Contributions
Born at Penshurst into a great family close to power, godson of Philip II of Spain, Philip Sidney embodied the ideal of the Renaissance gentleman: courtier, soldier, diplomat and poet. He travelled the Continent, mixed with humanists, and became at Elizabeth's court the figurehead of a learned circle. His work, though chiefly published after his death, founded several genres in English. Astrophil and Stella is the language's first great sonnet sequence and set off the Elizabethan vogue for the sonnet. The Arcadia (The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia), a vast pastoral romance written for his sister Mary, became a model of narrative prose. His Apology for Poetry (A Defence of Poesy) is the first great English treatise of literary aesthetics, defending poetic fiction as a path to virtue. A patron of poets — Spenser dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to him — he died at thirty-one of a wound taken in battle in the Low Countries, leaving the image of a flawless hero.
Significance
Sidney was the first to give English poetry theoretical dignity and the Italianate love sonnet: Astrophil and Stella opened the way for the whole next generation, Shakespeare included. His Defence of Poesy framed for centuries the idea that fiction, far from lying, teaches virtue by delighting — "to teach and delight." His Arcadia prose nourished the emerging English novel. But his fame rests as much on his life as on his work: a courtier who fell and rose again from disgrace for daring to advise the Queen against a French marriage, he was raised after death into a national model of the Christian knight, a blend of elegance, courage and learning. That legend, carefully built by those near him — his sister Mary, his friend Fulke Greville — has at times eclipsed the real man: a young aristocrat often thwarted in his ambitions, kept from the great offices, whose heroic death froze the image before he could disappoint. The myth of the perfect Sidney owes much to the Elizabethan need for a secular saint.
Influence
He launched the sonnet-sequence craze that swept 1590s England (Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare). His Defence of Poesy became the founding text of English literary criticism, and the Arcadia shaped prose romance into the seventeenth century. His figure of the poet-knight modelled the ideal of the cultivated gentleman. He himself drew on Petrarch and the Italian Petrarchists for the sonnet, on Sannazaro's pastoral Arcadia, on Aristotle and Scaliger for his poetics, and on the Protestant humanism he met on his travels, notably through Hubert Languet; Elizabeth's court supplied both his constraint and his matter.
Anecdote
On 22 September 1586, at the battle of Zutphen in the Spanish Netherlands, Sidney charged the enemy lines and took a musket ball in the thigh; gangrene killed him twenty-six days later. His friend and biographer Fulke Greville reports that, carried off wounded and consumed with thirst, the poet raised the water bottle to his lips, then, seeing a dying soldier gaze at it with longing, held it out to him saying, "Thy necessity is yet greater than mine." True or embellished, the scene made Sidney the pattern of chivalric generosity. His funeral at St Paul's Cathedral had a splendour reserved for princes; a whole nation mourned a poet of thirty-one.