477d Sidney, Sir Philip. (1554-1586) The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the eighth time published, with some new additions. With the supplement of a defect in the third part of this history, by Sir W.A. Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth booke, by R.B. of Lincolnes Inne, Esq.

London: Printed for Simon Waterson and R. Young, 1633

$2,500

Folio, 7.5 x 10.75 in. Eighth edition, with new additions. ¶3, A-Z6, Aa-Zz6, Aaa-Fff6. This copy contains the engraved title page and is marked throughout with a past owner’s marginal notes and underlining. It is bound in full contemporary English calfskin and has been rebacked.

“Sir Philip Sidney was a cultured, courteous, and courageous man — everything a man should be when the term ‘aristocrat’ is applied to him. His work was not published in his lifetime though the manuscripts were circulated, in the fashion of the day, and widely read. Sidney’s appearance in English poetry is sudden, brilliant, and brief.” (Cambridge Guide to English Literature)

William Ringler describes Arcadia as “the most important original work of English prose fiction produced before the eighteenth century.”
“The romance’s complicated plot is full of oracles, disguisings, mistaken identity, melodramatic incidents and tangled love situations. Some episodes are of political interest, and Sidney clearly put more of his serious thought on statecraft into it than he pretends when he describes the book as mere entertainment. The Arcadia also contains many poems—ecologues and songs which are interspersed throughout the narrative; they represent Sidney’s experimental and exploratory ventures into verse.”

“Sidney’s ‘Astrophel and Stella’ (Starlover and Star) is the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles. These collections, imitative of Petrarch or of his French imitators, were based upon a well-understood convention. The poet undertook to display all the contrary feelings of a lover—hope and despair, tenderness and bitterness, exultation and modesty, by the use of ‘conceits’ or ingenious comparisons. Many of these became traditional, and eventually, stale: the poet who complained that in love he both burned and froze, or that his sighs were the winds driving his ship on a tossing sea, was echoing many an earlier poet. So Sidney protests, in the role of Astrophel, that he uses no standard conventional phrases; his verse is original and comes from the heart. (This pretense is also conventional.) But what gives Sidney’s sonnets their extraordinary vigor and freshness is Sidney’s ability to dramatize. He uses dialogue, is often colloquial, and he heightens the situation as much as he can within the fourteen lines.” (Norton)

STC 22549; Tennenbaum #58