The New Arcadia

Abstract

Sidney’s revised version of the Arcadia was left unfinished at the time of his death. From the opening scene of the New Arcadia, where the pastoral world of Montemayor’s Diana is almost literally swept off the page by the changeable sea of Heliodoran romance, it is clear that the familiar fictional world of the Old Arcadia has turned into a much larger and far more complicated domain. Within it, the physical wanderings of the young heroes of the New Arcadia develop in tandem with the branching out and purposeful ‘wandering’ of the narrative itself. This chapter places Sidney’s revisions in the context of the Old Arcadia’s youthful confidence. At the same time, it examines the political and emotional chaos depicted in the New Arcadia in the context of England’s involvement in wider international geopolitics. In the process, it explores the ways in which Sidney’s new prose fiction brings a significantly more mature understanding to bear on the relationship between personal virtue, ethics, and politics, offering a markedly sharper, bleaker vision of the world it inhabits in the process.