This study presents a radically original theory of how and why Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590) matured from a very conventional collection of lyric poems into a comprehensive prose narrative. Schneider grounds the multiple versions of Sidney’s text in historical, narratological, and biographical contexts and carefully tracks the influence of international Renaissance literary theory on Sidney’s revisions. The courtier-poet of Schneider’s analysis emerges as a revolutionary figure in European literary history. Schneider demonstrates that Sidney’s revised Arcadia ought to be read as the practical demonstration of the theoretical problems of voice and narrative that preoccupied him during the composition of his Apology for Poetry. In the Arcadia, Schneider argues, Sidney “surpasse[d] his models and explore[d] new ways of story-telling, ways that were to become indispensable for the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century.”

Sidney’s (Re)Writing of the “Arcadia” is primarily addressed to students and scholars of the Renaissance, who will find in this study valuable information on the literary tools available not only to writers of prose fiction but also to contemporary dramatists such as Marlow and Shakespeare. But because its focus on basic poetic structures, the text will also interest readers concerned with the development of English prose fiction in general and with the “birth of the modern novel” in particular.

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