That perfect-unperfect Arcadia [...]
This comment by John Florio (R3r) on Sidney’s Arcadia describes the composite edition of 1593, in which Sidney’s revised, or ‘New’, version of the romance was completed (‘perfected’) by the addition of the ending of the ‘Old’ Arcadia written fourteen years earlier. But as Florio’s judgement so economically reveals, this expedient editorial act created a hybrid text of internal contradictions and strange conjunctions. Apart from being imperfectly perfected, the hybrid Arcadia is a work of intimate, familial entertainment bound up with grand instruction, both lightheartedly comic and sombrely tragic. Similar comments could be made on Sidney’s life, which serves, indeed, as a microcosm of typically Tudor contradiction and assimilation. In Sidney’s biography we find intellectual aspiration combined with political wiliness, deference to the classical past interacting with an intensely modern sense of the new religio-political order, and a pride in insular identity that also demands self-fashioning in the European mould.1 Sidney’s intellectual and literary interests were also famously compendious. According to Fulke Greville, Sidney’s friend and biographer, the Arcadia manifests the extent of Sidney’s ‘great harvest of knowledge’ (1986: 8), a harvest drawn not just from his humanist classical education, but also from fashionable European literature, cartography, painting, architecture, landscape
' For two biographies that in different ways make much of the contradictions inherent in Sidney’s life, see Duncan-Jones (1991) and Stewart (2000).
Gardening, hunting, and horsemanship, to name only a few of the elements that make their appearance in the Arcadia.
The Old Arcadia (OA) was probably begun in 1577 and was completed by 1580. Sidney continued to make minor changes to his ‘toyfull booke’, as he described it to his brother Robert (Sidney 1912-26: iii. 132), until 1582, when he embarked on the full-scale rewriting that became the New Arcadia (NA).254 The Old Arcadia begins with the retirement of Duke Basilius from the active life of the ruler, an ill-conceived act based upon an oracle that ultimately imperils his household and realm. Two princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, arrive in Arcadia and adopt the disguises of a shepherd named Dorus and an Amazon named Cleophila (changed to Zelmane in the New Arcadia), in order to gain access to the duke’s daughters, Pamela and Philoclea, with whom they have fallen in love. But the stratagem has unexpected results: both the duke and his wife, Gynecia, fall in love with Pyrocles-Cleophila, which ultimately leads to Basilius’ mistakenly drinking a love potion that makes him appear dead. In the meantime, Musidorus has sought to elope with Pamela, and Pyrocles has succeeded in making love to Philoclea. But both sets of lovers are apprehended, and when the apparent death of the duke is discovered, Arcadia falls into political disarray. Into this commotion comes Euarchus, King of Macedon and Pyrocles’ father, who passes judgement on the princes for their crimes, being initially unaware of their identities. At the very last moment, however, the impending disaster is averted as Basilius awakes.
The New Arcadia retains the essence of this plot, while amplifying the original romance’s embedded themes of princely behaviour, familial disorder, and political strife through digressions and inset narratives. In accord with its greater dignity and heroic temper, Sidney’s revision also moderates the severity of the domestic and political crimes committed by the princes in Arcadia. Most significantly of all, the New Arcadia adds the tyrant Cecropia, Basilius’ sister, who imprisons the princesses in an attempt to secure the succession of her son Amphialus to the government of Arcadia. Sidney’s revision breaks off during the period of the princesses’ captivity, and the shape of his intentions for the new work is not known in any detail. Whereas the Old Arcadia circulated only in manuscript, the incomplete revision of the New Arcadia was published in 1590 under the auspices of Fulke Greville and entitled The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. The composite version of 1593 was published under the direction of the Countess and the editorship of Hugh Sanford, secretary to her husband, the Earl of Pembroke. This ‘broken-backed hybrid’ (Woudhuysen 1996:299) is the Arcadia that was known to readers until the rediscovery of the Old Arcadia in 1906 and its publication in 1926.255
This early embodiment in two manuscript versions and two printed texts—of which only the Old Arcadia can be said to be a fully coherent and finished ‘work’— means that the Arcadia in its material form exemplifies the overlapping publication cultures of manuscript and print. It therefore stands, like much later Tudor literature, on the cusp of two very different literary worlds: one intimate, familiar, and essentially elite, the other public and socially diverse. So it is that on the one hand the Arcadia is Sidney’s ‘toyfull booke’, purportedly written for the amusement of his sister, and on the other it is the work of dignified eminence described in Greville’s Dedication. The historical dominance of the incomplete and composite printed versions means that the textual history of the Arcadia is characterized by a rhetoric of hybridity, deficiency, and attempted ‘perfection’; this essay will argue that in form and content, as much as in material survival, the Arcadia is a hybridized text, at once private and public, comic and serious, English and Continental, modern and retrospective.
There are ten surviving manuscripts of the Old Arcadia, and it is clear that transcripts of the work circulated within the Sidney family and its near acquaintances, although it was closely guarded. Indeed, the close keeping of the work was the subject of discussion and some controversy long before it was printed. In the earliest printed reference to Arcadia (in 1581), the Countess of Pembroke’s servant Thomas Howell lamented that ‘so perfite work’ (1581: E4v) should remain hidden from wider knowledge, and in 1587 Sir Henry Sidney’s secretary, Edmund Molyneux, commented on how the work was ‘choislie kept’ and hard to obtain: ‘a speciall deere freend he should be that could have a sight, but much more deere that could once obteine a copie of it’ (1587: 1554). Yet despite this close keeping and restricted circulation among friends, knowledge of the Arcadia’s existence had clearly spread some distance beyond the confines of the family: two writers of early elegies for Sidney, Angel Day and George Whetstone, also make reference to its existence, and there is evidence that Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, and Barnaby Rich may have seen manuscript copies of the Old Arcadia, perhaps through access to Sidney (in the case of Lodge), friends such as Lodowick Bryskett (in the case of Rich) or aristocratic patrons who may have owned a copy (such as George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, in the case of Greene). A contradictory rhetoric of close keeping and common knowledge thus surrounds the manuscript circulation of the Old Arcadia. When Sidney’s revision was published in 1590, it perpetuated this world of intimate familiarity through the inclusion of the Old Arcadia’s dedication to Sidney’s sister Mary, while at the same time casting Sidney’s revision as a work of public worth and Protestant virtue through the editorial interventions. Sidney’s original dedication frames both the undertaking and its dedicatee in terms appropriate to the original conditions of the romance’s ‘close’ keeping: ‘To my deare ladie and sister [...] a principall ornament to the familie of the Sidneis’ (A3r, A4r). Throughout the dedication, sexual and familial roles are amalgamated, transferred, and broken down, as though in playful anticipation of the sexual hybridity and domestic mayhem that is to ensue in the text itself. Sidney presents himself as at once father (to the text) and loving brother (to its dedicatee): the role he cannot play—that of husband—hovers but is left unspoken in the homage and instruction he offers to Mary as muse and mistress: ‘you desired me to doo it, and your desire, to my hart is an absolute commandement’ (A3v). Like an infant, the work is to be kept close to its second mother once the mother-father in whose brain such fancies have been ‘begotten’ has been ‘delivered’ Mother, father, brother, lover: in this dedication, the familial dramas, ambiguous gender roles, and sexual taboos of the Arcadia itself press insistently upon the description of its writing, reading, keeping, and showing.
The 1590 Arcadia was brought to the press by Sidney’s close friend Fulke Greville with the help of Matthew Gwinne and perhaps John Florio. It was based upon what Greville claimed was the unique copy; in fact, there was at least one other, now the only surviving manuscript copy of the New Arcadia. Greville’s claim to guardianship of the revised Arcadia was asserted rapidly after his friend’s death in 1586, when he wrote to Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, warning him of a planned unauthorized publication of‘sr philip sydneys old arcadia’ (Woudhuysen 1996: 416-17). In such a context of intimate, familial keeping, Greville’s appearance on the scene, brandishing a version of the work that he claimed was ‘a correction of that old one donn 4 or 5 years since which he left in trust with me wherof ther is no more copies, & fitter to be printed then that first which is so common’, would seem to be very much that of an interloper seeking to wrest Sidney’s offspring from the breast of its second mother by presenting a claim of male friendship and privilege that challenges the authority of the familial bond. In his letter to Walsingham, Greville also refers to a ‘direction’ in Sidney’s hand that should be used to amend this new version; this may have contained indications for adapting the text of the Old Arcadia in the ways that were later carried out by editors of the composite 1593 edition.
Greville’s intentions in securing the publication of the New Arcadia were both personal and ideological. On the one hand, the 1590 Arcadia asserted his own privileged position as the guardian of Sidney’s revised manuscript and of the author’s future intentions for the work, and on the other it allowed him to intervene in and influence the ways in which the Arcadia was to be read. Both ends were served by the editorial shaping of the work, most evidently through what is described in the prefatory note included in some copies as ‘the division and summing of the chapters [...] for the more ease of the readers’ (Sidney 1590: A4v). This took the form of reducing the text into sections, each of which was introduced by a summary of its action. Assessments of this enterprise differ. From one point of view the summaries are flawed by errors and interrupt the progress of Sidney’s narrative; they are swaggering and intrusive, and the system of marginal annotation they employ to link passages with numbered topics is riddled with errors. From a different perspective, the summaries act as a topical index to facilitate wise reading, and thereby provide detailed information concerning Greville’s aspirations for the Arcadia as a work of moral philosophy; the summaries inserted into the captivity episode in particular indicate the importance laid by Greville on reading the princesses as exemplars of stoic constancy (see Skretkowicz 1986:111-13,116; J. Davis 2004: 416).
On both familial and literary grounds, Sidney’s sister Mary probably had good reason for intervening in the publication of the Arcadia, as she did in 1593 with the help of Hugh Sanford. In this edition the intimate, playful Old Arcadia Preface was retained and supplemented by Sanford’s Preface reasserting Mary’s significance to the enterprise. This time she features as editor, ‘correcting the faults’ and ‘supplying the defectes’ that were evident in the ‘disfigured face’ of the 1590 text. Her task is the ‘conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia’ as directed by ‘the Authours own writings, or knowen determination’ (Sidney 1593: f4r). As Sanford makes clear in his Preface, Mary’s editorial involvement mirrors and extends the role accorded to her by Sidney, the Arcadia being ‘done, as it was, for her: as it is, by her’ (f4v). In accordance with its reasserted place within the Sidney literary fold, the 1593 edition appeared in folio format, with a new title page, while the summaries and marginal numbers were removed. The supplying of the Arcadia’s defects did not meet with universal approval: Florio for one lamented that in the composite version ‘see we more marring that was well, then mending what was amisse’ (R3r). Nevertheless, the Countess’s ‘completing’ of the unperfect Arcadia was of critical importance in establishing the canon of Sidney’s works; her version of the Arcadia was carried through into the 1598 edition that also printed the Certain Sonnets, Defence of Poetry, The Lady of May, and Astrophil and Stella, and that secured Sidney’s lasting reputation as ‘a secular writer of erotic works’ (Woudhuysen 1996: 235-6), rather than, say, a Protestant translator or political writer.
The hybrid identity of the Arcadia as both pastoral and heroic, familiar and public, continued to resonate well into the seventeenth century, thanks to the publication of Greville’s Life of Sidney in 1652 (now more accurately known by the manuscript title A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney). The works for which the Dedication was intended comprise Greville’s Senecan tragedies Mustapha and Alaham along with treatises on subjects such as monarchy, religion, and war. The perils facing monarchy, specifically tyranny and weakness, figure large in Greville’s own works, and may explain the Dedications characterization of the Arcadia as illuminating the follies of ‘sovereign princes’ (1986: 8) in hearkening to ‘their own visions’, placing the command of their families into the hands of the base, and by private humours rendering the country vulnerable to insurrection and invasion. Greville's is a truly encyclopedic vision of the potential of the Arcadia, that in casting Sidney’s intention as being to ‘turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life’ (10) brings public affairs and private fortunes equally under the remit of fiction.
Any assessment of the writing and rewriting of the Arcadia necessarily addresses the question of Sidney’s own political engagement in the period 1579-84. There is a long-standing tradition that the Arcadia was written in pastoral retreat during 1579 at the Pembroke seat of Wilton, following Sidney’s criticisms of the ‘French match’ between the Queen and the duc d’Anjou, as voiced in his Letter to Queen Elizabeth, and the fallout from a tennis court quarrel with the Earl of Oxford (see Wood 1691-2: i. 183; Duncan-Jones 1991:163-7). Pastoral literature, however, relocates rather than repudiates the matter of politics: in this genre, retirement serves as a disguised means of political engagement, as the ‘greater matters’ of state are addressed ‘under the vaile of homely persons’ (Puttenham 1936: 38). Despite Sidney’s physical distance from the court, greater matters, whether of the ‘philosophy precepts' type or the specifically Elizabethan, abound in the Arcadia, from the princes’ debate on solitariness and honourable action, to the ‘crises of counsel’ and urging of foresight that reflect forward Protestant anxiety about Spanish intentions in the Netherlands (see Worden 1996:140). Potentially the most serious of the Arcadia’s matters is also its most comic: the simultaneously risible yet dreadful affection of Basilius and his wife, Gynecia, for Cleophila, which reduces them to folly and slavery as emblematized by their fawning kisses simultaneously lavished upon Cleophila (OA 49). Sidney’s interest in the passions of the great is clearly indebted to the controversy over the French match, which threatened to visit one of the Arcadia’s recurrent horrors, undue foreign influence, upon England. Philanax’s advice to Basilius concerning the oracle echoes that of Sidney to the Queen in the Letter, and the inset story of Erona—the only significant digression in the Old Arcadia, and still the most important in the New—is Sidney’s exemplary narrative proving the dangers of ‘obstinate’ and ‘wilful’ love in a princess (OA 67). The principle articulated by the Erona story—that the amorous bodies of the great are inseparable from their public personae—provides the explanation for the manifold sexual, domestic, and political ‘garboils’ (OA 327) that overtake the plot of the Old Arcadia. A ‘garboil’ is a disturbance or tumult, and it was used in the second half of the sixteenth century to describe religious and social turmoil. Arcadia is engulfed by a rising tide of such commotion, beginning with the social and sexual transformations of the princes that render them unknowable agents—‘thou woman or boy, or both’, as Dametas says to Cleophila (OA 32). Initially, this ambiguity of gender, role, and person is a light-hearted metamorphic theme, elaborated by reference to Ovidian figures such as Apollo, Arethusa, and Caeneus.256 But as Philoclea’s laments reveal, Cleophila is a ‘strange’ guest in a dangerous, double sense, both a foreigner and an unknowable, unaccountable sexual being (OA 111), and this strangeness has personal, familial, and political consequences. Pyrocles’ ‘metamorphosis’ into Cleophila (OA 120) leads not only to Philoclea’s mental and sexual disquiet, but also to an overturning of domestic government, as Philoclea becomes the amorous rival of both her father and her mother in a Sidneian version of Ovid’s disastrous family narratives in the Metamorphoses. The hybridity of Cleophila-Pyrocles’ sexual identity thus extends to include his-her lovers, in whom generational and gender distinctions are themselves blurred: the father loves the daughter's lover, the mother becomes the daughter's rival for the affections of a woman, and so on. Pyrocles’ metamorphosis is also incidentally a cause of disquiet among the Arcadians, who fear the consequences of the duke's retirement, and rise up in unsuccessful revolt, thereby ensuring that private tumults become civic ‘garboils'. The political freight carried by the word ‘metamorphosis' in the Arcadia is underlined by its later deployment in Greville’s Dedication to describe Sidney’s anxiety that the French match would ‘metamorphose' England's moderate monarchy into Continental absolutism (1986: 32).
This theme of disruptive hybridity and metamorphosis is linked to the parallel theme of error, the other main cause of personal and collective turmoil in the Arcadia. Basilius’ tribulations are firmly ascribed to his foolish interpretation of the oracle, which leads him into the error of retirement and so to the follies of his misplaced love for the hybrid Cleophila. This chain of events renders Basilius himself a politically hybrid and contradictory figure: the duke who is still the duke (as his people insist) yet who has abnegated the dignity and responsibilities of that office in order to indulge in wilful folly. Error is the bane of order in Arcadia, as it is in comedy more generally according to Sidney’s Defence: ‘comedy is the imitation of the common errors of our life’, manifested in ‘our private and domestical matters’ (1973:95-6). Most of the errors such as craftiness, flattery, and vainglory that Sidney cites in the Defence through allusion to characters from Terentian comedy are typical of those seen in the parallel households of Basilius and his rustic servant Dametas. These are also, of course, the errors that bedevil courts, and so they later re-emerge in the New Arcadia as characteristics of Cecropia’s agent Clinias and the delinquent lovers and rulers of the digressions. Error and faultiness are endemic in the public as much as in the private sphere in the Arcadia, as exemplified by the Ister bank fable sung by Sidney’s pastoral alter ego, Philisides, in the Third Eclogues. In this fable, the beasts make man to be their king by supplying their own attributes (craftiness and flattery among them), but are then rendered subject to his tyranny; the fable thereby articulates a typical charge against government by the people, whose weakness leads them to favour tyrants (see Worden 1996: 230). The Third Eclogues mark the point at which the political and amorous themes of the work converge, as the dark consequences of tyranny in both realms begin to be laid bare: the Ister bank fable is preceded by Dicus’ epithalamion celebrating Cupid’s defeat by Hymen and by Nico’s fabliau warning of adultery and jealousy.
The errors committed by the body politic in the Arcadia are treated in a manner at once comical and serious, being depicted on the one hand with a certain insouciance during the Phagonian rebellion in book 2 and on the other with deep solemnity in book 4 following the death of Basilius. The rebellion of the Phagonians is ascribed to the double cause of drunkenness and resentment at Basilius’ retirement: they are ‘clowns’ and ‘beasts’ armed with pitchforks who nonetheless threaten outright harm by marshalling sporadically sound arguments in a wrongful cause. In elucidating the reasons for their hostility, Sidney employs a languid occupatio—‘it were tedious to write their far-fetched constructions’ (OA 127)—but then proceeds to do exactly that at length, including in his summary the justification of rebellion as the rescue of the duke from himself, from bad advice, and from foreign influence (OA 123-32). In talking down the rebels, Cleophila deploys ideas familiar from contemporaneous debates on tyranny and rebellion such as Vindicae contra tyrannos (1579), written by Sidney’s friends Hubert Languet and Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, by warning of the horrors attendant upon ‘the tyrannous yoke of your fellow subject’ and by recasting the rebels’ hostility as ‘vehement affection’ (OA 130-1).5 While disaster on
On Protestant theories of rebellion, see Worden (1996: 281-7).
This occasion can be averted because Cleophila rhetorically disempowers the rebels’ cause, and they do not in the main rise above their comic rusticity, the apparent death of Basilius initiates very serious commotions. In the absence of its monarch, Arcadia slides rapidly towards disaster, fractured by ‘confused and dangerous divisions’ and fatally undermined by self-interest and the failure of great men to know how to act in the public good (OA 320-1).
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