SOURCE: “Sidney's Arcadia as an Example of Elizabethan Allegory,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney, Archon Books, 1986, pp. 271–85.

In the following essay, originally published in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge in 1913, Greenlaw argues that by Elizabethan standards Arcadia is a heroic poem; Sidney provides the type of allegory his audience would have expected, and the work reflects political crises of sixteenth-century England.

By Sidney and his contemporaries, Arcadia was regarded as an heroic poem. Fraunce lists it with the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid;¹ Harington cites it in his defense of the structure of Orlando Furioso;² Harvey says that if Homer be not at hand, Arcadia will do as well to supply examples of the perfect hero: “You may read his furious Iliads and cunning Odysses in the brave adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus, where Pyrocles playeth the...