SIDNEY, PHILIP, sir. - Writer, b. at Penshurtt on 30 Nov. 1554, d. at Arnheim (Netherlands) on 17 Oct. 1586.
He is regarded as the typical gentleman of Elizabethan England, possessing the virtues of the courtier, the soldier
and the scholar, in the Italian and French Renaissance tradition; a patron of artists and men of letters, himself a man of letters, and a defender of the national religion. His posthumous works include the long epic-pastoral romance Arcadia (1590), which stands alongside the work of Sannazaro and the Diana of Jorge de Montemayor, written in prose, at times prolix, interspersed with lyric poems of a chiefly amorous character; the Apologie for Poetrie (1598), written following an attack on the theatre by Stephen Gosson, which makes him the first representative of English Renaissance literary criticism and contains interesting judgments on contemporary production; and Astrophel and Stella (1591), a collection of sonnets addressed to Penelope Devereux, which place S. among the most distinguished and original European representatives of Petrarchan lyric poetry.