Arcadia: A Restoration In Contemporary English Of The Complete 1593 Edition Of The Countess Of Pembroke's Arcadia By Charles Stanley Ross And Joel B. [Paperback]

Sidneys Renaissance romance offers a surprisingly astute analysis of statesmanship and erotic passion. King Basilius misinterprets an oracle and retreats to a country house. There he pursues a cross-dressed Amazon whom his wife also desires. Musidorus and Pyrocles in disguise woo the royal princesses Pamela and Philoclea, recounting their attempts to bring justice and stability to foreign countries. The kings envious sister-in-law stirs up dissensions and adds to the misery of her love-sick son. Sidney himself was a courtier and close observer of Queen Elizabeth I. His father was three times governor of Ireland. Readers will find his fable of power, love, and civic unrest both entertaining and timely.

Ross and Davis have undertaken a daring venture: to restore, as they put it, the immense masterpiece of English Renaissance prose, Sidneys Arcadia. Why, one might ask, should Sidneys baroque syntax be made simpler and his archaic diction modernized? Because their complexity and unfamiliarity, after the lapse of some 400 years, has made the work all but unreadable, except by a small and steadily shrinking cohort of scholars. The choice is either pious oblivion or the kind of creative updating we routinely welcome in contemporary productions of Shakespeare. Ross and Davis want to give a new generation of readers access to a literary achievement of surpassing intelligence and beauty.

Stephen Greenblatt,?Cogan Professor of English, Harvard University

Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia perfectly defines what we think of as the English Renaissance. By the sheer quality of its achievement, it created the illusion of separating traditional rhetoric from literature or polite letters. Emerging out of the small coterie around Sidneys sister Mary, the countess of Pembroke, Sidneys oeuvre reached Shakespeare, who took to new heights the oratory exhibited by the Arcadias characters in their speeches, debates, and poetry. Sidneys masterpiecel“(