SOURCE: “Divided Aims in the Revised Arcadia,” in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: A Poet in His Time and Ours, Croom Helm, 1984, pp. 34–43.

In the following essay, Evans contends that the Revised Arcadia is Sidney's attempt to put his theory of poetry into practice, but that his aims often are at odds as his mimetic genius clashes with and is stifled by a didactic purpose.

The Revised Arcadia is the most capacious of Sidney's literary works, and the one which expresses the widest range of his needs and interests. This paper explores some of the problems to which his peculiar eclecticism gave rise. It is a commonplace that the Renaissance ideal of man involved versatility and excellence in many different fields, but in the case of Sidney, the diversity is extreme. He was an idealist with more than a dash of romantic heroism in...