ABSTRACT
The three main versions are witnessed by a significant number of manuscripts of OA and one of NA, a printed edition of NA published in 1590, and one of the hybrid Arcadia published in 1593 that was reprinted in 1598 and 1605 and in a slightly revised form in 1613. Some of the poems from the Arcadia also survive in substantive texts in manuscript miscellanies and in printed books from the period. it also needs to be remembered that these witnesses are bulky: OA consists of around 200,000 words, and NA of more than 250,000. Much of this material was made available in an edited form in the edition of Sidney’s writings undertaken by Albert Feuillerat for Cambridge University Press between 1912 and 1926, which included the first publication of a manuscript version of the complete OA. A fuller consideration of the then-known texts of the Arcadias was undertaken by William A. Ringler, Jr. for his edition of Sidney’s poems published by the Clarendon Press in 1962. This was supplemented and modified by Jean Robertson and Victor Skretkowicz in their respective editions of OA and
NA published in 1973 and 1987. During the half-century or so that has passed since Ringler’s edition of the poems, new approaches to editing and textual histories have developed, not least in the current understanding of scribal publication and the circulation of works in manuscript. Ringler’s brilliant analysis of the evolution of the Arcadias has been modified and challenged by successive editors as well as by scholars and critics.
