ABSTRACT
Sir Philip Sidney’s participation in The Four Foster Children of Desire and the authorship of Astrea by his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, are only two examples of such entertainments from an incomparable Sidney family legacy. Other entertainments supervised for Queen Anne by Robert Sidney and masques and tilts with his nephews William and Philip Herbert centered on Prince Henry from 1609 until his unexpected death in 1612, and thereafter on Prince Charles. Leicester’s historic patronage to public entertainment set the stage for the extraordinary patronage of later generations. The public entertainment at Kenilworth, Warwickshire in July 1575, unrivaled in her reign, lasted seventeen days. Philip wrote two political entertainments and entered his own Arcadia as the shepherd Philisides; Mary found in her entertainment and her play how a woman could be as politically poetic and succeed, paving the way for Robert, in middle age and home from the Netherlands, to become Queen Anne’s Lord High Chamberlain.
