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Contents
1 Early life 2 Politics and marriage 3 Literary writings 4 Military activity 5 Injury and death 6 Works 7 In popular culture 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links
Early life[edit]
Born at
Penshurst
Penshurst Place, Kent, he was the eldest son of Sir Henry
Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley. His mother was the eldest daughter of
John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, and the sister of Robert
Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. His younger brother, Robert Sidney was
a statesman and patron of the arts, and was created Earl of Leicester
in 1618. His younger sister, Mary, married Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of
Pembroke and was a writer, translator and literary patron. Sidney
dedicated his longest work, the Arcadia, to her. After her brother's
death, Mary reworked the Arcadia, which became known as The Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia.
Philip was educated at
Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford.
Politics and marriage[edit]
In 1572, at the age of 18, he was elected to Parliament as a Member of
Parliament for Shrewsbury[1] and in the same year 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, the Kingdom of Hungary
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, Walter
Devereux, 1st 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.
During a 1577 diplomatic visit to Prague, Sidney secretly visited the
exiled
Jesuit
Jesuit priest Edmund Campion.[2]
Frances Walsingham
Sidney had returned to court by the middle of 1581 and in 1584 was MP
for Kent. 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, 16-year-old daughter of Sir
Francis Walsingham
Francis Walsingham and
the couple had one daughter, Elizabeth, in 1585, who later married
married Roger Manners, 5th Earl of Rutland, in March 1599 and died
without issue in 1614[3]. In the same year, he made a visit to Oxford
University with Giordano Bruno, who subsequently dedicated two books
to Sidney.
Literary writings[edit]
His artistic contacts were more peaceful and more significant for his
lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote Astrophel and
Stella and the first draft of The Arcadia and The Defence of Poesy.
Somewhat earlier, he had met Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The
Shepheardes Calender to him. Other literary contacts included
membership, along with his friends and fellow poets Fulke Greville,
Edward Dyer,
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser and Gabriel Harvey, of the (possibly
fictitious) 'Areopagus', a humanist endeavour to classicise English
verse.
Military activity[edit]
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
Protestant effort against the Roman Catholic Church and Spain. In the
early 1580s, he argued unsuccessfully for an assault on Spain itself.
Promoted General of Horse in 1583,[1] his enthusiasm for the
Protestant
Protestant struggle was given a free rein when he was appointed
governor of Flushing in the
Netherlands
Netherlands in 1585. 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.
Injury and death[edit]
Memorial for Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at the spot where he was fatally
injured
Later that year, he joined Sir John Norris in the
Battle
Battle of Zutphen,
fighting for the
Protestant
Protestant cause against the Spanish.[4] During the
battle, he was shot in the thigh and died of gangrene 26 days later,
at the age of 31. As he lay dying, Sidney composed a song to be sung
by his deathbed.[5] According to the story, while lying wounded he
gave his water to another wounded soldier, saying, "Thy necessity is
yet greater than mine".[6] This became possibly the most famous story
about Sir Phillip, intended to illustrate his noble and gallant
character.[6] It also inspired evolutionary biologist John Maynard
Smith to formulate a problem in signalling theory which is known as
the Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney game.[7]
The funeral of Sir Philip Sidney, 1586
Sidney's body was returned to London and interred in the Old St.
Paul's Cathedral on 16 February 1587. The grave and monument were
destroyed in the
Great Fire of London
Great Fire of London in 1666. A modern monument in
the crypt lists his among the important graves lost.
Already during his own lifetime, but even more after his death, he had
become for many English people the very epitome of a Castiglione
courtier: learned and politic, but at the same time generous, brave,
and impulsive. The funeral procession was one of the most elaborate
ever staged, so much so that his father-in-law, Francis Walsingham,
almost went bankrupt.[4] As Sidney was a brother of the Worshipful
Company of Grocers, the procession included 120 of his company
brethren.[8]
Never more than a marginal figure in the politics of his time, he was
memorialised as the flower of English manhood in Edmund Spenser's
Astrophel, one of the greatest English
Renaissance
Renaissance elegies.
An early biography of Sidney was written by his friend and
schoolfellow, Fulke Greville. While Sidney was traditionally depicted
as a staunch and unwavering Protestant, recent biographers such as
Katherine Duncan-Jones have suggested that his religious loyalties
were more ambiguous.
Works[edit]
The Fatal Wounding of Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney by Benjamin West
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
Astrophel and Stella – The first of the famous English sonnet
sequences,
Astrophel and Stella
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
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 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 idealised 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 storylines are intertwined. The work
enjoyed great popularity for more than a century after its
publication.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester
subplot of King Lear; parts of it were also dramatised 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 sword
fight. 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[9] (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 defence 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
Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan stage.
The Sidney Psalms
The Sidney Psalms – These English translations of the
Psalms
Psalms were
completed in 1599 by Philip Sidney's sister Mary.
In popular culture[edit]
A memorial, erected in 1986 at the location in
Zutphen
Zutphen where he was
mortally wounded by the Spanish, can be found at the entrance of a
footpath (" 't Gallee") located in front of the petrol station at the
Warnsveldseweg 170.
In Arnhem, in front of the house in the Bakkerstraat 68, an
inscription on the ground reads: "IN THIS HOUSE DIED ON THE 17 OCTOBER
1586 * SIR PHILIP SIDNEY * ENGLISH POET, DIPLOMAT AND SOLDIER, FROM
HIS WOUNDS SUFFERED AT THE BATTLE OF ZUTPHEN. HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR OUR
FREEDOM". The inscription was unveiled on 17 October 2011, exactly 425
years after his death, in the presence of Philip Sidney, Viscount De
L'Isle, a descendant of the brother of Philip Sidney.
The city of Sidney, Ohio, in the United States and a street in
Zutphen, Netherlands, have been named after Sir Philip. A statue of
him can be found in the park at the Coehoornsingel where, in the harsh
winter of 1795, English and Hanoverian soldiers were buried who had
died while retreating from advancing French troops.[10]
Another statue of Sidney, by Arthur George Walker, forms the
centrepiece of Shrewsbury School's war memorial to alumni who died
serving in
World War I
World War I (unveiled 1924).[11]
References[edit]
^ a b "History of Parliament". Retrieved 2011-10-29.
^ Duncan-Jones (1991), pp. 125–127.
^ Hutchinson, Robert (2007) Elizabeth's Spy Master: Francis Walsingham
and the Secret War that Saved England. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson. ISBN 978-0-297-84613-0, pages 266–267
^ a b The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixteenth/Early
Seventeenth Century, Volume B, 2012, pg. 1037
^ The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Sixteenth/Early
Seventeenth Century, Volume B, 2012, pg 1037
^ a b Charles Carlton (1992). Going to the Wars: The Experience of the
British Civil Wars, 1638–1651, Routledge, ISBN 0-415-10391-6.
p. 216
^ Maynard Smith, John; David Harper (2003). Animal Signals. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-852685-7.
^ Timbs, John (1855). Curiosities of London: Exhibiting the Most Rare
and Remarkable Objects of Interest in the Metropolis. D. Bogue.
p. 394.
^ Works by Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at Project Gutenberg
^ Bert Fermin en Michel Groothedde: 'De Lunetten van Van Coehoorn',
Zutphense Archeologische Publicaties 34, 2007, page 7
^ Francis, Peter (2013). Shropshire War Memorials, Sites of
Remembrance. YouCaxton Publications. pp. 74–75.
ISBN 978-1-909644-11-3.
Further reading[edit] Works
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans. Penguin Books,
1997. ISBN 0-14-043111-X
The Sidney Psalms, completed by
Mary Sidney
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of
Pembroke, ed. R.E. Pritchard. Fyfield Books.
ISBN 978-0-85635-983-5
Books
Alexander, Gavin. Writing After Sidney: the literary response to Sir
Philip Sidney
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
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
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.
Kuin, Roger (ed.), "The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney". 2 vols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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.
Woudhuysen, H. R., Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney and the Circulation of
Manuscripts, 1558-1640, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996
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
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
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[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Philip Sidney
Wikisource
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Philip Sidney
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Philip Sidney.
A Restoration in Contemporary English of the Complete 1593 Edition of
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Charles Stanley Ross and Joel B.
Davis[permanent dead link]
Works by
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at Project Gutenberg
The Correspondence of
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney in EMLO
Works by or about
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at Internet Archive
Works by
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at
LibriVox
LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Audio: Robert Pinsky reads "My True Love Hath My Heart and I Have His"
by
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney (via poemsoutloud.net)
"Archival material relating to Philip Sidney". UK National
Archives.
Portraits of Sir
Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney at the National Portrait Gallery,
London
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
Authority control
WorldCat Identities VIAF: 71397821 LCCN: n79018045 ISNI: 0000 0001 2138 6465 GND: 11861391X SELIBR: 208783 SUDOC: 027397904 BNF: cb119246973 (data) BPN: 76360794 BIBSYS: 1055990 ULAN: 500325995 MusicBrainz: 298cb6d3-5624-41d8-8b3d-5fa86e62d4f0 NLA: 35498378 NDL: 00456526 NKC: jn19990007926 BNE: XX831