The Reformation of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney's The New Arcadia

By eschewing supernatural motifs in the revised Countess of Pembrokes Arcadia, Philip Sidney endeavors to change how romance solicited readers' memory. Long read by critics for its engagement with classical and Continental literary tradition, the New Arcadia in this reading takes up a central concern in reformed English religious polemic: how to reckon the wonder generated by the marvelous machinery integral to romance plots from a Protestant perspective. Impelled by Protestant denunciations of the genre, Sidney counters polemicists who accuse papist romances of seducing readers away from scripture. By subverting romance's trademark supernaturalism and relegating such marvelous literary devices as magic swords, deus ex machina, and monsters to the realm of superstition and human duplicity, Sidney reclaims romance from the taint of Catholicism in order to reform the genre in its effect on readers' memory, thereby showing "forth the wonderful effects of vertue" for a post-Reformation readership. (T.W.).