Happiness in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 59-69
Author(s):  
Joachim Frenk

Sir Philip Sidney is not commonly associated with a search for happiness or the use he made of concepts of happiness in his works. Yet, as this article seeks to show, he employed a rhetoric of happiness throughout. In particular, Sidney’s Arcadias – the Old Arcadia, which he finished in 1581, and the New Arcadia, the substantial rewriting which remained unfinished – are markedly different in their representations of and their reflections on happiness. While happiness is associated with the Arcadian state as a – potentially fatal – aim in the Old Arcadia from its very beginning, it is subordinated to a sterner and more violent discourse in the New Arcadia, for which after Sidney’s death other writers wrote diverse happy endings. This different treatment of happiness in the Arcadias is also discussed with a view to different manuscripts and print editions as well as to the power play at the Elizabethan court.

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Loman ◽  
Melanie Johnson
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Chocano Díaz ◽  
Noelia Hernando Real

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.


1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Berry
Keyword(s):  

This book intends to provide a comprehensive reappraisal of the work of the Renaissance poet and politician Sir Fulke Greville, whose political career stretched from the heyday of the Elizabethan age into the Stuart period. While Greville’s literary achievements have traditionally been overshadowed by those of his more famous friend Sir Philip Sidney, his oeuvre comprises a highly diverse range of works of striking force and originality, comprising a sonnet sequence, a biography of Sir Philip Sidney, a series of philosophical treatises, and two closet dramas set in the Ottoman Empire. The essays gathered in this volume investigate the intersections between poetics, poetic form, and political and religious thought in Greville’s work, arguing how they participate in all of the most important debates of the post-Reformation period, such as the nature of grace and the status of evil; the exercise of sovereignty and scope and limits of political power; and the nature of civil and religious idolatry. They examine Greville’s career as a courtier and patron, and foreground both his own concerns with the posthumous life of authors and their works, and his continuing importance during the Interregnum and Restoration periods.


2021 ◽  
pp. 100837
Author(s):  
David S. Jiang ◽  
Scott D. Hayward
Keyword(s):  

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