As Arcadia’s near-disaster demonstrates, self-interest is a private error with serious public consequences. In both versions of the Arcadia, self-interest is manifested at every level of society, from Basilius’ wilful folly to the self-important delusions of his servant Dametas. Particular dangers inhere, however, in the attempts of the Arcadia’s young men to advance their self-interests, because those interests are necessarily a hybrid of amorous and political imperatives: this tension between the maintenance of patriarchal order and the fulfilment of young male desire is intrinsic to the operations of Renaissance romance. According to the argument of Greville’s Dedication, one of the dangers of princely retirement lies in the encouragement it offers to ‘the conspiracies of ambitious subalterns to their false ends [...] the ruin of states and princes’ (1986: 8). While it is the insurrection of Amphialus in the New Arcadia that is intended here, the amorous conspiracies of Pyrocles and Musidorus, who are rendered subaltern figures by being ‘transformed [...] in sex and [...] state’ by their disguises (OA 43), equally pose a threat to the stability of Basilius’ life, family, and realm in the Old Arcadia; indeed, Greville goes on to state that ‘these dark webs of effeminate princes be dangerous fore-runners of innovation [rebellion]’ (1986: 9). The rebellion of Amphialus is, arguably, the logical extension of the princes’ own actions in the earlier version of the romance, and the darker vision of young male insurrection offered by the New Arcadia sheds instructive light upon the conduct of Sidney’s princes.
The princes are inextricably linked with the creation and execution of ‘crooked shifts’ (NA 109) during the pursuit of their amorous ambitions. All kinds of‘shifts’ (that is, ingenious devices or contrivances) are to be expected in comedy, but the meaning of the word as it is used in the Arcadia resides firmly within a more sinister ambit: ‘a fraudulent or evasive device, a stratagem; a piece of sophistry, an evasion, subterfuge’ (OED, 4a). Strategy is an integral part of a young noble’s education, and in one of the New Arcadia digressions Musidorus brings to bear the knowledge of stratagems he has gained in reading histories, by advising the Arcadian soldiers to disguise themselves as ‘the poorest sort’ of people in order to deceive their Helot enemies (NA 35). But an air of fraudulence still hovers over this, in that it is a theatrical shift rather than a proper military stratagem. Even the most ostensibly comic shifts, such as the gulling of Dametas, Mopsa, and Miso through stories that exploit variously their faults of vainglory, cowardice, greed, and lust, are coloured by the princes’ underlying self-interest and their failures of compassion.
Of an even more serious order than their tall tales, sophistry, and disguisings are the strategies that indicate the princes’ lack of regard for the laws of Arcadia, and the careless contempt of their methods. Musidorus’ disguise is effected by means of the arrest and imprisonment of the shepherd Menalcas, whose clothing he assumes (OA 41), and he intends to bring an army upon Basilius in order to force him, ‘willing or unwilling’, to surrender Philoclea to Pyrocles (OA 173). The moral deficiencies of Cleophila’s plan simultaneously to rid herself of her inconvenient married lovers and to secure Philoclea are self-evident from the start. All these schemes are unveiled in the trial scene that serves as the climax to both the Old Arcadia and the composite 1593 edition. Following the apparent death of Basilius and the princes’ attempts on his daughters, Gynecia, Pyrocles, and Musidorus are arrested and brought to trial before Euarchus, Pyrocles’ father and Musidorus’ uncle, whose arrival halts Arcadia’s decline into chaos. The trial scene lays bare the counterfeiting strategies of Pyrocles and Musidorus and subjects them to rigorous judicial investigation. At issue here in book 5 are not just questions of crime and intent, but also the conflict of old and young men, as the princes are dragged—typically, arguing all the way— back within the purlieu of patriarchal power. At the same time as the trial scene stages the reining-in of amorous and subaltern ambition, it also engages closely with the attendant dilemmas experienced by the royal judge Euarchus, who has to subordinate his own person and inclinations to the demands of justice and duty by pursuing his judgment against the princes even once their relationship to him is known. Sidney’s bringing Euarchus to the borders of an Arcadia that threatens to implode into civil war, and making him the unwary judge of his own progeny’s misdeeds, is an inspired variation on the theme of hybrid identity: it renders the foreign power Arcadia’s salvation (parallels with Sidney’s hopes for England’s role in the Netherlands are evident here), and the father a judge. It also diversifies the emotional landscape of the romance beyond that of amorous love by encompassing love of state and ruler (as exemplified by Philanax) as well as the love of son, and by revealing the contours of, in Greville’s telling phrase, a king’s ‘map of desolation’ (1986: 9).
There is no doubt in the world of the Old Arcadia that the princes’ actions are culpable. Philanax’s assessment of their guilt is coloured by his vengeful grief at the perceived death of Basilius, but his assessment of the facts of the case is still an accurate one. His charge of shape - and name-changing as laid against Pyrocles is undoubtedly true (OA 387) and the ‘vagabonding’ princes have indeed ‘pilfered’ Arcadia’s ‘jewels’ (the princesses), with their ‘disguising sleights’ (OA 399); the princes were clearly blinded by passion (or, worse, the arrogance of the interloping foreign power) if they did not see that their ravishments of Pamela and Philoclea were as much acts of treachery against public persons still in their minority as they were manifestations of private passion. The crucial charge against the cousins is that they have ceased to behave as princes, and, having presented themselves as private men,
Have rendered themselves subject to the judgment of Arcadia’s laws (which, in any case, do not recognize any royal persons except their own).
The princes’ crooked shifts thereby almost lead to their actual downfall in a stratagem that no one intended but many now suspect, namely the murder of Basilius and the seizure of Arcadia. Following Gynecia’s ‘confession’, Philanax is determined to find proof of this non-existent stratagem, accusing the princes of being ‘of counsel’ (OA 302) with Gynecia, a charge that in the composite 1593 Arcadia creates a chilling parallel between the domestic treacheries of the princes and the familial treachery of Cecropia’s attempt to seize power via Amphialus. It is in the treatment of the princes’ amorous stratagems in the Old Arcadia and in the composite version of 1593 that the disjunctions between ‘Old’ and ‘New’ versions are most clearly felt, and the tensions of the hybrid edition most obviously revealed. Whereas in the Old Arcadia the princes achieve or come close to the consummation of their loves, in the revised version they are cleansed of sexual impropriety. In the Old Arcadia Pyrocles and Philoclea give way to the bliss of ‘mutual satisfaction’, but in the 1593 version they fall asleep in ‘chaste embracements’ (OA 273; 93 690). Similarly, in the 1593 version the moment when Musidorus is about to break his promise and rape Pamela is removed (OA 202; 93 654). Given that Sidney had already moved the poem ‘What tongue can her perfections tell’ from its location in the Old Arcadia consummation scene (OA 238-42) to the scene of the sisters bathing in the New Arcadia (190-5), it seems highly likely that the editors of the 1593 version were reconstituting authorial intentions (probably gleaned from Greville’s ‘direction’) in making these changes to the princes’ most culpable actions.
Sidney’s rewriting of the wrongs perpetrated by the princes in Arcadia necessitated further interventions by the editors of the 1593 version. Thus, at the moment of Musidorus and Pamela’s discovery, the rebellious ‘clowns’ who stumble upon them in the Old Arcadia are presented as the ‘chastisers of Musidorus’s broken vow’, whereas in the 1593 version the discovery is rendered as the initiation of the rebels’ own punishment for insurrection (OA 307; 93 754). In his self-defence to Euarchus in the Old Arcadia, Pyrocles’ desire to protect Philoclea’s reputation compounds the problem of his undoubted strategizing, in that he claims on the one hand that she is ‘most unjustly accused’, yet on the other admits responsibility—‘Whatsoever hath been done hath been my violence, which notwithstanding could not prevail against her chastity’ (OA 380)—and he is therefore open to the charge of equivocation. For the editors of the 1593 version, the logical solution was to rewrite this self-accusation, thereby smoothing out the narrative inconsistency and moderating the evidence of Pyrocles’ sexual misdemeanour and his equivocation in law. In this version, therefore, ‘violence’ is changed to ‘only attempt’ and ‘could not prevail’ to ‘was never intended’ (93: 811). Inevitably, inconsistencies remain in the presentation of Pyrocles’ guilt, particularly in the treatment of the violence or force of which he accuses himself (a necessary element in the protection of Philoclea’s honour, but inconsistent with the events as they are presented in the 1593 version). So his claim that ‘whatsoever hath been informed, was my force’ in the Old Arcadia is changed to ‘fault’ in the 1593 version, but the climax of his speech remains the same, invoking a violence that is at odds with the facts as they now stand: ‘I cannot, nor ever will deny the love of Philoclea, whose violence wrought violent effects in me’ (OA 395; 93 826). Similarly, the editors of the 1593 version removed the Old Arcadia’s judgment upon Pyrocles that he should be thrown from a high tower for his lust, having Euarchus assert instead that the two princes are ‘equally culpable’ and should be beheaded for planning the abduction of the princesses, but then in the summary of the judgment, Pyrocles’ original punishment resurfaces (OA 408; 93 838).
Similar unevennesses occur in relation to the princes’ proofs of their heroism. Even if Sidney’s intentions for the New Arcadia had retained the original denouement of the plot and the trial scene (a fact by no means certain in itself), it is inevitable that the trial would have made extensive reference to the heroism displayed by the princes during the episode of Cecropia’s castle. The editors of the 1593 version recognized this problem, and made a handful of references to the new matter, such as Musidorus’ allusion to their service to Basilius ‘in the late war with Amphialus’ (93 831-2), but a full integration of the material was clearly beyond their intention or capacity, and inevitably the logic of the judgments in the 1593 version suffers as a result. Given the slightness of the editors’ integration of the matter of the New Arcadia into the trial scene, it is remarkable that one of the few other instances where they do seek to do this features Philanax, and concerns the exercising of pity (both emotional and judicial) in relation to the accused. Until the revelation that Basilius lives, Philanax maintains a rigorous adherence to his vengeful anger and resists the urge to pity, thereby bringing down upon his head the hostility of the narrator (and of Pyrocles) but simultaneously providing a powerful seam of psychological drama that Sidney sustains from the moment of the Pyrocles’ discovery to the revival of Basilius. The editors of the 1593 version clearly noted the importance of Philanax’s struggle between rigour and pity in books 4 and 5, and used the events of the New Arcadia to enhance it by making Philanax recall Philoclea’s intercession on his behalf when he was captured by Amphialus; this sharpens Philanax’s difficulty, as it inclines him to a ‘tender pity’ that is restrained only by his ‘perfect persuasion’ of the plot against Basilius (93 751).
A comparable tension between pity and persuasion is also manifested in Euarchus once the princes are revealed to be his son and nephew. Persuaded of the truth of their crimes, Euarchus must prefer justice to the claims of blood, or indeed sacred royalty; his compactly moving lament ‘alas, shall justice halt’ (OA 411) is merely a brief punctuation of a speech that otherwise reasserts the all-encompassing necessity of‘sacred rightfulness’ and refuses mercy.257 But Euarchus’ fatherly body betrays him, and his tears of pain render him a ‘pitifull spectacle’ even as he is charged with tyranny by his nephew (OA 412) and, similarly, judged to be ‘pitiless’ and his dominion insupportable by the beholders (OA 414). In this figure of the weeping judge, Sidney deftly encapsulates the conjunction of the judicial and the tragic forms of pity, and has laid the groundwork for the turn to tragedy that is manifested in his revised Arcadia.
World History
