The Ridiculous to the Delightful

Sir Philip Sidney’s comic technique, in particular the comic characters in the second version of his pastoral romance, is the subject of this ably written essay. Robert Nicholas Reeves begins with a re-examination of comic theory in Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, and proceeds to a reading of the humorous in the Arcadia as a happy kind of moral teaching. He discusses devices employed—irony, ridicule, deflation—and the relation of the low comic figures to the delightful elements of the main plot.