Sidney and Politics

Abstract Philip Sidney’s life cannot be separated from international politics of the 1570s and 1580s. This chapter surveys and reassesses diverse scholarly approaches to Sidney’s political career in relation to the question of political theory implicit within his Arcadia. On Sidney’s political activity, dominant biographical premises of the late twentieth century need to be reconciled more precisely with documentary evidence of royal favour and with current historiography regarding the foreign policy of Elizabeth I and her inner regime. On political theory, the hermeneutic terms of a long-standing debate should be adjusted regarding law and religion, so as to identify more precisely intellectual convergence and divergence between specific sixteenth-century theories associated and dissociated with Sidney’s thought in modern scholarship. Here new analysis of the Arcadia’s texts focuses on their nuanced representations of sovereignty and rebellion, whereby Sidney’s fiction conveys a political perspective that extends the Lutheran legacy of Philip Melanchthon while both qualifying and complementing it with a legal particularism reminiscent of Jean Bodin’s political thought.