In December, 2019, video editor Jason Doty finished our Sidney Documentary. We had filmed the interviews at the Renaissance Society of America meeting on March 23, 2018 in a suite at the Hilton Hotel. Over the summer, I logged the video tapes and Jason roughed out the sequence of talking heads. It took a year to put together financing to edit the B roll, which finally came from the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University and Stetson University. Meanwhile we searched for visuals, and I wrote a script, some of which made it into the documentary, whose main theme remains “Who is Philip Sidney?”
The resulting video is in High Definition, suitable for network broadcast. None of the material is in copyright except possibly the opening shot of Derek Jacoby as the Chorus calling for a “Muse of Fire” from Kenneth Branagh’s movie version of Shakespeare’s Henry V. It’s a great scene and illustrates the powerful influence of the Arcadia—where the leading men are Musidorus (gift of the muses) and Pyrocles (fire and glory)—on Shakespeare’s imagination.
Videographer Caitlyn Foster traveled to England on a grant from Stetson University to photograph one of the few visual representations of Sidney, his statue in Shrewsbury, where he attended school in the late 1560s.