This thesis starts from the point of departure that Sidney's claim in his Defence of Poetry that the purpose of literature is to delight and instruct a given audience is both an accurate and important guiding principle behind the creation of his two Arcadias. By their author's criteria, Sidney's works seek not only to provide diverting images of a fictive world, but to insure that these images serve some specific moral, didactic purpose. The manner in which Sidney goes about achieving this end is, however, less simplistic than the ordinary understanding of didactic literature connotes. The most historically determined aspect of the Arcadia 's didacticism is its extensive and strategic deployment of rhetorical figuration. Rhetoric in Sidney's Renaissance England represented both a vital tool in the smooth running of political life and a signpost of literary genius. The Arcadia thus manipulates specific rhetorical figures and tropes both to demonstrate the great literary skill of its author as well as to depict an ethical and political ideal. Part One of the thesis first investigates the history of rhetorical theory and its impact on the reputation of Sidney's work. It then goes on to explore particular rhetorical devices employed most frequently and significantly in the Old and New Arcadias, drawing comparisons between the versions as to underscore the differences in stylistic procedure and dramatic content of each work. Other aspects of Sidney's rhetoricism, such as his treatment of paradox and his rhetorical character portrayal, are also studied in an effort to gauge the major differences between the Old and New Arcadias. The overall conclusions drawn indicate that Sidney adapts his rhetorical strategy to accommodate a more complex and mature vision of ethical behaviour in his revised work. The other key aspect of Sidney's didacticism is his self-conscious and contentious depiction of gender roles. That is, Sidney plays off varying aspects of traditionally gender-associated behaviour to portray his own vision of an heroic ethical ideal. For example, the Amazon and the transvestite become vehicles through which to explore aspects of femininity that are for Sidney wholly in concord with manifestations of heroism. Moreover, Sidney subverts traditional gendered conceptions of particular vices and virtues to illustrate a liberal attitude toward the potentialities of women and men. Part Two, then, is dedicated to drawing out Sidney's understanding of gender roles as they reflect and demonstrate his unique vision of an heroic ideal. The observations made about the rhetorical and gendered dimensions of Sidney's didacticism are brought together in the conclusion, where Sidney's rhetoric is situated within the context of gender. In other words, the gendered conception of Sidney's particular brand of rhetoric is brought to the fore and poised within the ethical framework it embodies.

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.