Although not, perhaps, obvious from the title, Sidney's “Arcadia” and the Conflicts of Virtue is essentially a study of stoicism. Throughout its densely argued pages, Richard Wood greatly expands the concept of stoicism as it is presented in Sidney's New Arcadia. In their conflation of classical and Christian ethics, Renaissance thinkers went well beyond what Wood styles “passive” stoicism: a fatalistic model in which the individual is cast as victim of events and duly responds with endurance and fortitude. Against this model, Wood ranges the “anti-stoical ethos” of Hubert Languet (77) and “Neostoicism” of Justus Lipsius (87) to develop a model of stoicism that is, by contrast, active, pragmatic, and ultimately gendered female.

This thoroughgoing complication of stoicism is called for because of the potentially distorting effect the first publication of the Arcadia—produced by Fulke Greville in 1590—had on the reception of the romance. As Wood explores, Renaissance political theorists initially followed Leonardo Bruni's reading of Tacitus, which suggested a nation could achieve greatness only if its people were able to participate in the business of government. In the 1580s, when the Arcadia was written, courtiers like Sidney and the faction to which he belonged (“forward” Protestants arguing for military intervention in the Netherlands) still held out some hope for their participation in foreign policy and state affairs. But after his death in such an enterprise in 1586 and Elizabeth's failure to pursue the policy, disappointment and disillusion set in. The “broader, optimistic Neostoicism” (141) that had once been found in Tacitus morphed into a darker, more pessimistic version: the gloomy Taciteanism that came to be associated with the Essex circle (which included Greville) in the increasingly factionalized 1590s.

The editions of the Arcadia that Sidney's sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, produced in 1593 and 1598 went a long way toward mitigating this development, re-pastoralizing the romance and, in Wood's view, taking it back to the more positive model of stoicism under which it had been composed. What is original about this study is the way Wood maps these “passive” and “active” models of stoicism onto confessional allegiances, the former (austere, absolutist, purist) approximating to Calvinism and the latter (irenic, equitable, even ecumenical) to the theology of Philip Melanchthon. Against the hardcore predestinarianism of the Calvinists, Melanchthon and his followers (Languet first among them) allowed for a degree of human agency—arguing that the human will was capable of cooperating with the Divine in achieving salvation—making for a much more optimistic model of human action in the world. Wood takes his cue here from Robert Stillman, whose promotion of a new, revisionist, “Philippist” Sidney has been a crucial intervention in Sidney studies. Wood goes beyond Stillman, moreover, by extending the latter's argument about Sidney's Defence to the Arcadia, and thus from poetic theory to poetic practice.

Although Wood discusses many aspects of the romance, his star witness for the exercise of “active” stoicism is Amphialus: the troubled prince, entirely new to the revised Arcadia, who plausibly doubles as a Sidney-figure. Apparently irredeemable—bound up as he is with the abduction, imprisonment, and torture of the Arcadian princesses by his evil mother, Cecropia—Amphialus is not, for all that, beyond redemption. He is presented, rather, as the victim of bad luck, his moral failings an injury that, however severe, is capable of being healed, so that he appears a negative example, yes, but one to be judged with clemency and consideration: the very qualities “active” stoicism promotes. As a figure thwarted by fate, Amphialus has all the qualities of a tragic hero, yet, Wood insists, because he is in a romance not a tragedy, he is subject to the “happy ending” of the genre and thus “his end need not, indeed, by definition, must not be tragic” (115, Wood's emphasis). No matter how sinful, the genre he is in allows for his miraculous recovery: the very reason Melanchthon himself endorsed the reading of romance.

Here, however, the argument gets into difficulty. Considering the trial scene at the end of the Old Arcadia, Wood contrasts Euarchus (the classic Stoic sage who puts the rigor of the law above family ties when he condemns his son and nephew to death) with Basilius (the merciful king who exercises equity, exonerates the erring princes, and returns them to their roles as romance heroes). Following a key article by Debora Shuger—who detects, behind this scene, Livy's account of the rape of Lucrece as the pivot between the Tarquinian dynasty and the Roman Republic—Wood maps “passive” stoicism (Euarchus) onto republicanism, and “active” stoicism (Basilius) onto monarchy. While reasonable in the context of Sidney's support for “limited monarchy,” this nonetheless runs the risk that, when extrapolated from the Old Arcadia to the New, from the princes to Amphialus, the sexual transgressions of aristocratic males effectively end up being waived, given a carte blanche, thereby “sanctioning the wayward behaviour of Sidney's aristocratic characters” while permitting him to follow the “moral end of his fiction” (135). Bizarrely, what amounts to a rapist's charter becomes a way of exercising “Protestant piety” (135) by means of an “optimistic poetic sensibility” (136) in which such transgressions are destined to be forgiven and salvation assured. Such a reading comes close to the model of prodigal fiction Wood rejects, and puts a slightly sinister spin on the suggestion that the end of someone like Amphialus “need not,” “must not be tragic.”

Wood's curious resistance to the tragic aspects of the New Arcadia has echoes of what Leo Bersani calls the “culture of redemption” that refuses to honor the catastrophes of history by assuming they can be repaired by art. But this resistance—a sense that the argument may be picking up on the tensions, fears, and guilt that remain unresolved within the text—registers in the later chapters of the book: where the case for Philoclea's passive yet active virtue, for example, seems over-argued; and the case for Pamela's stoicism being a feint, mere play-acting and “not necessarily a sincerely held philosophical creed” (175), to smack almost of desperation. Wood claims that “Sidney's romance is not a work conceived merely as a means of propagating Melanchthonian theology” (86), and argues from the outset that it paints a broad canvas accommodating diverse and contradictory aspects of morality. Much of this serious book respects literature's capacious ability to do exactly that, and struggles only when what might be called an “agenda reading” is given the upper hand.