1. See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), x: ‘Literature itself is conceived neither as a separate and separable aesthetic realm nor as a mere product of culture, but as one realm among many for the negotiation and production of social meaning, of historical subjects, and of the systems of power that at once enable and constrain those subjects.’
2. Stephen Cohen, ‘Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism,’ in Renaissance Literature and its Formal Engagements, edited by Mark David Rasmussen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 31.
3. Hence Marjorie Levinson writes that the New Formalism ‘reassert[s] … the critical (and self-critical) agency of which artworks are capable,’ in ‘What Is New Formalism?’ in PMLA 122.2 (2007): 558–69. See also the essays collected in Rasmussen, Renaissance Literature; and in Shakespeare and Historical Formalism, edited by Stephen Cohen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). On the New Formalism in literary studies more generally, see the essays collected in Reading for Form, edited by Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007).
4. The Defence was posthumously published; likely composed during the winter of 1579/80, it references Edmund Spenser’s recently published The Shepheardes Calendar and may be a reply to Gosson’s The School of Abuse, which was published early in 1579. For a full discussion of the date see Sir Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose, edited by Jan A. Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 59–63.
5. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 218. Subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the body of the text.