Sidney and Money

Abstract This chapter applies recent biographical discoveries to move beyond conventional accounts of Sidney as either idealistically naïve or callowly profligate in money matters. Rather, it argues, Sidney’s self-conscious style interrogates his own courtly success in linking sophisticated performance to material advantage. The chapter reviews the material context in which Sidney and his family operated as Tudor elites. It recounts Sidney’s own history of income and expense, focusing on how his experience of credit and debt influences the style of his letters and his courtly pageantry around the crisis of Leicester’s marriage. It ends by considering sonnets from Astrophil and Stella that elaborate the complex relations of artistic production to money matters in Sidney’s mature style.