The Thigh and the Sword: Gender, Genre, and Sexy Dressing in Sidney’s New Arcadia

Abstract

While generally acknowledged to be the most influential work of prose fiction in the English Renaissance, Sidney’s Arcadia is a strangely fractured work. Only since the discovery of a complete manuscript in 1907 has it been possible to read the tale in a coherent form, in a version now called the Old Arcadia. ² Until then, only the partially revised text—the New Arcadia—was available to readers. The New Arcadia is a hybrid, combining Sidney’s revised version of Books 1 to 3, which breaks off in the middle of a sentence, with Books 3 to 5 of the Old version. The resulting work, first published in the composite text of 1593, awkwardly marries a heroic romance to the happy pastoral tale of the earlier version.³ Critics and readers since the sixteenth century have attempted to explain the generic and narrative hole at the work’s center. Hugh Sanford, the secretary to the Countess of Pembroke, acknowledged in a prefatory letter to the New version that the book was “the conclusion, not the perfection of Arcadia.”⁴ Sidney himself, in a letter written for the Old Arcadia but published with the New, calls the work “a trifle, and that triflingly handled” (p. 57).⁵ In part because of its structural fragmentation, the New Arcadia seems an extended experiment with the idea of coherence itself. Sidney’s text hybridizes both genre and gender, and its manipulation of literary convention and sexual display provides a suggestive parallel to recent notions of the performativity of human sexual identity.⁶

When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is “male or female?” and you are accustomed to make this distinction with unhesitating certainty.

—Sigmund Freud, “Femininity”¹ New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933)