Editing Philip Sidney (section)

===Literary writings===
Like the best of the Elizabethans, Sidney was successful in more than one branch of literature, but none of his work was published during his lifetime. However, it circulated in manuscript. His finest achievement was a sequence of 108 love sonnets. These owe much to [[Petrarch]] and [[Pierre de Ronsard]] in tone and style, and place Sidney as the greatest Elizabethan sonneteer after [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]]. Written to his mistress, Lady Penelope Rich, though dedicated to his wife, they reveal true lyric emotion couched in a language delicately archaic. In form Sidney usually adopts the Petrarchan [[Octave (poetry)|octave]] (ABBAABBA), with variations in the [[sestet]] that include the English final couplet. His artistic contacts were more peaceful and significant for his lasting fame. During his absence from court, he wrote ''[[Astrophel and Stella]]'' (1591) and the first draft of ''The Arcadia'' and ''[[An Apology for Poetry|The Defence of Poesy]]''. Somewhat earlier, he had met [[Edmund Spenser]], who dedicated ''[[The Shepheardes Calender]]'' to him. Other literary contacts included membership, along with his friends and fellow poets [[Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke|Fulke Greville]], [[Edward Dyer]], Edmund Spenser and [[Gabriel Harvey]], of the (possibly fictitious) "[[Areopagus (poetry)|Areopagus]]", a humanist endeavour to classicise English verse. {{citation needed|date=July 2022}}