Sidney’s Arcadia as Cultural Monument and Proto-Novel

Abstract

Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia is often reckoned to have been the ‘best loved’ or ‘most admired’ work of English prose fiction in the seventeenth century.¹ One hesitates to say ‘most popular’ because of the manifest difficulty of its complex prose, its often recondite poetical experimentation and because we simply do not know how far down the social scale its readership extended — one assumes not very far. It was, none the less, one of the most frequently reprinted works of prose fiction in the 150-year period before what is generally considered the birth of the English novel, having gone through 13 editions between 1590 and 1674 and two more by 1739.² Its importance for the history of the novel is registered in Richardson’s appropriation of his title character’s name from Sidney’s work and perhaps in Fielding’s claim to be writing comic epics in prose. The Arcadia is definitely part of the pre-history of the novel, though and does not present itself as a work in that genre, what with its adherence to the Renaissance rules for epic (as laid down by Minturno), its alternation of prose narrative and poetic interludes, its self-conscious embodiment of aristocratic values and what amounts to its insistence that a reader apprehend its action and characters at some distance from him- or herself.