ARCADIA. ' 'The Countesse of Pem broke's a long and elaborate romance by Sir Philip Sidney, was written during or before 1580, and sent in scraps of manuscript by the author to the Countess, his sister. Its five books, in prose, with in verse after each in the manner of Sannazaro's cadia,' told the story of a king who, to avoid the fulfilment of a threatening oracle, retired with his wife and two daughters to a lodge in the forest, but whose plan was frustrated by the arrival of two princely heroes, so that after many chivalrous and pastoral episodes all the virtuous were made happy. The con tents — the travels, shipwrecks and hairbreadth escapes, the courtships, captivities, trials at law and harangues, the disguises and mistaken identities, deaths real and deaths feigned, re bellions and tyrannicides, children lost and re stored, in a word, the strange turns of love and fortune— were partly Sidney's invention, but were chiefly derived from romances of chivalry (in particular the of Gaul') and from the Greek romances (in particular the of Heliodorus and the phon and Leucippe' of Achilles Tatius). The narrative was straightforward and easy to fol low, This original or "Di& 'Arcadia) had cir culated in manuscript for several years when Sidney began a revision, which he left unfin ished at his death. He had, however, recast about half his old material, and cast a consid erable quantity of new material with it into the elaborate and complex structure of Helio dorus's '/Ethiopica,' which conceals the key of the narrative, overlays, interlaces and inter rupts the main story with many episodes, and inverts the chronological order to conform to the antique epic convention in medias res. The first edition, 1590, quarto, consists of this new version only. The second edition, published by the Countess and her friends in 1592, con sists, first, of the new version as far as it goes, that is, to the middle of the third book; next, of a few words of transition; and, finally, of the remainder of the old third book and the whole of the old fourth and fifth books.
This patchwork is the current or standard ver sion. The original 'Arcadia' has never been
printed, though . several manuscript copies of it were found by Bertram Dobell, the London bookseller and scholar, in •and 'after 1907.
As a 'romance of 'love and 'adventure the 'Arcadia' is still good reading, despite the riddle of its plot, which one soon *gives up.* Its sweet, rhydknical style, full of Renaissance imitations of late Greek and Roman rhetoric, full of antitheses and conceits and lofty senti ment and show-pieces of description and ora tory, is one phase of the Italianate style of Elizabethan courtly literature.
The intrinsic merit of the 'Arcadia> gave it deep literary influence. Elizabethan books allude often to both the old and the new ver sions; Greene and Lodge imitated its plot and structure in several prose romances; Shake speare borrowed from it the story of Kent in 'King Lear' ; Beaumont and Fletcher derived from it the plot of 'Cupid's Revenge' ; King Charles I adopted from it his prayer on the eve of execution. It was often reprinted in the 17th century, when also it reached France in translation, and helped in the elaborate con struction of the French *heroic romances.* It is the only work of Elizabethan fiction that continued to be popular throughout that cen tury and into the 18th, where its influence— certain as regards Richardson—has yet to be fully worked out. Scott's 'Ivanhoe' exhibits many borrowings. On the whole, the (Arcadia' probably brought into English fiction that sus tained elaboration of structure which distin guishes the novel ironi the short story and the picaresque tale. • It is thus a literary proto type. Editions: 1590 (quarto); facsimile re print, ed., H. Oskar Sommer (London 1891); ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge 1912) •, 1592 version often reprinted, recently ed., • Ernest A. Baker (London and.New York 1907). Con sult Dobell, Bertram, 'New Light. on Sid ney's Arcadia' (Quarterly Review, Vol. 211, pp. 74-100, July 1909); Wolff, Samuel L., 'The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fic tion' (New York 1912, pp. 262-366, 461-64).