Introduction

Alex Davis

IN THE THIRD Book of Sir Philip Sidney's revised ‘New’ Arcadia, the wicked Cecropia spies in at the door of the chamber in which she has imprisoned her niece Pamela, who is praying. ‘O all-seeing Light, and eternall Life of al things,’ Pamela opens, ‘to whom nothing is either so great, that it may resist; or so small, that it is contemned: look vpon my miserie with thine eye of mercie’. The prayer is quoted at length, followed by a description:

this prayer, sent to heauen, from so heauenly a creature, with such a feruent grace, as if Deuotion had borowed her bodie, to make of it selfe a most beautifull representation; with her eyes lifted to the skie-ward that one would haue thought they had begunne to flie thetherwarde, to take their place among the fellow starres; her naked hands raising vp their whole length, and as it were kissing one another, as if the right had been the picture of Zeale, and the left, of Humblenesse, which both vnited themselues to make their suites more acceptable. Lastly, all her senses being rather tokens then instruments of her inwarde motions, altogether had so straunge a working power, that euen the harde-harted wickednesse of Cecropia, if it founde not a loue of that goodnes, yet it felt an abashment at that goodness …

This emblem in prose stands as one of those moments in the Arcadia in which Sidney's conviction – that poetry might, by taking the form of a ‘speaking picture’, act as an effective agent for moral instruction – becomes self-reflexively embedded within his narrative.

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