Although Sidney's manuscripts of the Old Arcadia were not published until the 20th century, the New Arcadia was published in two different editions during the 16th century, and enjoyed great popularity for more than a hundred years afterwards. Sidney's book inspired a number of partial imitators, such as his niece Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, and continuations, the most famous perhaps being that by Anna Weamys. These works, however, are as close to the "precious" style of 17th-century French romance as to the Greek and chivalric models that shape Sidney's work.
William Shakespeare borrowed from Arcadia for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear;[2] traces of the work's influence may also be found in Hamlet[3] and The Winter's Tale.[4] Other dramatizations also occurred, such as Samuel Daniel's The Queen's Arcadia, John Day's The Isle of Gulls, Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge, the anonymous Mucedorus play from the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and, most overtly, in James Shirley's The Arcadia.
According to John Milton in Eikonoklastes, Charles I quoted lines from the book, an excerpt termed "Pamela's Prayer", from a prayer of the heroine Pamela, as he mounted the scaffold to be executed. Although Milton praised the book as among the best of its kind, he complains of the dead king's choice of a profane text for his final prayer.
The Arcadia contains the earliest known use of the feminine personal name Pamela. Most scholars believe that Sidney simply invented the name. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela. Despite this mark of continued respect, however, the rise of the novel was making works like the Arcadia obsolete. While the original is still widely read, it was already becoming a text of primary interest to historians and literary specialists.
By the beginning of the Romantic era, the grand, artificial, sometimes obstinately unwieldy style of Sidney's Areopagus had made it thoroughly alien to more modern tastes. Edmund Gosse in the EB1911 writes, "This severe censure of Euphuism may serve to remind us that hasty critics have committed an error in supposing the Arcadia of Sidney to be composed in the fashionable jargon. That was certainly not the intention of the author, and in fact the publication of the Arcadia, eleven years after that of Euphues, marks the beginning of the downfall of the popularity of the latter."[5]
In modern times, the Arcadia has been readapted for the stage. In 2013, the Old Arcadia was adapted for the stage by The University of East Anglia's Drama Department, and performed alongside Shakespeare's As You Like It as part of "The Arcadian Project". In 2018, Head Over Heels, a jukebox musical adapted from Arcadia featuring songs by The Go-Go's, opened at the Hudson Theatre.[6][7]
