The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 1 – Sidney · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 1Introduction
18
Literature · Romance
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia 1
Introduction
SidneyEnglish
BY
ERNEST A. BAKER, M.A.
LONDON
GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Ltd.
New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
LIFE OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY
TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE AUTHOR
SIDNEY’S DEDICATION
ARCADIA
BOOK I
BOOK II
BOOK III
BOOK IV
BOOK V
BOOK VI (by R. B.)
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
{vii}
In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material, expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia holds an important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the successive transformations, and the final development of English fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings, when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the chansons de gestes.
In the exordium of his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney himself lays stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature. Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose--this is the natural line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic {viii} philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in metre.
Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said, are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince. Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature, did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time, was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but would have been proud to be compared with {ix} Heliodorus and Longus, and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets, preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his Apologie the fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative literature.
The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and Alexander. Some of these were written in prose originally, but the majority were translations, paraphrases, or recensions of metrical narratives. Some were turned into verse again, and again in that form were the material for further prose recensions. And throughout these transformations the matter, the style, and the spirit of the stories underwent hardly any change. It was only now and then that the versifier gave a rein to imagination in his battles and pageants; or was hurried by the swing of the metre into bursts of lyricism, or a more dramatic curtness in the dialogue; or cut short the explication of motive and plot, which the prose-writer was inclined to elaborate. How well the prose sufficed to the minstrel converting it into his own idiom may be seen by comparing such a metrical romance as the Scots poem, Lancelot of the Laik, with the samples of the French prose story from which it was translated, in the edition by the Early English Text Society. There is very little poetical heightening except where the minstrel tacks on a prologue of his own composing; the rest is but the effect of the paraphraser’s occasional impulse to change and invent.[i01] Certainly these {x} writers were not embarrassed by any preconceptions of a strict boundary line between prose and the language of poetry, and the uses for which either was especially ordained. The traditional themes were handled, in both verse and prose, in the same traditional manner, and were animated by the same spirit of romantic adventure.
A change of style is almost invariably the result of a change of thought and feeling; but no profound mental and moral revolution like that which underlay the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, was the occasion for turning the mediaeval romances into prose. When all literary compositions were intended for singing and recitation, they naturally took a metrical form; but when books were meant to be read in bower and cloister, it was left to the writer to choose his vehicle. Thus, while there were true poets like Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach among those working upon the material of legend, many arrayed themselves in the poetic vesture without having a spark of divine fire; and the style of many of these metrical narratives strikes one as too prosaic for the subject, especially if we base our expectations on Malory, to us the chief exemplar of mediaeval romance, whose prose, though not in the least resembling in structure that bastard thing, prose poetry, is thoroughly epical in its stark simplicity, its sensuous colour, and the haunting suggestion of beauty and ideality. It was not an age of poetry in the way this can be said of the early period of Greek literature, when philosophers, historians, and lawgivers spoke in metre because the muse was in them. Romance is the decadence of poetry; and while the traditional forms survived, the poetic impulse grew weaker and weaker.
{xi}
By Caxton and his successors the prose romances of the age of chivalry were multiplied and circulated among wider audiences than even those who listened to the mediaeval jongleur: these were the first popular novels of the Tudor age, yet they were already getting out of date, inasmuch as they reflected the manners and the ideals of a bygone period. But there had arisen on the continent two forms of romance that represent another stage in the development of fiction; the Spanish chivalric romance typified in Amadis of Gaul, and the pastoral novel of Sanazzaro and Montemayor. The three great legendary cycles, no matter how wild and fabulous their later excursions, always claimed to be a reading of history; each writer was careful to state his authorities, real or fictitious; and though he added life and circumstance to his narrative, the substance was put forward and accepted as history. In Spain romance had begun exactly as in Britain with poetic chronicles of heroic periods, such as the story of the Cid, round which gathered in the process of time a vast accretion of anonymous legend. But in the Amadis, printed in 1508, but current in oral or manuscript versions for two centuries at least, Spain gave birth to a kind of romance in which such history even as that in the legendary chronicles had no place. Amadis himself, it is true, was connected with the Arthuriad by his lineage; but with this exception, the author or authors let both history and historical tradition go, and in the various knight-errantries of Amadis gave to their imaginative powers their full fling. In the beauty of its ladies, the size of its giants, the valour, constancy, and self-denial of its heroes, the Amadis eclipses all its rivals; and in the Palmerins and Esplandians that were the sequel, these exaggerations are carried to even more ridiculous lengths. The older romances had usually been localised in actual places and countries, though these were often idealised out of all likeness to reality; but Amadis and his successors met with their adventures and performed their feats of arms in a region created by the fancy of their authors. Spenser’s Fairy Land, and Sidney’s Arcadia were no doubt suggested by this romantic geography.
Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy {xii} were avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil. Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his Daphnis and Chloe depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel began its course with the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the Galatea of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of Diana, who added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which the spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.
The pastoral, however, was only a digression in the slow advance of the English novel towards its goal; and though it furnished perhaps half the inspiration of Sidney’s romance, it does not bear upon the present theme, the significance of the Elizabethan novel as represented by the Arcadia in the evolution of English fiction. The pastoral romance, it should nevertheless be noted, is more closely allied to poetry than to prose fiction proper, not merely because it mingles verse with a flowery and emotional prose, but chiefly because it is an offspring of the free imagination and not of the study of real life. The pastoral impulse has always been something factitious and retrograde in the history of literature and art, something exactly contrary to the return to nature to which Wordsworth gave the strongest impetus, and which exercised such an enormous effect on the advance of realism.
{xiii}
The Elizabethan novel, the general characteristics of which are roughly summed up in the words “poetic invention,” came next to mediaeval romance in a natural order of succession. It did not bring fiction any nearer the type conditioned by the laws of expression in strict prose, of the eighteenth century pattern. In an age of poetry the novel had become more poetic in style and in attitude to life than it had ever been. The Arcadia and Euphues have less than the Morte d’Arthur of the real world of men and women. A superficial view, accordingly, might suggest that with a hybrid and unfruitful type of art like the poetic novel one line of development came to an end, especially as we see that Defoe, in the next age, makes an entirely new beginning, abjuring romance and free imagination, turning directly to actual experience for his material, and using a homespun style, as close as he could make it to the speech of everyday life. Yet the semi-poetic novel represents a definite stage of transition, and it does contain elements that were to be developed later. The masterpieces of Italian story-tellers had made their mark upon the Elizabethans, who acquired the art of constructing a plot, and giving their narratives a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They showed also a more conscious effort to portray individual character; and by Lyly the analysis of motive and feeling was carried to a point that seems to anticipate Richardson. More than this, they came a good step nearer to reality, although they failed so flagrantly to reproduce the atmosphere of the real. They chose their subjects from the sphere of human experience; and they rejected giants, fairies, and witchcraft, together with the
“Forests and enchantments drear,
Where more is meant than meets the ear,”
which were stock features of the romantic literature; although, on the other hand, they put wild improbabilities in the place of supernatural marvels, and revelled in coincidences and disguises almost as incredible as the Celtic magic of the trouvère.
Sidney the critic expounds in his Apologie for Poetry his view that the novel of his time and of all anterior times, together {xiv} indeed with all literature having an imaginative and idealistic tendency, was comprehended under his definition of poetry.
“For Xenophon,” says he, “who did imitate so excellently as to give us the portraiture of a just Empire under the name of Cyrus, made therein an absolute heroical poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagines and Cariclea. And yet both writ in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a long gowne maketh an Advocate.”
What his theory of poetry was may be gathered from his description of the poet, who,
“disdayning to be tied to any such subjection (as the natural rules of things), lifted up with the vigor of his owne invention, dooth growe in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anewe, formes such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like; so as hee goeth hand in hand with Nature, not inclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging onely within the Zodiack of his owne wit. Nature never set the earth in so rich tapestry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.”
This corresponds to Bacon’s famous account of the nature of poetry, in the Advancement of Learning:--
“Poesy is a part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the imagination; which, not being tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined; and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things; Pictoribus atque poetis, etc. It is taken in two senses in respect of words and matter. In the first sense it is but a character of style, and belongeth to arts of speech, and is not pertinent for the present. In the latter it is (as hath been said) one of the principal parts of learning, and is nothing else but feigned history, which may be styled as well in prose as in verse.
“The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, {xv} because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical. Because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence. Because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things. And we see that by these insinuations and congruities with man’s nature and pleasure, joined also with the agreement and consort it hath with music, it hath had access and estimation in rude times and barbarous regions, where other learning stood excluded.”
These definitions are too broad for poetry, and too narrow for imaginative literature in general, though that is what they aimed to define. It was as difficult for Sidney and Bacon as for Aristotle to propound a theory embracing literary forms that were not yet invented; and furthermore it is probable that had they witnessed the birth of naturalism in Defoe, or its ultimate developments in our own age, they would have denied to it the name of literature or art. But there is no place in such a definition for many works that neither Sidney nor Bacon would have hesitated to admit, the novels of George Eliot, for instance, or those of Fielding. Yet a modern explanation of poetry, that of Newman, would not exclude even such prose works as these. He says,
“Moreover, by confining the attention to one series of events and scene of action, it bounds and finishes off the confused luxuriance of real nature; while, by a skilful adjustment of circumstances, it brings into sight the connexion of cause and effect, completes the dependance of the parts one on another, and harmonises the proportions of the whole.”
A stricter analysis, however, demands of poetry not only a distinctive mode of conceiving its subject, but a distinctive mode of utterance. If poetry is the fine art of words, and {xvi} its aim to give all the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual delight of which words are capable, it is clear that Sidney and Bacon gave full weight to only one side of the truth, and that they included far too much. The poetic novel, to which their definition applied so aptly, is a case in point, since it was a hybrid and transitional form, a thing that was just ceasing to be poetry, but had not yet become the new form of art to which it was the harbinger.
The Arcadia, and the same may be said of the Elizabethan novel generally, shows its near relationship to poetry in both ways, in its style and in the purely imaginative nature of the story, the characters, and the life depicted. In the introduction to Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, published in this series, I compared the opening of Defoe’s stories, Robinson Crusoe, for instance, so definite as to time and place, so particular in the mention of names and the exact circumstances in which the events occur, with the beginning of the Arcadia, which carries us at once away in imagination to a flowery meadow in a land of Arcady that has no existence save in the fancy of the poets and those under their spell. There is no effort to make the story credible, or the characters real, by attaching them with the bands of verisimilitude to the world of familiar things. Musidorus and Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea, Zelmane and Amphialus, are in no way studies from life, but embodiments of Sidney’s chivalrous energy and thirst for action, and of the craving for a life of pastoral simplicity and ideal love, strengthened by his enforced existence amidst the pomps and unrealities of a court. While he was living in retirement at Wilton, where the Arcadia was begun, he gave vent to this feeling in the following lines:--
“Well was I while under shade
Oaten reeds me music made,
Striving with my mates in song;
Mixing mirth our songs among.
Greater was the shepherd’s treasure
Than this false, fine, courtly pleasure.”
How strenuous in his nature was the heroic energy that gave the chivalric strain to his romance, was shown pre-eminently in the closing scenes of his life, when he roused his uncle {xvii} Leicester out of his sloth, and sacrificed himself on the field to a sense of knightly punctilio. It has been said of him that his whole life was “a true poem, a composition, and pattern of the best and honourablest things”; and not only in his shepherd Philisides, but in all the idealisms of courage, knightly faith and honour, and self-denying affection, that illumine the pages of his Arcadia, and in their splendid deeds of valour and endurance, he poured out the riches of his own nature, as the poet puts all that is best in himself into his verse. His purpose in writing the Arcadia, according to the testimony of his old schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, was moral and didactic; but “in all these creatures of his making his interest and scope was to turn the barren philosophic precepts into pregnant images of life,” that is, to energize them with poetry.
The prose naturally begotten of such a poetical conception of the novel is well illustrated in the following passage, one of those most charged with humanity and most free from extravagance.
“But the headpiece was no sooner off but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which, with the face, soon known by the badge of excellency, witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in despite of the past sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them; her roundly, sweetly-smelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed her neighbour death; in her cheeks, the whiteness striving, by little and little, to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck--a neck indeed of alabaster--displaying the wound which with most dainty blood laboured to crown his own beauties; so as here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of an unaffected languishing; though these things, to a grossly conceiving sense, might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looking upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness, so as Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion, and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.”
In the Apologie for Poetry, Sidney condemned Euphuism, {xviii} Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated circles immediately upon the publication of Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry, and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his contemporaries:--
“Mirus prorsus homo, immo semideus, vel certe Deus, qui magnae artis subtilitate tantum efferavit argentum … ut diem suum sibi domus faciat, licet sole nolente: sic cubicula, sic porticus, sic ipsae valvae fulgurant.”
“Namque saxum immani magnitudine procerum, et inaccessa salebritate lubricum, mediis e faucibus lapidis fontes horridos evomebat: qui statim proni foraminis lacunis editi, perque proclive delapsi, et angusti canalis exerto contecti tramite, proximam convallem latenter incidebant.”
Apuleius might very well have written such a sentence as this:--
“Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object that at first it did but hit flatlong. But little availed that, since the lady falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword with another blow to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.”
And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of {xix} Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such extravagances as this:--
“Exceedingly sorry for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that exceedingness in fear for Philoclea.”
The fact is, there are bound to be these freaks and extravagances whilst a style is still in such an inchoate and experimental state as English prose was in from the time of Malory and Berners, and the other early architects of a style unfettered by metre, with whom, as Mr John Dover Wilson has shown in his work on John Lyly, the germs of Euphuism found their way into English long before Guevara was known in this country, although the tendency is nearly always attributed to his influence. The writers of this period could not evolve even a poetic prose without falling into these pitfalls, for the simple reason that they wrote a century before the principles of what may be called a normal prose style had been determined. Mr Watts-Dunton has pointed out that in the present age there is another kind of poetic prose in process of evolution, a prose “which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry.” Prose to be truly poetical, he argues, must move far away from the “tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin,” and must no doubt be something very different from what Sidney and other writers made of Elizabethan prose, noble as their achievement was.
“It must, in a word, have all the qualities of what we technically call poetry except metre. We have, indeed, said before that while the poet’s object is to arouse in the listener an expectancy of caesuric effects, the great goal before the writer of poetic prose is in the very opposite direction; it is to make use of the concrete figures and impassioned diction that are the poet’s vehicle, but at the same time to avoid the expectancy of metrical bars.”
Such a prose as this must be the very latest product of literary effort. Its difference from the poetic prose actually evolved in the transitional age with which we are dealing, is the difference between an art founded on long experience and many attempts and failures, and above all on a sound philosophy of aesthetic causes and effects, and the essays of {xx} men who were not yet clear as to the objects they ought to aim at. So uncertain was Sidney even as to the true genius of English poetry that he was one of the most ardent members of the “Areopagus,” who endeavoured to reform English poetry on Italian and classical principles, the results of which attempt may be appraised in the verses inserted in the Arcadia. The indispensable basis for a sound poetic prose, if such a thing is feasible, must be a satisfactory norm of unpoetic prose.
Sidney’s romance did not escape ridicule in his own time; Ben Johnson parodied Arcadianism in Every Man out of his Humour; Dekker poked fun at Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen in the Gul’s Horne-book; and the involved and careless construction of the story came in for mild satire in one of the earliest burlesques of chivalrous and pastoral romances, Sorel’s Berger Extravagant, which was translated by John Davies of Kidwelly in a book that may be remembered by its sub-title, the Anti-Romance. The criticism in the passage following is not particularly acute, but is cited because few readers of Sidney are likely to come across such a very rare work as this translation (1648).
“Nor hath England wanted its Arcadia, whereof it is not long since we have had the translation. I find no more order in that than in the rest, and there are many things whereof I am not at all satisfied. At the very beginning you have the complaints of the shepherds Strephon and Claius upon the departure of Urania, without telling us who she was, nor whither she went. Now an author ought never to begin his book but he should mention the persons principally concerned in the history whose actions he is to raise up beyond any of the rest; yet this man makes afterward no more mention of these two shepherds than if he had never named them; and though he bring them in again at some sports before Basilius, yet that signifies nothing, since a man finds no period of their adventures, and that those verses wherein they speak of their loves are so obscure that they may be taken for the oracles of a Sybill. It is true that Sir Philip dying young might have left his work imperfect; but there’s no reason why we should suffer by that misfortune, and be obliged to take a thing for perfect because it might have been made so.”
… Thus Clarimond in his “Oration against Poetry, Fables, and Romances”; Philiris in his “Vindication” replies:--
{xxi}
“As for Sidney’s Arcadia, since it hath crossed the sea to come and see us, I am sorry Clarimond receives it with such poor compliments. If he hears nothing of the loves of Strephon and Claius, he must not quarrel with the author who hath made his book one of the most excellent in the world. There are discourses of love and discourses of state so generous and pleasant that I should never be weary to read them. I should say much in his commendation were I not in haste to speak of Astraea, which Clarimond brings in next, and I am very glad to find that book generally esteemed, which should oblige him to esteem it also.”
Sorel’s Berger Extravagant appeared in 1628. Two French translations of the Arcadia had already been made, one by Baudoin in 1624, and a second by D. Geneviefve, Chappelain, the year following. The book was translated into German in 1629, by Valentinus Theocritus, whose translation was revised by Martin Opitz, and appeared again in 1643 and 1646.
It would be rash to assert that the Arcadia, not published until 1590, though circulated widely in manuscript during the preceding decade, had any influence on the pastorals of Greene and Lodge, who boasted their adherence to the linguistic fashions set in 1579 by Lyly’s Euphues. It is enough to observe that these and the Arcadia have many close resemblances which are proofs of a common ancestry. Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), the original of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, his Menaphon (1589), and Philomela (1592); and Lodge’s Rosalynde: Euphues’ golden legacie (1590), whence As you like it was derived, have the Arcadian scenes and the atmosphere of fairy-land, combined with the same strain of chivalrous adventure, and the same complicated love-plots as Sidney’s romance. I venture to quote from Professor Courthope’s History of English Poetry a passage emphasising the strong feminine interest which was such a prominent feature in Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, as well as in Sidney.
“But after all, the element in the Arcadia which produced the greatest effect upon contemporary taste, on account of the dramatic tendencies of the age, was the one which Sidney derived from his study of Montemayor. Perhaps the most noticeable feature in the story is the complete elimination of the magical and supernatural machinery which formed so important a part of the older romances. {xxii} In imitation of Montemayor, Sidney now concentrated the main interest of his narrative in the complications of the love-plots. The consequence of this device was to bring the exhibition of female character into greater prominence. In the old chivalric poetry and fiction no more than three types of women are represented, the insipid idol of male worship who shows ‘mercy’ and ‘pity’ to her lover, according to the regulation pattern of the Cours d’Amour; the fickle mistress, like Cressida, who is inconstant to one lover, and so violates the code of chivalry; and the unfaithful wife of the class of Guinevere and Iseult. The Arcadia, on the other hand, is full of feminine heroines, martyrs, and monsters, each of whom plays her own distinct part in the development of the action. There is the ideal maiden, Pamela or Philoclea, type of lofty virtue, forerunner of the Clarissas and Belindas of Richardson; the vicious Queen Cecropia recalling the Phaedras and Sthenobaeas of Greek legend; Gynecia, the passion-stricken wife of a respectable elderly husband, a favourite figure in the modern French novel; the clownish Mopsa, the original, perhaps, of Shakespeare’s Audrey; and, above all, the representative of adventurous, unhappy, self-sacrificing love in its various aspects, Helen, Queen of Corinth, Parthenia, and Zelmane, predecessors of Shakespeare’s Viola, Helena, and Imogen.”
The popularity of the book, rivalling that of Euphues, is illustrated by the number of editions, of which a list will be given later. Sidney found writers eager to continue the story, and many imitators. The argument of John Day’s Ile of Guls (1606) was “a little string or rivolet drawne from the full streme of the right worthy gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydney’s well knowne Archadea.” Shirley dramatised many episodes in his Pastorall called the Arcadia (1640); the story of the dispossessed king of Paphlagonia and his son is probably the germ of Shakespeare’s episode of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear, and Mr C. Crawford has found traces of copying in the Duchess of Malfi and other plays of Webster. The author of the Emblemes, Francis Quarles, made a long poem out of the story of Argalus and Parthenia (1622); and other writers linked their compositions to the popularity and prestige of the Arcadia by using Sidney’s name as their advertisement, like the author of Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania (1606), a philosophical poem dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and the Lady Mary Wroath, a niece of Sidney, who produced a slavish imitation in The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania {xxiii} (1621), and made great play with her pedigree on the title-page. Excerpts and adaptations were published right down to the late seventeenth century.
The first edition of the Arcadia was published in 1590, four years after the author’s death. He did not finish the book, which had been begun for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was in exile from the court and living at Wilton House, the seat of the Pembrokes. It was Sidney’s dying request that the manuscript should be destroyed, and the dedicatory epistle to his sister expresses how little he valued the book as a literary performance:--
“If you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh error in the balance of good-will, I hope for the father’s sake it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being a trifle, and that triflingly handled.”
The Arcadia was entered in the Register of the Stationer’s Company in 1588, by William Ponsonbie, the publisher of Spenser’s Fairie Queene; and the first edition saw the light in a thick quarto in 1590. A photo-lithographic reproduction of this handsome first edition was published in 1891 by Dr Oskar Sommer, to whose scholarly bibliographical introduction I am indebted for the following list of the various editions. The fourth and fifth books, and a portion of the third book (57 pages), were added in the second edition, in 1593, a folio, by the same publisher. Beyond this, there are few variations in the text of the two editions. The third edition (1598), also by Ponsonbie, comprised Sidney’s Sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence of Poesie; and these works were again included in the fourth edition (misdescribed as the third) by Robert Waldegrave, at Edinburgh, in 1599.[i02] Mathew Lownes’ edition (1605), the fifth (miscalled the fourth), is almost a facsimile reprint of the third; but in the next edition, described on the title-page as the fourth (1613), we get some new “additions,” but of small importance compared with those in the seventh (described in the title as the fifth), published in 1621 at Dublin, which included a “Supplement of a defect in the third part {xxiv} of this History, by Sir W. Alexander,” which had been printed separately at Dublin the same year. In the present edition his supplement begins on page 428 and ends on page 451, where Sir William’s apologie for the liberty taken is duly quoted. Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards Earl of Stirling, was a poet and dramatist, and a statesman of genius, who died in 1610. He was a friend of Drummond of Hawthornden. The Dictionary of National Biography states wrongly that he published this continuation of the third book of the Arcadia in 1613, the date of the so-called fourth edition, certain copies of which have extracts from this work inserted. The first London edition, to which Sir William Alexander’s supplement was added, was the eighth, published in 1623; but it is doubtful whether the additional matter was really printed as a part of the volume, or added from the 1621 edition, or some other of which there is no trace, to the only copy of this issue known to Dr Sommer. The pagination, at any rate, is in a confused state pointing to this.
The sixth book of the Arcadia by Richard Beling (see infra p. 631), first published at Dublin, in 1624, was added to the ninth edition, miscalled the sixth, in 1627. It is not mentioned on the title, but before this new supplement another title-page is inserted, running as follows, “A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: written by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne Esquire. (Sat, si bene; si male, nimium.) London, printed by H. L. and R. Y. 1628,” thus dating a year later than the title-page proper. After Beling’s continuation come the Sonnets, the Defence of Poesie, Astrophel, etc. This edition was reprinted in exact conformity, except that the new title-page mentions the work of Beling, in 1629; and the five other seventeenth-century editions, appearing in 1633, 1638, 1655, 1662, and 1674, corresponded exactly in all textual respects but the title-page, except that in the twelfth, described as the ninth, edition (1638), an alternative supplement to a defect in the third book is introduced by Mr Ja. Johnstone, “Scoto-Brit,” and in addition to this the 1655 edition contained the forty-eight couplets entitled “A Remedie for Loue,” and an alphabetical table, or clavis, forming an index to the stories in the Arcadia.
Dr Sommer mentions only one edition in the eighteenth {xxv} century, one in three volumes containing also the poetical works and the Defence of Poesy, and described as the fourteenth edition, although fifteen previous editions have now been enumerated. The title of the first volume is dated 1725, but the other two volumes bear that of the preceding year, the preliminary matter of the first not having, apparently, been completed in 1724. This was a London edition, and Dr Sommer was not aware of another seventeenth century edition, printed at Dublin in 1739, which was a reproduction of this one: it bears the imprint, “Dublin: printed by S. Powell, for T. Moore, at Erasmus’s Head in Dame Street, Bookseller, MDCCXXXIX”; and a copy has been used in preparing the present edition.
The only edition of the Arcadia in the nineteenth century, with the exception of the photographic reproduction of the first edition by Dr Sommer, was published by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, in 1867, and was preceded by an introductory essay by Hain Friswell, the author of The Gentle Life, who says:--
“The principle on which this edition of the Arcadia has been put through the press perhaps needs some explanation. As the sheets of MS. left the hands of Sidney, after the first book, or perhaps two, had been completed, they were transmitted to his sister the Countess of Pembroke, and some of them mislaid and lost. Hence one great hiatus supplied by Sir William Alexander, others by R(ichard) B(eling) and Mr Johnstone. It is also known that the Countess of Pembroke added to the episodes, adventures, and strange turns, at least in all the later books. Hence there is to be met with an Arcadian undergrowth which needs much careful pruning; and this undertaken, with needful compression, will leave the reader all that he desires of Sidney’s own. Growing like certain fanciful parasites upon forest trees, on the books of the Arcadia are certain eclogues of laboriously-written and fantastical poetry, some in Latin measures, against which Walpole was right to protest, and anent which Pope said:--
‘And Sidney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet.’
“These have been boldly removed without any loss, it is believed, to the romance; lastly, long episodes of no possible use to the book, which we think have been supplied by other hands than Sidney’s have, whilst using their very words and phrases, been cut down. {xxvi} Tedious excrescences have thus been removed, but it is to be hoped with judgment, so that the reader gets all we think is Sidney’s, and without curb put upon his utterance.”
In the edition now offered to the student of Elizabethan literature an opposite method has been adopted. Rather than run any risk of omitting anything that is Sidney’s, it has been thought advisable to give the whole Arcadia, excrescences and all, especially as the additions of those who were fellow-spirits and admirers, and belonged to the same great epoch, cannot be without their interest to readers in the present age, who may, at any rate, skip the contributions of Alexander and Beling if they are so minded. The example of Hain Friswell has been followed, however, so far as the modernisation of the spelling and punctuation is concerned. “A Continuation of Sir P. Sidney’s Arcadia written by a young Gentlewoman” (Mrs A. W. Weames), and published at London, in 1651, and James Johnstone’s “Supplement to a defect in the Third Book,” which is merely an alternative to Alexander’s, are not included.
There was a modernised edition of the Arcadia published in 1725, under the title, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Moderniz’d by Mrs Stanley, London, Printed in the Year MDCCXXV”; and there were extracts from the book, like the abstract entitled, “The Famous History of Heroick Acts or the Honour of Chivalry,” London, 1701; and two versions of the episode of Argalus and Parthenia, the first, “The Unfortunate Lovers: the History of Argalus and Parthenia” (fourth edition, 1715), and “The History of Argalus and Parthenia. Being A Choice Flower Gathered out of Sir Philip Sidney’s Rare Garden,” c. 1770 and 1780. Dr Grosart included all the poems occurring in the Arcadia in his edition of “The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney,” in three volumes, in 1877. Students of our old texts owe an immense debt to Dr Sommer for the pains and industry lavished on his sumptuous facsimile editions of Caxton’s Malory and Sidney’s Arcadia, in both of which the comparison of all the extant readings has been carried out with microscopic thoroughness, and done once for all.
