i’m convinced that every notable renaissance author was on crack, sidney in particular

I also have The Old Arcadia (editor Katherine Duncan-Jones), his original 'trifle' written in his twenties. But give me The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (editor Maurice Evans) -- at twice the page count -- baroque and in confusion and unfinished at his death. The first was a silly romance, that he

I consider it a feat to have read and understood this book.

Each sentence is a sculpture, of which the author provides you the pieces, but you are required to assemble. The process is exhausting — beautiful, but exhausting.

UPDATE: The "New" Arcadia is superior to the "Old" one; take my word for it. It's the one you want to read, because it's the one that was read for more than two hundred years. And Sidney's craft had clearly matured. Get the Maurice Evans edition in the Penguin Classical Library.

I read this after bei

Sidney's Old Arcadia is a novel written a century before the rise of the novel as a major English literary form, a pastoral tragicomedy decades before pastoral tragicomedy had its day on the English stage (and indeed, it was to become a play via the pen of James Shirley in 1640), and a compendium of

There are actually three versions of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia in existence: the first version, called The Old Arcadia; the second, unfinished version, referred to in this review as The New Arcadia; and the hybrid book completed by Sidney’s sister, the Countess of Pembroke and Sir William Alexande

If you like 16th C men trying to impress women by cross-dressing and fighting off bears . . .

I don't usually like things that are old, especially stuffy prose from the 1500s, but Sidney's masterpiece (at least his prose masterpiece) is wonderfully relatable and actually quite funny. Who doesn't love a story where two heroes kill a full-grown lion and bear within the first 100 pages.

Spoiler