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Whatever its shortcomings, and despite its manifest quirkiness, the new biography of Sir Philip Sidney by Katherine Duncan-Jones (1991) is bound to precipitate new crises of interpretation for Sidneans - a faction that has endured more than its share of such crises over the last couple of decades. Among other controversial assertions, she proposes new dates for major works and raises almost-new questions about Sidney's sexuality. But surely what is most controversial about her life of Sidney - what will have us scrambling to our word processors like fighter pilots to their jets - is the evidence she presents that Sidney's relations with Catholics were much wanner and more extensive than has heretofore been generally perceived or - dare one say it? - conceded. The likely victims - if that's not too strong a word - of Duncan-Jones' revisionism will be those critics - and there have been many - who claim that Sidney was, in the words of Arthur F. Marotti, "an ambitious and irresponsible radical Protestant,"1 Similar views have been expounded by Alan Sinfield and, most notably, by Andrew D. Weiner whose influential 1978 book Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism presented the most extensive and impassioned argument that Sidney was in fact a deeply committed Calvinist.2 In light of the new biography such views are tenable only in the narrowest terms, true of Sidney's political career only, and of that only in its final year.
For every brash with which we might paint Sidney as a radical Protestant, there is another that could be used to show, in Duncan-Jones' words, "a crypto-Catbolic."3 The way to resolve this impasse - starkly opposing interpretations of Sidney's religious nature - is to begin by distinguishing more clearly than Protestant apologists typically do, between Sidney's personal faith, which seems to me to have been rather liberal, and Ms career ambitions, wMch were almost wholly connected with the politics of Protestantism.
The case is undeniable that Sidney's public, political life was shaped to accord with the official ideology of Reformed Protestantism. But Languet's aspirations for him, Sidney's own relationship with Protestant heads of state in Europe, his service as governor of Flushing - experiences all connected to the political imperative of Protestantism - little impinge...