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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.