ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals how Fulke Greville’s biography of the renowned Elizabethan poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney, A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, generated an ideological fiction of English racial identity and supremacist politics. It shows, Greville’s treatment of Drake’s character in the Dedication goes beyond dispraise. The lives and experiences of Cimarrones, Black Africans who escaped Spanish enslavement in the Americas and established their own independent communities (palenques), are central to Greville’s assertion of English supremacy and Spanish inferiority through the mythology of the Sidney-prophet. The Dedications’s theorization of Sidney’s “nature” mirrors early modern conduct literature’s efforts to locate the source of humans’ inherent characteristics. The treatise’s commitment to absolute English political hegemony is apparent through the discourse of comparative racialization, an account of religious, ethno-cultural, behavioral, and embodied characteristics of the peoples comprising the European nations.
