Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
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The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, also known simply as The Arcadia is by far Sir Philip Sidney's most ambitious work. It was as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model of Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a highly idealized version of the shepherd's life adjoins (not always naturally) with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published in the sixteenth century, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested within each other, and different story-lines are intertwined.
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[edit] Composition and publication
Sidney's Arcadia has a history that is unusually complex even for its time. Sidney may have begun an early draft in the late 1570s, when he was in his twenties. His own comments indicate that his purpose was humble; he asserts that he intended only to entertain his sister, Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. This version is narrated in chronological order, with sets of poems separating the books from each other. It seems likely that Sidney finished this version while staying at Herbert's estate during a temporary eclipse at court in 1580.
This draft, which was not published until 1912, is substantially shorter than the version known to the Renaissance and later periods. In the 1580s, Sidney took the frame of the original story, reorganized it, and added episodes, most significantly the story of the just rebel Amphialus. The additions more than double the original story; however, Sidney had not finished the revision at the time of his death in 1586.
In 1590, Fulke Greville supervised a publication of the unfinished revision. Three years later, Mary Herbert herself had published an edition in which the original version supplements and concludes the part that Sidney revised. Later additions filled in gaps in the story, but did not efface the difference between the highly artificial, hellenized revised portion and the straightforward conclusion Sidney wrote originally. Nevertheless, it was this edition that entered history.
[edit] Reputation and influence
The work enjoyed great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear;[1] traces of the work's influence may also be found in Hamlet[2] and The Winter's Tale.[3] Other dramatizations also occurred: Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia, John Day's The Isle of Gulls, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, the anonymous Mucedorus, a play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and, most overtly, in James Shirley's The Arcadia.
Sidney's book also inspired a number of partial imitators, such as his niece Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, and continuations, the most famous perhaps being that by Anna Weamys. These works, however, are as close to the "precious" style of seventeenth-century French romance as to the Greek and chivalric models that shape Sidney's work. The Arcadia also made a small appearance at a crucial moment in history. According to a widely-told story, Charles I quoted lines from the book, an excerpt termed "Pamela's Prayer," from a prayer of the heroine Pamela, as he mounted the scaffold to be executed. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton complains of the dead king's choice of a profane text for his final prayer; at the same time, he praised the book as among the best of its kind.
In the next century, Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela. Despite this mark of continued respect, however, the rise of the novel was making works like the Arcadia obsolete. By the beginning of the Romantic era, its grand, artificial, vaguely euphuistic style had made it thoroughly alien to more modern tastes. While the book was still widely read, it was already becoming a text of primary interest to historians and literary specialists.
The Arcadia contains the earliest known use of the feminine personal name Pamela. Most scholars believe that Sidney simply invented the name.
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Bullough, Geoffrey, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. 8 Volumes, New York, Columbia University Press, 1957-75.
- Rees, Joan. Sir Philip Sidney and "Arcadia." Rutherford, KY, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.
