Mary Sidney, Patron, Poet, Playwright

Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke (born 27 October 1561)

Mary Sidney was the daughter of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, Mary Dudley--as I noted just a few days ago, when I wrote about Sidney's niece, Mary Sidney Wroth, Mary Dudley was the sister of Guildford Dudley, who was briefly married to Lady Jane Grey just before she was maneuvered onto the throne of England (he was executed just before she was, on 12 February 1554), and of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite.

Mary Sidney Herbert, 1595,
miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard

Well educated, Mary Sidney became a member of Queen Elizabeth's court in 1575, her father and her uncle, Robert Dudley, arranging for her marriage to Henry Herbert, earl of Pembroke. 

Mary Sidney Herbert, the countess of Pembroke, was long recognized for her role as an important literary patron: her home at Wilton House became for twenty-five years the gathering place of a coterie of important writers, including her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, as well as other key Renaissance poets and playwrights like Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton. In her role as literary patron, she was praised for her support by poets like Ben Jonson and John Donne. 

But her own work as a writer, widely recognized in her lifetime, was largely forgotten after her death and has only been recently "recovered"—even now her accomplishments are often denigrated (as "just" translation, for example). Her role in preserving and publishing her brother’s work has also been considered negligible—although, in many ways, it was through her efforts that Sir Philip Sidney was transformed into the Sir Philip Sidney, the quintessential Renaissance man and major figure in Renaissance poetry. 

I certainly never heard anything about Mary Sidney Herbert, either as the woman who "created" Sir Philip Sidney or as a writer, when I was an undergraduate. And I just checked the massive anthology I had while taking courses in graduate school (1972-76), the 1375-pages-long Tudor Poetry and Prose (1953)--in all those pages, there is exactly one selection from Mary Sidney Herbert, some 54 lines of a chorus from a play.

Despite what those few lines in what was then a standard anthology might suggest, the scope of Sidney's work is extraordinary. 

In her Antonius, Sidney refashioned a French play by Robert Garnier, his 1578 Marc-Antoine, not only translating it into English and refocusing attention on the subject (influencing both Samuel Daniel's Cleopatra and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra), but introducing complex characterizations of Cleopatra and employing blank verse. Published in 1592 and republished as The Tragedie of Antonie, the play went through five editions in fifteen years.

Her literary output includes her translation of Philippe de Mornay's A Discourse of Life and Death, a meditation on death with a stoic theme, and of Petrarch’s The Triumph of Death, preserving the original's terza rima form. She also completed a short pastoral drama, "A Dialogue between two Shepherds," a competition in which each attempts to outdo the other in praise of Queen Elizabeth, here in the guise of Astraea.

An engraving of Mary Sidney Herbert,
countess of Pembroke

But Sidney's most significant accomplishment is her translation of the Psalms, a project she began in partnership with her brother. The two managed only forty-three poems before Philip Sidney's death--in completing the project, Mary Sidney employed such a range of forms and meters that at least one editor has concluded that "there is no collection of lyrics in English which uses such a wide range of metre."

In the 107 psalms she translates, Mary Sidney uses an incredible 128 different verse forms (Psalm 119 has twenty-two sections, so that accounts for the numbers). 

A 1599 presentation copy of the Sidney Psalter was prepared for Queen Elizabeth. This manuscript contains two additional poems by Mary Sidney, her dedication poem "Even now that care," addressed to the queen, and her elegy and apostrophe to her brother, "To the Angel Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney." 

For a biographical essay, posted at The Poetry Foundation website, click here. (The site has a complete bibliography, suggestions for further reading, and a few Sidney psalms.) You might also want to consult Margaret Hannay's biography of Mary Sidney, Philip's Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, is excellent. 

There are several affordable editions of her work, but I might suggest a Penguin volume that includes three early-modern English writers: Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemelia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets.

And one more thing: as I mentioned above, earlier this month I posted about Mary Sidney Herbert's niece, Mary Sidney Wroth (the daughter of her younger brother, Robert). Mary Sidney has another writing niece, much less well known: Elizabeth Sidney Manners, countess of Rutland--Sir Philip Sidney's only child. You will find three lyrics attributed to her in vol. 2 (1550-1603) of Donald W. Foster's Women's Works.

Oh, another one more thing--some scholars have argued that Mary Sidney is the "real" author of Shakespeare's plays. If somebody besides Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays, I vote for Mary Sidney. Just because.

Mary Sidney Wroth: Pamphilia, Poetry, and Prose

Mary Sidney, lady Wroth (born 18 October 1587)

The namesake of another Mary Sidney (about whom I'll be posting later this month), today's Mary Sidney is the daughter of Robert Sidney (whose mother, Mary Dudley Sidney, was the sister of Guildford Dudley, who married Jane Grey, and of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite, "Robin"--got all that?). Mary was the daughter of Sidney and first wife, Barbara Gammage, a wealthy heiress (and cousin of Sir Walter Raleigh).

A 1607 portrait thought to be of
Mary Sidney Wroth

Robert Sidney was both a patron of poets and a poet himself. At Penshurst, he welcomed writers and musicians. Ben Jonson would memorialize the artistic coterie promoted by Sidney in his poem "To Penshurst" (long regarded as the first country-house poem, though Aemilia Lanyer's "To Cooke-ham" probably preceded it). 

In the late 1960s, Robert Sidney's own compositions came to light when a manuscript of his poetry was discovered. Dating to the 1590s, the collection includes a variety of lyric forms, most notably that most popular of Renaissance English forms, the sonnet. (If you're interested, you can read about Robert Sidney, the discovery of his manuscript, and the poems themselves by clicking here.)

Mary Sidney's uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, has long been recognized as one of the great poets of early-modern England, but for her aunt and namesake, the third Sidney sibling, that took a bit longer. The elder Mary Sidney is now also recognized as a superlative patron, editor and publisher (of her brother Sir Philip's work) and, more importantly, writer. (As I noted above, I'll be posting on Mary Sidney Herbert later this month.)

Given these literary antecedents and models, that the younger Mary Sidney should choose to become a writer makes perfect sense--though it has taken centuries for her to gain (or, rather, to regain) recognition as a writer. 

In 1604 the younger Mary Sidney was married--unhappily--to Sir Robert Wroth, which has given her the name--Lady Mary Wroth--by which she is now most widely known, if for no other reason, I suspect, than to reduce confusion with her aunt, Mary Sidney (and even her grandmother, Mary [Dudley] Sidney). 

The accomplished Lady Mary
Sidney Wroth, with a lute

As Lady Mary Wroth, she was a member of the court of James I and his wife, Anne of Denmark--the queen was herself a great patron of the arts who was particularly interested in the staging of court masques.

I first encountered Lady Mary Wroth, in fact, not as a writer but as a performer, noted for her participation in the 1605 production of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness and its 1608 sequel, The Masque of Beauty. (Jonson would dedicate The Alchemist to Wroth.)

But Mary Sidney Wroth was more than a performer of work written and produced by others or the recipient of literary compliments, however graceful and flattering.

A reference to her as early as 1613 comments on her poetry and says that "her uncle's noble vein renews" in her. Ben Jonson also refers to Wroth copying out ("inscribing") her poems for private distribution among readers, a typical form of "publication" for early-modern writers.

Wroth's The Countess of Montgomery's Urania (1621) was the first prose romance published by an English woman writer. This pastoral narrative was modeled on Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, a pastoral romance composed at Penshurst and, he says, written to entertain his sister, Mary Sidney, countess of Pembroke. Wroth's Urania was dedicated to her dear friend--and literary patron--Susan de Vere, countess of Montgomery (the daughter of the Elizabethan poet and courtier Edward de Vere).

Attached to the Urania was Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, modeled on Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. In its published version, Wroth's sequence included eighty-three sonnets and twenty songs. Among all the sonnet sequences published in England during the Renaissance, Wroth's is unique, written from the perspective of a female lover, Pamphilia, to a male beloved, Amphilanthus.* But this published version of the sequence is a revision of an earlier version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus--a manuscript version, copied in Wroth's own hand, contains 110 sonnets and songs.

Wroth's sonnet sequence not only follows and subverts the model of sequences like Astrophil and Stella, but within the sequence is the "crown"--a series of fourteen linked sonnets. The series begins with Wroth's most well-known poem, "In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?" The fourteenth (and last) line of each sonnet in this "crown" becomes the first line of the next until the last sonnet in the series: its final line, "In this strange labyrinth, how shall I turn?" takes us back to the beginning, thus bringing the crown full circle.

(The corona, like the sonnet itself, is an Italian poetic form. Sir Philip Sidney had included a corona in Arcadia, linking ten ten-line lyrics and describing this form as "that kind of verse which is called the Crown." Wroth's father, Robert Sidney, also experimented with a crown, notably a crown of sonnets, but he completes only four sonnets and the beginning of a fifth, noting the failure of his effort with "the rest . . . doth want.")

In addition to her prose narrative and her sonnet sequence, with its embedded "Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love," Wroth also composed an original pastoral drama, probably about 1620, Love's Victory. In this she may also have followed Sir Philip Sidney's model--his one-act masque, The Lady of May, was written and performed for Queen Elizabeth in 1578 or 1579, its text preserved in a manuscript copy of Arcadia.

Wroth's life was not without its personal difficulties and complications--not least of which was the scandal that resulted from her daring to publish Urania. I'll leave that to you, if you're interested--you will find an excellent biographical essay here, and it includes a discussion of the "storm of criticism" that followed the publication of Urania.

You will find a complete online edition of her Pamphilia to Amphilanthus here. For Urania, I recommend the edition (abridged) by Mary Ellen Lamb, Mary Wroth: The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. The text of Wroth's pastoral play Love's Victory is in S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne Davies's Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents.

And for an excellent analysis of "why women in the English Renaissance wrote so few sonnet sequences in comparison with Continental women writers and English male writers," I recommend Rosalind Smith's Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560-1621: The Politics of Absence.

And, by the way--while it was originally thought that Wroth's is the first sonnet sequence written by an English woman, it now seems that is not the case. Anne Vaughan Locke (1530-c. 1590) was the first woman to compose a sonnet sequence-- Locke’s A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner was published in 1560, a sequence of 26 sonnets based on Psalm 51. (Actually she was not only the first Englishwoman to write a sonnet sequence, but the first English writer to do so.) Wroth's is certainly the first Petrarchan sequence, with its focus on secular love--though Mary, queen of Scots also wrote sonnets based on Petrarchan models. You can sample by clicking here.

*There were sonnet sequences written from the perspective of female lovers on the Continent--Gaspara Stampa and Louise Labé both wrote Petrarchan sonnets from the point-of-view of a female speaker, as we've seen in earlier posts.