Critical accounts of Sidney's life and writings frequently begin by listing numerous different roles that could be used to describe him: courtier, poet, patron, diplomat, soldier, humanist correspondent. No single term adequately embraces the multifaceted nature of his short yet complex life. Equally there are many different stories that can be told about Sidney, fashioning him variously as a model for his contemporaries of chivalric and courtly conduct, as an innovative literary craftsman and theorist, as the great hope of European militant Protestantism, or as the victim of Elizabeth's vacillatory domestic and foreign policy whose ‘great expectations’ of advancement were frustrated repeatedly. Sidney himself is often complicit in the creation of such stories, particularly those relating to his dashed hopes and obstructed ambitions in love and politics. Sidney's early death aged thirty-one, after being wounded at Zutphen in the Netherlands, initiates the myth-formation that often follows the premature death of a popular public figure. The creation of a Sidney ‘myth’ is another form of story-telling, but one in which what Sidney represents, and what he could or should have done had he lived, are just as significant - if not more so - than what he actually he did when alive. This book therefore attempts to address both the man and the myth, and remain sensitive to successive fashionings and refashionings of Sidney undertaken, not only by the writer himself, but by his closest contemporaries who play a significant role in shaping his posthumous reputation.

This book offers a structured introduction to Sidney's major writings through examining the relationship between the writer and his conception of his works’ function. It would be misleading, however, to view Sidney wholly as a literary figure whose work can be divorced from his wider role as courtier and statesman. Informed by the direction of Sidney scholarship of the last twentyfive years the present study also addresses the political and historical context of the writer's works and the complexity of his conception of what may (and should) be achieved in the public sphere through rhetoric and poetics. I therefore also discuss Sidney's writings in relation to his individual construction of personal identity, his cultural milieu and associated coterie and patronage networks, and his active response to the politics of continental Europe and the Elizabethan court.