The popularity of the book, rivalling that of Euphues, is illustrated by the number of editions, of which a list will be given later. Sidney found writers eager to continue the story, and many imitators. The argument of John Day’s Ile of Guls (1606) was “a little string or rivolet drawne from the full streme of the right worthy gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydney’s well knowne Archadea.” Shirley dramatised many episodes in his Pastorall called the Arcadia (1640); the story of the dispossessed king of Paphlagonia and his son is probably the germ of Shakespeare’s episode of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear, and Mr C. Crawford has found traces of copying in the Duchess of Malfi and other plays of Webster. The author of the Emblemes, Francis Quarles, made a long poem out of the story of Argalus and Parthenia (1622); and other writers linked their compositions to the popularity and prestige of the Arcadia by using Sidney’s name as their advertisement, like the author of Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania (1606), a philosophical poem dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and the Lady Mary Wroath, a niece of Sidney, who produced a slavish imitation in The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania (1621), and made great play with her pedigree on the title-page. Excerpts and adaptations were published right down to the late seventeenth century.
The first edition of the Arcadia was published in 1590, four years after the author’s death. He did not finish the book, which had been begun for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was in exile from the court and living at Wilton House, the seat of the Pembrokes. It was Sidney’s dying request that the manuscript should be destroyed, and the dedicatory epistle to his sister expresses how little he valued the book as a literary performance:—
“If you keep it to yourself, or to such friends who will weigh error in the balance of good-will, I hope for the father’s sake it will be pardoned, perchance made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed for severer eyes it is not, being a trifle, and that triflingly handled.”
The Arcadia was entered in the Register of the Stationer’s Company in 1588, by William Ponsonbie, the publisher of Spenser’s Fairie Queene; and the first edition saw the light in a thick quarto in 1590. A photo-lithographic reproduction of this handsome first edition was published in 1891 by Dr Oskar Sommer, to whose scholarly bibliographical introduction I am indebted for the following list of the various editions. The fourth and fifth books, and a portion of the third book (57 pages), were added in the second edition, in 1593, a folio, by the same publisher. Beyond this, there are few variations in the text of the two editions. The third edition (1598), also by Ponsonbie, comprised Sidney’s Sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence of Poesie; and these works were again included in the fourth edition (misdescribed as the third) by Robert Waldegrave, at Edinburgh, in 1599.[2] Mathew Lownes’ edition (1605), the fifth (miscalled the fourth), is almost a facsimile reprint of the third; but in the next edition, described on the title-page as the fourth (1613), we get some new “additions,” but of small importance compared with those in the seventh (described in the title as the fifth), published in 1621 at Dublin, which included a “Supplement of a defect in the third part of this History, by Sir W. Alexander,” which had been printed separately at Dublin the same year. In the present edition his supplement begins on [page 428] and ends on [page 451], where Sir William’s apologie for the liberty taken is duly quoted. Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards Earl of Stirling, was a poet and dramatist, and a statesman of genius, who died in 1610. He was a friend of Drummond of Hawthornden. The Dictionary of National Biography states wrongly that he published this continuation of the third book of the Arcadia in 1613, the date of the so-called fourth edition, certain copies of which have extracts from this work inserted. The first London edition, to which Sir William Alexander’s supplement was added, was the eighth, published in 1623; but it is doubtful whether the additional matter was really printed as a part of the volume, or added from the 1621 edition, or some other of which there is no trace, to the only copy of this issue known to Dr Sommer. The pagination, at any rate, is in a confused state pointing to this.
The sixth book of the Arcadia by Richard Beling (see infra [p. 631]), first published at Dublin, in 1624, was added to the ninth edition, miscalled the sixth, in 1627. It is not mentioned on the title, but before this new supplement another title-page is inserted, running as follows, “A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: written by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne Esquire. (Sat, si bene; si male, nimium.) London, printed by H. L. and R. Y. 1628,” thus dating a year later than the title-page proper. After Beling’s continuation come the Sonnets, the Defence of Poesie, Astrophel, etc. This edition was reprinted in exact conformity, except that the new title-page mentions the work of Beling, in 1629; and the five other seventeenth-century editions, appearing in 1633, 1638, 1655, 1662, and 1674, corresponded exactly in all textual respects but the title-page, except that in the twelfth, described as the ninth, edition (1638), an alternative supplement to a defect in the third book is introduced by Mr Ja. Johnstone, “Scoto-Brit,” and in addition to this the 1655 edition contained the forty-eight couplets entitled “A Remedie for Loue,” and an alphabetical table, or clavis, forming an index to the stories in the Arcadia.
Dr Sommer mentions only one edition in the eighteenth century, one in three volumes containing also the poetical works and the Defence of Poesy, and described as the fourteenth edition, although fifteen previous editions have now been enumerated. The title of the first volume is dated 1725, but the other two volumes bear that of the preceding year, the preliminary matter of the first not having, apparently, been completed in 1724. This was a London edition, and Dr Sommer was not aware of another seventeenth century edition, printed at Dublin in 1739, which was a reproduction of this one: it bears the imprint, “Dublin: printed by S. Powell, for T. Moore, at Erasmus’s Head in Dame Street, Bookseller, MDCCXXXIX”; and a copy has been used in preparing the present edition.
The only edition of the Arcadia in the nineteenth century, with the exception of the photographic reproduction of the first edition by Dr Sommer, was published by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, in 1867, and was preceded by an introductory essay by Hain Friswell, the author of The Gentle Life, who says:—
“The principle on which this edition of the Arcadia has been put through the press perhaps needs some explanation. As the sheets of MS. left the hands of Sidney, after the first book, or perhaps two, had been completed, they were transmitted to his sister the Countess of Pembroke, and some of them mislaid and lost. Hence one great hiatus supplied by Sir William Alexander, others by R(ichard) B(eling) and Mr Johnstone. It is also known that the Countess of Pembroke added to the episodes, adventures, and strange turns, at least in all the later books. Hence there is to be met with an Arcadian undergrowth which needs much careful pruning; and this undertaken, with needful compression, will leave the reader all that he desires of Sidney’s own. Growing like certain fanciful parasites upon forest trees, on the books of the Arcadia are certain eclogues of laboriously-written and fantastical poetry, some in Latin measures, against which Walpole was right to protest, and anent which Pope said:—
‘And Sidney’s verse halts ill on Roman feet.’
“These have been boldly removed without any loss, it is believed, to the romance; lastly, long episodes of no possible use to the book, which we think have been supplied by other hands than Sidney’s have, whilst using their very words and phrases, been cut down. Tedious excrescences have thus been removed, but it is to be hoped with judgment, so that the reader gets all we think is Sidney’s, and without curb put upon his utterance.”
In the edition now offered to the student of Elizabethan literature an opposite method has been adopted. Rather than run any risk of omitting anything that is Sidney’s, it has been thought advisable to give the whole Arcadia, excrescences and all, especially as the additions of those who were fellow-spirits and admirers, and belonged to the same great epoch, cannot be without their interest to readers in the present age, who may, at any rate, skip the contributions of Alexander and Beling if they are so minded. The example of Hain Friswell has been followed, however, so far as the modernisation of the spelling and punctuation is concerned. “A Continuation of Sir P. Sidney’s Arcadia written by a young Gentlewoman” (Mrs A. W. Weames), and published at London, in 1651, and James Johnstone’s “Supplement to a defect in the Third Book,” which is merely an alternative to Alexander’s, are not included.
There was a modernised edition of the Arcadia published in 1725, under the title, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Moderniz’d by Mrs Stanley, London, Printed in the Year MDCCXXV”; and there were extracts from the book, like the abstract entitled, “The Famous History of Heroick Acts or the Honour of Chivalry,” London, 1701; and two versions of the episode of Argalus and Parthenia, the first, “The Unfortunate Lovers: the History of Argalus and Parthenia” (fourth edition, 1715), and “The History of Argalus and Parthenia. Being A Choice Flower Gathered out of Sir Philip Sidney’s Rare Garden,” c. 1770 and 1780. Dr Grosart included all the poems occurring in the Arcadia in his edition of “The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney,” in three volumes, in 1877. Students of our old texts owe an immense debt to Dr Sommer for the pains and industry lavished on his sumptuous facsimile editions of Caxton’s Malory and Sidney’s Arcadia, in both of which the comparison of all the extant readings has been carried out with microscopic thoroughness, and done once for all.