ABSTRACT

The intricately plotted New Arcadia dwarfs any of Robert Greene numerous books; Sidney’s greater ambition motivates the greater amplification of his fiction. For generations, Greene’s use of Sidney’s romance motifs has seemed a trivialization of high art. Greene, on the other hand, locates his work’s origins and social power in the London marketplace. Greene’s self-description embraces “strong affections and weak arguments,” and Sidney rejects this course for the same reason he rejects Pugliano, because obsessions with material form misplace human reason and hierarchical control. Menaphon, Greene’s most ambitious fiction, was a media sensation in Elizabethan publishing. Along with Lodge’s Rosalynde, which appeared one year later, Menaphon represents the high-water mark of Elizabethan Heliodoranism. The sly “Gentlemen” reminds readers that Greene’s address to women readers are to be read voyeuristically by male courtiers. The anti-epic project that Elizabethan writers found in Heliodorus, and that Sidney problematized by revising his Arcadia, finds its clearest middlebrow expression.