The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

First written for his sister at Wilton House, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia is the great pastoral romance of the Elizabethan age — a world of shepherd songs, disguised princes, shipwrecks, duels, and love pursued to the edge of tragedy. When princes Pyrocles and Musidorus conceal themselves in Arcadia — one as an Amazon, the other as a shepherd — to win the daughters of Duke Basilius, Sidney weaves adventure, comedy, and poetry into a prose epic that captivated the sixteenth century and shaped English literature for generations. This edition presents the complete, unabridged original text, together with a new introduction illuminating the courtly world that produced it and reader's notes glossing its names, allusions, and archaic turns of phrase. Labyrinthine, witty, and unexpectedly moving, the Arcadia remains the fountainhead of English pastoral romance. Part of The Founding Texts Library.