The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now the sixth time published, with some new additions. Also a supplement of a defect in the third part of this historie, by Sir W. Alexander. London : Printed by W[illiam] S[tansby, Humphrey Lownes, and Robert Young] for Simon Waterson, 1627 [i.e. 1628]. STC 22547. Folio.

Signatures: pi⁴ A-3B⁶, ²2Y-²2Z⁶, 3E-3F⁶.
Pagination: [8], 676 [i.e. 576], 541-564, 601-624.

The title page to the Works of Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) (The Countesse of Pemproke’s Arcadia, a prose romance, is only the first of several works in this edition) shown above is that of the 1627 eighth edition. While Sidney’s Arcadia was first published posthumously in 1590, the survival of several manuscript versions of an earlier version of the Arcadia, often referred to as the Old Arcadia, testifies that the work had circulated earlier. A new 1593 edition printed in London was the first to include the Arcadia with some of Sidney’s most famous works, including his sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella and his Defence of Poesie. All subsequent editions would follow this Collected Works format. For bibliographical details of the early editions of Sidney’s works see Bent Juel-Jensen, “Sir Philip Sidney, 1554-1586: A Check-list of Early Editions of His Works” in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 289-314; for discussion of the circulation of Sidney’s works in manuscript, see H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).