ABSTRACT
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia-generically hybrid, stylistically dazzling, teasingly incomplete-prompted a good deal of further creativity among its readers. The work’s rhetorical complexity, its play of genres, and its exfoliating plotlines offer, as Martin garrett notes, “an impression of inexhaustible riches, possibilities which do not end when the book is completed” (7). not only tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, but also lyrical-dialogicchivalric-political, Sidney’s romance constituted a fertile source text for selective reading, imitation, and appropriation (see Borris ARC 2:6). Arcadian borrowings or reshapings can be as glancing as the 1599 retitling of the second (and post-mortem) edition of Robert greene’s Menaphon (originally half-titled Camillas Alarm to the Slumbering Euphues) as Greenes Arcadia or Menaphon-a move which announces Sidney’s displacement of Lyly as putative model.1 They can be as tongue-in-cheek as Thomas nashe’s delicious parody in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) of the baroque and heavily coded accoutrements of the warriors in the Arcadia’s formal jousts: nashe decks his earl of Surrey out in armor embossed with designs of lilies and roses, nettles and weeds, with his helmet shaped like a watering pot to represent how the tears he sheds both give life to his mistress’s scorn (the nettles and weeds) and nurture the glory “of her care-causing beauty” (the lilies and roses) (262). They can be as directly allusive as the poem in John Dickenson’s Arisbas (also 1594) which invokes the disguised Pyrocles’ blazoning of Philoclea at her bath as a point of comparison for the enjoyment of exquisite “fancie” (g1r).
