Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) was an English courtier, soldier and writer, the model of the Elizabethan gentleman. Nephew of the Earl of Leicester and educated at Shrewsbury and Oxford, he traveled widely in Europe, served as a diplomat and sat in Parliament, but Elizabeth distrusted his Protestant zeal and kept him from high office. In the enforced leisure of the early 1580s he wrote the prose romance Arcadia for his sister, the sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella and The Defence of Poesy, the first major work of English literary criticism. None was published in his lifetime. He died of a wound received fighting the Spanish at Zutphen, aged thirty-one.