PSALMS: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

Danielle Clarke

The Psalms composed, revised and revisited by Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of

Pembroke, in the period after her brother Philip’s death, and prior to the compilation of

the presentation copy prepared for the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Wilton in 1599, are

themselves an extended act of reception.1 The long and complex history of these

intriguing and challenging texts begins in the very moment(s) of their creation, as Mary

Sidney completed and revised what her illustrious brother had begun, “but hee did

warpe, I weav’d this webb to end” (“Even now that Care”, l.27). Despite a significant

body of criticism and extensive editorial work, accelerated notably by the catalysts of

feminist, historicist, and textual criticism, it seems fair to say that a variety of

circumstances have conspired to sequester these remarkable poems, even within the

canon of Renaissance literature, where their place now seems relatively secure

(Quitslund 2005, 83). We read too little poetry. We certainly read too little religious

poetry. And these texts, whilst they encapsulate much that is essential to the

Elizabethan age, require us to revise our assumptions about almost every category that

we bring to bear on the writing process. Contemporaries who read them grasped

immediately what was important about them, as responses by Daniel, Donne, and

Harington – amongst others – testify, but most modern readers have to engage in an

artificial process of contextual reconstruction for the specific nuances and verbal music

of the poems to bridge the distances created by our secular and individualist bias

(Hamlin, 2005). Nothing about these texts is straightforward, as Mary Sidney’s highly

apposite warp/weft metaphor implies, their point of origin being plural in relation to

1 Several manuscripts of Mary Sidney’s psalm version postdate 1599, but there is no clear evidence either way as to how long she continued to revise and work on them (see Michael Brennan 1982).

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sources, to authorship and in terms of revision (Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney).

Unlike the Psalm versions that the Sidneys drew on as sources and guides, the Sidney

Psalter comes without any framework to guide interpretation (Suzanne Trill, 150),

although the text itself presupposes that the reader will supply various intertexts and

contexts. The Psalter comes with paratexts too2; even if the readership for these was

limited, they provide important evidence, and are disproportionately represented in the

critical literature. For instance, the two dedicatory poems found in Ms J (see description

in Works 2: 308-36) provide a unique insight into Mary Sidney’s own conceptualisation of

her undertaking, as well as providing evidence of an idea of authorship that presents

categorical challenges to modern conceptions of the single author. Indeed, many of the

recurrent concerns of later criticism are to be found in these two extraordinarily

accomplished poems, and it is worth pausing over them momentarily before setting out

these key issues and the range of responses to them.

Both poems very effectively rework the conventions of the dedicatory poem to a

higher purpose, eschewing (for the most part) the commendatory mode in favour of the

admonitory mode, a decision that enables Mary Sidney to deftly negotiate the public-

private ligature within which her authorship is situated (Margaret Hannay, “’Doo What

Men May Sing’”, 149-65). Indeed, the two poems are frequently seen to each represent

one side of the public-private dyad, “Even Now that Care” representing the re-articulation

of Sidney’s political ideals to her foot-dragging monarch; “To the Angell Spirit”

expressing Mary Sidney’s profound and more personalised grief for her brother (Beth

Fisken, “’To the Angell Spirit’”; Clarke 2001, 168). Yet these poems each transcend their

ostensible purpose, much as the Sidney Psalms in turn profoundly transform the

accepted understanding of terms like ‘translation’, ‘paraphrase’, and indeed ‘psalm’. As

2 On the significance of layout and visual representation see Alexander, Writing after Sidney.

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Hannay astutely observes, ‘To the Angell Spirit’ is “as much a meditation on Mary

Sidney’s role as writer as it is elegy for Sidney”, and thus both praises and displaces him

(“Mary Sidney Herbert”). These two poems also provide a crucial key to another aspect

of Mary Sidney’s writing practice, as well as to Renaissance notions of aesthetic and

literary value. In both cases, a pre-existing mode is adapted, subtly, to a new purpose

(much as the Psalms themselves re-write an inherited tradition, or traditions). In the case

of ‘Even Now’, this is a careful reassertion of the agenda of the Dudley-Sidney alliance,

which nonetheless boldly elides politics with the true English voice of David. Both poems

also postulate an intriguing (and somewhat misleading) model of authorship for the

Psalter that follows, blatantly manipulating the standard modesty topos to the end of self-

assertion. Here, as elsewhere, self-abnegation turns out to be a form of appropriation, as

by invoking her unique proximity to Philip Sidney, Mary gathers his author-function to

herself:

the poorer left, the richer reft awaye:

Who better might (O might ah word of woe,)

have giv’n for mee what I for him defraye (“Even now”, 22-4)

Both poems use a metaphorically freighted language of cost and expenditure; “defraye”,

“small parcel of that undischarged rent” (‘Even Now’, 24, 35), “due tribute’s gratefull fee”,

“the debt of Infinits I owe”, “this Accompt, this cast upp Summe” (‘To the Angell spirit”,

33, 35, 43) which conjoins notions of the Psalter as gift, as obligation, as what was owed

in service to Elizabeth but unpaid (together with a pointed irony about Elizabeth’s

rejection of Sidney’s proffered service and the “price” paid by him for a higher cause)

with a language of spiritual account which is pervasive in the Book of Psalms itself (Jane

Donawerth, 16-17).

When encountering the Sidney Psalter we are confronted with a series of

questions that in the case of other texts might seem otiose or self-evident, although

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recent work on both drama and poetry has highlighted the degree to which literary

production in the Renaissance is frequently collaborative and co-operative in character,

a series of exchanges across and within intertextual space. Yet, as Hannibal Hamlin

points out, scholarship on the Psalter has routinely separated out poems on the basis of

putative authorship, meaning that the Sidney Psalter as a text with integrity is rarely read

as such (Hamlin, Sidney Psalter). Much critical effort has been expended on questions

of authorship, with the consensus being that the Psalter was originally Philip’s project,

and that Mary Sidney dedicated her considerable skill and literary energy to completing it

after his death. Alexander suggests that this was Philip’s “last literary project” and that

“the failure to complete the Psalmes seems down to circumstance alone” (85). Others

suggest that this was an earlier work (J.C.A. Rathmell; Duncan-Jones), but in either

case, it was clearly a project with which Mary Sidney was intimately acquainted, and in

which she was heavily invested, even without the catalyst of Sidney’s death. This

account of the genesis of the text is not supported by very much concrete evidence – Sir

Philip’s comments on the poetic nature of the book of Psalms in the Defence are widely

quoted – but upholds the culturally accepted position of the secondariness of the female

voice. This formulation runs the risk of reinscribing established gender norms, with the

male poet as vates, embodying invention, ars, risk, imagination, and the female poet as

poiein, the executrix, versifier, maker, a position that Mary Sidney daringly resists by

claiming to share Philip’s muse: “So dar’d my Muse with thine it selfe combine” (“Angell

Spirit”, 5). Many contemporary commentators focussed on Mary as the primary producer

of the text. Samuel Daniel, for example, in his lengthy dedicatory poem to the Countess

in 1594, mentions the precedent of Sir Philip, but in the stanza relating to the Psalter,

focuses exclusively on Mary’s input:

Those Hymnes thou doost consecrate to heaven,

Which Israels Singer to his God did frame:

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Unto thy voice eternitie hath given,

And makes thee deere to him from whence they came. (Delia and Rosamund

Augmented, sig. H6r; Hamlin 2005)

Alexander, on the other hand, notes the seeming reluctance on the part of Mary to be

identified publically with the project (107). There is no evidence to discount the idea that

the project was a joint venture from the start, and plenty of circumstantial evidence in the

Psalter itself that suggests that this may be the case. Mary Sidney’s stance in “To the

Angell spirit” claiming the work to be “First rais’de by thy best hand, and what is

mine/inspird by thee” (ll.3-4) needs to be contextualised by other assertions in that piece,

and by the complexities of authorising herself as a woman aspiring to the poetic

paraphrase of a divine text. Alexander suggests “the possibility that the metaphrase was

always intended to be a collaborative effort” (85-6), noting the long tradition of

collaborative work on the Psalter, including what was the Sidneys’ most important

model, the Marot-Bèze Psalter (CW; Hamlin, xviii; Quitslund 2005, 85-6). Patricia

Demers characterises the authorship question as

[d]eferred collaboration…since one can only speculate as to whether brother and

sister began the Psalter project together or if Sidney worked alone, perhaps in

the inspiring, encouraging presence of his gifted, like-minded sister (“’Warpe’ and

‘Webb’”, 43)

The processes of drafting and rewriting evident in Mary Sidney’s revisions to

‘Philip’s’ psalm versions suggest a writing relationship that exists somewhere on the

continuum between collaboration and appropriation, and these positions are variously

argued in the critical literature. The group of manuscripts in which the Sidney Psalter is

found is a valuable resource of detailed evidence about writing processes, as well as

providing witnesses to the texts of the poems: “the manuscript evidence provides a good

deal of information about the process of composition and revision” (Alexander, 86). It is

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possible that working and shaping these tricky poems into a range of complex forms

represented a form of dialogue with Philip: “the idea that the work was a collaboration

with her dead brother was dear to her” (Alexander, 86). Coburn Freer suggests in

Women Writers that “writing for the two must have been an easy and natural kind of

transaction” (402), and that Mary Sidney moves the versions in the direction of greater

stylistic complexity (“more sophisticated in technique” [403]), a rather more positive spin

on her contribution than his account in Music for a King, where he argued that “the

Countess herself seems to have been congenitally incapable of leaving a poem alone

long enough to produce a definitive copy” (74). The key phrase here is ‘definitive copy’, a

notion rooted in the New Bibliography and exemplified by the great Sidney editor William

A. Ringler, Jr., and his efforts, based in a post-romantic concept of authorship, to clear

the Psalm paraphrases of Philip Sidney from Mary’s revisions and accretions (see

Clarke 2011). Subsequent scholarship has reconfigured the sibling relationship, and in

relation to the Psalter, tends to view Mary Sidney’s contribution as the greater, once the

precedent of her brother gave her authority to undertake this ambitious work. As Hamlin

rightly notes in his introduction to The Sidney Psalter, “[o]nly in the twentieth century has

Mary been restored to her proper role as the principal author and editor of the Sidney

Psalter” (xvii).

It is widely acknowledged that without her brother’s example and early death, it is

unlikely that Mary Sidney would have engaged in such extensive literary production

(Danielle Clarke 2000, xvii; Hannay, “’This Moses and This Miriam’”, 217-26; Goldberg;

Beilin. Redeeming Eve; Fisken, “Art of Sacred Parody”). Gavin Alexander’s elegant

formulation might stand in for many such statements (despite the grammatical writing out

of agency “her…writing...chose”): “her own writing, which chose to occupy the threshold

of Sidney’s death and afterlife…and to concern itself with death and dying” (81). The

literary and poetic production focussed on Wilton in particular played a central role in

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Mary Sidney’s poetic education and formation, and the series of dedicatory epistles and

poems addressed to her, whilst deploying the conventional discourses of patronage

nonetheless hint at processes of exchange, influence and commentary. Louise Schleiner

suggests Mary Sidney at Wilton as one example of a formative reading circle:

Through these efforts and her own, her circle (or set of concentric circles) took on

a certain character and continue the Sidneyan Protestant piety and “areopagite”

experiments and debates concerning classical meters, music, and versifying

(Tudor and Stuart Women Writers, 53)

There is widespread evidence of a culture of exchange, commentary and critique in

what might be deemed the Sidney circle, and this provides helpful, but ultimately

circumstantial, evidence for how Mary Sidney learned her craft (see Lamb 1982 on the

tenuousness of this ‘circle’). Her poetic apprenticeship is inseparable from her familial

ties and relationships, which, as many commentators have noted (Alexander, Hannay

1990) remained unusually identified with her family of origin even after her marriage. The

Sidney Psalter might be seen as the apotheosis of these intertwined emotional,

devotional, intellectual and familial commitments, and thus at one level, confounds

attempts to partition it on the basis of authorship or contribution. As Margaret Hannay

asserts: “Far from abasing herself as merely Sidney’s sister, she proudly claims both

family connections and personal worth” (Justice and Tinker, 20-21). Paradoxically both

poets subordinate their status as originators to the divine, yet manage to produce an

artefact that bears an unmistakably Sidneian stamp, even as Mary Sidney’s versions

self-consciously echo her brother’s secular as well as divine poems (Trill, 153-4; CW 2:

31).

It is also clear that whilst her grief for Philip Sidney was deeply felt, his death also

presented her with an opportunity and a responsibility to safeguard his legacy, and to

keep familial control of his output. His death, as many have noted, prompted a sustained

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meditation on death and dying through the texts that she chose to edit, complete and

translate (Alexander, Phillippy, Bornstein). It is important to recall Mary Sidney’s unique

status in relation to the Dudley-Leicester alliance after the death of her brother, and the

extent to which the individuals close to her had had personal connections to Philip.

There is a clear attempt in the decade following Philip’s death to secure his legacy as

family property through a range of literary interventions, primarily using the medium of

print. This period of publication, editing, composition and circulation appears to be

truncated by the death of the Earl of Pembroke in 1601 and the passing of the title to her

son William. Patricia Pender in a recent article pushes this argument to its ultimate

conclusion when she argues for Mary Sidney’s central role in the creation of the idea of

Sidney as laureate and as author:

after his death and at his sister’s instigation, Philip Sidney becomes a laureate

poet…Mary Sidney advanced his status as the author function, developing the

figure of “Sir Philip Sidney” into the function of the “Sidney precedent” (“The

Ghost and the Machine”, 74)

Pender’s provocative argument focuses on the publication of the Arcadia and more

broadly on the production of the 1598 edition, which also included Sidney’s Defence,

Certaine Sonnets (“never before printed”, Sidney 1598, 472), Astrophel and Stella and

The Lady of May. The title page displays the name of the Countess of Pembroke more

prominently than that of Sir Philip Sidney, and the placing of the Sidney authored

material after the Arcadia strongly suggests an attempt on Mary Sidney’s part to

appropriate his author function for her own purposes, by placing his name in a

secondary position to her own, and bringing all his single-authored works together under

her own imprimatur.

The Arcadia was first printed in 1593, with a dedication (reprinted in the 1598

edition) that deliberately bifurcates and obfuscates the notion of singular authorship,

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elevating instead the dyadic sibling relationship and its collaborative underpinnings.

Mary Sidney is positioned here as the ideal reader, as primary audience, and as having

authority over the text:

Your deare selfe can best witness the maner, being done in loose sheetes of

paper, most of it in your presence, the rest, by sheetes, sent unto you, as fast as

they were done. (Arcadia, sig. ¶ 3r)

It has been suggested that this method might provide a clue to the Sidneys’ working

practices in relation to the Psalms, and indeed, it does give useful context for Mary’s

working methods, but it seems that the collaboration on the Psalter worked in the

contrary direction (Hannay, “Scribal”, 26). It is likely that the Psalms paraphrased by

Philip were mostly complete at his death. The Arcadia reverses the paradigm in that the

text is inspired by Pembroke, but written by Sidney. In the case of the Psalms, we seem

to have a text inspired by Sidney, but written by Pembroke. The linking metaphor of the

‘webbe’ (Arcadia ¶ 3r; ‘Even Now’, l. 27) differentiates neatly between singular

authorship (the spider spinning a web – one point of origin) and collaboration (the warp

and weft of cloth – two points of origin). If, as numerous critics suggest, the 1598

publication is designed as a kind of collected works, why are the Psalm paraphrases not

included? The volume contains manuscript materials in Mary Sidney’s possession,

together with the Defence with its famous argument for the poetic qualities of the Book of

Psalms, but the only hint of the Sidney Psalter prepared for presentation to Elizabeth I

the following year, 1599, is oblique and non-specific:

Neither shall these paines be the last…which the everlasting love of her brother,

will make her consecrate to his memory (Arcadia, ¶4v)

Kimberley Anne Coles argues that the Psalter might be seen as “the technical

demonstration of Sidney’s Defence” (Religion, Reform, 76) and goes on to suggest that

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The internal agreement of the two works – as well as their synchronised public

release – was not accidental. The publication of both projects was an

orchestrated effort on the part of the Countess of Pembroke to situate lyric poetry

within a Protestant cultural context (76)

There is a temporal proximity certainly, and it has proved illuminating to read Sidney’s

comments in the Defence alongside the Sidney Psalter (Baroway), but each text

circulates in distinct ways. If Coles’s argument is correct, why would Mary Sidney not

print at least some of Sidney’s Psalm paraphrases in 1598? Given that they were all but

complete, their non-inclusion looks deliberate.3

The answers to this question are complex. First of all, it is important to state

clearly that manuscript circulation is a particular type of publication and that print and

manuscript not only co-existed throughout the Renaissance period, but often coincided

or overlapped. Mary Sidney takes specific control of the Sidney output and appears to

take careful decisions regarding mode of circulation, working closely with trusted

individuals, William Ponsonby, for example. In some instances, such as Astrophel and

Stella, she had little option, as the texts were already, in some form, in the public

domain. Numerous reasons have been put forward to explain why the Psalter was not

printed, none of them entirely satisfactory in terms of evidence, many of them at some

level predicated - unconsciously or not - on the pre-eminence of print over manuscript.

Many of them relate to the question of gender, namely the notion that Mary Sidney’s

reputation might be called into question by venturing into print. This can be shot down on

several levels (see Brennan 2002). The divine subject matter of the Psalter to some

extent mitigated the effects of opprobrium that attached to female authorship, as

3 Alexander cites the evidence pointing to the Psalter’s being substantially complete by 1594 (84), but also notes that final stanzas for four of Philip’s Psalms were supplied as the scribe was putting the final touches to the Penshurst manuscript (94).

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contemporaries testified, even as these accounts understate the poetic ambition of the

project: “the same desire for godliness that was used to stifle women’s speech also gave

them a voice, particularly if they were translating male words about God” (Hannay 1991,

65). The Psalter is not, to say the least, unequivocally in the voice of the Countess, as

Margaret Hannay’s careful formulation makes clear when she refers to “the complexity of

the nested speakers” (“’House-confinèd Maides’”, 48) and to the fact that “three voices

infold and protect her own, those of God, David, and Sidney” (49). In the third instance,

Mary Sidney’s output (including the editing and preparation of her brother’s works)

reveals that she was willing to use the medium of print and to put her own name to the

works that she produced.4 The famous Simon van de Passe portrait (NPG d27991)

shows her holding a book labelled as ‘Davids Psalmes’, this is not a publication

obviously, but it is a very public and pointed assertion of her relationship to the Psalter,

one that nonetheless the viewer is required to infer, or is assumed to already know. The

bound volume she is holding shows the ties characteristic of manuscript volumes, but

the portrait uses the medium of print to put this into circulation.5 Margaret Hannay has

noted that Pembroke “reserv[ed] this work for scribal publication” (Justice and Tinker,

17) and that “[the psalms] circulated in manuscript in the approved aristocratic manner”

(84). As the editors of the Collected Works note, the textual history of the Psalter is

“exceedingly complex” (2: 337) but it is sufficient here to note the very conscious and

deliberate nature of the chosen mode of circulation; the text was clearly not intended to

be in any sense ‘private’, but rather restricted (Hannay 2002, 35). Hannay (2002) goes

on to suggest (following Steven May) that “it was verse, not print, that was stigmatized” 4 Her name appears on the title page of the printed translation of A Discourse of Life and Death. Written in French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius. A tragedie written also in French by Ro. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countess of Pembroke (1592) a moment of self-assertion all the more powerful given that one of these works (the de Mornay translation) had also been begun by Sir Philip.5 I am grateful to Dr. Jason McElligott, Keeper of Marsh’s Library, Dublin, for his guidance on book ties.

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(25), whilst noting the clear objections to this in the case of the Sidney Psalter.

Furthermore, Hannay suggests that in choosing manuscript circulation for this text,

“class prestige seems a more important factor than gender” (18) and that the very

uniqueness of the Penshurst and Tixall manuscripts conferred prestige on the text.

Gavin Alexander suggests that the decision not to publish may be connected to the

“vexed legal position” in relation to printed psalm metaphrases (85). None of these

explanations can be ruled out, but none of them seem entirely satisfactory either.

Psalm translation or paraphrase in sixteenth century Europe was not a neutral

activity, and there is a wide range of commentary that testifies to its potential political

application. Debra Rienstra and Noel Kinnamon state that translators of the period

“typically acknowledged in one way or another that they were about a dangerous

business” (“Circulating”, 53). The editors of the Collected Works outline in detail the

ways in which Psalm translations resonated, sometimes uncomfortably, with

contemporary events (2: 3-7), and Margaret Hannay supplies detailed examples of such

applications in Philip’s Phoenix (96-105), whilst noting how much of such application was

inferred and left to the reader to supply: “The countess did not need to add a political

cast to her original” (96). Clarke (2000; 2001) takes the case a little further, locating the

political meanings of the Psalter as being “supplied by sources and contexts through

complex networks of association” (xxi; 138-9). Alexander, by contrast, is agnostic on the

question of political impact, noting that “[p]olitical meanings are especially dependent

upon an audience” (106), and that the most obviously political of her texts, particularly

when accompanied by the pointed epideictic of “Even Now that Care” was very belated:

“it clearly was the close of Elizabeth’s reign in 1599, and the time for such counsel had

long since passed” (106). Coles argues a somewhat different position, one that might

account for the decision to use manuscript circulation rather than print, namely that the

poetic ambition of the Psalter potentially contradicted or undermined its devotional

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purpose, seeing formal and metrical variation as unsanctioned intervention in the divine

text:

if the poetics of David’s divinely inspired text were admitted, poetic inventiveness

that altered the Text was considerably more problematic…the polemical gesture

on the part of Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert was to translate the Psalms with

the primary intention of elevating poetry (98)

The use of “innovative forms” (99) “amounts to a rewriting of scripture” (99), and this

deviation from the avowed purpose of more mainstream psalm versification (Quitslund

2008; Smith) aligns the Psalter with a more rarefied, elite effort, testifying to the

importance of the Marot-Bèze Psalter as a model (CW 2: 11; Alexander; Quitslund

2005), not least in relation to the notion of collaborative authorship. Alexander too

suggests that the emphasis on poetics in the Sidney Psalter might mitigate against wider

circulation:

they were not the safe and simple translations readers were used to seeing in

print…and…they needed to tread a careful line between public and private

devotional conventions (85)

This potential tension between private purpose and public profession, can be found in

many critical accounts, although the reasons posited for it vary, but many settle around

the dual demands of poetry and piety, “art” and “truth”, or the master discourses of

Protestantism and Petrarchanism (Rienstra 2005; Quitslund 2005):

the demands of a verse form augment the temptation to alter, however slightly,

for reasons of art rather than truth – to choose a word because it is vivid or

completes a rhyme and not because it carries the nuance the original demands

(Rienstra and Kinnamon, 53)

Beth Wynne Fisken argues that Mary Sidney deliberately hybridises two dominant

Renaissance modes, emphasising the secular roots of the Psalm metaphrases:

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Both the sonnet and the psalm are essentially meditative forms that stimulate in

the reader the capacity for direct application of self to the rich and varied

experiences dramatized by the speakers of those poems (“Art of Sacred Parody”,

235)

Fisken suggests too that the poetic ambition of the Psalter entails some pressure on

contemporary gender norms, pointing to the asymmetrical effects of the poetic ambition

that is at the heart of the project:

Yet inevitably such an ambitious versification would transform the original

meaning. It is entirely appropriate for Philip to undertake these psalms in the

accomplished manner of the Geneva Marot- Beza Psalter but a very different

matter for Mary to demonstrate skillful mastery of the lyrical and rhetorical

conventions of secular verse (230)

The texts are hybrid and composite, drawing on almost all of the significant

sources, commentaries and translations available at the time: “The Sidney-Pembroke

Psalter is a peculiar work – a translation, a paraphrase, a scholarly meditation, an artist’s

sketchbook of poetic forms, an intensely personal devotional exercise – and it slips

frustratingly in and out of familiar categories” (Rienstra and Kinnamon, 51; Quitslund

2005). In a very real sense, a metrical paraphrase of the Psalter is a kind of textual echo

chamber, resonating with the sounds of earlier versions and traditions, and sustained

and careful allusions to predecessors both sacred and secular (Clarke, 2007). The

Sidney Psalter is a carefully poised balancing act between different (and sometimes

incompatible) impulses: doctrinal and poetic, and most serious commentators on the

Psalms situate them within these binaries, pulling slightly more in one direction or the

other, or framing the terms slightly differently. As Rienstra and Kinnamon argue, her

revision process

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demonstrates a deliberate methodology of moving from the straightforward, literal

rendering of the prose text to the more vivid, particular, even idiosyncratic. Her

completed psalter therefore strained conventional understandings of what it was

appropriate to do with Scripture by affirming individual assertion before the Divine

through poetry (52)

Hannibal Hamlin brings the devotional and the poetic into productive interplay: “like any

religious writing, they probably had a devotional purpose – both for the writer and the

reader – but these comprised a fundamentally literary work” (Sidney Psalter, xiv). The

broad consensus is that the primary impulse is poetic, whilst the Psalter exhibits an

ongoing concern with accuracy in terms of a commitment to the spirit rather than to the

letter of the text, “She approached her task of translation as a scholar as well as a poet”

(Hannay, “House confined”, 51). Questions of competence are not in doubt: “That the

Countess’s departures from her received text were deliberate cannot be doubted, given

the detail and extent of her revisions, and comparison of the two should long continue to

illuminate our understanding of the genre and the period as a whole” (Freer, 404). She

appears to have approached the task in a systematic manner: “Certainly she consulted

virtually every significant Protestant psalm version and commentary available to her in

English, French, or Latin” (Hannay, 52). There has been some speculation about Mary

Sidney’s acquaintance with, or knowledge of, Hebrew, with the editors of the Collected

Works stressing her scholarly credentials and approach: “she tends to follow the source

closest to the Hebrew” (2:13). Earlier readers and critics assumed the Countess’

knowledge of Hebrew as part of their construction of her as an examplar of learned

virtue (Ballard, 249-52; Lloyd Jones, 240). One article in particular asserts that both

Philip and Mary consulted Hebrew texts and commentaries. Theodore Steinberg, writing

in 1995, stops short of asserting that either of them knew Hebrew: “I am not saying that

Philip and Mary sat down with their Hebrew psalters and translated the texts directly into

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English…I am saying that the Sidneys were familiar with enough Hebrew to aid them in

their translations” (“The Sidneys”, 8). The Clarendon editors hedge their bets, asserting

that “[it] is not impossible” that Mary Sidney worked with a Hebrew original, but

concluding that “[i]n the absence of conclusive external evidence, it is impossible to

ascertain whether or not Pembroke did study Hebrew” (2:16, see also 19). Nonetheless,

the Psalms do reveal some evidence of an attempt at fidelity to admittedly poorly

understood Hebraic forms, for example, using Jehovah (2:18) and efforts “to render

Hebrew verse forms into English” (2:18). Melody D. Knowles’ painstaking and extensive

comparative analysis of key features within the Hebrew Psalms concludes that “her

accuracy is inconsistent, and she may be less indebted to the Hebrew than to the New

Testament” (“Pembroke’s Hebrew”, 287).

The process of tracking the multiple influences and intertexts in any given psalm

has been painstakingly undertaken by successive editors, although the selectivity

involved in annotation necessarily obscures some elements and heightens others. The

relationship to sources is mostly well covered in editions, but as H.R. Woudhuysen

points out in his review of the Collected Works: “The commentary is reasonably full, but

leaves one area unexplored: the countess’s borrowings from and debts to her

contemporaries are scarcely touched on” (279). Textual commentary tends to focus on

the unit of the word or the phrase, and is less able to register other kinds of allusions,

particularly those that use structure or repetition, although the Oxford World’s Classics

edition of the complete Sidney Psalter does helpfully preserve the layout of Psalms as

represented in Ms A whilst omitting other materials from the Collected Works on which it

draws: “We restore the alignment in Mary’s psalms where the indentation is usually

(though not invariably) functional, with rhyming lines aligned, even when they vary in

length” (Hamlin, Brennan, Hannay and Kinnamon, xxxv). Margaret Hannay argues that

Mary Sidney worked with several key sources: “the Coverdale Psalter, already beloved

16

in the Book of Common Prayer; the Geneva Bible with the notes of 1560; and the

commentaries of Calvin and of Bèze” (CW 2:11). She notes that “[b]ecause she so

frequently gives composite readings of these texts, she must have worked with them

open before her” (2:11). It is likely too, that she knew the Book of Common Prayer

Psalter by heart, and that some of her sources were drawn from memory, given the

existence of at least two (conjectural) working copies, kept in different residences

(Ringler, 503; CW 2: 338). The aural dimension of the Sidney Psalter has tended to take

second place to the careful reconstruction of processes and sources, but it is crucial to

recall that even if the poems move away from ritual (“nearly everywhere…[Philip] Sidney

rubs out ritual” [Greene, 36]) and towards lyric that this entails a complex musicality that

is designed to be heard as much as it is to be read. Equally, ritual and lyric are not

necessarily oppositional or exclusive categories (Quitslund 2005). In other words, the

process of composition was not exclusively text-based, nor unequivocally linear; as Gary

Waller notes, “in a sense, the countess had no ‘final’ version of the work” (“The

Countess of Pembroke”, 338). Gavin Alexander further notes that revision and rewriting

are ways of merging two authors:

By ending the Psalmes Pembroke makes the metaphrase a shared labour. But

by rewriting Sidney’s endings she crosses some threshold between the two poets

– a threshold of time and poetics; what was linked becomes merged…She

places herself before him; she inverts chronology, and influence. And by having

his poems head to her endings Sidney is almost forgotten as their originator: she

becomes their aim (94)

Notions of completion and incompletion have been debated widely in the last few years,

with Alexander noting the Countess’s engagement with incompletion (Writing after

Sidney, 89-95), and Danielle Clarke in “The Countess of Pembroke and the Practice of

Piety” locating her processes of revision and rewriting within the framework of scriptural

17

study and meditation. Joel Davis in his book also deals with Mary Sidney’s negotiation of

her brother’s legacy (see also Pender). The point is that the experience of reading the

Sidney Psalms, as well as the experience of composing them involves continual tracking

across intertextual space. The evidence of the manuscripts and impact suggests that for

many readers, the reading process is not linear or chronological, despite the rootedness

of the project in the liturgical cycle.6 Sir John Harington, for example, included copies of

Psalms 51, 104 and 137 with the translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death that he sent

to the Countess of Bedford in 1600, presumably because he thought these of particularly

high quality. The penitential psalms seem more likely than the others to circulate

independently, not least because of a long tradition of reading these together, as work

by Hamlin and others illustrates. Sidney’s version of Psalm 51 was one of the earliest to

circulate in its own right, possibly because of its powerfully allusive nature, and its strong

identification with the reformed cause, and is one of two psalms to have been set to

music (Alexander, 99). Psalm 51 has proved popular with critics, turning up with some

frequency in discussions (Hannay, “’Unlock my lipps’”). For all the extensive critical and

editorial works on the Psalms, the discussion of them as literary and poetic artefacts is

still relatively limited, based on a small selection of interpretively amenable Psalms. This

suggests the ways in which these poems challenge accepted critical categories, and the

extent to which they resist straightforward explication: this is partly due to their

irredeemably intertextual nature, and partly due to their heavy investment in formal and

technical patterning.

Almost all of the current energetic critical interest in the work of Mary Sidney can

be traced back to the concern of feminist critics to acknowledge her fully as a woman

writer in her own right. This enabled a thorough reappraisal of key aspects of her work,

6 It is perhaps worth noting that Mary Sidney is credited with adding numbers to her brother’s sonnet sequence, an innovation that may be indebted to her work on the Psalter.

18

but also prompted a series of key insights in relation to early modern women’s

authorship that continue to structure the field. Elaine Beilin viewed Mary Sidney’s

contribution in terms of its formal and technical exceptionalism: “her devotion to poetry

and her studied development as a literary artist distinguish her from her precursors and

contemporaries” (Redeeming Eve, 121), and it is clear that despite clear debts to other

women writers (notably Lok) Mary Sidney does require a category of her own – as later

women writers like Aemilia Lanyer recognised. At the forefront of these crucial efforts

was ground-breaking work by Betty Travitsky, Margaret Hannay, Beth Fisken, Mary

Ellen Lamb, Gary Waller, Elaine Beilin and others. This work shares an assumption that

gender is not only a significant category of analysis, but that it is a primary framework

through which women’s writing should be read – an insight that has been modified in

recent years, by critics like Alexander, and indeed by some of these critics themselves

(Hannay, “’When Riches Growes’”). This insight, derived from work rooted in different

eras and quite different assumptions, led feminist critics in various directions: the

establishment of Mary Sidney as author figure; the identification of gender-inflected

concerns within the Psalms themselves; the revision of the status of

translation/imitation/paraphrase (Trill; Schleiner; Clarke 2000); and the exploration of

Mary Sidney’s negotiation of authority and her brother’s legacy.

Arguably, as she has become more and more identified with the canon, gender

issues have become sidelined, except in the scholarship on pedagogy where as Hannay

(and others) suggest, gender is a very productive analytical category, as Mary Sidney

“effectively counters many of the stereotypes of early modern women held by our

students” (Teaching, 135). Margaret Hannay’s prodigious and highly influential body of

work (critical and editorial) on Mary Sidney in particular has shown how turning the lens

of gender on her work in fact requires a careful reconsideration of key structuring

categories. Suzanne Trill, Louise Schleiner, Danielle Clarke, and others, have made the

19

case for the centrality of translation to early modern culture more generally, alongside

insights as to the critical importance of psalm metaphrase, insights that bring together

feminist criticism with historicist work on the reception of the Psalter in early modern

England (Zim, Quitslund, Hamlin, Psalm Culture). Suzanne Trill writes

translating the Psalms was far from a marginal or intrinsically feminine activity:

firstly, they were a central discourse in the construction of protestant subjectivity

and protestant politics in the sixteenth century; and secondly, while contemporary

poetic translations of them were on the whole produced by men, Mary Sidney’s

versions are represented as exceeding hers in both form and style. This stresses

her ability as a poet and also indicates that, although the subject matter was

religious, her translations cannot be seen as unproblematically situating her

within the confines of acceptable female expression. (Trill, 150)

The negotiation of authority made explicit in the dedicatory poems (which nonetheless

avoid specific mention of humility attendant upon gender, as opposed to the elevated

nature of the task) and that is implicit in the entire Psalter project requires us to

understand the psalm metaphrase more broadly in context. So Hannay notes (as do

other commentators) the status of the Psalms in early modern England: “a privileged

form of discourse, one of the few genres open to female as well as male voices in

sixteenth-century England” (“House-confined”, 44). Similarly, Mary Sidney’s generic

choices can been seen as a way of enabling her poetic ambition within the restrictions

placed upon her gender: “her sex modified what she would do; her woman’s training

what she could do” (Beilin, 127).

Margaret Hannay was at the forefront of a group of feminist critics who

recognised the significance to Mary Sidney (and other writers) of the contested and

20

complex relationship between gender and devotion. The collection of essays Silent but

for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works,

published in 1989 made two crucial methodological interventions which opened up the

study not only of an exceptional figure like Mary Sidney, but also of women writers

engaged with religious discourse more broadly. The first was to take religion seriously in

its own right, but also as a form of political engagement and intervention. The second

was to reconceive authorship and agency. Subsequent work has followed these key

trajectories, even where it is not specifically feminist:

Her parade of poetic skill might be partly an indication of female capability, partly

also an expression – particularly through any forced phrasing – of the tension

produced by this act of presumption…If the Countess, as Elizabethan lady, could

not easily speak out publicly, she could at least, as a mouthpiece of the

Psalmist’s (male) voices, and like Shakespeare’s heroines, speak most for

herself when speaking as another (Pritchard, 17-18)

The issue of ventriloquism is a vexed one for feminist criticism not least because it

threatens the erasure of precisely what gender-inflected research attempts to uncover:

the female self, female agency, evidence of literary autonomy. The question of voice

(and thereby authorship and agency) has been crucial, and is the topic of much debate

within feminist criticism in particular. The specific dynamic tension between the lyric “I”

and collective ritual within the Psalter creates both limitation and opportunity, as Ronald

Greene eloquently outlines in his important essay on Sir Philip Sidney’s Psalms: “the act

of reading devotional lyrics is not an interpretive activity, but the entry into a collective

identification” (23). The Sidney Psalter, with its powerfully intertextual nature might be

seen to embody what Greene terms the “latent collectivity and synchrony that can be

activated in the solitary reading of a text” (21). Yet as much feminist scholarship has

demonstrated, it is possible to read Mary Sidney’s Psalm versions in the first instance

21

through the framework of gender, focussing on issues relating to mode of production,

audience, processes of revision, semantic/stylistic choices, and interpretation. Margaret

Hannay, for example, provides specific textual detail to back up her claims (echoed by

critics such as Fisken) that Mary Sidney uses the Psalter to comment on “female

experience” (“House-Confined”, 45), noting that the voice she deploys is “carefully non-

masculine” (52); that she avoids the use of the male pronoun for the speaker of the

Psalms (64); and develops the Psalter’s specifically female references and allusions:

“the most obvious indications of a woman’s voice are in the references to the female

experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing” (58). Beth Fisken emphasises the

secular poetic sources that Mary Sidney drew upon, “the parallel functions served by the

sonnet cycle and the Psalms, the resemblances between the anxiety of the lover

beseeching his beloved and the anguish of the worshiper pleading with God” (223),

whilst Emma Clark’s 2007 article focuses on Mary Sidney’s reworkings of figures of the

maternal, drawing largely on biographical and contextual evidence. One of the difficulties

with such arguments is that the evidence of the revision process provided by the various

manuscripts suggests a tendency to work towards a more gender neutral and less

overtly politicised “final” version (Clarke, “Practice of Piety”), even where the strata of the

text imply that Mary Sidney’s interest was piqued by various female references (Hannay,

“O daughter heare”; “When riches Growes”), such as those in Psalms 44, 58, 63 and

139. Hamlin suggests that these psalms (amongst others) “reflect not just Elizabethan

society but the special experience of a woman”(xxii), and that Psalm 68 in particular

“gives women a more active role than the biblical original” (xxii). The difficulty with such

arguments is that for the Sidney Psalter to fulfil the kinds of claims made by

commentators on the Psalms, Mary Sidney’s versions have to simultaneously transcend

questions of gender, in order to preserve the open-ended multivocality of the biblical

sources, a contradiction that many commentators rework, but few of them confront

22

directly. Margaret Hannay, for example, argues that as well as allowing us to hear a

female voice in the Psalms, Mary Sidney “reveals a desire to use poetic composition to

soar above the confinement of gender restrictions” (45). Many other critics also see the

female aspect of the Psalter in its negotiation (and perhaps sublimation) of limitations,

whether social, poetic or technical. Most such criticism is broadly historicist and

empiricist in nature; despite the Psalter’s investment in techniques like indeterminacy

and deferral, surprisingly little work drawing on other theoretical models has been

undertaken, with the exception of Jonathan Goldberg’s discussion in Desiring Women

Writing (1997) which attempts to queer the relationship between Philip and Mary, but

does not focus on the Psalms to any significant degree.

Criticism of early modern women writers in general, certainly in the wake of the

New Historicism, has been strangely reluctant to engage with questions of form (Clarke

and Coolahan; Scott-Baumann), yet critical work on the Sidney Psalter has been deeply

concerned with issues relating to form, metre, versification and style (see Hannay 2005

and Rienstra 2005). The Psalter itself is often viewed as much as a series of arguments

about poetics as it is a spiritual text, which places Mary Sidney in the unique position (for

a sixteenth-century woman writer, at any rate) of being viewed as a poet. Having said

this, however, there is a strangely evaluative edge to some of the commentary on her

poetic techniques and style (this is particularly notable in discussions of her revisions to

Philip’s versions, which are rarely seen as improvements) which one generally doesn’t

find in discussions of male contemporaries. Coburn Freer notes that her psalms “are if

anything more complex stylistically, more sophisticated in technique” (403); Rienstra and

Kinnamon use the term “idiosyncratic”; Gavin Alexander notes when discussing Mary

Sidney’s revisions of Philip’s endings that “Mary Sidney does not understand that

asymmetry can give greater poetic closure” (94) – the suggestion is that adherence to

the rules triumphs over poetic understanding. Once again, questions of revision are

23

central to the analysis of the formal complexities of the Psalms, as Mary Sidney clearly

worked from paraphrase through a series of steps towards complex and resonant

patternings:

[the revision process] demonstrates a deliberate methodology of moving from the

straightforward, literal rendering of the prose text to the more vivid, particular,

even idiosyncratic. Her completed psalter therefore strained conventional

understandings of what it was appropriate to do with Scripture by affirming

individual assertion before the Divine through poetry (Rienstra and Kinnamon,

52)

There is a tendency to drive a wedge between poetic and spiritual impulses in much of

the criticism, to see poetic ambition as somehow negating or undermining the divine:

“the demands of a verse form augment the temptation to alter…for reasons of art rather

than truth” (Rienstra and Kinnamon, 53). Kimberly Coles sees the poetic ambition of the

Psalter as being at odds with its apparently devotional purpose, it “amounts to a rewriting

of scripture”, “innovative forms” are allegedly “sanctified by the content” (99), and overall

the Psalter is “far more sensuous than spiritual” and apparently “violated the principle of

Protestant devotional practice” (103). It is crucial, of course, to recognise the ways in

which the Sidney Psalter deliberately and self-consciously sets itself apart from existing

metrical versions, and to acknowledge that this is a potentially risky strategy, but poetics

and devotion are not mutually exclusive categories: this surely is the cumulative

argument of the Psalter? As Alexander asserts, “what the Sidneys are able to do is to

merge the pursuit of formal variety with the aims of the psalmist, to ‘sing a new song’”

(112), a project that is seemingly authorised by the Psalter itself in its repeated self-

consciousness about the need for songs and forms appropriate to the praise of God.

The formal and metrical innovations of the Sidney Psalter were acknowledged by

contemporary readers (the title page of Ms A declares the Psalter to be “translated into

24

diverse and sundry kinds of verse, more rare and excellent, for the method and variety

than ever yet hath been done in English”), and form a key axis of critical interest in the

poems. Hallett Smith famously dubbed the Sidney Psalter “a School of English

Versification” (“English Metrical Psalms”, 269) and subsequent readers have followed

this line of argument: “The Sidney Psalter is nothing if not various in its forms and

schemes” (Hamlin, xxiii);

the most striking aspect of the Sidney Psalms is their metrical variety. Very few

forms are repeated, and the poems tend to push well beyond the boundaries of

contemporary prosodic convention. In some cases it can be suggested that the

form grows out of the psalm’s own rhetoric; in other it may seem to be imposed

at random (Alexander, 111)

The question of relationship between chosen form and specific psalm remains relatively

unexplored, a crucial consideration being not only the non-repetition of forms, but

relationships between particular poems, an obvious case in point being the two psalms

written as sonnets, 100 and 150, or the group of psalms that use quantitative meter (“too

undemocratic a medium for Scripture” [Rienstra and Kinnamon, 66]). Other structures

and patterns of formal relationship could no doubt be uncovered which may reveal new

dimensions to the Psalter as a carefully constructed artefact comprised of individually

self-sufficient poems (Petrarch is an important model here, as the Sidney Psalter in turn

was to, for example, Herbert’s The Temple). To some extent, this key aspect of the

Sidney Psalter has fallen victim to prevalent critical trends, and so far important work on

metre, verse form and its relationship to meaning and verbal patterns, has remained

largely unconnected to other key critical approaches. Hannibal Hamlin includes a richly

suggestive section on form in his edition of the Psalter, but it is hard to avoid the

implication that these formal questions are somehow separable from other aspects of

the psalms, for example “content’ (xviii-xxiii). Scholars of rhetoric would undoubtedly

25

take issue with the assertion (at least in the context of style) that “[s]chemes…were fair

game, since they cold be applied and manipulated without greatly altering the

fundamental content” (xxiii).

The generation of scholars who pioneered feminist work on early modern women

writers, and who should be credited with bringing Mary Sidney to critical attention,

tended to be interested in formal matters as a marker of Mary Sidney’s poetic stature.

Elaine Beilin, for example, notes that the Countess was

the first to embark on a course of imitation and experimentation which led her

through varied personae and a wide range of lyrical forms…if not an absolute

progress from apprenticeship to mastery, a clear series of trials in form and voice

(121-22)

For Beth Fisken, the incorporation of methods and techniques derived from her reading

of secular poetry is what provided Mary Sidney with the authority to exploit the Psalter’s

limited potential for self-expression:

Yet the mere fact that she composed poetic versions in an impressive array of

sophisticated meters and stanzaic forms gave her a latitude to visualize,

intensify, and amplify the existing text to express as well as translate (226)

For Fisken it is mastery of form that facilitates expanded poetic vision (hardly, one would

think, a “mere fact”), or perhaps that demonstrating this degree of poetic skill in some

way ‘permits’ Mary Sidney to move beyond ‘translation’ to poetic expression and

articulation. This line of enquiry needs further work, particularly as it has the potential to

offer a specifically gendered approach, but one that is not purely thematically or content

based, a position that Trill takes Fisken to exemplify: “[she] demonstrate[s] a desire to

recover a “feminine” voice in these psalms which is inappropriate” (150). More work is

needed on what might constitute a feminine poetics in the specific case of Mary Sidney,

but with reference to the larger poetic context, both of predecessors and

26

contemporaries, and those influenced by the Sidneys’ work (see Benson; Deinstra;

Hamlin 2005).

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