Parentheses and Privacy in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia

The following excerpt from the first edition of Philip Sidney’s Arcadia typifies the book’s pages.¹ The numbers heading each paragraph—here a numeral 8—correspond to chapter summaries conveniently provided every few pages. Here, as elsewhere, the tale itself is thrilling: this section comes from the episode in which Prince Musidorus gives his life as ransom to free his friend, Prince Pyrocles, and the latter returns the favor by springing Musidorus from the executioner’s scaffold. And even a cursory glance over the page reveals the number of parenthesis marks, unusually frequent by comparison to other contemporary texts (see Figure 1). These curved marks appear on every page. Known since Erasmus as lunulae (Latin for “little moons”), they distinguish text without wholly separating it. Modern readers may skip over them as unnecessary, while even readers familiar with sixteenth-century prose—including those who read the Arcadia in recent editions that edit out many lunulae—may find them distracting, a bothersome remnant of an earlier age.

But if the parenthesis marks and the text they contain were removed, the passage would appear and read very differently. The voice that speaks at two distinguishable levels, one more private than the other, would then speak at a single level to an undifferentiated public. We would no longer hear the rhetorical question affirming Pyrocles’s wit and courage (“what would they not bring to passe?”), just as we would no longer understand precisely why he must act alone (“he could get . . . no forces”). We would also lose the privileged insight into his state of mind, his “little hop[e]” for something better than death. The contrast between the prince’s great “expectation” and “bloud” and his low position as assistant executioner would get lost, as would the nobleman’s ignorant sorrow, which the parenthesis passes directly to us, the readers. Altogether, we would lose the structure of intimate exchange between ourselves and the narrative voice, a structure for which the parentheses create a textual space and that they effectively constitute.

Figure 1.

“The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” by Philip Sidney, fol. 136v. Huntington Library.

That structure, along with the marks that create it, belongs inextricably to Sidney’s book, and in fact defines it. This essay argues that the parentheses are essential not just to the passage above but to the whole rhetorical framework of the Arcadia. While some editors and scholars have noticed the parentheses but ignored their possible meanings, others have analyzed the Arcadia in terms of privacy, intimacy, and subjectivity without discerning the textual and rhetorical markers that bear on those very issues. By attending to the way parentheses literally define two distinct modes of discourse in the Arcadia, we can see how they establish for the reader a private but still visible space outside (and at the same time, inside) the normative and public narrative text and how they thus articulate a distinct way of thinking about one’s relationship to the larger world. Although the usual “private vs. public” division might lead us to consider anything denoted “private” as equivalent to “interiority” and as antithetical to the “public” sphere, the parenthetical habit of thought developed in the text places the two domains not in opposition, but side-by-side in apposition. To make this argument, I first present bibliographical evidence that the parenthesis marks derive from Sidney himself and not from the editors who, in the early 1590s, manipulated his posthumous legacy for their own political and philosophical ends. I show too how Sidney’s use of parentheses diverges greatly and idiosyncratically from the convention of his day. Then I catalog how the various kinds of parentheses in the Arcadia move from public to more direct, intimate speech, and how the area between the brackets gets distinguished as the reader’s private space. Finally, I turn to several of the book’s best-known and most-discussed moments to show how that space supplies the reader with protection from the “public” mode, interpretive control over that same public mode, and...