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Neda Jeny. Notable Images of Virtues and Vices: Character Types in Sir Philip Sidney's New Arcadia & in Italian Romance Epic. (American University Studies: Comparative Literature, No. ni, Vol. 24.) New York: Peter Lang, 1989. 192 pp., Index. Cloth: ISBN 0-8204-0740-2, $32.90 US.
The title of Neda Jeny's short monograph on Sidney's character types is accurately, if unfortunately, titled - unfortunate because it is moré supple in its discussion than it at first appears and unfortunate, too, because the title does not reveal the work's greatest value - its detailed treatment of Sidney's prose epic in the context of his two Italian predecessors, Tasso and Ariosto. The many detailed comparisons demonstrate Sidney's knowledge of the Gentsalemme Liberata and the Orlando Furioso; especially convincing is the early catalogues of incidents which Sidney borrows from the two epic poems (2-3) and of verbal echoes (3-4). Jeny's observation that all but one of these instances in the New Arcadia, however, are not to be found in the Old Arcadia argues not only that Sidney read Tasso and Ariosto somewhat late in the game but that the pressures from those two poems were instrumental in the reformulation of Sidney's major opus. It is a telling point.
But the consequences are many and varied. Noting at the outset (14) that Sidney's method of characterization is that of interior psychology rather than exterior description and action, Jeny proceeds to divide characters into types for purposes of comparison; princes, princesses, married lovers, warrior women, mighty warriors, wise counsellors, shepherds, and villains. Pyrocles is at first modest, cheerful, and impulsive, but love tempers him and in his maturity he is characterized by moral fortitude; Musidorus is "majestic" (26). While their heroic actions bring them close to their models in Tasso and Ariosto, Sidney's characters are thus more particularly distinguished by their inner strengths.
This interest in psychology is necessary...