page_title: Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester
section_title: Music and poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester / Music and poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester (1563-1626). Courtesy of the British Museum, London.
context_page_description: Robert Sidney, 1st Earl of Leicester, second son of Sir Henry Sidney, was a statesman of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He was also a patron of the arts and a poet. His mother, Mary Sidney née Dudley, was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth I and a sister of Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, an advisor and favourite of the Queen.
context_section_description: Leicester was a man of taste and a patron of literature, whose cultured mode of life at his country seat, Penshurst Place, was celebrated in verse by Ben Jonson.
  Robert Sidney was a patron of musicians, as is proved by his being the dedicatee of Robert Jones’s First Booke of Songes and Ayres (1600) and A Musicall Banquet (1610) compiled by Robert Dowland, son of the composer John Dowland. Sidney had agreed to be godfather to John Dowland’s son, and A Musicall Banquet opens with a Galliard by John Dowland entitled Syr Robert Sidney his Galliard.
  Though the brother of one of the most famous poets in the English language, it was not suspected that Robert Sidney had himself been a poet until the 1960s, when his working notebook emerged (in a 19th-century binding) through the dispersal of the Library of Warwick Castle. Subsequent research showed it had been acquired in 1848 after passing through a number of sales beginning with the dispersal of the library at Penshurst in the early 19th century. Sold again at Sotheby's and acquired by the British Library in 1975 (catalogued as Add MS 58435), the autograph is, as its first editor P. J. Croft pointed out, "the largest body of verse to have survived from the Elizabethan period in a text entirely set down by the poet himself". Dating apparently from the latter half of the 1590s when Robert Sidney was governor of Flushing, the collection comprises 66 sonnets, songs, pastorals, elegies and slighter pieces, apparently structured as a kind of reply to Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella. They show Robert Sidney as an advocate of the Neo-platonic philosophy of love and adept at a great variety of verse forms. The fact that several of the poems are based on identifiable tunes confirms his interest in music. While he cannot be placed in the first rank of Elizabethan poets, his poems are by no means negligible and of the greatest interest for the working methods and intellectual interests of the period.
caption: Engraved portrait of Sidney by Simon de Passe, 1617
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