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Earls of Paradise

Too much in Arcadia

Adam Nicolson
Harper Press, 298pp, £25,

Blair Worden

Wednesday, 16th January 2008

Blair Worden on Adam Nicolson's new book

His definitions of Arcadianism are so loose and so various that he can find it anywhere. What he calls ‘ambiguities’ in the term produce confusion or contradiction. ‘Arcadian balm’ offered escape from politics, but Arcadianism was also ‘the dream of power’. Protestantism is claimed to have gone ‘hand in hand’ with Arcadianism, but also to have repudiated it. Arcadianism was the enemy of absolute monarchy and courtly corruption, so that in the civil war the parliament fought for Arcadianism, the king against it. But there was also a ‘crown-dominated’ Arcadianism, and Charles I, who loved Wilton, adopted a prayer from Sidney’s story before his execution.

Inevitably Hamlet was ‘an Arcadian’, longing as he did for release from strife, and the soliloquy being ‘an Arcadian form’. Shakespeare’s sonnets are set in ‘a polite Arcadia’. The story, which comes from the Victorian author of the Eton Boating Song, that Shakespeare was once at Wilton for a performance of As You Like It draws Nicolson into the long queue of excited hunters of topicality in Shakespeare, and into the postures of strained ingenuity familiar from that pursuit. He ‘explains the play’ by presenting the Wilton performance, with the third earl himself perhaps playing Orlando in a text rewritten for the occasion, as a coded and successful bid to dissuade James I from having Sir Walter Raleigh executed in 1603. Like most biographical hypotheses about Shakespeare, of whose life we know so little, Nicolson’s has the solitary advantage that it can’t be disproved.

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