Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet

Rating:
Summary: Disjointed, difficult to follow.
Review: Out of print? Good! This book is so filled with bits of extraneous material that it is almost impossible to follow. Despite considerable interest in the subject matter, and despite returning to the book four or five times, I could not distinguish which facts pertained to Sir Philip Sidney and which to the hundreds of people with whom he came into contact without almost graphing out the characters. It was worse than any Russian novel.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: What a great book! This is biography at its best. Katherine Duncan-Jones succeeds in that most difficult of tasks - writing a biographical work that is at the same time scholarly and amusing. She paints a convincing portrait of this gifted, generous and tormented individual,who was also remarkably tolerant and warm-hearted for the times in which he lived. Sidney emerges from this book as a sophisticated and highly intelligent man who felt bitter and frustrated because of the unfair treatment he received at the hands of a capricious Queen, in whose service he nevertheless lost his very life. Altogether, I found Sidney very different from the typical Elizabethan - his dislike of hunting as a cruel, bloody sport, and his enlightened views on women are some of the traits in which we recognize a modern mind. And, nevertheless, after his absurd death he became a sort of hero or role-model for his contemporaries - many of whom hadn't recognized his worth while he lived. Duncan-Jones writes elegantly and in an entertaining style, quoting extensively from Sidney's writings as well as from those of his relatives and friends. I completely disagree with another reviewer, who criticized the "extraneous material" and the quantity of facts and persons in the book. No material is extraneous here: everything is relevant, either to Sidney's life or to the social and political context in which it must be viewed. As to the amount of characters - well, think about your own life: if someone were to write your biography, how many characters would there be? Four of five? I wouldn't trust a biography that didn't have many characters (even counting only the significant ones). After all, every person's life is complex - and full of other persons. All in all, this book is highly recommended - you'll gain a great awareness of an exceptional man.