The Making of Sir Philip Sidney

Andrew Taylor is a professor of English specializing in Medieval Studies
at the University of Saskatchewan.

This elegant and persuasive study provides valuable insights into the
complexities of Elizabethan court culture and the early history of
autobiography. Its title refers not to the posthumous construction of
Sidney, the perfect knight, or to the full social construction of
identity, the Renaissance self-fashioning explored by Stephen
Greenblatt, but to Sidney’s construction of his literary personae. As
Berry notes in his introduction, his study touches on central questions
in current cultural theory: “whether we possess an essential self;
whether we construct our own identity, or whether society constructs it
for us, whether what we call identity is something more than a
fiction.”

Berry claims that methodologically eclectic study offers no answers to
these questions, but it certainly suggests them. While he acknowledges
Greenblatt as a major influence, his book actually makes a forceful
argument for a more traditional position, depicting Sidney as a strong
and relatively stable essential self who uses literary fictions to
fashion a public identity. This biographical Sidney is a man of
exceptional promise burdened by the weight of his family’s
expectations and his need to carve out a place for himself at the court
and as the leader of a Protestant faction. He is short-tempered but
conscientious and solemn, assuming a witty manner as an act of filial
duty. He must negotiate various conflicting codes, such as those of
Ciceronian friendship and the realities of the court. He is subject to
sexual desires, although Berry only touches on these gingerly. Berry
traces a coherent literary career, running from Sidney’s schoolboy
exercises in Latin and his early correspondence with his tutor, Hubert
Languet, through his major works, capturing Sidney’s ambivalent
attitude toward his writing, which he perceived both as a lapse from his
sterner political duties and as a means of making himself anew.