In book two of the New Arcadia, the ignorant peasant girl Mopsa tells a story to the royal ladies Philoclea, Pamela and Zelmane:

The tactful and generous Philoclea, wanting to show some appreciation for Mopsa's effort without actually bestowing undeserved praise, interrupts: ‘Now good Mopsa […] I pray thee at my request keep this tale till my marriageday, and I promise thee that the best gown I wear that day shall be thine.’ Such kindly patronage has generally been the lot meted out to the chapbook retellings of stories from the Arcadia by critics, not entirely dismissive of these Arcadian afterlives, yet conscious that they do not capture the multifaceted brilliance of the original. Dennis Kay, for instance, describes them as ‘cheap and crude retellings’ which, however, ‘forcefully demonstrate the degree to which Sidney's stories were still read into the eighteenth century’.

But these texts reveal more about how Sidney was read in the long eighteenth century than the bare fact of his being read at all. As John Simons writes in his edition of Guy of Warwick and other Chapbook Romances, ‘it is true that chapbooks do not speak to a world thronged by readers who were conversant with high literary culture’, but far from appealing only to the ‘reader of low sophistication and intellect’, these texts could ‘stimulate an internal commentary and debate on the values [they] enshrined’ and their producers and readers served as ‘culture brokers’ to their society.