Have just come across a passage in George MacDonald's Wilfrid Cumbermede (chapter vi) in which the eponymous hero recalls how as a child he discovered the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia in his uncle's library: "This book I read from boar to finis--no small undertaking, and partly, not doubt, under its influences, I became about this time conscious of a desire after honour, as yet a notion of the vaguest."
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stillman, Robert E
Sent: Friday, 3 July 2009 4:12 p.m.
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Word Searching Harington's Orlando Furioso... / Does anyone teach the Old Arcadia to Undergraduates?
Yes, I do teach The Old Arcadia in a sixteenth-century non-dramatic lit class designed for English majors, and yes, it goes very, very well. The romance is beautifully plotted, as you write. It's filled with amazingly good material for talking about Petrarchism come-to-life, about pastoralism, romance, heroic action (and inaction), and fiction-making of all sorts: Sidney is both very funny and very wise about the fictions people tell themselves and the fictions that poets tell us. (Read some of Castiglione's Courtier beforehand, if possible, especially Bembo on love, and lovers transformed into the image of what they love, and so much of the Arcadian game becomes teachable in that context as a serio-comic parody of the platonic). This is is a smart, urbane, largely undervalued text ordinarily dismissed as the deformed pastoral child to the reformed heroic successor. Give it a try. Your students will like it, and what's not to like in a book filled with polymorphous perversity, featuring one transvestite prince who experiences Elizabethan literature's funniest moment of premature ejaculation and another tongue-tied prince turned shepherd boy, whom nobody pays attention to, precisely because he's a shepherd? I spend much of the first class at the blackboard, after the students have read its first book or act, diagramming its network of romantic relationships; it takes my students a while to catch onto the gamesmanship of reading pastoral romances (the ironic narrator is a plus), but they do understand soap operas, and I'm happy to have them explore the analogy. Like you, I shy away from assigning all of the eclogues, but they shouldn't be avoided entirely either. I'd get them to read one set, maybe the first, at least to wonder about what sort of work they perform in the book as a whole. And yes, Strephon and Klaius's "Ye goat-herd gods" is too good to skip. Anyhow, I couldn't resist sharing a few random thoughts. The Old Arcadia is a joy to teach.
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List on behalf of Bruce Danner
Sent: Thu 7/2/2009 7:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Word Searching Harington's Orlando Furioso... / Does anyone teach the Old Arcadia to Undergraduates?
I'm interested in searching Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso (standard word searches, as in a concordance), but I don't believe that any concordance exists. It looks as if it's been digitized on LION, but my library doesn't subscribe. Do I have any options outside of a full read-through?
Midway through Sidney's Old Arcadia, and wow, I forgot how interesting it is (and how tightly plotted)! I'm thinking about how it might fit in an undergraduate class (sans the majority of the eclogues...), and am curious if it's been taught much, and if so, how successfully.
Bruce Danner
St. Lawrence University
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