ABSTRACT
Aside from her completion of the metrical psalter begun by her brother (see Kinnamon ARC 2:2) and her work as an editor of her brother’s posthumous legacy (see Woudhuysen ARC 2:3), Mary Sidney’s original compositions and translations constitute a small but diverse body of work in both print and manuscript. More than her larger creative endeavors, both clearly aimed at a wider audience, these shorter poems and prose translations offer insights into Mary Sidney’s coterie circulation of her works. For a previous generation of scholars, her Wilton House was the seat of a large-scale poetic revolution promulgated by Mary Sidney and carried out along the neo-classical lines sketched out in her brother’s Defense of Poetry (eliot 76-9; Buxton 173-204). That picture has given way under more careful scrutiny, leaving a still quite active circle of patronage surrounding the Countess of Pembroke, but one less programmatic in nature and more narrowly circumscribed by links of family or service (Brennan, Literary Patronage 79-80, Lamb, “Patronage”; Lamb, “Myth”). Though Mary Sidney’s surviving literary output did not, with a few possible exceptions, remain confined to coterie circulation, some of the most interesting questions about her work remain tied to this initial stage of circulation. Her printed works point back to their coterie origins, while poems of disputed authorship and possible new works recently discovered underline the challenges and opportunities for further research created by her coterie circulation of works.
