477E Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-1586) Owner  Eliza: Sippi …heetory… 1658.

The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the sixt time published, with some new additions. Also a  supplement of a defect in the third part of this history, by Sir W.Alexander Knight. Whereunto is now added a sixth booke..

London : Printed by W[illiam] S[tansby, Humphrey Lownes, and Robert Young] for Simon Waterson, 1627 [i.e. 1628]                                                    $3,200

Folio 29 x 19.5 cm. Signatures: π3 A-Z6, Aa-Zz6, Aaa-Fff6. [“A sixth booke, to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia” by Richard Bellings, originally published separately in 1624, has separate title page with imprint “London, printed by H.L. and R.Y. 1628”; pagination and register are continuous.] This copy is bound in full modern English calfskin in a contemporary style, It has spine label. Contemporary female ownership inscription, dated 1658, partially cropped by later trimming. The first page also bears a contemporary manuscript couplet and numerous pen trials, almost certainly by the same hand, providing appealing evidence of seventeenth-century use and readership.  Eliza: Sippi …heetory… 1658. (While many institutional collections already possess one of the pre-1600 editions of the Arcadia, later editions such as the present are often absent. Yet these expanded seventeenth-century printings preserve the supplements, continuations, and editorial interventions through which most later readers encountered Sidney. The present edition is particularly notable for incorporating Richard Bellings’s Sixth Booke, first published separately in Dublin in 1624)

This edition contains  The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia — Certaine sonnets — The defence of poesie — Astrophel and Stella — Her most excellent maiestie walking in Wansted Garden.

“Sir Philip Sidney was a cultured, courteous, and courageous man – everything a man should be when the term ‘aristocrat’ is applied to him. His work was not published in his lifetime though the manuscripts were circulated, in the fashion of the day, and widely read. Sidney’s appearance in English poetry is sudden, brilliant, and brief.” (page 808 The Cambridge Guide to English Literature.) William Ringler describes Arcadia as “the most important original work of English prose fiction produced before the 18th century.” 

“The romance’s complicated plot is full of oracles, disguisings, mistaken identity, melodramatic incidents and tangled love situations. Some episodes are of political interest, and Sidney clearly put more of his serious thought on statecraft into it than he pretends when he describes the book as mere entertainment. The Arcadia also contains many poems – ecologues and songs which are interspersed throughout the narrative; they represent Sidney’s experimental and exploratory ventures into verse.”

Among the influences behind Sidney’s Defence of Poesy was Stephen Gosson’s attack on poetry and the stage from a rigorously Puritan perspective. Although Sidney never answered Gosson directly, he responded in what became the most important work of literary criticism in Elizabethan England. Published posthumously as The Defence of Poesy (or An Apology for Poetry), the essay argues that poetry is neither frivolous nor morally suspect, but one of humanity’s highest arts. Sidney recalls the esteem accorded poets in classical antiquity, where they were regarded as prophets and makers, yet his central argument rests not on ancient authority but on poetry’s unique creative power. Unlike other arts, which work from the materials of nature, poetry can fashion “another nature,” presenting models of virtue, wisdom, and beauty beyond ordinary experience. In Sidney’s view, the poet is not merely an observer of the world but a creator capable of imagining—and inspiring—a better one.

” ‘The Defense of Poesy’ and ‘An Apology for Poetry’. In this long essay Sidney systematically defends poetry (indeed all imaginative literature) against its attackers. He points out the antiquity of poetry, and its prestige in the ancient world. He establishes its universality. He cites the names given to poets by the Romans (vates or prophet) and the Greeks (poets or maker) to indicate their ancient dignity. But, he says, the real defense of the poet depends not upon what he has been but upon what he does. All arts depend upon works of nature, but the poet, supreme among artists, can make another nature, new and more beautiful.”

“Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella (Starlover and Star) is the first of the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles. These collections, imitative of Petrarch or of his French imitators, were based upon a well-understood convention. The poet undertook to display all the contrary feelings of a lover – hope and despair, tenderness and bitterness, exultation and modesty, by the use of ‘conceits’ or ingenious comparisons. Many of these became traditional, and eventually, stale: the poet who complained that in love he both burned and froze, or that his sighs were the winds driving his ship on a tossing sea, was echoing many an earlier poet. So Sidney protests, in the role of Astrophel, that he uses no standard conventional phrases; his verse is original and comes from the heart. (This pretense is also conventional.) But what gives Sidney’s sonnets their extraordinary vigor and freshness is Sidney’s ability to dramatize. He uses dialogue, is often colloquial, and he heightens the situation as much as he can within the fourteen lines.” (quoted from the Norton Anthology, 479-480)

https://datb.cerl.org/estc/S117301. STC 22547; Sir Philip Sidney (ed. Dennis Kay, 1987), p.299;  Lawn, Brian. Catalogus Bibliotheca Lawnianae,; p. 152; ESTC,; S117301;Juel-Jensen, Bent. Books by Sir Philip Sidney,; p. 12; Stump, Donald V. Sir Philip Sidney: An annotated bibliography,; no. 6; W.W. Greg. A bibl. of the Engl. printed drama, v. 3, p. 1128.

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