main characters, Musidorus and Pyrocles. In a manner more familiar to modern readers, the heroes of the new Arcadia are introduced to us gradually, through their actions, their interactions with others, and cumulative descriptions of thought and emotion.

The bulk of the new material distinguishing the new Arcadia from the old consists of episodes dealing with persons other than the original characters: the four lovers, and Philoclea's and Pamela's mother and father, Basilius and Gynecia. The collective meaning of these new episodes, taken in relation to the whole work, I discuss in the concluding half of this study, since they contribute to transforming the new Arcadia into a work wholly different from Sidney's earlier production. In this first part I examine how Sidney employs his differential schema to delineate the moral and ethical dimensions of these new characters.

Drawing on the central exclusion/implication differential illustrated in the passages of scenic description, Sidney employs a limited paradigm of logical relations among the ethical qualities of the characters he delineates. Constant, however, is his articulation of characters' traits as the dialectical interplay of various differentially related virtues and vices. In a fashion that appears at least partially indebted to Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Sidney conceives virtues and vices as always related in various forms of mutually implicative and exclusive oppositions. Particularly relevant is Aristotle's notion that virtue and vice are not merely discrete ethical categories in polar opposition, but rather dispositions and practices aligned on a continuous spectrum of potentials. ¹⁵ It is this last feature that Sidney exploits: the notion that specific virtues and vices are related as potentials of each other. That is, a virtue is a potential for either vicious extreme of deficiency or excess. In this connection, Sidney's character portraits assume that a given virtue or vice exists and is articulatable only in relation to the other virtues and vices to which it is related as its potentials.

Sidney differs from Aristotle, however, in the specific dialectical forms in which he arranges these ethical relationships. Whereas Aristotle posits an excess/deficiency differential underlying the extremes of vice with virtue in the intermediate position, Sidney assumes a logical structure wherein mutual implication and mutual exclusion

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