The one thing most people know about the life of Sir Philip
Sidney (1554–1586) was almost certainly invented by the man who
first told the story, Sidney’s lifelong friend and biographer Fulke
Greville. Wounded in the Battle of Zutphen, and “being thirsty
with excess of bleeding,” Sidney called for a drink:

But as he was putting the bottle to his mouth he saw a poor
soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast,
ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle; which Sir Philip
perceiving, took it from his head before he
drank, and delivered
it to the poor man with these words: “Thy necessity is yet
greater than mine.”

Greville refurbished a story Plutarch told about Alexander
the Great. The Sidney myth began early, as Alan Stewart reminds
us at the outset of this new biography.
For centuries Sidney was an
exemplar of
the Renaissance polymath and prodigy, the finest
flower of Elizabethan chivalry. As so often, it was left to T. S.
Eliot, in “A Cooking Egg,” to supply the irony:

I shall not want Honour in Heaven,

For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

And have talk with Coriolanus

And other heroes of that kidney.

Eliot is typically obliquely subversive. Neither Coriolanus nor
Sidney were straightforward “heroes.” Sidney’s bravery failed to
prevent the Spanish from taking Zutphen. This may, paradoxically,
account for his fame: the English admire a