Lady Mary Margaret Sidney, Sydney, Lady Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1st cousin 13x removed)

1561–1621

BIRTH 27 OCT 1561 • Ticknell, Bewdley, Wales

DEATH 25 SEP 16211st cousin 13x removed

About

https://www.geni.com/people/Mary-Sidney-Countess-of-Pembroke/6000000006444784896

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Mary Sidney

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke nÃ©e Mary Sidney (Bewdley, 27 October 1561 â€“ London, 25 September 1621), was one of the first English women to achieve a major reputation for her literary works, translations and literary patronage.

Family

Mary Sidney was born at Tickenhill Palace, Bewdley in Worcestershire in 1561. She was one of three daughters of Sir Henry Sidney and his wife, the former Lady Mary Dudley, the daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Lady Sidney is known to have written poetry. A year after Mary’s birth, Lady Sidney nursed Queen Elizabeth I through smallpox and caught the disease from her, becoming severely disfigured in the process. Though her husband never repudiated her, she often lived separately from her family.

Mary-Sidney-Wikipedia

In 1576 Mary, who was by then her parents’ only surviving daughter, was summoned to London by the Queen to be one of her noble attendants. In 1577, her mother’s brother, Robert Dudley, arranged his niece’s marriage to his close ally, Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, then in his mid-forties. At seventeen, Mary became the mistress of Wilton House near Salisbury and Baynard’s Castle in London. Mary had four children, the first of whom, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580â€“1630), is possibly the young man described in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The other surviving child, Philip, became the 4th Earl of Pembroke on his brother’s death in 1630. Mary Sidney’s sons are the “Incomparable Pair” to whom William Shakespeare’s First Folio is dedicated. At different times, both were patrons of the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s acting troupe.

Their children included

William and
Philip, who both were Earl of Pembroke after their father,
Katherine (who died as a small child), and
Lady Anne Herbert, who died young.[1][3]

Life and work

Mary Sidney was highly educated by her tutors, who included a female Italian teacher. Like her learned aunt Jane Grey she was educated in the Reformed humanist tradition. In the 16th century, noblewomen required a good understanding of theological issues and were taught to read original texts. Mary was also schooled in poetry, music, French, the Classics, possibly in Hebrew and rhetoric, in needlework and practical medicine. She later translated Petrarch’s “Triumph of Death” and many other European works. She had a keen interest in chemistry and set up a chemistry laboratory at Wilton House, run by Walter Raleigh’s half-brother. She turned Wilton into a “paradise for poets”, known as “The Wilton Circle” which included Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Sir John Davies and Samuel Daniel, a salon-type literary group sustained by the Countess’s hospitality.

Her aim was to banish barbarism (an aim she shared with John Florio), by strengthening and classicising the English language and also by practising “true religion”, which, in her view, combined Calvinism, devotion to Christ and acts of charity. She propagated Italian culture and literature. She was herself a Calvinist theologian. Her public persona (at least) was pious, virtuous and learned. She was celebrated for her singing of the psalms, her warmth, charm and beauty. In private, she was witty and, some reported, flirtatious. She ran safehouses for French reformed refugees.

Mary Sidney was younger sister and disciple to the poet, courtier and soldier Sir Philip Sidney who was for some time, the heir of both Ambrose Dudley, 3rd Earl of Warwick and Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester brothers to Guildford Dudley, husband of the Lady Jane Grey, who were regarded as Reformed martyrs, not just by the Dudley family, but by the reformed Protestant party. Philip Sidney was being prepared to be leader of the Protestant party at Court and supported the founding of a Protestant “empire” which would include the New World (North America) to counterbalance the threat of Catholic and Spanish domination. Mary Sidney financially supported the explorations of Frobisher. Her son William Herbert was a funder and supporter of New World explorations: there is a river in the US named after Pembroke.

After the death of her sister Ambrosia, the Countess appears to have been devoted to her brother Sir Philip Sidney. Mary was a natural cultural catalyst. She had a gift of inspiring creativity in all those around her, including her circle, relatives and servants. Philip wrote much of his “Arcadia” in her presence. Philip Sidney was engaged in preparing a new English version of the Book of Psalms (because the translations under Edward VI were deficient). He had completed 43 of the 150 Psalms at the time of his death during a military campaign against the Spanish in the Netherlands in 1586.

Mary Sidney took on the task of amplifying and editing his “Arcadia” which was published as The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, one of the most widely read books for the next 300 years. She also finished Philip’s translation of the Psalms (which are sung unaccompanied in Calvinist worship), composing Psalms 44-150 on her own poetry, using the 1560 Geneva Bible and commentaries by John Calvin and Theodore Beza. As a competent theologian, she was unafraid to disagree with Calvin on minor points. A copy of the completed book was presented to Elizabeth I of England in 1599.

This work is usually referred to as “The Sidney Psalms” or “The Sidneian Psalms” and is regarded as an important influence on the development of English poetry in the late 16th and early 17th century. John Donne wrote a poem in celebration of them. The Psalms were drawn from previous English translations rather than original Hebrew texts and are therefore properly called “metaphrases” rather than translations. Like Philip’s, Mary Sidney’s versions use a wide variety of poetic forms and display a vivid imagination and vigorous phrasing.

Mary’s husband died in 1600. Thereafter she played a large part in managing Wilton and the other Pembroke estates, on behalf of her son, William, who entirely took over her role of literary patronage. After James I visited her at Wilton in 1603 and was entertained by Shakespeare’s company “The King’s Men”, Mary moved out of Wilton and rented a house in London. Though it is certain that the King’s Men attended Wilton, whether William Shakespeare was with them is uncertain.

However, it is reported that there was at Wilton at one time, a letter in which the Mary Sidney urges her son to attend Wilton, as “we have the man Shakespeare with us”.[1] From 1609 to 1615 she lived at Crosby Hall, now a private residence relocated to Chelsea, London, but then located in the City of London. She may have secretly married her doctor, Sir Matthew Lister and she famously travelled to Spa on the Continent, where she relaxed by shooting pistols and played cards. She employed Italian architects to build a Bedfordshire country home with fine vistas, Houghton Hall, now in ruins, near Milton Keynes), which John Bunyan refers to in his works as the “House Beautiful”.

She died of smallpox at her house in Aldersgate Street, London near the French Protestant Church and in the same street in which John Wesley was later converted in 1621, shortly after King James I visited her at Houghton Hall. After a grand funeral which celebrated her widely recognised literary achievements in St Paul’s Cathedral, her body was buried next to that of the Earl, under the steps leading to the choirstalls in Salisbury Cathedral.

Assessment

Mary Sidney’s imaginative, lively and warm style is filled with “Sidneian fire”, transparency and holy ardour. This ardour is apparent in ‘matters of the heart’, for example in the death scenes in her closet drama The Tragedy of Antonie (1592),[2] which William Shakespeare may have used as source material for his Antony and Cleopatra (1607)[citation needed], as well as in her poetic masterpiece “The Psalms of David”, which describes the pain of an earthly existence in the light of the divine comfort of ‘grace’.

The Psalms, which she considered her memorial, lack the weighty dignity of the Psalms of the Authorised Version (which was the crown of thirty years effort to forge English into a vehicle fit for theology). Mary’s versions, though, have delightful and felicitous poetic forms and expressions. Her influenceâ€”through literary patronage, through her brother’s works, through her own her poetry, drama, translations and theology (e.g. she translated Philippe de Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death to strengthen the international reformed communityâ€”cannot be easily quantified; it is clear that she had a strong influence on some of the finest literary fruits of the English Renaissance.[citation needed]

Her poetic epitaph, which is ascribed to Ben Jonson but which is more likely to have been written in an earlier form by poets William Browne and William Herbert (Mary’s son), summarizes how she was regarded in her own day:

Underneath this sable hearse,

Lies the subject of all verse,

Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.

Death, ere thou hast slain another

Fair and learned and good as she,

Time shall throw a dart at thee.

Mary, Countess of Pembroke was the most gifted woman writer of the English Renaissance, much praised on her death by many, including the poetess Aemilia Lanier. She was the aunt of the poetess Lady Mary Wroth (the daughter of her brother, Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester). She also influenced the religious writing of the divine and poet George Herbert (her sons’ first cousin). Her literary talents and aforementioned family connections to Shakespeare has caused her to be nominated as one of the many claimants named as the true author of the works of William Shakespeare in the Shakespeare authorship question.[3][4]

[edit]Notes

^ F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion1564â€“1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 531.

^ The Countess of Pembroke’s The Tragedy of Antonie was a translation of the French play Marc-Antoine (1578) by Robert Garnier; it was completed in 1590 and first published in 1592. Samuel Daniel also wrote a closet drama on the same subject shortly afterwards, The Tragedy of Cleopatra (1594). Both dramas portray the lovers as “heroic victims of their own passionate excesses and remorseless destiny” (David Bevington, Introduction to Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) p.7. ISBN 0521272505).

^ Underwood, Anne. â€œWas the Bard a Woman?â€ Newsweek 28 June 2004.

^ Williams, Robin P. Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? Wilton Circle Press, 2006.

Sources

Introduction to The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, Vols 1 & 2, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998

Mary Sidney and Sir Philip Sidney – The Sidney Psalms. Edited by R. E. Pritchard, Carcanet, Manchester, 1992.

Margaret P. Hannay – Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Margaret Patterson Hannay – “Herbert [Sidney], Mary, countess of Pembroke (1561â€“1621)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 8 April 2007

Gary Waller – Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: A Critical Study of Her Writings and Literary Milieu. Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1979.

Mary Sidney was the alleged daughter of Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I. Raised by Robert’s sister Mary Dudley, and her husband Sir. Henry Sidney. Mary Dudley was one of Queen Elizabeth’s most intimate confidantes during the early years of her reign. Her duties included nursing the Queen through smallpox and acting as her mouthpiece towards diplomats. A sister of Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, she remained always loyal to her family

Mary Sidney

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sidney

Mary Herbert
Portrait of Mary Herbert (née Sidney), by Nicholas Hilliard, c. 1590.
Countess of Pembroke
Tenure	19 January 1601 – 19 January 1601

Known for	Literary patron, author
Born	27 October 1561 Tickenhill Palace, Bewdley, England
Died	25 September 1621 London, England
Buried	Salisbury Cathedral
Noble family	Sidney
Spouse(s)	Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke
Issue	William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke Katherine Herbert Anne Herbert Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke
Father	Henry Sidney
Mother	Mary Dudley

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (née Sidney, 27 October 1561 – 25 September 1621) was among the first Englishwomen to gain notice for her poetry and her literary patronage. By the age of 39, she was listed with her brother Philip Sidney and with Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare among the notable authors of the day in John Bodenham‘s verse miscellany Belvidere.^[1] Her play Antonius is widely seen as reviving interest in soliloquy based on classical models and as a likely source of Samuel Daniel‘s closet drama Cleopatra (1594) and of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1607).^[A] She was also known for translating Petrarch‘s “Triumph of Death”, for the poetry anthology Triumphs, and above all for a lyrical, metrical translation of the Psalms.

Biography[edit]

Early life[edit]

Mary Sidney was born on 27 October 1561 at Tickenhill Palace in the parish of Bewdley, Worcestershire.^[2] She was one of the seven children – three sons and four daughters – of Sir Henry Sidney and wife Mary Dudley. Their eldest son was Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586),^[3] and their second son Robert Sidney (1563–1626), who later became Earl of Leicester. As a child, she spent much time at court where her mother was a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber and a close confidante of Queen Elizabeth I.^[4] Like her brother Philip, she received a humanist education which included music, needlework, and Latin, French and Italian. After the death of Sidney’s youngest sister, Ambrosia, in 1575, the Queen requested that Mary return to court to join the royal entourage.^[2]

Marriage and children[edit]

Arms of Herbert: Per pale azure and gules, three lions rampant argent

In 1577, Mary Sidney married Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (1538–1601), a close ally of the family. The marriage was arranged by her father in concert with her uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. After her marriage, Mary became responsible with her husband for the management of a number of estates which he owned including Ramsbury, Ivychurch,^[5] Wilton House, and Baynard’s Castle in London, where it is known that they entertained Queen Elizabeth to dinner. She had four children by her husband:

William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke (1580–1630), was the eldest son and heir.
Katherine Herbert (1581–1584)^[6] died as an infant.
Anne Herbert (born 1583 – after 1603) was thought also to have been a writer and a storyteller.^[6]
Philip Herbert, 4th Earl of Pembroke (1584–1650), succeeded his brother in 1630. Philip and his older brother William were the “incomparable pair of brethren” to whom the First Folio of Shakespeare’s collected works was dedicated in 1623.

Mary Sidney was an aunt to the poet Mary Wroth, daughter of her brother Robert.

Later life[edit]

The death of Sidney’s husband in 1601 left her with less financial support than she might have expected, though views on its adequacy vary; at the time the majority of an estate was left to the eldest son.

In addition to the arts, Sidney had a range of interests. She had a chemistry laboratory at Wilton House, where she developed medicines and invisible ink.^[7] From 1609 to 1615, Mary Sidney probably spent most of her time at Crosby Hall in London.

She travelled with her doctor, Martin Lister, to Spa, Belgium in 1616. Dudley Carleton met her in the company of Helene de Melun, “Countess of Berlaymont”, wife of Florent de Berlaymont the governor of Luxembourg. The two women amused themselves with pistol shooting.^[8] Sir John Throckmorton heard she went on to Amiens.^[9] There is conjecture that she married Lister, but no evidence of this.^[10]

She died of smallpox on 25 September 1621, aged 59, at her townhouse in Aldersgate Street in London, shortly after King James I had visited her at the newly completed Houghton House in Bedfordshire.^[2] After a grand funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, her body was buried in Salisbury Cathedral, next to that of her late husband in the Herbert family vault, under the steps leading to the choir stalls, where the mural monument still stands.^[2]

Literary career

Wilton House

The title page of Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antony, her interpretation of the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

Mary Sidney turned Wilton House into a “paradise for poets”, known as the “Wilton Circle,” a salon-type literary group sustained by her hospitality, which included Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, and Sir John Davies. John Aubrey wrote, “Wilton House was like a college, there were so many learned and ingenious persons. She was the greatest patroness of wit and learning of any lady in her time.”^[11] Sidney received more dedications than any other woman of non-royal status.^[12] By some accounts, King James I visited Wilton on his way to his coronation in 1603 and stayed again at Wilton following the coronation to avoid the plague. She was regarded as a muse by Daniel in his sonnet cycle “Delia”, an anagram for ideal.^[13]

Her brother, Philip Sidney, wrote much of his Arcadia in her presence, at Wilton House. He also probably began preparing his English lyric version of the Book of Psalms at Wilton as well.

Sidney psalter[edit]

Philip Sidney had completed translating 43 of the 150 Psalms at the time of his death on a military campaign against the Spanish in the Netherlands in 1586. She finished his translation, composing Psalms 44 through to 150 in a dazzling array of verse forms, using the 1560 Geneva Bible and commentaries by John Calvin and Theodore Beza. Hallett Smith has called the psalter a “School of English Versification” Smith (1946), of 171 poems (Psalm 119 is a gathering of 22 separate ones). A copy of the completed psalter was prepared for Queen Elizabeth I in 1599, in anticipation of a royal visit to Wilton, but Elizabeth cancelled her planned visit. This work is usually referred to as The Sidney Psalms or The Sidney-Pembroke Psalter and regarded as a major influence on the development of English religious lyric poetry in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.^[14] John Donne wrote a poem celebrating the verse psalter and claiming he could “scarce” call the English Church reformed until its psalter had been modelled after the poetic transcriptions of Philip Sidney and Mary Herbert.^[15]

Although the psalms were not printed in her lifetime, they were extensively distributed in manuscript. There are 17 manuscripts extant today. A later engraving of Herbert shows her holding them.^[17] Her literary influence can be seen in literary patronage, in publishing her brother’s works and in her own verse forms, dramas, and translations. Contemporary poets who commended Herbert’s psalms include Samuel Daniel, Sir John Davies, John Donne, Michael Drayton, Sir John Harington, Ben Jonson, Emilia Lanier and Thomas Moffet.^[12] The importance of these is evident in the devotional lyrics of Barnabe Barnes, Nicholas Breton, Henry Constable, Francis Davison, Giles Fletcher, and Abraham Fraunce. Their influence on the later religious poetry of Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and John Milton has been critically recognized since Louis Martz placed it at the start of a developing tradition of 17th-century devotional lyricism.^[2]

Sidney was instrumental in bringing her brother’s An Apology for Poetry or Defence of Poesy into print. She circulated the Sidney–Pembroke Psalter in manuscript at about the same time. This suggests a common purpose in their design. Both argued, in formally different ways, for the ethical recuperation of poetry as an instrument for moral instruction — particularly religious instruction.^[18] Sidney also took on editing and publishing her brother’s Arcadia, which he claimed to have written in her presence as The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia.^[19]

Other works

Sydney’s closet drama Antonius is a translation of a French play, Marc-Antoine (1578) by Robert Garnier. Mary is known to have translated two other works: A Discourse of Life and Death by Philippe de Mornay, published with Antonius in 1592, and Petrarch‘s The Triumph of Death, circulated in manuscript. Her original poems include the pastoral “A Dialogue betweene Two Shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in praise of Astrea,”^[20] and two dedicatory addresses, one to Elizabeth I and one to her own brother Philip, contained in the Tixall manuscript copy of her verse psalter. An elegy for Philip, “The dolefull lay of Clorinda”, was published in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595) and attributed to Spenser and to Mary Herbert, but Pamela Coren attributes it to Spenser, though also saying that Mary’s poetic reputation does not suffer from loss of the attribution.Coren (2002)

By at least 1591, the Pembrokes were providing patronage to a playing company, Pembroke’s Men, one of the early companies to perform works of Shakespeare. According to one account, Shakespeare’s company “The King’s Men” performed at Wilton at this time.^[21]

June and Paul Schlueter published an article in The Times Literary Supplement of 23 July 2010 describing a manuscript of newly discovered works by Mary Sidney Herbert.^[22]

Her poetic epitaph, ascribed to Ben Jonson but more likely to have been written in an earlier form by the poets William Browne and her son William, summarizes how she was regarded in her own day:^[2]

Underneath this sable hearse,
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

Her literary talents and aforementioned family connections to Shakespeare has caused her to be nominated as one of the many claimants named as the true author of the works of William Shakespeare in the Shakespeare authorship question.^[23]^[24]

In popular culture[edit]

Mary Sidney appears as a character in Deborah Harkness‘s novel “Shadow of Night“, which is the second instalment of her “All Souls” trilogy. Sidney is portrayed by Amanda Hale in the second season of the television adaptation of the book.

Ancestry[edit]

hideAncestors of Mary Sidney
8. Nicholas Sidney4. Sir William Sidney9. Anne Brandon2. Henry Sidney10. Sir Hugh Pakenham5. Anne Pakenham1. Mary Sidney12. Edmund Dudley6. John Dudley13. Elizabeth Grey3. Mary Dudley14. Edward Guildford7. Jane Guildford15. Eleanor West

MARY SIDNEY HERBERT, THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE (1561–1621)

Could she be the author of the Shakespearean works?

Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, was known to be a hot-tempered redhead, brilliant, multi-talented, strong, dynamic, passionate, generous, and a bit arrogant. She was born three years before Shakespeare and died five years after.

For two decades, she developed and led the most important literary circle in England’s history, Wilton Circle, taking the mantle from her mentor, her brother Sir Philip Sidney, who died in the Queen’s Protestant war. Her work, the work of her brother, and the work of many of the writers in her circle were used as sources for the Shakespearean plays.

She was devoted to literature and to creating great works in the English language. This was a brave mission since English was not considered a significant language at the time; there were great works in Italian, French, Latin, and Greek, but few in English. Nor was English spoken anywhere else in the world—rarely even in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland.

*Mary Sidney Herbert, miniature portrait by Nicholas Hilliard, ca. 1590, in the National Portrait Gallery, London.*

Mary Sidney exhibited a lifelong passion and commitment to her literary goals. In her versification of 127 psalms, she used 126 different verse forms. Pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable for women, she was the first woman to publish a play in English (a formal closet drama meant to be read aloud in an aristocratic home), and the first woman to publish original dramatic verse (which was allowed because it was for Queen Elizabeth). She was also the first woman who did not apologize for publishing her work.

She was trained in medicine and had her own alchemy laboratory where Adrian Gilbert (Sir Walter Raleigh’s half brother) was her assistant. Recipes she developed are still extant, including a recipe for disappearing ink. Mary had an active interest in spiritual magic and was close with the “magician” John Dee and visionary Giordano Bruno (Bruno dedicated his two most important works to her brother). Adrian Gilbert (a fat, Falstaffian fellow and half-brother to Sir Walter Raleigh) designed her garden at Wilton House in a “heavily geometric and symbolic nature” in which it was possible to read “both divine and moral remembrances,” a “personal iconographic program based on symbolic geometry.”

She was fluent in Latin, French, and Italian, and is believed to have also known Welsh, Spanish, and probably Greek. She was one of the most educated women in England, comparable only to Queen Elizabeth. She was politically involved and outspoken, although she disliked the fawning and superficiality of the royal court.

Mary was an energetic woman: She held large parties. She sponsored an acting troupe. She traveled, rode horses, hunted, hawked. She bowled (lawn bowling), danced, sang, was famous for her needlework. Mary participated in theatrical productions at the royal court and developed Ludlow Castle into a cultural center that included just about every known theatrical troupe in the country. She played the lute and the virginals, and—if we can believe a German report—the violin. This German report also describes a musical code she invented with which she would send letters to friends in the form of musical compositions, each measure representing a letter of the alphabet.

The Sonnets

Scholars believe the Shakespearean sonnets tell the story of the poet’s passionate affair with a younger man, who then had an affair with a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman close to the poet’s heart; this dark-haired woman was newly married, perhaps to a man named Will. No one has ever been able to positively identify the younger man or the dark-haired woman in relation to William Shakespeare (nor any of the other candidates).

But Mary’s documented love life has a striking resemblance to these sonnets. After her husband died, Mary (43 years old) had an affair with a younger man, Dr. Matthew Lister (33 years old), whom she could not marry because of their differences in social status, although they were together for the rest of her life. There was strife in the relationship, however, when she thought her younger lover was having an affair with her dark-haired, dark-eyed niece, Mary Wroth (19 years old and newly married), whom Mary Sidney had helped raise. In reality, Mary Wroth was not having an affair with Dr. Lister, but with Will Herbert (also newly married), Mary Sidney’s oldest son.

The Incomparable Brethren

This same son, William Herbert, acted as bawd for the King, effectively changing the power structure at court by providing King James with a new lover, George Villiers, and thus procuring for himself the office of Lord Chamberlain. Mary’s younger son, Philip Herbert, acted as a whore to the King in exchange for an earldom, a rare honor for a second son.

This is particularly intriguing because in the First Folio (the printed collection of the works of “Shakespeare” printed seven years after his death), Ben Jonson writes a eulogy, “To the Memory of my Beloved, the AUTHOR,” in which he complains how certain people might pretend to praise someone while really trying to destroy that person. “These are, as some infamous Bawd, or Whore Should praise a Matron. What could hurt her more?” There has never been an explanation for why Ben Jonson (considered to have been a protégé of Mary Sidney’s and well-documented as a close friend of William Herbert’s) mentions a bawd (pimp), a whore, and a mature gentlewoman/matron who will be hurt by this publication in the eulogy’s introduction.

This First Folio is dedicated to Mary Sidney’s two sons, the “incomparable brethren,” neither of whom has otherwise been connected to the man named William Shakespeare.

Just the Beginning

These few documented facts are some of only part of Mary’s story. Unlike every other proposed authorship candidate, Mary Sidney has no anomaly (such as being dead) that needs an elaborate explanation to justify. Everything about her fits neatly and remarkably into the authorship of the Shakespearean plays and sonnets—she is the most articulate, literate, educated, and motivated writer of the times with hundreds of connections to the source materials of the plays, and her love life matches the sonnet story. Because she was a woman, however, she was not allowed to write plays for the public theater.

There is no reason to believe her authorship was a conspiracy that needed to be hidden by many people; it is possible that a very few loyal friends, or only her oldest son knew. This same son covered up his two illegitimate children with his first cousin, Mary Wroth, a fact that wasn’t discovered until 1932. In any case, since there is doubt about who the author or authors of the “Shakespearean” canon may have been, it is important as well as enlightening to include Mary Sidney as possible author.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A concise, traditional biography of Mary Sidney by her primary biographer, Margaret Hannay:

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/sidney/pembroke_biography.htm

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A site with some of Mary Sidney’s works, plus links to essays about her:

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/mary.htm

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?, third edition, by Robin P. Williams.

Related pages[edit]

Notes[edit]

^ Each portrays the lovers as “heroic victims of their own passionate excesses and remorseless destiny”.Shakespeare (1990, p. 7)

References[edit]

^ Bodenham 1911.
^ Jump up to:^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ODNB 2008.
^ ODNB 2014.
^ ODNB 2008b.
^ Pugh & Crittall 1956, pp. 289–295.
^ Jump up to:^a ^b Hannay, Kinnamon & Brennan 1998, pp. 1–93.
^ Williams 2006.
^ Margaret Hannay, ‘Reconstructing the Lives of Aristocratic Englishwomen’, Betty Travitsky & Adele Seef, Attending to Women in Early Modern England (University of Delaware Press, 1994), p. 49: Maurice Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603-1624 (Rutgers UP, 1972), p. 209.
^ William Shaw & G. Dyfnallt Owen, HMC 77 Viscount De L’Isle, Penshurst, vol. 5 (London, 1961), p. 245.
^ Britain Magazine 2017.
^ Aubrey & Barber 1982.
^ Jump up to:^a ^b Williams 1962.
^ Daniel 1592.
^ Martz 1954.
^ Donne 1599, contained in Chambers (1896).
^ Walpole 1806.
^ Mary Herbert as illustrated in Horace Walpole, A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland, and Ireland.^[16]
^ Coles 2012.
^ Sidney 2003.
^ Herbert 2014.
^ Halliday 1977, p. 531.
^ Schlueter & Schlueter 2010.
^ Underwood, Anne. “Was the Bard a Woman?” Newsweek 28 June 2004.
^ Williams, Robin P. Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare? Wilton Circle Press, 2006.

Sources[edit]

Adams, Simon (2008b) [2004], “Sidney [née Dudley], Mary, Lady Sidney”, ODNB, OUP, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/69749 (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
Aubrey, John; Barber, Richard W (1982). Brief Lives. Boydell. ISBN 9780851152066.
Bodenham, John (1911) [1600]. Hoops, Johannes; Crawford, Charles (eds.). Belvidere, or the Garden of the Muses. Liepzig. pp. 198–228.
Britain Magazine, Natasha Foges (2017). “Mary Sidney: Countess of Pembroke and literary trailblazer”.
Chambers, Edmund Kerchever, ed. (1896). The Poems of John Donne. Introduction by George Saintsbury. Lawrence & Bullen/Routledge. pp. 188–190.
Coles, Kimberly Anne (2012). “Mary (Sidney) Herbert, countess of Pembroke”. In Sullivan, Garrett A; Stewart, Alan; Lemon, Rebecca; McDowell, Nicholas; Richard, Jennifer (eds.). The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature. Blackwell. ISBN 978-1405194495.
Coren, Pamela (2002). “Colin Clouts come home againe | Edmund Spenser, Mary Sidney, and the doleful lay“. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. 42 (1): 25–41. doi:10.1353/sel.2002.0003. ISSN 1522-9270. S2CID 162410376.
Daniel, Samuel (1592). “Delia”.
Donne, John (1599) [1952]. “Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countesse of Pembroke his Sister”. In Gardner, Helen (ed.). Divine Poems | Occassional [sic] Poems. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780198118367.book.1. ISBN 978-0198118367.
Halliday, Frank Ernest (1977). A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Penguin/Duckworth. ISBN 978-0715603093.
Hannay, Margaret; Kinnamon, Noel J; Brennan, Michael, eds. (1998). The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Vol. I: Poems, Translations, and Correspondence. Clarendon. ISBN 978-0198112808. OCLC 37213729.
Hannay, Margaret Patterson (2008) [2004], “Herbert [née Sidney], Mary, countess of Pembroke”, ODNB, OUP, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/13040 (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
Herbert, Mary (2014) [1599]. “A dialogue betweene two shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in praise of Astrea”. In Goldring, Elizabeth; Eales, Faith; Clarke, Elizabeth; Archer, Jayne Elisabeth; Heaton, Gabriel; Knight, Sarah (eds.). John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources. Vol. 4: 1596–1603. Produced by John Nichols and Richard Gough (1788). OUP. doi:10.1093/oseo/instance.00058002. ISBN 978-0199551415.
“June and Paul Schlueter Discover Unknown Poems by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke”. Lafayette News. Lafayette College. 23 Sep 2010.
Martz, Louis L (1954). The poetry of meditation: a study in English religious literature of the seventeenth century (2nd ed.). Yale UP. ISBN 978-0300001655. OCLC 17701003.
Pugh, R B; Crittall, E, eds. (1956). “Houses of Augustinian canons: Priory of Ivychurch”. A History of the County of Wiltshire | British History Online. A History of the County of Wiltshire. Vol. III.
Shakespeare, William (1990) [1607]. Bevington, David M (ed.). Antony and Cleopatra. CUP. ISBN 978-0521272506.
Sidney, Philip (2003) [1590 published by William Ponsonby]. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Transcriptions: Heinrich Oskar Sommer (1891); Risa Stephanie Bear (2003). Renascence Editions, Oregon U.
Smith, Hallett (1946). “English Metrical Psalms in the Sixteenth Century and Their Literary Significance”. Huntington Library Quarterly. 9 (3): 249–271. doi:10.2307/3816008. JSTOR 3816008.
Walpole, Horatio (1806). “Mary, Countess of Pembroke”. A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England, Scotland and Ireland; with Lists of Their Works. Vol. II. Enlarged and continued — Thomas Park. J Scott. pp. 198–207.
Williams, Franklin B (1962). The literary patronesses of Renaissance England. Notes and Queries. Vol. 9. pp. 364–366. doi:10.1093/nq/9-10-364b.
Williams, Robin P (2006). Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a woman write Shakespeare?. Peachpit. ISBN 978-0321426406.
Woudhuysen, H R (2014) [2004], “Sidney, Sir Philip”, ODNB, OUP, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25522 (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mary Sidney Herbert.

Works by Mary Sidney at Project Gutenberg
Works by Mary Sidney at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Works by or about Mary Sidney at Internet Archive
“The Works of Mary (Sidney) Herbert” (for some of the original texts and Psalms), luminarium.org; accessed 27 March 2014.
Project Continua: Biography of Mary Sidney

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Friday, October 27, 2017

Happy Birthday to Mary Sidney Herbert

Mary (Sidney) Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, was born on October 27, 1561. According to the Poetry Foundation:

Mary Sidney was the most important non-royal woman writer and patron in Elizabethan England. Without appearing to transgress the strictures against women’s writing, she composed a sizable body of work, evading criticism by focusing on religious themes and by confining her work to the genres thought appropriate to women: translation, dedication, elegy, and encomium. Even more important to her success was her identity as the sister of Sir Philip Sidney. She began her public literary career after his death by encouraging works written in his praise, publishing his works, and completing his translation of the Psalms. Except for some business correspondence, all of her extant works were completed or published in the 1590s. Tantalizing later references indicate that she continued writing and translating until her death, but all subsequent works have been lost, probably to fire; her primary residences of Wilton and Baynards Castle burned in the seventeenth century. The extensive family correspondence mentioned by her brothers and other contemporaries has also been lost; her only surviving personal letters were written to her uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1578; and to Robert Sidney’s wife, Barbara Gamage, in 1591, offering the services of a nurse.

The daughter of Sir Henry Sidney and Mary Dudley, Mary Sidney was born on 27 October 1561 at Tickenhall near Bewdley, Worcestershire, on the Welsh border while her father was serving as lord Governor of the marches of Wales. He had been a companion of King Edward, who died in his arms. Her mother, a well-educated woman who was a close friend of Queen Elizabeth, was the daughter of the Earl of Northumberland, who was virtual ruler of England in King Edward’s final years, and the sister of Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley. Lady Sidney was badly scarred by smallpox after nursing the queen, and thereafter rarely appeared at court.

Describing her work on the psalter, the Poetry Foundation states:

Sometime in the early 1590s, probably while she was completing her Petrarch translation, the countess had begun the work for which she is known, her metric translation of Psalms 44-150 that completes and revises a project that her brother Philip had begun in his final years. Although the Psalms have always been an important part of Judeo-Christian worship, translating them into the vernacular for private meditation and public singing had become a particularly Protestant activity in the sixteenth century. When the countess first began her metric versions, she remained fairly close to the phrasing and interpretation familiar to her from Miles Coverdale’s prose version in the Great Bible, incorporated into the Book of Common Prayer.

Her more polished versions, transcribed by Sir John Davies of Hereford in the Penshurst manuscript, evidence a scholarly process of revision, however. Choosing Protestant scholarship based on the original Hebrew, the countess revised her Psalms to be closer to the Geneva Bible than to the Great Bible, with considerable reliance on Théodore de Bèze (in the original Latin and in Anthony Gilby’s English translation), on John Calvin, and on Les Psaumes de David mis en rime Françoise, par Clément Marot, et Théodore de Bèze (1562). References are also made to other continental versions and to earlier English metrical Psalms, such as those by Anne Lok and Matthew Parker.

The countess used 128 different verse forms for the 107 Psalms she translated (Psalm 119 has twenty-two sections), making her achievement significant for metrical variety as well as for the content, Like her Genevan sources, the countess used the Psalms to comment on contemporary politics, particularly the persecution of “the godly,” as Protestants called themselves. By expanding metaphors and descriptions present in the original Hebrew, Sidney also incorporated her experience at Elizabeth’s court, as well as female experiences of marriage and childbirth.

Sir Philip Sidney offered this translation of the most famous psalm, number 23:

The Lord, the Lord my shepherd is,

And so can never I

Taste misery.

He rests me in greene pasture his:

By waters still, and sweete

He guides my feete.

He me revives : leades me the way,

Which righteousnesse doth take,

For his names sake.

Yea though I should through valleys stray,

Of deathes dark shade, I will

Noe whitt feare ill.

For thou, deere Lord, thou me besett’st:

Thy rodd, and thy staff be

To comfort me;

Before me thou a table sett’st,

Even when foes envious eye

Doth it espy.

Thou oil’st my head thou fil’st my cup:

Nay more thou endlesse good,

Shalt give me food.

To thee, I say, ascended up,

Where thou, the Lord of all,

Dost hold thy hall.

Mary wrote this translation of Psalm 90:

Thou our refuge, thou our dwelling,

O Lord, hast byn from time to time:

Long er Mountaines, proudly swelling,

Above the lowly dales did clime:

Long er the Earth, embowl’d by thee,

Bare the forme it now doth beare:

Yea, thou art God for ever, free

From all touch of age and yeare.

O, but man by thee created,

As he at first of earth arose,

When thy word his end hath dated,

In equall state to earth he goes.

Thou saist, and saying makst it soe:

Be noe more, O Adams heyre;

From whence ye came, dispatch to goe,

Dust againe, as dust you were.

Graunt a thousand yeares be spared

To mortall men of life and light:

What is that to thee compared?

One day, one quarter of a night.

When death upon them storm-like falls,

Like unto a dreame they grow:

Which goes and comes as fancy calls,

Nought in substance all in show.

John Donne praised this work highly in this poem:

UPON THE TRANSLATION OF THE PSALMS BY SIR
PHILIP SIDNEY, AND THE COUNTESS OF
PEMBROKE, HIS SISTER

ETERNAL God—for whom who ever dare
Seek new expressions, do the circle square,
And thrust into straight corners of poor wit
Thee, who art cornerless and infinite—
I would but bless Thy name, not name Thee now
—And Thy gifts are as infinite as Thou—
Fix we our praises therefore on this one,
That, as thy blessed Spirit fell upon
These Psalms’ first author in a cloven tongue
—For ’twas a double power by which he sung
The highest matter in the noblest form—
So thou hast cleft that Spirit, to perform
That work again, and shed it here, upon
Two, by their bloods, and by Thy Spirit one ;
A brother and a sister, made by Thee
The organ, where Thou art the harmony.
Two that make one John Baptist’s holy voice,
And who that Psalm, “Now let the Isles rejoice,”
Have both translated, and applied it too,
Both told us what, and taught us how to do.
They show us islanders our Joy, our King ;
They tell us why, and teach us how to sing.
Make all this all three choirs, heaven, earth, and spheres ;
The first, Heaven, hath a song, but no man hears ;
The spheres have music, but they have no tongue,
Their harmony is rather danced than sung ;
But our third choir, to which the first gives ear
—For Angels learn by what the Church does here—
This choir hath all. The organist is he
Who hath tuned God and man, the organ we ;
The songs are these, which heaven’s high holy Muse
Whisper’d to David, David to the Jews ;
And David’s successors in holy zeal,
In forms of joy and art do re-reveal
To us so sweetly and sincerely too,
That I must not rejoice as I would do,
When I behold that these Psalms are become
So well attired abroad, so ill at home,
So well in chambers, in Thy Church so ill,
As I can scarce call that reform’d until
This be reform’d ; would a whole state present
A lesser gift than some one man hath sent ?
And shall our Church unto our Spouse and King
More hoarse, more harsh than any other, sing ?
For that we pray, we praise Thy name for this,
Which, by this Moses and this Miriam, is
Already done ; and as those Psalms we call,
—Though some have other authors—David’s all,
So though some have, some may some Psalms translate,
We Thy Sidneian psalms shall celebrate,
And, till we come th’ extemporal song to sing
—Learn’d the first hour that we see the King,
Who hath translated those translators—may
These their sweet learned labours all the way
Be as our tuning, that when hence we part,
We may fall in with them, and sing our part!

Mary Sidney died on September 25, 1621.

LADY MARY SIDNEY ~ 1561-1621

Lady Mary Margaret Sidney, Sydney, Lady Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (1st cousin 13x removed)

1561–1621

About

Mary Sidney