-
Providence and Perspective in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia
- SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 1, Winter 2014
- pp. 25-40
- 10.1353/sel.2014.0010
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The troubling inscrutability of providence, with its apparent lapses and contradictions, was a Renaissance commonplace. But for Philip Sidney, this very inscrutability offered a narrative opportunity. In his Old Arcadia, Sidney uses the gap between the future-oriented perspective of his characters and past-tense narration to show how moral agency interacts with an overarching providence. The paradoxes of human action in a divinely plotted world are embedded—and, ultimately, resolved—within the grammar of the text.