"And therefore, being so masked . . . ": Whispering Rooms in The New Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella

Abstract

This paper looks at literary constructions of gender, rhetoric, and male subjectivity in Philip Sidney's The New Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella, arguing that the writer dons a series of literary poses or masks to retain mastery in both works. The New Arcadia, however, deconstructs and exposes such poses, thereby calling into question the poet's authority. In the end, both The New Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella can be seen as being representative of the Early Modern literary tradition which often questioned rather than merely helped to prop up the dominant Tudor ideology. Philip Sidney's New Arcadia, a work in the pastoral genre, often comments on its own construction as a literary work. One part in the work showing this is Book 2, Chapter 2, the scene where Musidorus, disguised as the shepherd Dorus, recounts to Pyrocles, dressed as the Amazon Zelmane, his attempts to woo his beloved, Princess Pamela. In shepherd garb, he can't speak to Pamela freely, so talks to her through Mopsa, a shepherdess. Musidorus' means of story-telling echoes Sidney's own in Astrophil and Stella, where Sidney took on the role of Astrophil to woo Stella. As the sonnet sequence was written for the "dear ladies" who were Sidney's sister and the other women at her home in Wilton, Musidorus' account of wooing to his audience of Zelmane, who the narrator always refers to as "she" despite being a cross-dressed prince, compels one to wonder about how The New Arcadia echoes tropes and schemes found in the sonnet sequence. The New Arcadia more than echoes the sonnets, however, since the object of Musidorus' affection, Pamela, unlike Stella, does have a voice and calls the rhetorical poses of her suitor into question.