Abstract
If early twentieth-century scholarship tended to perceive Mary Sidney’s religious translation as an appropriately unassuming activity for a woman writer, this is at least partly due to the resounding success of her modesty rhetoric. Attention to early modern literary tastes, however, alerts us instead to the ambitiousness of her undertaking. In his Defense of Poesie, Philip Sidney identified the psalms as ‘the highest matter in the noblest form,’ and sometime after 1578 had embarked on a translation of the Old Testament material into English metrical verse.2 At the time of his death in 1586 he had completed 43 of 150 poems. Mary Sidney continued this project after Philip’s death and throughout the 1590s, translating another 107 psalms and incorporating and revising her brother’s selections.3 The ‘Sidneian Psalms,’ as John Donne called them, circulated widely in manuscript during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and survive in eighteen different manuscript copies.4 Mary Sidney’s prefatory poems, however, survive together in only one extant copy, known as the Tixall manuscript. The Tixall manuscript is an elaborate presentation copy, transcribed by John Davies of Hereford in an elegant secretary hand with gold flourishes.
but hee did warpe, I weav’d this webb to end
(Mary Sidney Herbert1)
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Notes
This dating of the composition of the Psalmes follows Gary Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1979), 44, 156–7.
See ‘Manuscripts of the Psalmes’ and ‘Relationship of the Texts of the Psalmes’ in Collected Works II: 308–58. See also Margaret P. Hannay, ‘Introduction: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: An Introduction to the Critical Heritage,’ in Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700: Volume 2, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009), xv–lxii.
See Michael G. Brennan, ‘The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton and the “Sidney Psalms,”’ Sidney Journal 20 (2002): 27–53.
William A. Ringler, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962 ), 547.
See also Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 177 n.15.
Margaret Hannay, ‘“Doo What Men May Sing”: Mary Sidney and the Tradition of Admonitory Dedication,’ in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985 ), 149–65, 164.
Beth Wynn Fisken, ‘“To the Angell spirit….”: Mary Sidney’s Entry into the “World of Words,”’ in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, eds Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst, MA: Haselkorn and Betty S. 1900 ), 263–75, 265–6.
Clare R. Kinney, ‘“Love Which Hath Never Done”: The Countess of Pembroke’s Elegies and the Apology for Copia,’ Sidney Journal 21 (2003): 31–40, 31.
Danielle Clarke, ‘Introduction,’ in Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer: Renaissance Women Poets, ed. Danielle Clarke (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000 ).
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ), 10–11.
Philip Sidney, ‘To my dear lady and sister, the Countess of Pembroke,’ in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 ), 57.
Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetoricke (London, 1588), ed. Ethel Seaton ( Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950 ).
See Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980)
and Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,’ Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3–35.
S.W. Singer, ed., The Psalmes of David… ( London: The Chiswick Press, 1823 ).
See especially Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet ( New Haven: Yale University. Press, 1991 )
Louis Adrian Montrose, ‘Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtship,’ Renaissance Drama 8 (1977): 3–35
Raphael Falco, Conceived Presences: Literary Genealogy in Renaissance England ( Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994 )
Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976 )
Raphael Falco, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 )
Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995); and May.
On the ‘stigma of print,’ see J.W. Saunders’s classic essay ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry,’ Essays in Criticism 1 (1951): 139–64
J.W. Saunders’s ‘From Manuscript to Print: A Note on the Circulation of Poetic MSS. in the Sixteenth Century,’ Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 6 (1951): 507–28. For an extended analysis of the complex roles gender played in early modern constructions of ‘the stigma of print,’ see Wall.
Jan van Dorsten, ‘Literary Patronage in Elizabethan England: The Early Phase,’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, eds Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 191–206, 200 (emphasis added).
On parallels to JFK see Elizabeth Mazzola, ‘Brother’s Keepers and Philip’s Siblings: The Poetics of the Sidney Family,’ Criticism 41.4 (Fall 2000): 513.
See also the essays in Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore, eds, Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture: The Poet in His Time and Ours ( London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1984 )
Jan van Dorsten, Dominic Baker-Smith, and Arthur F. Kinney, eds, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend ( Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1986 )
Dennis Kay, ed., Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987 )
and M.J.B. Allen, Dominic Baker-Smith, Arthur F. Kinney, and Margaret Sullivan, eds, Sir Philip Sidney’s Achievements ( New York: AMS Press, 1990 ).
George Gascoigne, The Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne Esqyre: Newlye compyled into one Volume (London, 1587).
Margaret J. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987 ).
Stephen Orgel, ‘What is a Text?’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 24 (1981), 3–6, 3–4.
Richard C. Newton, ‘Making Books from Leaves: Poets Become Editors,’ in Print and Culture in the Renaissance, eds Gerald P. Tyson and Sylvia S. Wagonheim (Newark: Tyson and Sylvia S. 1986 ), 246–64, 260.
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994 ), 39–40.
See Michael Brennan, ‘William Ponsonby: Elizabethan Stationer,’ Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography 7.3 (1983): 91–110, 101.
See Germaine Warkentin, ‘Patrons and Profiteers: Thomas Newman and the “Violent Enlargement” of Astrophil and Stella,’ Book Collector 34.4 (Winter 1985): 461–87 and Brennan.
Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia Written by Sir Philip Sidney Knight. Now since the first edition augmented and ended (London, 1593), sig. P4v; containing preface ‘To the Reader’ by Hugh Sanford. For the subsequent controversy
see especially Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Editorship of the Arcadia,’ PMLA 54.1 (March 1939): 122–38
and Joan Rees, ‘Fulke Greville and the Revisions of the Arcadia,’ Review of English Studies 17.65 (February 1966): 54–7.
For scholarship reassessing the material role of Englishwomen in early modern literary culture, see the essays in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800, eds George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially those by Margaret Hannay, Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon, Michael Brennan, and Margaret Ezell. Susan Broomhall has examined women’s roles in early modern French print culture in Women and the Book Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002) and work on the American context can be found in A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture, ed. Susan Albertine (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995 ). Studies dealing with early modern English material tend to favor either the earlier or the later end of this period.
See, for instance, Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Paula McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
and Margaret Hunt, ed., Women and the Enlightenment ( New York: Haworth Press, 1984 ).
Julie Crawford, ‘Sidney’s Sapphics and the Role of Interpretive Communities,’ ELH 69.4 (Winter 2002): 979–1007, 982.
Jean R. Brink, Michael Drayton Revisited ( Boston: Twayne, 1990 ), 4.
Michael Drayton, Idea: The Shepheards Garland (London, 1593) and Collected Works I: 9.
Drayton, Ideas Mirrour. Amours in Quatorzains (London, 1594).
Drayton, Pastoral. Contayning Eglogues (London, 1619).
Samuel Daniel, Delia and Rosamond augmented. Cleopatra (London, 1594), sig. H6.
Samuel Daniel, The Civile Wares betweene the Howses of Lancaster and York (London, 1609), sig. A2–3v.
See Samuel Daniel, ‘To William Herbert, Earle of Pembroke,’ in A Panegyricke Congratulatorie… with a Defence of Ryme (London, 1603), sig. G3 and Collected Works I: 12.
Mary Sidney, A Discourse of Life and Death. Written I French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius, A Tragoedie written also in French by Ro. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke (London, 1592).
Francis Davison, A Poetical Rapsodie Containing: Diverse Sonnets, Odes, Elegies, Madrigals, Epigrams, Pastorals, Eglogues, with other poems both in Rime and measured verse (London: Printed by William Stansby for Roger Jackson, 1611). The volume is dedicated to the ‘worthy son unto a peerlesse mother,’ William, Earl of Pembroke (sig. A2). ‘A Dialogue betweene two Shepheards’ (23–5) follows ‘Two Pastorels made by Sir Philip Sidney Upon his meeting with his two worthy friends, and fellow Poets, Sir Edward Dier and M. Fulke Greuill’ (17–25).
Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie in Sidney’s ‘The Defense of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Gavin Alexander ( Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004 ), 4.
See H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Appendix 3, 416–21; and Hannay, ‘“Bearing the livery of your name”,’ 30. Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon discuss why Pembroke may have preferred to reserve The Psalmes of David for more private and limited circulation in ‘Circulating the Sidney-Pembroke Psalter,’ in Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas, eds Justice and Tinker, 50–72.
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© 2012 Patricia Pender
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Pender, P. (2012). Mea Mediocritas: Mary Sidney, Modesty, and the History of the Book. In: Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008015_5
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