Within the current scholarly excitement in early modern studies, two of the most powerful and controversial concepts are and A third, romance, has long been of interest, and it too is being rewritten in intriguing ways. In particular, intense pressure has been brought to bear upon through the controversies involving Lawrence Stone, Alan Macfarlane, Peter Laslett, and other social historians; and upon from the extraordinary range and energy of feminisms, theoretical, scholarly, and practical, Anglo-American and European. Meanwhile, romance, a staple of traditional scholarship, is being newly scrutinized by a variety of feminists and cultural historians.2 Behind these revaluations stand, inevitably, the figures of Freud and Marx, their insights (and errors) written over and over into later discourses. Marx's readings of family and gender are still suggestive, while the Marxist reading of history is repeatedly, and differently, rewritten as a never-ending romance. The Freudian models of family and gender are the more obviously pervasive, but they too have been radically rewritten-by Kleinians, object relationists, Lacanians, feminists.3 And in these swirling currents those of us who focus on early modern England place texts which we so long took for granted-by Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney-together with texts by writers hitherto marginalized by class, race, or gender. It is a fascinating time in which to be at work in the early modern period. The lives and writings of the Sidney family between about 1580 and 1630 have increasingly gravitated to the center of this excitement.4 Quite apart from Philip, the