Passion and reason in sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

Lisa Hopkins

pp. 61-75

in: Constance C. Relihan, Göran V. Stanivukovic (eds), Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

Although the old and new Arcadias are different in many significant respects, at the heart of both lies the prophecy received by Basilius from the Delphic oracle, and the consequences of his futile attempts to avoid its fulfillment. This motif of a king's attempt to thwart an oracle is not, of course, confined to the Arcadia. Variations on it recur in both The Winter's Tale and Ford's The Broken Heart, which is clearly indebted both to the Arcadia, like so much of Ford's other work, and also, it has been argued, to the life of Sidney himself and his ill-fated love affair with Penelope Devereux, to whom Ford, many years earlier, had dedicated his first published work. A rather different inflection of the motif is found in another Renaissance play, Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, where the astrological predictions concerning the Duchess's first son by Antonio may or may not be fulfilled. Most obviously, it is also the driving force of the events of Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus. And in all these plots, it is inextricably bound up with fears and taboos about incest. In this essay, I want to show how the new Arcadia codifies a definition of romantic love in which negotiation with the idea of incest becomes an inevitable corollary of the young aristocrat's development of a personal and romantic identity. Sidney is sensitive both to the threat of endogamy and the dangers of exogamy, and to the ways in which love both disrupts families and is a prerequisite for the formation of new ones.