ABSTRACT
Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, boldly entered into literary conversation with the two central poetic discourses of early modern Europe, the discourses that clustered around the authorizing voices of Petrarch and of David. She addresses the Psalm tradition directly, by completing the metrical Psalmes that her brother Philip had begun: he metaphrased Psalms 1-43; she completed the remaining 128 poems. In her metrical Psalmes she draws on virtually every Psalm version and commentary available to her in English, French, and Latin, but her primary sources are the French Psaumes, Coverdale’s Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer, the Geneva Bible, and the Psalm translations and commentaries of John Calvin and Theodore Beza (in Latin and in English translation). In her Psalmes, she also enters into dialogue with others who composed English metrical Psalms-including Anne Lock, Sternhold and Hopkins, Matthew Parker, and of course her brother Philip. She addresses the Petrarchan sonnet tradition more obliquely, translating The Triumph of Death, which gives the silent Laura a voice after her death, and rendering Psalms 100 and 150 in two different sonnet forms, Sidneian and Spenserian (or Scottish). For her, as for many sixteenth-century English poets, the voice of Petrarch is largely mediated through the voice of Astrophil. She not only enters individual conversations with these voices that cluster around Astrophil and David, but also draws them into conversation with each other in her Psalmes. Psalm translation and meditation were highly valued as devotional practices, and undoubtedly the Sidney Psalmes did fulfill a devotional function for their authors and many of their original readers. Nevertheless, Pembroke’s direct allusions to English lyric poets-notably Wyatt, Spenser, and Sidney-signal that her work is also a deliberate effort to enter the lyric tradition. She alludes to Wyatt in Psalm 57, as we shall see, but her debt to Edmund Spenser is more profound. Her Psalmes demonstrate an extensive stylistic debt to Spenser, and she makes
elsewhere. She was, in many ways, one of the first Spenserian poets.1 And yet her most important literary conversation is with her brother Philip’s works, both secular and sacred. Like her Spenserian echoes, the Countess of Pembroke’s Sidneian echoes are not merely an act of homage, but a strategy to position herself in the mainstream of the English poetic tradition. The Psalms are, like Petrarch’s Rime sparse, “a mastertext through which the writers of the age tested their capacities, in this case not only as worshippers and theologians but as poets and critics,” as Roland Greene observes.2 She thus makes a bid to enter the literary conversation by engaging the two central poetic discourses of sixteenth-century Europe-Petrarch and Psalms-particularly as both were addressed by her brother. It has long been recognized that Pembroke “in a devotional sense, meditated on the text,” recreating the Psalms as “Elizabethan poems,” and that the Sidneys together “create a new persona for the Psalmist,” that of “an Elizabethan poet, expressing a contemporary religious sensibility with rare and delicate artistry,” thus contributing to the development of the seventeenth-century religious lyric “in the biblical and psalmic mode.”3 Pembroke herself, however, disclaims originality, stressing that her poems simply transmit the biblical text. In “Angel Spirit,” she says that the Sidneian Psalmes are not “transform’d / in substance,” but only in “superficiall [at]tire,” thus drawing on the traditional metaphor of translation as reclothing to dispel any anxieties (including, perhaps, her own) that their splendid rhetorical dress alters their sacred content.4 Similarly, her dedicatory poem to Queen Elizabeth declares that “the Psalmist King” would be “undispleased” by this reclothing, “Oft having worse, without repining worne.”5 Such a gesture is necessary because metrical Psalms raise in a particularly acute form the problems inherent in all scriptural translation. Because Christians normally read, recite, and sing the Psalms in Latin or in their own vernacular, there is already a gap between
I am grateful to Michael G. Brennan, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Debra K. Rienstra for their insightful comments on this essay.
