Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney is one of the most well-known of Elizabethan sonneteers, and a key poet in contributing towards the fashionable success of the genre. Born in 1554 in Penshurst in Kent, Sidney was educated in Oxford (Christ Church) and Shrewsbury. Sidney was an ambassador (to the German Emperor in 1577), and involved in European politics (his European tour was 1572-1575). He was knighted in 1583, and was governor of Flushing in 1585. He died aged 31 in 1586, following wounds sustained in the Battle of Zutphen.