ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how the eclogues came to be placed in Sidney's expansive pastoral and then draw attention to how they work. Echo can be considered a viable poetic figure embodying the play of chiasmus. Victor Skretkowicz relates in the introduction to his edition of the Arcadia, Sidney clearly wrote for a knowledgeable audience with a wide appreciation of the symbolic and the emblematic, and Sidney subtly unites the various symbols into a coherent whole. Sidney, and his sister after him, conceived and accomplished through rhetorical mnemonics, of which chiasmus is a constitutive part, ranging from syntactic arrangement, to plot development, to an overarching architectonic template organizing and containing the various episodes. The aesthetic of chiasmus, with its implicit imposition of a desire for order in formal terms as a way to give expression to Sidney's characters' runaway desires, brings together both the Art of Memory and shades of melancholy.
