Sidney, Sir Philip

b. 1554; d. 1586

English soldier, statesman and poet, born at Penshurst, Kent, a nephew of the Earl of Leicester. He was educated at Shrewsbury, where he formed a friendship with Fulke Greville, and at Christ Church, Oxford.

In Paris in 1572 he took refuge at the English embassy during the massacre of St Bartholomew. After travelling in Europe he returned to England in 1575 and met Penelope Devereux, the 'Stella' of his sonnets. He was entrusted with missions to the Emperor and William the Silent, and in 1578 became known as a poet; Spenser dedicated the Shepheardes Calender to him.

In 1581 he lost Elizabeth I's favour for a time, but in 1583 he was knighted and in the same year married Frances Walsingham. He was made governor of Flushing in 1585, became involved in war, and while leading a charge at Zutphen received a fatal wound. The story of his passing a cup of water to a dying soldier with the words 'Thy need is greater than mine' is probably authentic.

Liked and admired by all as the pattern of chivalric virtue and nobility, Sidney is the most attractive of the great Elizabethan figures. His literary work, all written between 1581 and 1584 but not published until after his death, is of the first importance. The Apologie for Poetrie, later renamed Defence of poesy, is the first example of literary criticism in English. His Astrophel and Stella started the vogue in England of the sonnet sequence; and his pastoral medley, Arcadia, written for his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, is the greatest of all the Elizabethan prose romances.

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