ABSTRACT
THERE is a certain justice to W. W. Greg’s charge that “of the books which everybody knows and nobody reads, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia is perhaps the most famous.” 1 Even had it lacked literary merit, the Arcadia would have been destined for contemporary fame solely because it was written by Philip Sidney. And the popularity of Sidney’s romance certainly did languish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as a good part of the twentieth. But Greg’s claim is true in a deeper sense, because the fame of Philip Sidney has always obscured the nature of the Arcadia : it is not one work but several different works, if we take a “work” to be a literary artifact shaped by authorial and editorial intentions. 2 In spite of the social-historical orientation 286of much literary criticism written since the Arcadia began to regain popularity in the mid-nineteen sixties, scholarship on its textual and reception history has downplayed how both the reception of the Arcadia and the idea of Philip Sidney as its author depend on the editorial work that shaped the Arcadia’s first two printed editions in 1590 and 1593.
