A Continuation of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia

The books appearing under the aegis of OUP's Women Writers in English series are making an invaluable contribution to Renaissance studies by providing scholars and students access to rare texts by women writers of the period. The burgeoning fields of cultural studies, women's studies, and gender studies have prompted the discovery or rediscovery of several fascinating women's texts, as wall as many scholarly studies probing their significance. But until very recently, teachers have been frustrated in their efforts to bring these largely inaccessible texts to students, save in unsatisfactory anthology extracts. Now, however, some (though still too few) of these texts have been or are about to be published in good editions. The Oxford series format is especially useful for the classroom: these are inexpensive, reliable editions, usually based on a single good copy, with sound historical and textual introductions and informative annotations.

Anna Weamys's continuation of the New Arcadia in Patrick Cullen's splendid edition is a major and very attractive addition to this emerging archive of Renaissance women's writing. Cullen quite rightly argues that this is not merely a Sidneian appendage but essentially an original text displaying creative choices, reconceived characters, and rewritten plot elements. Weamys almost entirely erases the events of the Old Arcadia in the 1593 composite edition, making the reunion and betrothal of Sidney's chief characters (Philoclea and Pyrocles, Pamela and Musiodorus) follow immediately upon the captivity, trials, and combats, which end in mid-sentence in the New Arcadia. This resolution of Sidney's plot is Weamys's starting point and the frame for her three largely original narratives about minor Sidneian characters - Plangus and Erona; Amphialus and Helen; Claius, Strephon, and Urania - as well as an unintentionally comic tale told by Mopsa and a brief account of the lovelorn and melancholy Philisides's death. Weamys shapes her narrative to the concerns of women and youth: it emphasizes romance rather than heroic combat; it ends with four weddings founded on lovers' desire rather than Sidney's trial of young lovers by aged patriarchs; and it further privileges youth over age as the young princes award Urania to the young Strephon rather than to the aged Claius, whose claims are backed by the aged Basilius.

Cullen's editorial decisions are generally admirable, especially his presentation of both a modernized text for classroom use and a reprint of the original for scholars. While Weamys's 1651 text is not difficult to read, the fact that student editions of Sidney, Shakespeare, and other Renaissance works commonly modernize spelling and punctuation makes Cullen's light editing of these accidentals entirely appropriate, especially because there is no manuscript to indicate Weamys's own practice. As Cullen recognizes, every reader will have reservations about any system of modernization. My chief regret is that the decision to spell characters' names according to Weamys's most frequent usage erases the Sidneian significance of some. On this principle, Euarchus (good ruler) is rendered as Evarchus, though it is at least arguable that this is a case of the common u/v substitution in the printing house rather than an authorial choice which would indicate ignorance or disregard of the name's meaning.

The appendices of this edition supply many useful materials: brief synopses of Sidney's Old and New Arcadia; summaries of the narrative backgrounds in Sidney for Weamys's three narratives; and a list of Sidney/Weamys characters with variant spellings. The biographical note is sketchy, since almost nothing is known of Anna Weamys or her family (her father was possibly one Lodowick Weems or Wemys or Weames). Cullen deduces what he can from prefatory references suggesting associations with the Pierrepont family of Dorchester and with James Howell, author of Dodona's Grove; other scholars will no doubt discover additional facts in due course. Cullen's analysis of the literary contexts of Weamys's work, especially in regard to the Renaissance mimetic and intertextual aesthetic and the Sidney precursor text, makes a valuable beginning in criticism for a work that thus far has received almost no critical attention. Also, the warm and elegant tributes in Patrick Cullen's acknowledgments, especially to a mother dying of Alzheimer's, provide a model for linking the personal and the professional - a feminist ideal all too seldom realized.

BARBARA K. LEWALSKI Harvard University