Sir Philip Sidney: <i>The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia</i>

The New Arcadia, Second Revised Edition

Victor Skretkowicz, Elisabeth Chaghafi, J. B. Lethbridge

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781526174970
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526174987
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Modern readers mostly know Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia in its complete 'old' version, but it is the New Arcadia (published in 1590), a revised version of his pastoral romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, that was the most influential and most widely imitated literary text of the sixteenth century. Preserving the basic plot, New Arcadia adds further narrative strands and introduces ambitious revisions, demonstrating Sidney's brilliance as a prose writer.

This edition of the New Arcadia is the first in nearly four decades, preserving the text of Victor Skretkowicz' celebrated 1987 edition, whilst making the text accessible through modern spelling and supplementing it with a substantially expanded scholarly commentary, an updated glossary, and additional long notes on the book's history and Sidney's use of rhetorical devices, as well as his contributions to the English language.

Table of contents

• Front Matter
• General Preface
• Preface to the 1987 Edition
• Contents
• References and Abbreviations
• General Introduction
• Textual Introduction
• The History of Arcadia in Print
• Arcadia Editions Before 1700
• Rhetorical Figures in the New Arcadia
• The New Arcadia
• Appendices
• Commentary
• Glossary
• Index of Characters
• Index of Other Names
• Index of Places
• Index of First Lines of Poems
• Genealogical Tables
• General Index to Introduction and Commentary