The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

Philip Sidney wrote this sprawling prose romance for his sister Mary, the Countess of Pembroke, and read it to her in installments before his early death. Set in an idealized Greek Arcadia, it follows two princes who disguise themselves, one as a shepherd and one as an Amazon, to win the daughters of a king who has retreated to the countryside to escape a troubling oracle. Around their courtships Sidney packs shipwrecks, jousts, disguises, rebellion, and long debates on love and honor, interlaced with poems and pastoral songs. Wildly influential on later English fiction and poetry, it stands as one of the great works of the Elizabethan age. This free edition is available as a PDF and EPUB download.