Queen Elizabeth’s court, 1580: Europe was at war or under Inquisition rule, sea voyages were opening an exciting New World, but England alone kept to a rare and tenuous peace. Philip Sidney was highly-educated, well-travelled and fitted for a career in diplomacy or soldiery, a friend to Europe’s most prominent Protestant intellectuals, many of whom lived in exile. But at home he was idle and fell under a cloud when he opposed the Queen’s marriage to the French Duke of Anjou.

Should Philip, the child of royal servants and scion of the powerful Dudley family, join the stream of exiles? Instead he made another choice: to become a maker or poet. In doing so, despite his unpublished works and early death in 1586 at the age of thirty-two, he became one of the glories of English literature.

When his works were first published posthumously in the 1590s, the playwright Shakespeare, like others of a younger generation, was strongly influenced to carry Sidney’s style, themes and stories onward into As You Like It, King Lear, his own Sonnets and other writings.

Dorothy Connell’s book, first published by Oxford University Press in 1977, now re-issued and updated for the digital age, elegantly bridges the historical, courtly, playful and poetical elements so mixed in Sir Philip Sidney’s life and work in order to give the reader a vibrant picture of the man, his milieu and Renaissance Europe in his time.