Amazon.co.uk Review
Philip Sidney was "the ultimate silver-spoon baby". Nephew to the Earls of Leicester and Warwick and son of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, he became a legend if not in his own lifetime, then certainly on his death. Alan Stewart begins Philip Sidney: A Double Life with his funeral and ends with his death but the life in between yields rich pickings. The "double life" ostensibly refers to his role as courtier and poet; it could equally apply to the mythologised biography that sprang up around him even as he breathed his last. When he died aged 31 at Arnhem in 1586 after receiving a wound in battle at Zutphen, he was being spoken of as the next ruler of the Low Countries, having shrugged off the label, Stewart puts it, of being "someone's nephew, someone's son". Certainly he was an excellent European, finding more common intellectual ground on the Continent than in Elizabeth's stifling court, and had he lived he may have been at the forefront of an English Protestant literature and even perhaps European political Protestantism. In fact, the "literary trifles" he wrote whilst away from court--chiefly the prose romance The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, the literary treatise A Defence of Poetry and the 108 sonnets of "Astrophil and Stella"--were not published in his lifetime (more poetry was published in his life about him than by him), yet within a few years his works were scarcely out of print. Today, you will not find them on the National Curriculum and he is read perhaps less than at any time since then.
Alan Stewart's cogent style is the very essence of modern history. Unflustered and unindulgent, he cuts a commanding swathe through the slippery manoeuvrings of the Elizabethan court and does much to correct the half-truths and rumours surrounding Sidney, unpicking the hagiographic knot by a painstaking trawl through the archives of innumerable European academic institutions. Philip Sidney: A Double Life is a remarkably assured debut by a young historian who brings fresh enlightenment to the Renaissance and does considerable justice to a deserving figure, who "slipt into the title of the poet" and of whom it was written at his death, "the very hope of our age seemeth to be utterly extinguished in him". --David Vincent
Review
"A work of great scholarship." -"The Times"
