ABSTRACT
A criminal trial consumes the last two books of Sir Philip Sidney’s prose romance, the Old Arcadia. Although an eleventh-hour resurrection countermands the trial’s several grim death sentences, the concluding pages of the narrative, like its legal proceedings, focus on the act of looking back. What stands out in Sidney’s fi ction is that the Old Arcadia ends by looking back to a moment that looked forward. The text opens with an oracle, yet Sidney does not set prophecy and judicial review in simple opposition; rather, he scrambles them, commingling the language of law and judgment, promise and contract, to join the attempt to control the future with the prospect of eventual retrospection.
