ABSTRACT

Mary Sidney Herbert’s dedicatory poem “To the Angell spirit of the most excellent Sir Phillip Sidney” in the Tixall Manuscript of the Sidneian Psalms seems eager to offer, as Mary Ellen Lamb has noted, a strategically “acceptable version” of the female author. 1 In this respectful preface to her tributary completion of the Psalms, the Countess of Pembroke emphasizes her secondariness as a co-translator whose Muse is her own brother and insists that her act of “simple love” displays “not Art nor skill.” 2 Yet even as she deploys her modesty topoi, she articulates her humble and ancillary status by way of an elegiac encomium that is both poetically complex and intellectually sophisticated. This essay will argue that “To the Angell spirit” asserts and enacts the rights and rites of a grieving sister by way of a quite idiosyncratic appropriation and reimagination of the elegiac project — one that emphasizes the supplementation of language necessitated by the very act of mourning Philip Sidney.