Arcadia. Sir Philip Sidney
archaic or difficult. But some words have changed their meaning enough to become false friends. These are words you think you know the meaning of, but don’t. For example, when Sidney uses conceit, it means conception or imagination and not vanity, as in the contemporary sense. Want usually means lack in the Arcadia, not desire. Sidney uses desire as a verb where we would say want. A clown is someone of the lower classes, not a funny man in a circus. Silly means innocent, not inane. To stay is to pause. To do something straight is to do it immediately. Stuff refers to cloth and weeds to clothing. Sweet applies to what is charming, agreeable, or pleasurable, not necessarily sugary. Not to change false friends invites misunderstanding, but too many footnotes can be distracting. Our practice with regard to modernizing false friends is therefore eclectic. Sometimes we amend them, sometimes not.
Our restoration of Sidney’s Arcadia is therefore consistent, as Sidney might say, in its inconsistency. We tend to edit more at the beginning of the story than at the end on the assumption that readers who make it that far will have grown accustomed to Sidney’s style. It would be easy enough always to modernize Sidney’s now slightly archaic “heroical” to “heroic” and “tragical” to “tragic,” but we treat each instance separately, balancing the needs of the reader against the possible loss of flavor and rhythm.
The result is a text that on every page could probably be edited differently. The project began with the idea of using the 1674 edition on the theory that seventeenth-century editors would have corrected and clarified any cruxes. It turned out that new problems outweighed any fixes. We have therefore remained focused on the 1593 edition from which all others derive. We leave more extensive editorial apparatus, including a comparison of subsequent editions and notes, for our website. Scholars can compare texts and cite the original 1593 edition according to their needs, using the folio and line numbers we have included at the start of each chapter.
A five-hundred-page novel is not a play. There are no actors to use phrasing or gestures to make Sidney’s language comprehensible. Our experience is that modern readers want frequent paragraphing, modern spelling, more digestible sentences, and no footnotes. We have not gone that far, but we occasionally substitute synonyms for difficult or archaic words unless there is a particular reason to retain them, such as a pleasing sound or deliberate strangeness. There were no chapter divisions in 1593 or in later editions, but we have kept them as guides, because Sidney wrote in scenes (as Shakespeare did) based on what characters do in response to developing situations. We have replaced the eclectic, if not confusing, 1590 chapter summaries with our own.
This project began in the fall of 2010 with transcriptions and extensive suggestions by an international class of students in English and Comparative Literature at Purdue University: Russell Keck, Khalid Alrasheed, Bing Yan, Marisa Buccieri, Sophia Stone, Yuhan Huang, Massimiliano Giorgini, Hwanhee Park, Amy Tevault, Meng Wang, and Joanna Benskin. Joanna read and compared diligently as our graduate assistant. Mary Adkins served as an undergraduate reader for Book Four. Sharon Solwitz suggested solutions to many of the most difficult editorial and syntactic problems. Robert Stillman and Mary Ellen Lamb have been valuable interlocutors. Several of our classes of undergraduate and graduate students have vetted our effort to make the text of Sidney’s Arcadia accessible to modern readers while keeping it as close as possible to the original. They include Abbey Bush, Gene Cousins, Carley Fockler, Jake Moore, Leah Morey, Billy Biferie, Taylor Cochran, Emily Minguez, Dana Roders, Adrianna Radosti, Bryan Nakawaki, Stacey Smythe, Ingrid Pierce, Alex Cramer, Tiffany Hunsinger, Brooke Cleaver, Elizabeth Collins, Olivia Locke, Kaitlyn Circle, Joe Mushalla, Emily Shearburn, Emily Meyer, Elizabeth Ziga, and Ashley Seigal. We want to mention that this project received timely encouragement during the Sidney panels at the 2016 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America.
Illustrations in this text reproduce Mattäus Merian's copperplate engravings for the 1643 German translation, published too late for Shakespeare to have seen. The portrait of Mary Sidney appeared in an Italian translation printed in 1659. Selected footnotes from the edition of Sidney’s poetry by William A. Ringler, Jr., pay homage to his scholarship and succinctness.
Select Bibliography and Biography
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. 1991:
“The Arcadian princes are shown as having encountered dragons, tyrants, shipwrecks, misers, civil wars and lustful women. … Sidney, on the other hand, encountered enormous numbers of learned men. … Judging by the copious correspondence surviving from these years, his chief problem was not how to ward off the advances of amorous female rulers but how to placate and reassure the numerous old men eager to advise him. … Sidney was above all a vir generosus, a man ‘in all ways generous,’ as Henri Estienne said, whose magnificence often came near to prodigality. From his gift of 12d. to a blind harper when he was only eleven until his very last breath, with which he tried to leave rings to the witnesses of his will, he spent a large part of his life rewarding merit. … Probably every one of the sixty yeomen and gentlemen who followed in his funeral procession on 10 February 1587 had received particular and personal benefits at his hands.” (64-65, 304-305)
Greenblatt, Stephen. “Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre, and the Representation of Rebellion.” Representations 1 (1983): 1-29.
“Faced with the limitations of both offensive and defensive military strategy, Sidney’s heroes turn to what for Renaissance humanists was the original and ultimate prop of the social order: rhetoric. Pyrocles, in his disguise as Zelmane, bravely issues forth from the lodge, quickly ascends to the nearby judgment-seat of the prince, and signals that he wishes to make a speech. The multitude, at first unwilling to listen, is quieted by one of the rebel leaders, a young farmer who ‘was caught in a little affection toward Zelmane.’ Unlike the more sanguine humanists, Sidney does not pretend that, through the magical power of its tropes, Zelmane’s speech is able to pacify the crowd; rather its cunning rhetoric, piercing ‘the rugged wilderness of their imaginations,’ reawakens the rebels’ dormant divisions of economic, political and social interests. … Sidney’s solution to the problem of representing a victory over a popular rebellion is a brilliant one, but it depends, as we have seen, upon the disguise of the aristocratic heroes, a disguise whose stain to their princely honor is only partially washed away by the rebels’ blood.” (18-19)
Greville, Fulke. The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. [1609] 1651.
“Indeed [Sidney] was a true model of worth, a man fit for conquest, plantation, reformation, or what action so ever is greatest and hardest among men. Withal such a lover of mankind and goodness that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power; like Zephyrus he giving life where he blew. The universities abroad and at home accounted him a general Macaenas of learning, dedicated their books to him, and communicated every invention or improvement of knowledge. Soldiers honored him, and were so honored by him.” (38-39)
“[At Zutphen, a gunner] broke the bone of Sir Philip’s thigh with a musket-shot. The horse he rode upon was rather furiously choleric than bravely proud and so forced him to forsake the field, but not his back, as the noblest and fittest bier to carry a martial commander to his grave. In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle the general was, and being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle. Which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head, before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” (143-45)
Lewis. C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. 1955.
“If the recovery of the cancelled version is to prevent our looking steadily at the text which really affected the English mind, it will have been a disaster.” (333)
Ringler, W. A., Jr. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. 1962.
“The Arcadia, in both its old and new forms, is the most important original work of English prose fiction produced before the eighteenth century. It has an ingenious plot, a series of strong situations, a varied cast of characters, and a surprising denouement.