The New International Encyclopædia/Arcadia (pastoral romance)

ARCADIA. The title of various pastoral romances, suggested, doubtless, from the use of the word in Vergil's Eclogues, where it is spoken of as a realm of bucolic content. One of these romances is by Sannazaro, and appeared at the close of the Fifteenth Century; another is by Sir Philip Sidney, and was published in 1590; a third is by Robert Greene, published in 1589; and a fourth by Lope de Vega, in 1598. In 1640 Shirley wrote a dramatization of Sidney's tale.