By Anna Weamys
Introduction and Editing by Dakota James McIntyre
Dakota James McIntyre is an English MA student at the University of Central Arkansas
I have chosen to create a five-page edition of A Continuation of Sir Philip Sydney’s Arcadia by Anna Weamys. I chose to use the first pages of the work, as I felt that these would work best as an introduction, as opposed to excerpting some other passage from later on in the text. I will state at the outset that I have not read in full the original work that this is a sequel to; I have looked through it and tried my best to pull elements from it as needed for the annotations (it is a monstrously long text in itself). As a result there may be elements that I have overlooked in my annotations as a result.
Overall, there was not that much that needed to be done to modernize the language. The English used is fairly modern, but there were several archaic spellings that needed to be updated (many words that ended in “-ie” instead of “-y”). One of the trickiest parts was the lack of apostrophes used to indicate a possessive. The name or word would just end with an “s” and no other indication that it was in the possessive form. This was especially tricky for plurals and names already ending in “s” that were in the possessive form. I did my best to add in apostrophes where I thought they were needed. I have kept the italicization for each proper noun, and I have kept the somewhat random instances of capitalization. Aside from the few instances where I have altered the spellings, I think the work is fairly straightforward and does not need much in the way of rephrasing or extra explanation.
Based on our previous experience with Urania by Mary Wroth, I believe that this work displays the characteristics of romances of the period, with characters being introduced with little introduction or explanation. However, I cannot be certain that this is not a result of my having not read all of Sydney’s original text. That being said, I used my annotations to explain references to places that no longer exist, to mythological characters that may be unfamiliar, and to certain elements from Sydney’s original text that Weamys does not provide much explanation for.