ABSTRACT
Recent work on Mary Sidney has emphasized her role as translator, as patron, and as an original poet. Yet, from Mary Ellen Lamb's study of the Sidney circle to Margaret Hannay's rich biographical work to Wendy Wall's analysis of Sidney's dedicatory poem 'To the Angell Spirit,' most of this criticism has stressed Sidney's biography, especially her identity as the sister of Philip Sidney, his influences on her literary career, and the consequences of his death for her writing. In this essay, I wish to reorient the conversation to address Mary Sidney's own literary production, in particular the strategies she employs in her four original poems: the two dedicatory poems written to accompany a presentation copy of the psalms; the 'Dialogue between two shepherds, Thenot and Piers' written for Queen Elizabeth's planned 1599 state visit to Wilton; and Sidney's elegy on her brother Philip, 'The Dolefull Lay of Clorinda.' 1 While I will not be addressing Sidney's artistic choices in her translations of the psalms, the Tragedy of Antonie, the Discourse of Life and Death, and the Triumph of Death, this sustained focus on the four poems - all engaging issues of audience, the sufficiency of language, and the deployment of generic conventions - allow us to interrogate Mary Sidney's poetic strategies. Because of the period's cultural restrictions on women's speech, these strategies are cognizant of, and the consequence of, gender as her poetry must work specifically to offset resistance to women as producers of poetic texts.
