Philosophy, History, and Sidney's Old Arcadia

Abstract

N HIS INTRODUCTION to one of the several recent editions of Sidney's Apology for Poetry, Forrest G. Robinson suggests that the full implications of Sidney's treatise will be clearest to those who use it as a prologue to the rest of the Sidney canon, and, in particular, that the Apology ought to be studied in conjunction with the revised Arcadia, the work that fully exemplifies the doctrines set forth in the Apology.' The suggestion, of course, is not a new one. A mutually illuminating reading of the Apology and the New Arcadia was the goal and the procedure that Kenneth Myrick adopted for his study of Sidney over thirty-five years ago.2 However, in spite of the continued importance of Myrick's book, his attempt to conflate Sidney's literary theory and practice created as many problems as it resolved, and the Apology, for the most part, is still studied without any detailed reference to contemporaneous literature. The problems encountered in a comparison of the Apology and the Arcadia are of several kinds. One set arises from the nature of the Apology; another from the nature and condition of the Arcadia; and a third set from the historical or biographical relationship between the works. The Apology raises problems largely because of its dependence on sixteenth-century Italian criticism. The precise extent and nature of Sidney's indebtedness has been disputed,3 but it is generally agreed