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Article: Reason, faith, and shipwreck in Sidney's New Arcadia.
- Article from:
- Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900
- Article date:
- January 1, 2004
- Author:
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Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed
them into a gale!
--Moby-Dick
The New Arcadia begins with shipwreck. Sir Philip Sidney's narrator, in one of the Renaissance's most famous literary descriptions, portrays "a sight full of piteous strangeness: a ship, or rather the carcase of the ship, or rather some few bones of the carcase hulling there, part broken, part burned, part drowned--death having used more than one dart to that destruction." (1) Amid the wreckage float mutilated corpses and a "great store of very rich things" (p. 66). This scene, when juxtaposed with the text's other shipwrecks, reveals a fictional ...