By Margaret P. Hannay
Mary Sidney Herbert, the first English woman to achieve a significantliterary reputation, is celebrated for her patronage, for her translations, forher original poems praising Queen Elizabeth and her brother Philip, andespecially for her metrical paraphrase of the biblical Psalms. The third daughter of Sir Henry Sidney and Lady Mary Dudley Sidney, she wasborn on 27 October 1561 at Tickenhall near Bewdley, one of her father's officialresidences as Lord President of the Council in the Marches of Wales; he servedas Lord President from 1559 to 1586 and concurrently as Lord Deputy of Irelandfrom 1565 to 1571 and 1575 to 1578. The fortunes of the Sidneys and the Dudleyswere closely tied to the favour of the monarch. Henry Sidney's father had beenPrince Edward's chamberlain, so the boys grew up together. When Edward becameking, the Sidneys were honoured; when Edward died their fortunes took a downwardturn. Lady Sidney was the daughter of Jane Guildford Dudley and John Dudley,Duke of Northumberland, who was executed for his attempts to put Lady Jane Greyon the throne. Under Queen Mary the Dudley brothers were imprisoned and theirproperties were confiscated, but after Elizabeth came to the throne she gaveparticular favour to them. Lady Sidney served Elizabeth at court until she caughtsmallpox nursing the queen; badly scarred by the disease, Lady Sidney spent therest of her life largely hidden from public sight, yet her wise advice and herfamily connections were essential to her daughter's social position. Mary SidneyHerbert was the niece of Henry Hastings and Katherine Dudley Hastings, Earl andCountess of Huntingdon; of Ambrose Dudley and Anne Russell Dudley, Earl andCountess of Warwick; and of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth'sfavourite. Mary Sidney's brothers were Philip (1554-86); Robert (1563-1626), later Earlof Leicester, and Thomas (1569-95). She also had three sisters: Margaret, whodied in infancy; Elizabeth, who died in Dublin at 1567; and a younger sister,Ambrosia, who died at Ludlow in 1575. She and her sisters were given a superbeducation, analogous to that of Queen Elizabeth and the learned Cooke sisters.She was schooled in scripture and the classics, trained in rhetoric, and wasfluent in French, Italian, and Latin; she may also have known some Greek andHebrew. Like other aristocratic women, she was also trained in householdmedicine and administration, and she excelled in the feminine accomplishments ofmusic (voice and lute) and needlework. After Ambrosia's death Queen Elizabeth invited young Mary to court. Her uncleLeicester subsequently arranged her marriage on 21 April 1577 to the wealthyEarl of Pembroke, Leicester's friend and contemporary. Mary Sidney therebybecame, at age 15, Countess of Pembroke and mistress of Wilton, the primaryPembroke estate, as well as Baynards Castle in London and many smallerproperties. They had four children in rapid succession: William (1580), laterthird Earl of Pembroke; Katherine (1581); Anne (1583); and Philip (1584), laterEarl of Montgomery and fourth Earl of Pembroke. These early years of hermarriage were a time of great joy--and great tragedy. Little Katherine died thesame day that Philip was born in October 1584. In 1586 Mary Sidney's father diedin May and her mother in August. And then, in that same year, her brother Philipdied on 17 October from wounds received in Zutphen, where he was fighting withthe English forces that hoped to rescue the Netherlands from the rule ofCatholic Spain. As a woman she was barred from participating in his elaboratefuneral and from publishing in any of the volumes of elegies put out by theuniversities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Leiden. Overcomeby illness and grief, and then fearing invasion by the Spanish Armada, MarySidney remained at the Pembroke country estates in Wiltshire for two years. She returned to London in November 1588 in a procession that marked herreentry into public life. All of her surviving writings were completed betweenthat date and the death of her husband in 1601. She began her public literaryactivities to honour her brother Philip by serving as patron to those who wrotein his praise, including Edmund Spenser, Thomas Moffet, and Abraham Fraunce; bysupervising the publication of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia that hehad originally written for her (1593 and, with additional works, 1598); bytranslating A Discourse of Life and Death written by his friend Philippede Mornay; by writing two poems in his praise, an early elegy mentioned in her1594 letter to Sir Edward Wotton, probably "The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda,"and her 1599 dedicatory poem "To the Angell Spirit of the Most ExcellentSir Philip Sidney"; and by completing the metrical Psalm paraphrase that hehad begun. The extent of her literary patronage has sometimes been exaggerated, but shedid encourage those in her family and household to write, including her brothersPhilip and Robert; her children's tutor Samuel Daniel; her physician ThomasMoffet; her son William; and her niece and namesake Mary Sidney, later LadyWroth, author of The Countess of Montgomery's Urania, Pamphilia toAmphilanthus, and Love's Victory. The lengthy list of dedications toher indicates that many other writers sought her favour and that of her wealthyhusband. Her own literary works fit approved categories for women – elegy, encomium,and translation – thereby allowing her to stretch the boundaries for women evenwhile she appeared to remain within them. Unlike most early modern womenwriters, she never apologises for, or even mentions, her role as a woman writer,instead presenting her own works as part of the English and Continental literarytradition. She modeled her work primarily on that of her brother Philip,including a similar choice of rhetorical devices (particularly alliteration,polyptoton, chiasmus, and compound epithets), numerous scattered allusions tohis verse, and the recasting of Astrophil and Stella 5 in her paraphraseof Psalm 73. She is also particularly indebted to Spenser, as signaled by herdiction and poetic style, her use of Spenserian characters in "Astrea,"and specific allusions to The Faerie Queene in Psalms 77, 104, and 107. Four of her works appeared in print during her life. She first publishedtwo translations: A Discourse of Life and Death. Written in French byPh[ilippe de] Mornay. Antonius, A Tragœdie written also in French by Ro[bert]Garnier. Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke (London: WilliamPonsonby, 1592). Both works, in the Christian Stoical tradition, emphasisereason over emotion and public duty over private relationships. A Discoursewas reprinted three times and reissued once during her life; its popularity isalso seen in Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson's meditation on that text (FolgerMS V.a.511). Antonius helped to introduce the vogue for closet drama,inspiring subsequent works such as Elizabeth Cary's Mariam; it alsointroduced the Continental custom of using Roman history to comment oncontemporary politics; and it was among the first English dramas to use blankverse. Three years later "The Doleful Lay of Clorinda" was publishedwith other elegies for Sidney in Spenser's Astrophel (1595). "ADialogue between Two Shepherds, Thenot and Piers, in Praise of Astrea,"a pastoral dialogue evidently written for the Queen's intended visit toWilton in 1599, was printed in Francis Davison's collection A PoeticalRapsody (1602). Other works circulated in manuscript. Her translation of Petrarch's "TheTriumph of Death" is preserved only in a transcription of a copy that JohnHarington of Kelston sent to Lucy, Countess of Bedford (Library of the InnerTemple, Petyt MS 538.43.14, ff. 284-86). She is the first English translator touse Petrarch's terza rima form. Equally important is her emphasis ofLaura's voice, thereby giving women an active role in the English Petrarchantradition. Two dedicatory poems are included in just one of the eighteen survivingmanuscripts of the Sidneian Psalmes: "To the Angell Spirit of themost excellent Sir Philip Sidney," which is as much a meditation on herrole as writer as it is elegy for Sidney; and "Even now that care,"which dedicates the Sidneys' poetic paraphrase of the Psalms to Queen Elizabeth(1599). Philip Sidney had begun translating the Psalms into English verse,completing just Psalms 1-43. Pembroke completed the 150 Psalms, including the 22poems of Psalm 119, using a dazzling array of 126 different verse forms. Psalmdiscourse was a recognized form of writing for women. For example, Anne Lock'stwenty-six sonnets meditating on Psalm 51 were published with her translation ofCalvin, Laura Battiferra composed metrical Psalms in Italian to great acclaim,and Thomas Bentley's Monument of Matrones included Psalm versions andmeditations by such "godly" women as Catherine Parr, Anne Askew,Elizabeth Tyrwhit, and Dorcas Martin. Mary Sidney's Psalmes are notablefor their metrical complexity, inspired by the elegant French Psaumes ofClément Marot and Theodore Beza; for their witty word play and use ofrhetorical figures; for their expansion of metaphors to reflect her ownexperience at court and as an aristocratic wife and mother; and for theircareful scholarship in the many Psalm versions and commentaries that sheconsulted in English, Latin, and French. Her Psalmes are a significantartistic achievement in their own right, and they also influencedseventeenth-century devotional verse by writers including George Herbert,Aemilia Lanyer, and John Donne. Donne calls Philip and Mary Sidney "thisMoses and this Miriam" and says that "They shew us Ilanders our joy,our King,/ They tell us why, and teach us how to sing"; thatis, they provided a model for English religious verse. Now that God "hathtranslated those translators," Donne says, "We thy Sydnean Psalmsshall celebrate" (Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (1978), 34-35). Except for some correspondence, nothing else survives that she may havewritten. After her husband's death in 1601 she helped to secure her children'sfuture by arranging marriages and positions at court. But after Queen Elizabethdied two years later, her influence at court waned; as her sons achievedpositions of prominence under King James VI and I they took over her role asliterary patron. In her twenty years as a widow she attempted to put downinsurrections in Cardiff, administered her properties, continued writing andtranslating, built herself the architecturally innovative Houghton House inBedfordshire (identified by local tradition as John Bunyan's House Beautiful),carried on a flirtation with her handsome and learned young doctor Sir MatthewLister, and took the waters for her health in the fashionable Continental townof Spa. She died from smallpox on 25 September 1621 at her home in London. Aftera funeral "according to her quality" in St. Paul's Cathedral, amagnificent torchlight procession took her to Wiltshire for burial in SalisburyCathedral. During her life she was celebrated as a writer. Among the male contemporarieswho praised her works and/or borrowed from them are Samuel Daniel, John Davies,John Donne, Michael Drayton, Gabriel Harvey, George Herbert, Henry Parry,William Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser. Her importance as a role model foryounger women writers is seen in Aemilia Lanyer's dedicatory poem in SalveDeus Rex Judaeorum (1611), and in her niece Mary Wroth's affectionateportrayals of her in Urania (1621) as the Queen of Naples. She is"as perfect in Poetry and all other Princely vertues as any woman that everliv'd, to bee esteemed excellent in any one, [but] shee was stor'd with all, andso the more admirable" (The First Part of The Countess of Montgomery’sUrania by Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts (Binghamton, NY: MRTS /RETS, 1995), 371). Her reputation is also reflected in the portrait engraved bySimon van de Passe in 1618. Dressed in the clothing that signifies herrank--embroidered silk, lace, ermine, and extravagant ropes of pearls--she holdsout to the viewer a volume clearly labeled "Davids Psalms," i.e., theSidneian Psalm paraphrase. The cartouche around the portrait is a design ofquill pens in ink wells, surmounted by a laurel wreath. In this portrait she isthus crowned with the laurel wreath of the poet, as Michael Drayton and othershad described her. She was the first English woman to achieve such recognitionas a poet.
© Margaret P. Hannay, 2000 |
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