ABSTRACT
Philip Sidney and Barnaby Rich were two very different writers, probably as different as Elizabethan writers could be: renowned knight and common soldier, courtly poet and hack writer, famous innovator and almost forgotten plagiarist. The Farewell, written around 1578 and published in 1581, was Rich's greatest success and is known today above all as a quarry for Shakespeare and other playwrights of the English Renaissance. This chapter argues that in both the Farewell and the Eclogues the narratives were enclosed in a dialogic frame. This apparently centripetal force, however, can also be considered from the opposite point of view: the narrator's voice is no longer the centre of interest, but has been shifted to the edges of the stories and the anthology as a whole. In both Don Simonides as well as the Old Arcadia the figures of the former inset stories became the new protagonists, narrator-characters who speak and act for themselves.
