Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney died on the 17th of October 1586, at the age of 31, from a wound to the thigh he had received at the Battle of Zutphen. He left behind an unfinished romance whose third book breaks off in the middle of a sword fight. He left behind a sonnet sequence that had never been formally published. And he left behind a story that would make him, for generations of English readers, the very image of what a gentleman ought to be. Who was this young man who managed to become a poet, a diplomat, a soldier, a courtier, and a legend all before his fourth decade? And how did a life so short produce works that Shakespeare borrowed from, that shaped the English sonnet, and that a king is said to have quoted on the scaffold?
Penshurst Place in Kent was where Sidney first drew breath on the 30th of November 1554, and the house itself spoke to the weight of the family he was born into. His father, Sir Henry Sidney, served as Lord Deputy of Ireland. His mother, Lady Mary Dudley, was the eldest daughter of John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland, and the sister of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester. Sidney's family tree was a map of Elizabethan power.
His sister Mary was no passive ornament to that inheritance. She became a writer, translator, and literary patron, and after marrying Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, she would shape one of the most important literary legacies of the age. Sidney dedicated his longest work, the Arcadia, to her. After his death, she revised and completed it, giving the world the version now known as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia.
His brother Robert Sidney also rose to prominence as a statesman and patron of the arts, created Earl of Leicester in 1618. The siblings formed something close to a literary dynasty, and Philip stood at its centre. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, before his life broadened far beyond England's borders.
In 1572, at 18 years old, Sidney travelled to France as part of the embassy tasked with negotiating a possible marriage between Queen Elizabeth I and the Duc D'Alençon. He was present in Walsingham's house in Paris during the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, an event that confirmed him as a keenly militant Protestant for the rest of his life.
He spent several years moving through Germany, Italy, Poland, the Kingdom of Hungary, and Austria, meeting prominent European intellectuals and politicians along the way. During a diplomatic visit to Prague in 1577, he took the remarkable step of secretly meeting the exiled Jesuit priest Edmund Campion. Recent biographers, including Katherine Duncan-Jones, have suggested that Sidney's religious loyalties were more ambiguous than his Protestant reputation implies.
Back in England, Sidney's political instincts led him into serious conflict. He quarrelled with Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, largely over Sidney's fierce opposition to the proposed French marriage of Elizabeth to the younger Alençon. Sidney challenged de Vere to a duel. The Queen forbade it. Sidney then wrote a lengthy letter to Elizabeth laying out why he believed the marriage was foolish. Elizabeth bristled at his presumption, and Sidney prudently withdrew from court.
He returned to court by the middle of 1581, was elected to Parliament for both Ludlow and Shrewsbury that same year, and sat as MP for Kent in 1584. He was knighted in 1583, the same year he married Frances, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. That year he also visited Oxford in the company of Giordano Bruno, the polymath renowned for his cosmological theories, who subsequently dedicated two books to Sidney.
None of Sidney's work was published during his lifetime, yet it circulated widely in manuscript, and its influence ran deep. His finest achievement, by wide critical consensus, was a sequence of 108 love sonnets written to Lady Penelope Rich, though dedicated to his wife. Sidney had first met Penelope Devereux when he returned from Europe in 1575; her father, Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, had reportedly planned to marry her to Sidney, but Walter died in 1576 and the plan came to nothing. In 1584, she was married, apparently against her will, to Lord Rich. The sonnets Sidney addressed to her, known as Astrophil and Stella, reveal what one tradition describes as true lyric emotion expressed in a language delicately archaic.
The first pirated edition of Astrophil and Stella appeared in 1591, five years after Sidney's death. An authorised edition did not reach the press until 1598. The sequence is counted as a watershed in English Renaissance poetry. Sidney drew deeply on the Italian model of Petrarch but partially adapted it for English verse, varying the emotion from sonnet to sonnet while experimenting with rhyme schemes that helped free the English form from the strict constraints of the Italian original.
His prose essay, known variously as The Defence of Poetry, A Defence of Poesie, and An Apology for Poetry, was written before 1583. It is generally believed that Sidney 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. Sidney's response, however, addressed far broader objections, including those of Plato. His core argument was that poetry, by combining the liveliness of history with the ethical focus of philosophy, is more effective than either discipline alone at moving readers toward virtue. Edmund Spenser, who dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to Sidney, was among the contemporaries the essay discussed.
The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia was, by Sidney's own scale, his most ambitious undertaking. A romance that mixed pastoral elements with a Hellenistic narrative model drawn from the ancient writer Heliodorus, it placed idealised shepherd's life alongside stories of jousts, kidnappings, political treachery, battles, and rapes. The narrative structure nested stories within each other, with intertwined storylines after the Greek manner.
Sidney wrote an early version, the Old Arcadia, during a stay at Mary Herbert's house. It moved in a straightforward, sequential manner. He then began a far more ambitious revision, adding much more backstory about the central princes, greatly complicating the plot, and multiplying the characters. He completed most of the first three books, but the project was unfinished when he died. The third book stops in the middle of a sword fight.
Fulke Greville published the revised version alone in 1590. Sidney's sister Mary published a version in 1593 that grafted the last two books of the original onto the first three books of the revision. In the 1621 version, Sir William Alexander provided a bridge to reconnect the two halves. The work was known in this patchwork form until scholars recovered the earlier version in the early twentieth century.
The Arcadia's reach across English literature was remarkable. William Shakespeare borrowed from it for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear. Parts of it were dramatised by John Day and James Shirley. A widely told story holds that King Charles I quoted lines from the Arcadia as he mounted the scaffold to be executed. Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, after Sidney's character Pamela.
Sidney's Protestant convictions were not merely philosophical. In the 1570s he worked to persuade John Casimir to consider proposals for a united Protestant effort against Catholic Spain. In the winter of 1575-76, while his father served as Lord Deputy in Ireland, Sidney fought there. In the early 1580s he argued, without success, for a direct assault on Spain itself.
Promoted to General of Horse in 1583, he was appointed governor of Flushing in the Netherlands in 1585. From that post he consistently pressed his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, for bolder action. In July 1586 he carried out a successful raid on Spanish forces near Axel.
Later that same year, he joined Sir John Norris at the Battle of Zutphen. During the fighting he was shot in the thigh. He died of gangrene 26 days later. One story attached to his final days grew to define his public image for centuries. Sidney allegedly removed his thigh armour before the battle because he noticed that one of his men was not fully armoured, and he thought it wrong to be better protected than his soldiers. As he lay wounded, he is said to have handed his water flask to another injured man with the words: "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine."
His body was returned to London and interred at Old St Paul's Cathedral on the 16th of February 1587. The grave and its monument were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. A modern monument in the crypt lists his among the important graves the fire consumed. His funeral procession was one of the most elaborate ever staged in London. The expense was so great that his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, came close to bankruptcy. As a brother of the Worshipful Company of Grocers, Sidney's procession included 120 of his company brethren.
Edmund Spenser, who had known Sidney through the loose literary circle called the Areopagus, wrote one of the greatest English Renaissance elegies in his memory, a poem titled Astrophel. In it, Sidney was memorialised as the flower of English manhood. Even before his death, Sidney had come to represent for many the ideal Castiglione courtier: learned and politically shrewd, yet also generous, brave, and impulsive.
His devoted friend and schoolfellow Fulke Greville wrote an early biography. The full scope of Sidney's life proved rich material for later writers across very different registers. Elizabeth Goudge placed him as a young man in her 1937 novel Towers in the Mist, set in Oxford during a royal visit. W. B. Yeats invoked his name directly in the poem In Memory of Major Robert Gregory, calling the subject "Our Sidney and our perfect man." The hard-boiled detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler named his fictional detective Philip Marlowe after both Sidney and Christopher Marlowe.
In Arnhem, at the Bakkerstraat, an inscription on the ground marks the house where Sidney died on the 17th of October 1586. The inscription was unveiled on the 17th of October 2011, exactly 425 years after his death, in the presence of Philip Sidney, 2nd Viscount De L'Isle, a direct descendant of Sidney's brother. A memorial also stands at the location in Zutphen where he was shot, at the entrance of a footpath called 't Gallee. The city of Sidney, Ohio, carries his name still.
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Common questions
How did Philip Sidney die?
Philip Sidney died on the 17th of October 1586 from gangrene, 26 days after being shot in the thigh at the Battle of Zutphen in the Netherlands. He was fighting for the Protestant cause against Spanish forces and was 31 years old at the time of his death.
What are Philip Sidney's most famous works?
Philip Sidney's most celebrated works are the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, the prose romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and the critical essay known as The Defence of Poetry. None of these were published during his lifetime; they circulated in manuscript and appeared in print only after his death.
Who was Penelope Rich and what was her connection to Philip Sidney?
Penelope Rich, born Penelope Devereux, was the inspiration for Sidney's 108-sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. Sidney met her in 1575; her father had reportedly planned to marry her to Sidney but died in 1576 before the arrangement was made. In 1584 she was married, apparently against her will, to Lord Rich.
What is the story of Philip Sidney giving his water to a dying soldier?
At the Battle of Zutphen in 1586, Sidney was shot and lay wounded on the field. According to the famous account, he passed his water flask to another wounded soldier, saying "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." This story became the most widely told anecdote about Sidney and was used to illustrate his gallant character.
How did Philip Sidney's Arcadia influence later English literature?
William Shakespeare borrowed from The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia for the Gloucester subplot of King Lear. Parts of the work were also dramatised by John Day and James Shirley. Samuel Richardson named the heroine of his first novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded after Sidney's character Pamela, and a widely told story holds that King Charles I quoted lines from the Arcadia on the scaffold before his execution.
Where is Philip Sidney buried and what happened to his grave?
Sidney's body was interred at Old St Paul's Cathedral in London on the 16th of February 1587. The grave and its monument were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. A modern monument in the cathedral crypt lists his grave among the important ones lost to the fire.
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7 references cited across the entry
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