The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia - Reputation and Influence

Reputation and Influence

The work enjoyed great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; traces of the work's influence may also be found in Hamlet and The Winter's Tale. Other dramatizations also occurred: Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia, John Day's The Isle of Gulls, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, the anonymous Mucedorus, a play of the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and, most overtly, in James Shirley's The Arcadia.

Sidney's book also inspired a number of partial imitators, such as his niece Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, and continuations, the most famous perhaps being that by Anna Weamys. These works, however, are as close to the "precious" style of 17th-century French romance as to the Greek and chivalric models that shape Sidney's work. The Arcadia also made a small appearance at a crucial moment in history. According to a widely told story, Charles I quoted lines from the book, an excerpt termed "Pamela's Prayer," from a prayer of the heroine Pamela, as he mounted the scaffold to be executed. In Eikonoklastes, John Milton complains of the dead king's choice of a profane text for his final prayer; at the same time, he praised the book as among the best of its kind.

In the next century, Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela. Despite this mark of continued respect, however, the rise of the novel was making works like the Arcadia obsolete. By the beginning of the Romantic era, its grand, artificial, sometimes obstinately unwieldy style (sometimes held to be euphuistic, perhaps wrongly) had made it thoroughly alien to more modern tastes. However, in the 20th century, the Latin American poet Giannina Braschi spins her own rendition of Arcadia in the trilogy "Empire of Dreams" which features the book "Pastoral; or the Inquisition of Memories". While the original is still widely read, it was already becoming a text of primary interest to historians and literary specialists. The Arcadia contains the earliest known use of the feminine personal name Pamela. Most scholars believe that Sidney simply invented the name.