A History of English Literature

Grant,O dear, on knees I pray’ –

(Knees on ground he then did stay)

‘That not I, but since I love you,

Time and place for me may move you ...’

She,with less self-deception and bathos, declines:

‘Tyrant honour thus doth use thee,

Stella’s self might not refuse thee.’

Therewithal away she went,

Leaving him so passion-rent

With what she had done and spoken

That therewith my song is broken.

Sidney returns to the first person and his foolish heart.
Artful in strategy and rhetoric, Sidney is simple in diction. In his Defence he
commended Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, but added ‘That same framing of his
style to an old rustic language I cannot allow.’ Elsewhere: ‘I have found in divers
smally learned courtiers a more sound stile, then in some professors of learning.’
The Defence is the first classic of English literary criticism, and Sidney the first in
a line of poet-critics: Dryden, Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold, Eliot. It defends poetry
against Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse (1579), a Puritan attack on the stage,
dedicated to a Protestant patron, Sidney himself. The Defence is elaborate,
patterned on a classical oration and full of humanist learning. Yet it begins with a
digression on horsemanship, and, compared to its Italian predecessors, it canters
along, humanized by touches of humour and sprezzatura. Its argument is that

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 95

The Arcadia

Publication

1 The Old Arcadia, completed in 1580 (first

pub. 1912): five books divided by pastoral

eclogues in verse.

2 The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia,

published by Fulke Greville (1590), known

as the New Arcadia. Although Sidney

rewrote less than half of the story, the

revision is 50,000 words longer than the

180,000 words of the Old.

3 ‘The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia ...

Now since the first edition augmented and

ended ... 1593.’ This joins the first half of

the Newwith Mary’s revision of the second

half of the Old.

4 In a 5th edition (1621), Sir William

Alexander wrote thirty pages to join the New

to the Old; this ran to nine editions. In 1725

a 14th edition appeared; and also an edition

rewritten in modern English. Selections

appeared throughout the 18th century.

Reception

1649 At his execution, King Charles I is said

to have repeated Pamela’s prayer in

prison.

1740 Richardson called his first novel

Pamela.

1810 Hazlitt called it ‘one of the greatest

monuments of the abuse of intellectual

power upon record’.

1860 Dickens’s Great Expectationshas as

hero Pip, who vainly pursues Estella,

borrowing names and features from

Arcadiaand its title from Astrophil and

Stella21.

1977 First complete modernized-spelling

edition, ed. M. Evans (London:

Penguin): 790 pages, c.320,000

words.