Writing after Sidney by Alexander Gavin;

Author:Alexander, Gavin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2011-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

8

Versions of Arcadia

Virginia Woolf may have been right when she said that ‘In the Arcadia, as in some luminous globe, all the seeds of English fiction lie latent’.1 But what impact did Sidney’s great work really have? For much of the seventeenth century the Arcadia enjoyed a sort of unchallenged preeminence. The major literary figures wrote epic poems and plays, and not prose fiction. A large amount of somewhat dreary courtly romance writing took Sidney as its founding father at the same time as it avoided any meaningful engagement with his example; more popular romance admired or satirized him from afar. But it needed an odd coincidence for Sidney to stand godfather to the modern novel. Samuel Richardson was one of the printers of the 1724–5 Works; this was reprinted in the Dublin edition of 1739, which was to be the last edition of Sidney’s collected works until the twentieth century.2 By that time Richardson was turning himself into a writer, and in 1740 he published his Pamela, a work that learns how to shape and describe its heroine’s spirited and virtuous response to adversity from her namesake, the Pamela of Book III of the revised Arcadia. Romance had given birth to the novel, and the Arcadia became a work that excited the admiration only of lexicographers.3

Did the Arcadia alter the course of earlier English prose fiction? It is hard to answer this question as positively as we might like. Certainly Sidney’s prose style had an impact on the way English was written. His contemporaries were already moving towards a prose far closer to modern syntax and cadence than the laboured periods of Puttenham or the pointless fussiness of Lyly. Drayton, writing in the 1620s, explicitly credited Sidney, ‘That Heroe for numbers, and for Prose’, with freeing English ‘from Lillies writing then in use’.4 But Sidney was not the only influential writer to raise the tone of English prose—Hooker, Bacon, Daniel, and others all took English forward, so that within only a generation even Sidney’s sparkling and elegant prose had begun to seem mannered, and any close imitation of it (as his continuators had to attempt) might sound only like anachronism or parody.5 As Kay puts it, ‘Sidney … appears to have created the taste by which he was enjoyed’ (14); but was his originality a bar to influence?

Like other classics, Sidney was often found in pieces. Early modern reading practices, printed anthologies of commonplaces like Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedere (both 1600), and the use of the rhetorically exemplary quotation by Fraunce and Hoskyns, encouraged an approach to the Arcadia that admired its bons mots and ignored its plot.6 One work did the opposite—John Day’s play The Ile of Guls (1606), which offered a hilariously knowing travesty of the plot in the language of modern city comedy. But too often Sidney was invoked as a sort of patron saint of English letters and ignored as an influence. Whilst Sidney’s intervention in the development of English verse was badly needed, there

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