| This study analyzes love in Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, with attention to the similarities and differences among the three versions of the work, in the contexts of Sidney's time and ours. In the first chapter, "Introduction," I survey the critical heritage of the Arcadia and problems encountered in previous criticism of Arcadian love, in this way justifying my area of study and my approach to the subject. In the second chapter, "The Polemic," I survey diverse discourses on love available to Sidney, including charges against love based on religious, philosophical, medical, and political grounds, and defense of love by appeal to its possible sublimation and its relations to marriage and heroism. I argue that Sidney's conception and treatment of love do not conform to established traditions. Instead, he exposes their contingency and invalidates their authority in the matter of love. In the third chapter, "Signifying Love," I invoke contemporary theory to analyze Arcadian loves, with special attention to psychoanalysis and feminism. In the Arcadia, a demand for love often simultaneously denotes multiple desires, including desires that cannot be named, conceived, or brought to the conscious level. Love questions the defining, clarifying, communicative, and persuasive functions of language. Love is a signifier, always referring to something more than its apparent, understood, or declared meaning, and the network of reference employs various figures, myths, types, diagrams, and symbols. I discuss Arcadian loves under four basic motifs: erotic rivalry, the looking glass, transmutation of desire, and textualization of love. Egoistic, incestuous, Narcissistic, homosocial/homosexual, political, and poetic desires are all confounded with erotic love. The elusive characteristic of love makes perfect reciprocity virtually impossible and even undesirable. To conclude, Sidney writes a variety of discourses on love into the Arcadia; he borrows, twists, and challenges them. Instead of proposing a systematic doctrine of love, he presents love by way of mimesis---"representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth," as he defines it in the Defence of Poetry---with an open ending. |
