ABSTRACT
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; MSH, Collected Works 1:102). Despite a significant body of criticism and extensive editorial work, accelerated 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 secure (Quitslund, “Teaching” 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 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 nuances and verbal music of the poems to bridge the distances created by our secular and individualist bias. 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 sources, to authorship and in terms of revision (Alexander 85-6). Unlike the Psalm versions that the Sidneys drew on as sources and guides, the Sidney Psalter comes without any framework to guide interpretation (Trill 150), although the text itself presupposes that the reader will supply various intertexts and contexts. The Psalter comes with paratexts, too.2 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 MSH, Collected Works 2:308-36) provide a unique insight into Mary Sidney’s own conceptualization 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.
