ABSTRACT
The Sidney family came to Penshurst Place, Kent (Illustrations 3 and 4) in 1552, and have retained the house and its landed estate to the present day. This chapter discusses the cultural achievement that Leicester House represents as an example of advanced architectural design for the 1630s. Leicester House can be incorporated with the Sidney family’s history of collecting that is better understood for Penshurst Place. Directions in research using Penshurst Place are traceable as two broad strands, distinguished by a primary interest in the physical or the textual. Both strands have the potential to converge on the theme of the fashioning of the self in the early modern period, but there is arguably more groundwork to be done on the material aspects of the Sidneys. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of the material world of the Sidneys, exploring themes that, like Jonson’s masque characters, display “poesie, historie, architecture and sculpture” on the same stage.
