by Linda Theil
"If you marry a wife, and if you beget children like your-self, you will be doing better service to your country than if you could cut the throats of a thousand Spaniards or Frenchmen." *
So said French protestant teacher and diplomat Hubert Languet to young Philip Sydney during their decade-long correspondence beginning in 1573. Languet's Sydney correspondence was published in the original Latin in 1633, and was translated into English along with some of Sidney's reply in 1845 by Steuart A. Pears. Pears' work was reprinted along with a new introduction by William A. Bradley in 1912. The 1845 edition is available free on Google Books; the 1912 edition can be purchased in reproduction from Leopold Classic Library on Amazon for $18.45. Various other sources of the correspondence are also available.
The existence and availability of this trove of primary source material was made known to us by Elizabeth Quattrocki Knight, MD, PhD during her presentation "Could Philip Sidney be the 'fair youth' of the sonnets?" before the Las Angeles Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable on April 13, 2024.
Knight calls on her education and research in neurology to examine the Languet correspondence for evidence of a potential link between Shakespeare's 17 so-called "fair youth" sonnets and Philip Sydney, with Languet as the poet. A video of Knight's presentation will be available on the LA Roundtable's YouTube channel in May 2024.
* Letter of Hubert Languet to Philip Sidney
from Frankfurt May 2, 1578
translated from the Latin original by Steuart A. Pears, MA Oxford and
published by William Pickering, London 1845