Reading Sidney

Abstract This chapter explores Sidney’s reception from three angles. First, it traces the circulation of his writings, from coterie to manuscript network to print, arguing that their prestige was shaped by a persistent tension between popularity and exclusivity. Second, it examines the ideologies of class and gender that shaped Sidney’s reception, as his works became available to non-elite readers, and as the Arcadia entered the crowded market of romance, a genre associated with women readers. Third, it considers the range of reading practices that Sidney’s writings inspired, from recreative immersion to pragmatic fragmentation to imitative expansion. Early modern readers mined his texts for commonplaces; they detected subtextual allegories; they wrote continuations of the Arcadia themselves. Sidney’s reception indexes the major fault lines of early modern reading: the intersection of manuscript and print cultures, the overlap of elite and non-elite reading, and the proliferation of different modes of interpretation and book use.