1. All quotations for The Lady of May are taken from Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, 21–32 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
2. see Robert Kimbrough and Philip Murphy, “The Helmingham Hall Manuscript of Sidney’s The Lady of May: A Commentary and Transcription,” Renaissance Drama 1 (1968): 103–19.
3. Scholars typically propose that Elizabeth did not pick the suitor Sidney expected. For a few key texts on this issue, see Derek B. Alwes, Sons and Authors in Elizabethan England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), pp. 67–74
4. Edward Berry, “Sidney’s May Game for the Queen,” Modern Philology 86 (February 1989): 252–64
5. Christopher Martin, “Impeding the Progress: Sidney’s The Lady of May,” Iowa State Journal of Research 60 (February 1986): 395–405