.

This project began in the fall of 2010 with transcriptions and extensive suggestions by an international class of students in English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University: Russell Keck, Khalid Alrasheed, Bing Yan, Marisa Buccieri, Sophia Stone, Yuhan Huang, Massimiliano Giorgini, Hwanhee Park, Amy Tevault, Meng Wang, and Joanna Benskin. Joanna read and compared diligently as our graduate assistant. Mary Adkins served as an undergraduate reader for Book Four. Sharon Solwitz suggested solutions to many of the most difficult editorial and syntactic problems. Robert Stillman and Mary Ellen Lamb have been valuable interlocutors. Several of our classes of undergraduate and graduate students have vetted our effort to make the text of Sidney’s Arcadia accessible to modern readers while keeping it as close as possible to the original. They include Abbey Bush, Gene Cousins, Carley Fockler, Jake Moore, Leah Morey, Billy Biferie, Taylor Cochran, Emily Minguez, Dana Roders, Adrianna Radosti, Bryan Nakawaki, Stacey Smythe, Ingrid Pierce, Alex Cramer, Tiffany Hunsinger, Brooke Cleaver, Elizabeth Collins, Olivia Locke, Kaitlyn Circle, Joe Mushalla, Emily Shearburn, Emily Meyer, Elizabeth Ziga, and Ashley Seigal. We want to mention that this project received timely encouragement during the Sidney panels at the 2016 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.

Illustrations in this text reproduce Mattäus Merian's copperplate engravings for the 1643 German translation, published too late for Shakespeare to have seen. The portrait of Mary Sidney appeared in an Italian translation printed in 1659. Selected footnotes from the edition of Sidney’s poetry by William A. Ringler, Jr., pay homage to his scholarship and succinctness.

Select Bibliography and Biography

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. 1991:

"The Arcadian princes are shown as having encountered dragons, tyrants, shipwrecks, misers, civil wars and lustful women. … Sidney, on the other hand, encountered enormous numbers of learned men. … Judging by the copious correspondence surviving from these years, his chief problem was not how to ward off the advances of amorous female rulers but how to placate and reassure the numerous old men eager to advise him. … Sidney was above all a vir generosus, a man ‘in all ways generous,’ as Henri Estienne said, whose magnificence often came near to prodigality. From his gift of 12d. to a blind harper when he was only eleven until his very last breath, with which he tried to leave rings to the witnesses of his will, he spent a large part of his life rewarding merit. … Probably every one of the sixty yeomen and gentlemen who followed in his funeral procession on 10 February 1587 had received particular and personal benefits at his hands." (64-65, 304-305)

Greenblatt, Stephen. Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion. Representations 1 (1983): 1-29.

Faced with the limitations of both offensive and defensive military strategy, Sidney’s heroes turn to what for Renaissance humanists was the original and ultimate prop of the social order: rhetoric. Pyrocles, in his disguise as Zelmane, bravely issues forth from the lodge, quickly ascends to the nearby judgment-seat of the prince, and signals that he wishes to make a speech. The multitude, at first unwilling to listen, is quieted by one of the rebel leaders, a young farmer who ‘was caught in a little affection toward Zelmane.’ Unlike the more sanguine humanists, Sidney does not pretend that, through the magical power of its tropes, Zelmane’s speech is able to pacify the crowd; rather its cunning rhetoric, piercing ‘the rugged wilderness of their imaginations,’ reawakens the rebels’ dormant divisions of economic, political and social interests. … Sidney’s solution to the problem of representing a victory over a popular rebellion is a brilliant one, but it depends, as we have seen, upon the disguise of the aristocratic heroes, a disguise whose stain to their princely honor is only partially washed away by the rebels’ blood. (18-19)

Greville, Fulke. The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. [1609] 1651.

Indeed [Sidney] was a true model of worth, a man fit for conquest, plantation, reformation, or what action so ever is greatest and hardest among men. Withal such a lover of mankind and goodness that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power; like Zephyrus he giving life where he blew. The universities abroad and at home accounted him a general Macaenas of learning, dedicated their books to him, and communicated every invention or improvement of knowledge. Soldiers honored him, and were so honored by him. (38-39)

"[At Zutphen, a gunner] broke the bone of Sir Philip’s thigh with a musket-shot. The horse he rode upon was rather furiously choleric than bravely proud and so forced him to forsake the field, but not his back, as the noblest and fittest bier to carry a martial commander to his grave. In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." (143-45)

Lewis. C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. 1955.

If the recovery of the cancelled version is to prevent our looking steadily at the text which really affected the English mind, it will have been a disaster. (333)

Ringler, W. A., Jr. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. 1962.

"The Arcadia, in both its old and new forms, is the most important original work of English prose fiction produced before the eighteenth century. It has an ingenious plot, a series of strong situations, a varied cast of characters, and a surprising denouement. There is a deal of high-flown language and much dallying with the gentle passion of love, which is treated sentimentally, sometimes 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, I fear, like the spider’s web will be thought more fit to be swept away than read to any purpose. For my part, in truth, as the cruel fathers among the Greeks would cast out the babes they did not want to foster, I could well find in my heart to cast out in some desert of forgetfulness this child, which I am loathe to claim. But you desired me to write it, and your desire is an absolute commandment to my heart.

Now it is done only for you, only to you. If you keep it to yourself or to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of good will, I hope it will be pardoned for the father’s sake. Perhaps it will be made much of, though in itself it has some deformities. Indeed, it is not fit for severer eyes, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled.

Your dear self can best witness how it was written on loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence, the rest by sheets sent unto you as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were (and shall be when God wills), having many fancies begotten in it, would have grown a monster if it had not been in some way delivered. More sorry might I be that those fancies came in than that they got out.

This work’s chief safety will be not to walk abroad, and its chief protection that it bears the livery of your name—which, if much good will does not deceive me, is worthy to be the sanctuary for a greater offender. This I say because I know your virtue, and this I say, that it may ever be so—or, to say it better, because it will ever be so.

Read it, then, at your idle times, and blame not the follies your good judgment will find in it, but laugh at them. If you look for no better stuff than you would when looking for mirrors or feathers in a haberdasher’s shop, you will continue to love the writer, who loves you exceedingly and prays most heartily that you may long live to be a principal ornament to the family of the Sidneys.

To the Reader

The disfigured face, gentle reader, with which this work not long since appeared to the common view, moved the noble lady (to whose honor it was consecrated and to whose protection committed) to take in hand the wiping away those spots by which its beauties were unworthily blemished.

As often in repairing a ruinous house, the mending of some old part occasions the making of some new, so here her honorable labor, begun in correcting faults, ended in supplying defects. Her view of what was ill done guided her to consider what was not done.

Those unfurnished with the means to discern are entreated not to define with what advice the lady entered her task and what success completed it. The rest (it is hoped) will favorably censure. They shall for their better satisfaction understand that though they do not find here the perfection of Arcadia or as much as was intended, yet they will find the conclusion, and that no further than the author’s own writing, or known determinations, could direct.

Whoever does not see the reason for this must consider that there may be reasons they do not see, albeit I dare affirm such a person either sees (or some wiser judgments than his own may hear) that Sir Philip Sidney’s writings can no more be perfected without Sir Philip Sidney, than Apelles’ pictures without Apelles. There are those who think the contrary. And no wonder. Arcadia was never free from the encumbrance of such cattle. These people say that to them, the pastures are not pleasant. And as for the flowers, such as they light on they take no delight in, and most of them grow out of their reach. Poor souls! What talk they of flowers? They need roses, not flowers, to transform them from asses, and if they do not find them here, they shall do well to go feed elsewhere. Any place will be better for them, for outside the boundaries of Arcadia nothing grows more plentifully than lettuce suitable to their lips.

If it be true that likeness is a great cause of liking, and that contraries infer contrary consequences, then is it true that a worthless reader can never worthily esteem of so worthy a writing. And it is equally true that the noble, the wise, the virtuous, the courteous, and as many as have any acquaintance with true learning and knowledge will with all love and dearness entertain this book, as well for its affinity with themselves, as that it is the child of such a father. For although it does not exactly and in every lineament represent him, yet considering that the father’s untimely death prevented the timely birth of the child, this book may happily seem a thankworthy labor. The great unlikeness is not in deformity but in what is missing, although such defects are few and small and do not affect the principal parts.

However it is, it is now by more than one interest The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: done, as it was, for her; as it is, by her. Neither shall these pains be the last (if no unexpected accident cut off her determination) which the everlasting love of her excellent brother will make her consecrate to his memory.

H. S.

¹

Hugh Sanford, secretary to the Second Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, b. 1534, married Mary Sidney in 1577.

Book 1

Chapter 1

Shipwreck and Loss

Young Strephon and wise Claius, two shepherds, reach the coast of Laconia (in Greece) across from Cythera (the island of Venus, goddess of love), where they muse on their memories of Urania (heavenly spirit). Now they see Musidorus (gift of the muses) floating in the sea, clinging to a casket. As soon as he revives, Musidorus seeks to rescue his friend Pyrocles (fiery glory), who floats on a broken mast, waving his sword. Pirates foil the rescue. Another ship besets the pirates.

It was in the time of year when the earth puts on her new apparel against the approach of her lover, and the sun, running a most even course, becomes an indifferent arbiter between the night and the day, that the hopeless shepherd Strephon came to the sands across from the island of Cythera. Viewing the place with a heavy kind of delight and sometimes casting his eyes isleward, he called unto him his friendly rival, the pastor Claius, setting down in his darkened countenance a doleful copy of what he would speak.

My Claius, said he, "hither we are come to pay the rent for which we are called by over-busy remembrance. Remembrance, restless remembrance, claims not only this duty of us, but will have us forget ourselves.

"I pray you, when we were amid our flock and that of other shepherds, some running after their sheep strayed beyond their bounds, some delighting their eyes with seeing them nibble upon the short and sweet grass, some medicining their sick ewes, some setting a bell for an ensign of a sheepish squadron, some (with more leisure) inventing games to exercise their bodies and sport their wits, did remembrance grant us any holiday? When have we had time for amusements or devotion, nay, for necessary food or natural rest but that remembrance forced our thoughts to work upon this place where we last graced our eyes upon Urania’s ever-flourishing beauty (alas, that the word last should so long last)? Did not remembrance cry within us, ‘Ah, you base-minded wretches, are your thoughts so deeply mired in the trade of ordinary worldlings (to gain what some paltry wool may yield you) that you let so much time pass without knowing perfectly Urania’s estate, especially in so troublesome a season? You left the shore unsaluted from which you may see to the island where she dwells. You left unkissed those steps on which Urania printed the farewell of all beauty.

"Well, then, remembrance commanded; we obeyed. And here we find that as our remembrance came to us always clothed in the form of this place, so this place gives new heat to the fever of our languishing remembrance. Yonder, my Claius, Urania alighted (the very horse, methought, bewailed to be so disburdened). And as for thee, poor Claius, when thou wentst to help her down, I saw reverence and desire so divide thee that thou didst blush and quake at one instant, and instead of bearing her, thou wert ready to fall thyself.

"There she sat, vouchsafing² my cloak under her, making it gorgeous.

"At yonder rising of the ground she turned and looked back toward her wonted abode with much sorrow in her eyes because of her parting, but her eyes were so naturally cheerful that even sorrow seemed to smile. She turned and spoke to all of us, opening the cherry of her lips, and Lord, how greedily my ears fed upon the sweet words she uttered. She laid her hand over your eyes when she saw the tears springing up in them, as if she would conceal them from others while yet she herself felt some of your sorrow.

Over there she put her foot into a boat, and at that instant she divided her heavenly beauty between the earth and the sea. Don’t you remember how the winds whistled and the seas danced for joy when she embarked? The sails swelled with pride because they had Urania, O Urania, blessed be thou, Urania—the sweetest fairness, and the fairest sweetness! With that word, his voice broke so with sobbing that he could speak no further.

Then Claius answered: "Alas, my Strephon, what’s the point of this reckoning, if only to total our losses? What doubt is there—the very light of this place calls our thoughts to appear at the court of affection held by that racking steward, remembrance. As well may sheep forget to fear when they spy wolves as we can miss such fancies when we see any place made happy by her treading. Who that saw her can help but remember where she stayed, where she walked, where she turned, where she spoke?

"So what is all this? Only that, as this place serves to remind us of those things, so those things serve as places to call to memory more excellent matters.

"No, no, let us think with consideration, and consider with acknowledgement, and acknowledge with admiration, and admire with love, and love with joy in the midst of all woes. Thus we should consider how our poor eyes were enriched to behold, and our low hearts exalted to love, a maid whose beauty is the greatest thing the world can show, while it’s the least thing about her that may be praised.

"Her eyelids were more pleasant to behold than two white kids climbing up a fair tree and browsing on its most tender branches. Yet her eyes were nothing compared to the day-shining stars contained in them, her breath sweeter than a gentle southwest wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer, and yet it was nothing compared to the honey-flowing speech her breath carried. Our eyes having seen her, now whatever else they shall see is but the dry stubble of clover-grass. But then nothing our eyes saw of her can match the flock of indescribable virtues delightfully penned in that best-built fold.

"Indeed, as we can better consider the sun’s beauty by marking how he gilds these waters and mountains than by looking upon his face (too glorious for our weak eyes), so it may be that our conceits (unable to bear her sun-staining excellence) will better weigh Urania by her effect on meaner subjects.

And who, alas, are better witnesses than we, whose experience is grounded upon feeling? Has not our love for her made us (being silly ignorant shepherds) raise our thoughts above the ordinary level of the world, so that great clerks do not disdain our conversation? Has not the desire to seem worthy in her eyes made us stay awake to view the course of the heavens, while others were sleeping? When others were running bases, we ran over learned writings. When others were marking their sheep, we were marking ourselves. Has she not bridled, as it were, our desires with reason, and given eyes to blind Cupid? Has any beloved besides her ever maintained friendship between rivals? Has any beauty but hers taught the beholders chastity?

He was going on with his praises, but Strephon bade him pause and look out to sea, where they both perceived a thing which floated and drew nearer and nearer to the shore, moved by the favorable current of the sea and not its own workings.

They wondered a while what it might be, until it was cast up directly before them, at which time they fully saw that it was a man. When for pity’s sake they ran to him, they found his hands—more constant friends to his life than his memory—gripping hard on the edge of a small, square coffer under his chest but otherwise in him no sign of life, the box but a bier carrying him to land, to his sepulcher. They drew him up, a young man of so goodly shape and well-pleasing face that one would think death in him had a lovely countenance and that, even though he was naked, nakedness was to him clothing. That sight increased their compassion, and their compassion called up their care. Lifting his feet above his head, they made a great deal of salt water come out of his mouth, then laid him upon some of their garments and began to rub and chafe him till they brought him to recover both breath (the servant of living) and warmth (its companion).

At length he opened his eyes and gave a great groan, a doleful