Philip Sidney Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kenneth Muir

Critical Essay by Kenneth Muir

SOURCE: "Sidney and Political Pastoral," in Sir Philip Sidney, Longmans, Green & Co., 1984, pp. 91-108.

In the following excerpt from an essay written in 1960, Muir discusses contemporary and modern opinions of the Arcadia and Sidney's purpose in writing and rewriting the work.

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia is the only English masterpiece which has been allowed to go out of print. It has never been included in a popular series of classics and one must conclude that it is read now only by scholars. It has, indeed, a reputation for tediousness. Mr. T. S. Eliot, though writing in defence of the Countess of Pembroke's circle, dismissed Arcadia as 'a monument of dullness'; Mr. F. L. Lucas called it 'a rigmarole of affected coxcombry and china shepherdesses'; Virginia Woolf described her reactions as 'half dreaming, half yawning'; and dullness is the one fault which the general reader neither can...
(read more)