Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550-1700

Volume 2: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

Margaret P. Hannay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754660835
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351964999
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, was renowned in her own time for her metrical translation of biblical Psalms, several original poems, translations from French and Italian, and her literary patronage. William Shakespeare used her Antonius as a source, Edmund Spenser celebrated her original poems, John Donne praised her Psalmes, and Lady Mary Wroth and Aemilia Lanyer depicted her as an exemplary poet. Arguably the first Englishwoman to be celebrated as a literary figure, she has also attracted considerable modern attention, including more than two hundred critical studies. This volume offers a brief introduction to her life and an extensive overview of the critical reception of her works, reprints some of the most essential and least accessible essays about her life and writings, and includes a full bibliography.

Part I

Original Works

1

Davies’s Astraea and Other Contexts of the Countess of Pembroke’s ‘ A Dialogue’

Mary C. Erler

Mary C. Erler is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. She coedited Women and Power in the Middle Ages, and is working on a study of women’s book ownership between 1485 and 1558.

In dancing, a single step, a single movement of the body that is graceful and not forced, reveals at once the skill of the dancer. A singer who utters a single word ending in a group of four notes with a sweet cadence, and with such facility that he appears to do it quite by chance, shows with that touch alone that he can do much more than he is doing.

Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York: Anchor, 1959), pp. 46–47.

Like these two examples—the single step, the single word—the poem by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, “A Dialogue between Two Shepherds,”¹ embodies the quality of sprezzatura or nonchalance in a form remarkable for its brevity. Indeed it is only the privileged status which Castiglione gives to suggestiveness which allows so detailed an examination of the countess’s jeu d’esprit in what follows—even though analysis itself may be thought inimical to nonchalance. The following essay will attempt to establish a firm dating for the poem, since scholarship has suggested both 1592 and 1599. Links between the countess’s husband’s family, the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke, and the family of the poet Sir John Davies, provide background for a study of the resemblances both formal and thematic between the countess’s poem to Elizabeth and Sir John Davies’s Hymnes of Astraea. The poetic stances of the two works offer provocative comparisons, while reflection on the two pieces as rhetorical and as social artifacts may illuminate both. The essay concludes with a consideration of the countess’s poem in relation to Sir Philip Sidney’s work, and with some final thoughts on the use of the Astraea myth at the century’s end.

I

The disparity between the two dates assigned to the poem has not been previously noticed. The first person to suggest a date of 1599 for the poem was the anonymous H.T.R., writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1845. Subsequently Sidney Lee also asserted, in his DNB article on the countess, that Queen Elizabeth visited Wilton, the earl of Pembroke’s seat in Wiltshire, “late in 1599” although “no account of the royal visit is extant.” Like H.T.R., Lee believed the countess’s poem was written for this occasion. Modern scholars who have accepted this assignment include Hallett Smith, Frances Yates (who places the poem at Wilton, but gives no date), and both the poem’s editors. H. E. Rollins, in his edition of A Poetical Rhapsody, the miscellany which is the poem’s only source, prints the title given it in the first edition (1602): “A Dialogve betweene two shepheards, Thenot and Piers, in praise of ASTREA, made by the excellent Lady, the Lady Mary Countess of Pembrook at the Queenes Maiesties being at her house at[ ]Anno 15 [ ].” He comments, “The blank spaces in the title should evidently be filled with Wilton and 99.” G.F. Waller, the poem’s most recent editor, concurs.²

E. K. Chambers disagreed with this dating and observed, “But there was no progress in 1599, and progresses to Wiltshire planned in 1600, 1601, and 1602 were abandoned. Presumably the verses were written for the visit to Ramsbury of 27–9 August 1592 (Cf. Appendix A).”³ Appendix A consists of the court calendar compiled by Chambers from a variety of documents. Two of these sources support his statement that a royal visit to Ramsbury, a smaller Pembroke house, took place in August 1592. The Cecil papers at Hatfield preserve a 1592 document headed “Diary of Events by Burghley,” which includes the entry “Aug 26—At Ramsbury.”⁴ In addition the Acts of the Privy Council record a 1592 meeting “At the Court at Ramsbery, the 28th of August.”⁵ Chambers’s dating of August 1592 was followed by Samuel Schoenbaum in his revision of Harbage’s Annals of English Drama, and by C.E. McGee and John C. Meagher.⁶

Examination of the Hatfield correspondence for the year 1599 reveals evidence, however, for the suggested royal visit to Wilton. The letter which confirms the queen’s intended visit is dated by its editor “before July 24” 1599. Written by Sir Charles Danvers to the Earl of Southampton, it outlines the queen’s projected summer itinerary: “The progress was first appointed to Wimbleton [Surrey], to my Lord Keeper’s at Parford [Pyrford, Surrey], to my Lord Treasurer’s at Horsley [Surrey], to Otelands [Surrey] and so to Windsor [Berkshire], but by reason of an intercepted letter, wherein the [queen’s] giving over of long voyages was noted to be sign of age, it hath been resolved to extend the progress to Basing [Hampshire] and so to Wilton [Wiltshire], and unto Wimbleton the Queen goes on Tuesday next.”⁷

The queen did indeed go to Wimbleton—either on Tuesday, 24 July, as Danvers says, or on 27 July, as John Chamberlain has it.⁸ Only this first of the several planned visits took place, however. The progress was aborted by the news of a possible Spanish invasion, responses to which have also left their trace in the Hatfield papers. The first warning comes in a document dated 1 August 1599, the minute of a letter from the Privy Council to Sir Robert Sidney ordering the dispatch of 300 soldiers from Flushing to England “for its defence against any hostile attempt of the Spaniards.” On the next day the Lord Mayor of London, Stephen Soame, writes to Cecil that 3000 men have been lately levied within the city, and on the same day the Archbishop of Canterbury inquires of Cecil “to know if her Majesty will be pleased to have some special form of prayers to be used in this time of expected troubles.”⁹

Although nothing came of the Spanish scare (Chambers says that the fleet “went off to meet the Dutch at the Azores and largely foundered on the way”),¹⁰ it cancelled most of the projected progress and definitely erased the possibility of travel to the most distant of these country houses, Wilton. The Hatfield manuscripts, however, in establishing an occasion and a date for the planned royal visit in 1599, demolish Chambers’s objection to that dating. Further, given the choice between a royal visit made as part of a summer progress (1599) and one made in order to attend a privy council meeting (Chambers’s alternative suggestion for dating in 1592), the festive nature of the former occasion, as opposed to the workaday character of the latter, makes 1599 a more likely choice for an occasion on which verse was presented. If, then, Mary Sidney planned these verses for presentation to the queen on her 1599 summer progress, the “Dialogue” was probably composed in July 1599 (or even slightly earlier), since the visit to Wilton was scheduled in August.

II

On 17 November 1599, the queen’s accession day, Sir John Davies’s twenty-six acrostic poems in her honor, Hymnes of Astraea, were entered in the Stationers’ Register. Robert Krueger, Davies’s editor, believes that these poems “were probably presented to Elizabeth for that occasion and then given to John Standish for publication.”¹¹ He continues: “The poems themselves imply that they were written in spring, though this implication may be a poetic fiction. The weight of evidence, internal and external, however, points to 1599, probably spring, as the time of composition.”¹²

The resemblances between Davies’s Astraea-poems—written probably in spring 1599—and the countess’s Astraea-poem—written probably in summer 1599—are many. In addition to the poems’ numerous formal correspondences which will be examined below, a previously unnoticed connection exists between the families of the two poets. Quoting Bodleian MS Carte 62, written by Theophilus Hastings, Davies’s grandson, Krueger says, “John, the [poet’s] paternal grandfather, had come with Sir William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, from South Wales into Wiltshire.”¹³ J.R. Brink prints a summary made by the antiquary Sir William Dugdale from Theophilus Hastings’s second, later, set of “Biographical Notes”: “He [the poet] was son to Edward Davys of Tisbury co. Wilts. … which Edward accompanying Sir William Herbert (whom King Ed. 6 created Earl of Pembroke) when he first came into England seated himself in that county, where this his son was born.”¹⁴

Sir William Herbert, first earl of Pembroke, was the father of Mary Sidney’s husband, Henry Herbert, who later became the second earl. Whether it was Davies’s father or grandfather who accompanied the first earl, in Wiltshire the Davies family settled at Chicksgrove. Here, according to Krueger, the poet’s grandfather “became lord of the manor [and] … on the side of a valley overlooking a stream … built a large stone house that still stands.”¹⁵ Both Chicksgrove and Tisbury, the parish where the poet was baptized, lie about seven miles west of Wilton, the Pembroke seat.¹⁶ Thus Sir John Davies sprang from a dependent of the earl of Pembroke; the family’s establishment in Wiltshire was due to that connection; and the two families of Davies and Pembroke were Wiltshire neighbors.¹⁷

A few scholars have noticed general resemblances between Davies’s Hymnes and the countess’s “Dialogue”: Frances Yates, in illustrating the various notes to be found in the portrayal of Queen Elizabeth as Astraea, juxtaposed the countess’s work and Davies’s, although she did not speculate on their relationship.¹⁸ Earlier, Rollins had cited an unpublished Harvard thesis by F.Y. St. Clair which suggested the countess’s poem “resembles the treatment of the Golden Age given in Sir John Davies’s Hymnes of Astraea, 1599.”¹⁹ The similarity between the two works, however, is closer than these comments might indicate, and is not confined to thematic resemblances of a general sort. First, the poems use the same pattern of rhyme and metrics; second, their treatment of Elizabeth as Astraea chooses the same elements on which to focus; and finally the countess’s poem may be read as offering an implicit comment upon the poetic stance which Davies adopts in his own work.

Following is a text of the countess’s poem:²⁰

Thenot:	I sing diuine ASTREAS praise, O Muses! help my wittes to raise, And heaue my Verses higher.
Piers:	Thou needst the truth but plainely tell, Which much I doubt thou canst not well, Thou art so oft a lier.
Thenot:	If in my Song no more I show, Than Heau’n, and Earth, and Sea do know, Then truely I haue spoken.
Piers:	Sufficeth not no more to name, But being no lesse, the like, the same, Else lawes of truth be broken.
Thenot:	Then say, she is so good, so faire, With all the earth she may compare, Not Momus selfe denying.
Piers:	Compare may thinke where likenesse holds, Nought like to her the earth enfoldes, I lookt to finde you lying.
Thenot:	ASTREA sees with Wisedoms sight, Astrea workes by Vertues might, And ioyntly both do stay in her.
Piers:	Nay take from them, her hand, her minde, The one is lame, the other blinde Shall still your lying staine her?
Thenot:	Soone as ASTREA shewes her face, Strait every ill auoides the place, And euery good aboundeth,
Piers:	Nay long before her face doth showe, The last doth come, the first doth goe. How lowde this lie resoundeth!
Thenot:	ASTREA is our chiefest ioy, Our chiefest guarde against annoy, Our chiefest wealth, our treasure.
Piers:	Where chiefest are, there others bee, To vs none else but only shee; When wilt thou speake in measure?
Thenot:	ASTREA may be justly sayd, A field in flowry Roabe arrayd, In Season freshly springing.
Piers:	That Spring indures but shortest time, This neuer leaves Astreas clime, Thou liest, instead of singing.
Thenot:	As heauenly light that guides the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• PART I ORIGINAL WORKS
• PART II TRANSLATIONS
• PART III PSALMS
• PART IV LITERARY CONTEXTS
• Index