Sidney and the Court

Abstract Legend imagines Sidney as an ideal courtier, but in life Sidney’s courtly gifts never fully delivered on his great expectations. While Sidney shared this experience of perpetual frustrations and disappointments with many minor members of Elizabeth’s court, what makes him unusual were his actual and literary responses to his situation. Once unseated as Leicester’s heir, Sidney turned to paternal military legacies as a primary avenue for his courtly ambitions, but he had to do so in a milieu where feudal martial service to a king had been displaced by rhetorically savvy counsel and seemingly ornamental service to a queen. For Sidney, athletics were a gateway between courts and camps. Chivalric combats, horsemanship, and other sports mediated these forms of courtly service and provided male courtiers with sites of negotiation and possibility. Athletics likewise provides Sidney with literary means to illuminate synergies and conflicts between courtly civility and violent wildness, and words and action, as he explores the courtier’s gender and socioeconomic status in works such as Astrophil and Stella, The Defence of Poesy, and the New Arcadia.