Philip Sidney's revised, ‘new’ Arcadia opens, like so many fictions, by setting the scene: ‘It was in that time that the earth begins to put on her new aparrel against the approch of her louer, and that the Sun running a most euen course, becums an indifferent arbiter between the night and the day ….’ Which is one way of saying that it was spring. What the reader does not immediately get is an indication of historical time. When, during what period of history, is this fiction set? But the answer comes soon enough, supplied as much through the situations depicted as anything else. We are in ancient Greece, but we are also in nowhen: the dreamy world of classical pastoral, in which shepherds pass their day in endless discussions of love; or, a few pages later, the hectic adventure playground of Hellenistic romance, liberally furnished with sea battles and burning ships and pirates and disguised princelings. It is understood that this world is set in the past, but what it is not is in any way chronologically specific – this or that year BC or AD.

This is the dominant view of the Arcadia: that although Sidney's fiction is historical, this is the case only in the loosest and most generalised way. It is an understanding of the text that is reinforced by Sidney's analysis of the pastoral genre in the Defence of Poesie, where he argues that it is possible ‘under prettie tales of Woolves and sheepe’ to ‘enclude whole considerations of wrong doing and patience’.