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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

whose denouement was withheld until the very last page and featured
the long frustrated spousals of its four principals: Pyrocles, Musidorus,
Philoclea, and Pamela. In the extensive but incomplete revision of
what has survived as a manuscript of the so-called Old Arcadia (com-
posed ca. 1580) — a revision filling more than half the length of The
Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia — Sidney experimented with focalized
points of view. The revision’s diverse perspectives of characters and
narrator added still more complication to the work’s five prose books
(each subdivided into chapters and interspersed with lyrics), separat-
ed by four interludes featuring pastoral eclogues. Chapters within the
books are filled with characters – low and high in social status – who
mix intimate thoughts with public declarations and actions.
If romance narratives by Sidney and his followers, including
Spenser, promoted a learned and sophisticated aesthetic, they also at-
tracted those who privileged complex narrative structure. Around
1599, a resident at the Inns of Court, William Sco , produced The Model
of Poesy, a wide-ranging manuscript that strove to supplement and su-
persede Sidney’s poetics in the Defence of Poesy and that expressed
deep admiration for Sidney’s practice in writing the Arcadia. For Sco ,
the success of the la er resulted from its frustrating an easily identi-
fied, simple plot in order to achieve the more important effects of
pleasure in the moment of reading and in anticipation of a future res-
olution to many distinct narrative threads. Sco called the interlaced
plots in Arcadia pleasant “diversions” that express “a delightful easy
intricateness and entangling” of “particular narrations, one with an-
other.” Narrative “difficulties and interruptions,” he continued, have
the advantage of engaging the reader’s mind and memory and pro-
moting anticipation of a conclusion that the author will have “held
4
aloof from the longing mind.” Although narrative indirection in Ar-
cadia culminates in marriages that the Faerie Queene never achieves,

4 William Sco , The Model of Poesy, ed. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 37. Sco believes that Arcadia does aim
at a “final issue”: the harmonious marriages of Pyrocles and Musidorus to
Philoclea and Pamela — unions typical of romance and unlike the many de-
ferred marriages in Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

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