Philip Sidney

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The English poet, courtier, diplomat, and soldier Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) realized more dramatically than any other figure of the English Renaissance the ideal of the perfect courtier and the universal gentleman.

The son of a noble and well-connected family, Philip Sidney was born at Penshurst, his father's estate in Kent. His formal education began with his entrance into the Shrewsbury School in 1564. In 1568 he moved on to Christ Church, Oxford. Sidney's correspondence and school records indicate that as a youth he already showed clear signs of brilliance but that he was of sober temperament and uncertain health. Leaving Oxford without a degree, as was not uncommon for noblemen, Sidney completed his education with a 3-year tour of the Continent (1572-1575), visiting France, Germany, Austria, Poland, and Italy.

Life at Court

On his return to England, Sidney entered quickly into the life of the aristocracy, dividing his time between the London house of his uncle, the powerful Earl of Leicester, and the country home of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. Late in 1576 he paid a visit to his father, then Lord Deputy of Ireland, and observed political and social conditions in Ireland firsthand. Upon returning to England he addressed to the Queen a Discourse on Irish Affairs, defending his father's administration from the many criticisms leveled against it. In 1577 Sidney was sent on a diplomatic mission to Germany, during which he enthusiastically but unsuccessfully attempted to reconcile the quarreling Protestant factions and to organize a unified resistance against the Catholic nations.

Sidney's interests and relationships, however, were not restricted to the worlds of the court and diplomacy. He enjoyed frequent contacts with a variety of literary men, notably Thomas Drant, Fulke Greville, Edward Dyer, and Edmund Spenser. In his attempt to share in their efforts to create a new English poetry, Sidney wrote a number of experimental poems in nonrhyming quantitative meters. Other works probably written during this period include his Lady of May, an elaborate entertainment performed in honor of Queen Elizabeth I (1578), a large part of his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, and the first draft of his prose romance, the Arcadia. His Apology for Poetry was probably composed shortly after the publication of Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse (1579), an attack on the theater that had been dedicated to Sidney without his knowledge or approval.

Marriage and Death

Meanwhile, Sidney's situation at court was not entirely satisfactory. He had for some years been regarded as a young man of promise and importance; but he was still without any steady and remunerative position. Other disappointments may have added to his discouragement: he had for some time known and admired Penelope Devereux, the daughter of the Earl of Essex, who clearly inspired the "Stella" of his sonnet sequence. But she married Lord Rich in 1581. Two years later Sidney married the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was knighted the same year.

Sidney had been a leader of the strong Puritan faction promoting English involvement in the wars of the Protestant Dutch against their Spanish rulers. In 1585, after Elizabeth I finally acceded to this faction's demands and sent an army to the Netherlands, Sidney was named governor of Flushing, one of the towns that the Dutch had ceded to the Queen in return for her support. For several months he fought and commanded troops at the side of his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, in Flanders. At the battle of Zutphen on Sept. 22, 1586, he was fatally wounded. A biography written by his friend Greville tells how Sidney was vulnerable because he had generously lent a part of his protective armor to a fellow knight.

Major Works

During his lifetime Sidney's works circulated only in manuscript. His Arcadia was the first to be printed, in 1590. Combining elements drawn from the pastoral tradition, the heroic epic, and the romances of chivalry, this long mixture of prose and verse summed up the heroic ideals that inspired Sidney's life. The Arcadia is noted for its complex plot, for its earnest digressions on such topics as justice, atheism, virtue, honor, and friendship, and for its involved and elaborate style. The published version of 1590 was a revision, much amplified and elaborated by comparison with the first draft.

In Astrophel and Stella, first printed in 1591, Sidney expressed varying moods and intensities of passionate love, in imitation of Italian and French sonneteers of the Petrarchan tradition. Sidney's simple yet delicate verse is markedly superior to that of his contemporaries. His Apology for Poetry (first published in 1595) was the first major critical essay in Renaissance England. Drawing on such foreign critics as Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro, Sidney condensed the classical defense of "poetry" (by which he meant all forms of creative writing), and he insisted on the ethical value of art, which aims to lure men to "see the form of goodness, which seen they cannot but love ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine of cherries." This critical essay, perhaps more than any other work, has assured Sidney's position in the history of literature. All three of his major works, however, hold an important place in one of the most brilliant eras of English literary creativity.

Further Reading

Sidney's Complete Works were edited by Albert Feuillerat (4 vols., 1912-1926). An excellent edition of the Poems was prepared by William A. Ringler, Jr. (1962). Full biographies of Sidney include Malcolm W. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (1915); Mona Wilson, Sir Philip Sidney (1931); and Kenneth Muir, Sir Philip Sidney (1960). Other helpful studies include Kenneth Orne Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (1935; 2d ed. 1965); John Buxton, Sir Philip Sidney and the English Renaissance (1954; 2d ed. 1964); and Frederick Samuel Boas, Sidney: His Life and Writings (1955). Recent critical assessments are available in Robert L. Montgomery, Jr., Symmetry and Sense (1961); David Kalstone, Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations (1965); and Neil L. Rudenstine, Sidney's Poetic Development (1967). For general literary background see Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939); S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (1951); Hallett Darius Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (1952); and C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954).

Additional Sources

Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Sir Philip Sidney, courtier poet, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

Greville, Fulke, Baron Brooke, The life of the renowned Sr Philip Sidney (1652), Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1984.

Greville, Fulke, Baron Brooke, Sir Fulke Greville's Life of Sir Philip Sidney, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.

Hamilton, A. C. (Albert Charles), Sir Philip Sidney: a study of his life and works, Cambridge Eng.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Lloyd, Julius, The life of Sir Philip Sidney, Folcroft, Pa. Folcroft Library Editions, 1974.

Sidney in retrospect: selections from English literary renaissance, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Wilson, Mona, Sir Philip Sidney, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1978.

Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86). Soldier and poet. Educated at Shrewsbury and at Christ Church, Oxford, he was devoted to study. In 1583 he married the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, served in Parliament, and continued to win golden opinions. But in 1585 when Leicester, his uncle, was given command of the forces against Spain in the Low Countries, Sidney was made governor of Flushing. He volunteered to join Leicester in the attack upon Zutphen, was wounded in the thigh, and died of gangrene nearly a month later. The story that he gave his own bottle of water on the battlefield to a dying soldier was first reported by his friend Fulke Greville many years later, and is suspiciously like a story of Alexander the Great. Sidney left much unpublished work, but his posthumous reputation depended as much upon character and courage as on his poetry.

Sidney, Philip (1554–1586), English poet, courtier, and statesman. Born at Penshurst (Kent) to Sir Henry Sidney, viceroy of Ireland, and Lady Mary Dudley, sister of Queen Elizabeth's favorite, the earl of Leicester, Sidney was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church, Oxford, and then sent on a three-year tour of the Continent in 1572. In Paris he made the acquaintance of Sir Francis Walsingham, the English ambassador (whose daughter Frances he was to marry in 1583), and of Hubert Languet, an older Huguenot political observer who became his friend and mentor. Narrowly escaping the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 24 August 1572, Sidney spent a year at the University of Padua, and then traveled the Continent from Florence to Cracow.

Back in England (1575), he represented his father at court, and in 1577 was chosen to head a congratulatory embassy to the new Emperor Rudolph II, secretly exploring possibilities for a Protestant coalition against the pope's Holy League. That project came to nothing, but Sidney acquitted himself brilliantly.

The next few years saw him cutting a dash at court and writing a masque, The Lady of May (1578), with Queen Elizabeth in a deciding role (the masque was written in such a form that at the end the queen was given the role of deciding which suitor the Lady of May should accept). When in 1579 Spanish successes revived the project of the queen's French marriage, the court's alarmed Protestants chose Sidney to write an open letter dissuading her from wedding the duke of Alençon. He also quarreled with the dissolute earl of Oxford, one of the marriage's supporters, was rebuked by the queen on grounds of rank (even though Sidney was in the right, in a quarrel with an earl, a mere gentleman should give way), and withdrew for a year to Wilton, the country manor of his sister Mary, the countess of Pembroke. Here he began his three major literary works, the treatise A Defence of Poesy, the prose romance Arcadia, and the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. ("Astrophel" is the spelling long used, but the consensus among most modern scholars is that the double pun of "Astrophil" is too good not to have been intended. He is the "Astro-phile"—the Star-Lover—and his name is "PHIL-ip.")

The graceful Defence (c. 1580, published 1595; also called The Apologie for Poetrie) adapts Continental literary concepts to English conditions. Imitating a legal speech for the defense, it claims for "poesy" (imaginative writing) the highest role in moral education, and passionately defends the poet's faculty of "invention" which makes poesy, alone among human arts and sciences, the equal of creating Nature, under the overall authority of God.

Astrophil and Stella (c. 1581, published 1591), based upon but not tied to Sidney's love for Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich, uses the Defence's principle of energia (liveliness or poesy's power to "move" its readers) dramatically to revive the 250-year-old Petrarchan sonnet sequence. Its rhetoric movingly dissects the way esteem becomes love, love becomes desire, and desire eventually undermines true love. Its vitality created a wave of English sonnet sequences and influenced John Donne (1573–1631) and his followers George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, Thomas Carew, and Andrew Marvell.

The Arcadia, begun in 1580 and written initially for his sister Mary, also adapts Continental models, especially Jacopo Sannazaro's "Arcadia" (1504) and Jorge de Montemayor's "Diana" (c. 1559). Its adventures of two princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in combat and in love (with the princesses Pamela and Philoclea), are interspersed with eclogues in which shepherds' singing matches become virtuoso poetic experiments. This first version, now known as the Old Arcadia, only circulated in manuscript, and was then lost until 1908.

Sidney's later revision, now known as the New Arcadia, remained unfinished at his death. It was subsequently completed with the ending of the old and issued as a composite (1593): this became the Arcadia read until the twentieth century. The New Arcadia consistently moves toward greater narrative complexity and less frivolity: it is a more "serious" work, concerned with principles of both public and private (self-) government.

The early 1580s saw Sidney engrossed in preparations for war with Spain and writing more religious works: he versified the first forty-three Psalms (later magnificently completed by his sister Mary), and began a translation of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas' La semaine (1578; The week) on the Creation (since lost), as well as an English version of his French friend Philippe Duplessis-Mornay's work The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (completed by Arthur Golding).

As Spain advanced in the Netherlands, Elizabeth finally sent troops; in return for English military aid, the queen and her government asked for three forts and fortified towns to be garrisoned by English troops and held as sureties for the repayment. In 1585, Sidney was made governor of Flushing, chief of these three cautionary places. With Prince Maurice of Orange, Sidney stormed the town of Axel, and in the autumn of 1586 helped besiege Zutphen, on the Spanish supply corridor that ran from Franche-Comté through Burgundy to the Netherlands. On 22 September 1586, against heavy odds the English attacked a Spanish column that was coming to relieve Zutphen. Sidney was wounded in the thigh, and three weeks later, at the age of thirty-one, he died of gangrene at Arnhem. He became an instant hero and in February 1587 was buried in St. Paul's Cathedral in London, receiving the grandest funeral of any private Englishman until Winston Churchill's in 1965.

Sidney, the statesman, courtier, and convinced Protestant, is most remembered as a poet. He was a profoundly serious man, yet of great charm; a passionate man, yet deeply religious and filled with the morality of politics; a reflective man, yet a skilled and daring soldier when the occasion came. His friend Duplessis-Mornay's motto Arte et Marte ("by art and Mars") applies equally to Sidney.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: The New Arcadia. Edited by Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford, 1974.

——. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: The Old Arcadia. Edited by Jean Robertson. Oxford, 1973.

——. Miscellaneous Prose. Edited by Jan van Dorsten and Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford, 1973.

——. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. Edited by William A. Ringler, Jr. Oxford, 1962.

Secondary Sources

Hamilton, A. C. Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1977. Classic study of both life and work, and of their interaction.

Kalstone, David. Sidney's Poetry: Contexts and Interpretations. Cambridge, Mass., 1965. Well-balanced analysis of the secular poetry.

Stewart, Alan. Sir Philip Sidney: A Double Life. London, 2000. Excellent study especially of Sidney's political career.

—ROGER KUIN

Quotes:

"It is the nature of the strong heart, that like the palm tree it strives ever upwards when it is most burdened."

"All is but lip-wisdom which wants experience."

"To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue."

"With a tale, for sooth, he comet unto you; with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner."

"Alexander received more bravery of mind by the pattern of Achilles, than by hearing the definition of fortitude."

"The ingredients of health and long life, are great temperance, open air, easy labor, and little care."

See more famous quotes by Sir Philip Sidney

For other persons named Philip Sidney, see Philip Sidney (disambiguation).

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Sir Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (30 November 1554 – 17 October 1586) became one of the Elizabethan Age's most prominent figures. Famous in his day in England as a poet, courtier and soldier, he remains known as the author of Astrophel and Stella (1581, pub. 1591), The Defence of Poetry (or An Apology for Poetry, 1581, pub. 1595), and The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1580, pub. 1590).

Contents 1 Life and family 2 Works 3 Notes 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Life and family

Born at Penshurst Place, Kent, he was the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley. His mother was the daughter of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, and the sister of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. His younger sister, Mary Sidney, married Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke. Mary Sidney, who upon her marriage became the Countess of Pembroke, was a writer, translator and literary patron. Sidney dedicated his longest work, the Arcadia, to her. After her brother's death, Mary Sidney Herbert reworked the Arcadia, now known as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.

Philip was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford. He was much travelled and highly learned. In 1572, he travelled to France as part of the embassy to negotiate a marriage between Elizabeth I and the Duc D'Alençon. He spent the next several years in mainland Europe, moving through Germany, Italy, Poland, and Austria. On these travels, he met a number of prominent European intellectuals and politicians.

Returning to England in 1575, Sidney met Penelope Devereux, the future Lady Rich; though much younger, she would inspire his famous sonnet sequence of the 1580s, Astrophel and Stella. Her father, the Earl of Essex, is said to have planned to marry his daughter to Sidney, but he died in 1576. In England, Sidney occupied himself with politics and art. He defended his father's administration of Ireland in a lengthy document. More seriously, he quarrelled with Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, probably because of Sidney's opposition to the French marriage, which de Vere championed. In the aftermath of this episode, Sidney challenged de Vere to a duel, which Elizabeth forbade. He then wrote a lengthy letter to the Queen detailing the foolishness of the French marriage. Characteristically, Elizabeth bristled at his presumption, and Sidney prudently retired from court.

His artistic contacts were more peaceful and more significant for his lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote the first draft of The Arcadia and A Defense of Poetry. Somewhat earlier, he had met Edmund Spenser, who dedicated the Shepheardes Calendar to him. Other literary contacts included membership, along with his friends and fellow poets Fulke Greville, Edward Dyer, Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, of the (possibly fictitious) 'Areopagus', a humanist endeavour to classicize English verse.

Sidney had returned to court by the middle of 1581. That same year Penelope Devereux was married, apparently against her will, to Lord Rich. Sidney was knighted in 1583. An early arrangement to marry Anne Cecil, daughter of Sir William Cecil and eventual wife of de Vere, had fallen through in 1571. In 1583, he married Frances, teenage daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. The next year, he met Giordano Bruno who subsequently dedicated two books to Sidney.

Both through his family heritage and his personal experience (he was in Walsingham's house in Paris during the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre), Sidney was a keenly militant Protestant. In the 1570s, he had persuaded John Casimir to consider proposals for a united Protestant effort against the Roman Catholic Church and Spain. In the early 1580s, he argued unsuccessfully for an assault on Spain itself. In 1585, his enthusiasm for the Protestant struggle was given a free rein when he was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, he consistently urged boldness on his superior, his uncle the Earl of Leicester. He conducted a successful raid on Spanish forces near Axel in July, 1586.

Later that year, he joined Sir John Norris in the Battle of Zutphen. During the siege, he was shot in the thigh and died twenty-six days later. According to the story, while lying wounded he gave his water-bottle to another wounded soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine".^[1] This became possibly the most famous story about Sir Phillip, intended to illustrate his noble character.^[1]

The funeral of Sir Philip Sidney, 1586

Sidney's body was returned to London and interred in St. Paul's Cathedral on 16 February 1587. Already during his own lifetime, but even more after his death, he had become for many English people the very epitome of a courtier: learned and politic, but at the same time generous, brave, and impulsive. Never more than a marginal figure in the politics of his time, he was memorialized as the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser's Astrophel, one of the greatest English Renaissance elegies.

An early biography of Sidney was written by his friend and schoolfellow, Fulke Greville.

The Rye House conspirator, Algernon Sydney, was Sir Philip's great-nephew.

In Zutphen, the Netherlands, a street has been named after Sir Philip. A statue for him can be found in the park at the Coehoornsingel, where the English soldiers who fell in the Battle of Zutphen were also temporarily buried. A memorial at the location where he was mortally wounded by the Spanish can be found at the entrance of a footpath at the Warnsveldseweg, southeast of the Catholic cemetery.

Works

• The Lady of May — This is one of Sidney's lesser-known works, a masque written and performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579.
• Astrophel and Stella — The first of the famous English sonnet sequences, Astrophel and Stella was probably composed in the early 1580s. The sonnets were well-circulated in manuscript before the first (apparently pirated) edition was printed in 1591; only in 1598 did an authorised edition reach the press. The sequence was a watershed in English Renaissance poetry. In it, Sidney partially nativised the key features of his Italian model, Petrarch: variation of emotion from poem to poem, with the attendant sense of an ongoing, but partly obscure, narrative; the philosophical trappings; the musings on the act of poetic creation itself. His experiments with rhyme scheme were no less notable; they served to free the English sonnet from the strict rhyming requirements of the Italian form.
• The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia — The Arcadia, by far Sidney's most ambitious work, was as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model of Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a highly idealized version of the shepherd's life adjoins (not always naturally) with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. As published in the sixteenth century, the narrative follows the Greek model: stories are nested within each other, and different story-lines are intertwined. The work enjoyed great popularity for more than a century after its publication. William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; parts of it were also dramatized by John Day and James Shirley. According to a widely-told story, King Charles I quoted lines from the book as he mounted the scaffold to be executed; Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's Pamela. Arcadia exists in two significantly different versions. Sidney wrote an early version (The Old Arcadia) during a stay at Mary Herbert's house; this version is narrated in a straightforward, sequential manner. Later, Sidney began to revise the work on a more ambitious plan, with much more backstory about the princes, and a much more complicated story line, with many more characters. He completed most of the first three books, but the project was unfinished at the time of his death--the third book breaks off in the middle of a swordfight. There were several early editions of the book. Fulke Greville published the revised version alone, in 1590. The Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister, published a version in 1593, which pasted the last two books of the first version onto the first three books of the revision. In the 1621 version, Sir William Alexander provided a bridge to bring the two stories back into agreement.<Evans, 12-13> It was known in this cobbled-together fashion until the discovery, in the early twentieth century, of the earlier version.
• An Apology for Poetry^[2] (also known as A Defence of Poesie and The Defence of Poetry) — Sidney wrote the Defence before 1583. It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579, but Sidney primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as those of Plato. In his essay, Sidney integrates a number of classical and Italian precepts on fiction. The essence of his defense is that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either history or philosophy in rousing its readers to virtue. The work also offers important comments on Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Charles Carlton (1992). Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651, Routledge, ISBN 0415103916. p. 216
2. ^ Works by Sir Philip Sidney at Project Gutenberg

References

• Carlton, Charles (1992). Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651, Routledge, ISBN 0415103916.
• Sidney, Philip (1997). The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Penguin), ISBN 014043111X

Further reading

Books

• Alexander, Gavin. Writing After Sidney: the literary response to Sir Philip Sidney 1586-1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Craig, D. H. "A Hybrid Growth: Sidney's Theory of Poetry in An Apology for Poetry." Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. Hamden: Archon Books, 1986.
• Davies, Norman. Europe: A History. London: Pimlico, 1997.
• Duncan-Jones, Katherine. Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991.
• Frye, Northrup. Words With Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature. Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992.
• Garrett, Martin. Ed. Sidney: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Greville, Fulke.Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. London, 1652.
• Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. New York: Atheeum, 1994.
• Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in Contemporary Rhetorical Studies. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2001.
• Kimbrough, Robert. Sir Philip Sidney. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1971.
• Leitch, Vincent B., Ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001.
• Lewis, C. S. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954.
• Robertson, Jean. "Philip Sidney." In The Spenser Encyclopedia. eds. A. C. Hamilton et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "A Defence of Poetry." In Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.
• Sidney, Philip. A Defence of Poesie and Poems. London: Cassell and Company, 1891.
• The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910.

Articles

• Acheson, Kathy. "'Outrage your face': Anti-Theatricality and Gender in Early Modern Closet Drama by Women." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 7.1-16. 21 October 2005.
• Bear, R. S. "Defence of Poesie: Introduction. In Renascence Editions. 21 October 2005.
• Griffiths, Matthew. English Court Poets and Petrarchism: Wyatt, Sidney and Spenser. 25 November 2005.
• Harvey, Elizabeth D. Sidney, Sir Philip. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. 25 November 2005.
• Knauss, Daniel, Philip. Love’s Refinement: Metaphysical Expressions of Desire in Philip Sidney and John Donne., Master's Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the North Carolina State University. 25 November 2005.
• Maley, Willy. Cultural Materialism and New Historicism. 8 November 2005
• Mitsi, Efterpi. The "Popular Philosopher": Plato, Poetry, and Food in Tudor Aesthetics. In Early Modern Literary Studies. 9 November 2004.
• Pask, Kevin. "The "mannes state" of Philip Sidney: Pre-scripting the Life of the Poet in England." 25 November 2005.
• Staff. Sir Philip Sidney 1554-1586, Poets' Graves. Accessed 26 May 2008

Other

• Stump, Donald (ed). "Sir Philip Sidney: World Bibliography, Saint Louis University. Accessed 26 May 2008. "This site is the largest collection of bibliographic references on Sidney in existence. It includes all the items originally published in Sir Philip Sidney: An Annotated Bibliography of Texts and Criticism, 1554-1984 (New York: G.K. Hall, Macmillan 1994) as well updates from 1985 to the present."

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Philip Sidney

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Philip Sidney

• Audio: Robert Pinsky reads "My True Love Hath My Heart and I Have His" by Philip Sidney (via poemsoutloud.net)

Military offices
Preceded by The Earl of Warwick	Master-General of the Ordnance (jointly with The Earl of Warwick) 1585–1586	Succeeded by The Earl of Warwick

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