Defence of Poesie

This Renascence Editions publication was transcribed, with an introduction, notes, and bibliography, by Risa S. Bear for the University of Oregon, September-December 1992. Original material copyright 1992, 1995 the editor and the University of Oregon.

 Converted to HTML by Risa S. Bear, March 1995.

Contents:
 
 

• Introduction
• Defence of Poesie
• Notes
• Bibliography

 This etext of Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie is based on the Scolar Press facsimile of the British Museum's copy (Shelf-mark: C.57.b.38) of the Ponsonby editon of the Defence. It was transcribed in October, 1992 by Risa S. Bear of the University of Oregon and proofed by Risa S. Bear and Micah Bear. The editor acknowledges the invaluable guidance of Professor William Rockett in making improvements to the Introduction. The letters "j," "u" and "v" have been normalized for the modern reader, and catchwords eliminated; otherwise the old spellings have been retained. As in the original Ponsonby text, there is neither paragraphing nor pagination. Quotations found in the original in the Greek alphabet have generally been transliterated, and a few corrections of compositor's typographical errors or omissions have been made which will be found within square brackets. Endnotes are serially numbered and are enclosed within braces. Copyright (1992) for this edition belongs to the University of Oregon; it is freely distributed for nonprofit scholarly and teaching purposes only.

Introduction

 Biographical note

 Born into great expectations at the estate of Penshurst, Kent, on 30 November 1554, Philip Sidney was educated at Shrewsbury Grammar School in Shropshire, and entered Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1568. After three years, he departed for the traditional "Grand Tour" of continental Europe, arriving in Paris 1572, the year of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, of which he was an eyewitness. He became friends with the noted humanist scholar Hubert Languet, and spent the winter with him at Frankfort. In 1573 he passed through Hungary and Vienna on his way to Venice, and the following winter visited Padua, Florence, and Genoa. Sidney joined Edward Wotton for an embassy to the Imperial Court at Vienna, 1574-5, and returned to England, after a visit to Poland, in June 1575. In 1576 he became Queen Elizabeth's cupbearer and traveled to Ireland to take part in the campaign with Essex. For several years, the gallant, dashing, and well-traveled young Sidney, who was greatly admired on the Continent and at home, waited for an opportunity to serve his Queen in some capacity commensurate with his abilities, but no such opportunity came-- perhaps because his volatile temperament could not safely be employed in the temporizing style of government she required to ensure stability. It was probably in 1578 that Sidney's small pageant, The Lady of May, was presented before the Queen in vain hopes of persuading her to look with more favor on his uncle Leicester (and by extension, himself). At this time he also began work on the Old Arcadia, which he completed about 1581. Finding employment at Court virtually denied him, Sidney at this time (1578-82) divided his time between visits with his friends (including Edmund Spenser, who published The Shepheardes Calender in 1579) and his own writing, including The Defence of Poesie [1580-81], Certaine Sonets [1581], and Astrophel and Stella [1581-2]. He also began, but did not complete, a new version of the Arcadia. 

Beginning about 1583, it seemed Sidney's fortunes might be about to turn. He was knighted in that year, so that he could stand in for his absent friend Prince Casimir of the Palatinate in installation as a Knight of the Garter. An important appointment came to him soon after, assisting the Earl of Warwick, Master of Ordinance, in preparing the defense of England against possible invasion by the Spanish. In the fall, he married Frances Walsingham. 

It was Sidney's belief that the best way to slow the advance of the Spanish empire on the Continent was to attack the colonies of Spain in the New World. He arranged, in 1584, to sail with Sir Francis Drake on such an expedition but was recalled by the Queen at the last moment and made governor of Flushing, in the Netherlands. Sidney took up the cause of the overextended and unpaid garrison but discovered that his uncle, the Earl of Leicester, had diverted the allocated funds to his own use. Sidney nevertheless rallied the troops as best he could, and, going to the relief of the garrison at Zutphen, 22 September 1586, was wounded in the thigh by a musket ball. The wound festered, and he died, in great pain, at Arnheim, 17 October. All of Europe was stunned by the loss, and the body of Philip Sidney was laid to rest with a lavish state funeral at St. Paul's cathedral, London, 16 February 1587 (Kimbrough, unpaginated chronology, Sir Philip Sidney). 

 Sidney's famous essay is said to be a response to an attack on poetry and stage plays, which had been dedicated to him without his permission, by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright: The Schoole of Abuse, 1579. Another reply, inferior but interesting, had been published by Thomas Lodge in 1580.

 Henry Olney produced a printing of An Apologie for Poetrie in the spring of 1595; this edition proved to be unauthorized, as William Ponsonby had entered the work in the Stationer's register on November 29, 1594. Olney was directed to halt sale and turn over his remaining copies to Ponsonby, who replaced the title page with his own and sold the copies along with his own printing. These combined copies, and those of Ponsonby's own edition printed by Thomas Creede, are rare, whereas Olney's exists in a number of copies. Four versions of the Defence are known: The Penshurst manuscript, De L'Isle MS. no. 1226; The Norwich manuscript found in 1966 in a commonplace book of Francis Blomefield's; An Apologie for Poetrie, Olney's printing of 1595, and Ponsonby's The Defence of Poesie of the same year. An examination of the paper used in the two manuscript versions, which was done at the request of Mary Mohl, the discoverer of the Norwich maunuscript, suggested that the latter, though in some respects inferior, is the older of the two (The Apology for Poetry xxiv). If this is the case, a stemma of these documents might appear as follows: 

 
 
                        Fair Copy (no longer extant)
                                    |
                                    |
                  Copy seen by both/ \Copy seen by both
              Ponsonby's compositor   Norwich scribe and
            |------Penshurst scribe   Olney's compositor--|
            |    (no longer extant)   (no longer extant)  |
            |          |                  |               |
            |          |          Norwich, 1584-1595 (?)  |
            |          |                                  |
            |      Ponsonby, 1595               Olney, 1595
            |
           Penshurst (Robert Sidney's copy) ca. 1600
 

Many scholars, some of whom have devoted a lifetime with skill and devotion to the task, have written on Sidney and on the Defence, so a definitive general introduction will not be attempted here. There is one aspect of the Defence, however, that has been often noted only in passing, and often dismissively, and as I feel it is Sidney's main point I will attempt to throw a little light on it. Sidney is conscious throughout his defence that it is fiction he is defending, and that his strength lies in attacking the privilege generally accorded to "fact." He says that "of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer"; that is, the practitioners of what we now call the academic disciplines are regularly betrayed by their literalism, while the poet, who is under no illusions, freely creates "fictional" statements as true as any other, and the truer for not being asserted as literal. Sidney's approach is characteristic of Renaissance humanism, and more closely akin to modern semiotic theory than is generally appreciated. 

Renaissance education came to specialize in rhetoric at a time in which political and economic power came to be concentrated in the courts of princes. This can hardly be a coincidence. Every courtier was trained to the art of sprezzatura, of skill in seeming effortlessness in horsemanship, swordplay, singing, dancing, speaking, and writing, so as to catch the eye of those higher in the hierarchy, and especially that of the prince. Self-presentation has always been and remains the first move in the game of self-advancement, but for the Renaissance in general and Elizabethans especially, "fashioning a self," to echo Spenser, was an obsession. Peter Ramus and the humanist rhetoricians provided a timely operating environment for such pursuits, because their foregrounding of the provisional status of any assertion helped the courtiers to understand self-image as a work in progress rather than as a cynical device. 

The Defence of Poesie reflects the humanist education which Shrewsbury and Oxford had given to Sidney, and reflects on the rhetorical aims of self-presentation with which an underemployed Elizabethan gentleman would undertake such a work. It follows the rules and outline of a standard argument: exordium, proposition, division, examination, refutation, digression, peroration; and does so with a spirit and style that must have done its author great credit in the eyes of his contemporaries. The Defence serves almost as a copia of Renaissance theory, for Sidney brings every available gun to bear on his objective: Pliny, Musaeus, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, Linus, Amphion, Livius Andronicus, Ennius, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Gower, Chaucer, Thales, Empedocles, Parmenides, Pythagoras, Phocilydes, Herodotus, Virgil, Xenophon, Tremellius, Junius, Tyrtaeus, Lucretius, Manilius, Pontanus, Lucan, Cicero, Heliodorus, Plato, Aristotle, Cornelius Agrippa, Horace, Terence, More, Erasmus, "Dares Phrygius," Plautus, Euripides, Phocion, Sannazaro, Boethius, Persius, Plutarch, Pindar, Tasso, Ovid, Dio Cassius, Ariosto, Scaliger, Bembo, Bibbiena, Beze, Melancthon, Fracastorio, Muret, Buchanan, Hurault, Juvenal, Surrey, Spenser, Sackville, Norton, Apuleius, Demosthenes, Landino, and both Old and New Testaments are all cited in support of his position, which as every critic will tell you is that poetry is useful because it delights as it teaches, a view that dates back to Horace and beyond. 

The venerable tradition of didacticism, and Sidney's heavy reliance upon it in the Defence, has sometimes led to a tendency to dismiss the Defence as derivative: "not a very original theorist," says Hazard Adams in Critical Theory Since Plato (154). Adams himself, however, notices something that "sounds modern" in Sidney's argument that the poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth." He perceptively compares Sidney on this point to I.A. Richards, but concludes that the comparison will go nowhere because "Sidney does not have a modern theory of language" (154). While it is obvious that Sidney had not the advantage, in his education, of having read Ferdinand de Saussure and his successors, I believe it is a mistake, on the basis of our own historical chauvinism, not to seek the implications of Sidney's argument, and to callously assume that Sidney did not himself see some of those implications. Nor was Sidney alone in so seeing; Renaissance humanists, of whom Sidney was one, understood not merely formal rhetoric but epistemology and even ontology in terms of appearances. 

Throughout the period, diagrams appeared in books, such as Andrew Borde's The First Book of the Introduction to Knowledge [1542], or Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi Historia [1616], relating the Ptolemaic cosmology to the idea of a "great chain of being" in which the cosmos is arranged as a hierarchy in which each successive level downward in the hierarchy contains entities which are analogies of entities in the preceding level; to begin to understand the world view of those who produced these diagrams, it may help to visualize ourselves not as "made in the image of God" in the sense that we are independent objects that resemble God, but are actual depictions of God, like paintings. In this view, nature is not divided from God in the way in which we are accustomed, after Descartes, to think, but is something more like a thought or imagination in the mind of God. As imago dei, we reflect our Maker in all that we do, and most of all in doing what our Maker does: to make, especially by imagining. To attempt to improve one's image is then not the dishonest activity which an Enlightenment materialist assumes it to be, but in imitatio dei, is to participate in the creative activity of the Cosmos. Such a world view will hold that all epistemological practice will be mimetic in procedure, and this is in fact what Sidney tells us early on: 

There is no Art delivered unto mankind that hath not the workes of nature for his principall object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become Actors & Plaiers, as it were of what nature will have set forth. So doth the Astronomer looke upon the starres, and by that he seeth set downe what order nature hath taken therein. So doth the Geometritian & Arithmetitian, in their divers sorts of quantities. So doth the Musitians intimes tel you, which by nature agree, which not. The natural Philosopher thereon hath his name, and the morall Philosopher standeth uppon the naturall vertues, vices, or passions of man: and follow nature saith he therein, and thou shalt not erre. The Lawier saith, what men have determined. The Historian, what men have done. The Gramarian, speaketh onely of the rules of speech, and the Rhetoritian and Logitian, considering what in nature wil soonest proove, and perswade thereon, give artificiall rules, which still are compassed within the circle of a question, according to the proposed matter. The Phisitian wayeth the nature of mans bodie, & the nature of things helpfull, or hurtfull unto it. And the Metaphisicke though it be in the second & abstract Notions, and therefore be counted supernaturall, yet doth hee indeed build upon the depth of nature. 
 
 

worketh, not onely to make a Cyrus, which had bene but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyrusses, if they will learne aright, why and how that maker made him.
 
 

Now doth the peerlesse Poet performe both [the work of the philosopher and the historian], for whatsoever the Philosopher saith should be done, he gives a perfect picture of it by some one, by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the generall notion with the particuler example. 
 
 

Sidney hammers this point home by his argument on "lies." Poets are accused of lying, since there is no necessary connection between their models and observed phenomena. His reply is that in all the other arts, the assumption is made that models re-present observations accurately; but this is never so. Therefore he can assert 

that of all writers under the Sunne, the Poet is the least lyer: and though he wold, as a Poet can scarecely be a lyer. The Astronomer with his cousin the Geometrician, can hardly escape, when they take upon them to measure the height of the starres. How often thinke you do the Phisitians lie, when they averre things good for sicknesses, which afterwards send Charon a great number of soules drowned in a potion, before they come to his Ferrie? And no lesse of the rest, which take upon them to affirme. Now for the Poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for as I take it, to lie, is to affirme that to bee true, which is false. So as the other Artistes, and especially the Historian, affirming manie things, can in the clowdie knowledge of mankinde, hardly escape from manie lies. 
 
 

From Petrarch on, the assumption of scholars during the Renaissance was that the centuries from the fall of Rome until their own time were a "dark age," in which the great knowledge of the ancients fell into disuse; it was their mission to recover something of the glory of Greece and Rome by recovering and mastering their literature and "arts," or, interchangeably, "sciences." History, Philosophy, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Medicine were among these, as were painting and sculpture, music, and the production of literary works, especially epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, lyric, pastoral, and other forms, which some authorities gathered together under the heading of "poesie." A student in England in the age of Ascham and Wilson could expect to be exposed to a wide range of "arts" and literary and historical works under the curriculum--an adaptation of the medieval trivium--by which means students had for centuries been taught grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Although this curriculum was often taught under the implicit assumption that it formed a seamless and perfect whole, it contained a contradiction that produced (and still produces today) considerable friction among thinkers and artists. Plato had regarded rhetoric as a highly suspect art, productive of immorality. He argued for dialectic to be used in its place, which he defined as the science of understanding (architectonike) as oppposed to merely convincing; he desired that the conclusion of a syllogism be true of the world to which it refers (Theatetus, Sophist, Phaedrus, Republic). Aristotle had made a place for rhetoric within dialectic by claiming that dialectic is simply the use of complete syllogisms to understand truth while rhetoric is the use of partial syllogisms to attain specific ends, such as convincing a jury of one's innocence, regardless of one's actual guilt (Rhetoric). 

But attacks against the primacy of dialectic had been made, notably by Peter Ramus, whose doctoral dissertation was on the topic "everything Aristotle said was wrong." Ramus chose to invert Aristotle's position and upheld that dialectic is but a part of rhetoric, thus re-privileging rhetoric as the architectonike, or science of sciences, as it had been formerly held by the Sophists to be. Ramus' insight was that an assumption generally made by dialecticians is that true premises can be found upon which to base the complete syllogisms that are intended to lead to true, that is, ontological, knowledge. Ramus's system of logic, unlike that of Aristotle, assumes that a premise is always only posited, and any conclusions based on it are likewise only posited. 

The empiricist view is that the senses report a "real" or literal world that is like our conception of it. The empiricist view of language is that words refer to objects in a "real" world, and that metaphor is a distortion of reference, so that a word can be used out of its proper context in order to make a useful statement about another kind of object in another context. Thus, we can say of a wise prince: "behold Cyrus!" -- transferring reference from the real Cyrus who was wise onto someone who is not Cyrus, but whose wisdom we wish to praise. Sidney calls our attention to the unsupportable assumption in the phrase "real Cyrus." What real Cyrus? Historians cannot show us one; they are only repeating what they have heard. Their Cyrus is posited only. This realization undermines the empiricist view of language and suggests that contrary to what we expect, all reference is metaphorical. It is our insistence on literality that is the distortion, for the literal is only metaphor that we have agreed among ourselves to regard as somehow non- metaphorical. This idea is at the root both of the effectiveness of the art of rhetoric and of our uneasy but continued acceptance of it. Plato sought an immaterial reality, Aristotle a material one; Sidney suspects that neither can be found by us, but at best a model of a posited model, or copy of a posited copy (Plato's nightmare) can be fashioned and tested. This utilitarian view is the basis of rhetorical theory, and can be traced from the Sophists through Scaliger, Ramus, and the humanists, to Sidney, to Milton, to the reaction to the Enlightenment in Coleridge's criticism, and in our own time to suggestions made by C.S. Peirce, William James, Karl Popper, Owen Barfield, W.V. Quine, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Stanley Fish, and many others. 

Why, then, do critics feel that Sidney "does not have a modern theory of language"? The answer is that he does not follow through on his own insight but applies the very principle he has just refuted, that of the common-sense privileging of literality, in his criticism of the current drama; of it he complains that
 
 

Now you shall have three Ladies walke to gather flowers, and then we must beleeve the stage to be a garden. By and by we heare newes of shipwrack in the same place, then we are too blame if we accept it not for a Rock. Upon the back of that, comes out a hidious monster with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a Cave: while in the meane time two Armies flie in, represented with foure swords & bucklers, and then what hard hart wil not receive it for a pitched field. 
 
 

...you shall have Asia of the one side, and Affricke of the other, and so mannie other under Kingdomes, that the Player when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. 
 
 

      Viola:   What country, friends, is this?
      Captain:                                 Illyria, lady.
 

The charge that Sidney's theory of language is not modern is misdirected. He is accurate in his assessment of language, and goes astray only when adopting a poetics that runs counter to his own theory. In Twelfth Night, which our unfortunate Sir Philip did not live to witness, we have both the refutation of the literalist theory with which he was saddled, and the confirmation of the metaphorical theory he so brilliantly elucidated. In refutation, we easily conceive the three months of the action, and its movement from seacoast to palace, street, and garden; the work is unified by its being a kind of land voyage of discovery, or rather recovery, of the losses that were sustained on the high seas. In confirmation, the play is, as Sidney recommends, an invention that is eikastike, and not phantastike, in that it figures forth good things, showing its Viola as one who should be emulated and its Malvolio as one who, perhaps, should not, though he never lacks his humanity. And these are inventions all, the "lies" of the poet. Yet if anyone should call Viola a lie, would we not give them the lie-direct? She lives in our minds, and not necessarily in our minds alone: so far substantially is she worked, not only to make a Viola, which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but to bestow a Viola upon the world, to make many Violas, if we will learn aright why and how that maker made her! 

We all use metaphors, says Sidney, for we cannot communicate our various knowledges without them, literal reference being a prerogative of a higher Nature than that we are born to. But to some of us it is given to not merely use metaphors, but to create them. If, says he, we are so blinded by our literality that we must condemn our metaphor-makers out of hand, then we bring upon ourselves the curse of oblivion, for our memorials are necessarily constructed entirely of metaphor: 

...and when you die, your memorie die from the earth for want of an Epitaphe. 
 
 

Risa Stephanie Bear, 1992
 
 

(text)

Notes

{1} E.W.: Edward Wotton, secretary to the English at the court of Maximilian II. (Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney [1989] 372) 

{2} Pedenteria: pedantry.

{3} In Renaissance times Musaeus was thought to predate Homer.

{4} It was believed that the works of the ancients were intrinsically superior and of great authority. It was a mark of learning to imitate them, as in fact Sidney does by casting the Defence in the form of a classical oration. 

{5} Amphion: said to have rebuilt Thebes with the sweetness of his lyre.

{6} Details on the works, or in some cases fragments, of these Greek philosophers may be found in the excellent exhaustive notes of Duncan-Jones, 373. She believes Sidney may have encountered them in Henri Estienne, Poesis Philosophica [1573].

{7} Symposium.

{8} Phaedrus.

{9} Republic II.

{10} stale: stole.

{11} Arentos: areytos. Religious music of the native inhabitants of Haiti, from Decades of the newe worlde or West India [1555], by Peter Martyr (tr. Richard Eden), III.vii. (Duncan- Jones 373) 

{12} Vaticinium, and Vaticinari: prophecy, prophesying. The prophetic office of poet has interested poets and philosophers from Plato to S.T. Coleridge. For a useful discussion of this poetics in Sidney's time, see Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser [1971]. 

{13} Albinus was the Roman governor of Britain in 192 C.E. (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney 189) The line quoted from Aeneid II.314 translates "insanely I arm, that have no reason to arm." 

{14} Hebritians: Hebricians, scholars of the Hebrew language. Jerome, and many others after him, believed that the Psalms were written in verse, and sought in vain to find the rules. (Duncan-Jones 375)

{15} Prosopopeias: attribution of human qualities (personification) to natural objects or events.

{16} poieten: "a poet," with which phrase the Greek word is replaced in subsequent editions.

{17} Art: any skill in production, including of knowledge, hence inclusive of the sciences.

{18} Theagenes: from Heliodorus, Aethiopica. 

{19} Pylades: from Euripides, Oresteia.

{20} Orlando: Ariosto, Orlando furioso [1532].

{21} Cyrus: Ruler of Persia, 600?-529 B.C.E.; from Xenophon, Cyropaedia. 

{22} Aeneas is said to have been regarded during the Renaissance as the perfect man (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 190); he was especially attractive to Englishmen as the ancestor of the founders of Rome and also, according to legend, of the founders of Britain. See Michael Drayton, Poly-Olbion [1612].

{23} Compare Scaliger, Poetics [1561]. The poet, according to Scaliger, creates models, which partake of the first nature, so that the poet's creativity is like that of God. 

{24} Aristotle, Poetics I.2.

{25} Horace, Ars Poetica. Plutarch says, in the Moralia, that Simonides said this first. 

{26} Bible translators.

{27} Paules: subsequent editions have James': the quote is from James 5:13. 

{28} Pontanus: Giovanni Pontano is the only non- classical author here cited. For details on the works alluded to, see Duncan-Jones, 375. 

{29} Heliodorus, Aethiopica.

{30} architectonike: Master-art or science of science. Analogous to the use of "scientific method" as the organizing theory of the scientific disciplines today. 

{31} Sidney seems to be quoting his Cicero (De oratore II.ix.36) from memory. The passage reads: Lux vitae, temporum magistra, vita memoriae, nuntia vetustatis...: "Light of life, master of the age, life of memory, messenger from the past..." 

{32} Formidine poenae: fear of being punished.

{33} Virtutis amore: love of virtue.

{34} Anchices: Anchises, the father of Aeneas. See Virgil, Aeneid II. 

{35} Homer, Odyssey V.

{36} Horace, Epistles I.ii. (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 195)

{37} The first three examples are from the Iliad; in Aeneid V., Nisus helps Euryalus to victory in an important race, even though he himself has fallen and cannot complete the course. 

{38} Terence, Eunuchus. "Gnatho" in Sidney's time was any social parasite after the character by that name in Terence. (Duncan-Jones 376) 

{39} Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde. A "pandar" was a procurer of sexual services, after the character in Chaucer. 

{40} Horace, Ars poetica: "Mediocrity in poets is permitted neither by the Gods, nor men, nor booksellers." (Books were sold around columns in Rome.) 

{41} Luke 16:19-31.

{42} Luke 15:11-32. 

{43} Poetics X.

{44} "studiously serious" was omitted in Ponsonby.

{45} Justin, Histories, translated by Arthur Golding, 1564. (Duncan-Jones 377) 

{46} "Dares Phrygius's" purported account of the Trojan war was traditionally thought to be genuine, but by Sidney's time there were already serious doubts. (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 196)

{47} Horace, Epodes V.

{48} Tantalus revealed the secrets entrusted to him by Zeus and was horribly punished in the underworld; Atreus killed the two sons of Thyestes and served him their flesh at a banquet.

{49} Quintus Rufus Curtius wrote a life of Alexander the Great.

{50} Herodotus, Histories III; Justin, Histories I.x. (Duncan-Jones 378) 

{51} Livy, Histories I.iii,iv. (Duncan- Jones 378)

{52} This incident is recorded in Cyropaedia VI.i, but of Araspas, not Abradates. (Duncan-Jones 378) 

{53} Milciades: Miltiades defeated the Persians at Marathon, but afterwards misused an Athenian fleet and was imprisoned, where he died of a leg wound received in the naval adventure. Herodotus, Histories IV.

{54} Phocion, an Athenian public servant, was executed for suspicion of illegally negotiating with the Macedonians; Plutarch, Phocion. 

{55} Socrates was condemned and executed on suspicion of having taught atheism to the youth of Athens; Plato, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. 

{56} Lucius Septimius Severus, Roman emperor, C.E. 193- 211, who tended to visit horrible vengeance on defeated foes, and celebrated victories with massively bloody spectacles in the Roman circus.

{57} M. Aurelius Alexander Severus, Roman emperor C.E. 222-235, who effected many reforms and halted, for awhile, the deterioration of the the Roman civilization. 

{58} Lucius Sulla and Caius Marius (second century B.C.E.) fought over Rome for many years, with much loss of blood in civil strife, yet neither came to a violent end. 

{59} Each was killed after he had already fled.

{60} Cato, among the defeated at Pharsalia (48 B.C.E.), was run to ground some time afterward, and killed himself to avoid capture. 

{61} "He knew not letters"; Julius Caesar in Suetonius' biography.

{62} Occidentos esse: occidendos esse, "they are to be executed."

{63} An assortment of noted tyrants.

{64} philophilosophos: "lovers of the lovers of wisdom." A fan of philosophers.

{65} gnosis: knowledge; praxis: performance.

{66} "here is the work and the labor." Virgil, Aeneid VI. The Sybil on getting back from the underworld. 

{67} Aristotle, Poetics IV.

{68} Amadis de Gaule, written in Spanish, was much read in French translation and frequently imitated, influencing the genre of knightly romances, including Sidney's Arcadia. 

{69} Virgil, Aeneid II.

{70} "And shall my country watch me flee? Is it such a terrible thing to die?" Virgil, Aeneid XII. In Ponsonby "usque" and "adeone" are run together into one word. 

{71} Poetius: Boethius. Perhaps a typographical error or compositor's misreading of the transcript; corrected elsewhere.

{72} indulgere genio: "indulging one's natural bent."

{73} A friend of Coriolanus. The story was famous in antiquity, and is retold in Shakespeare, Coriolanus I.i.

{74} II Samuel 12:1-15.

{75} Psalms 51.

{76} Sannazaro, Arcadia [1504].

{77} Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae [524 C.E.].

{78} Virgil, Eclogues I.

{79} "I remember this, that conquered Thyrsus achieved nothing: meanwhile for our time it is Corydon [who is the winner]." Virgil, Eclogues VII. "Thyrsim" in Ponsonby is elsewhere emended to "Thirsin." 

{80} A classical genre, in iambic feet, like satire but less indirect.

{81} "The sly one all vices touches on, so that his friend may laugh." Persius, Satires I. In the original text: Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico Tangit, et admissus circum praecordia ludit. 

{82} "around the heart he plays." See quotation from Persius, note 81.

{83} "Is there life in Ulubrae for us if we can keep our balance?" Horace, Epistles I.xi. Even assuming we can get to Ulubrae without falling down, the place will bore us stiff, says Horace. The town was reached by passing through marshes. (Duncan-Jones and Van Orsten, 200) 

{84} Terentian characters, none of whom were intended to be imitated.

{85} Pistrinum: pistrinum, a type of Roman flour mill, powered by asses; when slaves misbehaved, they were sometimes substituted for the asses as a punishment. 

{86} "An evil ruler's heavy scepter makes him afraid of those who fear him, and the fear returns to its author." Seneca, Oedipus.

{87} This Alexander had killed his uncle and taken over rule of Pherae (369 B.C.E. approx.), and was particularly noted for bloodshed. Plutarch, Vita Pelopidae.

{88} Chevy Chase.

{89} Street musician, especially a fiddle player.

{90} Tideus: Tydeus. Statius, Thebais.

{91} Tasso: Gerusalemme Liberata [1575].

{92} Marcus Tullius Cicero.

{93} "Better than Chrysippus and Crantor." Horace, Epistles I.ii. It is Homer that is better for students than these philosophers, says Horace. 

{94} Ovid, Ars Amatoria: et lateat vitium proximitate boni. Call a woman light instead of short, "thus hiding evil by its nearness to the good." 

{95} Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarium et artium [1530].

{96} Scaliger, Poetics I.ii.

{97} Other creatures might have speech or some reasoning powers, but only in the human, it was thought, are these combined.

{98} In Ponsonby only; quisq=quisque. See Horace, Epistles I.xviii; Ovid, Remedia amoris. 

{99} Canterbury Tales, "The Knights Tale" 28. "To eare" is "to plow." 

{100} Plato, Republic II.iii.

{101} "This is but to beg the question."

{102} Charon: ferryman who conveyed souls to Hades over the river Styx.

{103} Magicians drew a pentangle within a circle for conjuring up demons.

{104} eikastike: shown forth.

{105} phantastike: imagined.

{106} Genesis 22.

{107} Judith 13.

{108} I Samuel 17.

{109} Albion Nation: the English.

{110} Chain-shot: two cannon balls connected by a length of chain, fired at once. Suitable for firing into massed opponents, or ship's rigging.

{111} Dio Cassius, Historia Roma, continuation, iii.

{112} "I say to him to feel free to be a fool." Horace, Satires I.i. 

{113} Scholastic topoi: "essential nature" and "primary substance" are not subjects that go well with body armor.

{114} M. Portius Cato Censorious sought to prevent M. Fulvius Nobilor from obtaining the honor of a Triumph because, as he said, Fulvius did not maintain proper discipline among his troops and kept a poet in his camp. See Cicero, Tusculanarum Disputationem i.2.

{115} M. Porcius Cato, great-grandson of Cato the Censor.

{116} Pluto: god of the underworld.

{117} Ennius'. Cicero, Pro archia poeta IX.

{118} Told in Plutarch, Vita Niciae.

{119} Simonides talked Hieron I into being reconciled to his brother. (Duncan-Jones 383)

{120} Cicero, Pro Caius Rabirio postumo IX.

{121} Plutarch, Moralia.

{122} Plato, Republic V.

{123} Ponsonby here omits "who yet for the credit of Poets allegeth twice two poets and one of them by the name of prophet," found elsewhere. Acts 17:28 and Titus 1 are cited in the margin of the Penshurst ms. (Duncan-Jones 383)

{124} Colossians 2:8.

{125} "[Plato's] authority used by barbarians to send out poets from the republic," Scaliger, Poetics I.ii.

{126} Aesop, Fables.

{127} "The Man Who Hurts Himself." 

{128} "O muse, cause me to remember how, when balked..." Virgil, Aeneid I. 

{129} Generals and poets all. Adrian: The Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-38 C.E.). (Duncan-Jones 384) 

{130} Robert II of Anjou, the friend and patron of Francesco Petrarca.

{131} Francis I.

{132} James I.

{133} Bembus: Pietro Bembo. Author of number of works, including poetry; see also Baldsar Castiglione's Il Cortegiano [1528], in which he figures prominently. 

{134} Bibiena: Bernard Dovizi, Cardinal Bibbiena, served Lorenzo de'Medici. (Duncan-Jones 385) 

{135} Beza: Theodore de Beze.

{136} Philip Melancthon was known to Sidney's humanist friend Hubert Languet. 

{137} Fracastorius: Girolamo Fracastorio, scientific and medical author. 

{138} Julius Caesar Scaliger had considerable influence on the Defence. 

{139} Pontanus: Giovanni Pontano.

{140} Muretus: Marc-Antoine Muret.

{141} George Buchanan was a humanist scholar and tutor to James VI.

{142} Michel Hurault de l'Hospital.

{143} See Ovid, Metamorphoses IV. In Golding, lines 202ff.

{144} The office of Telearch included keeping the streets clean. Plutarch, Moralia.

{145} Stream (here, of unnecessary words) flowing from the spring of the Muses.

{146} "From superior clay their being by the Titan formed." Juvenal, Satires XIV.

{147} "Orators are made, but poets are born."

{148} Manured: fertilized. This included the turning under of the soil.

{149} Dedalus: Daedalus, mythological architect and archetype of the artist. "Wrings"="wings." Daedalus constructed wings for himself and his son in order to effect an escape. The fate of Icarus demonstrates Sidney's point that it is the use of a thing, not the thing itself, that goes awry, though he does not pursue that point here.

{150} Quodlibet: Scholastic term for "what you will"; the floor is open to debate on any point.

{151} "Anything I attempted to say, verses became." Ovid, Tristia IV.x. (Duncan-Jones 387) 

{152} The Mirror of Magistrates first appeared in 1555, but was suppressed by the Lord Chancellor as a threat to Queen Mary's reign. It survived through seven more editions, however, and became immensely popular and influential. There may have been as many as seven authors in the first edition, and the number grew as the volume was expanded; hence "partes." (Hyder Rollins and Baker and Herschel Baker, The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century [1954] 269) 

{153} Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Many of his poems had found their way into the popular volume of Richard Tottel's Songs and Sonnets Written by the Right Honorable Henry Haward Late Earl of Surrey and Other [1557], known to posterity as the Miscellany. In fact only some forty of the poems were Surrey's; more than ninety are attributed to Thomas Wyatt. (Rollins and Baker 194). 

{154} Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender Conteyning Twelve Aeglogves Proportionable to the Twelve Monethes [1579]. Theocritus, Virgil, and Sannazaro represent the pastoral tradition which the Calender follows. Sidney objects that none of them affects archaic language. 

{155} Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc [1571].

{156} Aristotle, Poetics V.i. It was commonly believed that Aristotle limited the action of drama to a single day, or what computer game designers now call "real-time." Aristotle was descibing current practice, not laying down rules. 

{157} This is not Eunuchus but Heautontimouromenos (see note 127 above). Sidney, as was very common at the time and well into the seventeenth century, appears to be working from memory alone for most of his citations. 

{158} Probably a reference to the Captivi of Plautus.

{159} Calecut: Calicut, a port on the southwest, or Malibar, coast of India, reached by Vasco da Gama in 1498.

{160} Pacolet, the magician in the medieval romance Valentine and Orson, had a horse that could transport him instantaneously to his destination. 

{161} Message runner.

{162} ab ovo: "out of the egg." Horace, Ars poetica.

{163} The story is from Euripides' Hecuba.

{164} Hercules, in mythology, fell in love with Omphale, giving her the leverage to order him to yet more labors besides the famous Twelve which he had just completed. 

{165} Aristotle, Poetics V.i. What Aristotle actually says is that comedy examines the ludicrous but not to the extent of finding humor in pain. 

{166} "There is no greater unhappiness in poverty than than it makes men appear silly." Juvenal, Satires III.

{167} Thraso: a character in Terence, Eunuchus.

{168} Buchanan: George Buchanan, the tutor of James VI.

{169} Nizolian paper bookes: common-place books containing a copia of useful phrases, the misuse of which could lead to writing that smelled of "ink-horn termes" (Wilson, Arte of Rhetorique [1553]). 

{170} Cicero, In Catilinam I: "Senatus haec intelligit, consu videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? Imo vero etiam in senatum venit..." "The Senate knows this, and the consul has seen it, yet he is still alive. Alive? why, he even comes to his seat in the senate!" The effect of alliteration of "v" in "sees," "lives," "lives," "truth," "comes" (in the Latin), says Sidney, is imitative of someone so filled with moral indignation that he hasn't time to prepare a formal speech on the topic. 

{171} Similiter cadenses: similiter cadentes, use of similar-sounding endings of nouns and clauses in excessive imitation of Cicero. (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 207)

{172} The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric criticized by Plato for being too ready to take either side of a question for pay. The story of the eggs was an old (Thomas More used it) but still useful joke in Sidney's time. 

{173} M. Antonius and L. Crassus, first century B.C.E. Cicero, De oratore II.i. 

{174} pounded: impounded.

{175} Tower of Babel, Genesis 10.

{176} "plaise, taise" require two-syllable pronunciation to take his point.

{177} "motion, potion" in Sidney's example of sdrucciola are three-syllable words.

{178} Attributed to Aristotle by Boccaccio, De genealogia deorum XIV.vii. (Duncan-Jones 390, Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 208) 

{179} Scaliger, Poetics III.xix.

{180} Conrad Clauser, preface to 1543 translation of Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, De natura deorum gentilium. (Duncan- Jones 390) "Quid non?" is "What not?" 

{181} Landin: Cristoforo Landino, preface to edition [1481] of Dante Alighieri, Divina commedia. (Duncan-Jones and Van Dorsten 209) 

{182} "Of a free father born." Horace, Satires I.iv. 

{183} Herculea proles: "descendants of Hercules."

{184} "If these my numbers have any power." Virgil, Aeneid IX.

{185} Plinius Secundus, Historia Naturalis XXXVI.v. The sculptor Bupalus was driven to kill himself by the recited poetry of Hipponax. (Duncan-Jones 390) 

A Selected Bibliography

 Allen, M. J. B. "Sidney's Defense and the Image Making of Plato's Sophist." Sir Philip Sidney's Achievements. Allen, M. J. B., ed., Baker-Smith, Dominic, ed., Kinney, Arthur F., ed., Sullivan, Margaret, ed. New York: AMS, 1990. Rhetoric and Plato in the Defence. 

Attridge, Derek. "Puttenham's Perplexity: Nature, Art, and the Supplement in Renaissance Poetic Theory." Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Parker, Patricia, ed., Quint, David (ed. & introd.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, the Defence, and deconstructionist theory. 

Bergvall, Ake. The "Enabling of Judgement": Sir Philip Sidney and the Education of the Reader. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1989, (Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia 70). The Defence, Plato, Augustine, Aristotle, epistemology and instruction theory. 

Berry, Edward. "The Poet as Warrior in Sidney's Defence of Poetry." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 1989 Winter v29(1). 21-34. Polemics as literary warfare and the poet as the exemplary warrior. 

Bogdan, Deanne. "Sidney's Defence of Plato and the 'Lying' Greek Poets: The Argument from Hypothesis." Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly. 1986 Fall v7(1), 43-54. Sidney's understanding of Plato's poetics. Coogan, Robert M. "More Dais Than Dock: Greek Rhetoric and Sidney's Encomium on Poetry." Studies in the Literary Imagination 1982 Spring v15(1), 99-113. Defence as an instance of Classical rhetoric in action. 

________________. "The Triumph of Reason: Sidney's Defense and Aristotle's Rhetoric." Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. 1981 Summer v17(3), 255-270. Sidney and Aristotelian epideictic rhetoric. 

DeNeef, A. Leigh. "Opening and Closing the Sidneian Text."Sidney Newsletter 1981 v2(1), 3-6. Textual criticism and Defence. 

Devereux, James A. "The Meaning of Delight in Sidney's Defence of Poesy." Studies in the Literary Imagination. 1982 Spring v15(1), 85-97. 

Doherty, M. J. The mistress-knowledge: Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie and Literary Architectonics in the English Renaissance. Nashville: VUP 1991. Includes bibliography. Sidney and epistemology. 

Dorsten, Jan van. "How Not to Open the Sidneian Text." Sidney Newsletter 1981 v2(2), 4-7. A reply to DeNeef on textual criticism of the 

Defence. Duncan-Jones, Katherine, and Jan Van Dorsten. Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973. This prose anthology includes a nicely annotated Defence with an outline of its encomiastic structure and marginalia to help keep the outline in mind. 

_______________________. Sir Philip Sidney. Oxford: OUP, 1989. This is the most useful of the many anthologies of Sidney's poetry and prose. A volume in the Oxford Authors series, its notes are comprehensive. 

Dundas, Judith. "'To speak metaphorically': Sidney in the Subjunctive Mood." Renaissance Quarterly 1988 Summer v41(2), 268-287. Defence and metaphor. 

Fargnoli, Joseph. "Patterns of Renaissance Imagination in Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie." Massachusetts Studies in English 1982 v8(3), 36-42. Renaissance theories of the imagination and the Defence. 

Ferguson, Margaret W. Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry. New Haven: YUP, 1983. Studies of Defence and similar works: Du Bellay, Tasso. 

Fonesca, Terezinha A. The 'Correlitiue Knowledge of Thinges': Relations and Intertextuality in 'Astrophil and Stella' and 'A Defence of Poetry'. Diss. Abs. 1989 Apr. v49(10), 3032A. 

Hamilton, A. C. "Sidney's Humanism." Sir Philip Sidney's Achievements. Allen, M. J. B., ed., Baker-Smith, Dominic, ed., Kinney, Arthur F., ed. Sullivan, Margaret, ed. New York: AMS, 1990. Defence as a late Renaissance document. 

______________. Sir Philip Sidney: a Study of His Life and Works. Cambridge: CUP, 1977. A standard biography and literary introduction. 

Heninger, S. K., Jr. "'Metaphor' and Sidney's Defence of Poesie." John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne. 1982 v1(1-2), 117-149. Mimesis and metaphor, Aristotle's Poetics and Rhetoric, and the Defence. 

___________________. "Sidney and Boethian Music" SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 1983 Winter v23(1), 37-46. Boethius, Plato, Aristotle, mimesis, and Defence. 

___________________. "Sidney and Serranus' Plato." English Literary Renaissance. 1983 Spring v13(2), 146-161. The Defence and Plato, Serres, Estienne, and translation. See also: 27-44 in Sidney in Retrospect: Selections from English Literary Renaissance. Kinney, Arthur F., ed.. Amherst: UMP; 1988.

___________________. "Speaking Pictures: Sidney's Rapprochement between Poetry and Painting." Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours: A Collection of Critical and Scholarly Essays. Waller, Gary F., ed., Moore, Michael D., ed. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984. The Defence, Aristotle's Poetics, and critical theory. 

Herman, Peter C. "'Do As I Say, Not As I Do': The Apology for Poetry and Sir Philip Sidney's Letters to Edward Denny and Robert Sidney." Sidney Newsletter 1989 v10(1), 13-24. Sidney's poetics reflects humanistic education, especially as touching upon morality. Correspondence shows the same influence. 

Hunt, John. "Allusive Coherence in Sidney's Apology for Poetry." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 1987 Winter v27(1), 1-16. Coherence and ambiguity in the Defence. 

Hunter, C. Stuart. "Erected Wit and Infected Will: Sidney's Poetic Theory and Poetic Practice." Sidney Newsletter 1984 Fall- Winter v5(2), 3-10. The Defence and Astrophil and Stella. 

Kimbrough, Robert. Sir Philip Sidney. New York: Twayne, 1971. A volume in the Twayne English Authors series. Biography, literary history, criticism. With annotated bibliography. 

Kouwenhoven, Jan Karel. "Sidney, Leicester, and The Faerie Queene." Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend. Dorsten, Jan van, ed. Baker-Smith, Dominic (ed. & pref.) Kinney, Arthur F. (ed. & pref.) Leiden: Brill, 1986. Discusses connection between Defence and Sidney's partisanship with Leicester at Court. 

Martin, Christopher. "Sidney's Defence: The Art of Slander and the Slander of Art." Sidney Newsletter 1988 v9(1) p3-10. The encomium as polemics. 

Miller, Anthony. "Sidney's Apology for Poetry and Plutarch's Moralia." English Literary Renaissance 1987 Autumn v17(3), 259-276. Plutarch as a source in French. 

Myrick, Kenneth O. Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1935. The classic study of Sidney and Castiglione. 

Payne, Paula H. "Aristotle's Rhetoric: 'Matter' and 'Manner' in Sidney's Sonnet Sequence, Astrophil and Stella, and in His Defence of Poesie." Diss Abs. 1988 Aug. v49(2), 260A. 

______________. "Tracing Aristotle's Rhetoric in Sir Philip Sidney's Poetry and Prose." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 1990 Summer v20(3). 241-250, The Rhetoric in both the Defence and in Astrophil and Stella. 

Pears, Stewart A., ed. The Correspondence of Sir Philip Sidney and Hubert Languet. London: Pickering, 1845. Continental humanists continued in the tradition of Erasmus in guiding the bright stars of English literature, as exemplified by Languet's friendship with Sidney. 

Prescott, Anne L. "King David as a 'Right Poet': Sidney and the Psalmist." English Literary Renaissance 1989 Spring v19(3), 131-151. The Book of Psalms and Sidney's poetics. 

Qiu, Zihua. "The Aesthetic Manifesto of English Humanism: On Sidney's Defence of Poesie." Foreign Lit. Studies. 1986 Mar. v31(1), 9,49-54. China. Defence as a document of the Renaissance humanist tradition. 

Raitiere, Martin N. "The Unity of Sidney's Apology for Poetry." SEL: Studies in English Literature. 1981 Winter v21(1), 37-57. 

Reichert, John. "Do Poets Ever Mean What They Say?" New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation. 1981 Autumn v8(1), 53-68. How literary conventions mask the power gestures of authors. 

Robinson, Forrest G. The Shape of Things Known; Sidney's Apology in its Philosophical Tradition. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1972. Sidney and epistemology. 

Schleiner, Louise. "Spenser and Sidney on the Vaticinium." Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual. 1985 v6, 129-45. The Shepheardes Calender and the Defence on vaticinium. 

Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defense of Poesie. London: Ponsonby, 1595. Reprinted in facsimile by The Scolar Press, Menston, 1968. Used for the present edition. 

__________________. The Norwich Sidney Manuscript: The Apology for Poetry. Mahl, Mary R., ed. Northridge, CA: SFVSC, 1969. This is the official transcription of the famous Sidney manuscript that was found in 1960, mis-shelved as "A Treatise of Horseman Shipp." While not holograph, nor even of so early date as the Ponsonby edition, it was copied from another ms., possibly from Sidney's original, and is of great value to scholarship. 

_________________.Prose works. Feuillerat, Albert, ed. Cambridge: CUP, 1962. 4 vols. (First edition appeared 1912-26). Useful as primary source. 

__________________. The works of the Honourable Sir Philip Sidney, kt. London: 1724-1725. 3 vols. A standard collection from days gone by. 

Sinfield, Alan. "The Cultural Politics of the Defence of Poetry." Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and in Ours: A Collection of Critical and Scholarly Essays. Waller, Gary F., ed., Moore, Michael D., ed. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Pagan literature and Puritanism. 

Gerald. "Dissociation of Sensibility and the Apology for Poetry in the Twentieth Century." Studies in the Literary Imagination 1982 Spring v15(1), 115-128. Eliot, New Criticism, and Sidney. 

Donald V. "Sidney's Concept of Tragedy in the Apology and in the Arcadia." Studies in Philology. 1982 Winter v79(2), 41-61. Aristotle, the Arcadia, George Buchanan, tragedy and comedy.

 Ulreich, John C., Jr. "'The Poets Only Deliver': Sidney's Conception of Mimesis." Studies in the Literary Imagination. 1982 Spring v15(1), 67-84. The failure of the literal and its inevitable absorption into the mimetic and metaphorical. 

Voss, A. E. "The 'Right Poet' in Astrophil and Stella." Unisa English Studies: Journal of the Department of English 1986 Sept. v24(2), 7-10. Defence and Astrophil and Stella. 

Wallace, Malcolm. W. The Life of Sir Philip Sidney. Cambridge: CUP, 1915. Still the standard biography. Sympathetic, but with a minimum of the enthusiast's distortion. 

Webster, John. William Temple's Analysis of Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry. Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 32. 1984. Discussion of Sir William Temple's Analysis Tractationis de Poesi Contextae a Nobilissimo Viro Philippe Sidneio Equite Aurato. 

Weiner, Andrew D. "Sidney, Protestantism, and Literary Critics: Reflections on Some Recent Criticism of The Defense of Poetry." Sir Philip Sidney's Achievements. Allen, M. J. B., ed., Baker- Smith, Dominic, ed. Kinney, Arthur F., ed., Sullivan, Margaret, ed. New York: AMS, 1990. The continuing influence of Gosson's attitude. 

________________. Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism : a Study of Contexts. Minneapolis, MN: UMP, 1978. Includes bibliography. Puritans and Poetics.