Month: November 2017

When first reading the summary surrounding Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, I was genuinely surprised to find that it sounded like a mere Shakespearean comedy. You have disguises, as Pyrocles masks himself as a woman named Zelmane, and you have a wacky twist, in which the mother and father have both fallen in love with him. An example of this could be found in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, a tale of disguise as well as misleading love. The adaption of this that so many of my generation know is the movie, She’s the Man, in which Amanda Bynes plays a girl, Viola, who dresses up like her brother and plays on the male soccer team at his school in order to prove others wrong.

In correlation to the Arcadia, where the father (of Pyocles desired love) falls in love with the fake female identity, in She’s the Man, a girl named Olivia falls in love with Viola’s impersonation as her brother. At the end, Viola has fallen in love with one of the male soccer players, who believes she is truly a man and is confused about his own feelings for her. In in the Arcadia, the daughter, Philoclea, is also confused about her feelings for someone she perceives to be a woman. Why are readers so fascinated by this wacky love turned upside down? While in real life these could be highly unrealistic, these stories have always entertained readers, presumably because you don’t really expect what is going to happen next.

Although on a more serious note, what is interesting about the Arcadia, is that the mother, Gynecia, sees through the disguise. In She’s the Man, rarely anyone knows the truth until the end. What I believe to be significant about this, is that it is possible that Gynecia is truly falling in love, rather than the false love which plagues her husband. Gynecia talks of the “passion of love” to “Zelmane” and accuses him of disguisement (Sidney 1043). In my eyes, I see this as a cry for the truth, in which she just wants to affirm her love to him, as would anyone so distraught with their own feelings. By seeing both the hilarity of the disguise, and the love that plagues mother and father, the reader can infer that while love can be cause for laughter, it can also be cause for deep internal troubles.

The Romance form is characterized by the three phases of integration, disintegration, and reintegration. This form is simple enough so that it can be used and tweaked to fit many different narratives. For example, Sir Philip Sidney uses the form to create humor and entertain the reader. The selection we read was from the disintegration phase and was filled with dramatic irony used for comedic effect. Mary Roth also uses the Romance form but to a different effect. We read a part of the disintegration from The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania which played off of what her uncle’s earlier work The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Since when Roth and Sidney were writing the Romance would have already been an archaic form, it would apparent that Roth’s work was playing off of her uncle’s work.

Even today, the Romance form is used as the basis for many modern narratives. One way is through children’s movies and cartoons, such as Finding Nemo or The Spongebob Squarepants Movie. The Romance form is simple enough that it can be used to tell simple stories that hold moral truths (both movies teach children to believe in themselves and the power of perseverance albeit through different means), but also can tell a complicated or more mature story and hold complex meanings as in the work of Roth and Sidney.