ABSTRACT
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia spent almost a century after its 1593 publication provoking further improvements. The work’s rhetorical complexity, its play of genres and its exfoliating plotlines offer, in the words of Martin Garrett, “an impression of inexhaustible riches, possibilities which do not end when the book is completed” (7). Its many literary offspring, which include both prose continuations and adaptations of the romance into other forms, potentially constitute case studies in reception-as-reinterpretation. Redactors’ attempts to contain the narrative copia of the Arcadia or to temper the work’s more provocative experiments with mixed modes may produce moments of signifi cant resistance to the agendas of the (offi cially) “onely to be admired Sir Philip Sydney” (Markham A2v), quite egregiously erasing some of the possibilities Sidney fi nds in romance. It is one such “undoing,” the dismantling of the Arcadia’s heterogeneous representation of female speech and agency in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Cupid’s Revenge that concerns me here.
