I've been looking forward to reading this work for years after dropping it once due to the complexity of the prose that made it too challenging for good old me. Ironically I am dropping it once again because I found the text subpar in terms of content and style, and after reading a variety of works written by pastoral authors I can assert that this novel is nothing more than a product of the Elizabethan society under the guise of a bucolic romance, a wannabe Sannazaro's Arcadia loaded with petty moralism and anecdotes about virtue and sin all too divorced from the real intent of the pastoral genre. Despite the impressive length of his work, Sidney drops the facade quite early in the novel and has no qualms about slapping 17th century quirks and literary tropes in his romance, which leaves us with a disappointing pseudo-historical Renaissance soap opera where respecting the importance of historical accuracy doesn't even cross the mind of the author. If this novel was written solely for entertainment purposes, it failed to deliver even that. ( )

Reprint with portions of the introduction removed ( )

Reprint with portions of the introduction removed ( )

800-odd pages of dense Elizabethan prose and poetry telling the story of two princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, who are travelling under the aliases Palladius and Daiphantus and fall in love with two sister princesses, Pamela (apparently Sir Philip Sidney made the name up) and Philoclea. Eventually of course after many vicissitudes true love finds a way.

I did find this very heavy going, reading very slowly, due to the very ornate language. Unfortunately the slow pace meant I'd often forgotten earlier episodes by the time they were referred to again. ( )

This is my personal candidate as the first Fantasy book written in English. I don't call it a medieval romance, because it's set in a deliberately invented background, the poetic kingdom of Arcadia. And, as it was cleared for publication by the Lord chancellor in 1593, it's not medieval in date, and the combats in it are sword and shield, not rapier and dagger. Is it in Elizabethan prose? Yesiree, Bob! But the spelling is regularized, so it's more readable than Spencer's Fairie Queene.
Eventually i finished it and it does have some entertaining content, but it was so successful in seizing the popular taste of the time, that now it's full of cliches, both plotwise and in figures of speech. I think it is still worth a look at by moderns, and it is due to be ripped off again by some Science fiction guy looking to revamp a classic with a "modern Re-Telling'. ( )