The Countess of Pembroke's New Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney

*contains spoilers*


Some would say that I have done this the wrong way round, but it was the result of circumstance that meant I read the New Arcadia before attempting the Old Arcadia. You see, Sir Philip Sidney wrote the Old Arcadia, then simply called Arcadia, obviously, after visiting his sister the Countess of Pembroke following a quarrel with the Earl of Oxford in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Sidney’s flight of fancy was initially merely a device to entertain his sister; this attempt at a Greek-style romance evolved somewhat, however, as Sidney hoped to add a serious and didactic tone with an extended prose version that unfortunately remained unfinished due to his death at the very young age of thirty-one: the New Arcadia. The Countess of Pembroke consequently took it upon herself to piece together this attempted extended version after seeing so many badly compiled manuscripts finding their way around society’s libraries, resulting in Maurice Evans’s 1987 edition which I came across in a charity shop somewhere on my travels. Up until my finding this edition, I had actually made steps in searching for a nice, new, clean edition from my favourites the Oxford World’s Classics – it appears that you can all do what I couldn’t – but these were fruitless, it seems!


I have now ordered an Old Arcadia in an Oxford World’s Classics edition, but I’m actually quite glad I took this journey with Evans’s version in Penguin Classics from decades ago, as the yellowed pages compounded the already archaic tone of the text. Sidney’s syntax, rightly left by Evans to speak its late sixteenth century context, allows the modern reader to transcend time along with Sidney back to a version of a pastoral and classic Greece, a history he quite obviously acquired from his time at Christ’s College, Oxford. Alongside this, is Sidney’s knowledge of the classical art of rhetoric, most notably manifested in Philanax’s prosecuting speech at the trial of Pyrocles and Musidorus in the text’s final pages; “’But whosoever well weighs it shall find it sprung out of the same fountain of mischievous naughtiness, the killing of the father, dishonouring the mother and ravishing the child.’” Philanax’s assertions, as the reader knows, are utterly false, but his argument is grounded in a proven method of pattern-of-three rhetoric, which was once a core aspect of classical education.


There is also a fusion of the tales of the gallant gentlemen knights, which Sidney was himself considered by many, and mocked only a decade-or-so later by Cervantes, and an Homeric-style recounting of epic battle scenes; “There was strength against nimbleness; rage against resolution; fury against virtue; confidence against courage; pride against nobleness; love in both, breeding mutual hatred…” The noble undertaking of strapping on one’s armour and mounting one’s trusty horse to fight another for honour means not hating your enemy but loving the side for whom you fight and even the process by which victory is obtained. Such an extended piece of prose also allows you to truly know these characters over time and experience, and as events unfold that shock and delight the heart, some characters risk death at the sword’s edge. The compiled nature of the text means that style sometimes alters, even considering that each book of prose is punctuated by a series of lyrics, sestinas, sonnets and other types of verse in a pastoral setting, and this is none more obvious than the point at which Sir William Alexander deems it worthy to contribute a couple of chapters with what he supposes Sidney would have wanted to say.


Sidney died of a war wound after suffering twenty-six days of it festering and eating away at his body. But even before this, Sidney was perceptive enough to understand such depths of human experience and pain. Early on, Sidney makes a supposition that defies and contradicts his youth in a succinct way; “None can speak of a wound with skill, if he have not a wound felt.” Sidney either profoundly knew such joys and pain, or he could at least conjure it through his genius.

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