Sidney in Retrospect

Four hundred years after his death on a Dutch battlefield, Sir Philip Sidney is being honored with international conferences across the United States and in Europe. One of the three master writers of the English Renaissance along with Shakespeare and Spenser, Sidney gave to his own time the first sonnet sequence in English and the best English defense of poetry ever written. His book Arcadia—the first novel in English—was the best-selling English novel for two hundred years. In our own time he is seen, unlike his contemporaries, as a writer whose political life at Elizabeth’s court and whose diplomatic and religious ties to the leading rulers of Europe make the interrelationship of his work and his culture singularly important in the present reassessment of his age.

Sidney in Retrospect, a special quatercentenary volume, brings together for the first time the landmark essays from English Literary Renaissance that reinterpret the significance of his life and reassess all of his major work. In addition, two newly discovered letters appear in book form for the first time.